The arrival of consciousness is often preceded by a period of confusion, destruction, and uncertainty.

Consciousness has even been known to bring sudden upsets and changes along in its wake. Things may not go according to plan. Your old friend, Doubt, shows up and wants a place to stay.

People keep doing irritating things, such as filling the oceans with noxious poisons and taking the whole planet hostage. It’s easy to get mired in the muck, and you begin to wonder if anything can resolve this whole mess.

A recent post at this blog, ‘Who made the rules you follow?’, examined some of the unwritten social rules that we follow, both consciously and unconsciously.

These rules are agreements by which we live our lives. As we have seen throughout human history, breaking a social rule can lead to punishment ranging in seriousness from being ostracized or shunned, to excommunication, banishment, imprisonment, or even execution.

Despite the threats of punishment, there are many who broke the rules, and thereby transformed the old agreements.

Several years back, I went to Joshua Tree State Park to see the annual blooming of the Joshua trees.

I joined a fascinating talk given by one of the park rangers, called ‘Meeting the Joshua Tree’, and learned about the mystical growth of these special trees. Each tree is unique and different, often markedly so. There is no genetic predisposition to become a perfect Joshua tree shape – each tree is a perfect Joshua tree and each is one of a kind, like fingerprints.

You've surely noticed that destruction is a recurring and uncontrollable part of life.

So is creation, but destruction is the energy that gets the bad rap. Destruction is judged as a negative, an unnecessary evil, and it often gets mixed up with other energies like anger, unkindness, and war. Bad, bad destruction! Destruction is the bad girl (or boy) of energies.

Some of what is said about destruction goes like this: good and nice people don’t willingly destroy a perfectly good thing, and women are not supposed to destroy at all.

When everything in your world seems to be unraveling, it’s not easy to see how healing is taking place.

If you’ve held tightly onto what has been, to the things you thought were real, it’s even more painful when those things begin to fall apart.

What shakes up when you wake up?

If it’s been feeling like an earthquake is happening even when the ground isn’t rocking, you are noticing the effects of huge change. This change is happening not just Out There but inside of you. You are in the process of waking up.

It’s time for a new way of doing business. The old structures are crumbling, mostly because we humans are done with them. We’ve learned what we created them to learn, and now we get to create new structures, and live in a new way, based on the information we have gleaned from the old.

Consciousness is awareness. Deciding to be conscious is a choice.

Sometimes it seems like there is no reason to be optimistic, and that choosing optimism is a delusional act.

When you become aware of what's really going on around you, and allow yourself to finally see clearly, it can often seem bleak, at first. What's worse is that you might have to let go of some of your cherished illusions, the ones in which you really immersed yourself.

You may have to destroy old ways of seeing and being, if you want to become fully aware of what’s happening inside of you and around you. Destruction and disillusion are part of becoming conscious.