The way to make a shift in life is to make a shift in perception.

That is a key thing you need to do. With the new perception, you will be naturally inspired to take new, effortless action that will not feel as work but as going with the flow. Virtuology is all about that – raising your consciousness to the modes of virtues, which work for you. Allow your inborn virtues to work for you.

Virtuology is meant to provide you with aha-moments that will raise your modes of consciousness higher and higher. The higher your consciousness is, the more pleasant your experience of living will be. Your pleasure level is your barometer of how developed your consciousness is, so use that to measure your progress at times.

The reason why we never suggest resisting or abstaining from vices, flaws, faults and such is that this is a surefire way to achieve the reverse. As you know, if we told you to contemplate anything but the pink elephant, you would hardly succeed at that. As the saying goes, forbidden fruit is the sweetest, which is why drugs and vices have a greater appeal and allure than their counterparts. Temptations are hard to resist but it has more to do with the fact that it is in human nature to demonstrate some sort of rebellious attitude towards any limitations or boundaries because we want to be free. Anything that authorities or the majority condemn has the effect of upping the “cool” factor by some minorities.
Another reason is the law of resistance, which regulates that what you resist persists.

Therefore, our focus is rather on cultivating virtues and liberating oneself from the rule of vices. It is futile and unnecessary to try to exterminate flaws from human nature. They are there for a reason. Without the negative, there would be no positive features. They are like two sides of the same coin.

Your level of consciousness or caliber is your character. Character is defined as the aggregate of distinctive qualities characteristic of a person (or of anything else, such as wine, artwork, place, nation, etc.). Your identity is tied to your consciousness level. Your personality, your interests and tastes reflect the level of your consciousness. Your interests and tastes reveal your level of consciousness and with it your level of well-being. To estimate the caliber of a person for yourself, you need only look at his or her interests and tastes.

An analogy may make this clear. Those who prefer rap music and those who prefer classical music have different levels of consciousness and are therefore people of a different caliber. Highly spiritual, developed and cultivated beings are unlikely to have a taste for harsh and badass rap or hip-hop beats and rhythms. Likewise, brute and unrefined individuals are unlikely to have taste for subtle spiritual and classical music and literature, so you will never see gangsters chanting a mantra or singing gospels, nor reading Dostoyevsky, let alone the Vedas. It is because everything, including music and literature, has its frequency, which corresponds to caliber or level of consciousness.

So, if you are mostly in the mode of apathy, or fear, or criticism, or greed, or passivity, or resentment, or vanity, pride, blaming, rivalry, pessimism, or arrogance, you cannot expect to achieve well-being because it does not fall from skies but depends on your actions, which depend on the level of your consciousness. Therefore, you need to constantly elevate yourself to the modes such as integrity, or courage, or taking responsibility, and then raise your consciousness even further to the virtuous modes such as perseverance, confidence, patience, contentment, humbleness, optimism, gratitude… As you raise your consciousness further, elevate it to the virtuous modes of dignity, enthusiasm, understanding, altruism, hope and ultimately raising your consciousness to the mighty mode of love, especially unconditional love. From love, you can raise your consciousness even further to the potent virtues of faith, joy, compassion and peace.

You can tell how high is your consciousness’ level by calibrating it with a kinesiology method of muscle-testing, which we will explain, but actually, there is no need to evaluate your own current caliber, because what matters most is how far are you willing to lift yourself up. You are free to raise your consciousness as far as you wish. The sky is your limit. As soon as you take a leap of your consciousness, everything changes. As you improve, everything else in your life and world improves with you.

These insights, like many others, demonstrate that it is highly disadvantageous to hate, criticize, make accusations, or get angry or greedy because the toxic charge of such modes of consciousness weakens our attraction field and so we impair ourselves, disable our well-being as well as any progress and solution-finding. Therefore, even if you’re right, rather choose to be at peace than to be right! Choose a higher level of consciousness, rather than a lower one – take responsibility for your emotions and your consciousness, be in control of your conditions, instead of being at their mercy or a slave of your emotions.

Easier said than done, you might think. Everything is easier said than done, so what? It does get much easier with time and practice. Just being aware of all this, as you are now, it makes it easier to take charge of your consciousness. Surely, your unconscious mind will take over at most times, but it too will be greatly influenced for the better when you keep your consciousness at higher modes, and so, with times, you will even unconsciously stay more at such beneficial modes, that is, cultivate virtues and reject flaws.

So, next time some trouble “hits” you, don’t give in to the temptation to go down the scale of consciousness but raise your consciousness as high as possible using virtues. Of course, it is better not to wait for trouble, but to regularly bring yourself to a higher mode of consciousness. That way you can avoid much of the troubles and be prepared for the inevitable ones.

It is in human nature that we can develop and learn best through resistance and challenges, meaning through negative or difficult circumstances. For instance, we can’t improve our physical muscles in the gym without weights or resistance. Same, in every sport and game there are challenges to overcome in order to win or advance to the next level. Resistance and challenges are necessary for developing power, both the physical and the spiritual one. The only way we humans evolve, improve and learn is through resistance and challenges.

So, whenever some resistance or challenge shows up in the form of illness or family issues or love concerns or work distress or whatever else, embrace it as a chance to make a breakthrough or to learn something that will help you in the future even if you do not know how. So, you need to see such situations as stepping-stones that help you leap to another level in your life, make a breakthrough. This is possible only with the virtues, with a higher mode of consciousness than the one we were at.

This is what distinguishes successful from unsuccessful people – successful people make decisions and act from higher modes of consciousness, regardless of that they might otherwise often be at a lower mode of consciousness (such as greed, arrogance or whatever). If you know people who are very successful and wealthy, and know them to be mostly at the modes such as pride, arrogance, vanity, egoism, selfishness, meanness and the like, it would be wrong to conclude that these are the features needed to achieve success and therefore turn away from striving for success or even act like that way. They are successful not because they are how you perceive them to be, but because they make decisions and actions related to business and finance at a higher mode of consciousness. And we all know that the decisions and actions are what determine results.

Everything in the world is interrelated at some level, so a radio receiver and we have also some similar features, such as that we both need to tune in to the right frequency to receive what we want. On the radio, each station has its own frequency and we cannot listen to a particular one unless we tune in to its frequency. Similarly, we cannot have real and lasting success unless we adjust ourselves to a log of 500 or more on the consciousness scale.

There is no one cause to anything and success is not a metaphorical lock for which there is a key, but if there is such thing as the key to success in representational terms, then rising consciousness would be it, which is done by cultivating virtues (virtufication).