Let’s discuss the levels of human consciousness in career, what are they and how we embody the highest ones, transforming ourselves and our career lives to the benefit of all.
To begin this one I want to start off with an anecdote. So let’s rewind back four or five years to 2018. At that time I’m 21 years old and I’m going through an enormous life crisis, an identity crisis even.
My Life Crisis & Huge Epiphany
I’d lost a lot of friends, I’d lost that sense of direction and certainty that I’d had in my life before and certainly when it came to my career life I’d completely lost the North Star as it were.
At that point I was just working part-time doing maths tuition in my local city. I wasn’t working very much but I was spending a lot of time asking a lot of deep questions about life, reading, rethinking my past, feeding the future, going for long walks and none of it seemed to really be working very much. Things just didn’t make sense to me at all and I couldn’t find a new cohesive structure for my life, a new cohesive motivation.
But in February of 2018 I decided to go to Bristol to do a meditation teacher training course. If you don’t know Bristol that’s a small city quite near London in the south of England. I’d found meditation two years prior to that and I’d been quite serious about it.
I’d gone to retreats, I’d read books, I’d listened to audios, I’d been on online courses, and I’d been practising it a lot. I wasn’t necessarily thinking about becoming a meditation teacher at the time, it was really just to break myself out of my comfort zone, visit a new city, meet new people who were interested in meditation, and try and just find a new direction for my life. So I decided to go to Bristol.
Not long before that I’d started learning about the levels of human consciousness, reading books about them, watching YouTube videos and so on.
This topic was something that really inspired me. It seemed to bring clarity to human life. The idea that there was predictable levels of human functioning and human complexity and that we can detect them in society, human history and in our personal lives, seemed interesting to me. There I was in this hostel in dark damp February. To give you an idea it was quite a noisy hostel. It was actually above a bowling alley.
So I was sitting there reading a book above this bowling alley. I could hear people having a good time downstairs, and I’m just trying to enjoy my book. I’m reading about the levels of human consciousness in this book and I was thinking about what it meant.
I was reflecting on my life quite a lot, being in another city for a few days got me in reflection mode, got me thinking about things. I was reading about these levels and thinking about what it meant for my life and how I could make sense of my life using these levels.
All of a sudden, something happened. I can remember this very vividly. I can remember looking around the room, I can remember what the room was like and where I was sitting, and I can remember the emotions but I can’t really remember where it came from necessarily.
But I had this moment of clarity, it was almost like a moment of enlightenment or something. My life flashed before my eyes, and all of a sudden everything made much more sense to me than it ever had before.
That’s especially true for my career because it was a painful area of my life for me at that moment. I’d lost my previous career ambition, it looked very shallow and almost amoral to me, and I wanted something that I was really passionate about, something that wouldn’t require me being a wage slave to people.
Instead of looking at this career and this life crisis as something stupid, after reading about these levels, I could actually see that it was necessary.
I’d been taught by family members and peers that what I was going through was stupid and unnecessary and a waste of time. They told me I should just put my nose to the grindstone and get a career using the degree that I had achieved.
But what I could see was that my career journey was actually a process of me moving into higher levels of consciousness and that this crisis was really like a step from one level to the next. My job wasn’t to fight it. It was really to let it happen and also to try and bring the next level online.
As for my life as a whole, I could see that it was this continual process of expansion and unfolding, and I was at the centre of it. I was like the actor in the movie. It really applied to my entire life, although it was very salient for my career at the time.
And tears came to my eyes as I realised this because it completely changed how I saw things. That’s stuck with me ever since, and that’s how I usually see things.
So the person next to me in the hostel must have thought I was going a bit crazy, but I was having a good time reading this book and having all these insights about my life. Ever since, my way of looking at career has never been the same again.
That’s what I want to share in this article. I want you to feel the power of these levels and I also want you to learn the theory because it’s good. You want it to hit you in the heart, but you also want to know the structure and framework behind it.
What Are The Levels of Consciousness?
