The Higher Self and transcendent experience, including OBEs

[Guish]

I think that the last paragraph is very important as often spiritual seekers want to live in their bubble while bringing the bliss to routine tasks or relationships brings more peace and wisdom.

[TraineeHuman]

Posted by Guish (here)
I think that ... often spiritual seekers want to live in their bubble while bringing the bliss to routine tasks or relationships brings more peace and wisdom.

Indeed. Yes. At the beginning of this thread I mentioned the centrality of letting go. In some early posts I indicated that such letting go needs to be applied not just during meditation and for astral travel and psychic healing, but in life generally. After all, to quote from a song by Jennifer Warnes:

"Ain't no miracle bein' born
People doin' it everyday
Ain't no miracle growin' old
People just roll that way
So it goes like it goes and the river flows
And time it rolls right on
And maybe what's good gets a little bit better
And maybe what's bad gets gone."

In some posts I've also mentioned how proper letting go also very much includes staying involved to a certain degree. Partly because this is the only way to view the biggest picture: the "beyond" plus also the nitty-gritty. This means, then, seeing or feeling the "beyond" as it permeates its way all throughout every niche of the nitty-gritty level of reality.

It's analogous to how in sitting meditation, and in moving meditation, one releases one's back muscles by more than 50% from "normal". But one also consciously retains a certain lower level of tension in the back, just enough to keep it from dropping to the ground.

So, during meditation, the aim is to let go of unnecessary tension generally and leave only what's needed. This gives one a physical feeling of (seeming) effortlessness. Ditto with emotional/psychological tensions that the particular situation or your particular thoughts at the time are bringing up. But this doesn't mean escaping from, nor "fogging up", an awareness that these tensions exist, even as one ever so gradually lets a little more of them go. Not so easy to do, and as we know, it often takes ever such long practice, practice, practice to finally get things just right. But your older-age years will genuinely be just peaches and cream then.

Clearly, it's harder to keep on doing this outside of one's meditation periods because usually one will be more engaged with -- well, lost in, -- the tensions. But yes, as you say, Guish, that's the ultimate challenge, and it's most certainly the source of all the greatest gains and rewards. And staying that way permanently is precisely what genuine enlightenment is about, says he.

Beginner meditation usually involves learning to physically relax plus simultaneously learn to cultivate being aware or "mindful". One should ideally learn quite quickly to turn the letting go of physical tension into bliss at a (purely) physical or sensual level. The hard part is to then learn more and more how to turn (dissolve, just drop) all one's emotional tensions straight into bliss. At the physical level, the aim is that one quickly learns to tap into (or "switch on") the body's natural physical bliss, and as very much the normal or (higher-) "natural" state. The much harder part is learning to equanimously retain that bliss -- and freedom from negative emotions -- however badly lost at sea emotionally your circumstances may some days threaten to supposedly make you.

Yes, that's what it's all about. Absolutely.

[Guish]

I was recently talking about Master Dogen to Fuyu, a Buddhist monk and Friend of mine. Master Dogen was trying to find the right master to learn true Dharma and he stumbled on a Buddhist Cook. The cook told him that cooking meals for the priests was his true practice and he was not interested in doing another activity to learn true practice. The point is that any activity can bring our true nature out and each activity is actually practice.

[TraineeHuman]

Posted by Guish (here)
Master Dogen was trying to find the right master to learn true Dharma and he stumbled on a Buddhist Cook. The cook told him that cooking meals for the priests was his true practice and he was not interested in doing another activity to learn true practice. The point is that any activity can bring our true nature out and each activity is actually practice.

A major issue in this is that although the Western notion of "God" supposedly says -- according to theologians -- that God is both imminent and transcendent, in practice God is treated by most (including at least some of the theologians) as being 100% transcendent. In other words, there is supposedly, Westerners believe, an infinite, largely untraversable gulf between God and man or woman.

Only in such a state of affairs does it seem so desperately important to have "very special" experiences. For these mean one is temporarily crossing that gap, however much also incompletely and wildly and (psychologically) harmfully this may perhaps in most cases be being done. In this way, the myth of the vast infinite gap is given even greater credibility. But what I'm talking about is not buying that myth at all -- and eventually (hopefully) living and experiencing everything in such a way that the myth no longer makes sense.

