Challenges as a Pathway to Conscious Evolution | Awaken Your Inner Light FREE Video Mini-Series #3

Life is so extremely challenging. And those challenges of life, all the things that continuously seem to almost, almost designed to make your life difficult. If you look at your life, yes, there are interludes of. We can. Suddenly you can take a sigh of relief and you say, ah, I've made it, I have arrived, something good has happened and here I am. But never for very long. Quite soon something else comes up to spoil that lovely place that you thought you had arrived at. Sometimes it's the case with relationships, sometimes it's the case with your profession or what you achieve there, or your social status or whatever it may be, or possessions. So you feel, I made it. And then these interludes are never last for too long. And then life brings you another ops, another big obstacle. Now deal with this. And that brings, that brings about suffering. If you don't know the deeper dimension of who you are, your reaction to the problems of life, the difficulties of life, the challenges of life, the trip, the manifold tribulations of life, then you begin, you, you suffer, you get, become unhappy because you don't understand why you're here. You're not here to find your comfort zone, although when you do have comfort zones for a while, enjoy it while it lasts, it's fine. But you're not here to find your comfort zone. You're here to. Well, I will go so far as to say you are here to make, to feel uncomfortable, to experience difficulties. And of course you are experiencing difficulties both on a personal level and on a collective level. Some difficulties are of a collective kind, such as are increasing in the, in the time period that we are living now, the external challenges are increasing. Sometimes externals seem to be relatively stable. External environment, as far as the collective is concerned, economically, socially or politically, you live in a relatively ordered and stable environment. And then most of the challenges that come to you are of a more of a personal nature. Challenges that concern your health, that concern your finances, that concern your relationship, relationships and your living situation. And so then you have most of your challenges come on a personal level. You're then relatively, relatively in a. You live in a relatively stable external environment, as in Western countries has been for quite some time now. There have been, There are other countries on the planet while the west lived in relative stability collectively. Other countries, of course, have been in turmoil and still are in extreme turmoil, where the challenges that most people in those places face tend to be more of a collective kind than of a personal kind. When the economic situation is extremely bad, the political situation extremely unstable, there's violence around that could threaten you at any moment. But now in the Western world, we are moving from a relatively stable collective environment to a more turbulent collective environment. And it's becoming more turbulent into various areas. And we only see the beginning of it now. This is not something to be afraid of. It is part of a normal cycle of development that is the same in a. For an individual as it is for the collective. And there are cycles both as an individual. You find most people find they. They move sometime into a period of turbulence in their personal life when they're not just facing one or two challenges. When many things seem to be happening at the same time, many seemingly negative things seem to be happening at the same time. You. You lose your job, then you lose your marriage, divorce, then you, you might not even keep your home. You suddenly. And you fall ill. This is not all that unusual for a person to have to experience a sudden influx of challenges on a personal level. And if you don't experience that, if your life is so regular that you go, you have a job that is not challenging, but yeah, you have almost 100% job security. And you go every day, you go to the same office, come back always. No, perhaps you have no, you're not married or not having no relationships. You're not challenged there. A few people may be like that until finally they fall ill or something. Eventually something happens to all of them. But if not, if several decades you had a very ordered life, that would be the most undesirable thing because there would be no evolution of awareness of consciousness in you. You would remain stuck in your relative comfort zone, and without any awakening of consciousness, you would not evolve as a human being. You remain stagnant. It's only by being challenged that you evolve. And we have to look at why that is. But before we look at that, let's look for a moment at the collective again. Problems seem to be arising one after another in the collective, and we can't even foresee what the next problem is going to be. Suddenly, something comes over. Who could have foreseen what 2020 would bring? Nobody foresaw it. Well, I haven't seen any psychics that foretold there might have been one. Don't think so. So the important thing is to realize that whether the challenge or the adversity, whatever you want to call it, whether it is of a mostly of a personal nature or whether it also collective nature, well, that's good. That's also partial. Collective just means that a large number of people in any location experience the same kind of challenge that Is a collective challenge. You still, of course, it still affects you personally. So a large number of people experience the same kind of challenge at the same time, same location. So this is what's happening to many people now, and it's going to continue to happen. Now. What is the relationship of this, the relationship between realizing your essential identity as the light of the world and the challenges that you're experiencing that are coming towards you right now? More of a collective kind, but also of personal kind. The same external circumstances are experienced very differently by one person who is very still, very unconscious and another person who is much more conscious, which means more in touch with that which is beyond the conditioned personality. This person experiences the tribulations of this world, the difficulties, very different, differently from a person who is still deeply trapped in ego. The person is still deeply trapped in egoic identity that any challenge becomes very, very threatening. Not only that, even the possibility of challenges that might happen or going to happen, things that are going to go wrong is