– by Søren Lauritzen
Over the years, I have worked with helping many people (as a consciousness guide / consciousness coach), and along the way, I have asked almost all of them what they consider important in life, what makes a good life?
I have received a wide range of different answers such as:
Love, sex, intimacy, physical survival, health, integrity, authenticity, closeness, presence, family, happiness, politics, religion, spirituality, appearance, inner peace, personal development, work, security, achievements, recognition, status, money, power, control, freedom, fun, play, helping others, wholeness, sports, hobbies, justice, morality, ethics, norms, values, beliefs / faith, attention, expectations (own and others’), traditions, “what feels right for me” / intuition, knowledge, culture, harmony, being perfect, creativity, fame, popularity, truth / honesty, meaningfulness, feelings, thoughts … and more.
So, I could give you a quick, ‘cheap’, and quite useless answer by saying that what people consider important depends on whom you ask.
But I could also view the question – and therefore also the answer – from a slightly higher perspective to see if there is a more universally human – and practically useful – answer. And there is. That answer is the point of this little article. It can change our lives for the better, and we will get to it in a short moment.
But first, we need to cover a couple of things to get a somewhat complete picture. Let’s start by asking: why is it interesting to know what we consider important?
What We Consider Important Will Rule Our Lives
The reason for this is:
What people consider important often becomes their focus and driving force, i.e., their motivation – the reason why they think, feel, believe, choose, act, and live as they do.
In other words:
What you or I consider important in life ends up setting a direction for a whole lot of stuff in our lives. In fact, it essentially controls or governs our entire lives.
Therefore, we will do well to think carefully when choosing what should be important to us.
But that being said, my point here is NOT that we should spend a lot of time, attention, and energy thinking about what is important to us. On the contrary, actually. There is a shortcut, and that is what this article is about.
Of course, there are several excellent methods we can use to uncover our values, both the values we have lived by so far and those we would rather have instead. Such a value clarification process can be interesting and open our eyes to many things, making us more aware so we can make more conscious and thus better choices.
What Makes a Good Life? Is There a Recipe?
We have free will, which we use to make choices, but what we choose depends on various factors, including who we think we are, our worldview, our cultural background, and our level of consciousness in different areas of life.
Earlier in this article, I mentioned a long list of examples of what people consider important. Here we found everything from love to politics to money and power. These things can be divided in different ways, including placing them in a hierarchy with the most important ones at the top. Doing this reveals some pretty interesting things.
I began this article by explaining how, as a consciousness guide / coach, I have helped many people explore, raise, expand, and clarify their consciousness (thus becoming more consciously aware), and therefore asked them what they consider important in life. But I have actually done more than that: I have used various techniques to help them examine their choices more closely, to reveal if there are things they consider even more important than their initial and immediate answers. And there are.
What Focus Is Best When You Want a Good Life?
We are all unique, but in fact, there is a hierarchy of important things that, as far as I can tell, is common to almost all people. This is what I will now describe. I have chosen four categories, and when I say that one category is more important than another, it reflects what almost everyone ends up considering the most important when they, through increased consciousness, examine their prioritization of important things in life more closely.
Becoming more consciously aware happens when you use the truth to make the unknown known, the unconscious conscious, and to examine, raise, expand, and clarify your consciousness.
So in fact, the four categories below indirectly reflect what people consider important (the goals and motivations they have) at different levels of consciousness. The category I have placed first (because it is the most important) reflects the highest level of consciousness – which is also the one that leads to the best life when focused on. Conversely, if one focuses on the fourth category as the most important one, one will, all other things being equal, have life that is less good.
Hierarchy for What Makes a Good Life (Preliminary Version)
With the most important things placed first, the pattern of what is important looks somewhat like this:
1. Fundamental States of Being
(Examples: love, happiness, inner peace, freedom, creativity, meaningfulness, wholeness, etc.)
– “I just want to be happy.”
– “I just want to have inner peace.”
– “I just want to experience meaning in my life.”
2. Basic Needs
(Examples: health, security, intimacy, closeness, presence, play, harmony, control, meaningfulness, helping others, development, truth / honesty, wholeness, etc.)
– “I just want to be healthy.”
– “I just want to feel safe.”
– “I just want to experience closeness and intimacy.”
