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The Mystic's Life Lesson #31
A Discourse On
Possibilities
What are the possibilities of higher consciousness? Who can truly say how great the possibilities are?
After all, we have only begun to learn our address in a vast universe a universe which we presume to be the only one. Thinking, struggling, man has worked through many conceptions and misconceptions over the ages and has, with brave science, brilliant mathematics, and pieces of glass in long tubes, finally been able to figure out where he lives in the physical universe. According to Timothy Ferris, in his book, Galaxies, your correct address (after you write down your street number, your city or town, your state or province, and country) is: "The Earth, The Solar System, The Sun's Neighborhood, Vicinity of the Orion Arm, The Milky Way Galaxy, The Local Group of Galaxies, The Local Supercluster, The Universe, Circa 18 Billion Years After the Beginning of Its Expansion."
So, at least we can be comforted in knowing where we live in the physical universe.
While we continue learning about our physical universe and are still wondering whether there is life on other planets within the inconceivable vastness, we know even less about the universe behind closed eyes. What is this stuff of life? Where does it come from? How does it work? It is conscious, we know, but how conscious is this life and what is the point of it? Where is life coming from? Where is it going? And why?
"Who Am I?"
"Who am I?" is a most fundamental question regularly occurring in the hearts of people around the world. Even after living seventy or eighty years, people confide that they wonder what their life was about and whether they lived it appropriately. They confess they still don't quite know who they are and very often yield up their lives in the same manner that they lived them perplexed.
Ramana Maharshi was one of the great masters of the twentieth century, recognized in the East and West as an enlightened man. He commonly responded to the questions of existence and the yearning of human hearts in saying that the main problem of people is we don't know who we are! If we could figure out who we are, we would live our lives entirely differently more harmoniously and constructively, he taught. People would recognize easily and naturally how to attain true peace and well being. Maharshi advised that while there are many beautiful techniques and practices to help a person solve the riddle and mystery of his or her existence and aching heart, there is a much more simple and direct procedure: ask yourself, "Who am I?"
Maharshi advised some people to ask this question several times a day but there were others, he knew, who were ready for the intensity of inquiry which would bring a quicker realization and a profound experience of the answer; and he counseled them to chant the question, "Who am I?" ten thousand times each day!
In this beautiful practice the ego, or false sense of self, gradually turns from its delusions and pretensions toward the higher consciousness and ultimately the soul, the spirit of the Divine within each of us. In time the ego is transformed and the soul stands resplendent.
The question is only resolved for periods of time at first, as the ego now and then due to old momentums and habit patterns reclaims dominance. But eventually the false sense of self is seen as a delusion and is happily discarded. The great "Who am I?" riddle is solved in bliss and wisdom.
The Source of Discovery
By considering the inner universe and life itself more important than mankind's discoveries in the physical universe, no disparagement is intended. Courageous, brilliant men and women guided people away from terrifying superstitions about the world. These honest scientists bravely led us from ages of human sacrifice which were supposed to influence capricious gods into the age of heart transplants, global communications, and manned space flight. Great men and women have shone their insights outward on the universe and we have marvelled. We have been set free of much ignorance by the Galileos, Newtons, Einsteins and Curies. We have been enabled by them to improve and lengthen our lives in innumerable ways. Too, great explorers of our physical universe have often made extreme sacrifices in serving truth as best they could. They were very often ridiculed, persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured by benumbed people. And, often these heroes and heroines did work which itself was dangerous Madame Curie, for example, died of leukemia caused by the effects of radiation.
However, a study of the lives of our great discoverers in the sciences reveals that almost always the seeker of truth needed moments of reflection, had to go within, in order to know the physical world better. Moments of inner communion inspired the humble seeker with new insights that resulted in almost every important discovery of chemistry, physics, medicine, mathematics, optics, calculus. All of their inventions and all their ways of knowing the physical world, it seems, came from the higher consciousness, from revelations within.
The physical world would hardly be known at all were it not for these seekers of truth finding within themselves the clues, or the procedures, or the insights, which have brought about every advancement in science and knowledge of the physical world.
But no one has claimed bringing rocks back from the moon can show people who we are or how to live together harmoniously. Brain surgery can preserve a life but it can't reveal what life or a person is. Nor do the leaders in the social sciences, with their considerable light, say they can solve our deep yearnings or give us lasting peace.
