Concentric Circles

All of us at some point might have believed that growth in our lives happens in a linear way. Perhaps when we were in school, we were told that all we had to do was ensure we study well for our Tenth Grade Board exams and our “life would be set”, then the twelfth board and then perhaps the best undergraduate college and so on and so forth. That sounds pretty linear, right? I have grown up listening to this and for a long time, I was under the assumption that my personal growth or the growth of my consciousness happens in a linear way. I could not have been more wrong.

I have come to understand that one of the best analogies for growth is the structure of concentric circles. Let’s assume that we start from the innermost circle. (The red one in picture below). When we are inside the red circle, we believe that the inner part of the small red circle is our world. And it surely would be for that point of time because our consciousness has reached that level. How do I, the soul, increase my level of consciousness to the next big circle, the orange one? How can we break out of the red circle?

Here is where most of us may go wrong. We presume that we can reach the orange circle by learning from who we think are in the orange circle or the green or the blue (which we somehow assume to be better). We may even try to imitate what they do or say or wear or act or believe. This might indeed lead, for us to believe that we now have the orange-ness in us. But we actually are nowhere close to being in the orange circle. We might adapt skills that we think are necessary or imitate the orange neighbors, to grow out of the red circle, but it does not exactly happen that way.

The only way to grow out of the red circle and merge with the orange is to look within ourselves. We must look deep into the red circle and try and get to know every nook and corner of it. We must look within ourselves, and become self-aware and observe ourselves without judgment. The red circle will then automatically disappear and our consciousness will then expand to the Orange circle like in the picture below. That possibly is how we can move along our journey of personal growth. Now, what happens when we are in the orange circle?

Either we may not really recognize this new development and we still stay in the premises of where the red circle previously existed. Or the brighter chances are that we recognize this shift as this shift of consciousness is a feeling from within that would be strong and loud if we just tune into it to listen. We are elated and rejuvenated with the newness and we embrace it wholeheartedly. But again, we have to look within the Orange circle and now, experience every granular structure of it. Each of us has our individual pace to this growth, and we cannot compare any other soul’s timeline to ours. Or in fact even our timeline from the red to orange and orange to green. The process of looking at our circles and experiencing it fully is the only way to move to the next.

In this picture, there are clearly drawn, differently colored, a specific number of circles for us to understand this analogy of reaching higher consciousness. But in reality, the fact is that these circles may not even be clearly drawn (and definitely not with distinct bright colors). We may struggle to even understand which colored circle we are in. We do not know how many circles there actually is. We do not really know how deeply we might have to experience one corner to the other. Sometimes we may be happy to stay in a particular circle because we find companions there that we think will complete us and with whom we can enter the next circle, only to realize that just single tickets are allowed in this journey. Bad days may make us feel like another smaller circle just got drawn around us. And sometimes, we may think that we have lived, seen and experienced every nook and corner of the current circle, but are unable to move to the next.

But a good thing to know would be that all these dilemmas and thoughts are a part of the process of experiencing our current circle. Sometimes we will find our answers and sometimes the questions change. As we move along we may encounter newer and bigger dilemmas. We just have to keep going.

I often wonder what is more fulfilling – the process of reaching the next circle or actually reaching the next circle?