Excerpt Book II | ThePath of Awareness

The Path of Awareness II

A Journey Through Belief, Intention, and Conscious Creation

Steven Abbey

No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Published by Nlite

First Edition

This book is a work of nonfiction reflecting the personal views, beliefs, and experiences of the author. It is intended for informational and inspirational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or financial advice. The author and publisher disclaim any liability arising directly or indirectly from the use of this book.

Contents

Prelude

1. Belief

2. Fear

3. Doubt

4. Calm

5. Breath

6. Attention

7. The Heart Center

8. The Living Field

9. The Akashic Records

10. Intention

11. Imagination

12. Frequency

13. Resonance

14. The Torus

15. Outward Attention

16. Alignment

17. Release

18. Identity

19. Creation

20. The Practice

Appendix

Additional Material — The Hack

Prelude

None of these ideas came to me from one source.

They developed slowly, over years, through looking at the same questions from completely different directions. Near-death experiences. Past-life regression accounts. Ancient spiritual traditions. Christianity. Gnosticism. Eastern teachings. Consciousness research. Physics. Meditation. Breathwork. And probably most importantly, my own attempt to understand what all of these different perspectives might actually be pointing toward, underneath their different languages.

I never found one teaching that answered everything for me. What interested me were the patterns that kept showing up anyway, across traditions that had no reason to agree with each other. Different languages, different centuries, but many of them seemed to be pointing at the same thing: that there is something within us deeper than the physical body. Call it consciousness. Call it spirit. Call it the soul.

Over time, I came to believe we do have a soul, and that the soul may operate in a completely different way than the physical life we're used to navigating.

Here, we move largely through physical action. We walk somewhere. We pick something up. We build. We speak. We cross distance one step at a time. But when I studied accounts describing consciousness beyond the physical body, one idea kept appearing again and again, in different forms, from sources that had never spoken to each other. Intention seems to come before movement. You intend to go somewhere, and awareness moves. You focus on something, and experience follows the focus. You direct consciousness toward something rather than physically forcing your way there.

That idea stayed with me longer than I expected it to. It led me to wonder whether intention isn't simply a mental tool we developed here on Earth, useful for goal-setting and little else, but something far more fundamental to consciousness itself. Maybe intention is a natural form of navigation. And maybe creation is closely tied to it.

That doesn't mean we can simply imagine anything and have it appear instantly in physical reality. Life here clearly doesn't work that simply, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But I began wondering whether the abilities we use every single day without a second thought — attention, imagination, intention, emotion, creation — might be expressions of something much deeper than habit or psychology.

Think about imagination alone. Consciousness can hold something that isn't physically present anywhere. Then intention can give that image a direction. Action begins bringing it into physical form. A book starts as something invisible. So does a building. A piece of music. An invention. A different life. First there's an idea. Then there's attention. Then intention. Then creation.

The more I looked at that sequence, the less random it seemed to me. And that became one of the foundations of this book.

Maybe we're not trying to learn abilities that are completely foreign to us. Maybe we're learning to become conscious of abilities we already use every day without noticing. Belief. Attention. Intention. Imagination. Creation. Maybe these were never separate concepts to begin with. Maybe they're different parts of the same process, one we've been running unconsciously our whole lives.

I can't prove that the soul navigates through intention. I can only tell you where my own research and my own understanding have brought me. But once I started looking at the subject from that angle, a great many things started fitting together in a way they never had before.

It also changed the question I was asking. Instead of how do I gain more power, I started asking something different:

How much of what I'm already capable of am I not using, simply because I never realized it was mine?

That question became this book.

There's another idea that became important to me as I started putting all of this together.

Leakage.

If intention is a natural way consciousness directs itself, then maybe the biggest problem was never a lack of ability. Maybe it's that we rarely hold that ability long enough, or clearly enough, to actually use it.

Our attention leaks everywhere. We form an intention, then doubt it before it's had a chance to breathe. We imagine an outcome, then immediately imagine the opposite one right behind it. We decide what we want, then spend the rest of the day worrying about everything we don't want instead. Fear pulls attention one direction. Doubt pulls it another. Distraction takes its piece. Anger takes its piece. The past takes some. The future takes some. By the end of an ordinary day, very little of your attention was actually moving in the same direction at the same time.

That's what I mean by leakage. Not energy mysteriously vanishing from the body, but focus, emotion, imagination, and intention constantly divided across competing directions, none of them ever fully committed to.

