Conscious Life Journal: What does it mean to you to live a conscious life?
Michael Mirdad: Generally speaking, to be conscious means to be awake. As someone becomes more conscious, they start living a little healthier, and they become more conscious of what they eat and what they think. On a deeper level, there are human beings that are really asleep—or unconscious. They do nothing for the betterment of themselves or for the world. Asleep is the opposite of awake. Unconscious vs. conscious. Being conscious is not just reading labels on cans in the grocery store, but knowing everything about yourself and being a more conscious participant in your life. Instead of saying I don’t eat healthily, find out why you don’t eat healthily. Know why you are attracted to tall people vs. short people, why you are afraid of the dark or why you are afraid of spiders. Look inside and you can find out everything. If you decide to become a vegetarian because your friends are vegetarian, that is not a conscious decision. You aren’t going to get the greatest benefit from that decision because it was not made consciously.
CLJ: Do you find that living consciously is difficult for people?
MM: For most people it’s actually impossible, but only because they think it’s impossible. Like it’s the biggest decision in the world, which is why most people avoid it. They are afraid of being conscious because it’s a huge inconvenience for the human ego. It can screw everything up. Everything dysfunctional or co-dependent about us is going to be exposed if we become conscious. That’s why most human beings only do a little work at a time—one book a year, one little adjustment per year. It’s all very safe and measured. But we are supposed to be excited about becoming conscious. The goal is to teach people that conscious living is not an inconvenience; it’s the only way to live. All else is just a lie, a choice of our false self. If it’s a false self, then it doesn’t offer a real path to consciousness. Unconsciousness doesn’t mean you are bad; it just means you aren’t doing anything to become conscious. You are merely getting by. Consciousness comes only when you “show up” and are now making conscious decisions and you know why.
CLJ: How do we do that? What are some of the pathways to becoming fully conscious?
MM: The good news is that it varies from person to person. One person may be able to meditate. Someone else can work on their health. You get to choose your direction, what feels right for you. Becoming conscious means having a healthy relationship with Spirit and yourself. You need some sort of self-healing maintenance program where you consistently look at yourself and ask yourself why you do things and get objective feedback. Breath work, counseling—it doesn’t matter what. These are all techniques of opening up your psychological and emotional self. You also want a healthy relationship with others, which comes through having good communication skills, healthy intimacy and affection. When I say intimacy, that doesn’t mean sex (although it certainly can include sex as one of any number of expressions and when appropriate). It means how to connect with people in a healthy, affectionate way. Making eye contact. Smiling. Random acts of kindness. If someone slips and falls, you help them up. If someone needs help in the grocery line, you pay their bill. You also need healthy boundaries. Without healthy boundaries, you are still unconscious because you have to know what works and what doesn’t work for you. Know when to say “no” to someone.
When we know how to communicate responsibly, we do it with love and tact. This is how to bridge and connect with other people. We have to nurture the connection with our children, partners, friends, people at work, etc.
CLJ: I feel it’s impossible to have a healthy relationship with others if you don’t have a good relationship with yourself. Do you advocate that self-healing is a precursor to having healthy relationships with others?
MM: That’s brilliantly said and an absolute must. Technically, you can’t give to others what you don’t have within yourself. So the relationship with God and self really comes first.
The concept that we are all one is a beautiful concept to me. As we develop a healthy relationship with ourselves, because we are all one, we are also creating healthy opportunities in everybody we touch. The healthier we become the more we affect our relationships with others. Imagine everything is swimming in one ocean. Just because there is a rock in one part of the ocean and a fish in another part of the ocean that look separate from one another doesn’t mean they’re not connected. The water is connecting both of them. When you sneeze on one side of the universe, the whole universe quivers from that. And the consciousness of each person affects the entire ocean or universe. The ocean that we perceive (the ocean called the “uni-verse”) is, in a sense, a screen over another ocean called heaven. It’s a cosmic ocean, not a material one. In the cosmic ocean of God, there is only peace and joy. In our ego-based ocean, there is duality and conflict. However, there will come a time when the ocean that we perceive will disappear and surrender to the other ocean, the ocean of peace. Everybody will then recognize our oneness. We have to recognize our oneness with each other before we recognize the oneness with the greater whole—God.