3. Topics and Goals Often / Mostly Based on Internal Factors (Within Ourselves)
(Examples: emotions, thoughts, personal values, personal beliefs / faith, sex, perfectionism, justice, “what feels right for me” / intuition, knowledge, etc.)
– “I just want to experience intense emotions – good or bad – because then I feel alive.”
– “I just want to have sex, lots of sex, because that’s when I feel connected to my partner.”
– “I just want to know and understand – myself, others, and life itself.”
4. Topics and Goals Often / Mostly Based on External Factors (Outside of Ourselves)
(Examples: norms, appearance, politics, religion, expectations (own and others’), culture, traditions, cultural values, cultural beliefs / faith, status, money, power, fame, popularity, morality, ethics, work, achievements, recognition, hobbies, sports, etc.)
– “I just want to look good so others will find me attractive.”
– “I just want to be normal and be like everyone else, so they will accept me.”
– “I just want to be good at things, preferably the best, because I enjoy winning, and when I win, I get recognition.”
These categories overlap to some extent, so of course they cannot be completely separated from each other, but that doesn’t matter much. The main thing is that there are indeed different categories and – especially – that there is a difference in their importance. (The assessment of importance is, as mentioned, based on the goal of a good life).
And What Can We Learn from This?
What can be immediately seen is that what various human cultures around the world generally teach us is important, such as appearance, norms, religion, traditions, money, work, achievements, popularity, etc., is actually NOT important. Those things don’t have much to do with a good life.
People engaged in personal development (and / or spiritual development) have smelled the rat: career and money are not as important as, for example, love and wholeness.
But it’s still somewhat thought-provoking to see it laid out so clearly, isn’t it?
And now we’re slowly reaching a place in this article where we can see the first major point leading up to the main point …
Consciousness: The Higher the Level, the Better
The four categories are as mentioned an indirect reflection of different levels of consciousness. Here is how different levels of consciousness work:
A high level of consciousness is both more effective and more pleasant to experience than a low one.
Or, put another way:
A higher level of consciousness WORKS better than a lower one.
(Examples of a low level of consciousness include panic, anxiety, jealousy – or just about anything based on fear, lack, inferiority, and any type of non-wholeness).
At a higher level of consciousness, not only do you feel and function better, but you also see everything more clearly than you do at a lower level. (This forms the basis for what you prioritize as important and is the basis for the hierarchy of important things mentioned above).
Higher Consciousness Can Transcend All That Is Unpleasant
Albert Einstein has been quoted saying that problems can only be solved at a higher level of consciousness than from where they were created, and although that’s not exactly what he said, it points to something important:
From a higher level of consciousness, we can not only solve problems more effectively, we can simply transcend them, meaning we find such comprehensive and good solutions that the problem is no longer a problem.
This principle constitutes the basis for almost all the work we do here at goodconsciouslife.com
In other words:
The result of raising your consciousness is that you get a better life.
And precisely that is something we all want – in fact, it is one of the main reasons people seek a coach or consciousness guide – like us here at Good Conscious Life.
Thus, we are finally at the main point of this article:
Our Life Experience Is the Most Important Thing in Our Life
This (in the headline) is the point. As an answer, it is quite straightforward, and it is both intuitively understandable and feels completely right (when you think about it and feel it). Isn’t that true?
Yet, it took several years of working with these things and a death among one of my closest loved ones before it became completely clear to me. Similarly, it is my impression that it is not at all clear to most people.
The most important thing in our lives is our experience, our life experience.
Let that sentence linger for a moment.
It is such a simple and innocent sentence, yet it has so much power that if we TRULY embrace it and live by it, it can change everything for us.
Experience Is Our Job
Experiencing is the thing we all do practically all the time. We even do it a good portion of the time we sleep. Clearly, it’s the same for animals; they experience too. So, wouldn’t it be the same for all life – or perhaps more accurately: for all consciousness.
(And as far as we consciousness explorers – and quantum physics – can ascertain, EVERYTHING is consciousness).
We humans are “units of consciousness”, and our job – our purpose – is to experience.
An experience is an experience, so in principle, one experience is as good as another. But as humans, we care deeply about whether we have an experience of love and happiness (for example, because we have given ourselves a high level of consciousness), or if we have an experience of pain and suffering (for example, because we fall into a sewer, break both legs, and become sick from the sewage).
