244 The 7 Stages of Consciousness

Introduction

0:00Have you ever noticed that personal growth feels like a roller coaster? You have a breakthrough, you finally feel aligned, your mindset changes, your relationships improve, your business starts working, and you feel powerful, clear, and intentional. And then suddenly you're anxious again, triggered again, doubting yourself again, reacting again. And the immediate assumption is, what happened? I thought I already healed this. Why am I back in the same place again? But what if that experience isn't failure? What if that exact cycle is actually the normal evolution of consciousness?

0:31Because most people think growth is linear. They think you wake up, you heal your limiting beliefs, you master yourself, and then life becomes permanently peaceful and aligned. But that's not how consciousness works. Consciousness evolves in stages. And if you do not understand the stages, then every new challenge will feel like regression

Seven Stages Overview

0:49instead of expansion. So in this episode, I'm going to break down the seven stages of consciousness. Why you keep returning to old emotions and patterns, even after massive breakthroughs. Why the moment you think you finally arrived is usually the moment right before the next breakdown. And how to tell whether you're actually evolving or just stuck in another unconscious limiting belief loop. So let's get into it. Welcome to a changed mind, the journey into the topics that matter to you most from the neuroscience and spirituality of mindset and personal growth to groundbreaking strategies

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1:54and the potential you have inside, you're in the right place. Welcome to a changed mind. Hey, real quick before we continue with today's episode, we're growing fast right now. And that means our team is growing too. And so right now we have an open opportunity for a senior level customer service manager to come in and help us build out our customer care department from the ground up. So if you have experience creating SOPs, building ticketing systems, knowing your way around to CRM and can bring AI tools into the customer experience, we would love to hear from you.

2:27This is a great opportunity for someone who knows how to build a department that takes care of people at the highest level, especially if you want to be a part of an organization that's genuinely changing people's lives. If that's you, check out the link in the show notes in the description here of this episode for more details and apply. And now back to your regularly scheduled episode. All right, guys, I want you to know that I am with you. I have done the work over the last two decades. And every time I feel like I've figured it out, something happens in my life that oftentimes

2:59brings me back to my limiting belief knees to take a look at some other aspect of myself that I need to heal. And for a long time, I was really frustrated with this. It's like, can I just not get this self-help thing done? And the truth is, when you understand the seven stages of consciousness, getting it done doesn't really make any sense. And so by the end of this episode, I'm actually going to give you a framework so you can identify exactly where you are in these stages. Because once you're clear on that, it really helps you prepare for what is in front of you. And it allows you to start anticipating what's going to happen next.

3:30So we're going to get right into it.

Stage One Sleep

3:31Stage one is what I would call a sleep. This is the a sleep stage of consciousness. Now, this is not meant to insult anyone. One is just an explanation of what's going on here. In the first stage of consciousness, you're just not aware of your inner world. You know, this is where I was when I was in my drug addiction, my alcoholism, my sex addiction before I had gotten to any type of personal growth. I believed that my outer circumstances were responsible for how I was feeling. I didn't understand that there was this entire universe inside of me of activity that was taking place, thoughts, emotions, belief systems, resistance that was creating my external reality.

4:08And so at this first stage, you are reactive rather than responsive. And this is the stage of victimhood, feeling like things are happening to you. And that's the core idea. Life is happening around me. It's happening to me. And the way that I navigate through life is through some sort of, I don't know, luck or happenstance that I have no control. This is before you realize that your thoughts are things and they are creating your reality. And frankly, this is where most of the modern world lives today. If you look at what's happening today in the world, there's a fragmentation taking place,

4:41like a dimensionality where you have more and more people who are continuing to live in the asleep state. And the byproduct of that is what we see in terms of global oppression, financial insecurity, unfairness, corporate corruption. And you have people who are waking up. The people who are waking up are waking up to their own personal promised land. And the beautiful thing is they're doing it together and experiencing what I would call the great opt-out where people are going like, I don't need to live this old way anymore because I have a new mind. And that's the transition from stage one to stage two, from going asleep to aware.

5:12Stage two is awareness. And stage two is a tricky stage because you start to become aware of your internal world, but you're still behaving the same way. So when you become aware, you can see the limiting beliefs. You can see the programs. You can see the stories and the unconscious patterns. But externally, you're still behaving in the same way. So you are experiencing financial insecurity and you're feeling financial insecure. You are blaming your relationship, even though you can start to see that there's something going on inside of you, a reaction to your relationship that may actually be contributing

5:45to it. This is a very difficult place for people because you know the programs are there. Like you've started to read some of the books. Maybe you've gone to an event. You've listened to some podcast episodes. You start to understand that you're a powerful creator and you can start to see what's going on in your inner world, but you don't yet know how to change the beliefs. And so the core idea here is like, I can see it, but I'm still living from it. And this is also why when people first become self-aware, they can actually spend the majority of their time in suffering or what I would call a primal state, stress, anxiety, overwhelm,

6:17anger, reactivity. It's a challenging stage of development because you're like, holy shit, I'm being run by these programs, but I don't yet have any tools to begin to change them.

