Spirit Pages (continued)
F) You can author your own experience from other levels.
You can play the playwright in the play of your life to a certain degree. You can make changes and work with your character and change the plot. You have to appreciate the limits of your power at each level, but you can exercise your influence at each level as well. Your identity has many levels working together to create the illusion of �self.� This means that you can go to higher and higher levels of your own identity and work from that level to advance the development of yourself.
You have to recognize that your own way of looking at things may not carry over to that other level of self. But as you become more flexible in your identification, you will see that the you that you have thought of yourself as being is in fact a concatenation of various identities working in tandem. All experiences are connected in having their own �feeling.� All feelings are connected in that they are all variations on a theme.
The point of saying this is that all experiences pass through a single point of reference, which can be thought of as Highest Consciousness, or as the highest version of our self. This is the place where everyone is one being. Every object has an innate context that creates its own environment. That is to say that we normally think of objects as independent things floating in an �environment� when in fact they are ideas inside ideas that carry with them the idea of their entire environment. Every object exists in time and at a specific place.
So, the idea of an object contains the idea of all that information. We are also objects in our environment and as such we are generating our environment as much as it is �containing� us. This definitely helps us redraw our place in the world, as we are ourselves generating it by existing in it. Every feeling creates an event, objects, experiences and context that generates that feeling in the consciousness of the person who is having that feeling, rather than being merely generated by an event. That means that as much as context creates feelings, feelings create the whole event and context as well. The idea of a feeling contains everything that �creates� it.
To generalize, you could say that everything is as much the creator as it is the created in a world of ideas, and the physical is ultimately a world of ideas. Identity is made up of not only the different levels of identity, but also the spaces between them. That is to say that between level of identity x and level of identity y, there is a space that is mostly made up of non-identity and partially made up of identity. By non-identity I mean vast amounts of information that defines what we are not.
At the midpoint between levels of identity there is a point of almost zero identity where we are mostly defined by what we are not. In a nutshell, we are as much defined by the information of what we are not as what we are. The non-us has an identity that by default defines us negatively. There is an Absolute Reality behind all levels of existence, and no level of existence comes even close to it. All levels of existence are equally real/unreal/valid/etc. in comparison to absolute reality. There are always infinite levels of understanding between even the highest level of manifest reality and Absolute Reality.
We have discussed the idea before that Spirit consciousness is like a ball of yarn getting bigger and bigger in a huge void. The growth and development is sideways but also upwards as well. That means that consciousness at that level is constantly working to create a higher and higher ceiling for Spirit consciousness, to achieve a higher pinnacle of experience. But, Spirit consciousness can never reach Absolute Reality, which is the highest consciousness, even though it can progress forever, and will. This is a lot to process, so let�s look at each item in more detail.
F1) Your identity has many levels working together to create the illusion of �self.�
This means that you can go to higher and higher levels of your own identity and work from that level to advance the development of your self. You have to recognize that your own way of looking at things may not carry over to that other level of self.
But as you become more flexible in your identification, you will see that your �self� is actually a concatenation of various identities working in tandem on different levels. If you think mostly in terms of higher levels as being ethereal levels of light and feeling, you might be interested in inventing your own �higher self� setting that is a bit more concrete.
For example, you could be a hero in a fantasy setting, facing fantastic foes with amazing powers. You could examine your foes and challenges and relate them to your current life challenges. What does your current �heroic quest� represent for you in this life?
Or, you could be in a room full of people who are part of your �group soul,� a group of people who are parts of a larger self. Each self carries part of the responsibility for the advancement of the group soul. You could see who you are at that level and what your goals is, both in terms of the group and yourself individually.
Or, you could explore being a natural force, part of a �life being� that is both organic and inorganic, human and non-human at once. You could see how your physical life represents part of what the �nature matrix� is doing, rather than the usual view that we are outside of nature.
You could have a self that mixes with great philosophers, scientists, saints and mystics in a casual environment. What conversation are you having there? The point of all this is that for every possible permutation of yourself at different levels, you are pulling back more of the curtain and revealing more and more of who and what you are, as a multileveled being.
At first you might be challenged to draw your �self� with such a broad stroke, but as you spend more time in each character�s shoes, you will realize that the growing collection of selves is in fact part of a fabric of being that extends to touch everything around you, all lives and all problems and all history. You get insight into everything, not just the vagaries of your own life.
