Journaling can be a great way of freely putting your thoughts, feelings, ideas on paper to be able to look at and explore them in a deeper way. And as our quote above highlights, writing can be a way of relieving inner pressure. It can be a cathartic exercise.  

Journaling consistently can also help us tap into our inner creativity which can be a source of potential problem-solving in our day to day lives.  

Through journaling, we will also increase our own self-awareness and as we reflect on our day we will start to notice and get to know our thoughts and feelings on a very intimate level.   

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Our mechanical addictions keep us locked in place. Take a good look, what little compulsions and drives have power over you, by you not being able to live without them.  

We can start by looking at everyday things like our daily coffee, video games, social media, or gossip at the office. Is it a harmless indulgence or is it now running your life?  

It gets harder to see with things like our psychological suffering. We may not look at them like addictions, but how many people do you know that if they gave up their suffering would be a completely new person?  

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In modern psychology, they refer to the three dimensions of the mind as being the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. From Yoga and Vedanta, they are known as the gross, subtle, and causal dimensions of the human personality.  

These three aspects are then subdivided into the five koshas or bodies that go from the grossest to the most subtle dimensions of existence. Kosha is a Sanskrit word that means sheath, you can think of it as a layer of an onion.  

Many spiritual traditions identify and classify our subtle bodies although there will be some variance among them. Today will just be just a short introduction into the five Koshas.  

The five koshas correspond to the psychological, physiological, and different levels of awareness.   

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 We always hear how important it is to be present, to live in the moment. In order for us to become more conscious and aware, we need to realize just how unconscious we may be currently living. We need to realize our lack of presence. So, just how present are we in our lives?  

Today I want to share a little useful exercise that help you determine just how present you are to the present moment and the level of awareness that you possess. Having this baseline can help you realize many things and can provide a shock of motivation when you realize your degree of awareness.  

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Everyone is at a different stage in their development, but were all on our own journey from lower to higher, from ignorance to wisdom.  

It is a journey of discarding all that is false and discovering what is true, the source of our very own beingness.  

We all have different starting points, we all resonate with different ideas and teachings, but anything that helps us to move our center of gravity from the external to the internal is useful on our journey to awakening our connection to the source of all that is.  

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On our self-development journey, our goal is to become fully human, which means to become balanced in all our various functions. Right now most of us are unbalanced in various degrees.   

You can think of our centers as each being a different kind of mind. We have an intellectual, emotional, and instinctive mind.   

Each mind was designed for a different purpose and use. And since most of us never got a proper education on our highly complex and delicate machine, we don’t know it’s intricate workings and therefore use them wrongly.   

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Today our topic is on creating opportunities for our life. Let’s take a few minutes now to see how we can create more opportunities to live a happy conscious life.  

From an esoteric point of view, we learn that if you are living life from personality, the most exterior aspect of you, then you will be living according to the law of accident. Things just happen.  

When you are in tune and in touch with your inner self, when you know who you are at a deep level then you will be living according to the law of fate. Under the law of fate, you will attract circumstances that are perfect for your growth and which will bring out your own unique abilities and talents.  

Living from your inner self you will be fulfilling your destiny and will attract appropriate opportunities.  

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Meaning can come from life or we can find meaning in imagination. When we derive meaning from imagination we are functioning through our identification to our conscious thinking mind, through our personality. 

When we derive meaning from life we are functioning more through our essence, what is real and unchanging in us.   

When we start to sense the meaning that we derive from tapping into our essence, our self-development work, our spiritual work can then become the greatest source of meaning for us.  

Making your self-development work a priority you will be well on your way to waking up to reality.  

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One can get tired of something that it no longer has any meaning for the person. So what is the meaning of meaning? What is the source of meaning? When you look back on your life on your experiences, what is it that made them meaningful?

We need to realize that what we take for granted doesn’t have any real meaning for us. And many of us take our very life for granted, so we are simply just carried along by it.

We get a certain amount of meaning from life and a certain amount from our imagination.They are two sources of meaning but on completely different levels.

We also need to realize that imagination can never be satisfied by reality.

Living from what is real in you, you will be waking up to reality.

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On our self-development journey, our goal is to become a balanced human being. Balanced in our various centers or functions.  

In today’s quote, Epictetus gives us a good look at how our intellectual center should be used.  

“The proper work of the mind is the exercise of choice, refusal, yearning, repulsion, preparation, purpose, and assent. What then can pollute and clog the mind’s proper functioning? Nothing but its own corrupt decisions.” - Epictetus   

To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com