Yes, at the very least Dogen had the right idea. He was a 12th century Japanese master who tried so hard to really strip Zen Buddhism (which was ultimately based on ancient Taoism as much as on Buddhism), and indeed also the essence of Mahayana Buddhism, of all its ritual and formality and other clutter, and just keep the essential direct experience (just of immanence, hopefully) and the practice of such experience. I believe he didn't entirely succeed, no doubt partly because the Japanese are, and even back then were, probably the most formal people in the world (even worse than the British). Some scholars believe that Zen reached its peak in the fourth to sixth centuries in China, as Ch'an Buddhism, and that by Dogen's time too much clutter (too much of "special" behaviors) had wormed its way into everything. But maybe not. After all, immanence has no problem with time.

[samildamach]

Posted by TraineeHuman (here)

Posted by Guish (here)
I think that ... often spiritual seekers want to live in their bubble while bringing the bliss to routine tasks or relationships brings more peace and wisdom.

Indeed. Yes. At the beginning of this thread I mentioned the centrality of letting go. In some early posts I indicated that such letting go needs to be applied not just during meditation and for astral travel and psychic healing, but in life generally. After all, to quote from a song by Jennifer Warnes:

"Ain't no miracle bein' born
People doin' it everyday
Ain't no miracle growin' old
People just roll that way
So it goes like it goes and the river flows
And time it rolls right on
And maybe what's good gets a little bit better
And maybe what's bad gets gone."

In some posts I've also mentioned how proper letting go also very much includes staying involved to a certain degree. Partly because this is the only way to view the biggest picture: the "beyond" plus also the nitty-gritty. This means, then, seeing or feeling the "beyond" as it permeates its way all throughout every niche of the nitty-gritty level of reality.

It's analogous to how in sitting meditation, and in moving meditation, one releases one's back muscles by more than 50% from "normal". But one also consciously retains a certain lower level of tension in the back, just enough to keep it from dropping to the ground.

So, during meditation, the aim is to let go of unnecessary tension generally and leave only what's needed. This gives one a physical feeling of (seeming) effortlessness. Ditto with emotional/psychological tensions that the particular situation or your particular thoughts at the time are bringing up. But this doesn't mean escaping from, nor "fogging up", an awareness that these tensions exist, even as one ever so gradually lets a little more of them go. Not so easy to do, and as we know, it often takes ever such long practice, practice, practice to finally get things just right. But your older-age years will genuinely be just peaches and cream then.

Clearly, it's harder to keep on doing this outside of one's meditation periods because usually one will be more engaged with -- well, lost in, -- the tensions. But yes, as you say, Guish, that's the ultimate challenge, and it's most certainly the source of all the greatest gains and rewards. And staying that way permanently is precisely what genuine enlightenment is about, says he.

Beginner meditation usually involves learning to physically relax plus simultaneously learn to cultivate being aware or "mindful". One should ideally learn quite quickly to turn the letting go of physical tension into bliss at a (purely) physical or sensual level. The hard part is to then learn more and more how to turn (dissolve, just drop) all one's emotional tensions straight into bliss. At the physical level, the aim is that one quickly learns to tap into (or "switch on") the body's natural physical bliss, and as very much the normal or (higher-) "natural" state. The much harder part is learning to equanimously retain that bliss -- and freedom from negative emotions -- however badly lost at sea emotionally your circumstances may some days threaten to supposedly make you.

Yes, that's what it's all about. Absolutely.

Are there a difference between types of bliss,such as bliss generated from the heart as a focal point to that of the mind.
The more I practice bringing forward bliss through the heart as a focus I notice a slight synchronicity with the third eye chakra light a pulse as though the two are joined at bliss.

[Guish]

Hi TH,

My Buddhist friend sent this from Eiheiji. It's connected to what we are discussing here.

[TraineeHuman]

Posted by samildamach (here)
The more I practice bringing forward bliss through the heart as a focus I notice a slight synchronicity with the third eye chakra light a pulse as though the two are joined at bliss.

