Higher Consciousness and Your Career - Stuart Wilde

Our life's journey of self-discovery is not a straight line rising from one level of consciousness to another. Instead, it is a series of steep climbs and flat plateaus that take place within our spiritual perception and psychology.

We begin our spiritual understanding in a mundane place: the ordinary world of survival, where the ego reigns supreme, and tribal attitudes and ideologies are promoted as sacrosanct. The plane of day-to-day existence that most experience as "life" - -this is what I call "tick-tock".

When an individual is bored with tick-tock and wants more -- when they crave a higher awareness -- then changes at a deep inner level take place. This is especially so if the individual starts to control the ego with discipline.

Looking within, their energy quickens, and they begin the long, slow climb out of the consciousness of tick-tock. Usually the climb from tick-tock up to the first inner plateau of awakening takes about a thousand days.

Soon you realize that in order to sustain your progress upwards, you have to discard much of your mental and emotional weight. When you become less cluttered, new perceptions come to you quick and fast. The inspiration of your rising consciousness infuses you with a new vigor; you want to align to a new energy -- possibly a new career that is more spiritually aligned or has more meaning, except that you don't clearly see what direction to take.

The best thing to do is to concentrate on the climb -- work on yourself rather than trying to carve out a new career just yet. If you head out too early, you'll shoot yourself in the foot. I have seen it happen a thousand times: an individual has become so inspired by their new perspective and their desire to abandon tick-tock that they have set themselves up in a new business -- usually related to self-help, alternative healing, or assisting others in some way -- before they really have the energy, perception, or capital to pull it off. They usually falter or go bust, or they never get off the ground. Their self-confidence level will not yet let them feel secure with their changes, so they cannot pursue the knowledge and experiences necessary to complete the climb.

Instead, do this: Recognise that what you are doing at this moment is changing and climbing -- nothing else. Simplify your life, and support yourself any way you can, providing it does not take too much of your time and energy. Or, you may decide to hold onto your tick-tock job. It's better to do that and have a strong financial backing to your quest than to be terribly spiritual. A third possibility is to keep your former means of financial support in place and begin a new venture, perhaps on a part-time basis.

Once the thousand-day climb is over, you reach the first plane of understanding. As you consolidate on that inner plateau of consciousness, you'll find that opportunities in the external world will begin to emerge. At first, they seem rather small and relatively unimportant. Follow them: they will lead to greater things. It matters not if you head up the wrong path a little way as it will help you learn about yourself and your needs. Eventually, you are bound to find what you seek.

As you make the inner journey from one plateau to the next, the ego's dominance over your life is loosened, and the light of the Infinite Self begins to melt it somewhat. When those melt-downs occur, they seem to your psyche as if bits of your personality are dropping off. In those periods, you will feel overwhelmed by the thought that you are dying, but you are not dying -- your ego is. When the sensation becomes oppressive, put yourself on a vigorous discipline of some kind -- fasting, silence, meditation, whatever. The negative thoughts will pass, and eventually the ego will agree to lessen its grip on your life.

Proceed, climb, and travel your inner journey some more. You will eventually, after a number of years, come upon a very strange place: the Plane of Desolation. In the mind, it feels as if you're moving in slow motion across a vast, empty desert. I'm not sure if the length of time we spend on the Plane of Desolation is the same for everyone, but in my case it took three years to walk across it. At the other end is a door. As you approach it, the melting process of the ego becomes so intense that it's like walking toward a raging fire.

Close to the threshold, you will begin to sense that time is getting slower and slower. This is because around the doorway to the other worlds there is a singularity of space-time, where the inner reality is compacted to the extreme, and time is almost at a standstill. Here you are close to eternity. Imagine a world where it takes you a year to lift your foot and place it a stride in front of you. Time is so thick and you move so slowly that you get the feeling you're never going to make it. I expect that many a traveler has quit at this point and turned back. You need tenacity and patience; if you don't quit, you'll get through.

On the other side is another dimension. Its beauty is pure, pristine, and utterly beyond imagination. It covers you with its presence, and the first thing you do is fall asleep.

I can't say how long that inner sleep lasts in the time-frame of our world, nor can I say whether the sleep period is common to everyone. But in my case, fifteen months passed on the earth plane. Then you wake, and another journey begins. Good traveling