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The Mystic's A Beginning Discussion
What is Your Greatest Treasure?
What do you have a right to expect from your higher consciousness?
If you make the effort and refuse to fool yourself with fantasies, you will begin to find four priceless faculties within yourself. As these faculties become more instantly available to your attuned mind and heart, they will prove themselves to be your finest assets.
Not only do these four initial capacities of your higher consciousness have great value in themselves, they will be extremely useful in helping you create the life you yearn for. Many of the old goals which you failed to achieve can, if you find this consciousness inside you, be realized pleasantly. Still, higher consciousness is itself so thrilling and presents such a satisfying dimension to life that several old goals will no longer seem important to you. Rather, you will begin to perceive greater possibilities within yourself.
Let's consider the four delightful capacities of your higher consciousness. Keep in mind, as you read, the importance not only of having these faculties within your easy reach every day, reflect also what these four wondrous capacities can bring into manifestation for you as you allow yourself a superconscious way of doing things.
1 — Insight, Creative Intelligence
Have you noticed you're generally at your worst, as is most everyone else, when the big decisions of life have to be made? Too frequently, the events of life press us, push us, knock us around until we react and make a change. Decisions of immense significance to the rest of our lives are often made in moments of emotional chaos when we're merely reacting to inner or outer pressures. How many people think clearly when choosing a mate, deciding on a career, or making a big purchase? These decisions will be a major factor in our lives for decades! The decision about a lifetime partner, a suitable profession, or a new residence, for example, will be a major reason for your daily and long-term happiness or sorrow. Yet it is not even popular to think clearly at the time of choosing one's mate for life. People often stumble into their careers, victims of blind circumstance. And, purchases involving years of debt are often made emotionally: "Well, I don't know, but I feel this is the right one."
Very often the pressure of a deadline determines what you think and do about a particular problem. With more time to think, along with more information, wouldn't you choose differently at times? Much of the time? 1
The good news is: in becoming aware of your higher consciousness, you discover a tremendous talent which helps you meet the challenges of your life. This faculty of your higher self is called creative intelligence, or superconscious insight. Through your creative intelligence you will be at your very best when making a decision. You will be able to see your problems clearly, in all their aspects. You will distinguish between true opportunity and much suffering disguising itself as opportunity. Insights from your higher consciousness will develop your mind, emotions, and will into a constructive team, improving not only your decisions but the advice you give to professional colleagues and loved ones.
Value of Insight
Again and again people with worried, turbulent minds make snap decisions — shortsighted decisions which bring hurt and even ruin into their lives. Sometimes a person without creative intelligence puts all his energy into getting the goal of his dreams, only to find that goal was not worth the effort. His or her dream falls to the pavement and smashes to bits. The hope for happiness and love becomes pain and criticism. Pleasure deteriorates into torture. The hope of being close to someone often makes you blind about what that "special person" is really like. Your distorted mind confuses the relationship and the "yearned for" intimacy becomes instead a sense of revulsion, or even self-hatred.
Insight, creative intelligence from deep within you, helps you avoid many losses, many tears. Insight keeps you from being stuck in a horrible problem for years, stuck in futility and lack of self-expression.
Insight from your higher consciousness is creative. It helps generate not only solutions for your problems but new opportunities and options for you. Consider the American immigrant who found he didn't have to spend his life being a busboy while anxiously hoping for a waiter's position. Instead, he discovered within himself the abilities to become a millionaire in real estate. He more than solved his problems — he creatively found a new life.
Consider another example. Years ago doctors routinely threw out moldy blood samples by the thousands. However, Alexander Fleming, the Scottish bacteriologist, followed an intuitive insight to study the mold on a blood sample which had gone bad. Fleming's insight was the beginning of the discovery of penicillin and antibiotics. In many ways Fleming's creative intelligence — and that of a small group of colleagues at Oxford University — changed the world.
What Happened?
Your life pretty much reflects the decisions you've already made. Your present lot in life is the best indicator of how good your decisions are. It's easy to see the choices you made when confronted with challenges and opportunities. Are you happy with your choices? Good for you if you are. If you're happy with your choices, you likely have a degree of this marvelous insight from your higher consciousness already available to you.
However, if you look back at your life with frustration and wonder "What happened?," you do not have access to your best assets, including superconscious insight. Do you wonder why some friends became so successful and happy while you, who had equal opportunity and perhaps even superior talents, have to poke through the ashes of your years searching for the few remaining embers of happiness? What happened?
