Living a more conscious life is the first step towards truly flourishing, a step that helps not only you to experience the joy of LLP, but because of our interconnectedness can help change the world.
Living consciously changes everything. When we live consciously, we are more present in each moment, we become more mindful and intentional in our thoughts and actions. We become aware of our limits. We understand that we have limited sensory knowledge and limiting beliefs and that we are all interconnected and not just by technology.
Fear and anxiety start to fall away when we realize that most of our fears are the result of our perceptions and that we have the power to change our perceptions. Hate, rage, and judgment can be replaced by compassion and love. The false narratives that have been ingrained in us no longer deceive us.
We become less compulsive in our actions and do not allow externalities to drive our passions. Self-judgment and even self-hatred fall away and are replaced by acceptance and striving to better ourselves. We see others succumbing to the same fallacies and feel compassion for them. We have become aware of our evolved biases and heuristics and are able to counteract them by bringing conscious awareness to decisions that were automatic before.
When we live consciously, we should be able to see beyond the rhetorics of many false prophets and guides that surround us these days. In Section 2, we will look at several of these so that we can better avoid them and their pitfalls.
We become mindful. Mindfulness is the kind of light that shows us the way. It is the living Buddha inside of each of us. Mindfulness gives birth to insight, awakening, compassion, and love.
Along with this is a sort of “ah ha” moment (and often many moments) that is best seen in the following short story.
What exactly does it look like to live fully with an LLP Mindset? We next take time to detail our observations and experiences.
We divide these individual observations into some major groups:
Awareness of Our Limited Sensory Apparatus
We will realize that we are limited by our own sensory apparatus and hence we don’t see reality as it is.
Visible light, we have learned, is not the sole illuminating energy of the universe, as prescientific common sense decreed. It is instead an infinitesimal sliver of electromagnetic radiation, comprising wavelengths of 400 to 700 nanometers (billionths of a meter), within a spectrum that ranges from gamma waves trillions of times shorter to radio waves trillions of times longer than the human visual specturm. The rest of the spectrum, saturating the Universe, ranges from gamma rays trillions of times shorter than the human visual segment to radio waves trillions of times longer.
Bias Awareness
If we live consciously, we will realize that we have unconscious biases which we have developed over the course of our lives, such as, confirmation bias, appearance bias, group bias (why almost all Republicans/democrats vote the same way on all issues), our bias toward short termism (explanation in our short term instincts as hunter gatherers(to spot danger), seeking patterns when randomness is the truth, bias toward action when patience is needed, knowledge illusion(limitations of our own perception). We project linearly into the world, we confuse correlation and attribute some sort of causation. Our brains evolved from very different circumstances than we are currently in, we had very few decisions to be made, unlike today when there is a decision at every moment.
Our brain is marvelously adapted to the past, but not the modern world.
We will be aware of our ego and how that is self-limiting.
We are aware of our beliefs.
No matter what worldview you adopt, you will end up adopting some set of beliefs that are on some level subjective and may even be at some level of analysis against truths (objective) or facts. What is important is how you came to adopt these sets of beliefs and how you respond to others who decided to adopt a different set of beliefs.
Our problem isn’t simply a matter of having the wrong beliefs. It’s a matter of believing that right beliefs are what matters most.
It’s also often the case that people are unaware of where their deeply held beliefs come from. If we were to continue our street conversation by asking why she believes what she claims to believe, she might shrug and reply, “I don’t know, I just believe it.” Often people get their beliefs like they catch colds— by being around other people! And since ideas are everywhere— on television, in books and magazines, at the movies, and in conversation with friends and family— it’s easy to pick them up without considering whether they’re worth believing or even true.
Here is Deepak Chopra’s perspective on living consciously
Read more about his thoughts on conscious living here
Knowledge acquired by human beings has been increasing at an exponential rate for over a century. However, we have yet to make commensurate progress in human flourishing. This is because knowledge has been getting increasingly fragmented and sits mostly in silos. The UEF believes that if we can integrate knowledge across the silos of time, civilizations, geographies and academic disciplines.
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