As I've mentioned before, ideally one should learn to access one's higher faculties through the heart and the mid-head and the oversoul together, with all three combined. But initially it's easiest to learn to do it via the heart center only, and to build further from there.

Are there a difference between types of bliss, such as bliss generated from the heart as a focal point to that of the mind

Well, you're talking about "bliss" and unfortunately that makes things tough for me. As I understand it, that question seems to me to be implicitly and indirectly seeking a definition, or at least a partial definition, of what bliss is. The truth is, virtually all of reality is quite undefinable, and also unknowable in any complete sense, unfortunately. (For example, strictly speaking, truth is undefinable. The mathematical proof that that is precisely so was considered one of the most important achievements in twentieth century mathematics, and in twentieth century philosophy as well.) I would say it's also true that all our experiences are expressions -- usually very distorted expressions -- of the infinite bliss. Bliss is ineffable, yet it's also certainly not nothing (in the nihilistic (non-)sense of "nothing").

Which bliss is "the real bliss"? My reply is: how long is a piece of string? To quote from the Kena Upanishad: “From Ananda (i.e., Bliss) all existences are born, by Ananda they remain in being and increase, to Ananda they depart.”
Any attempt to define something is an attempt to turn it into an object. In post #2649 https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1146404 I explained how the metaphysics (the "worldview" regarding everything) on which Zen and Taoism are based is relational and contextual, and how that's in stark contrast to, and indeed very much superior to, the dominant Western metaphysics that Westerners (all of you guys and gals -- though hopefully not any more, once you've appreciated what's in that post, hopefully) unknowingly have used from childhood and so have wrongly imagined to be "reality".

[TraineeHuman]

Further to my previous post, I believe I may need to include a reminder for the benefit of some newish readers. Please don't forget that, unfortunately, you can't begin to properly access the higher faculties (even psychic skills, such as to astral travel smoothly like I and some individuals do) until you master how to consciously step aside from the mind. In a word, here first you'll need to master ignoring and taking no interest in your thoughts. And you may not be able to do that unless you first learn something like how to be fully awake to ("mindful of") all your physical senses at once, and how to be quite often aware of all your thoughts (or most of them).

Then, to continue my comments regarding the heart, mid-head and oversoul centers, in my experience the heart center gives you intensity and warmth and positivity, while the mid-head center gives you clarity and higher understandings and insights. The oversoul combines the two together, so that, among other things, you experience the spaciousness, the all-pervadingness and power, of the delight that's in your heart center; plus the jewel-like beauty and the miraculous-seeming effectiveness and truth of the clarity in your mid-head.

In my experience, the oversoul is also often about interconnection with formless realms, and even with universality, or let's say infinity at least.

[Guish]

To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by all things.” ~Dogen

[TraineeHuman]

The question is, though, can one directly experience being, and living constantly with oneself as, at heart formless (and nameless)? No more of Fred Nurk (or whatever your name is) supposedly being you. That's finished, except it takes a very long time -- years -- to fully shake it all off. In other words: can one forget or discount the superficial "self" (the "self" that is in any sense an object and not, instead, a relation, or a flow, quite beyond objects in its essence)?

If so, one will actually be living beyond time, or at least with one "foot" beyond time and one "foot" in it. And what if actually, everything was so interconnected that living beyond time (but still being able to handle the superficial world of working for a living etc) would mean living in reality?

Memory is just a thing we do, not who we are.

[Guish]

You are asking a very important question here. One gets away from the drama, the normal aims of chasing money and fame. One stops getting carried away.
Are we still in the "reality" ?

[TraineeHuman]

What is this true “self” that exists beyond time and beyond one’s superficial self? Some talk of being aware of awareness itself. Let me clarify that this doesn't mean awareness of any concept of awareness. It’s pure awareness, quite beyond the mental world of concepts. It means being aware of -- as distinct from only passively being -- the one who experiences the physical senses. It also means being impassively aware of the one who is taken over by emotions and temporarily becomes this or that emotion. It also means being the unmoved watcher of one's thoughts who can consciously take or leave those thoughts, and the points of view behind them, with equal indifference. And it’s very much linked with being the authentic “I” as distinct from the superficial “I” that’s tied up in, or hijacked by, distractions. It's very important to get a sense of what are distractions and how the energy of them feels (i.e., no good).