Chances are you made some bad decisions, selected the wrong alternatives. You probably ignored your best opportunities. Perhaps you responded to people in a way that made your life less successful and progressively narrow. Perhaps, due to the turbulence of your mind, you didn't notice people who could have been your good friends for life. Did you instead choose projects and colleagues who crippled your talents? Perhaps many opportunities for happiness were not perceived clearly and you chose instead numbness, boredom, or a cynic's attitude. In any case, how very sad it is that day in, day out, for years you did not seek or heed your creative intelligence — nor the other wonders within your higher consciousness.
Turning Points
Life has so many turning points. Each turning point involves a choice, a decision to be made. Why not be at your best? You can be at your best, not only meeting these turning points with excellent, beneficial decisions, but also your superconscious insight will reveal the turning point to you before it occurs. Your faculty of creative intelligence prepares you again and again to make the best, the very best, of your decades on planet earth. With this special insight you can see the finest direction and course for the furtherance of your life. Without this superconscious insight there is a blindness of your whole being much more profound than that of not having eyes. It is a blindness of mind and soul. We are, in this state, not capable of seeing the way to fulfillment or lasting happiness.
What wouldn't you give to be able to make excellent decisions? What would it be worth to choose wisely, to know how best to meet your challenges, to know when to act and when to be quiet, to know when to move and when to wait? You can have superconscious insight. You can experience this creative intelligence every day if you learn how to contact your higher consciousness.
2 — Security
To many people, the growing sense of security and comfort is the most wonderful aspect of higher consciousness. Even sophisticated and seemingly powerful people with numbered Swiss bank accounts, weighty diamonds, and $140,000 cars yearn for a sense of security. A seemingly omnipotent boss confided on the way to his third coronary, "I spent half my life to get this management desk. I have to spend the rest of my life fighting to keep it."
We all need to feel there are safe and untroubled places in our lives where we can relax and confidently refresh our energies. At times we need a spot free of disturbance or any unwanted infringement. Without daily periods in which we feel definitely secure, we can become progressively neurotic and spend all our time in considerable discomfort. Without a profound sense of security, worry and fear become our way of life and we cannot feel — deep within us — that it is good to be alive, or that it is good to be a distinct individual.
Your life is precious, you are precious. When you still the hubbub of your thoughts and emotions for awhile, you can sense the strong comfort of your higher consciousness. You sense the immensity of your inner strength. When you discover your mighty inner security, a renewed sense of purpose fills your mind. In the security of your higher consciousness, you also gain a sense of self-esteem. You are more able to discern superconscious insight and learn how to accomplish your projects. This enriching security calms your heart and nerves; it helps your blood pressure. Security prepares you to enjoy your life and achieve your goals at will.
Comfort
Again and again the challenges and demands of life may try to frazzle you or make you feel limited or incapable of dealing with your problems. Even when you're harried or feeling inadequate, you can turn to your higher consciousness. Then security and comfort will spring into your mind, into your body cells — and even into the atmosphere around you.
It's interesting to note the derivation of the word comfort, which is such an important attribute of profound security. Comfort comes from two Latin words: com (cum) means with; fort comes from the Latin fortis, meaning bravery. The initial concept of the word comfort is that one who is comforted is instilled with bravery. When you are comforted in the true sense, you have the ability to look honestly at reality and use your capabilities to bring about improvement. In your higher self you will discover a security you can find nowhere else, a sense of security that is complete. No other place in the world can provide so definite a sense of security. To live without this vital part of your potential is to live in worry and fear. If you choose, your higher consciousness will grant you a deep and abiding sense of security.
3 — Peace and Joy
An important point to understand is that your thoughts and feelings are wearing you out. Literally, your mental/emotional activity is probably shortening your life. Would you drive your car twenty-four hours a day? If you did, how long would it last? Any machine kept going without rest and maintenance starts to malfunction in short time. Quite similarly, those who allow their thoughts and feelings to churn continually, every day, as most people do, suffer in many ways.
Is thinking and feeling, then, bad for you? Certainly not. In a world starving for love and great ideas, genuine good will and inspiration are vitally important. What is meant by "churning mind" is the undirected, random drift of thoughts. Most people allow their thoughts to come and go as they please — memories, sensations, fantasies, and other ideas continually moving in haphazard, generally chaotic, fashion.
Similarly, the emotions wildly move within us — a warfare of hope, fear, desire, resentment, love, and hatred. Also, thoughts and feelings often clash in their separate pursuits. For example, you may have a feeling of grief which dominates and limits your mental range of thought; or your repeated thoughts about a negative situation will likely make a good mood vanish. Usually there are several layers of mental/emotional turbulence going on within, even during sleep.
