Awareness vs Consciousness
What is the difference between awareness and consciousness ? Consciousness is the state of awareness. It refers to your individual awareness including your memories, feelings, thoughts etc. Simply it is an awareness about your internal and external things or world inside and outside.
How to Raise Awareness and Consciousness
To raise your consciousness or awareness you need to do two things mainly – reduce your thoughts and try to be in the present moment always. These 2 things will help you a lot to achieve the goal. Normally 65k thoughts come to our mind daily and mostly negative thoughts and those thoughts not only drain energy but also reduce our awareness. When you are aware about the present moment or when you live in the present moment thoughts will slowly reduce.
Practice Mindfulness
Best way to be aware about the present moment is practicing mindfulness. Past is history and future is imagination. So no point in thinking about the past or future too much. So what we have full control of is only the present moment. By thinking about the past or future we are missing the current moment. Also when the mind is in past or future control goes to the subconscious mind. It is called automatic mode of the brain. In this you don’t have much control. Subconscious plays recorded data like a tape recorder and remember these data can be very old mostly from your childhood because most of the subconscious writing happened during that period.
Instead if you force your mind to be in the present moment then control will be handed over to the conscious mind which is more logical. In this direct mode thoughts will slowly reduce and you will become more practical. Old memories no longer haunt you to stop making strong decisions. You can change habits. Also this will increase your consciousness and awareness if you practice it daily.
You are Not Body or Mind
Try to find out the real You. You are not body or mind. The real you – Soul, Athman, Consciousness or Spirit – whatever you call it, that is behind your mind, body and intellect. So be with the soul and observe your mind, body and intellect. You can see thoughts are played out in the mind like a cinema screen.
Don’t Judge, Just Observe your Thoughts & Emotions
If you observe the mind you will see thoughts are coming and going every minute. There is no problem with that. Problems occur when we get attached to or when we try to judge, otherwise it will just pass. You are much bigger than your mind and body. So be the master and just observe the mind, body and intellect. Dont be a slave, be the master. If you keep this attitude slowly things will change. Move from mind to heart. Heart (not physical heart) supposed to be the master and mind just a slave.But normally the opposite happens and that is the problem. So don’t allow your mind to take over control. Mind is like any other part of the body – use it only whenever required.
Many other things also can be done to increase the consciousness or awareness like eat healthy foods, practice yoga and pranayama, spend time with nature, be with similar thinking people, listen to relaxing music, repeat a mantra, read inspirational books, watch or listen satsang and inspirational speech, be grateful and forgive everybody, go more inward etc