Consciousness as an Alternative to Therapy

Jun 24

I think everyone has glimpses of, flashes of, an experience with truth-consciousness even if it lasted only a second.

In spite of that, you are more apt to define your experience of life not through these breakthroughs of consciousness but through the negative experiences that permeated your life, that left lasting marks on your mind, body, and emotions.

There would be the tendency in any of these messages to drift into those events, into the horizontal, into the realm of daily life, where there is an endless source of dialogue and analysis as to why you are the way you are, how your past was responsible for creating your future, the childhood you had, etc.

What we teach here at TruthSpring is that while those negative events had a huge impact on you, your story is not the real story…but it certainly looks that way. There’s another story, a more promising one, a more powerful one that you haven’t been told about. It’s the story about you becoming whole and well and fulfilled.

We are trying to establish a new language, a new approach to understanding and mastering your life through the journey of consciousness which we define as the discovery of truth in physical matter. Now, I want to be very careful about that statement. Truth has already been defined. Truth already exists in physical matter itself, including you. We are not discovering anything that has not already been established but what we are doing as we learn more and more about consciousness is to help you increase your understanding and as a result, we apply to apply a new science of living to your life.

Spirit is one everywhere and it knows all things as itself and in itself. It knows the reality of who you are.

And much of your life has been about coming to terms with what that reality is and what it’s not. Human beings will do all kinds of crazy stuff if it promises to give them meaning and identity. I have the utmost respect for therapy, its many versions, and attempts in helping the individual reconcile the unreconcilable.

My own personal experiences in individual therapy, marriage counseling, and group therapy led me to believe that it would eventually reach a certain point where it could only circle back to the same old discussions about the same old things. To me personally, therapy was not about empowerment or the soul for it knew nothing about the soul. It was about reconciling the mind and ego which I now see cannot be done. I knew it at the time but I didn’t have the experience or words to describe the limitation I experienced.

To make matters worse, if what I am saying is true, that the content of your mind is an illusion, it’s just stuff you made up in order to survive, then how can something that doesn’t exist be fixed? It can’t.

But it can occupy endless hours of nonsense and mental exchange that reinforces the mental garbage that the mind invented to somehow convince itself that its content was somehow real but everyone else’s was not.

The work we speak about is not therapy but is a yoga. It is a path of life that is not about an escape to the nirvana or another world but is an embracing of being in the physical body but does contain an ascent to a higher knowledge with the understanding that truth-consciousness itself seeks to descend, displacing the old ways of living in order to make room for the new. This work is not about thinking or analyzing. It is about being. I want to share that the world is not an illusion as you have been taught by the spiritually elite because if the world is an illusion, then what is the point in being here?

There isn’t a point except to figure out how to escape! And the damage that these approaches have done and the religions that have offered a heavenly afterlife in spite of the fact that you can’t even manage your life without being ruled by depression, sadness, powerlessness, and the daily assault of the experience of meaninglessness here on earth is a childish fantasy.

But there is an illusion. The illusion is the lens through which you see the world and yourself- that’s the illusion. Therapy attempts to adjust the lens, tweak the lens, talk about where the lens came from, who stole your lens, who damaged your lens, and other mindless games. The greatest limitation ion traditional therapy is that it reinforces your identification with your mind.

Therapy treats your experience but it doesn’t know very much about your existence and understanding the nature of your existence should be the most important pursuit of your life because until you know who you are, how can you possibly know how to live? Where in the human mind can you find harmony, peace, justice, equality, and a litany of other conditions to which mankind has aspired to but never reached in its entire history of existence? Where in the perfectly visible imperfection and the endless suffering of mankind can you find the power of God? You can’t.

Division doesn’t produce unity any more than prejudice produces equality. The mind is no more capable of creating consciousness than slavery is capable of creating freedom.

I had a personal experience in therapy 40 years ago that I would like to recount. My first wife and I went to counseling to work on our marriage. About halfway through the session, I realized that the psychologist had fallen asleep. I studied him for a moment as he began to snore. I felt nothing but sympathy for him. I said to my wife, “You would fall asleep, too, if you had to sit around all day long and listen to this bullshit.”

