What is Higher Consciousness? - I
When we use the term “Higher Consciousness” we are not talking about some alien form of mindset attainable only after thirty years of meditation in a cave in the Himalayas. Higher Consciousness is the mindset with which we were born: the joy, contentment, and feeling of at-one-ment which was our everyday mind when we were infants and young children. In most of us adults, Higher Consciousness has been largely replaced by self-pity. In other words, what we mistakenly believe to be our “self” is merely self-pity in one or another of its forms (shame or glory).
We can get a clue as to what our social training does to us by observing newborns. Although newborns occupy a physical body from our point of view, that’s obviously not the newborns’ point of view. Newborns don’t have a sense of being centered or trapped in a body. They don’t even understand that they have a body. All they know is feelings, how things feel. If they are hungry, or in pain, they cry. However, they have no sense that it is a bodily condition which is causing their discomfort. All they know, all they are, is a feeling at a particular time.
Being in a body is an interpretation that infants learn as they grow and discover their bodies. In other words, our physical body is something that we’ve learned: we’re not born with it. Learning how to operate without a body – unlearning what we learned as infants – is what astral projection is all about: operating outside the box of the physical body. Astral projection is a technique (or better said: a cognitive process) predicated upon the realization that the physical body has no objective existence. The physical body is a cognitive interpretation we have learned to make, and astral projection is based upon an alternative interpretation. The interpretation that we have a physical body is merely a belief, exactly like the interpretation that we have a body while we’re dreaming is merely a belief. Being awake is in fact nothing more than a highly evolved and specialized form of dreaming. Waking consciousness has evolved over millions of years, since the first multi-cellular beings appeared on the earth. Therefore it has a lot of stability and momentum behind it. When we’re awake, it really seems real. The physical body really seems solid. When you bang it, it really hurts. In fact, however, the physical body is merely a solider illusion – a more encompassing, more persistent, more convincing illusion – than the body that we have in dreams. We adults have a much more sharply defined and delineated sense of selfhood than infants do – by which self is meant (body-centered) lower self. The difference between Higher Consciousness and lower self is that Higher Consciousness says: “This happened”, whereas lower self says: “This happened to me.” Our sense of our having a lower self – a central “me” to which things happen – actually consists of nothing more than self-pity.
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