The Unconsciousness Of Consciousness

Jonathan Seagull spent the rest of his days alone, but he flew away out beyond the Far Cliffs. His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.

He learned more each day. He learned that a stream-lined high-speed dive could bring him to find the rare and tasty fish that schooled ten feet below the surface of the ocean; he no longer needed fishing boats and stale bread for survival. He learned to sleep in the air, setting a course at night across the offshore wind, covering a hundred miles from sunset to sunrise. With the same inner control, he flew through heavy sea-fogs and climbed above them into dazzling clear skies . . . in the very times when every other gull stood on the ground, knowing nothing but mist and rain. He learned to ride the high winds far inland, to dine there on delicate insects.

What he had once hoped for the flock, he now gained for himself alone; he learned to fly and was not sorry for the price he had paid. Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with these gone from his thoughts, he lived a long fine life indeed.

Richard Bach, in his 1970 book Jonathan Livingston Seagull does a superb job expressing the wisdom that rests in all of us. There is an unconscious, but conscious force within us, and it’s filled with exceptional abilities. This force manifests physically from the well of wisdom within the inner self.

The conscious mind is a portion of the inner self. It holds the information we need to function daily. The conscious mind also holds other knowledge that does not directly apply to our physical reality. When we need that information, it will suddenly appear unless our conscious beliefs create a barrier and block it. When they happens, we ignore pertinent data that lies within our filed of perception.

The inner self manifests whatever experiences the conscious mind desires. This unique self keeps the body alive, but it always looks to the conscious mind for an assessment of the body’s reality and condition. It forms an image that is in line with the beliefs of the conscious mind so our beliefs and ideas about the self create the body we live in. The body is an artistic creation. It is constantly being maintained at unconscious levels, but it will always align with our conscious beliefs about who and what we are.

The Wise Silence Of Consciousness

The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like all ripe fruit, from our experience and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows wither. The landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the world. The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world for her, leaving worlds behind her. She has no dates, no rites, nor persons, nor specialties, nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in 1841. Emerson believed that our physical consciousness is contained and made one by the entity known as the over-soul. Beliefs are thoughts reinforced by emotions as well as imagination so they are powerful vibrations. They impact the nature of our individual as well as mass reality.

Beliefs develop from within. They leave indelible, but changeable marks on the ego. We can’t touch our beliefs, but we do feel them emotionally. The sense of believing impacts the atoms and molecules in our cells, and we become what we believe. The brain accepts this form of inner energy, and it utilizes it to form portions of our reality. Most of us are not cognizant of the power that is buried in our repetitive thoughts.

The inner sound of our thoughts has a huge impact on the body. The cells listen to those sounds and the body reacts. There’s also a wise silence within the body. That silence can change our body and our reality when we allow it to override our belief structure. When we identify the reason we believe in or for something, we discover the thoughts that restrict that silence.

The wise silence within us percolates with natural desires. In each moment, clouds of silence vacillate in rotating energy. The complexity of the events that unfold from that innate silence moves through the dynamic spiral of time and space. The silence lingers like smoke, and we become more than we believe.

The Imagination Of Consciousness

Thus those who say that they would have right without its correlate, wrong; or good government without its correlate, misrule, do not apprehend the great principles of the universe, nor the nature of all creation. One might as well talk of the existence of Heaven without that of Earth, or of the negative principle without the positive, which is clearly impossible. Yet people keep on discussing it without stop; such people must be either fools or knaves.

That interesting thought was written 2500 years ago in Chinese by Chuang-Tzu. Chuang-Tzu had a pretty good handle on his reality. He understood that contrast creates expansion. He believed we create a life filled with dualistic lessons.

Our will power and imagination are never in conflict. Our thoughts and beliefs may be combatant, but our will power will always follow our imagination. Imagination helps create reality, but we also choose to fulfill our desires using beliefs. Beliefs are filled with positive as well as negative influences and associations. We communicate our beliefs to others, and they accept or reject them in their own way. Individuals develop their own protective screen of personal beliefs, and that screen creates personal realities.

Life is an ever-changing three dimensional painting. When we change the structure of our beliefs, we change the painting and our experiences. We can mentally throw away beliefs that no longer serve our desires, but there is a residual energy attached to those antiquated beliefs and that energy may continue to restrict the fulfillment of our desires.

Religious Consciousness

Mere scholasticism or mere sacerdotalism will never create a living faith. Religion requires something inwardly propelling, energizing and capable of doing work. The intellect is useful in its place, but when it tries to cover the whole field of religion it dries up the source of life.

D.T Suzuki wrote those thoughts in his 1949 book Essays In Zen Buddhism. Suzuki believed that religion is fundamentally based on the life force called Zen. Early Chinese philosophers also identified this subjective power. They called it Chi. Confucius wrote about Chi, and the works Lao-tzu express the value of Chi in all physical thoughts and actions. When Chinese artists and thinkers are unable to assign a quality to a particular phenomenon, they simply paint two wavy lines. Those lines are the original characters used to express Chi. The names we use to identify this life force doesn’t matter. It is firmly rooted in our consciousness, but our religious beliefs change how we perceive this life force.

Thought is energy. Thought creates and alters beliefs. Beliefs are the product of religious thought; they are road maps for our experiences. They help us perceive our reality. We live in a religious based reality. That reality has been in motion for thousands of years. Beliefs produce chemical and electrical actions within the body, and they also create a harmonic resonance between our molecules, cells and organs. It’s no wonder we react differently to the same information. Our beliefs color the cells in our brains, and our perception of reality is tainted by the associations within those beliefs.

Chi Consciousness

Human beings are born because of the accumulation of Chi. When it accumulates there is life. There is one Chi that connects and pervades everything in the world.

Zhuang Zi in his book, The Great Happiness talks about the energy of Chi. Zi, one of China’s 4th century BEC philosophers, explains that Chi is an eternal non-physical life force that continues to expand. He also said physical life was limited, but the amount of things to know is unlimited. Zhuang Zi is considered a precursor of relativism. True relativists say there are no absolute truths in physical life. Truth is always associated with a belief within a language or culture.

The energy of Chi is well-known around the world. The actual translation of the word Chi is energy flow. The term is often compared to the Indian notion of Prana or the Western words energeia or élan vital. Other translations of Chi, which is also written as Qi or Ki, are air, spirit and breath. Huang Di, the founder of what is now known as Chinese medicine, believed that Chi is the foundation for all healing. He developed acupuncture to remove self-created internal blockages that limit the flow of Chi through the body.

All matter originates as thought so thought is energy. The body was consciousness before it was matter so it does make sense to address the thoughts that restrict the pure energy of consciousness from circulating through the body. Restricted or blocked energy will manifest physically in some way. Energy is constantly in motion. It continues to move through layers of consciousness, and we feel the effects of that motion. If there is nothing blocking this life force the body functions as it is designed. When we block it with stressful thoughts the body responds.

Conscious Projections

The autonomous alternative is to move beyond pressure by recognizing that any sense of insistent pressure is one’s own projection drive. The man who recognizes that what he feels is his own drive will neither resent nor resist the pressure, he will act.

Snell and Gail Putney in their 1966 book, The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society explain how our projections impact our now. The brain does not hold just current beliefs; the brain contains passive beliefs as well. Beliefs lie in a fertile pool of mental enzymes, and they wait for a thought to stimulate them.

Our reasoning abilities are meant to grow and evolve as we use them. We become more conscious in consciousness as we reason, and we are able to make minute-by-minute judgments as we need them. Imagination grows along with reasoning in the conscious mind. As we acquire knowledge our imagination expands. A mature conscious mind accepts impulses from objective projections as well as from inner wisdom. We tend to accept the impulses we receive from our objective projections, but discount the wisdom from our subjective consciousness.

The result of this choice is perception separation. We call one part of us awake and another part of us unconscious. But there is nothing unconscious about the inner wisdom we receive from another area of the psyche. That wisdom helps us manifest all conscious projections.

An Element of Consciousness

Zen is what makes the religious feeling run through its legitimate channel and what gives life to the intellect. Zen does this by giving one a new point of view of looking at things, a new way of appreciating the truth and beauty of life and the world, by discovering a new source of energy in the inmost recesses of consciousness and by bestowing on one a feeling of completeness and sufficiency.

That is to say, Zen works miracles by overhauling the whole system of one’s inner life and opening up a world hitherto entirely undreamt of. This may be called a resurrection. And Zen tends to emphasize the speculative element, though confessedly it opposes this more than anything else in the whole process of spiritual revolution, and in this respect Zen makes use of phraseology belonging to the sciences of speculative philosophy.

D.T. Suzuki in his work, Practical Methods of Zen Instruction is explaining the effects of Zen. He doesn’t define Zen; he is explaining what we believe are the effects of Zen. We describe our beliefs using words and language, but they do a poor job describing what Zen actually is. We can substitute the phrase “an element of consciousness” to actually describe the energy of Zen because Zen is consciousness, and consciousness is within Zen. Zen is like the wind. We see its effects not its image. In a sense, the conscious mind takes a back in seat in the vehicle of consciousness when we experience Zen.