In finding our higher consciousness, remote possibilities come near. As you find your superconscious awareness dawning, many hopes become possible. As groups of people become more conscious, the world changes.
A List of Possibilities
What are the possibilities of higher consciousness? Let's speculate together about some wonderful improvements in life and our world which will likely become commonplace as people solve the mystery of "Who am I?" and discover they can use their higher consciousness as easily as their eyes, ears, mind, and feelings.
The woes of the world so far are mainly the effects of what we have caused in the past. Old, burdensome, and oppressive effects will yield to new, thoughtful causes engendered by inspired people. And these new possibilities may at some date in the future be looked upon as a very rudimentary and extremely partial glimpse of the wonderful life that humanity has long since found for itself.
On the other hand, a hundred years of hindsight may look upon these ideas as insubstantial as wishes and fantasies. However, people who experience higher consciousness generally find their lives benefited in every area. It is not absurd, then, to speculate that with more people becoming awakened to their inner faculties society will gradually enjoy its great undiscovered legacies. The dream of the American forefathers Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and all will be real and blissfully commonplace to our whole world: a world which chose fulfillment instead of worry and emptiness.
Following is a small list of new possibilities which are becoming available to the world.
1 Ecstasy
Lasting, ever-new joy frees people from addiction to drugs, alcohol, and much neurotic behavior.
In the profound ecstasy of their true natures, people are free to love and understand one another.
The burdens of deep, personal confusion no longer pour outward, inflicting pain on society.
2 Less Frustration In A Saner World
Higher consciousness will immeasurably increase our ability to evaluate personal, national and global goals. We will also have a clear understanding of our internal and outer resources for achieving our objectives. People will begin to clearly see and thoroughly achieve their life-enriching quests. There will be less frustration from failure. Fewer people will be floundering and wondering what to do.
With more success in seeing and achieving goals, people will feel less guilt. There will be less outer-directed hostility as people focus instead on satisfying, meaningful endeavors and enjoy the well being which results from purposeful accomplishments. Through goal satisfaction, people will likely seek more positive goals. There will be a progression of accomplishments at more and more subtle levels.
Having solved one's creature needs and goals, a person will move on to even greater satisfaction in fulfilling mental, emotional, social, and spiritual aims.
A more successful and fulfilled populace will be less frustrated and angry. As a result, there will be less crime. There will be fewer expressions of violence, fewer cruel expressions of inner exasperation. Also, successful people will feel no need to steal or block others from fulfilling their goals. There will be less depression and mental illness as the newfound capacities for fulfillment and creativity become the norm.
3 Plenty and Prosperity
As people waken to their missing components for success, they will gain a greater capacity to understand the world and to act within the framework of reality. They will become much more able to manifest the newfound inner well being outward into the external world. People will find that their inner resources will attune them to opportunities for financial and material abundance. A person attuning with the inner self and functioning through the higher consciousness has difficulty avoiding prosperity and material well being. Having enough money, people won't be thinking about it all the time. They will begin to discover, through their material comfort, the other aspects of life that are infinitely more important and satisfying.
By prosperity, a person of higher consciousness does not think necessarily of vast amounts of money in the bank. Rather, by prosperity is meant having all one's needs met not only materially, but on other levels of life as well. "Enough and to spare" is the key. Not only having enough to meet one's daily needs, but living day by day in the knowledge that there is always enough that whatever one truly needs in order to be a constructive person, or to be of benefit to another in any positive way is always at hand. Financial security, food, shelter, every need is met.
4 A Way Out of the Subconscious
Today most people behave mechanically unthinkingly. They do today each and every task as they did it yesterday and the years before. People usually have the same attitudes, the same prejudices, as they did in years past prejudices often passed down from generation to generation.
The modern field of psychology emphasizes how much our personality the way we're going to be all our life is influenced by our first three years. "Everythings pretty much set before you're five years old," they often say. Psychotherapists, almost inevitably, take a person who has problems back to the time when he or she was an infant, back to the time when life's patterns and attitudes were established in the tender young child.
When you find your higher consciousness, you will realize how profoundly true it is that people are so often near-automatons, acting out their early formative training from childhood. People go through their lives generally stuck in the behavior patterns of yesteryear. They are slaves of their subconscious mind, that part of the mind which holds the patterns however crude and inapplicable.
