# 1 Act with impact? Your consciousness is the key!
We will start our journey with ourselves. To increase our ability to transform, we need to understand ourselves deeply. We ourselves and our unique souls are the key to effectiveness. Whenever we face something challenging, the best thing we can do is return to ourselves and look inside. That’s why we start there.
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Imagine two children: one is crawling through your legs, trying to stand, holding your shin for a moment before he falls again. The other, his six-year-old sister, can do more than just move and speak. She’s sitting on your lap, diving into a book about the fire service, connecting the story you are reading to the sound of the siren coming in from the street.
There are worlds between those two children, differing in terms of what they perceive and understand, and how they act. These two worlds tell us a lot about the magic of life, how it evolves, and how our consciousness comes into being.
The world you live in comes into existence through your consciousness. Without your senses, nervous system, and brain, there would be no world. And the way your consciousness is built and how it works defines your world.
So, what even is consciousness?
Hold on for a second and try to be aware of what’s happening.
You can have at least three distinct perspectives. The first perspective is the world around you. The second one is about your inner life. The third looks at the dynamic between your inner and outer world, how they interact, and how that influences your well-being. Those three perspectives are a part of your consciousness, the part we have direct access to.
Consciousness has a biological foundation. It’s deeply embedded in our biological body, with its brain and chemistry. This foundation has a form that, in turn, gives form to how our consciousness works. The way this foundation is built and how it evolves throughout a lifetime is based on biological principles that are the same for everyone: every child learns to crawl, to stand, and then to walk, not the other way around.
Equally, consciousness is shaped by its surroundings. It makes a difference whether you grow up in urban China or rural Wales. This influence is partly social and partly individual: Every language is simultaneously individualistic and communal, and the world models, ideas, and behavior that come with learning to speak are equally individualistic and communal. So, your consciousness is shaped by the world.
Consciousness creates the world you live in.
It would be too simplistic to believe you can set an impulse, and that a baby will immediately integrate it and follow your advice. Although many parents hope it will work like this, their daily experience tells them it doesn’t. It’s not a one-way interaction. It’s a complex relationship, and every one of us has an individual way of reacting, of choosing what to perceive, how to understand it, and how to act upon it.
The child constantly examines what happens outside and inside, and develops worldviews and models. These models are based on experiences, stances, beliefs, metaphors, and paradigms. But not exclusively. There’s an individual setting everyone brings into this world. You might call it character, disposition, expression of our genetic settings, or an imprint of the cosmological constellation at conception and birth. These are only names for something that’s beyond what we can understand. So your consciousness is shaped by your self.
Interestingly, those worldviews are much more than just ‘views’; they are manuals that guide us from moment to moment. They define how we perceive and understand a situation, and shape how we act and deal with the world. To use an example: if we understand the world as a hostile place, we will not only perceive and experience hostility, but we will act according to this world model, for example, with anger, hate, fear, and defense. This experience and our actions create a hostile world, not vice versa. In this way, consciousness creates the world you live in.
So, your consciousness is an inseparable part of the world you are living in. The world shapes it, and it creates the world. This does not only apply to individuals; it also applies to us as humankind. The world we live in, with all its frictions, destructions, challenges, and tensions, is a direct expression of our consciousness—individually and collectively.
To a certain degree and under certain circumstances, consciousness is malleable. The biological principles of our species govern its primal development, but it doesn’t end there. Consciousness still evolves beyond the conclusion of biological development. There’s no biological driver anymore. It’s far more deliberate.
There’s an essential connection between our ability to evolve our consciousness and the world we created and are creating as humanity. That’s an important aspect, and it’s the topic for next week. For now, we can note three essentials about our consciousness: It’s our ability to be aware, and, simultaneously, it governs our behavior. It has a biological fundament that shapes how it works (and, consequently, what we perceive, understand, and how we act.) It is equally shaped not only by its biological form, but also by its surroundings, and itself, or, more precisely, by its ‘self’.