We are not only what we think; we are also much more than we think. The brain controls the functions of the conscious mind, and those functions are elements of our belief structure. The brain keeps the conscious mind in a three dimensional focus. That’s why we experience linear time. Zen and other elements within consciousness are not restricted by the brain. They are free to interact with our belief structure, and that mixture takes place more than we realize. Zen has the ability to alter our beliefs in any given moment. When we become aware of this alteration, we are unable to describe the transition in words so past knowledge or religious doctrine is used to define this change in the self. Buddhists call this change of energy, Zen; Christians call it miraculous intervention, and other religions describe it using words that are deeply rooted in individual religious mythology.

Whatever the name, we all alter our belief structure as we move through linear time using other elements of our consciousness. Our beliefs generate emotions as well as our imagination. Experiencing the energy of Zen consciousness stimulates an emotional response, and that response takes us to another area of our imaginative mind.

Transpersonal Consciousness

What we consider “normality” is actually a form of arrested development. That idea is not new. Rather it is a more precise formulation of Abraham Maslow’s comment, “What we call normality in psychology is really a psychopathology of the average so undramatic and so widely spread that we don’t even notice it.” But if normality is a form of arrested development, then what arrests it? Retarding forces seem to operate within both the individual and society.

Growth involves movement into the unknown and often requires surrendering familiar ways of being. Consequently we tend to fear growth. The tragic result is we deny and defend against our greatness and potential. These meta-defenses, as we might call them, have been described in many ways. Erich Fromm viewed them as “mechanisms of escape,” while Maslow called their net effort “the Jonah complex,” after the biblical prophet Jonah, who tried to escape his divine mission. Kierkegaard described how we seek “tranquilization by the trivial,” while others speak of the “repression of the sublime.” The crucial point is that our transpersonal potentials do not remain undeveloped merely by accident; rather we actively defend against them.

Defenses against transpersonal development also operate in society. Cultures seem to function not only to educate, but also as collective conspiracies to constrict consciousness. As such they mirror and magnify individual ambivalence towards transcendence.

Roger Walsh and Frances Vaughan make those points in their book, Paths Beyond Ego. There observations do hit an exposed nerve of truth. Society does little to cultivate transpersonal experiences that sit below the surface of our consciousness. Religion is a core belief that handles this aspect of human education. But, religion has been more restrictive than open in its approach to understanding different aspects of consciousness, especially individual consciousness. Religions encourage development up to a certain point and beyond that point a fear sign is posted and society conforms to the sign and leaves the territory beyond it shrouded in mystery. Religions try to make the individual whole using fragmented information. So society is conditioned to believe that our consciousness is fragmented.

Our core beliefs are just a sliver of our conscious mind. Once we identify the power of our individual mind we can rearrange, renew, change or completely disregard our beliefs. Beliefs do not exist on their own; there are strings of consciousness that originate, perceive and understand them before we do. Beliefs automatically move toward the consciousness that is already connected to them. That’s why religion is so important to us. Religions give us a way to describe what we don’t believe we know. But when the smoke of religious control starts to choke our consciousness, we realize that what we know is greater than the fragments of truth we have been spoon fed by objective rhetoric.

Conscious Within Consciousness

Much material that is our own, that is part of ourselves, has been dissociated, alienated, disowned, and thrown out. The rest of potential is not available to us. But I believe most of it is available, but as projections. I suggest we start with the impossible assumption that whatever we believe we see in another person or in the world is nothing but a projection. . . We can reassimilate; we can take back our projections, by projecting ourselves completely into that other thing or person. . . We have to do the opposite of alienation. We must identify our consciousness within the energy of all consciousness

Fritz Perls, the 20th century psychiatrist and psychotherapist, wrote those thoughts in his 1969 book, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. The thought that everything we see in our reality is a projection goes against everything we have been taught to believe. According to Perls, our waking and dreaming reality are filled with self-created messages about the nature of being conscious as well as the nature of the consciousness that exists in all things.

We create projections using our core belief structure. Our core beliefs tend to be invisible. We are not aware of the entire contents of our conscious mind. When we analyze different experiences we put them in a catalogue of sameness based on our beliefs about them. We consider our beliefs facts of life, but they are actually beliefs about life. The belief in guilt for example is the cementing structure that holds similar core beliefs together and strengthens them. Beliefs are psychic matter and in that sense they are alive. They group together like cells and protect their validity as well as their identity. Our beliefs project themselves outward and we experience what we believe about the nature of our reality.

Beliefs are like magnets that attract as well as produce the projections that we experience. Those projections have been experienced in different ways in other environments by other aspects of our consciousness so in one sense no projection is new. They are just dressed differently by the focused consciousness creating them in this linear time reality.

The Unity Within Consciousness

The Chinese world-view depended upon a totally different line of thought than the Western view of a mechanical universe externally ruled by a political Monarch and Creator. The harmonious cooperation of all beings arose, not from the orders of a superior authority external to themselves, but from the fact that they were all parts in a hierarchy of wholes forming a cosmic pattern and what they obeyed were the internal dictates of their own natures. Modern science and the philosophy of organism, with its integrative levels, have come back to this wisdom, fortified by new understanding of cosmic, biological and social evolution.

Joseph Needham, the 20th century British academic and sinologist, is well known for his research on Chinese science. “Needham Grand Question,” also known as “The Needham Question,” explains why China was overtaken by the West in technology and science despite its earlier successes. He believed that Taoism and Confucianism played a role in slowing the pace of Chinese scientific discoveries. Those beliefs are based on the spiritual or subjective aspect of the self. Chinese spiritual beliefs were overpowered by the scientific and objective inventiveness of the Western World.

Western education does little to promote the teaching of Chinese philosophers so most of the knowledge we trust and then add to our individual belief structures is rooted in philosophical objectiveness that conforms to our limited idea about Western consciousness. Separation is a mighty weed and it has infiltrated our fundamental spiritual belief system. We tend to use personal and mass religious score cards to catalogue the unity within consciousness, but those score cards are flawed with the hash marks of fear, anger and hatred.

Most of us believe that spiritual unity takes place after death. Death is the end of life as we know it, but in Eastern thought death is another aspect of life. There is nothing dead about being dead. It is a portal where separation is blended with the unity within consciousness. The ancient Chinese masters believed that consciousness doesn’t require a score card to be what it is.

The Intelligence Of Consciousness

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles: it is an act quite easy to be contemplated, but in its sequel, it turns out be a horrible jangle and confounding of all relations. Especially the crimes that spring from love, seem right and fair from the actor’s point of view, but, when acted, are found destructive of society. No man at last believes that he can be lost, nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon because the intellect qualifies in our own case the moral judgments. There is no crime to the intellect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is his 1844 essay Experience walks the fine line of judgment when he speaks about the nature of the murderer’s intellect. What makes one man or woman a murderer and others saints? Saints and murderers are born to enjoy the desires and the challenges of physical life, but cryptic thoughts change their individual play and that behavior is label in several ways by humanity.

Saints overcome the burden of their choices and accept and appreciate the experiences they produce. As the actor they lived each life experience with purpose. Saints realize the script is the work of another aspect of the self, which lies just below physical awareness.

Murderers blame their choices on some external chain of events that seem out of their control. They are victims of their own thoughts. The nature of their reality changes and they conform to that change. Murderers perceive themselves as the actors; someone or something else is writing and directing the script.

Emerson reminds us that the murderers accept their experience shattering role until the horrible aftershock crumbles all semblance of normalcy in their perplexing reality. Life becomes a string of vacant perceptions and unfulfilled choices. But in the intelligence of consciousness, the vicious felon is on the same non-physical path as the saint. Consciousness expands from each experience. Both labels choose to experience physical life in order to sense and feel the results of their own thoughts and beliefs. Judgment doesn’t exist within the wall-less form of consciousness; it exists in the framework of our beliefs.

Our beliefs about death make these two physical labels real and personal. We honor saints because we yearn to be like them, and we despise murderers because we fear death and don’t understand them. The death part of the psyche is shrouded in mystery, misconceptions and religious fables.

We create belief labels to physically feel the consequences of being passionate about our desire to be what we already are―a whole in the whole of intelligent consciousness.

The Insanity Of Consciousness

The Insane

They are silent because the division walls Are broken down in the brain, And hours when they might be understood at all Begin and leave again.

Often when they go to the window at night, Suddenly everything seems right: Their hands touch something tangible, The heart is high and can pray, The calmed eyes gaze

Down on this unhoped for, often distorted Garden in this peaceful square at rest, Which in the reflex of this foreign world Grows ever larger, never to be lost.