Still, the person of higher consciousness laments that people who begin to become free of the subconscious do not go farther and discover how to make their subconscious a friend. With wisdom, you can enable your subconscious mind to become a very constructive force in your life, a force of good habits, good mental attitude, from which to declare your freedom for a better life and from which to instantaneously make changes for the better. The subconscious can become an ally and inspire you to flourish.
Until you step free of your subconscious and its domination, you live in a chaos of past thoughts and feelings which so dominate your mind that you find it next to impossible to think clearly or to know love in a constructive way. It's also impossible, when dominated by the subconscious, to look at another person or anything in the outer world without misperceiving it greatly.
Higher consciousness liberates you and all who are stuck in the hindering mire of the past to step into a life of your choosing, a life that moves in the light rather than the shadows of old impressions.
5 Solve Self-Esteem Problems
Through higher consciousness people will discover who they really are. They will no longer have to pretend to be significant personalities or patch together egos which tend to fall apart each day. As you discover your true nature and the ineffable love showered on you through your higher consciousness, your self-esteem problems will vanish. You will become fully aware that you are an accepted being. You will end your orphan years. You will come home through higher consciousness and feel no need to bluff or be arrogant, no need to fear or go through days and months of self-doubt. Your higher consciousness will reveal to you, as you progressively develop, your true nature and you will have an abiding self-esteem which becomes a strength and a joy. Your new self-esteem will enable you to enter enchanting dimensions of satisfying relationships and also comfort you when you're alone.
6 New Opportunities
Today people tend to spend most of their life dealing with their problems, endeavoring to solve them or somehow avoid them. For most people today, problem-solving is a full-time occupation. However, so many are focused on problem-solving that they miss most of the opportunities that come their way. People in higher consciousness clearly behold thousands or millions of new opportunities that were never conceived of while life was a wrestling match. Often the new opportunities are much more important than solving the old problems.
So, a person of higher consciousness with far vaster perspectives on life becomes mindful and alert to the opportunities that abound in all directions left, right, in front, behind, above, below, and beyond.
7 Problem-Solving
While it's important to look at life anew and see its fresh opportunities, a major aspect of higher consciousness is that it unleashes creative intelligence which enables you to solve old problems. Your creative intelligence and inner power will solve with ease problems which once were so difficult to solve despite the application of all your personal might. Higher consciousness unleashes energies and abilities which most people do not know they have. It makes problems into opportunities. It makes problems, and even the failures of life, steppingstones toward success. A problem with shyness becomes self-assurance, deep compassion, and love for all.
As one multimillionaire said recently on television, he was once a busboy hopeful of "moving up" in the restaurant business. He greatly wanted to be promoted to a waiter's position. He was passed up several times, however, and his failure in becoming a waiter forced him to study how money is made. He went to school and learned how a person becomes successful in this great country. His problem in becoming a waiter pushed him into an opportunity. As a result of his studies, he can now hire a thousand waiters. His higher consciousness helped him to see his problem in a new way and to so phenomenally solve it that he now travels the country showing other people how they can become wealthy.
You will generally find that your higher consciousness looks upon your problems differently from the way you normally think about them. Your higher consciousness is undaunted and very able at dealing with problems, and it awaits your attention.
8 Meaningful Lives
Is your life meaningful? Do you feel your activities and time spent on this earth are deeply satisfying? Do your activities seem extremely worthwhile?
Parades of people go to counselors every day because their lives have no meaning. They can't figure out why they work, eat, sleep, and go on with what life demands of them.
Through your growing superconsciousness, your higher insight will begin to abide with you and regularly share or shine into your mind and heart. It will reveal the underlying meaning and purpose of everything you do. What you see, what you hear, will become filled with a deeper understanding which gives great satisfaction and joy. Thinking becomes a pleasure because it ends with understanding and insight rather than even more questions. And questions themselves abide gracefully in the mind, not creating anxiety, but excitement and inspiration. Meaning and purpose unfold as you build up days and then years of what you know to be before your heart, mind, conscience, and Creator a meaningful life.
9 Sympathy
Other parades of people, in addition to those who are seeking more meaning in their lives proceed to their counselors' waiting rooms because they feel so lonely. They feel that no one loves them, or perhaps they've discovered that they're incapable of giving love, neither able to give nor receive love.
