People have so many different goals. We have so many different things we think will make us happy. For one it is love, for the next it’s material wealth, for another one it’s travelling and freedom and for someone else it is some completely far-off dream.

 We are all very different, we walk on different paths, have different desires and experiences.

 So I wondered if there is a common factor to all our dreams and goals. I am constantly looking for patterns in reality and it seemed to me like wishes seemed to have the same flavor. No matter what we want in particular, it always has to become better, higher, bigger, more intense emotions, more out-of-the-ordinary experiences. That can show up in vastly different styles. One person might attain that by building a loving family and an own home and having security and love all day long. The other person might attain that by going wing suiting on from an even higher mountain.

Those are two extremes, but you get what I mean. What they do is vastly different, but the pattern of the feeling they want is similar.

So I kept searching for common patterns of where we are all trying to go, purposefully, by setting goals and working on dreams come true, or subconsciously, without even knowing what we are going for even that we are going for something at all.

 What is the ultimate goal? With our own goals, what are we trying to achieve over all? It’s true that everyone has different goals and different wishes and a different idea of happiness. But is there a pattern behind what we are trying to achieve? Is there a common place we are all trying to go, everyone in his or her unique way of experience?

 This theory comes from Ken Wilber, a famous modern-day philosopher. In Wilber’s Integral theory of human development, what we are trying to do is level up to a higher level of consciousness.

 Have a look at the map of consciousness stages from Clare Graves below. We went from instinctive, survivalistic cavemen, to a magical worldview, to a strength worldview and all the way up to where we are today and then there are stages yet to come. Stages don't end. There is always a next stage to come.

If you want to read more about Integral theory, check out this summary.

Spiral Dynamics by Clare Graves, picture source: https://www.pinterest.at/pin/476114991827179274/

According to Wilber, a holon (for example a human) either goes upwards in the spiral through self-transcendence or downwards and dissolves. All holons, meaning all beings, have the goal to self-transcend their current stage of being into higher levels of existence. For the human mind, that means leveling up into higher realms of consciousness. For example, going from a rational worldview to an eco-worldview. That is what has been begun in human history lately, at least in the developed countries. Not single humans, but populations, are trying to get from a achiever dominated industrial age to a more eco-friendly perspective that appreciates nature and all life. 

While single beings might choose not to follow that direction and instead walk the spiral downwards or stay stuck at a level for the sake of comfort, the species as a whole goes upwards with time. Along the lines of the saying “The individual wolf may die, but the pack survives.” (just that you probably don't die from it.)

Although, there are negative consequences to when you choose to go downwards instead of upwards.

You see, a species tends to reward those people who push themselves and the world around them upwards. Scientists are a good example today. In the same way, society tends to disprove of those who work on lower levels.

There is always a majority of society at one state. Then there are a few people further down and a few further up. And then, there are a few individuals who are way more up the spiral than the majority. We tend to call those people genius or talented or lucky. In truth, they are just a few consciousness levels up. And at every consciousness level you are up, the world works differently. The way you function in the world completely changes with the next level. The higher up you are, the more likely it is that the way the world works for you there is in your favor.

Although, with higher consciousness levels can also come bigger problems and bigger responsibility. Just think of it, a person at the lowest level, that was when we were living in caves, might have to take care of himself and his family. A person on a higher level, for example the power level, might have to take care of a whole business or a country or nuclear weapons. We, as higher consciousness beings, have the power to destroy the planet. What a huge responsibility!

But as mentioned before, with more developed consciousness, navigating and influencing the world around you becomes easier, so those problems are more easily overcome.

 If we are aware of it or not, our natural subconscious tendency for the majority of people is to level up. Sometimes we use means that won't really help us level up. Just because you get a promotion and a higher paycheck doesn't mean you are gonna expand your consciousness. But, maybe it can. If, because of your promotion, you have to learn new things and maybe you are put in charge of a team and you have to adapt to care for them, that challenge might lead to a higher level worldview.

 Why level up? Well, the higher up you are, the more blissful your experience becomes. You could also call that happiness, which is what is often said we all chase. Or, if you are into Asian practices like meditation or yoga, you have probably heard of the term enlightenment. If you look at the consciousness stages, the stages way up there can be translated as enlightenment.

At some stages, even a small level-up, not even a whole level, can shower you with a new set of emotions, a new farsightedness or a new state of flow.

Leveling Up

So, if it’s such a cool thing to level up a notch, let’s ask the question: How do you level up?

By reaching for something on the next level.

As our evolution is instinctive, as soon as we are ready to move upwards, we automatically develop desires and ideas that live on the level above. Your only job is to not suppress those new internal pulls. And that’s often easier said than done.