What are some exercises to access this state directly? One is to practise physically letting go of tension progressively down your body over and over again in one sitting, until one achieves a super-great calm in relation to anything that's going on in the body, and outside it too. Some may even ultimately then experience the illusion that much of one's body has been temporarily replaced by great holes: maybe now there just seems to be a hole where one's chest or belly should be, maybe even most of one's arms and legs seem to have dissolved, leaving just points of contact like elbows and soles of the feet.

Different individuals find different methods more useful. I personally seem to warm to all of them. But one has to practise at least one of them daily – and in the very, very long run, ideally, keep practising all the time throughout when one is going about one’s daily life. To continue this list, my experience of mantras (repeating just one phrase or sound that is meaningful to you over and over, such as “I believe in love”, or “Only this, what’s here, exists right now” etc etc), has been that quite quickly the whole physical environment around me seems to start “saying” the mantra over and over. Once that gets established, the mantra seems to be “saying” me. After all, if the mantra has seemingly taken over my entire environment, it’s only a matter of time before it will (apparently) take over me. But when it does, it’s still possible to detach, to separate from the mantra and just watch the mantra. Some similar considerations apply to the use of contemplation rather than a mantra. In contemplation one allows one’s mind to roam freely with its thoughts, provided they are all about, and remain only about, one topic that you select beforehand.

I’ve already discussed the exercise of feeling the aliveness in you many times in this thread, and I’ve discussed the exercise of letting everything be just as it is several times. Both of them super-powerful, provided you learn to do them properly. I would say both of them also put you into awareness of awareness as long as you are really doing them “correctly”.

Another type of exercise is that of watching the breath, as I have described in detail in this thread. One practises this exercise until one is no longer using any effort to watch a breath, because one has let go of effort altogether.

[Guish]

Thank you Trainee. You remember that you told me that the right teacher comes at the right time? I have joined a Soto Zen Sangha led by Jundo. The lineage comes down from Master Dogen and the main practice is Shikantaza zazen. It's the perfect platform for me right now. Our conversations have helped my quest a lot my friend and I'm sure that I have much to discuss and learn from you.

Meditation reflects your day and your day gets reflected in your meditation session.

Gassho,
Geerish.

[TraineeHuman]

That sounds great, Guish. There are many practices in Soto Zen that are advanced, or fairly advanced, and quite deceptively so. I’d like to ask you some details about your experience of what’s involved in some of those practices, but only after you’ve experienced practising them a while under the teacher’s guidance. I can’t help but laugh at the expression “just sitting”, for example, because as I understand it the “just” really means ideally or eventually being totally in touch with all of Reality. Also, I know that at least some of the Japanese Soto Zen masters have had the practitioners sitting in two rows, facing each other and performing what I would describe as a certain variety of eyegazing meditation. As far as I can tell, that’s a significantly different type of eyegazing meditation than the very ancient variety that comes to us from pre-Vedic Indian culture. A related practice, in my view, is that of (“just”) “walking between two posts”. I understand some of the most famous twentieth century Japanese Zen masters liked their practitioners to spend as much time walking as sitting. At some later point I may have questions about some of the details of what’s involved. From my own experience I know it can be described as involving more than “just walking”.

When I started this thread, I was feeling much frustration about the abstract way most Forum members seemed to talk about spirituality at that time. So I deliberately highlighted out-of-body experience, because I wanted to nudge contributors to the thread towards speaking about, and on the basis of, experience rather than theory. I was also trying to operate from the assumption that contributors were already seriously engaged in some type of spiritual practice. My strong preference is to bring things back to experience and practice wherever that is possible.

My own out-of-body experiences (occurring over many years, but early on almost every night, and also every day) had mostly come spontaneously, and in accordance with the traditional method for inducing them, which was from one's being in a state of meditation, or asleep. In meditation, as in sleep, one is practising a deep level of effortlessness, which I still consider the only natural way, the only smooth way, and probably the only 100% safe way, to undergo such experiences. To my great surprise, most contributors were apparently very solidly stuck in the assumption that what was needed instead of effortlessness was very great effort and usually brutal self-forcing, combined with some form of self-hypnosis! I also regret the confusion post #10 may well have caused, as it described a self-hypnosis method for accessing or at least getting a glimpse of one’s past lives.

