Christ Wisdom Movement

My Time in the Conscious You

by Lucia Sweetland

False Belief

The path of the mind was very attractive to me for quite awhile. I was out of touch with my feelings, and although I sincerely wanted to give and receive love, subconsciously I was blocking this through a fear of facing my feelings and taking responsibility for them. Deep down I felt bad about myself and I was afraid that if I really looked into this belief, it would prove to be founded in truth – in other words, that I actually was bad. On some level I convinced myself (hoped) that If I could just stay in my mind, and be enlightened through my mind, then eventually I could be safe and “good”, back with God and comforted that I would not have to worry anymore. In actuality, this wasn’t comforting at all, because it required me to be outwardly perfect – in other words, make no mistakes, because the conscious you abhors mistakes and sees them as very bad, hence my belief that I was bad, because I knew I had made many mistakes, and some of them probably very serious ones. But it is impossible to be perfect in an outer way, and since I could not be perfect, I felt inferior and insecure a lot of the time, jealous of those who seemed to be more advanced, inwardly fearful and anxious about my ”imperfect” state, and trying hard to live in denial.

Lost Connection with Feelings

It was easy to live in denial sometimes. I got very good at discoursing from my mind about all these spiritual concepts I had learned. What a safe place it seemed to be - in the mind, and looking intelligent and wise to boot. This is when I felt superior. But where was the love? The conscious you teachings taught me that I could be happy and at peace through controlling the mind – and even love through the mind, but even though I believed this on a superficial level because I desperately wanted to, I still felt tormented inside, and I was insecure, frequently off-balance and certainly not fulfilled in feeling love or loved. I could study more and more and try very hard the conscious you way, but I never seemed to get anywhere; I never got to the place where I felt safe and loved. Well, how could I? I was looking for spiritual sustenance in the dry desert of the conscious you mind. And the terror festered and grew.

The Work Needed

One day I hit a wall and couldn’t run from myself any longer. The terror had to be faced, and the pride – especially manifesting in my inferiority/ superiority complex – had to be faced; I had to muster up every ounce of will and desire to Be within me, and all the love of God I could recall from the depths of my being in order to make it through this time. I did not do it alone, for God was with me the whole time, as God is instantly “there” whenever we turn to him in humility and a willingness to take responsibility for our mistakes. I have had to learn that taking responsibility does not involve self-pity or self-condemnation, that it is not actually the real God who seeks to punish us, put us down or tie us to our mistakes forever; it is rather the conscious you “god” – the intellectually glorified ego that does this. Yes, we are required to bend the knee to God, but it is not so that our back can be lashed with a whip or so that God can step on us and keep us down or so that God can chain us to the ground forever; we kneel down so that God can take from us what is unreal and lift us up in Himself.

The conscious you will never kneel before God just as a shadow would never seek out the sun. We have to learn to stop listening to the conscious you in order to be free. And one conscious you lie that is important to overcome is the lie that we can make it back to God without doing the hard and sometimes painful work of facing and surrendering all of our miscreations and invoking forgiveness for all of our mistakes. One day we will come to a point where we will have risen above all lower emotions and thoughts, but it will not be because we avoided the hard work in the name of a false sort of transcendence, but because we had the courage and the love of God to do our hard work, to face and move through our fear and our pride and all other misqualified energy and negative beliefs by the grace of our loving God, and to accept and Be who we really are – I AM. This is the real transcendence and the real Victory over the conscious you.