What are the advantages of multi-leveled thinking about yourself? If you think about any fantasy life that you have that has any plot, you could place yourself in a setting created by a science fiction show or popular drama, or create your own. No matter what the setting, the missing element usually is not looking for a direct interpretation of what you are going through in your fantasy life in terms of relating it to your real life.
It is a lot like dream interpretation. I have created a dream character I call my �dream cop� who is an old fashioned police officer. He is someone I consult to interpret my dream characters and events. I can ask him any question about any dream and he can give you a concise translation of what the dream means. I usually access him when I am half-asleep. But, such a character can be used in visualization or at any level of your exploration of the levels of your self. He can be brought in and questioned and will show you how the situation at that level mirrors your physical life issues.
For example, in the fantasy setting, I was a priest of the God of Time, who is on a boat in a rough ocean. He is moving to a place where a violation of the time-stream has occurred and will seek to correct it. It is probably an evil wizard that is seeking to bend the stream of time and fate to his or her own purposes. This spot is in the middle of the ocean, and it is a place where time has come to a stop.
My dream cop explains that this means that I am here on earth to help correct people who are misusing time. In other words, those people who are not using their time in life in a positive way, more specifically, by seeking to hold onto the past and thus are holding others back from progressing naturally. This is an example of how you can explore this.
This insight helps me to more clearly define what I am doing. Also, the understanding that I am moving toward a meaningful encounter helps me understand how my life can be in a lull but still be involved in meaningful pursuit. I can follow, in the future, this storyline, and see how it plays out. I will eventually have to face the time distortion and rectify it, as well as probably having an encounter with the villain who created it. This will be reflected in my life in some way. It is good to know that as the hero I will win in the end. (I hope�)
In the exercise below, I will discuss creating your own dream interpreting character and how to use them to explore various levels of your self and how to chart your progress.
Exercise: Dream Interpreting Character and Self-Exploration
Begin by getting comfortable with your journal and a notebook. Relax and think back to a dream you had at some point in the past that was not a nightmare. Try to focus on a dream with a memorable setting, where you can capture the feeling of the setting of that dream even today. Place yourself in that setting and walk around a bit, exploring. Now, think of a character from a dream that you had once that you feel comfortable with. If you can�t think of such a character, create one. This person should make you feel very at ease. The character is with you now, so ask them some questions about your dream life or a specific dream or nightmare that you are puzzled about. Ask them is they are willing to be your official dream interpreter. If they say yes, then move on to the next portion, otherwise, generate a new character and try again.
Go to a higher level of self as we were discussing before. It can be any setting as you choose. Explore your self at that level, getting a feel for who you are there and what is going on. Once you have identified generally what is happening with you at that level and what your goals are, shift your identification to your �normal� self, while still in that setting, and ask your dream interpreter to show up. Ask them to interpret the events, situation, etc. in terms of what it represents in your present life. Take notes in your journal, including your dream interpreter�s name and appearance. In the future, consider reconnecting with this level of self and seeing where you are at that time in that storyline.
F2) All experiences are connected in having their own �feeling.�
All feelings are connected in that they are all variations on a theme. The point of saying this is that all experiences pass through a single point of reference, which can be thought of as Highest Consciousness, or as the highest version of our self. This is the place where everyone is one being. The commonality of all experiences creates a flow of being that is like a huge fabric. There is no privacy of consciousness, and nothing is entirely new.
Every accomplishment you have ever achieved is partially due to the efforts and
resources of others, and the accomplishments of others. The language we speak, the roads we drive on and every single thing we buy has to be produced. Although many people wish to divorce themselves of the experience of poverty, it is often the poor who are the base of the pillar of society, generating the basic products and services that make our lives possible. The wealthy, in a sense, feed on the poor. It takes the poverty of many people to create the wealth of a few in some cases, although not all.
There is a level of being in Spirit where all experiences run though one being. You are that being and so is anyone else. Our individual experiences make up the whole of their experience. From the Spirit level of understanding, all levels of identification are valid. The point is not to be shoved back into that one identity and to lose your individuality; the point is to explore experience throughout an infinite number of evolutionary possibilities. Although some states of being have more information and some have less, the fact that all consciousness in existence is unique and not repeated exactly anywhere is what makes its contributions unique and thus valuable.
It is like a world of paintings, where every new experience, whether it be a sick alcoholic dying in a cardboard box under a bridge or a scientist inventing a cure for a dread disease, is a masterpiece and a unique masterpiece at that. We may not at this level not always see the value, but at the level of pure meaning-experience, we definitely would.
