All growth and personal development begins with
self-awareness: the self being aware of itself, becoming aware of
dissatisfactions with its self, and projecting, therefore, changes that will
enable it to ‘improve’. There are three primary tools of personal development
that follow from this self-awareness.
One, desire itself: seeing our own condition we
desire to improve, rectify, and enhance it. Desire is not motivation but it
precedes it. The consequence of this, then, is that our emotions are vital to
our development, and are not playing some subordinate role to our thought and
logical processes.
Two, imagination: the self produces images that
begin a process of manifestation. The etymology of the word manifestation is
from the Latin for “hand” – we can ‘handle’ thoughts via manifestation. Manifestation,
then, is the process by which material reality comes into existence as a
concretization of what the mind has ‘seen’. Hence, it is too that we find that
the visible things depend upon the invisible things for their existence. There
is a wonderful line from the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead which expresses
this: “All the world which lies below has been set in order and filled in
contents by the things which are placed above; for the things below have not
the power to set in order the world above”.
Three, expectations: our beliefs in future outcomes,
or in short, faith. What we believe, especially about the future, has an
inordinate effect upon that future and upon the outcomes (of life) for us. So
much so, our belief – faith – may be considered a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Meditation is the process and the objective by which self-awareness is maximized. This leads
to the interesting reflection that altered brain wave patterns – not the
everyday beta brain way patterns (c. 13-40 Hz) – are intimately connected with
developing self awareness.
Two corollaries of this are: first, relaxation is
therefore essential to human happiness and development. Secondly, the ultimate
relaxation is in sleep, and sleep itself requires both the non-being (as it
were) state of non-consciousness AND the dream state. In fact the dream state
is every bit as essential as the non-conscious state. Why? Possibly because
dreams themselves, remembered or otherwise, are primary agents shaping our
desires, imagination and expectations.
Bizarrely, then, the real changes we want in our
life, and even the fact we want them, derive from the invisible, intangible,
insubstantial and nebulous world within us.
The Mapping Motivation Series 