Chapter 10: Walking Forever
A person’s conscious understanding of old internal factors and new external factors determines their intelligence. Consciousness and intelligence are often conflated similar to being informed and being aware. Consciousness however, does not presume intelligence. But rather intelligence works as an additive factor to your consciousness. There are multiple forms of intelligence to develop across your lifetime to better understand yourself and others. On the other hand, between useful and reductive, Self-awareness often becomes a term that shows up as a plateau of inaction towards that development. Discovering a state of self-awareness is simply the first step. By recognizing the mountain that is in front of you, you then must explore the potential change you can create off of what you’ve become aware of.
Across the last nine chapters, I’ve dedicated time speaking to ego, limits, narratives, attachment, emotions, timing, conceptualization and the scales of depth, all to connect to the unifying importance of unconditional love. The conditional love of holding selective acceptance of yourself while requesting the world to unselectively accept you is ego-dominant. We use the explored themes of the previous chapters to move towards one form of love consciously and unconsciously. The conditional lover prioritizes their fear and further disregards their potential for intelligence. The unconditional lover understands that breaking from normalcy to pursue into the absent is how you can consciously become more intelligent.
Those who are restrictively self-aware are still ego-centric in nature. An ego ruled mind will distort the true range of one’s intelligence. That part will never change until they remove the pride of whichever narrative they claim as their true sense of self. The development of our self-awareness leads to a crossroad of believed superiority or inferiority. The person who chooses superiority over the average human, lacks self awareness and is still connected to the ego of the dying man. The person who sees their inferiority to a human who lacks self awareness is connected to themselves. Self-awareness is a state, a temporal thing that can end very easily. Intelligence does not end but it can become obsolete by one’s restricted self-awareness.
Exercising your knowledge, being informed and teaching others are outward signs of intelligence that exist before and after the step of self awareness; they are the foundation of your intellect. But to truly take the step past your state of self-awareness, you must also execute your intelligence in the absence of your circumstances. Trying to create positive, impactful change in situations that benefit you, others and the environment all while allowing equitable opportunity for others to discover self-awareness from the impact. This step has no end or time period it only starts. Reaching this step itself will be a challenge because it requires unconditional love to be successful.
The need to maintain balance and control of our own personal factors is difficult enough. To then understand another’s and help influence them to recognize their own is an intensive process. The person who finds superiority in their self-awareness will stumble once they fail to connect to their past of unawareness; a lack of empathy. The person who finds inferiority in their self-awareness will do better with connection but may crumble from all the pressure; becoming somewhat of a martyr. The person who separates their sense of self from the role of the second step will thrive. They will transcend what they have yet to understand with the same positive grace they offer to what they understand well, truly being open to their potential intelligence and deepening consciousness.