LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
From low to high, the levels of consciousness are: shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire,
anger, pride, courage, neutrality, willingness, acceptance, reason, love, joy, peace,
enlightenment.
While we can pop in and out of different levels at various times, usually there’s a
predominant “normal” state for us. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re at least at
the level of courage because if you were at a lower level, you’d likely have no conscious
interest in personal growth.
I’ll go over these levels in order, mostly focusing on the ones between courage and reason,
since that’s the range where you’re most likely to land. The labels are Hawkins’. The
descriptions of each level are based on Hawkins’ descriptions but blended with my own
thoughts. Hawkins defines this as a logarithmic scale, so there are far fewer people at the
higher levels than at the lower ones. An increase from one level to another will result in
enormous change in your life.
Shame – Just a step above death. You’re probably contemplating suicide at this level. Either
that or you’re a serial killer. Think of this as self-directed hatred.
Guilt – A step above shame, but you still may be having thoughts of suicide. You think of
yourself as a sinner, unable to forgive yourself for past transgressions.
Apathy – Feeling hopeless or victimized. The state of learned helplessness. Many
homeless people are stuck here.
Grief – A state of perpetual sadness and loss. You might drop down here after losing a
loved one. Depression. Still higher than apathy, since you’re beginning to escape the
numbness.
Fear – Seeing the world as dangerous and unsafe. Paranoia. Usually you’ll need help to
rise above this level, or you’ll remain trapped for a long time, such as in an abusive
relationship.
Desire – Not to be confused with setting and achieving goals, this is the level of addiction,
craving, and lust — for money, approval, power, fame, etc. Consumerism. Materialism. This
is the level of smoking and drinking and doing drugs.
Anger – the level of frustration, often from not having your desires met at the lower level.
This level can spur you to action at higher levels, or it can keep you stuck in hatred. In an
abusive relationship, you ’ll often see an anger person coupled with a fear person.
Pride – The first level where you start to feel good, but it’s a false feeling. It’s dependent on
external circumstances (money, prestige, etc), so it’s vulnerable. Pride can lead to
nationalism, racism, and religious wars. Think Nazis. A state of irrational denial and
defensiveness. Religious fundamentalism is also stuck at this level. You become so
closely enmeshed in your beliefs that you see an attack on your beliefs as an attack on you.
Courage – The first level of true strength. I’ve made a previous post about this level:
Courage is the Gateway. This is where you start to see life as challenging and exciting
instead of overwhelming. You begin to have an inkling of interest in personal growth,
although at this level you ’ll probably call it something else like skill-building, career
advancement, education, etc. You start to see your future as an improvement upon your
past, rather than a continuation of the same.
Neutrality – This level is epitomized by the phrase, “live and let live.” It’s flexible, relaxed,
and unattached. Whatever happens, you roll with the punches. You don’t have anything to
prove. You feel safe and get along well with other people. A lot of self-employed people are
at this level. A very comfortable place. The level of complacency and laziness. You ’re taking
care of your needs, but you don’t push yourself too hard.
Willingness – Now that you’re basically safe and comfortable, you start using your energy
more effectively. Just getting by isn’t good enough anymore. You begin caring about doing a
good job — perhaps even your best. You think about time management and productivity and
getting organized, things that weren’t so important to you at the level of neutrality. Think of
this level as the development of willpower and self-discipline. These people are the
“ troopers” of society; they get things done well and don’t complain much. If you’re in school,
then you’re a really good student; you take your studies seriously and put in the time to do a
good job. This is the point where your consciousness becomes more organized and
disciplined.
Acceptance – Now a powerful shift happens, and you awaken to the possibilities of living
proactively. At the level of willingness you’ve become competent, and now you want to put
your abilities to good use. This is the level of setting and achieving goals. I don’t like the
label “acceptance” that Hawkins uses here, but it basically means that you begin accepting
responsibility for your role in the world. If something isn’t right about your life (your career,
your health, your relationship), you define your desired outcome and change it. You start to
see the big picture of your life more clearly. This level drives many people to switch careers,
start a new business, or change their diets.
Reason – At this level you transcend the emotional aspects of the lower levels and begin to
think clearly and rationally. Hawkins defines this as the level of medicine and science. The
way I see it, when you reach this level, you become capable of using your reasoning
abilities to their fullest extent. You now have the discipline and the proactivity to fully exploit
your natural abilities. You ’ve reached the point where you say, “Wow. I can do all this stuff,
and I know I must put it to good use. So what’s the best use of my talents?” You take a look
around the world and start making meaningful contributions. At the very high end, this is the
level of Einstein and Freud. It ’s probably obvious that most people never reach this level in
their entire lives.
Love – I don’t like Hawkins’ label “love” here because this isn’t the emotion of love. It’s
unconditional love, a permanent understanding of your connectedness with all that exists.
Think compassion. At the level of reason, you live in service to your head. But that eventually
becomes a dead end where you fall into the trap of over-intellectualizing. You see that you
need a bigger context than just thinking for its own sake. At the level of love, you now place
your head and all your other talents and abilities in service to your heart (not your emotions,
but your greater sense of right and wrong — your conscience). I see this as the level of
awakening to your true purpose. Your motives at this level are pure and uncorrupted by the
desires of the ego. This is the level of lifetime service to humanity. Think Gandhi, Mother
Teresa, Dr. Albert Schweitzer. At this level you also begin to be guided by a force greater
than yourself. It ’s a feeling of letting go. Your intuition becomes extremely strong. Hawkins
claims this level is reached only by 1 in 250 people during their entire lifetimes.