Leveling up is tied to changing yourself and tackling new goals, which can often be scary. That is why a lot of people decide to remain on their current stage. They are afraid of leveling up and they cannot see the benefits and the joy that awaits them on the next level. That’s where dreaming big, with lots of emotions tied to it, comes in handy. A clear imagination of what you desire is crucial, because it makes you see past the struggle you have to go through to get it.

There are different things we can desire on the next level.

Sometimes we desire to be someone better. We want to upgrade our self-image to who we would be on the next level.

Sometimes we desire a better life and lifestyle, or a better environment. We want the world to function for us at a higher, better level.

Sometimes there are specific goals or desires we have in mind that live on the next level that are uniquely ours.

And sometimes we admit that we just want to feel better or more alive. Because with every new level, there come new and more intense feelings.

Here’s a little hack you can use to get a rough idea of how far up or down you are on the consciousness spiral and where you are heading for the next level: If you currently have strong goals or dreams, real desires, not just “Oh, that would be nice too.”, write them down.

Then look at them and ask the following question: “How much can this goal not only benefit me, but other life too?”

There is a rule of thumb that he more “selfless” your goals are, the higher up in the consciousness spiral you are. That doesn’t mean the goal can’t hold a huge benefit for you.

Let me give you an example. A low- to mid-level goal might be to create a business that makes you financially wealthy and you don’t care about what the business does. In contrast, a very high-level goal might be to create a business that makes you financially wealthy through providing services that are so valuable to the customers that it transforms their lives to the better and they want to reward you through paying for it.

See what happened here? The goal still is about getting wealthy. But this time, it is because you are serving your customers well and improve their lives.

The Way Downwards

What if I refuse to level up?

In terms of the Hero’s Journey, that is called “denying the call of the adventure”. Essentially, it’s your choice. You can stay comfortable at the level you are at right now. A lot of people live like this. But there's a downside to that. It’s unlikely that you will stay on your current level. Even if you aren’t trying to level up, there is still some effort involved in staying at the level you are at.

You can imagine it like a muscle. If you want the muscle to grow, you have to work out. But as soon as you stop, it doesn’t stay as it is, it starts losing mass again. If you want to keep your current muscle mass, you still have to work out. Less intensely than when you try to build it, but you still have to do some work.

If you don’t take effort to rise up, you risk sliding down levels automatically. And sliding down often comes with even worse circumstances.

When we don’t rise up to our unique adventure in the long term, we run into the arms of boredom, a feeling of emptiness, a feeling that life doesn’t have any real meaning, purpose or direction, that our lives are random compilations of events. We lose our drive to create, express, explore. We lose the joy for live and become more negative. We stop experiencing, feeling, celebrating, being grateful. We become less energetic and less focused, less dedicated and determined. Life becomes more shallow and more of a thing to “get through” than to fully experience. We feel at the mercy of the world instead of having control over our own lives, because we don’t follow the path that would align for us. We don’t grow and by that we feel more and more incapable and useless. We lose sight of the big picture, both of the world and of our own life’s story. So we stop caring about all kinds of things, from the people around us to the planet and its future to our own emotional state and health and especially, we lose our dreams. Summed up, we stop being fully alive.

In literature, when the main character goes through the hero’s journey, and he refuses the call to his adventure, you know what happens in the story? He dies.  And that is a great metaphor for life. When we refuse the call, we don’t necessarily die physically (although sometimes we develop depression and diseases as a follow up of all the downsides mentioned above), but most of the time, we don’t die physically, but our spark for life dies.

Let me give you an example out of your own life. Think about all the people you know and tell me if there's a certain age where the majority of people just lose their tenacity for living. When they start going through the motions more than usual. Do you have your own estimation what age that could be? Go ahead and make one.

The answer is, that for a majority that starts a few years into the job. While they were in school, they still had to develop, grow, learn. But as soon as worklife kicks in, that stops. They do the same things day in day out. Because they refused to take on a new journey. Of course, there are always exceptions. People who have a job that requires them to develop, people who are passionate about personal growth and develop and grow and learn in their free time. Don’t get me wrong, the right job can be a fantastic journey. Even one of the greatest ones you can take on, in my opinion.

But that’s not how most of us view our career. Many just use it as an excuse to plateau. 

The Upside of Leveling Up

We talked about the downside of refusing to level up, but now let’s talk about the upside of actually leveling up.

The upside of why you should level up is way more important. People who are naturally good at leveling up care more about the benefits of leveling up than they care about they downside of spiraling down. They focus on their desires, goals, dreams and visions on the next level and how amazing it will feel to have them. They focus on the awesome person they could become if they worked on themselves. They focus on the feelings that expand in the upper levels, often more and more ecstatic as you level up. They focus on the expanded sense of connectedness, flow, understanding of the bigger picture that increases with the levels. They focus on the meaning and cohesion and storyline of their own life that becomes more and more visible in the upper levels. They focus on how the world happens more for them, by them and through them in the upper levels as opposed to the world happening to them in the lower levels.