[samildamach]

Due you consider intent a forcefull effort or a guidance in direction ?.

[TraineeHuman]

Posted by samildamach (here)
Due you consider intent a forcefull effort or a guidance in direction ?.

That's a very good, very incisive question, samildamach. One of the things I would need to point out or explain in reply is (I certainly claim that) there is a very big difference between our inner consciousness and our outer, surface mind. The former has far more awareness, and far more interconnection with other realms or dimensions. Not only that, but the inner (initially subliminal) consciousness contains, among other things, all our psychic abilities, including the ability to astral travel.

As I understand it, meditation is a powerful tool to enable us to learn how to disidentify somewhat with our surface mind. The more we manage, through letting go, to develop the skill of so disidentifying, the more easily we can naturally experience our psychic skills.

On the other hand, holding a very strong desire to grab access to or reach any of our psychic abilities is, as far as I'm aware, primarily an action of the surface mind -- a "forceful effort", primarily. I guess it seems to me the self-hypnosis method involves making strenuous efforts with the surface mind to concentrate on its desire, but also a fuzzily implied willingness to slip into a dreamlike state. The trouble is, the dreamlike state is at odds with the strenuous surface desiring. My guess would be that the only reason the self-hypnosis method sometimes apparently works is that in such situations the intensity of the slipping into the dreamlike state manages to be much stronger than the surface desiring effort. (Maybe because the surface mind momentarily short-circuits itself somehow in all the strenuous effort of the egoic, surface mind.) But isn't that rather like trying to accelerate a car while the handbrake is on?

To answer your question fully would require probably many pages on the subject of what is consciousness and how does it work, and what are all the different forms of existence that harbor intentions, consciously or not, and incompletely or not (such as the Divine, higher parts of us, the ego, unconsciousness); and then how does that apply specifically to this question. I'm willing to attempt a shortened version of such an essay, but it may take a month or so for me to gather all my thoughts on this.

[samildamach]

My thoughts were that you could do yourself harm with forcefully intent,force yourself indirections your Simply not ready for.for myself while meditating I do bring intent at the beginning for a short time then let it go.I figure if the hs wants to answer then your ready to hear and process that information.if hs does not answer that your not ready or it's simpley just not important for your growth.
I would kindly ask for the short version of this question ( and very happy to wait) as it's a fundemental interaction between us and are hs.

[TraineeHuman]

Some brief comments to begin with about intention, and intentions. At one time I used to have a spiritual teacher who would sometimes say: "Intention really is everything." She would say this to encourage me, or some other individual, when we were attempting some challenging but very worthwhile or laudable project. I believe, though, that part of what she had in mind was that the Divine has intentions about you and for you, so that when you adopt an intention that's roughly aligned with that, you'll be getting some support for its success from the entire universe, no less.

The notion that "intention is everything" also has a shadow side. Many of our intentions are unconscious, and these may cause us to fail even though our conscious intentions are positive and strong. When I would be unsuccessful despite my strong intention to do well, that spiritual teacher would tell me I needed to work on my shadow side in that sphere of life.

I'd also like to suggest that the primary reason we find movies and plays and fiction stories of all kinds interesting is that they show us the characters' primary intentions working themselves out. In other words, I’m suggesting that what we really want to see when we watch a movie or play is the conflict between the inner, often somewhat secret intentions of the central character and those of his or her antagonist(s). This is the really important “action”, I suggest, and it’s inner action, and mental and emotional action. We find this interesting in movies because, as I see it, life itself is ultimately a “game” of intentions interacting with or colliding against one another.

In any activity or situation, if we have an inadequate attitude then it doesn’t matter how expertly or conscientiously we may perform a role or job, because eventually our bad attitude will create a bad intention which erodes the entire quality of our performance.

Also, let’s note that although the Divine (or Source, or whatever you may call it) has clear and very justifiable intentions for us, it very often (apparently) doesn’t push these on us – although I guess we consider any tragedy, or miraculous-seeming “luck”, in our lives or the lives of those close to us an “act of God” if it seems quite outside our control.