Rainer Maria Rilke, the great 20th century German poet, wrote that poem in the early 1900’s. Rilke spent his days studying people in the parks, gardens, museums and libraries, and at night he would wander around the boulevards of Paris watching the homeless. He felt the confusion that bubbles to the surface of awareness when a transformation takes place in the self. His behavior was labeled insane by some and he was discounted by others. In his mind, the hopeless needed some kind of help from society, but the system was too distorted and not ready to transform itself.

Rilke finally realized that the mental transformation he was experiencing was a road to the insanity within consciousness. He tried to get the message out through his poetry. He realized there is nothing sane about the cloud of nothing filled with everything that exists within the self. Consciousness wanders within itself and expresses itself in many forms. He believed we are insane dreamers that fill our objective world with sanity in order to know the complexity of it. He watched other forms of consciousness sense their insanity by freely living it without the tangled web of misconceptions that wrap us in a world of fear.

We bring our innate insanity to the surface of our reality when we immerse the self in antics of a butterfly or the strength of a spider weaving a web. We experience the insanity of consciousness in every bloom in nature and in every sliver of our being. But, we tend to focus on the follies of the sane and condemn the insane for experiencing another aspect of our own consciousness.

The Genius Of Consciousness

We cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order and thus in such way as to be able to see itself. That indeed is amazing. Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.

G.Spencer Brown wrote those thoughts in the 1969 book, Laws of Form. Brown is describing our innate genius, as well as the genius that exists in other forms of life. Genius is alive and it thrives in all forms of life, but we tend to discount other forms of genius because they do not conform to the standard we established for that word.

For example, butterflies give us insight into our innate beauty. Butterflies are a form of genius, and we are deeply connected to them. We ignore that connection because we believe humans are a separate life form that has no peers. There are countless stories of butterflies arriving after the death of a love one, and getting uncannily close to the grieving individual. No words are exchanged during these interludes, but there is a distinct sense that the butterfly is there to deliver some sort of message. That message is not verbal; it is vibrational.

We see this other world when we pull ourselves away from the rational reality we swear by, and allow our genius to wander through our mental fields of knowing. In that field the butterfly consciousness within us flies through our mind field of misconceptions, and we recognize genius for what it does― it see itself in physical form in order to change.

.

The Magnificence Of Consciousness

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghost-like we glide through nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no super-fluity of spirit for new creation?

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1838 essay, Experience, brings a bit of 19th century genius to the center stage of our thought process. We desperately look for our genius in the pews of churches and in the thoughts of others. Our outward search leads us to a steel door where salvation is the key that unlocks the pain of sin. This belief-based search inhibits our inner genius and we cover it with the manure of fear.

Nature doesn’t need acceptance to display its genius; it innately knows how to connect with the world it creates. Nature is designed to show us what our genius looks like, but the dense fog of educated misconceptions keeps us, as Emerson points out, in a mist-filled sleep.

Our genius waits to be discovered in the beauty of a butterfly or the sound that trees make as they sense the experience of physical life. Butterflies and trees continue to fine-tune the art of being more than we expect by fully experiencing life in all its dualistic splendor.

Our winged comrades in consciousness flirt with the hibiscus and honeysuckle to experience and feel the magnificence of life. Trees drink the water of knowing and grow in its presence. These free forms of nature teach us to expand our perceptions and break through our chrysalis of ignorance, and become caterpillars that know they are beautiful butterflies or trees that change without regret.

Consciousness Moves Through Itself

When we speak of beings of higher dimensions, we are speaking of the rate of vibratory frequency, not as better than or more important than humanity. There is no being anywhere who is more than another. The angel is no more than the human. The angel simply knows more of who it is. You are still learning. There is no hierarchy within Divinity.

Jani King, the Australian psychologist, has written several books on the nature of human beliefs. She explains that our physical belief system is based on learned knowledge as well as physical experiences. We expand our awareness using our beliefs and the experiences that manifest from those beliefs. We believe that there is a hierarchy in the spiritual aspect of the self, but there are not hierarchies in consciousness.

Consciousness is infinite, but it is also appears finite. There are non-physical regions, aspects, elements and various forms of consciousness, but there are no divisions within consciousness. We assign levels and a hierarchy in order to comprehend consciousness in our finite world. Religion as well as philosophy teaches us to dissect and catalogue consciousness in order to physically understand it. We move through and sense several regions of consciousness in order to feel it physically.

Our beliefs create vibrations and those vibrations are tuned into a specific frequency. That frequency is our reality. We also create vibrations through thoughts that are not beliefs. Those thoughts may come from a different frequency. Other aspects of our consciousness are aware of these frequencies so we sense the energy that emulates from these unusual vibrations. Some people call it intuition. Some call it voodoo while others call it magic. Consciousness calls it consciousness being conscious. Consciousness is always conscious as it continues to expand in its own divinity.

Consciousness Is Imaginary

The distinction between what is real and what is imaginary is not one that can be finely maintained. All existing things are imaginary.

John Stuart Mackenzie, the late 19th century British philosopher, was a Fellow at Edinburgh, as well as Trinity College at Cambridge. In 1895, he became professor of logic and philosophy at the University College at Cardiff. Mackenzie is considered a Hegelian in philosophy circles, which means he agreed with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophical beliefs. Hegel was an early 19th century German philosopher. Hegel believed that spirit manifests itself in contradictions and opposites in order to unify and expand. Hegel thought that finite things don’t determine themselves as finite; their character is determined by their boundaries as they pertain to other things. In order to become real they must go beyond their finitude.

Mackenzie believed that as finite beings we are imaginary, and so is ever other physical manifestation. Reality as we know it is a catalog of beliefs. That catalogue is put together by our conscious mind and ego, which are aspects of our infinite being. We use our belief catalogue to make the finite real.

Jacob Bohme the 17th century philosopher, as well as shoemaker, said that the imaginary separation of spirit and body was a necessary stage in the evolution of awareness. Through the contradiction and negation we experience in our reality or in our belief structure, we expand the infinite. Contradictions and contrast are self-created phases that expand the awareness of the finite self. That awareness is then projected into the infinite reality of our whole, which is constantly expanding.

Our whole is not a thing or a being that exists outside of our imaginary physical being. It is an element of all consciousness, which expands as the philosophical comprehension of each imaginary self experiences some sort of reality.

All realties are imaginary, but they are very real in terms of experiences. Linear time experiences are expressed in physical contradictions as well as in unity. Experiences that are real today are in our imagination tomorrow. Experiences that are real tomorrow are imagination today. We imagine and create. The infinite creates the finite so consciousness can feel itself physically.

Temperamental Consciousness

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergences of philosophies by it.

Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is not conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions.

Yet his temperament really gives him stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or another, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament.

Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world’s character and in his heart considers them incompetent and ‘not in It,’ in the philosophical business, even though they may far excel him in dialectical ability.

William James in his 1906 essay, The Present Dilemma of Philosophy, is explaining how philosophers as well as all humans expand their belief structure using their personal temperament. Our mental, physical and emotional traits define our unique humanity. Temperament is a quality of consciousness that is firmly rooted in beliefs.

A philosopher’s job is to open the door of awareness so people can align their temperament with other humans. Once a belief structure is aligned with similar belief structures a chain reaction is set in motion, and collective experiences unfold. But, each individual experience is different in that collective whole.

Religion, politics and other beliefs are constantly shifting and changing as the boundaries of our beliefs expand. A plethora of influences impact our individual temperamental structure. We use those associations to confirm our convictions. We then defend those convictions using our own perception of pertinent data.

Unconfirmed data also affects our collective temperament. Integration through acceptance changes our temperament. Rather that disputing or disclaiming conflicting political or religious philosophical issues we have the ability to sense an innate presence within us that blends different philosophies in a vat of cajoling perceptions. The integration process gives us the opportunity to accept individual beliefs even when we disagree with them. Our diverse collective consciousness is mixed together in this form of mental energy, and the result is a dualistic agreement to agree to disagree with respect and appreciation. Acceptance through integration is the chisel that craves a path so individual consciousness can accept and appreciate the mental juices that overflow in our temperamental dialectal mixture.

Complexity Of Consciousness

Okubo Shibun, a Zen master, was known for painting kakemonos which are Japanese scroll paintings that hang on the wall. He was asked by a patron to paint a bamboo forest and willingly consented and painted a beautiful bamboo grove, which was completely red.

The patron marveled at the extraordinary skill with which the painting had been executed. The patron asked the artist, “Master, I have come to thank you for the picture; but excuse me, you have painted the bamboo in red” Well, cried the master, in what color would you desire it? “In black of course,” replied the patron. And who, answered the artist ever saw a black-leaved bamboo?

D.T. Suzuki tells that story in one of his essays in his 1949 book, Essays In Zen Buddhism. The story is a good example of how the ego can ignore the conscious mind and create its own reality. Our reality comes from a functioning corner in our psyche and it is dressed in an abundant array of perceptions. We might say our reality is the crude oil of the conscious mind and the refined oil of the ego. When the conscious mind tells the ego something is real a belief is born. Each new belief becomes part of our intricate belief structure.

