THREE LEVELS OF OUR AWARENESS
The three levels of our awareness are physical, mental and spiritual.
Our physical and mental awareness have great value, which lies in the seeds of opposing qualities we germinate, seemingly good or bad, such as dependence and helpfulness, the sense of separation and rejoining. When we’re awake to the spiritual realm we’re fully redeeming and embodying these qualities, virtues which flower as we more greatly love the divine Other, opening out, pairs dancing, venerating the One Life. Coursing through these planes, through this metaphoric pattern of our divine growth, our sense of separation and twoness is transmuted into times of Sacred Relationship within Oneness.
We learn to distinguish these three levels, and the world doesn’t rest completely content til we get to the spiritual. The physical and mental are closely akin, both laboring with duality:
Physical awareness: Our belief that there are inert objects, cut off, dead, blind, loveless, just lying there outside us. The universe is an accident and the physical powers of objects are engaged at random, whether we bump into storms, fires, insects, germs, cancers, murderers or other nations. Intelligence and strength are tools to control objects, to attempt coordination, to get physical rewards including prosperity, pleasures, fame or power. Yet as we’ll see, Beloved, all the difficulties of our physicality, our sensuality lead us finally to revel in each other, to move the world towards Greater Love.
Mental awareness, also called the psychic or occult plane: Our belief that objects and events are created by the thoughts of our mind. One mental power may battle another, as with “white” and “black” magicians. If we appear to have a bodily disease, we detect a mental cause for it. Mental power projected out upon the world will direct it. We use this force to attract to us whatever we desire, whether prosperity, pleasures, fame or power. Mental awareness shows things aren’t physical, and Beloved, hitting another plane lets us sense that something waits still further along.
We see then that our physical and mental levels of awareness share plenty of common ground. They complement each other, just as our body-and-mind are combined. Our thoughts, and these apparently physical objects, form each other. Neither realm outranks the other. Although in our society we usually start with physical beliefs and only with much striving attain the mental plane, tribal members might grow up with mental beliefs and only later, in dealing with townsfolk, may adapt to the physical outlook. Together, the physical and mental make up our human sense of awareness.
Our physical and mental planes are two indispensable feet of a triangle, building up to our spiritual awareness at the apex. Strait is the gate and narrow is the way and few at first have entered. And they are two handles of a funnel, as in an hourglass, where everything eventually concentrates and pours down through the little spout into Reality. Our spirituality is always percolating through all levels, the prime mover. We travel around a plane, revisiting as long as needed for our missions.
Spiritual awareness is surrender of our will, our seeming power, our fears and hopes. We’re exploring through the gate of meditation: Life uniting with our own infinite Being, drawing only upon our Self-completeness within, sweeping up our ego and its desires, freefalling into compassionate arms, beholding without struggle, unfolding confidently into Really Being with You.
Our Physical Sense, and our Body
While the powerless picture of a limited physical body serves divine purpose, the hidden nature of this Body of ours is infinite, spiritual, fluid metaphors of godly activity.
Everything we sense is a vision. Eyes open or shut, we either have mortal visions, or else receive visions in conscious holiness. The things of the spirit, including our actual substance, can’t be comprehended by our sense of separation or felt by our physical level of awareness, but we discern them spiritually.
God, divine Consciousness, Appearing As the universe, Is divine Substance, the only Body. Physical sense is called “material,” yet it’s not really a bodily sense. Mutter, matr, our holy Mother, Mother Earth is a metaphor of spiritually organized Substance.
The difference between the three realms lies in changing awareness. So physical perception isn’t a slower and “denser” realm. Density’s a fond illusion signifying realness, and, in its role as the force of gravity, fostering worldwide togetherness.
Our physical and psychic awareness are ignorant and distanced from our own body, misperceiving it. Physically sensed, any notice of bones and flesh and organs, to which our ego’s normally a stranger, may sometimes just alarm us. Psychically, as in hypnotherapy, our Body is contacted and consulted like a ouija board.
But actually, we don’t have bodies, have no bodies to heal; we Appear As the Body of God, whether experienced as localized here or everywhere. It is I. Our Body lives, not dormant, supremely awake. Our unknown Body felt as individualized is a wondrous sensorium, perfect and inviolable, a mode of our divine Consciousness (which is unified Matter-and-Mind) that we sometimes happen to touch at a radical depth in meditation, or in the epiphany of an active moment “in the zone,” and which melds me to my very self and to you, so we embody those Sacred Relationships in the One Body.
