I’ve had people contact me about an episode (S4E11 – A New Way of Being in the World) on my Our Spiritual Life podcast… So many people agree with what I had to say about the state of the world and wanting to do something about it. That episode said we can and must raise our level of consciousness, and by so doing, we will change the world by helping raise the consciousness of humanity as a whole.
In this blog post, I want to summarize what I talked about in that episode, and I want to clarify something right up front… In the podcast episode, I spoke of “a new way of being”, and I was referring to awakening and living more consciously in a broad sense. But we can do that in many different ways and the results can take many different forms or expressions. So in this article, I talk about new ways of being – plural – and reflect that in the title. [And, of course, this relates directly to my new podcast called New Ways of Being.]
In the podcast episode, I approached the whole subject by talking about 12 critical spiritual lessons that I have learned over the last few years from spiritual teachers and coaches that I have interviewed as well as from other sources (such as books, webinars, trainings, etc.). These critical spiritual lessons are applicable at both personal/individual and collective humanity levels. But looked at broadly, the lessons are all about how humanity is slowly growing up and how it must become more conscious and aware if it wants to survive and prosper.
The 12 spiritual lessons follow:
- The world is crying out for change. Most of that is in reaction to the pervasive divisiveness, violence, war, inequality, and injustice that we see everywhere and especially that we hear and see in the news – to the extent that it can be frightening and overwhelming.
- The state of the world reflects human consciousness, collective and individual. And that collective consciousness is not what we would like it to be, and it is not aligned with truth, not aligned with our true nature and the Universe’s true nature. Most humans operate from ego – mental programming based on belief in separation and based on continual fear arising from that belief. But the whole universe, and everything in it, including human beings, is designed based on wholeness, unity, oneness, and love. How do I know that? From my own observations and spiritual explorations, some of which are also reflected in the next point.
- We have learned A LOT about our true nature and the nature of the Universe. This learning comes from: new science, from God directly through the Conversations with God books by Neale Donald Walsch and especially Book 4: Awaken the Species, and from spiritual teachers Deepak Chopra, Michael Beckwith, Patricia Albere, and many others. Our true nature is that we are spiritual beings – part of the Divine Unity/Oneness /One Consciousness – and we can operate from unity and love rather than separation and fear. We can tap directly (and immediately) into the awakened unity which is love, awakeness, oneness, wholeness, and conscious connectedness to the creative, expansive process of life. And science and consciousness research now is more and more confirming all of this. The quantum field and the universal field of consciousness is being understood from a scientific perspective as well as a spiritual perspective. [You can read a great article by Deepak Chopra (dated December 4, 2023) on what consciousness is (and the afterlife) on LinkedIn.]
- Humanity Needs to Awaken! Awakening will naturally lead to new ways of being in the the world. I believe we are at a point in time when humanity must decide if it is going to wake up and grow up or not. But it is not enough to casually say the world needs to change. It is time for caring individuals to step up to their own awakening – becoming more fully aware – and commit to real and lasting change. The Universe/Divine/God is calling us to awaken because it will serve us and the Earth so much. All spiritual people and those who want change in the world, must develop a DEEP LONGING for a new way of being in the world. Deep longing is the kind of powerful motivation and drive we need to step up to real change in our lives.
- The Return to Wholeness is What We Need Now. Here I included my recorded reading of Deepak Chopra’s essay with this title from his Reinventing Life newsletter published on LinkedIn. I think it’s a very good statement of where we are and why we need to return to wholeness (i.e., awaken fully) as a species. Returning to wholeness ultimately means returning to our true nature as spiritual/divine beings and becoming fully integrated or complete as beings of body, mind, and spirit.
- With this in mind, I personally need to have a new focus. So I have recently launched a new podcast and community – to be called originally Humanity Awakening but now called New Ways of Being with Raymond Posch – as another resource to promote and support the awakening of humanity. Through it, I will do what I can to help provide the “vision of wholeness” that Chopra talked about in his essay. I wrote a book on wholeness – Awakening to Wholeness, available on Amazon – but I will rely heavily on what spiritual teachers Chopra, Walsch, Beckwith, Albere, and others are doing to share such a vision. But, whereas Our Spiritual Life is broad and somewhat general about aspects of spiritual development, the new podcast will be much more focused on helping both individuals and humanity collectively awaken and begin to live more consciously.
- I have long taught that we must become more self-aware. When we are aware, we can recognize when we are operating from separation and fear, and consciously choose instead to be in a state of love and unity. This can be thought of as a practice that shifts us into a more empowered and conscious state of being, and it helps leads to awakening because it takes us out of fear and increases our awareness of self. But it requires that we also begin to realize that love and unity are aspects of oneness at deeper levels of beingness, and that a quiet, non-thinking mind is critical to greater awareness of self and world.
- So what does awakening really mean? And I discussed this briefly but it boils down to: 1) having greater awareness most of the time, 2) deeply knowing I am a spiritual being (pure consciousness in our essence), 3) realizing that the Universe is created by God/Pure Consciousness to be perfect (good) and serving our divine creative nature, and 4) deeply knowing that we are called to participate in co-creation of what we desire. This kind of awakening occurs in stages but invariably leads to big personal changes in how we experience life.
- Choose to awaken. Deepak Chopra has told us in Metahuman and his Reinventing Life newsletter that we can choose to awaken fully at any time, although for many/most people awakening will need to develop in steps and stages. Likewise, Eckhart Tolle tells us that we can do that by choosing to be fully in the present moment. It’s learning to be aware (in the present) rather than thinking most of the time (which is usually focused on the past or the future). So there is both conscious choice-making and awareness involved. Similarly, in my April 17 episode of Our Spiritual Life (S4E8), my guest Swami Nityananda emphasized that we can indeed awaken more directly into a state of awakeness simply by choosing to – and she teaches this in her new book Awake: The Yoga of Pure Awareness. But it requires a supporting practice of always becoming, or returning to, a state that is more fully awakened to unity and the divinity of all beings while we are in the world of the physical and especially with widespread ego-consciousness.
- Mutual awakening and shared unity consciousness. Patricia Albere (my guest in my S3E19 episode on September 19, 2022) is doing incredible work in helping people achieve this level of awakening/beingness. This involves reaching higher ways of being.
- Ways of being based on energy states. Many coaches I have interviewed have taught that we can awaken to (become more aware of) ourselves as energy beings, and by doing so we can improve our physical and emotional health, oftentimes dramatically. I was particularly influenced by Joshua Bloom who is a quantum energy healer and coach. This is also an important part of awakening and returning to wholeness.
- Discovering our life purpose. On the subject of life purpose, in the S4E5 episode (March 6, 2023), Bill Heinrich talked about his beliefs that our life purpose was decided by us before we came to Earth and that we can best connect with our purpose by connecting to our divine energies/gifts. And related to that, Steven Rudolph (S3E18 Sept 6 2022) talked about discovering our multiple natures, which are also a reflection of our divine energies/gifts, through testing. When we know our purpose, we can incorporate that into our new ways of being.
I hope you can see that all of these spiritual lessons relate in that they can be applied, individually and collectively, to help us achieve new ways of being in the world. The more that we can learn these lessons and develop new behavioral skills in the being and doing of these lessons, the greater our potential for “realizing heaven on Earth”.
Please leave a comment below, or feel free to contact me about this post or other topics at ray@raymondposch.com.
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