This turbulence wastes your energy and is destructive in several ways. Principally, mental/emotional turbulence destroys your sense of well being. Very importantly, too, constant mental/emotional turbulence costs a great deal: the activity of nerves and glands is at a more intense and regularly debilitating level. So, not only does your mental/emotional happiness start to break down; but the body, too, in time, simply cannot bear the constant strain. The weakest parts begin to malfunction and disease occurs.
Reduce Stress
According to a number of stress researchers, stress diseases are the major killers in North America and Europe today. The pressure of mental/emotional turbulence causes countless headaches, including numerous migraine headaches. Many allergies, too, are caused directly or indirectly by stress, and asthma is generally brought about through stress. Much heart disease, arterial disease, colitis, and ulcers are attributed to stress. Also, stress is considered to be a precondition which enables many forms of cancer to gain a foothold in the body. Stress also breaks down our immunities to common diseases such as colds and influenza. The body is not designed to withstand continual mental/emotional activity — especially when it expresses as worry and fear, or the predisposition to flee from reality which most mental turbulence mirrors.
Unfortunately, the chaos does not end when we fall asleep. Those who have continually random thoughts and feelings simply go into many dream and anxiety levels while they sleep. Due to a sleep which isn't deep, their attitude about life is bedraggled. The physical deterioration continues in bed. The body continues to wear out.
The Wandering Mind
Do you know the average person can only keep his mind on one thing for six to eleven seconds at a time? The average used to be eleven seconds about twenty years ago, but psychologists think that — due to social pressures, chronic television-viewing, and drug damage — the average concentration span is now only six seconds; and it's getting worse. So, even when you're thinking about something you choose to think about, something you like to think about, your mind will tend to wander every six seconds if you're average. You will have to consciously make an effort to bring it back. This inner chaos goes on and on. A sense of well being and the ability to think clearly is destroyed whenever thoughts or feelings are turbulent.
Millions of people have indicated in various surveys that they seek peace of mind above all. Great historical figures from the past have indicated they would give anything for peace of mind. Marcus Aurelius spoke of the great difficulty which he, the emperor of the whole Roman Empire, found in establishing peace of mind. Peace of mind is a greater treasure than most emperors can win.
You will gain peace of mind greater than emperors have been able to find when you experience your higher consciousness. As you develop you will be able to establish periods of peace whenever you choose. Later, as you develop even more, you will be able to sense peace filling your being in the midst of your activity. You will be able to become actively calm and calmly active. Scarcely any people living in the world today have found a state of deep peace in the midst of their activities. Actively calm and calmly active, you will discover a most blissful and heavenly quality in your daily activity.
Peace Feels So Good
Peace feels so good. As peace begins to occur to your mind and spreads through your head and face down into your chest, it ultimately feels like a quiet, cooling river flowing beneath your skin from head to toe, making your entire body feel very pleasant. The mind enjoys the refreshment of not having to churn out more and more thoughts. The heart is able to put aside envy, fear, anger, and feel good about life. At last, abiding in the peace of your higher consciousness, you have found a most delightful place to be.
Not only is peace a wonderful place to experience regularly, and ultimately to live in, peace is extremely valuable in another way: Peace gives you freedom of choice. Prior to having peace, your thoughts and feelings, even your decisions, will tend to be forced on you by your previous attitudes and experiences. These old attitudes will mechanically dominate your not-so-free will.
Old attitudes, believe it or not, almost always dictate what you're going to do about new problems and possibilities. That is, the momentum of past experiences, old thoughts and feelings, will persuade you to simply continue going in the direction you've been going. You will not be able to stop and look at the problem fully, think clearly, and consider new options until you have peace.
Peace is like the neutral gear on a car. Without a neutral gear you cannot switch from a forward movement to a backward movement — at least not easily. If you try switching from a fast forward to a reverse you will ruin your gears and other parts of your engine as well. Similarly, we need peace in order to switch gears. We need peace in order to stop the momentum of the past, to stop its dominance. Through peace you think creatively and determine the best decision.
So, not only is peace a most beautiful aspect of being alive, it's also extremely helpful — perhaps essential — in freeing us to choose the best alternatives at each and every turning point in our lives.
