Entheos Academy - How to Awaken Value in Your Life and Your Organization

To DO anything consciously, you have to BE fully conscious, and learn precise ways you can BECOME fully conscious, mastering the processes that awaken value for a thriving life. (Check out the Top 10 Big Ideas from the class below!)

Your Professor
Marti Spiegelman, MFA is a training professional, mentor, speaker, initiated shaman, diviner, and healer with over four decades of specialized training in shamanic technologies and related fields.


How to Awaken Value in Your Life and Your Organization

To DO anything consciously, you have to BE fully conscious!

Most of us think we’re already ‘there’, but in this series you’ll discover amazing things about the state of modern consciousness and the unintended limits it’s placing on our true capacity for value creation and thriving. Join me in this dialogue to learn precise ways you can BECOME fully conscious and master the processes that awaken value for thriving in your life and your organization.


The Top 10 Big Ideas


1 Value is a Natural Product of Full Consciousness at Work

Consciousness, left to its own devices, produces states of thriving, not scarcity! It produces exactly what is need for a living system and all its parts to grow and evolve, AND to support its future generations. Think of Consciousness [with a capital ‘C’] as a force in the universe that is always on the move, always evolving, and ALWAYS producing what is conducive to life in abundant amounts.

In addition, to fully support abundant life for generations to come, you have to include states of well-being and energies that provide momentum, the power to move forward. This is what Consciousness as a universal force does, and in the process it generates system-wide value that benefits every constituent member on all scales without waste.

2 To Awaken Value, You Have to Fully Awaken Yourself!

Human consciousness is just one expression of the ‘big’ Consciousness, and our capacities for thinking, reasoning, and strategizing are subsets of our consciousness at work. In the modern world, we’ve become overly dependent on thinking and strategy, but the truth is, you can’t think or strategize or talk your way to consciousness! These are outcomes of full consciousness, not its source components.

Most people would say they are conscious or awake, but is it true? To a degree yes, but there’s much more involved than we realize.

Full consciousness generates states of full awareness, full presence, masterful understanding of relationships as investments [whether in people, places, or things] that generate at least a 2-fold return for every element of every system involved.

Full human consciousness emerges when we learn to properly organize our awareness, and this requires some technical mastery.

Consciousness is not an elusive state open to interpretation. It is a very precise ‘force’ in the universe governed by specific processes and principles. For humans to become fully awake we need to learn and embody those processes and principles – we need to make the technologies of consciousness our way of being – and for this we need to be mentored, which by its nature is a culture-based, collective experiential process. You can’t do it alone.

3 To BE Awake, Let Your Awareness Shake Hands with Your Perception

Being human is a unique event in the universe. We have a special kind of consciousness based in four interwoven attributes, or four ‘cornerstones’ of human consciousness.

Let’s look at two of those cornerstones first – perception and awareness – in light of this profound indigenous teaching about what it is to BE human:

The core of our being is the act of perception; the magic of our being is the act of awareness.
– The Yaqui Masters of Central Mexico

Perceiving and being aware are actions – and their relationship is critical to your capacity to BE fully conscious.

According to its Latin roots, ‘to perceive’ means ‘to know one’s environment through the senses’ – or we could say ‘to experience one’s environment directly through the senses’. You read that correctly – your very human physical senses: kinesthetic sense, auditory sense, visual sense, and so on.

These are the mechanisms through which we participate in and know our world, through the act of perception; and we store all the data we collect 24/7!

However, just because we perceive, doesn’t mean we are aware of what we’ve perceived, or awakened to its value. In order to awaken value, you need to [1] participate [perception and awareness are actions] and [2] you need to know where your awareness is. It needs to be working in concert with the information you’re perceiving, not wandering off to ponder old ideas, opinions, assumptions, or daydreams!

