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.