already an enormous source of suffering for many people who are trapped in their egoic identity. They even at night, they're in bed at night, or doesn't have to be in bed at night, but. And then they're thinking, how much worse is it going to get? The world situation, for example, how much worse is it going to get? And then you can play out scenarios and you're experiencing emotions that are the same emotions that you would have if these things were actually happening. Or worse, probably worse. Very often the scenarios that the mind, the unobserved mind creates. And again is lack of consciousness, lack of the light of. Not enough light of consciousness in you. Then all you have is the unobserved mind that is creating an enormous amount of suffering for you of playing out scenarios that are not here. And not only that, also reacting to challenges that are here in a very limited way through the condition, the old conditioning of their minds. And that's. This is a very important point for you to realize. For us to realize that a vital thing in. As we move into this period of turmoil, external turmoil, the way in which you experience this is largely determined by your state of consciousness. If it's purely reactive, then it's going to be extremely difficult. Not only that, the reactive consciousness I pointed it out before is largely dominated by fear. And any action you take that is arising out of a fearful and very limited state of consciousness is ultimately not going to be helpful and in most cases will make things worse. Any fear interferes with your ability to. To be aware, to be conscious and even to rush to think rationally. Even that becomes difficult when there's fear. Because then you're thinking is no longer your thinking, it's fear. Thinking, thinking is controlled by fear. It's all part of the egoic consciousness. So the. Our greatest challenge does not come from outside. No matter what happens, our greatest challenge comes from the inside, from the. Our conditioned minds. And that's an important realization in any situation. Be aware of in any given moment, which ultimately means in the present moment. Be aware of your state of consciousness here and now and make that your primary reality. If fear rises, ask yourself, how does it arise? Why am I fearful? And then in most cases, you will realize that the fear is produced by your thinking, not by the situation. In fact, the situations you can always deal with, they happen in the present moment, and you face them in the present moment. But the fear is the realm where you're incapable of taking action while you're in a fearful state of consciousness. Or if you take action, it's completely contaminated by fear. Complete lack of wisdom. So the greatest challenge is how do I face the external situation? What action do I take? Is always Secondary action may sometimes be necessary. But prior to taking action, you need to be aware of the state, your state of consciousness out of which the action arises. And if that state of consciousness is egoic, then the action is going to, in many cases, make matters even worse, amplify the problem. You know that in a. When you. When you meet a very unconscious person, just a simple example from your personal dimension. When you meet a very unconscious person, person who is very angry, whatever, and what they want to draw you into their anger, how do you. What is your state of consciousness? Is your state of consciousness be determined by this unconscious person, in which case you will react and amplify that person's unconsciousness and you yourself becomes drawn into unconsciousness. That's unconscious action. The same person, if you're aware of your state of consciousness, faced with an angry person, you can stay present. And you immediately know, even without any thought, that this person is in the grip of unconscious mind patterns, emotional patterns. And you can, instead of becoming reactive, you become more alert. And thereby this difficult person, instead of making you as unconscious as they are, can actually help you become more present. In any difficult situation, whether it's a small difficulty or bigger difficulty, you can go either way. You can go into reactivity. And once you go into reactivity, this reactivity is a force within you that is, has taken possession of you. And it can grow in you. And then you. You try to still solve the external situation through this cloud of negativity, of reactivity. And you will make it worse, you will amplify it. You would create more enemies, whether in the form of human beings or antagonistic situations, so to speak, adverse circumstances. So how the, how things evolve in the externals, this is connected to your state of consciousness. So it's vitally important for humans. You can try it out in your own life if you're non reactive, but present when you're faced with difficult situations or people. And this applies to anything, whether it's lack of money, many people experience now, lack of income, relationship difficulty, turmoil in their environment. Make it your primary concern to be responsible for your state of consciousness first. And even to rush to think rationally. Even that becomes difficult when there's fear, because then your thinking is no longer your thinking, it's fear. Thinking, thinking is controlled by fear. It's all part of the egoic consciousness. So the, our greatest challenge does not come from outside. No matter what happens, our greatest challenge comes from the inside, from the our conditioned minds. And that's an important realization in any situation. Be aware of in any given moment, which ultimately means in the present moment. Be aware of your state of consciousness here and now, and make that your primary reality. If fear rises, ask yourself, how does it arise? Why am I fearful? And then in most cases you will realize that the fear is produced by your thinking, not by the situation. In fact, the situations you can always deal with, they happen in the present moment and you face them in the present moment. But the fear is the realm where you're incapable of taking action while you're in a fearful state of consciousness. Or if you take action, it's completely contaminated by fear. Complete lack of wisdom. So the greatest challenge is how do you. How do I face the external situation? What action do I take? Is always Secondary action may sometimes be necessary. But prior to taking action, you need to be aware of the state, your state of consciousness out of which the action arises. And if that state of consciousness is egoic, then the action is going to, in many cases.