I wrote the check out in his name, placed it on his desk, and tiptoed quietly out of the room. I wasn’t upset or angry. I understood. Even I was getting to the point of having trouble listening to me babble anymore. I knew there had to be something more but I didn’t know what it was.

It is above the mind and not in or below the mind in the subconscious that you must seek the truth and that truth will be found. And this becomes a yoga, a path.

Sri Aurobindo says this about what he referred to as the integral yoga: “This yoga can only be done in the end by those who are in total earnest about it and ready to abolish their little human ego and its demands in order to find themselves in the Divine. It cannot be done in a spirit of levity or laxity; the work is too high and difficult, the adverse powers in the lower Nature too ready take advantage of the least sanction or the smallest opening the aspiration needed too constant and intense. It cannot be done if there is a petulant self-assertion of the ideas of the human mind or willful indulgence of the demands and instincts and pretensions of the lowest part of the being, commonly justified under the name of human nature. It cannot be done if you insist on identifying these lowest things of the Ignorance with the divine Truth or even the lesser truth permissible on the way. It cannot be done if you cling to your past self and its old mental, vital and physical formations and habits; one has continually to leave behind his past selves and to see, act and live from an always higher and higher conscious level. It cannot be done if you insist on “freedom” for your human mind and vital ego. All the parts of the human being are entitled to express and satisfy themselves in their own way at their own risk and peril, if he so chooses, as long as he leads an ordinary life. But to enter into a path of yoga whose whole object is to substitute for these human things the law and power of a greater Truth and the whole heart of whose method is surrender to the Divine, and yet to go on claiming this so-called freedom . . . is to indulge in a blind contradiction and to claim the right to lead a double life.”

Let’s continue addressing the issue of therapy through another observation by Aurobindo: “Spiritual development takes quite a different approach because it regards the individual as inherently whole within a greater system of wholeness. Enlightened sages of all times concur in the view that an exquisite correspondence exists between the harmony of the heavens and the life of man on Earth; "That which is above is like that which is below, the Macrocosm is equal to the Microcosm".

This observation led them to describe man as "Microcosmos", a harmony unto himself, a center around which orbit the manifestations or outpourings of his inner landscape. Unlike psychology, the spiritual perspective holds that the events of a man's life proceed from a convergence of heredity, environment, the whole past action of his nature which determines will and character as well as the complex mechanism of destiny referred to in the eastern vernacular as ‘Karma.’

Given this set of determinates, the details of one's life experience appear to have been chosen at a much higher level in order to ensure a specific quality of consciousness that would encourage the development of the Soul. The ancient science of Astrology, based upon a knowledge of these "sets of determinates", concurs in this view and affirms that all that happens to a person occurs within a higher harmony, willing and accomplishing the highest good of all beings. That all things are the workings of the Supreme Being and nothing which happens in or around us is in vain or without its appointed place and just significance.”

I don’t recall any of this coming up in any of the therapy sessions I attended. I’m not knocking therapy. I’m just saying there are better alternatives to learning about yourself that are clearly not known in therapy. And that alternative is a spiritual path that does not seek uniformity but grants the expression of those spiritual realizations to the individual as the individual sees fit that best expresses the innate image that lies inside.

As above, so below. If it’s true about God, it’s true about you. And the fact is that you are a microcosmos of the macro cosmos. That is reality.

Robert Wilkinson, in an article entitled, “Modern Psychology and the Question of the Soul,’ states, “Psychology and its derivative therapeutic process is founded upon a principle of uniformity. It dissects and dismembers the dimensions of consciousness to analyze their function and reorganize them into a more harmonious mode of expression. It seeks to adjust the human creature to the limitations of his "instrument" and the society in which he functions. It achieves this goal by a series of elaborate mental theories which provide continuous experiences of emotional release by shifting the responsibility for one's actions outside oneself. It simultaneously moves the individual out of the present moment and away from what is, into a preoccupation with what ought to be or what should have been. It has developed over time, a rigid dogma that seeks to explain and order all aspects of human behavior from the poise of the reflective intellect. However, this limited mental perspective mistakes appearance for reality and fails to appreciate the profound spiritual symbols which lie behind and give rise to all mundane experience. In other words, it has no connection with the real because it is constantly dismembering and analyzing apparent experience to fit into its subject-object paradigm.”