[TraineeHuman]

Okay, here's another piece regarding intention, but there'll be more material to come. Let's look at the phenomenon of the Divine intentions.

Because our minds are tainted by ignorance, by ego, we crave or desire all sorts of things, big and tiny, and imagine they will make us fulfilled, at least for the moment. Which they never really do, and never will. This is because of our ignorance, in the ancient Eastern sense of "ignorance", meaning our failure to be mindfully aware of or even intuitively sense what the outcome -- and often even the real underlying intention -- of our every action will be, not to mention the "big picture" background. That ignorance guarantees that we'll fall short of the Divine intention in each situation -- except when we are in our highest moments.

The Divine intention, after all, is based on omniscience and universal interconnection, and not on the limited understanding of a mind out of touch with the Divine Mind. But the good news is (I claim) that the Divine intention always exists, however destructive of its workings such things as war and corruption and so on may be. Consequently, all our practice of meditation and mindfulness and love and selfless service amounts to a tuning in, albeit often incompletely or somewhat incompletely, to the Divine intention as far as that affects us and those around us. Such a tuning in happens without our effort.

The Divine intention is at work all the time, but it also allows us to make a mess of everything, because trial-and-error is the best way of learning to ultimately know better. The Divine intelligence even factors in the fact that many of the Divine intentions won't succeed immediately, but are still necessary for achieving a better final result. It factors in the reality of human impotence and ignorance. The Divine itself ultimately grows stronger through this.

Another very major consideration is the fact that we all contain and even embody the intention to become better, greater, more aware and in better relationship with our environment than what we already are. Extrapolate that inbuilt intention in us all to become ever better, however poorly and benightedly we may at times apply it within the world of matter in our daily lives, and you have the potential, the seed, of transformation that is ultimately limitless. Though of course, first we will need to outgrow our current limited state in many ways.

An interesting situation occurs if we deliberately and commitedly make it our biggest priority, above and exclusive of everything else, to do absolutely all we can to find and live by the Divine intention for us. Provided we can maintain having such a priority over a long time -- which no doubt very few do --, then we are opening ourselves to certain inputs from that Divine intention. Not yet to all the knowledge that that Divine intention carries within it, though, because as long as we are stuck in limitations we won't be able to make balanced, helpful use of something that's unlimited relative to us.

[TraineeHuman]

Let's agree to say that "the soul" is the same thing as the higher levels of what I have been calling the Higher Mind/Self. Then the soul is something that certainly exists in everyone. (I claim it also can't really be stolen or annihilated, by the way. On the other hand, the personality, or astral body -- which is probably what so many use the term "soul" for --, can be annihilated after death, or stolen. Such annihilation may even be a good thing, because it isn't who we really are but while we're physically alive it's "normal" to unquestioningly believe that we actually and totally are our personality -- unless we've done enough advanced work on developing our awareness, and sometimes not even then.)

It's important to get the hierarchy of existence straight:

Our Divine part, then

Superconsciousness below it, then

the soul, then

the lower HM (the psychic self), then

the personality, then

the physical body.


To say the least, there's ever so much confusion and misleading myths around in New Ageish circles as the result of mistaking phenomena on one level for those at some other level in this hierarchy. And that's understandable enough, for reasons some of which I'd like to briefly explain.

"Normally" -- while we're physically alive, and usually also for some time after our physical death -- the soul gets overpowered or overridden, undercut, at almost every turn by -- well, by the personality, meaning the ordinary thinking mind plus the emotions, plus (while we're physically alive) the urgings of the physical life-force or life-energy within us. Still, the soul does manage to shed a certain amount of light to the individual on a better way to live than the standard superficiality. It does that through premonitions, "light bulb" flashes of ideas, symbolic warnings that we sense are hinting at something major, synchronicities, dreams occasional intuitions that turn out to be correct, suggestions from others that resonate with us, unexplained attractions, and so on. All of these are coming from the lower half of the Higher Mind/Self. However, these are all piecemeal and often only half-correct (which is still nothing to be sneezed at), because although that lower half does have some true knowledge, that knowledge is always incomplete and therefore requires some reliance on mere guesswork, plus it's also tainted by the distortion of truth caused by our unconsciousness and our ego.

