My whole life, when I considered the qualities of a person, I always adopted the criteria most people use. Usually you hear people say: he is intelligent, he is handsome, he is humourus, he is extrovert. What you never hear is he is conscious.

I define consciousness as the ability of a person:

• to recognize what consequencies derive from his actions
• to understand what others want when they do/say something

There are many other ways I would define it, but these two are my favorites.

Being conscious is beautiful because it makes you experience life deeply. You find many meanings in situations where the unconscious find one or none. It is powerful because it makes you realize that you are responsible for your life, and it puts you a step forward to unconscious people. Someone use this privileged position to manipulate and milk money/services from them (tv commercials are a classic).

Being conscious is also difficult because it requires a lot of work, and it means belonging to a minority. A tiny percentage of people have a high level of consciousness. In my daily life, that includes relatives, friends, colleagues, acquaintenances, I can think to 2/3 persons.

At various levels, the rest seem to live a life that is the repetition of the same unit of time (10 minutes, 1 day, 1 year) over and over, all life long. Repetition is the keyword I associate to unconsciousness. Typically they always cycle the same thought patterns, and struggle with the same problems never to be solved. Be it a job they hate, a painful relationship, weight issues.

So, why are some people conscious and some are not? And how do one become conscious? So far my answer is that it’s both due to luck and predispostion. In fact I consider myself (conscious) very lucky to have found the messages of people like Harry Browne, Steve Pavlina, Loren Howe, Celestine Chua. And behind that, lucky for all the opportunities I had to study, read books, take lessons.

But it is necessary to have an open mind to understand and accept the concepts from the people listed above, in fact when I tried to share their revolutionary thoughts with the persons of my life, these latters didn’t show any interest or directly marked them as uselessness.

Instead I was entusiast when I first discovered them. and I still am because I keep getting great inputs from their material.

Pavlina wrote an interesting article about the levels of consciousness, describing each one with the feelings associated. Based on that, I would place myself somewhere close to acceptance. Of course I want to raise the ladder and reach the top level enlightment soon.

After all I already sign my mails as ‘Paolo the semi-god‘… it was evident that I was in the middle run to reach Jesus and Buddha 😀