4 To Know What’s Real, You Really Have to Know Where Your Awareness Is!

Did you know that most humans daydream 60-70% of their waking hours? That means most of the time, our awareness is someplace other than the ‘here and now’. Wherever your awareness is, that becomes the source of what you ‘know’ in the moment. Wherever your awareness is focused, that focal point is generating your ‘data stream’; it becomes the source of what you think has meaning and value. But if it’s old information, it may not be valuable NOW.

Remember that we actually perceive [know] the world around us 24/7. In a moment of pure perception, the sensory information we are collecting and storing is unbiased and accurate. In that moment we ‘know’ because we are experiencing – it’s called experiential knowledge in the neurosciences. But as we said, whether we’re aware of that perceptual data is another matter altogether. Without awareness of what we perceive, we can’t retrieve the data and use it.

Why would we want to retrieve experiential data? To create something of value! To further our thriving! To evolve our consciousness! Whether we’re creating a new way to play, an innovative way to work, or a deeper way to relate, Consciousness is always moving toward evolving and thriving, toward awakening new and more valuable ways to innovate and grow. To live at this level, you need to be able to focus your awareness in the world here and now, first and foremost flowing it through your perceptual centers, not your thinking mind.

So the BIG question is ‘Do you know where your awareness is?’

5 Only the Magic of Awareness Grows Your Creative Intelligence

"Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic."
– Arthur C. Clarke

There is a technology to consciousness, one so advanced that, as Arthur C. Clarke would say, it is indistinguishable from magic. To understand this magic, we need to look at the other two cornerstones of consciousness – relational mind, or intelligence and linear mind, or intelligence – and how they work in concert to discover, create, and use value.

The human ‘relational mind’ is a powerhouse that is constantly combining [making relationships between] chunks of pure sensory data, to create new kinds of value that support new ways of thriving in the world. It’s what we do as ‘conscious’ beings! The linear mind is set up to carry out the process of manifesting what we create with relational intelligence; essentially the linear mind receives maps of action from the relational mind and executes them guided by strategies and conditions set in place by the relational mind.

In our most creative moments, we actively release awareness of all that is linear and logical, and allow awareness to pick up the lightning speed processing of the relational mind. If we’re not good at bringing awareness to our relational mind, we may still pick up some of its innovative creations, but it will arrive in the form of ‘intuition’ – something we’re not sure is real, a vague stream of information that is lacking in detail only because we don’t know how to bring full awareness to it.

To access the full magic of awareness, you have to train it to ‘light up’ your relational intelligence. You have to teach yourself to release from the magnetic attraction of logic, strategy, and language. This ‘training’ is a very non-linear process, best done in nature where you can practice bringing your awareness to sensory details [color, shape, texture, sound, etc] and drawing or writing about what you perceive in a journal. Or you can make a practice of keeping a pocket size notebook and pen with you at all times and jotting down every cool idea that comes to your mind, or drawing everything you see that is beautiful to your eye. Or you can practice feeling the energy of a tree, or a space, or an object, and then draw it on your journal. The best way to raise awareness in your life is NOT to ‘hard focus’ on your life, but to take awareness off yourself and flow it into the world around you – let it show you what it can do.

The magic happens as you watch your creativity and problem-solving skills sky-rocket, even though you haven’t ‘studied’ how to do that directly. [And if you were to check your IQ, you’d find it’s 10 points higher, even after a week of brief sensory practices!]

