June 2008

I’d like to provide an understanding of the fundamental difference between knowing and believing. The absolute key to truly support an ascended, selfactualised consciousness is to move into a state of knowing.

Knowing and believing are two completely different things. Believing is about constructing with your lower mind. Beliefs are something that you construct and are akin to a lens through which you view things. To some degree every lens distorts, so to support an ascended consciousness is to move beyond “limited lens seeing,” to move beyond beliefs as a means through which you interpret reality. That’s easy to say and much more difficult to do, particularly when the collective consciousness on our beloved earth is geared around believing certain things. Just because you believe something does not mean it’s true, it’s just something that you believe.

You never know what you think. You can only ever know what you feel. This is why the great teachers have always said, ‘feelings are the eyes of the heart.’ Thinking about feeling is not the same as feeling. Thinking about reality is not the same as simply experiencing reality. The soul, you the soul, feel and feeling is the synthesis of everything that you experience.

Below the soul level we have our physical, emotional and lower mental bodies. These are the bodies which we’ve grown in this particular life. The humanness of you, as wondrous as it is, only knows what it has experienced in this one, short, lifetime. Hence it makes a lousy guru and this is why I encourage you to stop thinking all the time about everything. Most people, even concerning their enlightenment or personal growth process and service work, don’t do anything unless they consult their mind. They say to their lower mind, “what do you think about this?” All the lower mind knows is what it has experienced in a few short years, so any answer that it gives is limited because each life is just one day in the life as you as a soul.

Get out of this idea that you’re going to think your way to enlightenment. That’s just not going to happen. We need a far greater understanding of our humanness if our humanness is going to become fully and completely fused with you as a soul and descend an ascended consciousness, or higher aspect, of you into this reality as a human soul.

This physical body that you can see, hear, touch and smell with is the solid, liquid and gas bit. It’s a very small part of the totality of all that you are. It’s only three tiny levels of the human bit of you that you’ve built in this life. Your physical body is constituted of seven sublevels - solid, liquid, gas and four levels of ether. The etheric levels, while still technically part of the form, are more about sensing and are intangible. They allow you to see, smell, hear and feel sensations. Many people believe that the sensations experienced by the physical body are their feelings; however that’s not true, because it’s the soul that experiences feeling. Sensations within the physical bit of you are most certainly part of what the soul experiences as feelings but they’re not the same thing. Sensations are simply part of that total experience of you as a soul, feeling what it’s like to be a human being.

Your emotional body also has organs and a circulatory system. It takes energy in and out; it cycles prana in and out of itself, and exchanges life with the universal energy field. The emotional body allows you to interact, in a sentient way, to have an emotional interplay with the experience of being human.

The mental plane also has seven sub levels and structures on each of these sub levels. The brain, the chakra matrix and the nervous system are just a switch board, an interface between the soul and its physical vehicle to allow you to communicate to various levels of yourself. The mind is not located inside your head, the mind is a body of energy and there is mental matter equally intermingled with your feet as your head or as your hand.

Let’s perceive the mental body as a large sphere of golden energy protruding six feet, or two meters, beyond the body in all directions. The lowest level, vibrationally, of the mental body is the instinctive mind. Most animals rely almost exclusively for their mental processing on the instinctive mind and the instinctive mind runs entirely on survival. Instincts are about survival and passing on desirable qualities to offspring which are considered by the energies of nature to be those qualities which will ensure the ongoing evolutionary existence of those particular animals.

The instinctive mind is constantly monitoring all of the senses not just the five senses that we’re familiar with. (Dogs and many other animals use their tail as a kind of radar or sonar and that’s why they stick it up as they move around.) We have many senses beyond the normal five senses and the instinctive mind is constantly monitoring everything. It’s retrospective and constantly looking at what has just occurred and comparing that with what’s happened right now. So, if for instance, the instinctive mind of an animal experiences a river flowing, rain falling, the smell of fresh, wild flowers, the bright sun shining on that which is glistening in the rain, an antelope out of the corner of the eye in the distance and then the next instant a hunter appears and shoots that animal, it takes a snapshot and perceives danger, threat to survival, and it associates being potentially mortally wounded or slightly wounded with everything which just occurred. It takes a snapshot of the entire environment and all that goes into the collective, instinct mind of that whole species and perhaps even beyond. So then in the future, if that particular animal survives, or even it doesn’t, other members of that species, whenever there are any three of those ‘perceptives’ experienced--intuition, sight, hearing, smell, illumination, direct knowing, or a sensation—that response is re-stimulated and has the potential to cause an involuntary action in the animals instinctive mind.

If that animal ever experiences any three of those perceptions at any time in the future it will interpret that as I’m about to be shot. It doesn’t actually think like that but it’s equated to the threat of what happened next. Animals are relatively unconscious until they get to a stage of their development, which is just about when they’re to move into the human kingdom, and are focused almost entirely on survival. Because they are focused on survival they’re not really very aware.