These are just a few broad benefits of levelling up. Every person will discover his or her own surprise gifts as they level up. That’s what makes the trip up the mountain so exciting. And discovering your own tailored-to-you problems and surprise gifts on the journey is what makes your path uniquely your own, not anyone else’s.

Deciding the follow your own Human Journey, your own path of adventure towards a higher goal, is what enables you to live a life that has an own story, an own meaning, an own legacy, and an own evolution inside that.

The Human Journey

Now that we discussed some reasons of why we want to level up, what are some key ingredients for leveling up?

There are a few things that can help. They are found in all the places that help you to level up, be it a family, a natural place to level up, or a church, as on of the earliest attempts in history to create places to support people in that process, or more modern approaches like a school or a well-lead business environment.

Here are the main keys to make your uprise smooth:

- having a higher goal or purpose, a vision

- working on figuring out a way to get to that higher goal or purpose; having an own mission, a path, that forces you to stay active, learn and grow

- an innate drive, motivation, passion for what you are doing

- a main character (you) willing to develop and improve

- a community of like-minded, sharing your goal

If you can put all these parts into place, you are way ahead in the game, or rather, you are playing a completely different game now! This game is what I call “The Human Journey.”

Read more about the Human Journey here.

These are ideas taken from a concept on Personal Growth called “The Hero’s Journey”. I already mentioned that term above, but I will not go any deeper into that topic on this page.

Just this much, the Hero’s Journey is about the process that has to take place inside a person so that they level up.

If you want to know what the Hero’s Journey is, check out this article.

If you want to know how the Hero’s Journey is connected to Consciousness Evolution and how you can use it in your own life, stay tuned until the end of this page.

Enjoy Leveling Up and Use All Levels

Of course, you can and probably will stay on a level for some time. If you scratch the surface of a new stage, in the beginning, you will possibly fall back into old patterns from the previous level at the first attempts (and be frustrated about it).

When you have finally fully settled into a new level, you might stay there a while and explore it. You maybe want to set more goals within that level in order to expand your reach within it. There is more than one desirable goal inside a level, so you might want to go for different things that are suddenly within reach at that level.

For example, let’s say you just fully moved to the green level. In green, you primarily discover a reverence for nature and all life. But additionally, you might discover a new sense of self-love for yourself as one of those creatures or a new style of art that resembles your new sense of beauty for everything living. You can find more cool new things around the main topic of the stage. Make your own explorations.

Those stages shouldn’t be something to level up through and cash in your rewards like in a video game. They should be played with, experienced, enjoyed. A new level is your new playground for life. And it will hold things that the other levels couldn't give you. So why not enjoy it for a while, until you are ready to move on?

Also keep in mind that no level is a bad level. The lower levels are not something to be avoided. Every level fits certain circumstances.

For example, what if our ancestors, as cavemen, didn't live at that primitive consciousness level? That primitive level allowed them to be great hunters and gatherers. They wouldn't have survived without it. Their worldview fit their world.

There is no wrong level, but there are levels more and levels less favorable for particular circumstances.

No matter at which level you are right now, be assured that it is an important level that serves a specific purpose for your existence, and that there is definitely a way for you to level up.

Also, if you are now looking at the picture of the spiral and thinking “What level am I at?”, let me tell you that you probably aren’t on the same level all the time. Depending on the situation and on your emotions, you will have a handful of levels you are switching between. When someone treats you in a loving way, you are more likely to respond by switching to a level that is loving. If you are meeting a huge struggle and challenge, something in you might flip and you go into fight mode. And that’s a great design. We are able to switch states depending on the needs and circumstances.

But the question you ask yourself shouldn’t be about states. It should be about stages. You can switch states, as we just saw, depending on current needs. You can pull parts of the stages below and some of those above when they are in reach already into your current state, to adjust to the situation at hand.

Stages, in contrast, are permanent. You are only at one stage at a time. When you level up through the consciousness spiral, you level up from one stage to the next. Stages stay, they are your default worldview, your default way of thinking and feeling, and sometimes they are so natural to us we don’t even see them.

The question to ask would be “What is my dominant state?”. “What is the state I fall back to on default, after an emotional up or down?” “What is the state I tend to default to?”

That’s the consciousness level you wanna look at. That’s your current stage.

If you identify your default state, that might help you realize if it causing you problems or if it is helping you. If your default worldview contains beliefs and interpretations that hold you back from achieving your goals and living your life the way you want it, you might want to consider working on leveling up.

For example, let’s say a person tries to run an own company, but their default worldview is on the rule-obeying level (dark blue). They might not be as innovative and confident as they would need to be. So leveling up could make their whole work a lot easier and improve their results drastically.

