This is what conscious living is all about. It is about being aware of the infinite number of choices available to you in any given present-moment situation. It is about choosing what serves you, given your conscious choice about how you define who you are and consciously determine who you wish to be. It's all about choices.



As individuals we make choices constantly, day in and day out, because thoughts run through our heads in a constant parade. We choose to act on some thoughts and not act on others. When you choose to act on one thought, you make the choice to go where that thought takes you. You are constantly choosing. The question is, ?Are you making these choices consciously or unconsciously??

We have the capacity to put things on automatic if we choose (once again it is a choice). This is a pattern we fall into when we live unconsciously. We develop our ability to narrowly define the parameters of our existence into categories of good and bad or right and wrong. Before long we set ourselves on auto pilot and allow our minds to react to events in an unconscious manner.

When you live unconsciously long enough, it becomes ingrained in your mind and you don't have to think anymore. You limit your thought process to only include those thoughts you have thought a million times before. This becomes the parade of thoughts going through your head all the time.

Unconscious living makes it easy to make choices, so easy that it doesn't seem like a choice anymore. If you encounter certain stimuli that, in the past, has made you sad, and you are faced with those same stimuli in the present moment, you automatically become sad. It happens without thinking and you don't believe you chose to be sad. You say it just happened. The reality of the situation, however, is that you did choose to be sad. It was an unconscious choice, but it was a choice. While you are in this state of being called sadness you think that this is your only option, being sad. The sleepwalker is unaware that there are an infinite variety of other choices.

If you live consciously, you are aware that certain stimuli has produced this feeling of sadness in the past. The difference is that you are awake now and aware that you don't have to choose sadness in the present situation. You may choose to be happy. It is your choice. If you choose to be happy, you will do happy things. If you choose to be sad, you will do sad things. Remember your beingness creates your doingness, a point that will be made clearer to you as we explore further and begin to wake up from the unconscious living of the sleepwalker to walking in awareness.

As you make the shift into aware living, you realize that unconscious living is not limited to individuals, but applies to groups of people as well. Neighborhoods, communities, and nations can all be living unconsciously and making unconscious choices.

This impact of unconscious choice has a profound effect on our planet, because just as there are consequences of every action we take as individuals, there are the larger consequences of every action we take as groups of people as well.

Every action we take, from the choices we make, has a consequence. There are man-made consequences and there are natural consequences. The sleepwalkers of the world are conditioned to be mainly concerned with the man-made consequences of their actions. If you kill someone, the man-made consequence of your action may be that society will kill you. This is not the natural consequence of your action because nature does not strike you dead for killing another person. A natural consequence would be more in alignment with ?nature's healing ways? and a restoration of peace and harmony, rather than a swift call to judgment and revenge.

What you are going to find as you begin to wake up is that nature does not judge or condemn us for the actions we take or the experiences we have. Nature observes our actions and experiences and allows natural consequences to take place. Only human beings have created a system whereby we judge the actions of others, and then create a series of man-made consequences to deal with these actions, usually in the form of punishment.

The sleepwalker judges and condemns himself all the time. He takes the words of others who tell him how he should define what is good and what is bad, or what is right and what is wrong. He then incorporates these words of others into a value system that is in alignment with what the others have said is the best value system and calls it his own. He chose to do this because he has seen the man-made consequences of not doing this. He does not want to subject himself to the bad judgment of his peers.

Free yourself from judgment. Free yourself from condemnation. Wake up to your authentic self. Live your life consciously and revel in the infinite variety of choice available to you when you do so.