Unconsciousness is associated with running hard on the instinctive mind. So any time that you are unconscious, your instinctive mind is constantly taking snap shots of your environment and associating those snap shots of your environment with what happened next. “Oh, I had an unpleasant experience on a date with someone,” if you are unconscious, not fully present and engaged as a soul with the experience of living, when you’re going on a date you will store in your instinctive mind everything which was associated with that so called unpleasant experience. Then any of those perceptives can then re-stimulate the same feeling and cause you to instinctively avoid going on a date. That has nothing at all to do with reality; it’s just being unconscious and running on the instinctive mind.

Then you go, “Oh I don’t know why I did that or said that.” If you are not in your body very much, unconscious much of the time and floating through life this will occur. People who’ve meditated an enormous amount without actually engaging with psychological processing end up floating through life without being present and engaging with the experience of living a physical presence. When you’re unconscious day after day you build in your instinctive mind a set of re-stimulators which cause you to react irrationally, unconsciously, involuntarily and instinctively. So you must move beyond the limitation of the instinctive mind. This is essential to develop an ascended consciousness.

The next level of the mental body is the habit mind. It stores patterns which then are able to be triggered and run to simplify the tasks of living. There are many repetitive tasks like when you first learned to wash up or brush your teeth or tie your shoe laces or even go to the toilet that you had to put a fair amount of consciousness into learning. Eventually you came up with a pattern, this then that, then this then that, to completion, and those patterns are stored in the habit mind. Some habits are constructive, some are not. There will be habits in
your habit mind which have been there since you were four which may have served you beautifully then, but now are completely irrelevant. We need to clear out any dysfunctional habits which exist in order to develop an ascended consciousness.

The next level of the mental body is the conscious mind. It reasons and thinks and is constantly constructing beliefs around the way you perceive life. You perceive life to be a certain way, you perceive something to always lead to something else and around these conclusions that you draw you then create beliefs. More often than not those beliefs are limited lenses on the reality that is spirit within you. We also need to move beyond the limitation of beliefs and reality models. Beliefs collectively constitute a particular reality model and you
may have a model of reality which you believe to be accurate which has a major belief installed in it which says something like ‘all men are bastards.’ That might be a perfectly valid, reasonable conclusion you seem to have drawn from your experience. Those sorts of limiting beliefs will taint your entire experience of life. They cause you to constantly judge. It is important to move beyond judgment and learn to love unconditionally to develop an ascended consciousness.

The next level of the mental body is the soul. The soul resides on the mental plane so it succumbs to illusion. Illusion is a distortion of reality that you create by projecting with your conscious mind onto the truth that you are experiencing how you believe it to be. Beliefs and knowing, believing something and knowing, is not the same thing because the truth simply exists. For example, you might believe that it’s a good thing to be working on your personal growth process. That’s bullshit, it’s just another belief and beliefs and reality are not the
same thing. It’s simply choice. You may believe that someone who is consciously embracing the personal growth process is better than someone who’s not, better than someone who’s out there cutting down the rainforest. That is not true either. That’s just a belief, a judgment of yours that is not true. There’s another three levels, vibrationally, above soul level which I will discuss in a future article.

Now there are certain limits within creation. A limit is how high you can jump or how fast you can swim. But a limitation is something you create with your mind, it’s a belief that you project onto reality. The only thing that prevents you from being fully God realised is your belief. You have to truly move beyond the experience of seeing things as good and bad, or even as better or worse to seeing things as different.

As you, the soul, chooses to use your mind to construct beliefs so does the soul go into an unconscious state. You must cease madly constructing thought forms into beliefs and creating out of those beliefs reality models and projecting those onto reality and you must simply choose to embrace reality. This is the fundamental shift, on the mental plane, that everyone who has genuinely attained to mastery has achieved to move beyond self imposed limitation of a reality model based experience.

Clearing out the instinctual, habit and conscious mind may seem like an enormous amount of work. Yes it is, and it means that you have to be conscious and aware in every moment of your life. Your thoughts, emotions, feelings and experience of living must be consciously experienced rather than drifted through unconsciously.

To just honestly experience life without projecting a reality model on to it is essential. Transformational processes taught by the Insight Foundation will clear out all these levels of mind. The development of psychological clarity and the cultivation of purity (the ability to love yourself and others unconditionally without judgment) are equally important to activating light bodies, meditating and doing all that top end work in the process of developing an ascended consciousness and self actualisation.

©Michael King -The Insight Foundation * Michael King is the Co-Founder and CEO of the Insight Foundation * www.theinsightfoundation.org.au * michael@theinsightfoundation.org.au *