As we move through our dedicated time element we add associations to our beliefs and influences are salted in for good measure. We create a plethora of masterful realities to experience. The ego’s job is to orchestrate whatever version feels good to the physical self. Each version is real and valid,and each one is available to experience in some form.

Thought is energetic activity and it is a powerful tool in assembling as well as rearranging beliefs about the nature of our chosen reality. We construct several internal stories using the complexity that exists within our own consciousness. The chosen product is a reality that is fine-tuned using the conscious mind and the ego. We accept that product as fact.

The complexity of our consciousness expands the nature of our reality, but, as Suzuki points out, other realities are hidden below the surface of each conscious mind and its adjunct, the ego.

Marinated Mixture Of Consciousness

Across centuries and cultures transpersonal experiences have been regarded as vitally or even supremely important. In our own time the transpersonal vision and transpersonal disciplines are crucially important for many reasons. They draw attention to a neglected, misunderstood family of experiences; provide new understandings of ancient ideas, religious traditions, and contemplative practices; offer more generous views of human nature; and point to unsuspected human possibilities.

Roger Walsh and Frances Vaughn wrote those thoughts in their 1993 book, Paths Beyond Ego. Our beliefs structure is rooted in transpersonal experiences. Our belief about religion is a good example. All religions are based on transpersonal experiences that have been accepted as fact. The amount of transpersonal information that we accept as fact is considerable. There is a constant stream of non-verifiable impulses flowing into our reality, and all of them have value. We tend to analyze these impulses using an academic epistemology. That practice filters out some pertinent experiences. Those experiences are banished to an isolated mental contour in our psyche until our epistemology changes. The standard way we accept impulses is to marinate them in a selective mixture of associations and influences. That process makes some impulses pliable as well as hard to swallow mentally.

Ancient cultures accepted most transpersonal experiences as real. They became beliefs. All beliefs are valid to the believer. Beliefs have no expiration or do not use date. Some obsolete modern world beliefs are still valid in areas where there is an antiquated view of life. All beliefs are influenced by awareness, and can be expanded by new transpersonal experiences. Our transpersonal impulses restructure antiquated beliefs, and we experience that new structure using our own marinated mixture of consciousness.

Mysteriously Enchanting

Magical is a word that we all have used at one time or another to describe an event or a person that crosses the boundaries of our physical and scientific understanding. We believe the word means mysteriously enchanting in a non-ordinary sense. Magical can describe the world of the unknown as well as the art of being unreal in some way. There is an element of beauty attached to any magical world. We all love the stimulation we feel when a magical event takes place before our eyes. We stretch the corners of our brain to find an answer for not knowing why or how something exists. In most cases we throw these unanswered questions into a vacant lot in our conscious mind, and mark them ‘magic’ or ‘not-normal.’

Most of us are too busy to watch the magic that unfolds around us every day. The rigors of work and family responsibilities take up most waking hours so there is little time to enjoy the natural magical beauty that surrounds us. As the great Sufi poet, Rumi said: “Beauty surrounds us, but we usually have to be walking in a garden to appreciate it.” The quest to stay afloat in our economic pool of ‘what’s next’ takes a toll on what we see and experience in our individual reality, and the other natural realities that are constantly occurring around us.

We are conditioned to overlook our own spiritual magic. It sits in specialized compartments in our psyche while we idolize and worship other compartments that tend to fill the void we have within us. We have been conditioned to believe magical beauty belongs to an exclusive club and most of us don’t have a membership card. The quest to be more than we think we are is hindered by our thoughts about our own beauty and our creative imagination.

My book, The Butterfly Ball, is about the magical mystery of change. Who better than a butterfly to tell a story about change? Just like butterflies, the people in the story awaken from their metamorphic state in their own way.

Butterflies are living metaphors, but we are not educated to see them in that way. To most of us they are strange insects that become beautiful flies. We don’t usually focus on them as they flirt with bushes and flowers and spend their physical time drinking, eating and having sex. Their world is unknown to us, but when all the frills of life are extracted from our lives, we discover that we live just like butterflies. Our physical lives are exaggerated versions of the beautiful mystical magic that flows through butterflies, and all forms of life. The free will of butterflies represents the nature of our true beauty. Like all other aspects of consciousness they are here to imitate the multiplicity that exists within our conscious mind. When we bring that beauty into our awareness, life is less of a mystery and more of a journey of discovery.

Another Version of Consciousness

To conceive the truth as something external which is to be perceived by a perceiving subject is dualistic and appeals to the intellect for its understanding, but according to Zen we are living right in the truth, by the truth, from which we cannot be separated.

D.T. Suzuki is still considered the world’s leading authority on Zen Buddhism. Reading Suzuki’s work is an eye-opener for anyone who wants to know more about the nature of consciousness. If our inner consciousness used words to communicate with the ego the word Zen could be used to describe that process.

But consciousness is not restricted by words or specific thoughts about its nature. Consciousness expands in unique ways as we experience different elements of the psyche. The psyche is deeply immersed and extremely active in several regions of consciousness, but it is also consciousness acting as a free agent in this reality. The spokesman for this free agent is Zen. Zen gives us a clear view of the self as it absorbs other elements of consciousness. Several elements of consciousness create an energy mixture that flows in and out of Zen while the ego functions in time.

When consciousness is examined using rational thought it projects itself as an unknown. We measure this unknown using with various fabricated truth. Those measurements are man-made and have little to do with the truth that flows from our inner voice. Zen is not defined by religious beliefs; it is only identified using the language of those beliefs.

.

We concoct our own version of Zen consciousness and truth so they conform to our beliefs. Everything we experience in physical life is consciousness and is rooted in the quality and truth of Zen. This other quality of consciousness is an important aspect of the psyche even though we consider it irrational as well as undefinable.

Pieces Of Consciousness

While evidence of our intellectual and technological genius is all around us, there is growing concern that in other ways we have seriously underestimated ourselves. In part because of the blinding brilliance of our technological triumphs, we have distracted and dissociated ourselves from our inner world, sought outside for answers that can only be found within, denied the subjective and the sacred, overlooked latent capacities of mind, imperiled our planet and lived in a collective trance, a contracted, distorted state of mind that goes unrecognized because we share it and take it to be “normality.”

Francis Vaughn and Roger Walsh wrote those thoughts in their 1993 book, Paths Beyond Ego. Our reality is anchored to a dock of dogmas, beliefs and creeds, and we consider that information the foundation for all of our experiences. We don’t realize it, but we only use a slice of our consciousness to perceive our reality. We actually methodically choose to cut our consciousness into pieces, and then feed the pieces to the ego self as we move through the consciousness of time.

Walsh and Vaughan identify other pieces of our consciousness using a method called Transpersonal Integration. Transpersonal Integration opens avenues of thought that have been covered with the sludge of our own though-filled backwater. We begin to untangle ourselves from this bay of distorted beliefs when recognize our dualistic nature. When that happens, our polluted beliefs are overhauled in a diverse mixture, which contains other slices of consciousness. We sense these additions in unique ways.

We create our world of duplicity, and we shape it like a puzzle board. We use thoughts to put some of the pieces of consciousness together, and then feel them physically. These feeling thoughts and ideas have their own electromagnetic reality, and they generate emotions. The ego tries to maintain stability and a clear sense of focus while absorbing this information. As a new focus forms another identity develops. This inner identity becomes a composite of different characteristics and personality traits.

The new identity becomes another aspect of the self in our psychological structure. New tendencies and abilities continue to emerge from this structure. Even though we think the ego is permanent it is constantly changing as it adapts to new characteristics of the whole self. Every piece contains the whole even when we function as a piece of consciousness.

The Sound Of Consciousness

Human beings have three spiritual states. In the first, a person pays no attention whatsoever to God and worships anything. Sex, money, rank; anything but God. When he starts to learn something deeper, then he will serve no one and nothing but God. And when he progresses in this state he grows silent; he doesn’t claim: “I don’t serve God,” nor does he boast: “I do serve God;” he has gone beyond these two positions. From such beings, no sound comes into the world.

Rumi, the 13th century poet and mystic, is explaining ego consciousness in spiritual terms. Although Rumi is considered the father of Sufism he never called his spiritual beliefs by that name. He respected all religions during his lifetime. Rumi was all about connection. He was able to connect his ego consciousness and his body consciousness with the stream of consciousness that flows through all life.

Rumi also said that we are taught to believe:

The angel is free because of his knowledge, The beast because of his ignorance. Between the two remains the son of man to struggle.

Most of us believe in angels. They are qualities of our inner consciousness, and they are around and in us to help us sense our inner consciousness. The stages or states that Rumi identifies are choices that enhance our awareness with our conscious mind. The beast and other forms of consciousness are not ignorant; they are experiencing life to feel their own consciousness physically. They did not develop an ego consciousness so they are already in the state where no sound comes into their world. When we feel the bond that seals all forms of consciousness as one, we reach the state where no sound comes into the world. The ego works in tandem with the conscious mind. In that state the only sound we hear is the sound of consciousness expanding in a stream of knowing.

