by: Richard Blackstone
Spiritual growth doesn't happen in a vacuum. All the spirituality information that we gather can be used as tools to help us in our quest for understanding. Your own spiritual growth depends on tools that are practical and useful. To help us along in this journey we will be using a tool to help us gauge if we are on the right path. The tool we will be using is a simple four-word question.
“Does this serve me?”
Does it serve you to live your life more consciously and understand the true nature of how things work? Does it serve you to stumble through life never understanding the relationship between the thoughts you think and what manifests in your life? Does it serve you to seek to improve your life by asking the questions that are important to you and then allowing the universe to provide the answers? Does it serve you to continue to react to life situations using the same conditioned responses that you have used throughout your life and getting the same results?
What serves you? Only you can answer that question. That is why it is such a powerful tool for you to use on this journey that we are taking together. I invite you to incorporate it into your own evaluation system and ask it of yourself as often as you see a need to.
That is the beauty of the spiritual adventure that we call life on planet earth. It is an individual journey that only you can examine and evaluate as to whether it serves you or not. You are your own arbiter. You are your own playwright. You are the decision maker of your life. You are, in the final analysis, the creator of your life and the world you live in.
Are you creating a life that serves you? How will you ever know if you don't occasionally ask the question, “Does this serve me?” And the beauty of asking this question to yourself is that you must be conscious and aware of your self in order to ask it.
You will never ask yourself this question if you are living unconsciously. So rejoice when you notice yourself asking “does this serve me?” because in the asking of the question you are acknowledging that you are consciously aware of your self.
Who is this self that is asking this question? Who is the asker and who is the answerer? These are questions that never get asked or answered when you are living unconsciously. You are going to explore these questions in depth as you journey further into your life but for now it is important for you to understand that the mere asking of the question “does this serve me?” is a benchmark in your awareness of who you really are.
Who you really are is consciousness and consciousness is only aware of itself when it is conscious of itself. There are four levels of consciousness and they range from subconscious to conscious to superconscious to supraconscious. You operate within these four levels of consciousness at all times but you are not aware of all these levels of consciousness until you move up the hierarchy of consciousness through understanding and awareness.
Each level of consciousness taps into the part of our three-part being that we call our mind. Our individual mind is totally connected to the universal mind and allows us to bring forth anything that we desire from the unmanifest to the manifest. So it would seem to “serve us” to have a rudimentary understanding of where we stand on the scale of consciousness.
The subconscious mind is that part of our existence that handles those tasks of the body that are automatic, such as breathing and creating new cells and beating the heart. It also serves as a memory station for all the people, events and experiences that the physical body has been privy to.
The conscious mind is the workhorse that collects every piece of data from each and every moment of the now of your existence. This conscious mind also analyses your past, projects your future, comprehends, with limited awareness, your present moment decision making and provides you with your physical sensory feedback. Through this process the conscious mind is how you interpret your present moment experiences. The analysis you are going through right now, while reading these words, is filtered through your conscious mind. You are seeing whatever you are seeing from your current perspective of your conscious mind and you can actually change that perspective at any given moment by merely moving your perspective to a higher level of consciousness. One of the reasons you are reading this article is to allow you to move to a higher level of consciousness. Did you know that?
Does that serve you?