Joy – A state of pervasive, unshakable happiness. Eckhart Tolle describes this state in The
Power of Now. The level of saints and advanced spiritual teachers. Just being around
people at this level makes you feel incredible. At this level life is fully guided by synchronicity
and intuition. There ’s no more need to set goals and make detailed plans — the expansion
of your consciousness allows you to operate at a much higher level. A near-death
experience can temporarily bump you to this level.
Peace – Total transcendence. Hawkins claims this level is reached only by one person in
10 million.
Enlightenment – The highest level of human consciousness, where humanity blends with
divinity. Extremely rare. The level of Krishna, Buddha, and Jesus. Even just thinking about
people at this level can raise your consciousness.
I think you’ll find this model worthy of reflection. Not only people but also objects, events,
and whole societies can be ranked at these levels. Within your own life, you’ll see that
some parts of your life are at different levels than others, but you should be able to identify
your current overall level. You might be at the level of neutrality overall but still be addicted to
smoking (level of desire). The lower levels you find within yourself will serve as a drag that
holds the rest of you back. But you ’ll also find higher levels in your life. You may be at the
level of acceptance and read a book at the level of reason and feel really inspired. Think
about the strongest influences in your life right now. Which ones raise your consciousness?
Which ones lower it?
One thing I like about these levels of consciousness is that I can trace back over my own life
and see how I ’ve been moving through them. I remember being stuck at the level of guilt for
a long time – as a child I was indoctrinated into a belief system where I was a helpless
sinner, being judged according to the standards of someone at the level of love or higher.
From there I graduated to the state of apathy, feeling numb to the whole thing. By high
school I had reached the level of pride — I was a straight-A student, captain of the Academic
Decathlon team, showered with accolades and awards, but I became dependent on them. I
hit the level of Courage in my late teens, but the courage was very unfocused, and I overdid
it and got myself into all sorts of trouble. I then spent about a year in neutrality and moved
through willingness and acceptance during my 20s with a lot of conscious effort. At present
I ’m at the level of reason and getting closer and closer to completing the leap to love. I
experience the state of love more and more often, and it’s guiding many of my decisions
already, but it hasn’t yet stuck as my natural state. I’ve also experienced the state of joy for
days at a time, but never with any permanence yet. That state is a pervasive feeling of
natural euphoria, as if I ’m exploding on the inside with positive energy. It literally forces me
to smile. I’ve been in that state for most of this morning, probably because I haven’t eaten
anything yet today (I find it easier to hit that state of consciousness when I eat lightly or not at
all).
We’ll naturally fluctuate between multiple states throughout the course of any given week,
so you’ll probably see a range of 3-4 levels where you spend most of your time. One way to
figure out your “natural” state is to think about how you perform under pressure. If you
squeeze an orange, you get orange juice because that’s what’s inside. What comes out of
you when you get squeezed by external events? Do you become paranoid and shut down
(fear)? Do you start yelling at people (anger)? Do you become defensive (pride)? What
happens to me under pressure is that I become hyper-analytical, but recently I just had a
pressure situation where I handled it mostly by intuition, which was a big change for me.
This tells me I ’m getting close to the unconditional love state because in that state, intuition
can be effectively accessed even under pressure.
Everything in your environment will have an effect on your level of consciousness. TV.
Movies. Books. Web sites. People. Places. Objects. Food. If you ’re at the level of reason,
watching TV news (which is predominantly at the levels of fear and desire) will temporarily
lower your consciousness. If you ’re at the level of guilt, TV news will actually raise it up.
Progressing from one level to the next requires an enormous amount of energy. I wrote
about this previously when discussing quantum leaps. Without conscious effort or the help
of others, you’ll likely just stay at your current level until some outside force comes into your
life.
Notice the natural progression of levels, and consider what happens when you try to short-
cut the process. If you try to reach the level of reason before mastering self-discipline
(willingness) and goal-setting (acceptance), you ’ll be too disorganized and unfocused to
use your mind to its full extent. If you try to push yourself to the level of love before you’ve
mastered reason, you’ll suffer from gullibility and may end up in a cult.
Going up even one level can be extremely hard; most people don’t do so in their entire lives.
A change in just one level can radically alter everything in your life. This is why people below
the level of courage aren ’t likely to progress without external help. Courage is required to
work on this consciously; it comes down to repeatedly betting your whole reality for the
chance to become more conscious and aware. But whenever you reach that next level, you
realize clearly that it was a good bet. For example, when you hit the level of courage, all your
past fears and false pride seem silly to you now. When you reach the level of acceptance
(setting and achieving goals), you look back on the level of willingness and see you were
like a mouse running on a treadmill — you were a good runner, but you didn’t pick a
direction.
I think the most important work we can do as human beings is to raise our individual level of
consciousness. When we do this, we spread higher levels of consciousness to everyone
around us. Imagine what an incredible world this would be if we could at least get everyone
to the level of acceptance. According to Hawkins 85% of the people on earth live below the
level of courage.
When you temporarily experience the higher levels, you can see where you must go next.
You have one of those moments of clarity where you understand that things have to change.
But when you sink into the lower levels, that memory becomes clouded.
We have to keep consciously taking ourselves back to the sources that can help us
complete the next leap. Each step requires different solutions. I recall when making the shift
from neutrality to willingness, I listened to time management tapes almost every day. I
immersed myself in sources created by people at the level of willingness until I eventually
shifted. But a book on time management will be of little use to someone who ’s at the level
of pride; they’ll reject the very notion with a lot of defensiveness. And time management is
meaningless to someone at the level of peace. But you can’t hit the higher levels if you
haven’t mastered the basics first. Jesus was a carpenter. Gandhi was a lawyer. Buddha
was a prince. We all have to start somewhere.
