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By Wes Annac, Culture of Awareness

Life isn’t about working day in and day out to please someone else just so we can ‘earn our keep’ and stay financially secure. There’s an underlying theme to life that most people have forgotten, and if we want to understand this theme, we have to open the mind and consider concepts that most of society wouldn’t yet accept.

One of those concepts is that love is the driving force of our existence, and another is that there are higher states of consciousness we can access with meditation and other inner tools that connect us with a reality that’s much realer and more refined than our own.

To explore this greater reality, which exists beyond our surface awareness, all we really have to do is open up to it and let our higher consciousness take the wheel and steer. Our higher consciousness has always guided us, and for the most part, we’ve been unaware of its existence.

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By Wes Annac, Culture of Awareness

Every new day is an opportunity to explore ourselves and our planet, but it’s hard to explore the world when we’re too busy rushing around every day to get out, open our eyes and let the earth teach us a thing or two.

It doesn’t matter how far along the spiritual path we feel like we are – getting out to nature and learning from its simplistic (yet impressively intricate) beauty seems like one of the best ways to elevate our consciousness and our understanding of what life truly is.

We can merge our understanding of our higher consciousness with our understanding of the natural world, and by exploring nature and absorbing the energies that permeate that landscape, we can not only learn about our higher consciousness, but our grounded, earthy consciousness too.

This is one reason I think the earth’s natural environment is important to our attempts to find enlightenment. True enlightenment, in my opinion, comes with the recognition that everything around and within us has an essential role to play in our physical and spiritual evolution.

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By Wes Annac, The Culture of Awareness

Here in the United States, medical marijuana quickly went from something that was ridiculed to something that was accepted as having a potential basis in reality, and now, we have doctor after doctor coming out in favor of its widespread medical uses.

One of them is Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who you might’ve seen on CNN a few times and who recently started to endorse medical marijuana.

Dr. Gupta explained the journey to understand the plant’s medicinal properties in a 2014 article on CNN.com.

“This scientific journey is about a growing number of patients who want the cannabis plant as a genuine medicine, not to get high.

“It is about emerging science that not only shows and proves what marijuana can do for the body but provides better insights into the mechanisms of marijuana in the brain, helping us better understand a plant whose benefits have been documented for thousands of years.

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By Wes Annac, Culture of Awareness

The purpose of our existence, beyond realizing our eternal connection with the Almighty, is to serve others. We’re here to offer ourselves to the awakening of the masses in any way we see fit, and our perspective starts to shift when we realize we can no longer live solely for ourselves.

We can no longer satisfy our own material needs while so many people starve every day, and we have to find the willingness to look at the world’s condition and figure out how we can make a change.

We have to find compassion for the people around us, and until we can transcend selfishness and take a bigger look at our unbalanced society, we’ll continue to struggle without really understanding why.

We’re meant to work together to solve the issues we face – most of which are environmental and economic – but we’ve been kept too divided to become aware of the plight of people in poorer countries, much less to do anything about it.

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By Wes Annac, The Culture of Awareness

I’ve written a lot about eating healthy, but I’ll admit that I struggle with it. The funny thing about it is that it really doesn’t have to be a struggle, and all it takes is the willingness to refuse foods we know are fake or filled with so many chemicals that they can hardly be considered food.

For most people who want to eat healthy, the struggle lies in the fact that they’ve been conditioned to eat unhealthy food since childhood.

It isn’t necessarily the sole fault of their parents, who were also conditioned in their own ways, but either way, we need to break the cycle and feed ourselves things that actually sustain our bodies instead of gradually forming disease.