Clairvoyants will tell you how the (lower) astral realms are a kind of jungle, a relentless battleground where everyone's desires seem to conflict with everyone else's, but the forcefulness and energy available to each individual is considerably greater than what we have in the waking physical state. all that effort, though, is an expression of the things I've described above. It's at best semi-ignorant, and hence it's almost inevitable that the intentions we have at that level will be somewhat misguided. This often makes the effort to try and make them come true a waste of energy.

If, on the other hand -- as unfortunately happens in only a minority of cases --, the soul can eventually learn how to penetrate deeply into our shadow side and still remain mostly stable and peaceful, then it can finally become the master of all our thoughts and actions and urges. That's the point where intentions become sovereign, because now they're the soul's true intentions. And the soul achieves that mastery not through force and effort, but through understanding and insight primarily, as well as through love or gentleness or sensitivity or creativity -- which all become immensely powerful once the soul makes our thoughts and acts authentic, because it has quietly (coming from a position of obvious greater strength) taken them over.

From where will the soul attain such strength, such certainty? A major source is that the soul which has achieved such mastery sees that everything lies inside of it! This is because it has seen that going deeply enough inside oneself is to go into the universe, into all there is. Not only that, but that the only way we can know with certainty that anything else exists, and that it has this quality or that quality, is because it has been there inside us all along, but until this point our "eyes" were veiled. Let me try to elaborate a little.

You and I might agree -- if it happens to be so -- that we are at the same physical location and that there we see the same table. But that knowledge will be at the superficial level. If we're almost completely out of contact with our souls -- as most unfortunately are while in the physical world --, then we'll have no idea at all that the whole source of our certainty that that table exists actually comes to each of us from our soul. The soul lives in another world, so to speak, a higher world, yet the paradox is, it's much more the real us than who we ordinarily believe we are. Not only that, but the soul's world is what contains and sustains the superficial world and gives it its coherence.

Early in this thread I've said that consciously having intentions of any kind puts us into the lower levels of the HM, at least momentarily. But the intentions will only be semi-effective, and semi-powerful at best -- unless they come from the soul level of the HM and moreover the soul's intentions aren't being drowned out by the "noise" within us. So many New Age-ish individuals quite mistakenly tend to believe that all they need to do to manifest something is to have a strong (intense, if not, indeed, forceful) enough intention for that state of affairs to come true. But no. The reason so-and-so didn't get the check for a billion dollars materializing in their mailbox was that it wasn't their soul's intention for them to do so. Or even if it was their soul's intention, that intention probably got steamrolled or shouted down by the louder, semi-ignorant intentions coming from the lower half of the HM, or by desires coming from their (even more ignorant) surface mind and their emotions.

The soul doesn't have any identity in the same way that we "normally" believe that we have to behave consistently as "Fred Smith" or whatever our name is. The soul is too flexible and open and elusive for that. It may be helpful here to consider how, as I described in post #2649, who/what we really are is a relation, not a subject or object. To give just one example of what this means, the soul does does not have any goals, something to achieve "there" rather than "here", or in the future rather than now. From the soul's point of view, the journey is itself the goal. And the soul does choose to go on certain journeys, but it knows that reality is always a process and not anything that's fully completed or closed or not "elastic".

Another example is how the soul sees memories. To it, "our" memories and "our" past lifetimes are rather like lenses it can use to gain certain detailed knowledge and understanding. But beyond that, the soul doesn't view them as being "itself" in some way. They just happen to be the lenses which are the most accessible to the soul. The acquisition of some new, quite different lenses will often be preferable to the soul, if such are within its reach.

There is a big gap, a big quantum jump, between the lower levels of the HM and the soul. The creation and cultivation of that gap involves many very major spiritual practices or qualities, including: equanimity, "No thinking", detachment, "no-mind", formlessness, clarity, being nonjudgmental, serenity, unconditional bliss, and some others. All of them grand things to aspire to. The more fully and masterfully and frequently one cultivates those qualities or states, the more the soul will be able to at last take greater and greater mastery.