Aliquant Consciousness

Aliquant Consciousness

In the beginning, which is really no beginning and which has no spiritual meaning except in our finite life, the will wants to know itself, and consciousness is awakened and with the awakening of consciousness the will is split in two. The one will, whole and complete in itself is now at once actor and observer. Conflict is inevitable; for the actor now wants to be free from limitations under which he has been obliged to put himself in his desire for consciousness. He has in one sense been enabled to see, but at the same time there is something which he, as observer, cannot see.

D.T Suzuki wrote those thoughts in his 1927 book, Essays in Zen Buddhism. Defining consciousness is a difficult task. Consciousness is not just the awareness of our reality; it is in and around everything that exists physically as well as non-physically. Understanding consciousness takes more than rational thought so there are aspects and regions of consciousness that exist and function in ways that boggle our understanding. Our conscious mind paints a picture of our reality. Our ego focuses on that picture. Just like a flower that has many parts, our consciousness is composed of parts as well. Each part is a whole within a whole. The inner self, the conscious mind, and the ego are all designed to create the reality we believe we want.

Each aspect of our consciousness functions within a family of consciousness. The family is constantly changing based on our beliefs about it. We are products of a family of consciousness that forms individual aspects of itself in order to experience its own interpretation of an aliquant consciousness in physical form. Other qualities of consciousness interact with our family, and the result is a diverse reality.

That reality is our focused reality. Just outside of that focus is a plethora of realities that exist within the ever-changing regions of consciousness. There are fluctuations and gradations within this activity that go unnoticed since we rely on our ego to identify what is real. What is real extends outward with each thought we have so the result is an ever blooming consciousness that senses other parts of itself, but may not be in any hurry to accept them.

Reconfigured Ideas

If the doors of perception were cleansed Everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, til he sees all things thro’ narrow chunks of his own cavern.

William Blake uses his poetic prowess to open a mental window, and we begin to see the creative power we have within us. In the present, our conscious mind chooses a particular theme for our physical existence, and within that theme there are individual patterns filled with infinite resources that create our personal reality. The conscious mind embarks on this journey to translate reality into physical manifestations. The conscious mind is acutely tuned to physical reality. When the conscious mind accepts too many external generated beliefs, it chooses using the ego rather than the inner self. Our present perceptions are no longer pure input from the inner self; they are homogenized ideas that create a feeling that this reality is greater than our inner reality.

Our self-image is not unconscious; the present ego creates a physical image of us in relation to the world we actually perceive for ourselves. We are trained to perceive the ego or our own cavern, as Blake calls it, as a villain that taints our view of the inner self, but the ego is not equipped to negatively impact the inner self. The inner self is the force that changes the ego. Our present ego has a tendency to dwell on limitations, and when it does, we experience them. The inner self is always projecting a new image for the ego, but the physical senses may be so tuned into the negative results of past experiences we tune out our own inner projections.

The conscious mind can turn the ego in endless directions if the information from the inner self is accepted as real. The present ego has the ability to turn inward and observe its own content and change if it accepts its connection with the inner self and the conscious mind. There are graduations and fluctuations within this activity, so the ego is far more flexible than we believe it is. The present ego has the ability to use the conscious mind to perceive distorted internal as well as external realties using embedded beliefs. That action causes the inner self to reconfigure ideas and present them in a way that short-circuits those distorted beliefs. Some people call that process an awakening or enlightenment. Others call it mind over matter.

External Debris

In envisioning the way things are, there is no better place to begin than with modern science. Equally, there is no worse place to end. . . . Science dominates the modern mind. Through and through, from premise to conclusion, the contemporary mind is science ridden. Its sway is the stronger because we are unaware of its extent.

Huston Smith, the religious studies scholar, expressed those thoughts in his 1958 book, The World’s Religions. Our beliefs are the foundation for our experiences so even false beliefs seemed justified to the conscious mind. Science and religion are deeply rooted in our physical reality. Most of the knowledge we have about those two beliefs comes from influences, associations and conscious ideas. Ideas that materialize in the conscious mind are usually a mixture of the data we receive from the experiences we create for ourselves, and filtered material from the inner self.

The inner self automatically offers us new ideas, but we have a tendency to block that natural process using our existing beliefs. The inner self acts a catalyst for the conscious mind, but our existing beliefs take on a life of their own so we don’t listen to our inner voice. We become a dual entity, and our life’s purpose is immersed in a puddle of confusion. We betray the self and don’t realize it.

The nature of the inner self is fueled by spontaneity. The decisions it makes are valid, but when we refuse to allow it to function, the conscious mind becomes cluttered with external debris. Science and religion makes up some of that debris. The creative power to form our own experiences never leaves us, but we are taught that it does through science as well as religion. Science and religion are just tools we create to experience physical form. When we turn those tools into hard core facts, we betray the self. This behavior is passed from one generation to another until we change our ideas about our creative abilities, and the nature of the self.

We all choose the individual beliefs and patterns that create our personal reality. Within that reality are endless varieties of actions as well as unlimited resources. The conscious mind is so focused on our physical reality that it often perceives our physical phenomena as the cause rather than the result. That misconception puts the physical before the non-physical. The inner self reminds us in one way or another that this is not the case. But, some of our choices tend to create louder voices in order to fulfill our desire to expand in uncomfortable dualistic ways.

Reservoir Of Life

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness. We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream.

William James expressed those thoughts in one of his 1906 Lowell Institute lectures at Columbia University. James understood that we only accept ideas that we believe are true even though there is a steady stream of conscious mind-chatter. That chatter is filled with pertinent information about the self. We are all able to use that knowledge if we expand our beliefs about consciousness. James also understood that we only accept suggestions given to us by another if they fit into our preconceived ideas about the nature of our reality. It seems we only use a small portion of our conscious mind, and that restricts us when it comes to accepting any sort of change.

We are only half conscious when we reject the intuitive ideas that come from the vast wisdom within the psyche. False beliefs create mental roadblocks, and they give the inner self a faulty picture of reality. One example is religious manipulation. The belief in man-made religions has created a wall between the inner self and the conscious mind. Religion uses several controlling devices to limit the amount of information that comes from the inner self. Those controlling devices are anchored in the belief about sin. We believe we sin every day, based on our belief about salvation. Salvation is a controlling device that keeps us from listening to our inner self. All of our beliefs are covered in the rubble of man-made truths not inner truth.

When our reality is riddled with misconceptions, the inner self begins to make adjustments. The inner self takes corrective measures and bypasses these fabricated restrictions by expelling energy in other layers of consciousness. When this happens we usually call it a revelation. The result of any revelation is a new way of thinking, and thinking is the main ingredient in forming as well as expanding beliefs.

Our thoughts create our events. If we think the physical world is evil we will experience events that appear evil. There are no accidents in consciousness. Our beliefs grow in time and space like flowers in a well-watered garden. How they grow is our responsibility. If we recognize and then draw on the reservoir of life, which is the fertile stream of consciousness that exists within the inner self, our physical world becomes a dream. It’s the dream where inner truth fuels our beliefs.

The Window Of Everything

The nature of oneness is our original Mind, of which we are conscious; and yet there is neither the one who is conscious nor that of which there is a consciousness. To see into the absolute one or unconsciousness is to understand self-nature; to understand self-nature is not to take hold of anything. Self-nature is from the first thoroughly pure, because there is nothing to take hold of.

Shen-hui, the 8th century Chinese philosopher, explains the subjective self in somewhat obscure objective terms. Our subjective self is constantly transmitting insights and intuitions to the conscious mind. We have been educated to believe that this inner self is dangerous and can’t be trusted. We have turned off the power that opens the vault where our truth resides. We have been schooled to accept our difficulties as penance for some alleged deed that spiritually marred all of us, and that belief has tainted our ability to freely interact with the nature of our oneness.

Beliefs and ideas form the foundation for our experiences. The reasons why we believe what we believe are in the conscious mind. If we believe that the reasons are buried in some past life, we create a mental roadblock that keeps us from altering our individual reality. When we come to terms with the fact that we form our own reality, we begin to liberate the inner self, and taste the fruit of our own self-nature. We are responsible for our own being. Our self-nature joins with the flesh of our own choosing. Our self-nature chooses to experience a life filled with incredible beauty so we can help create a dimension of vivid colors and spectacular forms. We are here to enrich our own self-awareness, and to feel the power of the energy that fuels our individual consciousness.

We are not here to complain about the miseries of the human race; we are here to change them. When our conscious mind allows our self-nature to look out into the physical world we see the reflection of our own spiritual activity. When we perceive and assess that reality we have the ability to change it using the gift of self-nature. That gift comes from the consciousness we dress in religious terms, but religion is riddled with fear, guilt and control. We take ownership of those properties and hold them in our psyche. That is our choice. We can also choose to take hold of our self-nature, with our own conscious mind, and experience the window of everything.