Picture trying to shine a flashlight through a hundred tiny holes scattered across a sheet. The light is all still there. It's just scattered so thin it barely illuminates anything. Now gather that same light into one beam pointed in one direction, and everything changes, without adding a single extra watt of power.

Some of the leaking isn't even coming from inside you. Your phone is built to interrupt you. The show that autoplays the next episode before you've decided to keep watching was built the same way. Every app pulling for your attention was designed by people who get paid based on how much of it they can take. That's not internal contradiction. That's an external hand reaching directly into the same clay we've been talking about and pulling a piece out before you even notice it's gone. You can do all the inner work in this book and still leak everything you gained the moment you pick up a screen without asking yourself whether you meant to.

I began wondering whether consciousness works the same way. Maybe the problem was never a lack of creative ability. Maybe we're continuously dispersing the ability we already have, in every direction at once, without noticing. We intend one thing while emotionally feeding another. We say we believe while quietly doubting underneath it. We visualize possibility while rehearsing failure on repeat. We want peace while handing hours of attention to fear, every single day, without complaint.

That's internal contradiction. And contradiction is where the leakage happens.

Imagination may be where the leak is easiest to see. You decide what you want, then spend the car ride imagining every way it could fall apart. You picture the outcome you're working toward for thirty seconds, then spend the next thirty minutes picturing rejection, failure, or the conversation going wrong. Both are imagination. Both carry real emotional weight. Both shape the body and the state you're standing in. The trouble is they're pointed in opposite directions, canceling each other out before either one has the chance to build any momentum. You can't rehearse an outcome and its opposite with equal energy and expect either one to take hold. That's not balance. That's leakage wearing the disguise of being realistic.

This is one reason calm becomes so important later in this book. Calm reduces the noise. Breath brings attention back to one place. The heart center gives awareness somewhere to settle instead of scattering. Intention establishes direction. Imagination gives that direction form, but only once it stops being divided against itself. Emotion strengthens the experience. Alignment closes the leaks, one at a time, until there's almost nothing left leaking out.

The goal was never to strain harder. It's almost the opposite. Stop scattering yourself. Bring the pieces back together.

If I'm right about any of this, clear awareness, clear intention, and movement toward that intention may be closer to the natural state of consciousness than most of us ever get to experience. What we're learning in the chapters ahead may not be how to manufacture some brand new ability we never had.

We may simply be learning how to stop leaking the ability we've had the entire time.

I want to say one more thing before the real work of this book begins.

I wrote this, first and foremost, for my two boys. Everything in these pages is what I'd sit down and tell them myself if I had the words ready at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right order, every time they needed to hear it. I don't. Nobody does. That's part of why this exists on paper instead of only in conversation — so it's there for them whenever they're ready for it, whether that's now or twenty years from now, whether I'm the one who hands it to them or they find it on a shelf long after I'm gone.

But I'd be lying if I said that was the only reason I finished it. If one other person, somewhere, at some point, opens this book at exactly the moment they need it, and something in here helps them question a limit they'd stopped noticing they were carrying, then this book has already done everything I ever asked of it. That's the whole bar. Not a bestseller list. Not recognition. One person, one moment, one door left open instead of closed.

If that's you, I'm glad you're here.

Chapter 1

Belief

Belief is where everything begins.

Before intention. Before imagination. Before breathwork. Before you try to change one single thing about your life, there is belief. What you believe determines what you allow yourself to consider possible. It shapes what you attempt, what you reject, what you fear, and what you never even bother to explore.

We like to think our beliefs are our own. Some are. But most of them were handed to us before we were old enough to question them. We were told what was realistic. What was impossible. What people like us could do. What the world was. What consciousness was. What death was. What reality was supposed to look like.

Somewhere along the way, those ideas stopped feeling like beliefs and started feeling like facts.

That distinction matters more than almost anything else in this book. Because the moment you recognize a belief as a belief, you can examine it. You can ask where it came from. You can ask whether you actually know it to be true, or whether you just inherited it and never checked. And you can ask the question that matters most:

What if I'm wrong about what's possible?

That question opens a door.

I want to be clear about something. This isn't about pretending. It isn't repeating a phrase you don't believe until you trick yourself into believing it. Real belief runs deeper than words. It's an internal acceptance of possibility, not a script you recite.