Plowing deeper within yourself, you will find that contrary to the blockages on the surface of your consciousness, there is an ease in sensing the life and concerns of another person. You will sense a oneness that is easily shared between two people, two dozen, or two million. You will find that in your higher consciousness abides a universal sympathy. This special feeling is much like a mother's: because she has helped her children through their awkward and helpless years, she can feel a sense of motherhood for all little ones, from any country, even a country in conflict with hers. Similarly, you'll find you can care about people so naturally and in such a universal manner that your heart and mind become big enough to hold everyone.
This condition of universal sympathy frees you to love with ease and greatness. This state of universal sympathy develops into higher states of consciousness as well. It not only frees you to love and to feel for others, it enables you to enter into a state called cosmic consciousness, a level of awareness which is characteristic of most saints and sages throughout history. All of them, too, cared as much as you in your higher consciousness are learning to do.
10 More Might
Why must the cancer win? Why must the bully prevail? Why must evil terrorize us and demand so much of our thought and our compensating effort?
Your higher consciousness has, as one of its chief attributes, a higher power, a mighty power, which will help you with your life. This higher power can vitalize your physical body, clear your mind, and make your heart readily able to give and receive great love. This mighty power can enable you to be victorious over your ignorance and egoism.
Devotees who have experienced their higher consciousness over a period of years learn never to underestimate the power of the higher consciousness within themselves and within each person. This universal power which can make the sun shine and the earth revolve and rotate, and which can sustain the life in your whole body in each and every tissue is assuredly capable of helping you mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, too.
11 Inventiveness
Studying the lives of inventors, artists, and other creative people, there appears to be a very common factor. Their creative genius occurs during a moment of reflection, of inward turning, or of quiet during sleep, while taking a walk, or enjoying an absentminded shower, for example. Possibly, it could be argued that all creativity and all inventiveness occurs when our world's great creative people have been able consciously or unknowingly to enter the portals of their higher consciousness. From the invention of the wheel to the jumbo jet, the novelty and inventiveness of the human spirit seems to come from a supernormal level of awareness found deep within people who are able to attune themselves, individually or in groups, to the higher consciousness.
In being more attuned, we can use technology constructively; not as a means of ruining lands, oceans, habitats, the atmosphere, the earth's vegetation, and the health of mankind and all creatures. We will reverse the present trends. We will think long-term, with more common sense and compassion.
When you find your way into your own higher consciousness, you will find yourself becoming much more creative and inventive. The challenges of your life will find fresh answers and new, creative possibilities possibilities you had not dreamed of prior to entering your higher creativity.
12 Less Aggression
As people become more conscious and are able to clearly conceive of their goals, they will be able to bring forth their inner resources for success. Because of their practice and their training and working with their own higher consciousness, they will more easily and reliably achieve the important goals in their life. They will not need to maintain a fighting stance as a way of life. They will be able to succeed in achieving their important objectives without feeling the need to beat out someone else or to live in a mad scramble as if life is a deadly game of "King of the Mountain."
Instead of lashing out from states of gloom and frustration, men and women will be able to evaluate their capacities for success and choose pathways which highlight their particular talents. People discovering reliable principles for success will not need to generate enemies, heart attacks, ulcers, orphans, and widows or widowers as they endeavor to thrive.
Aggression is a problem which is mainly peculiar to the male of the human species. Men are trained and encouraged to be aggressive from infancy. Societies generally accept that aggressive males are needed to provide for families or fight wars to protect their turf. The down side of this philosophy is that male aggressiveness is destructive in so many ways.
By aggression we do not only mean physical aggression but also attitudes of superiority, attitudes by which people feel licensed to take what is not theirs, or to hurt people because of a personal opinion, or even a whim.
Awakening one's higher consciousness would, of course, be of inestimable help in converting one's destructive, aggressive tendencies into constructive and harmonious self-mastery. Ultimately, what was once aggression becomes dedicated service to others and to one's own ideals.
13 People Who Live In Safety
Almost every person has some resentment, anger, and potential for violence. This frustration in our hearts is the cause of meanness and cruelty to others. Hearts in pain lash out and hurt people. Hurt people live in fear and insecurity. Often their hearts then fill with anger and they too flail around hurting others.
