I have long seen myself as if I'm passing through layers and layers of awareness to greater levels of understanding. It's amazing.
This process has been accelerating for me. I can't say for sure if it's just the internet and the plethora of information it makes available on every subject imaginable that has been behind it as I have also steadily employed many personal growth methodologies, but I can say it's true that due to the internet, awareness 'upgrading' seems to be happening to the majority of the human race.
We're getting smarter every day, as a whole. Ignorance about commonly shared things in our respective cultures is harder and harder to have as an excuse. It's as if we're almost expected to know about whatever is going on and the more we know, the more there is to know about!
To make matters worse, or better, according to your perspective, there doesn't seem to be any 'Off' switch to this. In my case, my worldview continues to change even though I haven't been reading the news much, reading any self help books, or doing any specifically enlightening practices, save some new meditations (which entail the absence of thought, coupled with visualization). It's as if I'm absorbing understanding from simply doing ordinary day to day things (some of which entails 'keeping up') so even though I'm X number of years old and should be 'done' or close to done I find I'll probably never be done with learning. There is no Shangri-la valley where everything remains the same to duck into and even though I've had a gamut of experiences, and find that I know a lot, I hardly know it all and now wonder if 'knowing it all' is even possible. The World isn't the way it was years ago, let me tell you that. It's as if that world disappeared and something new rose in its place.
Everything nowadays is so connected, so interrelated. I see that clearly. Being older has brought it home to me that the know-it-all cockiness I had as a twenty something was ludicrous because The World has continued to surprise me. I'm a specialist in some areas, places where I've held intense focus, but I know I have to defer the majority of the running of the human race to other specialists who do what they do and like I, do what they do very well.
New and improved!
Louis Reed- Unsplash.com
I, like they, have discovered that if you do something over and over you only get better at it and even though you have done it a hundred or a thousand times you're never done. Take driving, for example, the ordinary commute to work or shopping expedition around town. You might be making the usual drive that you've made hundreds of times but it's never the same drive, is it? And you're never the same person that has made that drive before. Life is like that. You just get better at it, even if you might have, in the eyes of The World, 'failed' somewhere along the way.
Failing is a hot new concept now. The word is that failure is good because the more you fail the better you get overall in your approach to business and relationships and whatever else. Failure serves you because you inevitably have to reformulate your approach to something the next time you attempt it so that you can 'succeed', but ask any guy that has starred in a hit movie or made a number one record who has achieved 'success' and he'll tell you that it was only momentary success. That was then and whatever he's doing is now.
We're all reformulating, always, and will be for all time. Just the way of it.