Think about how fast we shut things down.

I can't do that.

That will never happen.

People don't change.

I'm too old.

I'm not capable.

That's impossible.

Those statements feel harmless. They're not. Every one of them is an instruction, and the mind hears the boundary and starts operating inside it.

So reverse it.

Instead of "I can't," try "I don't know yet."

Instead of "that's impossible," try "I don't understand how that could be possible."

Those sound almost the same. They are not the same. One closes the door. The other leaves it open. And an open door is enough.

I'm not telling you to believe every extraordinary claim that crosses your path. I don't. Skepticism is useful. But there's a difference between skepticism and automatic rejection. One keeps asking questions. The other stops asking altogether.

This is why one of the most powerful things you can do is remove certainty from your limitations. Maybe you can't do something today. Maybe nobody has ever shown you how. Maybe the mechanism is still unknown. Maybe the idea itself is wrong. All of that is very different from declaring that something can never be done.

One of the most fascinating questions a person can sit with isn't what is possible. It's why we're so certain about what's impossible.

Every generation inherits a model of reality — a set of boundaries, a set of assumptions, a list of things that can happen and a list of things that supposedly can't. Most of us never question those boundaries, because they arrive feeling self-evident, like facts of nature rather than opinions we absorbed from people who were just as unsure as we are. But history keeps teaching a different lesson. Again and again, humanity discovers that the limits it accepted weren't limits at all. They were beliefs wearing the costume of fact.

The more I looked at that sequence, the less random it seemed to me. And that became one of the foundations of this book.

It also changed the question I was asking. Instead of how do I gain more power, I started asking something different:

How much of what I'm already capable of am I not using, simply because I never realized it was mine?

That question became this book.

There's another idea that became important to me as I started putting all of this together.

Leakage.

That's internal contradiction. And contradiction is where the leakage happens.

The goal was never to strain harder. It's almost the opposite. Stop scattering yourself. Bring the pieces back together.

We may simply be learning how to stop leaking the ability we've had the entire time.

I want to say one more thing before the real work of this book begins.

If that's you, I'm glad you're here.

Chapter 1

Belief

Belief is where everything begins.

Somewhere along the way, those ideas stopped feeling like beliefs and started feeling like facts.

What if I'm wrong about what's possible?

That question opens a door.

Think about how fast we shut things down.

I can't do that.

That will never happen.

People don't change.

I'm too old.

I'm not capable.

That's impossible.

Those statements feel harmless. They're not. Every one of them is an instruction, and the mind hears the boundary and starts operating inside it.

So reverse it.

Instead of "I can't," try "I don't know yet."

Instead of "that's impossible," try "I don't understand how that could be possible."

Those sound almost the same. They are not the same. One closes the door. The other leaves it open. And an open door is enough.

One of the most fascinating questions a person can sit with isn't what is possible. It's why we're so certain about what's impossible.

For centuries, people were certain human flight was impossible. Certain instant communication across the globe was impossible. Certain that traveling beyond Earth was impossible. Not unlikely. Not difficult. Impossible, full stop, no further discussion needed. The limitation existed exactly until someone refused to accept it as final.

That should make us cautious about our own certainty, especially the certainty we've never actually tested.

Imagine living your entire life inside a room with no windows. Eventually you stop wondering what exists outside. Not because nothing is out there, but because you've quietly accepted the room as the whole of reality. I think limiting beliefs work the same way. They define the boundaries of our experience long before we ever test those boundaries ourselves, and most of us never do. We just decorate the room and call it the world.

This doesn't mean every extraordinary claim is true. It doesn't mean every story deserves to be accepted without question. But it does mean certainty can become its own kind of prison. The moment we decide something is impossible, exploration ends right there. The moment we decide we already know the outer limits of what a person is capable of, discovery stops before it's even begun.

The older I get, the less interested I am in arguing about what's possible and impossible, and the more interested I become in how we arrived at our conclusions in the first place. How many of the limits we accept were actually discovered through direct experience? And how many were simply inherited, the way you'd inherit a piece of furniture you never chose but somehow can't imagine the room without? Most people have never truly tested the limits of their own mind. Most have never spent real years cultivating focus, discipline, awareness, and inner stillness. And yet plenty of us feel completely confident declaring what a human being can and cannot do. That confidence fascinates me, because history suggests certainty is usually the enemy of discovery, not its foundation. The people who actually expand what's understood rarely start out certain of anything. They start out curious, and willing to ask a question everyone around them had quietly agreed not to ask anymore.