Conscious Beliefs

Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with truth.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the author, teacher, peace activist, and monk wrote those words. Thich wrote more than 100 books. Forty of the books are in English. He spent his life practicing the art of finding peace within.

Our conscious beliefs guide body functions. The inner self or non-physical self creates our physical consciousness, including our ego. Our non-physical self directs our outward physical activity as long as the ego is in sync with those directions.

Our non-physical self is not a closed system, but we think it is. We tend to fear our inner thoughts, so we adopt other beliefs to conform. That practice distorts the data received from the non-physical, and we find ourselves living in an ego-centered world. Thich calls that world experimenting with the truth.

There are different truths. Religious, political, social, and the truth we hold in our core beliefs have an impact on our choices and perceptions. Our core beliefs are the foundation that creates our perception of reality. Core beliefs include Truth, Sex, Religion, God, Relationships, Emotions, Perceptions, the Senses, Duplicity, and the Universe.

These beliefs or truths form our reality. Physical life is for the experience of experimenting with these core beliefs. We create them to express value fulfillment in a specific physical focus. That process is an individual one, but we use the collective to confirm it. We believe there is confirmation in numbers, so the collective truth becomes gospel regardless of how it manifests.

The non-physical self constantly sends data to the ego, but the ego doesn’t have to use that data. But when the ego uses the non-physical self to examine our core beliefs and the reasons behind those beliefs, our perceptions and reality change. Understanding where our beliefs come from gives us the ability to change them. We are the instrument that creates the truths we live.

Scientific Gibberish

One of the major questions that has dominated discussions of mysticism since the publication of William James’s classic work, The Varieties of Consciousness, is whether or not there is any core mystical experience that is common across cultures and traditions. Some philosophers say yes, but “constructionists,” who argue that all experience, including mystical experience, is constructed from and filtered through a variety of inescapable personal and cultural experiences, say no.

Roger Walsh in his essay, Mapping and Comparing States brings up an interesting point about mystical experiences that change the way we look at the self. We look at the self as only a body and a mind. The body, we think, is solid and the mind is located somewhere in the brain.

Those beliefs limit the way we look at physical reality. Consciousness is structured in various ways. There are regions, densities, forms, aspects, elements, and individual qualities of consciousness. All qualities of consciousness are in a perpetual state of expansion. The fuel for this expansion is the awareness of consciousness itself.

Mystical experiences are part of our expansion, but they are not mystical to the subjective self. Experiences contain innate information that creates awareness. Our thoughts, emotions and beliefs create experiences, and they trigger varying degrees of awareness.

Trying to put our subjective self in a box of rules and regulations is like trying to capture the air we breathe today and use it tomorrow.

There are no boundaries when it comes to mystical experiences. We form countless version of the self and we use them to become aware of the other aspects of our consciousness. We do it without doing and become without being aware of that becoming.

What the caterpillar in us calls death is called life to the butterfly self within us. That butterfly is the mystical self that experiences life.

Horrible Sanity

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe the American writer, poet, editor and literary critic was part of what’s called the 19th century American Romantic Movement. His works have stimulated the imagination of people all over the world. Some folks consider him a founding father of modern science fiction. He published The Raven in 1845, and he became an instant celebrity.

We take our beliefs about reality as truths so we don’t question how and why we are living this physical dream. We concoct invisible assumptions and they form and color our personal experiences. But, some of us dig into the rubble of these half-truths and find gold nuggets of awareness waiting to be absorbed by our ego consciousness. For others, beliefs are set in stone. Their reality conforms to that rigid objectiveness. When we stir the sand in the deep chasms where beliefs originate, aspects of the self begin to saturate our ego consciousness. They patiently knock on our door of awareness and wait for an answer.

Our conscious mind is always trying to open the door and allow awareness to shine a beacon of truth on our half-truths, but our preconceived ideas are forceful foes that block out our own innate intelligence. We often blame our mysterious subconscious for the fear that overshadows our real self. We have been educated to believe that this so-called sub consciousness is not conscious even though it is actually the conscious mind sending signals from the inner self. These signals alter our belief structure so we are trained to fear and ignore them. The door to the inner door has been shut tight by man-created laws and rituals that worship an entity that is separate from the conscious mind. This ego generated atmosphere of man-made power is easier to believe than believing that the self has never been separated from the source of all power. The concept of original sin conditioned the ego to block the conscious mind, and the inner awareness that we consider a form of insanity.

Poe described his flowering awareness like this:

I become insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.

The horrible sanity that exists within our judgmental beliefs structure is beginning to break down, and the ego’s hold on the conscious mind is becoming more of a homogenize blend of insanity that is opening our awareness to the folly of our own irrational fancy about the singular self.

The Characteristics Of Reality

You’ve got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself.

Richard Bach, in his 1970 international best seller, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, writes about physical life using the words of a seagull. We are much more than we think we are; the ego is only a specialized portion of the self that is concerned with the material part of our experiences. The ego and what we call the conscious mind are two different aspects of the self. The ego is a composition of various elements of the personality; it is a combination of ever-changing characteristics that act in a uniformed fashion. The ego part of the personality deals directly with the world.

The conscious mind is turned outward to perceive world events. It is part of our inner awareness and the soul looks outward within the individualistic portion of the mind. Left alone if perceives perfectly. In a sense the ego is the eye through which the conscious mind perceives reality. But, the conscious mind constantly changes it focus as we travel through time. If the conscious mind’s direction becomes stiff, and the ego is allowed to take over some of the functions of the conscious mind, narrow-minded perceptions develop. When that happens, the ego only allows the conscious mind to function in a certain fashion and awareness is blocked in other directions.

In order to expand objective awareness we must clear the conscious mind of our self-created egotistical roadblocks so we can experience the greater part of our physical identity. The Fabric of our experiences is woven by our expectations and beliefs. Our personal ideas about the self and the nature of our individual reality have an impact on our thoughts and emotions. We consider our beliefs about our reality true so we don’t question them. They are characteristics of reality itself. They become invisible assumptions and they color our personal experiences. Most of us are spiritually blind; we have allowed our ego to block our conscious mind with physical foolishness. When we take our limited perceptions as gospel, especially when it comes to beliefs about politics and religion, we stymy our psyche expansion. We don’t stop that expansion, but we do limit it. Our feeling-tone vibrates in a closed-end belief system and the characteristics of that sort of thinking becomes reality itself.

The True Tone Of Our Being

Without the transcendent and the transpersonal we get sick, violent, and nihilistic, or hopeless and apathetic. We need something “bigger than we are” to be awed by and commit ourselves to in a new naturalistic, empirical, non-churchy sense. Perhaps as Thoreau and Whitman, William James and John Dewey did.

Abraham Maslow, the father of humanistic psychology, wrote those thoughts. Maslow was a psychologist that conceptualized a hierarchy of human needs. He saw human beings’ needs arranged like a ladder. The most basic needs on the ladder are on the bottom step. They include: air, water, food, sleep; the next step on the ladder of needs is security and stability, and the next step is the social need for belonging as well as the need for love and affection. The top steps are made of up of self-actualizing needs like the need to fulfill oneself. Maslow’s psychological concepts were based on the assumption that unfulfilled needs lower on the ladder would inhibit the person from climbing to the next step. Humanistic psychology teaches that people possess the inner resources for growth and healing. Each individual is capable of climbing this ladder once obstacles are understood.

There is an energy that vibrates within us that is bigger than we are. It is a non-churchy sense of knowing that we are connected to a stream of consciousness that is rich in creativity and electromagnetic tones. We have deep musical type cords that send messages from the psyche and we feel them vibrate within us. At times, these cords rise to the surface in long rhythms and we touch the inner portion of our being and experience it physically. Those cords are part of our feeling-tone. Our feeling-tone is the timber that holds our physical experience together. Each feeling-tone is unique, but it is expressed in a fashion that is shared by all consciousness focused in our mass reality.

As Plotinus, the great 2nd century philosopher, said:

We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing… a wakefulness that is the birthright of all of us, though few put it to use.

Our feeling-tone is that wakefulness. While we experience this physical reality, we follow the basic laws or assumptions of that reality and we create the world as we perceive it. Within the framework of our reality we have the freedom to create all aspects of our physical life. We create a painting and become the painting. Our personal life surfaces from within us. We are educated to believe that our world comes from something other than the self so most of us let our feeling-tone operate without objectively knowing it exists. But, it functions subjectively regardless of our level of awareness. As Maslow and Plotinus remind us it’s time to recognize the other subjective portions of the self, and begin to feel the true tone of our being.