What we want most in our lives is a GOOD life experience.
The reason why we chase after things like money, status, power, sex, or whatever it may be, is to have a good life experience.
All the things we pursue, well …
Almost everything we think, feel, believe, choose, and do has the overarching purpose of giving us a good life experience.
We’re typically just not aware that this is the case. But when we think and feel deeply about it, we can see it, right?
What Is a Good Life Experience?
Based on the above “hierarchy of important things in life” we can see exactly what a good life is about:
A good life experience is an experience where we ensure our basic needs are met AND we experience the fundamental states of being, such as wholeness, love, happiness, inner peace, freedom, creativity, and meaningfulness.
So now we can actually add a point to our hierarchy of important things in life, namely the most important one:
Hierarchy for What Makes a Good Life (Final Version)
This is the concluding and final version of what is important to focus on in life:
0. A good life experience (which consists of experiencing point 1 and fulfilling point 2 below)
1. Basic states of being
2. Basic needs
3. Topics and goals often / mostly based on something internal (within ourselves)
4. Topics and goals often / mostly based on something external (outside ourselves)
This makes things quite simple. There’s no reason to be confused anymore, because now we know what we need to do. It can be put simply …
Choosing a Good Life Experience as Your Guiding Star
It turns out – very logically – that this exact knowledge is perfect for giving us a good life. Which means that focusing on having a good life experience is a good and useful thing to focus on and be motivated by.
It is a good idea to choose to focus on and let ourselves be guided and driven by wanting a good life experience.
A good life experience is the perfect focus, the perfect beacon in everyday life.
EVERYTHING we deal with, every choice we face, can be measured against whether it (in the short or long term) gives us a good life experience or not. If it does, we will benefit from choosing it, and if it doesn’t, we will benefit from letting it go and choosing something else instead.
The only reason for choosing something that may not give us a good life experience in the short term is if it leads to a good life experience in the long run. However, in practice, such choices seem to arise much less frequently than one might think.
On the contrary, it seems that a clear and strong focus on a good life experience makes us more authentic, which is highly satisfying in itself. Moreover, it appears to attract exactly the right people, things, and situations at the right time. (Carl Jung referred to this phenomenon as synchronicity, often associated with a higher-than-average level of consciousness).
Uncompromising Focus on a Good Life Experience Is Challenging, But Absolutely Worth It
I have spent many years working with my own consciousness and personal development, which has given me increasingly more, greater and higher self-awareness and a better inner life as a result.
However, creating a good life in practice is a challenge in itself, and it has only been in recent years – triggered by the untimely death of someone very close to me – that I truly realized the importance of the information I am sharing in this article … and therefore consciously choosing to always keep a good life experience as my guiding star.
Doing this has made me more and more authentic (and uncompromising) and has enabled me to give myself an increasingly better life in practice. I’ve become better and better at choosing what’s right for me and NOT just doing what I’ve observed others doing (the “normal”) or what I’ve been told is “the right thing” throughout my upbringing – often without words.
And it’s not always easy. We humans (mostly) don’t have thick fur over most of our bodies, but we’re still a kind of apes. Who apes. And we are social beings who want to “fit in”.
But we are also unique, all of us, and in some cases – mine for example – it just doesn’t work to live by norms and expectations if I am to be myself. I have to do everything MY way, a way that hasn’t been seen before (most recently in connection with creating a an education in consciousness). Having to start from scratch and do the unique thing that is right for me is … hard. It’s ‘big’. It’s challenging. (And very satisfying and rewarding).
Having a Good Life Experience as a Guiding Star Is Invaluable
In that process, having a clear focus on the fact that I MUST create a good life experience for myself has been a tremendous help. As a guiding star, that focus is simply invaluable. It is super useful.
In fact, this guiding star is so useful that I believe one could possibly forego a good portion of the intense work of raising, healing and expanding one’s consciousness and just go for a good life right from the beginning.
Or to put it precisely:
If we can simply relate everything to the grand purpose of a good life experience and always think, feel, believe, choose, act, and live from that, then we can most likely avoid much of the effort of having to raise, heal, and expand our consciousness, and simply live a good life right from the start.
So, to all who will listen and are willing to try something new, I highly recommend that focus.
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