The same principle works inward, not just out in the world of flight and physics. Your beliefs shape your attention. Your attention shapes what you notice. What you notice shapes your choices. Your choices shape your actions. And your actions shape your life. That alone makes belief enormously powerful, with nothing mystical required to explain it.

But I think there's more to it than that. Something stranger.

I believe consciousness, intention, emotion, and the field around us are in conversation with each other, constantly, in ways almost nobody has been taught to notice. I don't claim to have the answers. I'm not sure anyone does yet. What I have is a suspicion I can't shake: that the boundary between "me" and "everything else" is not where we've been told it is, and that many of the old accounts of healing, intuition, and extraordinary human ability were never an invitation to abandon reason. Maybe they were an invitation to expand it.

I can't prove that to you in a paragraph. I'm not going to try. But I can tell you this book is going to take you somewhere that idea starts to feel less like a theory and more like something you remember.

Before we get there, before fear, doubt, breath, intention, imagination, frequency, before the energy you may already be sensing but haven't named yet, there is one thing you have to be willing to do first.

Question the limits you inherited.

Not recklessly. Not blindly. Just honestly.

Take everything you think you know about yourself, and set one simple phrase beside it:

Maybe there's more.

Sit with that phrase for a second. Let it be uncomfortable. Most of what follows in this book won't make sense to the part of you that needs proof first. It will make sense to the part of you that's been waiting, quietly, for permission to ask the next question — the part of you that stopped asking what you are, a long time ago, and never got around to asking what you might become.

Belief doesn't require certainty. Sometimes it begins with nothing more than allowing possibility to exist.

And once possibility exists, something in you already knows what comes next.

Chapter 2

Fear

Fear is one of the strongest forces in your life. Most people never question it. They just obey it.

If you read the first book, you already know I don't consider this new territory for us. Fear showed up there too, and for good reason — it's not a subject you visit once and finish with. It deserves another pass here, from a different angle, because everything else in this book depends on understanding it clearly.

Sometimes fear earns that obedience. It tells you to move, to stop, to pay attention, and that kind of fear has a purpose. It's old. It's built in. It's kept you alive.

But most of the fear you carry isn't that.

It's anticipation wearing fear's face.

It's your mind constructing an outcome that hasn't happened yet, and then reacting to it as if it already has.

What if I fail?

What if I lose everything?

What if people judge me?

What if I'm wrong?

What if something bad happens?

Here's the part almost nobody tells you: your body can't always tell the difference between a real threat in front of you and one you're only imagining. Heart rate changes either way. Breathing changes either way. Muscles tighten. Attention narrows. Your nervous system doesn't check your math. It just responds.

And the moment fear takes over, possibility starts shrinking.

That's why fear matters so much in a book about becoming more of who you are. Fear pulls your attention outward. It makes you scan for threats instead of noticing options. It makes you react instead of choose. And worst of all, it makes you pour your energy into the exact outcome you're trying to avoid.

So the first move isn't fighting fear.

It's noticing it.

Notice where it shows up in your body. Notice the thought that arrived just before it did. Notice the story your mind is already halfway through building, the one you never agreed to write.

Then ask yourself one question:

Is this happening right now, or am I creating it in advance?

That question alone can change your state. Most fear doesn't live in the present. It lives in the future, in a version of events that hasn't happened and may never happen. The instant you bring your attention back to now, fear loses some of its grip.

This is where breath comes in.

Slow it down. Bring your awareness inward. Feel your chest rise. Feel your heartbeat. Feel whatever sensation is sitting in the center of you right now.

Don't fight the fear. Don't shove it away. Just become aware of it without becoming it.

That's the whole shift. There's a difference between feeling fear and letting fear make your decisions. That difference is power, and almost nobody claims it because almost nobody realizes it's available.

You may still feel uncertain. You may still feel the adrenaline. You may still hear that voice asking, "What if?"

But now there's another part of you standing behind it. Not fighting it, not arguing with it. Trusting something underneath it.

Fear says contract. Trust says stay open anyway.

Fear says run from possibility. Trust says you'll know what to do when you get there.

Fear says imagine the worst. Trust says you have survived every version of yourself so far.

