“The abundance of life is always present. When we recognize it, it opens our consciousness . . . and it comes flowing in mind and body with a mighty, quickening, healing power that renews, transforms, and changes.”

-Charles Fillmore

Expanded awareness is a great gift we have in this thing called life.

Are we using it wisely?

Are we using it well?

There is a school of thought which suggests that the human experience is the highest level of expressed consciousness on this planet because we have the capacity for self-awareness. I don’t know if that it true. I sometimes look at my cats and it seems that they have some level of self-awareness. So I ask, “What is it that sets me apart from them?” There are two answers I’ve reflected on over the years.

The first is that we have expanded awareness — awareness of that which is beyond our personal and limited idea of life. I don’t know that my cats have that awareness. That idea is a little esoteric for this moment. I expect it will come up again at some point.

Perhaps the more widely understandable idea is this: we have the capacity to be self-reflective. In being self-reflective we can modify our behavior. This is something I don’t see in cats. We might be able to temporarily curb their behavior, their response is related more to a change in stimulus from the outside. I can spray them with water when they do something I would prefer they not… but the change in behavior is not because they’ve reflected on why they are being sprayed with water, only that they don’t want to be sprayed.

We don’t need to be sprayed with water, because we have the ability to reflect on our behavior, make determinations about it, and act accordingly.

This begs the same questions I began with:

Are we using it wisely?

Are we using it well?

Only we can know for ourselves. No-one else can tell us.

In your expanded awareness, allow yourself the chance to self-reflect and set the compass for your own ethical standards based on what you know to be inherently true (my question for reflection is usually, "Is this loving and kind?"). You get to live according to your paradigm, and I suggest being open to flexibility within this as well. Don’t become so set in your ways that another idea, based on new information, around which you have exercised self-reflection, cannot then modify your moral compass. That is how we expand and grow. It is also a way we can open our hearts to more compassion. Self-reflection can be a tool in deeper understanding and experience of others.