Levels of Consciousness – Who’s Driving the Car?


The other day I was sitting with a client and she asked me a question that I often hear. She had been telling a friend that she had been listening to The Secret and working on manifesting what she wanted in life. The friend who had been studying Zen said that he thought the object was to let go of your wants. “So,” she said, “which is it? Am I suppose to manifest what I want or to want nothing?”

I love that kind of question because spirituality is so full of apparent paradoxes! I became very quiet and focused to allow the answer to emerge and this is the “download” that I received.

It depends on what level of consciousness you are working on as to whether you need to be actively manifesting or letting go. Here are the levels I was given with a great metaphor for understanding them.

Level 1 – Physical Consciousness
In this level it is like riding in the passenger seat of a car, not knowing who is driving, and not knowing where you are going – very scary. You might have a fake steering wheel or brake but they, of course, don’t work. Sometimes this is called Victim Consciousness. You have no control of what happens or how you respond to what happens. At some point you realize that you need to learn to drive and control the car.

Level 2 – Mind Consciousness
Here you slip into the driver’s seat and begin to drive with a real steering wheel, brake and accelerator. You have control of the car and the task becomes one of deciding where to go. Should your turn right or left, go fast or slow, or perhaps stop? Unfortunately you have very limited information and no map, so you decide based upon what things look like in the outer world. This could be thought of as an empowered level of consciousness that is associated with the ego’s desire to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. At some point you realize that you really don’t know how to get where you want to go as what things look like is not often what they are really like when you get there.

Level 3 – Heart Consciousness
So you move back into the passenger seat but this time you understand that your Higher Self is driving and you trust that the Higher Self has the map and will take you where you need to go. Your job as the passenger is to trust, and what you have control over is how you are with what comes up. You do not control where you are going but you need to learn to control how you respond to what shows up in your life on a day-to-day basis. The object is to hold the highest vibration with whatever is there, since that is what your Higher Self brought you to. Because you trust your Higher Self, you hold an attitude of loving acceptance or at least wonder and curiosity, regardless of what shows up. We could call this heart mastery.

Level 4 – Soul Consciousness
Once the heart consciousness is mastered and you have some control over your inner world, you slip back into the driver’s seat and, with no thought at all, you drive wherever you need to go in the moment to fulfill your soul’s mission on Earth. This is the level of true ability to manifest.

All of us have experienced all of these levels of consciousness although we might function more predominately from one or two of them. We may be at different levels of consciousness in different areas of our life, such as work, finances, relationships, or family. What the model shows us is that when we are having difficulty in a particular area of life, we need to ask what level of consciousness we are on in that area and then try to move up to the next level. You cannot jump from Level 1 to Level 3 without going through Level 2. For example, if you fell stuck in an area where it seems you have no control over anything in your life, you are probably in Level 1 and need to learn to drive the car. On the other hand, if you have control of the car but don’t know which way to turn, you would need to move over to the passenger seat and let go of the controls to allow your Higher Self to drive while you learn to control your inner response to what shows up.

Addressing the original question, it seems to me that Zen is a more masculine form of spirituality. In our culture, more men that women seem to have a sense of how to drive the car or make their way in the world because it is emphasized more for them, or at least it has been. Their task then is to give up ego and control. More women struggle with the victim consciousness and first need to learn to control the car before they can let go. In other words, they have to have an ego before they can let it go. I realize that this is a broad generalization but it does reflect the general differences in issues for many of the men and women I see.

The important thing is to be able to identify what level of consciousness a problem exists on and move it to the next level for solution. Overall, the more areas of our life we move to a higher level, the easier life will be, not in what shows up, but in how you navigate it.

What is the Pathway to the Stars?

As we approach 2012 and the alignment with the center of the Milky Way galaxy, there is a spiral path of consciousness evolving that lies before us. Humans are moving from Earth consciousness, to Solar consciousness, to Galactic consciousness, as our awareness moves beyond the physical to embrace the divine within. This blog will address the ways in which we are bringing the divine through us into our daily lives. While the concept of unity and oneness has firmly anchored into our minds over the last few years, it is like a download that has yet to be unzipped and opened into full consciousness that can direct our every word and action. We are fast moving toward a New Earth, as Eckhart Tolle has described, and we need to be the new humans that know how to live on the New Earth.

Each week I will post some practical information that will help us bring our wise knowing into our actions and ways of being on Earth. Welcome to the journey!