None of this means ignoring real danger. It means refusing to keep living inside imagined danger, the kind your mind builds out of nothing and then asks you to move into as if it were already true.

I don't believe releasing fear means becoming fearless. I think that's the wrong goal, maybe even an impossible one. What I believe is this: releasing fear means trusting yourself more than you trust the fear.

You can feel fear and still move, because you trust you can handle what's on the other side.

You can feel uncertain and still believe, because trust was never about knowing the outcome.

You can feel uncomfortable and still stay centered, because trust holds when certainty doesn't.

That's where real empowerment starts. Not when fear disappears, because it probably won't. It starts the moment you trust yourself more than you trust the story fear is telling you.

And something happens the more you practice this. Trust stops being a decision you make and starts being a frequency you live at. You stop needing proof before you move. You stop waiting for fear's permission. You start to recognize the quiet, steady signal that was underneath the fear the whole time, telling you that you were never as unprotected as you felt.

That signal has a name.

Trust.

And once you learn to hear it, it doesn't go away when things get hard. It gets louder.

Chapter 3

Doubt

Doubt is quieter than fear.

Fear announces itself. It shows up loud, physical, impossible to ignore. Doubt doesn't work that way. Doubt slips in.

It doesn't always say no. Sometimes it just asks a question.

Are you sure?

What makes you think you can do that?

What if this doesn't work?

What if you're fooling yourself?

That small voice is enough. It can weaken an intention before it ever gets the chance to become something real.

That's why doubt matters, maybe more than fear does. And I've come to wonder whether doubt is even simpler, and stranger, than a personality trait we're each stuck carrying.

What if doubt isn't simply part of being human? What if it serves a purpose?

One of the ideas I came across while studying interpretations of the ancient Sumerian writings was that doubt was introduced into humanity as a limitation. That idea stopped me when I first read it. Because if human beings possess a natural ability to influence and create their experience through thought, emotion, belief, and intention, one of the simplest ways to weaken that ability would never be to remove it outright. It would be to make people doubt they ever had it in the first place. You wouldn't need to take the power away. You'd only need to plant the question.

I'm not asking you to accept that as history. I can't prove it, and I don't think anyone can. But it reframed the question for me in a way I haven't been able to shake since.

You can hold an intention clearly. You can visualize exactly what you want. You can feel the emotion of already having it. You can believe, fully, for a moment, that it's possible. And then one small thought slips in: but what if it doesn't happen? That single thought changes everything. The intention says yes. The doubt says no. You end up trying to create while simultaneously arguing against the creation, which is a little like pressing the accelerator and the brake at the exact same time and wondering why the car won't move.

You can believe something is possible in one moment and destroy that possibility in the next, just by questioning it too fast. You can form a clear intention, feel it fully, imagine it completely, and undo the entire state with a single thought:

This probably won't happen.

I think most people have no idea how often they do this. We create, then cancel. We imagine, then dismiss. We feel possibility open up, then retreat straight back into what's familiar because familiar feels safer than possible. Doubt becomes a brake, and half the time we don't even realize our foot is on it.

I'm not telling you doubt should disappear. Questioning is useful. Discernment matters. You should examine your ideas. You should test what you can. But there's a real difference between questioning something and quietly sabotaging yourself. One leads to understanding. The other leads to hesitation dressed up as wisdom.

The problem was never asking questions. The problem is assuming the answer is always no before you've actually looked.

Notice how different your inner world becomes when you stop doing that.

Instead of I can't do this, try I'm learning how.

Instead of this is impossible, try I don't know what's possible yet.

Instead of this will never work, try let me give it my full attention and see what happens.

That's not blind optimism. It's removing resistance you never needed in the first place. There's a real difference between the two, and your body knows which one it's feeling even when your mind is still arguing about it.

Here's what doubt actually costs you: it divides your energy. Part of you moves forward while another part pulls back. Part of you intends while another part is already explaining why the intention won't hold. Part of you imagines while another part is quietly building the case for why the image can't become real. That internal conflict is expensive. If you're trying to become calm, focused, and aware, you cannot do that while you're at war with yourself.

This made me reconsider what belief actually means. Maybe belief was never something we need to manufacture from nothing. Maybe the more important work is removing everything that contradicts it — fear, conditioning, old limiting beliefs, and especially doubt. Because underneath those layers may be something far more powerful than belief itself.

Certainty.