Part of the problem is that we only appreciate what is valuable to us personally, which is essentially what is useful to us in the present. But when you are a being of consciousness, and you have eternity to explore all experiences, you don�t want to reject any experience from being because it can generate a value to someone, somewhere who will in turn possibly create something new of value and meaning to you, even if it isn�t directly and immediately of value to you.
The relentless, heartless advance of �civilization,� which is in itself so uncivilized, is nothing but the face of evolution, which both mercilessly destroys and relentlessly tests and creates. Evolutionary creation and destruction are endless because it is the nature of consciousness to constantly change and evolve into newness, and existence is made out of consciousness.
When you start thinking about yourself as pure consciousness, a number of things change. You can enjoy and appreciate your imagination equally with your �real� experiences, knowing that they are both equally real at a fundamental level, except that you are stuck into a context with one more than the other. You start thinking about the infinite stretches of time before you and how you are going to populate them with experiences.
You think in your imagination rather than being penned in by physical experience. You build your life both in the world and in the world of imagination, and as you do you broaden your self-definition and range of experience. You build new neighborhoods in your mind and frequent them. You broaden your definition of self to include higher levels of being and stretch beyond both the human and the familiar. You tour heavens and hell and pleasure paradises. You climb the highest ladders of intellectual exploration. You quickly exceed your ability to communicate what you know to others.
Ultimately, you drop the idea of consciousness as a thing or event and that the word is just pointing to something infinite and indefinable that simply is what we are. In the following exercise we will explore being a being made of pure consciousness.
Exercise: Pure Consciousness
In this exercise we will explore an imaginary landscape and switch to a self-perception that is pure consciousness. Then we will apply this to our physical experience. Begin by creating an imaginary outdoor landscape that you are comfortable. Then, hold up a pair of glasses that when worn will switch you to a mode of perception where you are entirely made of pure consciousness and so is your environment, with no �materiality� in them. Put the glasses on and notice the change in your perception of your own body, your environment and your senses.
You may notice that you can feel the distance between yourself and distant objects, rather than just seeing them. You can move your hand over the distant scenes and feel the contours of the objects. You can experience other forms of synesthesia, where you can taste colors, or smell shapes. You can extend your emotions out from you physically and touch the landscape with them. You can change your body, becoming completely flat like a sheet of glass, or amorphous and vast, filling the whole environment.
You can filter into the ground and the trees and feel their state of being. You can reach back in time and touch the scene there as a prehistoric world or reach into the distant future to touch it there. These are just the most cosmetic alterations you can explore. The deepest exploration is the alterations of consciousness that you can go into at this level. For the last part of this exercise, stay in the same state but shift the scene to a scene that was somehow emotionally important to you as a child or young adult. Re-explore this scene from this pure consciousness state and feel how you are able to explore the consciousness of everyone present.
Then, explore your current home and job situation, exploring them from this vantage point as well. Take time to explore objects that are important to you and the energy they give off. How do these places reflect where you are in your current life consciousness? Take notes in your journal as needed. You might also want to use this to explore a dream scene that you have had trouble interpreting.
F3) Every object has an innate context that creates its own environment.
This means that each object is an idea that is not just free-floating, but part of a larger context. So, the idea of an object contains the entire universe around it. It has to do so or it will not have a complete context in which to exist. Although this seems ridiculous at first glance, we can make sense of this statement.
First of all, the basic nature of all things is as pure concept made of consciousness (that is conscious). So, an object may have a form we can identify, but its nature is that of a conscious entity. This consciousness has no mass, size or qualities per se except in the way it expresses itself. That is to say, those qualities are not innate to the object/consciousness but are a form of expression or communication for the object/consciousness. The redness of a fire hydrant or the blueness of the sky are qualities that express the consciousness that those things really are.
If an object appears to have no consciousness, such as wooden block, we have to look deeper to see it. In actuality the block is made of consciousness that is conscious, and the form and limitations of the object are purely a form of expression for the object. The lack of nerves and �consciousness� of the block are qualities that the block/consciousness is expressing. In the physical world, the object may not have any intelligence or self-awareness, but physical being is just a tiny fraction of a much larger reality.
It is like sticking our finger into a lake and the fish seeing only the tip of our finger. Physicality and the form of an object are all just a means of experiencing, knowing and perceiving, evolving and those experiences include self-expression.
So, we come to the question of how the context of a simple object/consciousness can encompass the whole world. In a world of concepts that are made of consciousness, the great mystery is that all of these concepts contain all of existence, because all other consciousnesses are the context that define what they are. We have even made a bolder statement though, that every object has an innate context that creates its own environment. This is an act of creation.