Our prisons are full of abused people who now abuse others. Too often a boy battered by his father or mother grows up to mutilate or even murder others. The nightly news reports the daily mayhem of angry hearts.
Within our hearts the insecurity of the human race begins, and this is the principle place where the safety and well being of humankind can start.
Through raising your consciousness, and through the power of your higher awareness, you will find that you can overcome transform your inclination to violence. You can turn your inclinations for violence into a power for good, into a willingness to understand and be of service to others. You, and others like you, who have found personal safety in being free of inner violence, can then endeavor to live lives that do not hurt or cripple others lives which, rather, inspire and nurture, lives which encourage others to also take up lives of self-mastery and maturity. In any case, the violence which comes out of people can be changed, can be soothed and healed, when we raise our consciousness and learn what it feels like to live in trust and security with society as a whole.
Many people can remember when they lived year in, year out, without ever locking their doors. There was trust, confidence and joy in the certainty that no one would be so mad or so unkind as to break the sanctity of another's home or car. Policemen were greeted with respect and treated as friends.
Hopefully society has many options that it can try until the right combination is found and people are safe safe to walk the streets they have paid for with their taxes, safe to enjoy the lovely parks they have created.
Higher consciousness, too, can prove a beginning point of change in transforming personal violence into a constructive love and service, along with the dignity of self-mastery. A change in understanding will create the joy of daily life in each neighborhood, in each home throughout this country, and through every country that is suffering the malady of senseless violence and insecurity.
Higher consciousness is also available to help each person deal in strength and confidence with his or her bullies. Ultimately, each of us can find that abiding good will and strength prevails over a diminishing evil. We can have a saner world.
14 More Responsible People
As people become more conscious, and especially when they become awakened, they will be able to perceive clearly the consequences of their actions. They will be able to know, through their experience and through the beautiful insights of higher consciousness, what are the likely consequences of particular actions, words, thoughts, feelings, or attitudes. People will become able to choose the consequences which they most prefer simply by contributing to better and better effects causing them. Through appropriate and attuned thoughts, feelings and actions, they will realize a beautiful way of experiencing life.
But, in addition, as people begin to recognize that their lives are basically the results of previous actions, previous ways of treating other people, they will begin to realize that in most ways each person is responsible for the consequences of life which he or she is experiencing.
While some events in life are enigmatic a cause and effect relationship is not discernible the person of higher consciousness faces them with a willingness to learn and eagerness to be changed. A person in higher consciousness strives to transform all the causes which he finds to be clearly harmful to himself or others. He takes responsibility for what is happening in his life.
When people become more conscious, they will begin not only to sense why the bad or painful things happen in life but how to make the good and wonderful aspects of life come about how to make their hopes and dreams realities. To be on this planet is to be educated about the consequences of one's actions. We're all here, growing in our understanding of causes and effects. A person who seeks the higher consciousness finds tremendous release in comprehending how to meet a problem more successfully at the next opportunity due to a deeper grasp of the relationship between cause and effect.
Throughout the world, people who become more conscious will not blame others for what happens to them in life but will start a wave of improvement occurring from pole to pole. This is happening at this time. More people are accepting responsibility for what happens to them in life. They are often aware of the consequences of what they have done in the past good and bad and they realize it's not only their actions but their attitudes the ways they think and feel which directly contribute to making life fulfilling or sad.
People will get up each morning and address the problems of life, focus their higher awareness, and mindless chaos will cease.
15 Universal Life
As the seeker of higher consciousness becomes aware of the great and wondrous life within, he or she is changed. Simply looking at another person becomes a delightful experience. One recognizes that beautiful life, that inestimably precious and rare gift of life which is expressing in a unique and special way in each person one sees in everyone who walks the earth. This recognition of the beauty of life within oneself, and within others, leads to a geometrically increasing rate of understanding and appreciation of other people.
Sensing this preciousness of life, one begins to lead a universal life a life based on the golden rule: doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. From this comes a life of love a universal life. Love becomes easier and more natural. Love is less and less of an effort because love springs forward powerfully when there is the insight of the shared experience of life: between oneself and every person now living, or who has lived, or who is about to live.
These are some of the major possibilities for our world, and our loved ones, when we contact higher consciousness. Most amazingly, the talent and the power are already available. They rest within us, awaiting our notice.
REFLECTION