6 Necessity is Not the Mother of Invention – Love is!

Creativity doesn’t source from need; it sources from wholeness.’ – don Manuel Quispe, Andean Master Modern humans have a sad tendency to keep all of their awareness in their linear minds, focused on thought and reason, strategy and language. Because of this, we’ve lost the ability to consciously flow awareness into our center of creativity – the relational mind and its sensing intelligence. If we could do the latter, we would experience a full connection to the world, a sense of membership in life, a deep sense of creativity and connectivity. In brief, we would feel whole, in love with and in direct relationship with life and the magic of being conscious. The linear mind is wired to discern things on an either-or basis. It is designed to take action based on conditions. When conditions don’t support an action, a conscious linear intelligence will send the whole map back to the relational mind for a quick update. When we lock our awareness in the linear mind we begin to operate on necessity, not loving awareness of the whole; we begin to be aware of what is missing [and in fact what is missing from awareness is the entire relational mind!]. We fall into frameworks of scarcity. In your linear mind you have awareness of what has already occurred, what has already come into form, but no more. When your awareness is openly flowing in your relational mind [a loving, creative, connected state] your consciousness [perception and awareness working in concert] is able to reach beyond known horizons and you can literally create and manifest on the fly, every moment a moment of mastery and evolutionary growth.

7 Context•Meaning•Value•Choice – the Four Cornerstones of Action

Context–> Meaning –> Value –> Choice: This is the pathway to action for every biological entity. If a situation or opportunity has meaning for us, we will assign it value, and if it has sufficient value we choose it and act on it. Generally we use awareness to seeking meaning that, in turn, generates value, which leads us to choose what supports thriving. But if we’re in a context where thriving is not possible, then we’ll choose something that has value for our surviving, until such time as we can thrive again. However, we need to be careful because we can become imprinted with ideas that survival is the only possibility, and we can become acclimated to survival conditions, literally forgetting how to recognize the conditions for thriving! It all depends on how we use awareness.

8 To Take Any NEW Action, You Need to Create NEW Meaning

The way human intelligence generates meaning is to evaluate data in terms of a ‘context’. The context might be your family, your company, your community, and so on. The way your human intelligence works it that it first determines the context, and based on that it determines meaning and the value of that meaning in that context. In other words, awakening value is a contextual business!

On the basis of meaning and value you choose or not, take action or not. If you know where your awareness is, and how to focus it, you’ll be able to thrive. If you don’t know where your awareness is, or what it’s actually focused on, you might misperceive the context you’re in, incorrectly assign meaning to events or conditions, and totally miss the value of an opportunity.

One great skill we must cultivate is the skill of creating new meaning – it’s a game changer! To do this, we need to learn how to use awareness to place what seems impossible in one context, into new [larger] context. Immediately this shift brings us awareness of new meaning, new value, and new choices. This is one of the things your relational mind is doing all the time; this is your brain’s way of scaling situations to find and create opportunity that is otherwise not detectable by the strategic mind.

9 To Awaken Value, Wake Up As a Member of Your Living System!

As Janine Benyus tells us, nothing in life exists outside a system, and all life systems produce only what is conducive to life. It’s also true that Consciousness [with a capital ‘C’] is always evolving, which means all of the expressions of Consciousness – all living systems – are always evolving. What does this have to do with awakening value?

It means that new contexts are constantly emerging so evolutionary processes can continually create new meaning, which in turn constantly evolves new forms of value, choice, and the manifestation of new levels of thriving. In other words, Consciousness is constantly awakening value, and human consciousness is primed to be an expert participant in this process.

This requires us to master awareness and BE fully conscious.

10 Conscious Organizations Emerge When Their Members BECOME Conscious

When the forces of change come knocking on our doorstep, we tend to ask first ‘What should we do?’ Attaining full consciousness is not about working our way through a to-do list. It entails learning how to BE fully aware. You can certainly devote time and energy to discussing the how and why of becoming a conscious organization, and you can say what people should do . . . but none of this will shift a person’s awareness, or organizational intelligence, to the level where full consciousness takes a leap into the driver’s seat.

To shift our way of doing business, our way of forming and stewarding healthy communities and governments, we will need to make ourselves available to awareness training, and not the kind that focuses our awareness on the self. Human awareness needs to be returned to the world, to the land, to the powers of nature and the invisible forces that shape realities. Only in this larger context will the meaning of our current actions and values become clear to us; only in this larger context will see our way to becoming skilled creators of awakened value for thriving on a collective level.

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