Is It Really Difficult to Become Conscious?

There are people who study spirituality, self-help, and personal growth for years—decades, even. They will tell you how difficult it is to become a truly conscious, awakened, enlightened person.

But Constance Kellough, president of Namaste Publishing, proposes that consciousness is a reality anyone can enter at any time.

The leap into enlightenment is in fact easy to make, says Constance. “That’s because it’s natural to us to live from an enlightened consciousness. It’s the way we really are, and we’ve simply lost sight of it.”

The key is stillness—though stillness isn’t just sitting still, like a teacher might make a classroom of students sit still.

Constance explains: “Stillness is not silence. It is an intense awareness of our inner Presence. However, silence can be helpful in assisting us to more easily and quickly access our inner stillness.”

So, how does a person still their mind?

“By placing your attention on the present moment,” Constance clarifies. “A state of calmness arises in you when you do this.”

However, there’s a vital qualification to what it means to “place” our attention on the present moment: “It is important not to ‘effort’ in order to bring your attention into the present moment. A still mind is not a forced mind. It is a mind at ease. Any effort to stay in the now comes from thinking about what you need to do, and thinking is not stillness.”

Paying attention to the present moment “is the opposite of concentration. Concentration is an exercise of thought. It requires a tight mental focus. By its nature it isolates and restricts. You cannot enter stillness by concentrating. Paying attention to the present moment is more of a full-body experience. There is a spaciousness about it.”

Spirituality is often thought of as almost an escape from the physical body. In reality, it’s about getting connected to the physical realm in a profoundly deep way. That’s because spirituality isn’t about an afterlife, but about this life.

That’s not to say that this life is all there is—far from it. But spirituality is the immersion of ourselves in life without any holding back, precisely because we can afford to give ourselves wholly to life since we are grounded in eternity. Each moment becomes meaningful as an expression of eternity, and not as a sort of prelude to the main act.

When we live from inner stillness, everything we do—from fixing breakfast to enjoying a conversation or planting a garden—is the main act.

As the Zen masters say, before enlightenment chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

So many of us are lost in our repetitive thoughts or caught up in a whirlwind of emotional reactivity. When we become present, we approach everything from divine Presence.

And that’s where stillness comes in. Says Constance in the Namaste book The Leap—Are You Ready to Live a New Reality?, “When you are inwardly still, you get in touch with your own essence. How good it feels to be who you truly are! Once you are in touch with the life within, you come to realize this same life force is within everybody. We all share in the same animating Presence.”

By spending time in stillness, our entire life becomes a flow of conscious living, free of all “efforting.”