Feeling Tones Of Truth

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer see what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, “How do you know it is truth and not an error of your own? We know truth when we see it from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, which would alone indicate the greatness of of that man’s perception, ─ “it is no proof of a man’s understanding to be able to confirm whatever he pleases, but to be able to discern that what is true is true; and that what is false is false, this is the mark and character of intelligence.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1842 essay, The Over-soul gives us a sample of how beliefs and time affect truth. In his 19th century style, Emerson describes the world of physical matter. He understood that the world flows outward from the center of the inner psyche. There is nothing in our exterior experience that does not originate within the psyche. Physical life teaches us to use the inexhaustible energy that is available to all of us. Creativity flows through our cells effortlessly, and that creativity is packed with truth. Our feelings are dipped in electromagnetic realities. Inner electromagnetic energy affects objects as well as events. Some feelings become objects while others become structured events in physical time. The mark and character of intelligence is realizing that we create our experiences through our choices and expectations.

Our emotional feeling-tones are filled with truth, and there is a uniqueness that surrounds the essence within that truth. We sense the deep musical cords that play these tones as we choose what to experience. Some experiences are rooted in half-truths that manifest from antiquated beliefs. A number of antiquated beliefs are immersed in fear, and that energy is stamped into the psyche. The ink from those stamps colors our definition of truth. But, even half- truths have consciousness. All truths contain some qualities of our feeling-tones. These tones usually become the fiber of our physical experiences. They are fueled by awareness, so they eventually become false as the ego moves through time.

Different qualities of feeling-tones are expressed physically and become fashion statements of truth. Those statements are experienced as probabilities by individual consciousness in physical reality. Our individual reality as well as our mass reality is a combination of these feeling-tone fashion statements. Feeling-tone statements paint the landscape of our experiences as true, but these tones are measured by individual and mass awareness that occur within certain time sequences. The result is a changing opinion of truth as consciousness moves through physical time. The truths we know today are only fragments of the truths we experience in physiological time.

Conceptual Reality

Do not believe in what you have heard; do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations; do not believe anything because it is rumored and spoken of by many; do not believe merely because the written statement of some old sage is produced; do not believe in conjectures; do not believe merely in authority of your teachers and elders. When you accept your truth and live it awareness presents itself.

Those thoughts came from Buddha. There were written in the Karma Sutra. Buddha believed that nothing in the exterior world manifests unless it appears in the mind first. We are examples of the great creativity of consciousness. Everything is connected in the energy of spontaneous cooperation. From the highest to the smallest, to the greatest and the lowest, between every atom and molecule there are qualities of the conscious mind in action. The feeling-tones of the world manifests from the consciousness that creates them.

The deep and abiding rhythms of these ancient feeling-tones create thoughts, and they lay on a bed in the mind. These creative portions of the psyche manifest in individual patterns and they become expressions of life. The mind expresses inner knowing and unknowing, and it constantly surprises the self. The unconscious unknowing is just as knowing as the conscious knowing in the inner world of the psyche. We project and then reflect our own thoughts, and they become experiences of some kind. Buddha talks about our reflections and how we create a revolving ego that tries to alter those reflections in order to conform and experience physical desires. We live in a picture, and we paint the self in various ways. That picture changes as the ego becomes aware of itself. The ego is connected to the unknowing, and it constantly falls back into the unconscious to sip the nectar of unknowing. That action creates another ego, which blooms and expresses perceptions, which contain more knowledge.

The truth that Buddha talks about is rooted in the fact that the ego is always changing. It dies and is reborn constantly. The ego we called the ‘self’ five or ten years ago is not the same ego expressing the self now. The creative psyche creates and re-creates the ego as we expand in awareness. Our beliefs are the foundation for our experiences. If those beliefs are reflections of distorted truths, we live in a conceptual reality. In a conceptual reality truth becomes a flexible commodity that impacts awareness. A conceptual reality is the individual choice of consciousness. At some point conceptual reality blends with the unknowing, and the truthful nectar saturates it.

Significant Facts

The diverse response and grades of significance that an object elicits can be illuminated this way: An animal may see an oddly shaped black and white object, a tribal person a rectangular flexible object with curious marking. To a western child it is a book, while to an adult it may be a particular type of book, namely a book that makes incomprehensible, even ridiculous claims about reality. Finally to a physicist it may be a profound text on quantum physics.

Roger Walsh M.D., Ph.D. wrote those thoughts in his essay, Hidden Wisdom. We all know, but sometimes overlook the fact that awareness occurs in stages. Our beliefs as well as the new knowledge we digest contribute to our present state of awareness. Walsh makes us aware that stages of awareness are rooted in what we believe reality to be. Reality is not a fixed state; it changes as we change our perceptions and the significance of our perceptions. A good example of how these stages work is our current belief about war, poverty and disease. Our thoughts about these facts generate our experiences that are associated with them. Our energy, concentration and focus on these facts, and others like them, make them real to all of us in different ways. Significant facts vary quite a bit depending on our immediate awareness and the associations we attach to those facts.

The Buddhist economist E.F. Schumacher explains how facts should be understood this way:

Facts do not carry labels indicating the appropriate level at which they ought to be considered. Nor does the choice of an inadequate level lead the intelligence into factual error or logical contradictions. All levels of significance up to the level of the meaning in the example of the book are equally factual, equally logical, equally objective, but not equally real. When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.

Schumacher’s explanation of reality is a valid one when we consider the vacillating perceptions that surround facts. Self-conscious righteousness accepts facts through a narrow slit in a controlled pre-conceived reality. That reality rejects and even condemns facts that exist outside of that judgmental path. There is a sense of stagnation in that path, and the result is a clear separation in perceived truths. Each and every reality opens a doorway, and through that doorway we are able to experience our desires and expand our psyche.

Physical life is a mixture of significant and non-significant facts that blend into a potpourri of perceptions and choices that produce different stages of reality. The source of the psyche’s strength is interwoven within the fabric of expanding realities. The level of the knower is a subjective choice. We choose how we want to experience facts, and from those choices we expand our beliefs. Those beliefs may not be reality to all, but they are a valid reality to the consciousness that is creating them.

Physical Actions

In the same way that we today think that the slave trade and colonial exploitation were inhuman and inconceivably bestial ways of acquiring riches, there is no doubt that coming generations will think that our form of world trade and distribution of the world’s benefits were just as inconceivable and inhuman.

Eric Dammann was born in Norway in 1931. He wrote the 1979 book, The Future in Our Hands. Dammann established the 1970s movement, The Future in Our Hands, which promoted personal, political and social change. The goal of the movement was to enhance the sense of freedom that individuals expect in a modern society.

Every generation tends to look back and judge the decisions made by former generations. We use secondary information as the measuring stick for the present. We forget that our beliefs form the reality we experience. We function in a survival mode because the reality we create is filled with negative energy. The responsibility to create a reality that is rich in freedom without using the tools of injustice and pseudo-economic well-being is lost in the ruble of our conscious objectiveness. Social acceptance is a top priority, but it is wrapped in a lot of self-defeating strings that stress our body consciousness. The desire to express emotion, even if it is negative emotion, is the fuel of life.

The time to firmly grasp our own reality and then acknowledge and accept it as our own is beating its head on our creative doors. It’s time to sort through our belief structure and weed out the beliefs that are responsible for the negativity we shower ourselves with every day. Self-conscious righteousness is a narrow bridge that only allows limited traffic through the channels of individual reality. When we give our innate emotions the opportunity to expand our belief structure, we begin to experience a surge in our physical energy. The desire to create new experiences using other aspects of our consciousness is the formula for tapping into vast regions of the psyche that want to express objectiveness in unique and productive ways.

As we tap into these new areas of the self, past fears, failures and catastrophes are accepted and understood. They are in our reality to expand our awareness of the self. Each generation creates their own formula for traveling through time, and that formula becomes a measuring stick for the future expansion of awareness. We guide the self through the maze of physical explorations and issues to experience the energy of consciousness. Consciousness is always in an expansion mode. Consciousness constantly brings the present self to the door of awareness. When we recognize the power of the innate energy that is within the door, our physical actions change. Our physical actions become a blend of different aspects of consciousness that vacillate between the present, past and future.

In The Mystery

Asking yourself the deeper questions opens up new ways of being in the world. It brings in a breath of fresh air. It makes life more joyful. The real trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery.

Fred Alan Wolf Ph.D., the award winning author, has the ability to explain quantum mechanics in simple terms. Fred was featured in the movie, What the Bleep Do We Know. The mystery of life surrounds us in our physical reality, and we have been trained to accept it as something we can never fully understand. We tend to fear the mystery so we usually depend on secondary experiences to fill us with information about how we should live, and how we should act and react in the mystery. We rarely depend on our actual contact with our inner environment, and our emotional senses that guide us as we experience certain aspects of that mystery. We have trained ourselves to believe that what we read, watch and discuss is much more real than what we imagine and dream.

Our consciousness is much more than our conscious mind. But, the body has been wired to receive clear assessments from that conscious mind in order to perceive space and time. The body depends on that knowledge to construct the influences and associations that attach themselves to our individual belief structure. Our cultural conditions are established by these secondary influences, and the body mechanism becomes distorted by this objective information. Reading about danger and disaster propels the body into a state of fear when no danger or fear actually exists within our individual reality.