And Then There’s Joy
Believe it or not, peace of mind is not the goal or the main quality of higher consciousness. How far can you drive your car in neutral gear? Nowhere, unless you put your car in neutral and let someone drag you. In that case, some force outside yourself has to provide the impetus. However pleasant, peace is a neutral state. Peace will generally not get you where you want to go. It will give you relief, it will give you breathing space, it will give you a chance to change your life. Peace enables you to be a more conscious person; it frees you of many errors that you would tend to make without peace. All of this is wonderful. However, once again, peace is not a positive, dynamic state. It is a neutral state.
Numerous wise men of past and present seem to deplore the peaceful state. They emphasize again and again that one should not linger (or seek to linger) in the neutral, unproductive, and unexpressive state of peace. Perhaps they speak emphatically because some people who have had hectic lives are so desirous of peace of mind that they want to bury themselves in peace, even wishing to disappear from the face of the earth. That is, they would become addicted to nonactivity and doing nothing if the needs of life did not demand that they earn their bread and toothpicks.
Fortunately, the wonderful problem that peace presents is solved when you choose to move forward and go more deeply into your own higher consciousness. By changing the direction of your activities or your life in general, peace next enables you to experience a thrilling level of higher consciousness: JOY.
Ongoing Joy
Joy is vast. Words are inadequate. Joy is not an occasional bubble of cheerfulness. Joy is ongoing, self-renewing happiness. It is a positive state of well being which, as it develops, permeates your entire life. It floods your mind with happiness and great ideas. It fills your spinal cord and other nerves with an ecstatic sense. Your heart, lungs, and chest area feel light, clear, and expansive in a profound delight. Ultimately, your eyeballs, ears, and other senses, along with your bones, ligaments, muscles, skin, and other tissues feel like they are vibrating or dancing with exquisite and ever-pleasing joy. This joy is beyond description and must be experienced.
This level of joy isn't easy to discover. Much aspiration and deliberate focus are required in order to know the higher consciousness this intimately. Most people who find joy never dreamed that they would be able to experience something so lofty. However, this capacity of the higher consciousness which we are calling by a short, little word — joy — is already locked within each and every human being, awaiting discovery. As a consequence of not only visiting but ultimately living in a state of joy, you will find joy and ecstasy continually playing within your being.
There are many practical applications of joy. For those who must seek a benefit before they make an endeavor, consider this. Most people live in the hope that their work, their sporting activities, their marriages, their children, their inventions, their plans, their hard work, will bring them happiness. They look at money as something which will, if accumulated appropriately, also bring happiness. What if you could find happiness far beyond your expectation? What if you could find it directly? What if you could find it delightedly blazing inside you, ever-new, and never boring? What if it could so pour out of you that it would help your health, make your mind sharper and clearer, make your emotions more balanced, and enable you to be a much more mature, alive, and able person? What if this happiness increased your coordination? Your respect of other people? Your capacity to accomplish projects and solve problems? What if this joy sloughed off old hurts and pains, making your life feel fresh and clean? What if this joy made you a winner, a more successful person, full of enthusiasm and the capacity to lead and inspire other people?
These are some of the benefits to be found in yourself as you develop awareness of your higher consciousness. Your joy will not only directly satisfy innumerable emotional needs but will also spread like a positive disease, perhaps becoming an epidemic of good will in your part of the country.
4 — Inner Power
We feel very puny in this part of the twenty second century. Small and impotent, we continue to feel the burden of a potential nuclear holocaust — accidental or intentional — and, then again, we hear that terrorists who dislike us now have colossal bombs, too. The ground beneath our feet shakes. Hurricanes blow towns out of existence. There are cracks in our nuclear power plants. Our life-sustaining atmosphere is turning brown from poisons; its ozone layer has holes the size of continents. We now fear the possibilities of global droughts, for several reasons.
Additionally, there is the threat that our credit system — perhaps even the international banking system — might collapse and create a world where fleshless fingers clutch at ground fish patties and powdered milk.
Nor is any job secure. Careers and entire industries are being wiped out as a new economy replaces the old one. Young men and women today need to change their careers five to ten times in order raise their families. This will probably be very stressful — especially for those who don’t enjoy studying and frequent re-training.
Unleash Your Inner Power
The fourth marvelous faculty of your higher consciousness is inner power. Though you may at times feel very weak and incapable of changing oppressive conditions in your world and personal life, you actually do possess an inner power to change things! It's always there within you. You can unleash it as soon as you discover it and work with it. Why ignore it?