On the Mental Plane
To round out our evolutionary missions, we usually progress at first from our material belief system into the psychic plane. (Maybe a few journey straight to the spiritual.) Mental powers, such as telepathy, mediumship or telekinesis, strike us as the ultimate goal. But cracks will faithfully show up, reminding us that further exploration always remains before us (including at the spiritual level). We’re called to a powerful questioning and self-examination, to surpass all these accomplishments and strike out for Home.
Took out a book about controlling my thoughts. Reading it, a headache started, and grew tighter with each page. Sprinted back to the library, returned it, and immediately felt all right.
Such willful manipulation by positive thinking eventually leads to an equal and opposite reaction.
And also, our body and mind express divinity in tandem. When our mind becomes impatient and vaunts its quick change power over the physical realm, the physical sense justly revolts. My psychic friend turned his brown hair to auburn; then it went grey.
From a Hindu fable: A yogi tells a seeker, “After twenty years of training, I can make a flame shoot from my mouth,” and demonstrates his psychic ability. Then a passerby likewise sparks a flame---with a match. In that flash, teacher and student both realize the equality of the two planes.
Sometimes people find physical healing, sometimes psychic healing. Each of these is winning a battle between powers. There are no powers, only the One. In spiritual healing, we rest trustingly in the revealed wholeness of all.
Just as we let our Body reveal its real Self to us, we quieten so God can address us. To allow in Visions, we stop visualizing. We don’t invoke or seek experiences, but instead allow God to use us.
God within brings us back from sleep each morning, trust God like a baby, be able to go into sleep secure in divine contact, allow our ego to die nightly, then the dreamwork will reveal undreamt-of blessings. Trying to keep waking control while going through sleep resembles visualizing. And when we’re on the beam spiritually, we’re not frightened by nightmares; we immediately know they’re unreal and can wake up, gaining their instruction.
A Natural High: Beloved, when we’re ready for meditation instead of drugs, we get these advantages: The experience ends, but we don’t come down, we’re not just trampolining. (We can sometimes take quick dips after a great spiritual spurt, but the gifts we’ve been given we keep always.) We know it’s real when it happens, and afterwards we witness miraculous fruitage. We don’t need something outside ourself, we don’t have conflicts with the law. We’re still grounded when our head’s in the clouds. We contact the Holy directly, without technique, within ourselves. We’re brought to the spiritual level, incorporating the psychic level in service to the greater Self.
UFO’s: Having seen a number of UFO’s, including group sighting at close range, let me witness that alert observation agrees with wisdom in spotting them as tableaux of our mass psyche, on the mental plane. (The mass psyche consolidates all the scenes of physical belief, too.) It’s just like bumping into a fairy or sasquatch, an icon crying, and so on. Since they’re psychic phenomena, not physical: Observers often feel the UFO is aware of them; UFO’s defy the rules of physics, bouncing off empty space like billiard balls; they often appear in very dark skies, where merely some lights suffice to create an impression of a ship.
Qualities sometimes met on the psychic and also the material plane of awareness: Tantalizing UFO’s entice viewers to run after them. They offer a deity outside ourselves, begging the question of where creation’s help comes from. They give us plenty to do, yet while they seem to distract us interminably, everything prepares us for our ultimate work.
Mind-created deities or “otherworldly” beings are produced by our own mass psyche, hints of our own expansion, yet we may submit ourselves to their control. Like the velveteen rabbit, they derive their reflected life from us. Yet like computer adventures, we can cavort with them.
Any mythological figure, even in a novel or movie, like Superman, may take on a “real independent” existence as well, which we invest it with temporarily. They’re most valuable when we let them go. As we outgrow the sense of separation, we reclaim the mythic auras and heroic elements to enhance our own identity.
Angel, malach, means messenger. An “angel” exercises no free will and isn’t a separate entity at all. Again, from experience: It’s simply a message from the single Beyond-form, a ray of the celestial sphere, as seen through our incarnate eyes, and active only in its effect on us beings. So we see biblical people addressing an angel as if talking with God Itself.
Three angels visited Abraham because they bore three messages, with two angels, two messages, forwarded to Lot. We welcome messages and the One who sends them; we don’t try to objectify or idolize any envelopes they may come in.