Reading about a natural disaster is different from actually being a part of that disaster, but our ego projects us into that disaster and we feel the danger. We ignore the feedback from our primary consciousness in the present moment, and create pseudo-creature reactions that invade not only the present, but our future experiences. We rob ourselves by limiting our personal ability to act meaningful and with purpose in the now. We begin to believe that the most negative prophesies are the most practical ones even when our conscious mind is telling us we are innately safe.

The body is not designed to act tomorrow, today. Our conscious mind is not designed for extinction nor are we designed to live in fear. Our experiences can be filled with contrast, but there is an innate genius in all of us that guides us. We create the mystery Fred mentions in order to sense other aspects of the self that exist within the conscious mind.

Resurrection Of Our Own Religion

Zen is what makes the religious feeling run through its legitimate channel and what gives life to the intellect. Zen does this by giving one a new point of view of looking at things, a new way of appreciating the truth and beauty of life and the world, by discovering a new source of energy in the inmost recesses of consciousness and by bestowing on one a feeling of completeness and sufficiency.

That is to say, Zen works miracles by overhauling the whole system of one’s inner life and opening up a world hitherto entirely undreamt of. This may be called a resurrection. And Zen tends to emphasize the speculative element, though confessedly it opposes this more than anything else in the whole process of spiritual revolution, and in this respect Zen makes use of phraseology belonging to the sciences of speculative philosophy.

In his work, Practical Methods of Zen Instruction, D.T. Suzuki tries explains the meaning of the word Zen, and he does a noble job. Zen or the action of inner consciousness is the catalyst that expands life experiences. Individual beliefs can restrict the action of Zen, but the intent and the desire to experience certain physical things can override beliefs. When old thoughts about new information and new thoughts about old information meet, our projection of Zen becomes distorted. Zen is restricted by our use of that information. Information from various outside sources can be inspirational as well as deceptive. Information may not necessarily be comprehensible, and it may not be useable knowledge so focus plays an essential role in physically activating our own Zen-ness.

Each thought is a mini-resurrection of some aspect of the self. The mind has many facets and they are expressed using different qualities of consciousness. Zen is the action within individual consciousness. It saturates thoughts with the stroke of genius. That is to say, Zen becomes another aspect of the self that brings new awareness to our reality. Zen may not conform to current beliefs or past information, but it can impact the way we perceive those beliefs and information. It is a form of energy that propels itself around our inner universe, and at some point in linear time it changes our personal reality.

Zen breaks down the mental roadblocks we construct during certain linear points of time. We often use this subjective aspect of our own being physically without cognitive thought, and our experiences become more than real. Zen brings us to the ledge of the vast universe that thrives within us. On that ledge, we realize we are a form of energy that exists within a certain region of consciousness. We are experiencing physical reality to expand that region as well as the stream that fuels all regions of consciousness. We can call this process an awakening, a resurrection, or our spiritual revolution. The miracle of overhauling our belief system and sensing other elements of the self is rooted in the action of our inner consciousness. Suzuki calls it Zen. We can call it the resurrection of our own religion.

The Hour Of Becoming

The hour is striking so close above me, So clear and sharp, That all my senses ring with it. I feel it now: There’s a power in me To grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real Without my beholding it. All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things And they come towards me, to meet and be met.

No thing is too small for me to cherish And paint in gold, as if it were an icon That could bless us, Though I’ll not know who else among us Will feel this blessing.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours was published in 1905. He was twenty three when he started this work of art. The inspiration for this book of poems came from what Rilke called “inner dictation.” An inner voice spoke to him at different times during the day, and he listened to that voice. He manifested those deep seeded thoughts through his poetry. All of us experience this sort of innate electrical intensity, but we manifest these messages in different ways. Creativity is the product of life and we all have an endless supply of it. The energy we project comes back to us as reflections and we produce our reality, but we have been trained to believe someone or something else is doing that creating. That belief structure has kept us in the vacillating spiritual fog, and we call it a religious mystery.

The act of beholding our manifestations expands our beliefs as the creative enzymes become part of our reality. These creative enzymes spring from the stream of consciousness, and they embrace our senses in an intense dance of consciousness. The dance is immersed in energy, and a metamorphic resonance takes place. This action of consciousness changes as we expand our beliefs so reality becomes a pliable experience. A catechism of wisdom spews from our minds, and we live through our projections and choices. These molecules of radiant energy touch gravitational realism, and we build a story that teaches us something about the self, and all consciousness.

Creative energy leaves an imprint on the self, and all other aspects of the self experience that energy in unique ways. Energy is action that manifests in other realities as well as our own. The individual invisible wires of electrical intensity carry energy to each of us from several areas of consciousness, and we experience our own hour of becoming at certain points in linear time. When that happens, we begin to realize that becoming more than we believe we are is our desire in physical life.

The Ultimate Fact Of All Philosophy

Zen is the ultimate fact of all philosophy and religion. Every intellectual effort must culminate in it, or rather must start from it, if it is to bear any practical fruits. Every religious faith must spring from it if it has to prove at all efficiently and livingly workable in our active life. Therefore Zen is not necessarily the fountain of Buddhism thought and life alone; it is very much alive also in Christianity, Mohommedanism in Taoism and even in positivistic Confucianism. What makes all these religious and philosophies vital and inspiring, keeping up their usefulness and efficiency, is due to the presence in them of what I may designate as the Zen element.

D. T. Suzuki, the 20th century’s foremost authority on Buddhist thought, is explaining how Zen or consciousness impacts religion as well as philosophy. Zen is the inner action of consciousness, and it manifests using one of the non-physical aspect of the self or the psyche. The action of Zen can be experienced through different religions and philosophies because those modalities are part of our belief structure. Religions help open a channel to the inner self and we use that channel to form or influence our belief structure. All beliefs are valid to the believer until another aspect of consciousness forms another channel within the psyche. There is an ever-changing genesis of awareness going on within the psyche, and Zen is the word that can be used to describe portions of that genesis. Zen moments are unlimited, and they occur at various points in linear time.

Consciousness qualities fragment into Zen moments in order to sense other fragments of the self. Zen appears in religious experiences so the physical self can sense certain pieces of the psyche in time sequences. The action of the psyche intermingles with the action of Zen in a cloud-type way, and the combination produces a plethora of associations and influences that expand the awareness of our inner world.

Suzuki goes on to say:

Mere scholasticism or mere sacerdotalism will never create a living faith. Religion requires something inwardly propelling, energizing and capable of doing work. The intellect is useful in its place, but when it tries to cover the whole field of religion it dries up the source of life.

Faith is another way of saying we believe without proof. Individual consciousness experiences faith through the action of Zen not the action of religion. Religious groups tend to root themselves in rigid beliefs, and that inhibits the inner energy that circulates through the action of Zen. Those groups control willing participants through limited as well as judgmental beliefs. In that atmosphere faith is distorted. The source of faith constantly changes as we become more aware of the multiplicity that exists within the psyche and Zen. The value of an open mind is the main ingredient in the action of Zen, and it is a catalyst that regulates the power of religion.

Mutable Genius

Genius Upborne and surrounded we are by this all-creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the casual thought, and, far back in the womb of things, sees the rays parting from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters.

Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species; through many species, the genius; through all genera, the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unit. Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1841 essay History. Genius flows through all life. There’s even genius in the invisible forms of life that change the chemical make-up of other organisms. Life is a book of genius. That book is filled with blank pages, and individual consciousness gets to choose how to fill each page. Consciousness fills those pages with a special blend of innate energy that creates as it expands.

Our consciousness moves through a plethora of probabilities every moment, but we rarely see the genius within those untouched probabilities until a moment is shaped and lived. We try to examine all the genius within our mental reach, but we only see some of the mutable consciousness in the physical universe. In the unexplainable world of inner consciousness, genius is as fluid as the mental clouds formed by our perceptions. It is constantly in motion and it changes as we perceive it.

The freedom to explore our consciousness is restricted by our limited view of the self. We rely on religion or science to confirm or deny certain physical and non-physical truths about the nature of human consciousness. Once these “truths” are analyzed and judged by our fragmented system, the framework for logical sanity is established. Anything outside of that framework is considered false or insane until it has been proven true by our perceptions as well as our intent. Most of the truths we considered true through the centuries eventually are proven false so the framework of perceived genius has insane cracks in its foundation. Common sense guards the fractured framework until that common sense becomes uncommon.

Fragmented genius is classified using a logical sense of linear time, and exterior divisions. Our fragmented genius works as long as we stay within our fractured framework, but, our innate genius still exists outside of that framework, and it functions in a plethora of ways. That genius gradually breaks down the insanity of regulated commonality.

The insanity of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, a maggot turning into a fly, or an egg turning into physical consciousness show us various aspects of consciousness that thrive on mutable waves of time and space. The impetus to turn non-physical energy into individual mutable genius is part of the nature of the self. Mutable genius is a quality of consciousness. It breaks down the hard pendants of thought we form to define life.