Achieve Your Potential

What does it mean to achieve your potential?

On the relative level of human affairs, to achieve your potential means to live up to your expectations or the expectations of others regarding a high level of performance. You will hear a person say: He did (or didn't) achieve his potential as a first class athlete, or a great artist, or first in his class.

But actually, when we go deeper, the source of the desire to achieve your potential is the yearning for fulfillment. That is why I say, if you really want to achieve your potential as a human being, you must first unfold the super state of awareness. Achieving your potential is much more than personal development, it is also personal evolution!

As both personal development and personal evolution start with awareness, the first question is: What is awareness?

No awareness - The sleeping state

This is the identified state of (no awareness) where there is no observer separate from the experience.

For example when a person says, "I am angry," there is no observer of the emotion anger separate from the emotion. He/she is one with the emotion anger. In this state there are no choices in terms of action because there is no one separate from the experience 'anger' who can make a choice, especially a choice to do something differently.

Life is habitual. Potential is dormant and there is no opportunity to achieve your potential.

Relative awareness - The waking state

This is the relative state of awareness where there is an observer, "me", separate from the experience.

For example: If a person says, "I have or feel anger", he/she is expressing the ability to observe the anger and see him/herself as separate from it. Now that person can choose actions relative to the experience of the emotion anger.

You can achieve your potential to a point. Life is at choice.

Super awareness - The freedom state (from the Sanskrit word turiya, which means the freedom state of consciousness)

In turiya, or the super state of awareness, the observer transcends all conditions of separation - such as in the waking state where the observer separates from the experience, and is one with the flow of consciousness. Consciousness or super awareness is the source of all thoughts, all actions, and all phenomena. It is the state of awareness where one is conscious that the ground of all being is bliss. This is NOT a state reserved for just a few exalted enlightened beings. I have dipped into this state in deep meditation and also have merged into the state of Oneness for hours at a time while going through the simple acts of everyday life.

From this state my experience is that everything flows naturally, without obstruction. The mind remains quiet. There is a sense of observing everything while fully participating. There is a quality of peacefulness that is beyond joy. And there is an uncanny, natural imbedding of memories, in the way that people remember momentous events like where they were when they heard that the twin towers were bombed in New York City, or witnessing the birth of a child.

You also have entered into this state, although you may not have recognized or articulated it as such. However, many people around the world have recognized and have written about these moments since time immemorial.

Joyce Rupp writes beautifully about simple, everyday experiences of Oneness - from moments spent in nature to examples of the universal human experience of love, in her book The Cosmic Dance: An Invitation to Experience our Oneness.
P.D. Ouspensky, a student of the Russian philosopher and spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff, wrote about his experience of suddenly "waking up" from a relative state of consciousness while walking down a busy street in his book In Search of the Miraculous.

Achieving your potential is the ground of all experience. Life is the miraculous unfolding of potential.

Awareness is the fertile ground for personal evolution. By recognizing, articulating, and honoring moments of awareness, we naturally begin to evolve our thinking from a human being having a divine experience to a divine being having a human experience. That is why I have written Walk on Water: How to Make Change Easier as an experiential guide to unfolding awareness and achieving your true potential in both personal development and personal evolution.