Self-Awareness and Realization – All Knowledge can Only be Acquired through Direct Experience

Posted On August 23, 2017 / Written by Dr. Linda Gadbois

To fully grasp this idea, wipe the slate clean of all preconceived ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, should or shouldn’t, and move into a space of simply observing and realizing what is. Be present in your experiences by giving your full attention to them while stepping outside of your conditioned mindset and beliefs, and allow whatever is naturally being stimulated to rise up fully within you without squelching, resisting, censoring, editing or corrupting it with preconceived ideas and rules about it. Simply stay present and witness it from a spacious and wide open perspective. Allow it to reveal itself to you, and simply see what it is. Allow all contradictory feelings and ideas about things previously held as fact to freely express, giving them your full attention while relinquishing all judgment of them.

Create spaciousness around stuff as a kind of open arena where feelings, emotions, and ideas that normally arise in any situation, or do to any stimulus or activity, are allowed to freely express and reveal to you in very clear terms what they are and what they’re about. Resist the need to try and explain or justify them, and don’t label them as something that causes you to go into denial about having them, or that creates the need to repress and shun them out of shame and guilt of some kind, or without trying to ignore them all together. And in this spacious free flow expression of what you’re feeling and experiencing that’s coming from within you due to what you’re observing from a neutral and unbiased perspective of witnessing it from a dissociated position, fully take in what its showing you that may offer evidence that contradicts or undermines long held beliefs that caused you to repress how you really felt, and be willing to consider that your beliefs may be inaccurate and need revising with new information obtained through direct experience.

As we grow and are conditioned by our family unit, authority figures, and everyday situations of our youth, we acquire and take on as our own the beliefs, values, and thoughts of others. As children we don’t have the mental ability to think for ourselves and rationally evaluate information we’re being taught and programmed with for accuracy or validity, and so our mental paradigm as our formative conditioning is established from a predominately unconscious state of hypnosis. The subconscious mind is passive and receptive in nature, with no active will of its own, and simply acts to take in suggestions as seeded ideas, that it then develops into a reality in the imagination, which is fully active and well developed at this age. By making the suggested idea into a reality in our minds eye, which provides us with an experience of it that makes it seem real, we form a belief around it. Likewise, whatever family model as a dynamic we’re raised and trained to play a role in as a kind of life theme or type of story, we’re not only trained to the same behavioral dynamic and the emotional states that naturally produce those behaviors, but we’re also conditioned with the same values and mindset that act to drive the dynamic.

Naturally, our values and beliefs, and the life theme as a dynamic we’re programmed (trained) with, produces a consistent version of reality that gives us a limited and specific sense of ourselves within that reality. If this model is inherently incorrect, which nearly all are, especially in a group dynamic that requires multiple roles and people to play those roles, all with their own personal models bearing an influence, then the reality perceived and experienced out of that model is also incorrect and merely acts to validate, support, and substantiate the model producing it. An incorrect model and version of reality that’s superimposed over the outer objective reality (looked through like a lens), changing how it appears, also gives rise to constant inner turmoil and conflict because often what’s being stimulated in us and wanting to rise fully in our awareness, directly contradicts or disproves our belief about it, which undermines it, and we’re either forced to maintain the value and belief by arguing to defend it and ignoring the evidence against it (with ourselves), or use the new information to grow and evolve our values and beliefs to more accurately match our experiences. The choice is always ours and is being made both consciously and unconsciously within us all the time. Do we pose ourselves against truth that comes as direct experience in order to maintain an idea that we were given by others, or do we open our mind around it, and be willing to consider whatever comes as a result?

Many people are afraid to trust their own thoughts and feelings that naturally arise in them through certain experiences that act to contradict what they believe to be right or wrong, and good or bad, which is how our values play into the picture in a big way. While we can say there’s no such thing as right and wrong, or good and bad, except as we make it up in our minds by assigning those values to an idea, we still have a tendency to use these ideas to direct and create our experiences by way of them. This imaginary component of reality is true in the most basic sense that we’re always the one making up everything in our reality by assigning it values, qualities, and characteristics that conforms it to our story about things. While we know (or believe), there’s what we can call an objective and neutral reality that we all share in common, often described as the original creation, which sets the stage and provides the foundation for us to continue creating out of, the fact is that all reality as we’re capable of knowing it is subjective and personal in nature as a product of our own mind.

When we go into a situation with any form of preconceived ideas about it (which we always do), we tend to only “see†what we expect to see, or what matches our belief about it and can be used to form the experience of our belief about it by how we organize the elements involved, and how we interpret it through the story we tell ourselves about it that gives it meaning. Yet often, at a purely unconscious level, we’re being stimulated in a way that naturally causes other ideas as possible realities to arise in us as new possibilities that don’t seem to be a part of “usâ€, and therefore feel a bit foreign and often taboo. Yet these ideas are very much a part of us because they naturally arise out of our subconscious which is a part of the collective unconscious, or the level of the mind we share with everyone and everything else in the natural world of the astral plane or Earth’s atmosphere. The subconscious, having no active will of its own, which is necessary to manipulate or corrupt ideas through an agenda of some kind, is innocent in terms of only responding to and acting as a vessel for “what is†in terms of vibration and consciousness.

The subconscious is primarily emotionally driven and is always picking up impulses as mental impressions that it turns into imagined realities as thoughts. As we’re stimulated with the feelings involved in any activity or event, they’re drawn into the energy field of our subconscious mind and translated into thought-forms. These thoughts as imagined ideas that come as an experience are showing us the latent potential inherent in the feeling as a possible reality. Whatever we can imagine as an inner experience, we can do or make real as an outer experience of a corresponding nature. Whatever we acquire through the direct experience of it is real, and therefore true in terms of the possibility it offers for creating ourselves by way of that experience.