Stage Three Awake

6:28Stage three is when you truly start to become awake. Stage three is when you start to change some of the programs. You begin changing some of the internal belief systems. And as a byproduct of that, your reality starts to change. You do some work, you find some tool, you develop, make a new decision, or you build a new belief. And then you see that reflected back to you in the mirror of your reality. And this is actually where things start to hockey stick because momentum starts to build. There's a new positive feedback loop where your internal changes are creating external

7:02results. And then those external results reinforce the new identity that you're building inside of you in the new belief systems. And then that new identity creates more aligned behavior. There's this natural, positive, expansive feedback loop. And so at this third stage of becoming awake, this is like changing your golf swing and finally starting to see that you're lowering your score. It's like practicing a new backhand or a new shot or something, you know, using a sports

7:33analogy. And you go through this period of time where your performance actually dips, but now your performance starts to improve. And so that confidence and that motivation starts to build on itself. So you go through this awkward phase and then you start to win matches. And so the idea here is, wow, I can actually see that when I do the inner work and now that I have some tools that are kind of sort of starting to work and I change my belief system, my external reality is changing. And so this becomes a very exciting period, right? This is where you, many people actually start to become addicted to personal growth in a constructive,

8:08productive way, because as they begin to see the results manifesting, they also begin decreasing the amount of time that they spend in suffering and in a primal state. So your mood improves, your confidence improves, your self-esteem improves. And again, there's this feedback loop because sometimes it's a little bit like, well, which came first, the chicken and the egg? Like, did my internal world change and then my external world change or did my external world change? And so I'm giving myself permission to think differently about myself, about money, about work, about my career, about other people, about God, whatever it is.

8:41But if you look really, really closely, even though sometimes it feels like it happens within hours or days of each other, it's your inner world that changes first. There really is no chicken and egg debate here. Your inner world changes and your outer world begins to reflect it. And so you start to spend more time in what we would call a powerful state of being, in the parasympathetic expression of your nervous system, not in the fight or flight of your sympathetic nervous system, which is where suffering is. It's where you start out, but you start to spend more time in a powerful state of being, joy, curiosity, excitement, confidence, connection with other people.

9:14And so then we move into stage four. Stage four is the stage of flow. And so this becomes a period of growth where everything starts to feel aligned. You feel in flow. You feel like an intentional creator. You start to, as I mentioned before, train your nervous system. It's had enough experience with the new identity that alignment starts to feel more natural. And so now you start to build an unconscious competency. In stage three, you had to do the work, but you were able to hold the new belief system.

9:47And so your reality changed. Stage four is when you start to experience an unconscious competency. And this is when you start to feel like I've got it. Like, maybe I'm done. I've mastered this. Like, we've finally figured it out. The idea is that we're close to the finish line of our personal growth. And that is the period of time. Usually what you see is your relationships have improved. Your bank account has improved. Your health has improved. There's still some challenges in your life. But this is usually the period of time where stage five kicks in.

10:18And that's what I would call the valley. Like, this is what some people might describe as the long, dark night of the soul. Because eventually you find yourself feeling down again. You feel that there are challenges that no matter how much manifestation work or mindset work you do, you can't seem to overcome them. You start to notice that the problems in your life are actually patterned. There's like the same type of problem that keeps showing up. And this is confusing because there's now been enough time in the new identity for you to really feel solid in your nervous system to know what flow feels like.

10:51You know what alignment feels like. You know what it feels like to be intentional. But now there are these challenges. And many people interpret this fifth stage as a regression. And the idea is like, I'm struggling again. You know, why am I struggling again if I've already done this belief-shifting work? I've already addressed this problem in my life before. And so this is where doubt can start to creep in. This is where people oftentimes feel like, and maybe you can relate to this. I mean, I certainly, this is what I experienced. Let me know if I'm alone here. Like, I suck at my own personal growth.

11:23I almost start to feel like I'm moving backwards. And that's when you enter stage six. Stage six is what I would call the core program. So at this stage, you're confronted with a much deeper, unresolved trauma or program from your childhood that continues to materialize itself into your life. And you begin to realize that this problem is really unmanageable. There's an insanity that kicks in. You keep trying to solve the problem in the same way, but it just seems to make the problem work worse. And it's not surface-level patterns anymore, but a deeper identity.