When you feel weak, confronted by a multitude of obstacles, when fears amass and offensively charge you, seek your higher consciousness. Often superconscious insight guides you and you will know what to do. Or perhaps you may be given a deeply secure and comforting awareness which helps you to deal with your dread. You may find a sweet peace or a sense of the underlying beauty and joy of life. Also, perhaps early in your experience of higher consciousness, you will discover that mindfully taking your thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and your present understanding of your difficult situation into your higher consciousness enables you to find that subtle power which changes your situation.
When you find higher consciousness you find a marvelous power which moves into the chaos or the menace. This inner power may turn your problem into a benefit or dissolve the problem. This power might even delay your menaces until your situation is completely improved. You will find yourself growing from the sense of being puny and inadequate into a state of faith and certainty that knows good will inevitably expresses, right will be done, truth will prevail. You have this inner power. It is available in your distress and in the good times, too. Never forget you have this wonderful inner power to improve your life, and yourself.
New Possibilities
Here we are, sharing the modern world. We have so many advantages over previous times in history. We live in a world of new possibilities — computers, space travel, instant communication with the world via satellite. One agricultural representative in the United States says we could, in this country alone, produce enough food to feed eleven billion people!
Thousands of Americans become "new millionaires" every year because of their hard work, and the way they maximize opportunities which are often unseen by others. Approximately 100 people become millionaires every day in the U.S. By far, owners of small businesses "make up the largest number of millionaires." 2 Ebony Magazine finds "one million American families are worth $1,000,000 or more!" 3 Who knows how many millionaires there will be in ten years?
Just as key people throughout history have sensed new possibilities and have given birth to great inventions, inspiring works of literature and art, gorgeous symphonies, so too you may reach out to your higher consciousness and further the entire human race in its progression.
It has always been the case that some people refused to merely accept the menaces and problems which afflicted their society. They refused to be destroyed by challenges to their health or their very existence. They sought solutions — sometimes very desperately. In their quest they again and again reported enlightening experiences which sparked their greatest creativity. They clearly indicated that they, by design or accident, entered into the higher consciousness. Consider Newton's observations about falling objects; the pre-war discoveries of radar by Watson-Watt and others; Frederick the Great's observations that countries should rule themselves, not be dominated by an empire; Ben Franklin's observations that people should be free to rule themselves, not dominated by a foreign power or tyrannical government; and on and on. Mozart, Beethoven, Madame Curie, da Vinci, Dante, Shakespeare, Gandhi, Michelangelo, Einstein, people who contacted their higher consciousness, not only rose above the collective problems of their age but became its genius.
Global Challenges
It’s exciting to be alive today, isn’t it? We’re becoming able to communicate with one another in so many ways. Health research is lengthening our life spans. People of different religions, nations and races are striving to understand and embrace one another. We can gaze into a new millenium hopefully.
But we citizens of Earth find ourselves poised at a most delicate moment in history. Our water, air and soil are poisoned. Many of our families and communities are breaking down. We’re having trouble feeding everyone. 4 Violent crime continues in most places. Terrorism occurs frequently in so many countries. Nuclear annihilation remains a possibility. Poverty and disease afflict our global family too commonly.
This world is a product of the way we have thought, felt and acted over many centuries. In its triumphs and in its shuddering inadequacies, it represents what we as a human race have been thinking about life and ourselves so far. Our regular manner of doing things has resulted in the present worldwide condition — good and bad.
Considering humanity as a unit — which it most assuredly is — we might observe that however numerous and wondrous our advances, there are obviously some shortcomings in our routines of thinking and doing. Have we not, in a most awesome manner, missed the point somewhere? Aren’t we blocking or frustrating the aptitudes and skills necessary for survival and uninterrupted well being here on earth? At this most significant time in humanity’s struggle to live in peace, is our present state of awareness adequate to our needs? Aren’t increased awareness and concern absolutely necessary?
All around us we see partial solutions which cause problems that haunt us later. For example, getting rid of destructive insects with insecticides may be a good temporary solution, but what happens to those toxins later on has to be part of the consideration. Changing the face of nature can bring floods and death. Holding back bright children can have a devastating effect on the well being of a nation and humanity at large later on. Political motivation can often do great harm, as well as great good.
The point is, here at a major crossroad in human history, you are alive. Our world today is a product of what we've thought and felt and done in the past. Surely it is clear that a new way of dealing with life's challenges is imperative.
REFLECTION
1 Possibly you are one of the rare "clear-minded" and you enjoy much peace and success because of your excellent decisions Good for you!
2 Nation's Business, November, 1988.
3 Ebony Magazine, October, 1988.
4 800,000,000 of us live in hunger, 13% of the world population, according to The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger In Our Time by George McGovern, pub. By Simon and Schuster.