So let’s talk about what the levels of consciousness actually are. Basically, the levels of consciousness are levels of complexity in human beings. They’re visible across society, psychology, our lifespan, our individual lives, human history, and really all human activity. You can see them at work all over the place.
Think of these as a series of operating systems, each of which is more complex than the previous one, and each of which brings its own capacities, insights, skills, and so.
Like in a computer or a piece of software, when the operating system upgrades it includes everything that came before it, and it recapitulates everything that was already there into a new structure. That’s what these levels of consciousness do. So don’t think of them as stepping stones: think of them more as like stairs or steps in a ladder. They build on top of each other and each one supports the next.
At birth we start out at the most basic level of consciousness. As we grow with age, change biologically and physiologically, gain knowledge, have more life experiences, take on roles and responsibility in the world, as our awareness of the world changes and we get more knowledge about it, we gradually download higher and higher levels.
They’re not just visible in our career, but in so many areas, like our needs, our morals, our values, our social intelligence, our emotional intelligence, our goals, our worldview, our interpersonal life, our political views, our spiritual life.
They’re all over the place, and as we grow through life, we tend to download higher and higher ones, although we often get arrested in our development and at one stage that becomes our centre of gravity, the place we usually operate from.
This idea of the centre of gravity is really important. Sometimes people who talk about these theories say you are at a certain level of development, but in my eyes that’s really shorthand for saying that you have dominant level. It’s either the highest one you’ve downloaded, or the one that’s most active.
You’re never just at one level, you’ve never just got one online, even though one can often be quite dominant in your behaviour, actions, beliefs and so on.
These levels are also called the stages of development, but I tend not to use that wording because it implies that they’re like stepping stones, which they’re not. I prefer to say the levels of consciousness, or levels of development.
The Levels in Career
Let’s talk about why to use these levels in the context of career. You’ve probably never heard of this before. Basically, they bring simplicity into a very complex and confusing area, ergo personal growth, motivations and beliefs, and so on. They shine a light on all these confusing aspects of ourselves that don’t really make any sense to us.
They also put everything into a hierarchical context, which helps us see that there’s a direction to our lives. If you see your career as like a sea of random desires, drives and needs that you’re trying to fulfil, it probably doesn’t make much sense to you.
I won’t say these levels will solve everything, but they’ll definitely gives you a much better idea of what’s going on. They also give us give us solace. They help you when you’re going through periods of difficulty and change, and they help you understand it. Instead of seeing them as you falling off a cliff, it could be more like you’ve been on the same track for a while and now you need to fall down a bit.
This enables you to go into a new period of your life, live at higher levels of human complexity and download a new operating system. It might not be anything negative at all. It’s just a temporary unpleasant experience.
Learning about these levels for me also completely revolutionised what I thought of as success in life. When we think of success, usually we think about money, fame, status, possessions, and so on. You can now see success in a different way. You can see it as downloading higher levels and successfully integrating the lower levels into your functioning, especially in career, which has its own challenges when it comes to the levels.
The beauty about learning these things is that you can apply it not only in your career but in your relationships and your finances, your spirituality, your emotional intelligence, and so on. We’ll about them in the context of career but the same basic structures underlie many areas of life. Remember that as we’re talking about them.
If your mind’s trying to figure out where else this applies, just let it do that, because you might hit on some nice insights.
Before we get into the levels, I just want to say that ideally your career should serve as many of these levels as possible.
I’ll tell you in advance that often we get stuck at level five, and we miss out on levels six, seven and eight. Our career can become a glass ceiling. Another benefit of learning about these levels is that you can see the glass ceiling that you’re hitting your head against, and you can start to break through it.
If we only embody the lower levels, we feel a sense of constriction, a lack of self-expression, and even a sense of depression. How many people actually like their career?
I live in the UK, which is quite a developed country. We have an amazing wealth of opportunities open to us, but if I’d say that 90+ percent of my family and friends don’t like their career. One of the reasons for that is probably because they’re only embodying the lower levels. They don’t even know that the higher levels of consciousness exist in our career.
So if you’re not satisfied with your career, this could really help shine a light on why that is.
Head to Part 2 of this article to learn about the levels themselves.