Expand Your Consciousness.
“The mind is the container of consciousness; you can only go insofar as the mind.”—
Consciousness, or "to be conscious" (aware) of something, is the primary tool used when navigating through life. However, how does this awareness "know" what it is perceiving if there is no understanding for this awareness to attach to? How is one able to know that what they are perceiving is actually, "really" there? Enter, the mind.
“The mind is the container of consciousness…”
Awareness, by itself, has no end. That is why, when sitting in a state of total meditation, consciousness (awareness) becomes freed from its container and one is able to feel, allow, and accept all that surrounds them. It is what pundits describe as an “expansive” sensation, or a feeling of “total oneness”.
But, how does awareness know what it is perceiving; the ability to differentiate this from that? The mind.
Awareness starts by directing itself outward. It then comes across some sensory stimuli. Once it has engaged that stimuli, it then relays a message back to the mind, which then projects back to itself what it is perceiving. This is the möbius loop of mind, caught in a greater "Awareness Loop."
Fig.1.0 — "Awareness Loop."
“…you can only go insofar as the mind.”
Whatever the limitation of that mind’s knowledge, that is as far back as it will go when understanding what it is becoming aware of. Think about it, in “higher” or “altered” states of consciousness (awareness), you may begin to see the colour purple. How do you even know what “purple” is? The mind looked back in its storehouse of information and promptly told you "this is purple, according to what we know from before." If, while in an higher-or-altered state of consciousness, you see the floor moving, but know that it is your visual cortex being affected by some hallucinogen, who is more conscious of what's really going on? The one who believes to "see the vibration of the universe” or the one who knows that it is all a “perpetual trick”? Whichever narrative you choose to latch onto is your own mind’s limitation in understanding — as, one cannot know what they don’t know, only what they've known from their past.
“I am conscious of foreigners coming off of a boat onto my land's shore.” With a limited consciousness (understanding, in this case), one could easily think that these people were invaders (though, if you lived back in the early 1500s, this would probably be the case), but we’ve now "expanded our consciousness" to see these invaders as merely tourists. Our consciousness has shifted.
The point in all of this is to “expand our consciousness”. But what does that really mean? It means that when you expand the mind’s ability to understand things, you can be more consciously aware of what may or may not be really going on… “That name you called me was hurtful,” “The science shows that the world IS round,” “My parents went through a messy divorce when I was a kid and it still makes me sad,” all of these, expansions in understanding to help raise your conscious awareness of things you did not know from before.
As a caveat to all of this, there is no trick; no holy crystal that will get you there; only the persistent effort to learn and keep learning. For, when exercising a limited perspective of consciousness, we are all just animals anyways…
Though, a higher state of consciousness would tell you the exact same thing.
—think about it…