When we’re having an experience that draws up in us contradictory possibilities that go against our values and beliefs somehow, we are faced with options and the need to make decisions based on those options. When what existed previously as a firm belief or rule of sorts that we used as the means of deciding what we allowed to arise in us and lend ourselves to express by becoming it in body and mind, is uprooted by a new possibility that contradicts its truth and validity as the only possibility, or certainly the one we should allow ourselves to consider, and we can tell by how it feels as it arises in us giving us a preview of sorts, that it’s not bad or wrong, but rather a new kind of experience from a new perspective that shows us something different as a new way of being, we’re presented with a choice as to whether we step into it and try it on, or whether or not we don’t like how it feels and what it would mean about us, and so we shun and negate it by withdrawing our attention from it, returning it to a latent state.

All ideas and activities energetically contain all possibilities for creating various realities out of it as latent potential. Our mind acts to resonate only with certain potential within an infinite number of possibilities, activating and bringing a possibility by drawing it in and allowing it to rise up in our mind as a kind of preview of the reality inherent in it as a means for creating based on us being the channel for it. Whatever we give our attention to we channel our life-force energy into and bring it to life in the sphere of our mind, which encompasses our immediate environment. By continuing to focus on and think about it we structure it into a complete detailed reality in our mind as an energetic template (vibratory frequency) for producing the equivalent outer reality through resonance. It exists as a transparent idea of a possible reality that is imbued with an electromagnetic field (life-force) the we look through as a lens that changes what’s active (brought out) and passive (ignored or not noticed) in the outer environment, changing how it appears to us. While simultaneously forming a gravitational field between us and the outer elements of its fulfillment, and we naturally begin having an analogous outer experience of our inner imagining. When we withdraw our attention from a possible idea for creating, it recedes from our awareness and returns to a latent, inactive state. The only things that are alive for us (within us) is what we willfully direct our attention into and remain focused on for an extended period of time.

Our power to create by learning how our mind and soul operates, and learning how to use it intentionally comes by realizing the nature of our conditioning and how we act to form and build our own mental paradigm. Instead of being locked into a belief system we acquired through systematic training and accepting other peoples ideas as our own, we can realize that our paradigm is just a foundation as a starting point that we can continue to design and develop ourselves through our ability to recognize and give rise to aspects of ourselves that hold a greater truth. By embracing this new truth we’re provided with a path  as evolution that we must undertake by utilizing our creative capacities of choice and free will in skillfully creating ourselves by way of our own hand.

Once we realize the nature and power of our values and beliefs, and we return them to a fluid, mobile state of growth and development, and we stay present in all of our meaningful experiences, always honoring how we feel, and freely giving rise to the thoughts and feelings we’re naturally being stimulated with while observing them from a dissociated and objective perspective to see the actual reality they hold and imply, we can choose which ones to adopt and step into as a means of growing ourselves to a specific means, and which ones to let go and not allow to take hold. As we do this more and more and become experienced, we realize that our decisions come with much greater clarity as to who and how we become because of them, yet the results become more vague and often slippery because we often change our position and perspective in terms of how we enter into relationship with everything else, that changes, often entirely, how we look at things that we previously had a very definite and limited idea around.

As we begin honoring our personal experience as the basis for all of our decisions, we notice that it requires us to develop different aspect of our character, and changes how we reference our source of power from an external one to an internal one. It requires us to trust ourselves to know right from wrong, what will be good and beneficial for us and what won’t, what hurts and reduces us, and what enlivens and expands us, and to honor always our own experience over the experience of others. As we develop the ability to realize the reality that rises out of our experiences in a direct and intimate way as feelings that are imagined as scenarios and movies that inform us through the direct experience of them, and our ability to consistently make good decisions based on them, we become more secure and confident in our ability to make decisions that will foster our growth and direct our development in the way we want, and in doing so, we will come to implacably trust and believe in ourselves.

All true knowledge only comes through the direct experience of it. It’s something that’s in us that’s stimulated and brought to life in the imagination by that same knowledge outside of us. We never acquire knowledge from without, but only from within as the experience of it. It’s awakened in us in relationship with its outer source that’s of the same nature (sympathetic resonance). We can never know the truth of anything by accepting someone else’s experience over our own. When we deny our experience in favor of others, we live a life of delusion and give our will and creative ability over to another, becoming formed and determined by them. When our experience contradicts the experience of another, and we trust them to know better than we do, and we doubt and discount ours in favor of theirs, we literally sell our soul and reside in a basic and all-pervading form of darkness as self-imposed ignorance. We choose to live unconsciously (like a trained animal) and live out of an illusion instead of the truth.

To take back, and step into our God-given ability to self-create through realization, choice, and free will, is to first realize what experience we’re having in an given situation or activity, without censoring, editing, or repressing it, what’s rising in us because of it, and step into it as a possibility in order to see its true nature, then, based on the information we derive from it as the reality and experience it offers, make a decision as to whether or not to step into it further by embodying it and cooperatively participating in the experience of it. In this way we’re never required to believe in something in order to make it real for us, but instead we can know it as real. We can come to realize that we have a direct method for accessing truth, and we can have faith in our ability to know the difference. By developing confidence in ourselves and skill at discerning the truth as it exists within us, we begin taking full responsibility for our own creation and truly become empowered in our own life.

Dr. Linda Gadbois

Transpersonal Psychologist, Personal Transformation Coach, and Spiritual Teacher