Sometimes a human or an ant or dust mote is the angel, bearing the message. Look, every event is information for our ongoing, a present help and a letter to be opened.
Psychic experiences show us there’s something happening beyond our physical awareness. We don’t get stuck on them or mistake them for things with any power of their own. The true worth and enjoyment of everything in this universe only emerges when the passage is clear all the way to the everpresent Source.
The repeated shape of the linked mental and physical centers in our metaphorical body.
(These levels are equal and complementary, nearly the same, both serving to enter the spiritual level.)
We can have a foot in both camps, since the psychic plane and physical plane lie side by side, two impressions of one thing, of mind-and-body. Whether we’re on the psychic or physical level, this doesn’t necessarily correlate with other things we do. (For instance, scientists, who investigate physical ideas, can have psychic proclivities, as with the school of Tesla or parapsychologists. For instance, if women predominate as psychics in modern society, it’s not always the case; in tribes the shamans outnumber the shawomen.)
A meditation: Pyramid. Mountain. My two corners lift up my primal oneness anew to ever greater Love.
Moving Up a Notch
Psychic precognition: Instead of watching in dismay as the foreseen disaster plays out, we can learn contemplative prayer at the spiritual level, seeing through the picture. (We do the same, watching the news.) Let’s realize, any negative prophecy, like Jonah’s, is powerless and dissoluble. The approaching disaster may reverse, and importantly there is always an instructive message to decipher, and fruitage taking us closer to Home.
Aaron cast down his rod, and it became a serpent. Then Pharaoh’s magicians did in like manner. But Aaron’s rod swallowed up theirs.
A miracle may look like the paranormal, but it’s not just stronger magic, it lives on a whole higher plane, the one Reality that Is, effortless. “Swallowed up”: The spiritual level trumps the psychic, not destroying, but consuming and incorporating the value in the whole process. Psychic messages take their rightful place, no longer sought or stroking the ego, but in sacred service. We see through appearances with eyes of compassion and love, honoring every intention, every great effort in the shared work. Blake: “The cut worm forgives the plow.”
Miracles are the normal natural course of action when the door is opened to Who we are. They’re specifically fitted to us according to divine purpose.
Miracles occur in surrender, a revelation of the spiritual universe rather than our own thinking, without any volition or concocting or corralling, without passwords.
Miraculous signs are galactic waves of the hand, brought to point out broad truths, which we all can verify within our own souls.
Accept no substitute.
The In-Between Stage
If we can never admit to being wrong, we may need to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into seeing we are wrong. If we are cocksure of ourselves, we may need to be humbled in the dust. We’re the whole story: We mourn our first-born before we let the spiritual free to rush out of Egypt. Our staunchest characteristics on the mental and physical planes may need to be upended and revamped for us to advance, no matter the struggle: In a hidden sequence, only after the blustering tribe of Benjamin was nearly annihilated, did Saul the remnant Benjaminite become King of all Israel.
Anyone who touches this a bit may become a bit touched. We may reach new dementias of awareness, ride a series of endearingly passionate hobby-horses, until through these wanderings we regain our footing by reaching the spiritual realm.
We are each led through the maze by a golden thread....
A Muse and A Maze
We’re lost in the palatial maze, of walls without a roof. When we ascend to a higher level, we can uplift the prizes and perils, immediately step from wall-top to wall-top, and walk neatly out of the maze. We cannot find our answers on the same level of awareness as the problems.
We struggle every day, and it often looks as if the waves are engulfing us. Yet when we persistently return to meditation, even if just for a few minutes in a day, the truth can enter us, we meet the peaceful blessing Presence, the encompassing compass that’s ever and always here.
“Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit.” We learn to live, no longer by physical might, nor by using mental powers, but by resting in the Spirit.
We quarry every stone that raises the temple. When we reach the spiritual level, the house of holy Love, we find that physical awareness is all about divine Substance, the mental stage is the training ground of Truth. In countless ways, the pair of worldly states of awareness provides the bulwark for our greater World. Today more and more of us are planting one foot transitionally on the third level.
There are states and stages of our awareness, yet only one Consciousness.
As I voyage between different levels of awareness, the physical, psychic and spiritual levels, it is always the same Consciousness that travels, the I of my being, my life and self-awareness. My Consciousness looks out from my eyes, functions when I lie in dreamless sleep, compassionately watches over all my mythic adventures, and no matter what stories of the hotel I stay on, It is always Really Being with me, always Really Being Me.