Quote:
Originally Posted by lasti  I'd love to have more conscious relationships in my life.
But where to meet conscious people? Or how to meet conscious people while there are so many unconscious people around?  |
My pedantic, dogmatic, unhumble opinion:
The problem is that consciousness is not a religion, hobby, or costume. If it were, it would stop being consciousness. Unitarian Universalists and Buddhists and raw foodists and bloggers and posters on the Steve Pavlina forum and members of the Democratic Party are no more conscious as a group, or likely to be conscious as individuals, than are plumbers, mechanics, bowlers, everyday people you meet in real life, or just ordinary guys you meet fishing on the pier (actually these guys might be pretty conscious
).
In my own experience, there isn't any one place that conscious people gather. It's not like a club you can seek out and then go to. Actually, going somewhere "to meet conscious people" can work against you.
You're as likely to meet conscious people on a bowling league of mechanics and plumbers, or at the docks, as you are in a group that "calls" itself conscious. Actually, if you met a conscious person in a place you didn't expect, you'd spot him or her more easily. You'll spot the genuinely conscious person in a poor or working class group a lot more easily than you will in a group of upper middle class white Unitarian Universalists.
In the liberal, artsy "freethinking" milieux lots of people spout off consciousness to "fit in".
It's easier to spot a cat among dogs than it is among dogs in cat costumes. I was going to use black sheep/white sheep, then wolf/sheep, as analogies, but realized these terms had baggage I wanted to leave out of this conversation. I actually met the most nourishing, tightest group of friends in a small town where most people were "work a day" Christians who had nothing in common with any of us, not in places you'd think I would've met a greater quantity of like minds. The "like minds" stood out more, and somehow were truer and more genuinely freethinking, in the small town than in the places I've been where it was fashionable to be freethinking/liberal/etc.
The point of this is not to put down any group of people, though it may have come off like that.
The point is to point out that you don't meet "conscious" people in any one place. They're everywhere. If you know how to spot 'em, you'll find em, and conscious people tend to find each other. "Consciousness" doesn't have any particular flavor.
Just a thought:
Volunteer to work with the aged. You'll learn a lot. Spend time with a diversity of senior citizens. Many people stop pretending to be someone else when they get old. You'll learn to spot conscious people and then you can apply that to the same-aged people you meet.
And a great book is "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism" by Chogyam Trungpa... *looking* for conscious people and associating it with certain trappings (in this community you can start assuming conscious people are all raw foodists who blog for a living) can be a trap. Trungpa (who was Tibetan) would come to teachings in a three-piece suit, to shake up the Westerner hippies in Tibetan robes and sandals and make his point.