So, if we are going to make sense out of any of this, let’s be consistent and go back to the existence/experience paradigm and the issue of identity. Identifying yourself with your mind, which is SOP, produces monstrous results. And we all do it. To believe that you are your experiences, good or bad, will produce a false reality. Experiences change but the mind stays hooked into the old versions of itself in those early experiences. But what if you could begin the process of identifying yourself not with your past or anything your mind has created but with a reality that is stable within the unstable world, unchanging within your every day, changing life?

Consciousness creates itself in a million different pieces and you’re one of them! But in the discovery process of realizing that you are one with It and It is one with you, you choose through birth the path of becoming, of forgetting the oneness and who you are. The invisible became visible when you were born. Spirit became matter when you were born. So, to confirm, you are Spirit, God, playing the becoming game pretending you don’t know who you are: you are both who live in two different worlds. But with which do you identify? What if you could begin to make the shift?

There is the you think you are which is the you you made up. Then, there’s the you you are that was given to you at birth. One is real. One is not. Your false identity is like a cork. It takes some effort to keep it underwater but eventually, it will find its way to the top. This is none other than the becoming process itself.

At some point in the process, you’ll let go and rise. So, in this effort, it’s important to make a shift of identity. At some point in the process, you’ll let go and rise. You’ll notice that as time goes by, you become more and more uncomfortable with your manner of living any way…and by the way, so are those who love you…and you start figuring out how to get out of the box.

These instructions of how to get out of the box are contained in the same place as your identity. Both will be found above the mind and not in the mind.

So, consciousness is not about psychology or therapy and yet, those schools of thought have their place in the growth process. Let me give you an effective visual that you can begin to work with.

Your birth is a process by which the illimitable is closed within limits. The boundless is now contained in boundaries. The infinite is now contained in the finite. It’s taking you, a vast and boundless soul, and putting you in a circle. We call that circle the closed tape loop. In that process, in that circle, your individual cosmos is formed. The little “I” is born and is individualized. Now, in that cosmos, it becomes important to get a handle on how everything will orbit, how everything must become ordered.

The ordering, just like a galaxy, has a center in it, requires a center. Now, here, your center is comprised of your horizontal and vertical axes. This person called “you” lies at the nexus of these axes. These are the expanding and contracting forces of your life. And within this cosmos, within this circle, lies all of the experiences of your life, the good and the bad.

But, from this angle, everything seems separate and disconnected. Because those billions of other people have their own individualized cosmos, too, and they’re working on trying to get their cosmos to work, too. But, you see, they are part of the one consciousness that created it, too. We are all part of the same consciousness but each of us has our individualized cosmos.

So, some people’s cosmos, well, it’s outright annoying. Another person’s cosmos, you might be very attracted to. But you come into the process having preselected a lot of the stuff that makes up your cosmos and…are you ready? With destiny in mind. There’s the will of your ego, there’s the will of your soul and there’s the will of God. Who do you think is going to win?

When you are unaware of these dynamics, your universe, your galaxy, spirals out of control. When your horizontal, daily life runs into trouble, the vertical axis creates a contracting experience, forcing you to move from the outer part of your life to the inner part of your life, to your center, to come to terms with the event. So, the saying from “A Course in Miracles, “ if you do not go within, you will go without is actually true. Until the center is forged, the ordering within your cosmos cannot take place and that’s why it seems so often that you don’t have any control and that chaos runs your life. That’s OK. That’s the process! That’s why you’re here!

When you are aware, there is a certain “ordering” that takes place and it is this alignment that allows your world to hold together. You are, essentially, the center of your universe and this is your evolutionary process. Now, in saying that you are the center of your universe, I am not appealing to your ego, I am appealing to the powerful you, the higher you, the conscious you.

Consciousness is the force that teaches you how to create and maintain your center, the micro, through the understanding of the truth that lies in the universe, the macro. You can now see that this centering process, this ordering process, is not concerned with how you feel or what you think.

In describing this process, I did not refer to psychology in any way but referred to the illimitable, the boundless, God, the Divine, as the origin of your world. And that is where identity must be formed.

This process will not involve examining your mind and your mind’s content but certainly, that can be a very important part of the process in preparation for a greater journey.