11:56It's an identity-level program underneath the earlier ones. And this is why your progression is intelligently designed, because you're not really ready to deal with this core program until you've developed some competency and capacity working through the rest of these limiting beliefs. You can kind of think about it as like weeds in a garden. You've learned how to pull the smaller ones, and now you're up against the mother of all weeds. For me, and I've talked about this in other episodes, it was health challenges that kept showing up for me, business challenges that kept showing up for me, relationship challenges that kept showing up for me,

12:26that mirrored back to me this belief that there's something wrong with me. There's something wrong with me. That's what I learned when I was very, very young. I learned that I didn't know how to do things right, and there was something wrong with me. So when I had health challenges, and I experienced them, and I went from doctor to doctor to try to address them, and no one could figure out what was going on, when I'd experienced the symptoms, I'd think to myself, there's something wrong with me. When my business plateaued at several million dollars a year, and I couldn't break through that growth ceiling, my business was reflecting back to me this idea I had that there's something wrong with me.

12:58I didn't know how to do it right. I must be doing something wrong. Same thing in my relationship. When I had the challenges with my wife, and it got to a point where it all peaked out in stage six, and I'm like, I don't even know if this relationship is going to work out. I also had this reaction every time we get into a conflict, which is like, there's something wrong with me. But that just means that you're meeting the deeper thing underneath the earlier programs. This is the stage six. It's the core program. And one of the interesting things about stage six is it takes you to a higher level of mastery,

13:29of personal growth, because at the earlier stages, you start to think you're doing all the manifesting. And oftentimes we forget that there's actually a higher power that is responsible for 99.99999% of what actually occurs. The ego actually starts to lay claim to the personal growth progression that we've been experiencing. So it reinforces this idea that like, I'm a powerful manifester. I know how to create my reality. And so when we get to stage six in the core program,

13:59we're only able to work through that core program by learning how to surrender. We surrender our old behaviors. We surrender this childhood trauma. We surrender this core program. For me, it was this idea that there's something wrong with me to a higher power. The paradox of all of it, for example, in my case is I stopped going to doctors in order to heal. I stopped trying to fix my business in order to let my business reorganize. I stopped trying to fix my relationship. And instead, I allowed life to bring resources that miraculously showed up

14:30that allowed my wife and I to navigate through that challenging period of time and to reestablish connection and intimacy and passion in our relationship. You have to actually step away from doing all the personal development work by learning how to surrender. And that's a scary thing for most people. Because again, we look at, well, how did we change our life before? We changed it through all these tools, these tactics, this manifestation stuff, this visualization stuff, this limiting beliefs work that we think we did. And we finally get to this deeper program that requires us to actually say,

15:00you know, as we say in recovery, God, I can't, you can, I'll let you, whatever the God is of your own understanding. And that moves you into stage seven, which is truly mastery of personal growth. Because you start to distinguish between, and again, there's a beautiful prayer in recovery. We have the serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. And so by step seven, or stage seven, we've started to realize we're in this relationship

15:33with a higher power. There is some work for us to do. There are times that we need to step back, despite what our nervous system tells us to do, which is to try to solve the problem. And we start to come into acceptance that there are always going to be these peaks and valleys. And that the valley is not a bad thing. It's the announcement of another layer of expansion. And that if we didn't have the valleys, we'd never have the expansion. And, and most of us who are in this work, we always want to continue to grow and expand. And so we, the valleys come along with it, right? Just like all of creation is based on two principles, contraction and expansion,

16:07yin and yang, dark and light. And so while we would all love to just have continual expansion, it doesn't happen without the contraction. And so in stage seven, you really start to understand that there, you are a part of the ever expanding nature of life. And therefore you too will experience expansions and contractions. And so you stop trying to create a life where there are no psychological or external challenges because you realize every challenge precedes the next level of expansion. And every problem contains the seed of the next level.

16:39This is why one of the great teachers on law of attraction, Abraham Hicks says, you never want your problems to go away because the problems are the seeds of your next expansion. And that's what true mastery is. It's learning how to breathe through the contractions when they occur, knowing that there's nothing wrong with you and actually realizing that there's very little for you to do, but to breathe through the contraction. It's almost like a yoga practice. You get into a difficult yoga posture and what does the teacher say? It's like, you just breathe, you breathe through it.

17:10And that's exactly true mastery. That's what mastery is at stage seven. True mastery is not becoming someone who never experiences doubt or fear or challenges ever again. True mastery is realizing that those experiences are a natural part of the development of consciousness and the development of your soul.