The cool thing about leveling up in stages is that it breeds vastly different results than merely improving strategies or skills. Let’s stick with the example of the businessperson who is at the rule-obeying level. That person, while still at that level, might try to learn different business strategies and new tactics for innovation and new approaches to more confident leadership and decision making. When they are trying to improve this way, they will have to tackle every challenge one by one. They have to tackle their problem with innovation separately and then their problem that they are afraid of making decisions. That costs a lot of focus, time and energy.

On the other hand, if they level up to the next stage, the achiever stage (orange), which is a stage packed with initiative and confidence in one’s own capability, those problems might solve themselves without ever being seen again. How? Because the person changed their default outlook on the world, on themselves an gained new default emotions that make them feel confident and ready to go. By that, the way they approach everything by default becomes different.

So how can they go from the blue to the orange level? Three words. Work on yourself. And two words more. Personal Growth.

Leveling up might not be done in just a few days, but the radical improvement and enjoyment it brings in the long-term is worth it.

The levels are not only about logical thoughts and skills. They are even more about emotions. With each level comes a new set of emotions you default to. And those emotions are unlike anything you ever felt before. They weren’t available in the lower levels, or maybe a few of them were, but only very rarely. When that new set of emotions hits you, it hits you with ecstasy and improves your daily default happiness in a huge leap.

Appreciate All Levels

I like to look at those levels without judgement. I see them as different tools in a toolbox. You wouldn't call the hammer bad and the screwdriver good. You wouldn’t want to use the screwdriver all the time. That won’t work if you have to hammer in a nail. In the same way, you wouldn’t want to hold the hammer all the time. It’s not that great a help for tightening screws. You have to switch to the tool that fits best in the moment.

Note: When I am talking about “higher” levels of consciousness, it’s actually about depth, not height. That is the term Ken Wilber is using for those “higher” levels. They are actually deeper levels of consciousness.

The “higher” the level, the more depth it has. Casually said, the higher the level, the more “things” it contains. Those things could be emotions, thoughts, perspectives, skills, other people’s perspectives,... That is why a “higher” level is actually a deeper level than the one before.

The term higher comes from the fact that the levels are a hierarchy. You start out at one of the lower levels and work your way up to upper levels.

Imagine it like this: Do you know the picture of our minds as an iceberg? The subconscious is the main part of the iceberg which you cannot see and the conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg we can see. Leveling “up” in consciousness is diving deeper into the subconscious and discovering the broader structures beneath.

Freud's theory of the unconscious mind, picture source: https://www.theinevitableyou.com/how-your-subconscious-mind-creates-reality/#prettyPhoto

Note: There is a number of models of consciousness out there from different psychologists. Ken Wilber’s model is used here because it is the most sophisticated one. If you are interested in different maps of consciousness evolution, here is a list of some more:

- Spiral Dynamics by Graves

- Michael Beckwith’s Stages of Spiritual Growth, published by Mindvalley (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg-D2DMFbhk)

- Stages of Psychological Development by Richard Barrett

- The 6 Human Needs by Tony Robbins (this is not a model of consciousness, but a blueprint for the needs people have on different levels)

Summary

What the human species is trying to do by almost everything we desire is level up in consciousness. We do that through meeting our needs on the current level and then transcending into the next by setting goals that live in the realm of the level(s) above and pull us there. Or by having problems that push us out of our current level and force us to look for solutions in the higher level.

Higher states of consciousness give a lot of benefits, like increased states of flow, bliss and connectedness.

There are certain parts and patterns to the mechanics of leveling up, like following your own “Human Journey” and taking the path of the "Hero’s Journey". Those will help you navigate your adventure up the spiral better.

The next article, following this one, explains the process of leveling up. This page was about the “What” and “Why”, next up is the “How”. You are going to read more about the Hero’s Journey and the Human Journey. This will make the process of leveling up clearer and easier, and because achieving new goals is a part of rising up, that process will also support you in accomplishing your goals.

Have a look at the bottom of this page for links to other sources for Integral Theory, Consciousness Evolution and related topics.

Links

Dive deeper into Consciousness Evolution (pun intended).

Level 1: articles, charts, videos:

Integral Theory - a Summary

The Pattern to Personal Growth and Fulfillment

Integral Theory: https://integrallife.com/what-is-integral-approach/

Spiral Dynamics: http://www.cruxcatalyst.com/2013/09/26/spiral-dynamics-a-way-of-understanding-human-nature/

Conscious Evolution: https://www.consciouslifestylemag.com/conscious-evolution-save-humanity-planet/

A Crash Course on Spirituality by Mindvalley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycJ0SaNhRH4

Level 2: Books

Ken Wilber's Book: https://amzn.to/2DsdZuB

Code of the Extraordinary Mind (Vishen Lakhiani): https://amzn.to/2DdtKoz

Level 3: Courses

Coming soon! 

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