Inner  Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

 

Layers of Reality

What you see is what you get. And with limited vision, life seems flat. Yet it can grow immensely richer, if we develop the ability to live in its higher as well as its lower levels. Above the many layers of our physiology we find the level of the pre-programmed automaton in us. We walk, we eat, and we perform numerous other complex physical tasks without needing to consider or even notice the minute details of every little movement. The conditioned, automatic layer also includes our personality, the whole complex pattern of thoughts, emotions, and mannerisms that comprise the person we believe ourselves to be. Living in our personality, we react in our typical and idiosyncratic fashion to all the events of life. Our personality operates as a restrictive, deterministic program, reacting automatically to sensory inputs while harboring an illusion of initiative and freedom. Yet all these necessary skills embodied in our trained and habitual behaviors serve us quite well at a functional level.

At the next higher layer we find the sensitive energy, through which we can be aware of our thoughts, emotions, and body. At this level we already have some limited freedom from our pre-programmed personality: we can make real choices. The sensitive energy serves as the substantial basis for much of our inner work, as we collect, contain and transform it into our soul.

True consciousness announces our entry into the next layer. This level of stillness and cognizance enables us to be both fully ourselves and fully in touch with the world beyond ourselves. Consciousness underlies and permeates everything everywhere. Like the air we breathe, we can open, through stillness, to this unbounded yet immediate and substantive vastness which makes us whole. When we feel ourselves to be fully present, we begin to touch consciousness. Through consciousness we can organize and refine the lower levels.

The layers beyond consciousness include the creative energy and love. By emptying ourselves of ourselves, forgoing our egoism, surrendering to the Divine, we may come into contact with the new, the invigorating, the purifying forces of creativity and love.

All these layers of reality impinge on the here and now. Though we spend the bulk of our time in the lower levels, through spiritual practice we aim to open to and gain a foothold in the higher levels. But the lower does not evaporate, it remains. Only it does not have the same exclusive claim on our hopes and imagination. Being in consciousness, we still see the automatic and sensitive at work in us, assuming their proper roles in our personal ecosystem. Touching the creative and love, consciousness itself begins to unwind the knot of egoism. The more fully human we become, the more fully we live on all the levels.


     

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