Stage Seven Mastery

17:26And so the spiritual masters were not people who never experienced internal challenge. I mean, that's one of the great opportunities we have looking into the life of Jesus through the gospel is to actually see that, you know, even he who walked the earth as an embodiment of mastery and showed the way for all of the rest of us also doubted. That's a part of mastery. They experienced internal challenges too. They achieved a level of development where they realized challenge is part of the process. It's not this growth thing is not a thing that we get to the finish line on that fears

17:59and doubts can arise without meaning something is wrong, that the values are part of the expansion. So instead of asking, why is this still happening to me? You become capable of being with the challenge without creating a story that something has gone wrong. That's mastery. The core idea is that the challenges are not proof of failure. They are part of the expansion. And one of the biggest mistakes people make is measuring growth by whether or not they still experience fear or doubt or triggers or challenge, which creates this, again, false concern that like, oh my gosh, maybe there's something wrong with me.

18:31Maybe there's something really wrong with me that I've done all this personal development work and I'm still in this, in this chapter of struggle in this valley. But the real metric is how much time are you spending in a primal state versus a powerful state? How much time are you spending in suffering versus presence and connection? How much time are you spending in the sympathetic nervous system and fight or flight versus parasympathetic rest, relaxation, alignment, and creation? And so when people first become self-aware, most people at these earlier stages, stage one,

19:03stage two, even stage three, are spending most of their day in a primal state. And as they start to become aware, as you start to become aware, you go like, holy shit, I'm being run by all these unconscious programs. But as consciousness evolves, as you and through you, you spend less time reactive, you spend less time identified with fear, less time lost in unconscious patterns, and more time being intentional, being aligned, being responsive, and being powerful. And the interesting thing is that when you do find yourself in a primal state, sometimes

19:33it feels like it's even more intense because you've learned what it feels like to operate in a new baseline of peace, of calm, of presence. So real growth is not, I never become primal again. Growth is, I recover faster and I spend more time in a powerful state. And that's actually a great way to calculate your progression. You know, when we look at people who come in who are asleep, they're spending more than half of their day in a primal state. Some people like myself will say it's 24 hours a day because even when I wake up in the middle

20:06of the night, I'm stressed. I wake up in the morning and I'm stressed. It's just my nervous system has become so trained to be upregulated that I'm spending all day in a primal state. As you progress from asleep to aware, to awake, to flow, all the way through mastery, what you find is there's a reduction in the number of hours that you spend in a primal state. So this is a good audit for you right now. If I were to ask you, on an average day, if you added up all the time that you were stressed, anxious, overwhelmed, judging yourself, judging other people, arguing with somebody in your

20:38head, criticizing yourself in your head, you know, you're driving in your car from point A to point B and you're just entertaining the problem in your head. You're taking it with you. Any negative emotion or negative self-talk, on average, how many hours a day do you spend in a primal state? If you're listening on YouTube, you can type it into the comments. Probably if you've been listening to the show for a while, it's less than it used to be because you're using the tools and we're on this journey through the seven stages together. But how much time do you spend in a primal state? This is a good mile marker for you to then measure progress because progress is not about

21:10becoming someone who never experiences fear or doubt again. Progress to evolve your relationship with the experience of life and to spend less time primal and more time powerful and to realize that every new challenge is actually the doorway to the next level of your consciousness. So I hope you enjoyed this explanation as much as I enjoyed sharing it with you. By the way, if you have comments or questions, I try to read as many as I can. Drop them in the comments if you're following along on YouTube. If you haven't yet, please subscribe. Be a part of this growing movement of Conscious Awakened Creators.

21:42And if you want to go deeper into this work with me, jump on over to davidbear.com. There's a bunch of resources and links in the show notes. You can head on over to the website, subscribe to our newsletter. You get a really amazing free four-part video series. It's going to talk to you about how to navigate through the seven stages of consciousness and give you some really amazing tools for reducing the amount of time that you are spending in a primal state. So thank you so much for being on this journey with me. I love you so much. As I've always said, this growth thing is not a do-it-yourself project. It's to do it with others.

22:13And I'm grateful to be doing it with you. And I will see you in the next episode.

22:19Hey, it's David. One more thing. If you want to go even deeper on everything we've talked about on today's episode, don't forget to jump over to www.davidbear.com. You can find the link in the show notes and subscribe to our newsletter. A couple of times a week, I'm going to be sending you the latest episodes that we've released along with additional free trainings. You'll get immediate access to my free mind hack ebook and go even deeper into all the tools, the technologies, the frameworks that have helped tens of thousands of people establish a changed mind.

22:50Don't forget to jump on over to the site and I will see you in the next episode.