CLJ: What are some of your personal challenges in living a conscious life?
MM: I find that the more you wake up, the less patience you have for the unconscious world. As you start to wake up and you vibrate at a higher rate, then all lower vibrations seem like such a shame. For example, if I was once a drinker and I’m done drinking, I know how good it feels to no longer be an alcoholic. It’s so difficult to see other people ruining their lives when you KNOW they could wake up and change their whole life. They don’t have to lose their families and their jobs. We start to get a little excited and that starts to push our patience a little bit. I know it does mine. Here you are just sitting around in a world that doesn’t always want to wake up when you know darn well how wonderful and exciting it is. Yet you have to wait day after day for them to get it at their own pace. When you start to see that this world is a joke, that it has no power over you, you wish other people get that because it’s really hard to hear in our day and age that we still have people murdering based on race or religion. I would love to see people have an easier time waking up. I struggle seeing people learn the hard way. And even though I know that this world is an illusion, I find abuse to be relatively disgusting. If people could just get let go and let themselves get it, we would be saving a lot of time and pain.
CLJ: The word “fear” is a huge thing. I’ve read that fear and love can’t exist in the same place. Can you speak to that?
MM: We think that love has the opposite called hate. But the truth is that love has no opposite. Love is the absolute expression of Divinity and Divinity has no opposite. We don’t have love and hate; we have love and fear. Fear is only an assumption—it’s not a thing. So you have love and the assumption, or the fear that you don’t have love. The fear that you don’t have love doesn’t mean that you actually don’t have love, it just means that you have the fear that you don’t have love. Fear is a soul level perception that has you in a state of terror, which makes you try to take from others or makes you try to possess others to make you feel better. It’s the root of all addiction, all codependency, and leads to guilt, shame, regret and acting out.
CLJ: What do you feel is next for the world? Do you have any predictions?
MM: As the old saying goes, “the greater the light, the darker the shadow.” I think we are going to see a greater contrast in the world. Churches, as we know them, will collapse, and it will continue in all areas, including political and economic. The structures are going to start shaking up so they can be freed from their 3-dimensional boxes and the fear that tries to hold them together. As consciousness changes, all of the things formed on old consciousness are going to collapse. Also, in our lifetime and the next couple of lifetimes, we are going to see very, very large versions of earth changes, including the structure of continents. The 3-dimensional world as we know it has to keep collapsing so a higher dimensional reality can come into manifestation or perception.
CLJ: So we have to have change in order to become more conscious.
MM: We can do this the easy way or the hard way. It doesn’t have to be dramatic, but most of the time that is what humans choose because of stubbornness and fear. There is no doubt that the world is waking up. And because the world is waking up, the rest of the world that is asleep will continue fighting the concept of waking up. Those who make money and get power out of people who are asleep are going to try to keep everybody asleep.
But this is a natural thing, and there is a point where there will only be light. And that time is coming, and we will see that. Between now and the next generation or two we are going to see a complete shift. The things that everybody have been interested in—the shift of the millennium, the harmonic convergence, the 11:11 convergence and 2012—these things were not mere fads or failed prophecies. They were all signposts—all accurate and valid, marking what’s to come. And endings are coming, which means new beginnings. But the endings, in our personal lives or globally, are only as painful as our insistence to hold on to things as they were. When we learn to let go and allow a new consciousness, amazing things will come.
One of the biggest challenges that people have is the word “trust.” They have a hard time trusting, which is why they don’t take responsibility. We need to recognize that new jobs are waiting for some of us that don’t like our current jobs. And new relationships are waiting for people who don’t have good relationships.
There is a new universe coming, but we must first release all attachments to our former universe. If we can take responsibility and trust in letting go of the old world, then we will see a new world begin to manifest—a world that has been concealed behind our fear-based perceptions all along. And as we let go and let God, the entire universe will sing a song of love, peace, joy, and abundance. But we don’t have to wait for this to happen on a collective, universal level. Our job is to begin experiencing this in our own way right now by doing our best to live more consciously each and every day.