The cogs in the machine
...sustained on transient, paid-for thrills, beneath 'the powers that be', with no real command of your own existence."
In a dog-eat-dog world rife with power struggle, living "consciously" is last on most people's list of priorities, if it's on there at all. When push comes to shove, most people indulge in bad habits, neglect their truest desires, prefer short-term gratification, and live disconnected from their own inner divinity.
It's easy to see why. Society, shaped more than anything by profit-chasing companies, has turned most of us into mindless consumers with no real intentionality. It's a common experience to feel like another cog in the machine, sustained on transient, paid-for thrills, beneath "the powers that be", with no real command of your own existence.
Conscious people
People with higher-than-average self-awareness, people who'd built something from nothing, people who'd escaped the system.
While travelling these last three years across South America and Asia, I gravitated naturally toward people living a bohemian way: people with higher-than-average self-awareness, people who'd built something from nothing, people who'd escaped the system. When you've spent virtually your whole life immersed in, and knowing nothing beyond, the paradigms handed to you by society, finding people actually living by their own truth is heart-opening, stimulating, and humbling, all at once.
The common thread among them: they're on the path to living consciously, living intentionally, in accordance with their own authenticity. That requires self-knowledge, and a rich, curated inner world.
Conscious individuals often carry a greater sense of compassion, toward themselves and others. It's a natural byproduct of putting themselves first despite an occasionally hostile external world, and knowing firsthand what it takes to push through it. Many, though not all, feel a connection to a higher power watching over and guiding them, a source of transcendence, wisdom, and often of manifesting a life they love.
Doing the work
Intentional time to study oneself, tune the mind, face demons, expand.
How does one become more conscious? The real change is internal.
In the self-improvement world, it's common to call such people people who've done the work: taken intentional time to study themselves, tune their minds, face their demons, expand. Sometimes that means working through profound discomfort and trauma; sometimes it's a lighter ride, depending on the cards you were dealt. Prolonged determination, graft toward your own goals, and dedication to becoming the best version of yourself, by standards that resonate deep in your heart, are the optimal route to real self-actualisation.
What's wrong with just living your life as you want?
Nothing, as long as it doesn't harm others or your environment. The real problem with living overtly unconsciously is the negligence that tends to come with it: toward your own long-term wellbeing, and toward the people and world around you.
Remember: the real change is internal. The inner development that comes with raising your own level of consciousness brings, as a side effect, a deeper fulfilment, one that transcends the outer world's noise, and a genuinely good energy you cultivate rather than chase. I think it's this inner refuge that lets conscious people coexist with their environment without just taking from it. With less hollowness to fill, and more capacity to care for their own real needs, they have more to actually offer the world.
Changing the world
It's a flywheel: personal peace helps others feel peaceful, and so on.
Developing your inner world also means external things stop having such a grip on you. That's partly what we mean by a transcendent mindset. Such a way of thinking naturally begets optimism and gratitude. After all, we'd all love to think positively; the only thing stopping us is perceived external threat. Scarcity and fear-based thinking, on the other hand, make people look for someone to blame. If I can go out on a limb, I'd even suggest this is contributing to a lot of the tension we're feeling as a global society right now.
In a world where more people had a greater sense of inner fulfilment from living more consciously, we'd be less drawn into culture-war games and finger-pointing, and more focused on ourselves: our inner journey, our chosen direction, our own development. And that shift compounds. A person who isn't fighting their own scarcity has more to actually give, not performatively, but genuinely, to the people and causes around them. That generosity lowers the temperature for everyone nearby, which gives the next person a little more room to feel safe rather than threatened, which in turn frees them up to give something too. It's a flywheel: personal peace helps others feel peaceful, and so on.
A gift to yourself
The benefits to the world outside are just a natural by-product.
The beauty of it is that none of this is an obligation to better "the world"; it's a totally optional path that will almost certainly bring more clarity, personal power, and peace into your own life. The benefits to the outside world are just a natural by-product. Once you start working through what's really going on in your current mental landscape, cultivating a genuinely pleasant internal energy base, and making progress on the things you always said you would do, you'll have so much more to give to the world, and you'll feel fulfilled long before you reach any "final" destination.
Where do you start?
Good news: you don't need a retreat in the jungle or a decade of sitting with monks to begin.
A lot of it starts small: noticing when you're reaching for a distraction instead of sitting with how you actually feel. Writing down what's really on your mind, not the polished version, the real one. Asking yourself, honestly, whether the life you're building looks anything like the one you said you wanted. None of this requires anything external. It's available to you right now, in whatever room you're sitting in as you read this.
As you start doing this more regularly, as a well-deserved part of your day, it becomes genuinely enjoyable. The process opens up your inner landscape, and that brings with it a greater sense of expansiveness, which just feels straight-up good. You'll reach a point where you want to be that version of yourself, with no sense of "I ought to," and you won't quite believe you ever lived the old way. Speaking personally: since I got into meditation over ten years ago, I've never found a feeling quite as sublime as the stillness and connectedness of a good sit. I meditate when I want to now, and it never comes with a sense of obligation. Similar clarity can also come from a good session with your journal, or deep work towards a personal goal you made for yourself.
Consciously
To help you become more self-aware, and encourage movement toward the person you want to become.
I created Consciously for a few reasons. I felt there was a genuine need in the market for a product that ties these practices together, while also providing its own method of catalysing energetic change through personalised guided meditations. But I also wanted something I could use myself, to get out of some unintentional patterns I was still holding onto. Having been in software for over ten years, and an avid meditator with a deep interest in spirituality and esoteric philosophy, it's the perfect project for me.
Consciously is an all-inclusive suite of mind-reprogramming tools that help you become more self-aware and encourage movement toward the person you want to become. The backbone of the platform is the AI guided meditation generator, which produces great-sounding meditations directly tailored to your life.
We also have an intelligent journal that notices and flags repeated patterns in your thinking. You can import your existing handwritten journal, or journals in online formats, and even feed your entries into the meditation generator to create reflections on what's happened, so you can listen and process at your own leisure.
Our Manifest page lets you build a vision board with our AI image generator, which takes a reference photo of you and inserts it into aspirational scenes. It also has a personal manifesto editor and a goal planner that ties into the chatbot, so you can iterate on next steps for each of your customised life areas. You can feed your Manifest goals into the meditation generator too, to produce visualisation and manifestation meditations.
When you're ready to take action, you can feed your to-dos into the Focus component: a focus/break timer where you set dedicated time toward completing your goals and check things off as you go. Our dedicated Focus Chrome extension can also block distracting sites.
Finally, there's the in-built Chat, always available. It's aware of what's going on with you based on your journal, generated meditation topics, and manifesto, and can actually operate the app for you. Get it to create meditations, or just talk things through. Up to you.
It's about time we changed the world, and that change starts with you. It's about time we stopped blaming the powers that be - blaming doesn't get us anywhere. We all have our own special power, our own gift to bring to the world. The change you create within will be seen and recognised by the world, and you'll inspire those around you in profound ways.
There are so many ways you can start. If you feel Consciously may help you, feel free to create an account today.
Thanks for reading, friend. Live consciously; become the person you said you'd be.