In the last few decades there has been a lot of talk in various spiritual circles about expansion of consciousness; that in order to be spiritual, the person needs to expand their consciousness. Many people say that by using meditation or some other spiritual practices, that they have expanded their consciousness. If you would to inquire more about what they mean by this, often time you would get an answer that they have become more aware in daily life and more conscious of the things that previously they were not.

Nevertheless, most of these people continue living their lives in a mechanical way, just like they did before they started to practice the technique that helped them to ‘expand their consciousness’. To an unbiased observer, this can make it seem that the term ‘expansion of consciousness’ is subjective, vague and ambiguous, meaning different things to different people, without any concrete insight.

With a deep esoteric work, it is possible to see a concrete result in this respect of the “expansion of consciousness”, but in order to write more about it, it is first necessary to understand what consciousness is.

Consciousness is a non-physical substance, and it has the shape of a sphere. It is our true nature; that which animates us and which makes us aware of ourselves and everything that we know. When we are aware in the present moment, we are aware because we have consciousness. It has also been referred to as Buddhata, and as the “empty fullness”. This sphere is located inside the mind. The latter is a mental substance, also of  non-physical nature, located inside the brain.

Master Samael has explained that most of our consciousness (97%) is trapped inside the subconscious mind, and that we only have 3% of free consciousness. So someone begining the spiritual work would generally start with that ratio.

The spiritual work as taught by master Samael consists in elimination of egos (defects such as greed, lust, envy, fear, pride, depression etc.), which is part of our subconscious mind. Inside each of that defect is a conditioned particle of consciousness. By working on ourselves, we are eliminating those defects and by so doing the trapped conditioned consciousness gets liberated and returns to the main free consciousness that we have (the 3% of it). In this way then the consciousness is increasing.

The newly freed consciousness brought with it the knowledge of the ego in which it was trapped, together with virtues that are integral part of our consciousness; virtues such as intelligence, love, compassion, wisdom etc. It is said that if humans would have just 10% of free consciousness, the capacity to wage wars would be no more.

Now, as this consciousness grows in size, it actually and literally expands. It expands beyond the mind, beyond the brain, and finally beyond the head. As it grows percentage by percentage, it becomes larger and larger. In art this is depicted as halo around a saintly figure (just like in the image that I used in this article) – the size of the halo shows how large is their expanded consciousness. The goal of the inner work is to reach full consciousness; to liberate all of it from the animal ego (the subconscious mind) and to have 100% of consciousness.

Once we expand our consciousness in this way, the latter stays expanded. It doesn’t shrink back. It only shrinks back if the eliminated egos are revived, or some other type of energy is grown over it. Both of these cases are the result of (strong) identification with manifestations of subconscious mind and losing sexual energy with ejaculation/orgasm.

When we start working on our consciousness; liberating it from our egos and thus expanding it, we start to notice some very concrete changes taking place within us. In the beginning this will be related to how we respond to events and situations in our daily life – we are able to step back more and detach from our egos that want to react; seeing things more objectively and with greater clarity; having improved awareness and concentration.

However as we continue the work of eliminating our egos, sooner or later (depending on the pace by which we practice this technique) we see that our visual and auditory perception of external world have changed. The external world becomes larger, more spacious, and we become conscious of many small details in this large space. This is ought to bring a pleasant shock, as then we see that our work has a very concrete and tangible results. In my personal case, this happened after one year of working with the elimination technique, and from then on it became more and more noticeable.

Such increase of consciousness can help us tremendously with being grounded in the here and now, and detached from our thoughts, emotions and drives. It is then that we start to live life more fully.
Ironically, many people think that living life fully means to give way to many ambitions and desires, acquiring as much experiences as possible. But if such experiences take place from strong identification with the egos, then we are living them through our egos.

There is a huge difference between living life from egos and from consciousness – we only truly know this difference when we work on expanding our consciousness. Then, even though we don’t go along with desires and ambitions of our egos, we start to connect to our environment and ourselves in a profound way, which brings contentment and peace to our true nature.

HDP, February 2020.