Every object is made of consciousness that is evolving, and we have explored how only a fraction of that consciousness is expressed in the physical. This is also true in human beings in the physical as well. So, this consciousness must, in order to evolve, have exactly the right circumstances that produce the exact optimal experiences needed to catapult it into maximum personal evolution at each moment.
This is necessary because consciousness as we understand it in a time-space fashion can only exist in a state of motion and that motion is evolution. This in turn is because the only thing consciousness does is evolve. Anything less and consciousness would become cease to be self-aware in the same way. The momentum of consciousness from moment to moment in evolutionary development is what makes consciousness.
The environment must be entirely created with the object/consciousness in mind. So, the context of the object/consciousness in effect creates the environment by evolving and projecting at each moment both the world and the form of the object.
So, this creates an interesting conundrum. How can each object�s context be involved in this process of creating the rest of existence without conflict? The answer is pure semantics. The difference between talking about the consciousness/object�s context and all consciousness/objects in existences� contexts as one thing is only in our use of words to define reality. That is to say that the process of evolution is exactly the same for all configurations of consciousness, whether they be collective or �individual.�
If we pick two random object/consciousnesses and look at them both individually and as one consciousness, even though they may not appear to be connected in any way at the physical level, they can be considered to be one consciousness evolving in two different forms, because consciousness has no innate form, and therefore has no innate identity.
Another way to state this is that if we backtrack to lighter and lighter degrees of materialism, beginning at the physical world, we will arrive at a point where any two object/consciousnesses will be one consciousness, have one identity and not be separate.
The context of an object/consciousness is simply a mirror that simultaneously creates both the object and the world around it, both as projections on a screen, in a sense. Some of the consciousness of the object is expressed externally through the external context and some is experienced in the object itself.
Ultimately, the confusing image of co-creation is a stepping-stone for us as we move toward less materialistic modes of thinking. We step into our consciousness of the world as consciousness by first creating a model that resolves the seeming discrepancies that appear in the physical world. Then, we experience directly the world as consciousness at a tactile level through the use of our imagination. When we evolve sufficiently in our understanding of the world, we actually experience physical realities as concepts.
As a side note, it should be said that language seems to fail to describe reality at its most fundamental levels. However, we could create a more sophisticated language to more successfully allow us to describe reality at higher levels of understanding. Just as in science, we do this through trial and error and experimentation.
Part of our evolutionary process will be to collectively build a more sophisticated Spiritual language. This will have the effect of shedding light on entirely new concepts to the human race. I recently heard a Pink Floyd album and a New Age recording. I realized that certain common chords/instrumental tones/passages that tended to be repeated through each actually carried with them a certain tone of consciousness. Although I probably experience this consciousness through my own filters, it also has a mass meaning in common that people can relate to on a mass level. Emerging music thus both carries and mirrors new consciousness. Which creates which?
Exercise: Exploration of Context
In this exercise we will explore an object as consciousness. We will become the context of the object as consciousness and experience the process of this context creating all existence. Begin by creating a world. In this case, make it a beautiful lake at the foot of majestic mountains, under a clear blue sky. This is an idealized landscape.
Now, create a black cube. This cube is six inches on each side, and is made of wood. Hold it in your hand and see it against the background of this world you have created. Now, count from one to ten, with the goal of actually being the object as consciousness by the time you reach ten. Look at yourself from the position of the cube. Although the cube cannot see you, the consciousness that it is can. You are totally identified with this cube/consciousness now. How does this consciousness perceive you?
Now we will explore being the �context� of the cube/consciousness. This is the setting and time stream that cradle the object in being, and is also part of the object/consciousness itself. It is both internal and external to the cube, and in this case we will experience it as consciousness. Count from one to ten and identify with it. Look first at the cube and then yourself from this position.
Get a feel for your relationship with both the cube and the �external world� around you. Once you have your bearings, see how you are involved in creating all of existence outside of the black cube.
This process is effortless and is done simply by reflecting the cube�s consciousness in two different ways, as the form and identity of the cube on the one hand, and a movie screen-like projection of the physical world as the remaining aspects of the consciousness of the cube.
To simplify, the cube/consciousness expresses as either the cube or the world surrounding the world. But both are essentially pictures without substance. The context/consciousness of the object is nothing but a mirror that divides the world into subject/object in a particular way, and in this way creates the whole world and evolution. As a final exercise, explore yourself as an object/consciousness, and then your context/consciousness.
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