How to Gain the Potency of Total Consciousness
I want to make sure that each of us understands each step of the path that we must take. I also want to say that in this time, let’s say, this last moment of calm before the coming waves of storms, not the physical ones so much, our consciousness has to be raised—it’s not high enough.
We’re not making use of the one resource that we have in plenty, which is the power of consciousness. It is our ace in the hole. But if we don’t make use of that supernatural resource by staying in the ego level of consciousness, we’re not going to make it. And that’s why our preparations—regardless of what we do in terms of food security, or how much money we have even, or any of the other phenomenal plane accomplishments—they won’t enable us to survive if we’re still in the ego, and there will be struggles, and arguments, and anger, and disputes and schisms, and there will be a failure of the right kind of energy, and the right kind of unified field that will be able to download the powers that are latent in our consciousness that some of us don’t even imagine that we could access—let alone activate—and we have to break through this cynical paradigm of the ego, because consciousness does have the power to alter the climate and to bring more sun, and to bring more funds, and to bring more yogis, and to have abundance of every kind—but we’re not using that power.
And if we depend only on our phenomenal plane knowledge base, that will be insufficient to achieve the level of existence that will enable us to complete our real mission here, which isn’t just to survive—it’s to redream a new world, and to bring the light to every being who is still stuck in the ego.
But if we’re still stuck in it, how can we be of any service? And then it’s a question of whether we would even be allowed to survive by that Power that determines whether we have fulfilled the function that has brought us here, which isn’t just to have a good time on a mountain and try to do as little work as possible and just get by—and some people have that attitude. So we need to understand what this is about and what is at stake. And if we don’t do that, then the ego-mind, which as we know is filled with maras, with demonic energies, will simply take over, and people will be in a state of constant emotional volatility and meltdowns, and hysteria, and suicidal ideas, and all kinds of desires to run away from their own misery that is self-created. If we don’t destroy that misery at the root, by killing the mara of the ignorance of who and what we really are, we will not be victorious, we won’t be able to raise the flag of Jaya Dev, and we won’t be able to meet God with our heads held high when it’s time to leave these bodily forms.
So I hope everyone is taking very seriously the imperative of transcending the ego-mind and reaching the infinite mind that has the power that the ego lacks, and the coherence, and the intelligence, and the love, and the unity, and the power of bringing to bear the energy that produces miracles. But we have to be worthy of wielding that energy, and we have to have developed the sustainable God-consciousness that enables that power to flow through us, and emanate, and create a grid of energy that encompasses not only the whole Ashram, but ultimately the whole planetary noosphere.
So I hope everyone has that understanding of that potentiality, and you’re not simply staying in the ego-mind and assuming that that’s you. And if you’re believing in what your ego-mind is thinking and believing those are your thoughts, you’re done for. If you cannot distinguish the Self from the ego, and separate, extract your consciousness from it, then you have lost before you’ve even started to struggle upstream to reach the Lord of Consciousness. So I hope everyone has that intention.
Anyway, the teaching was about the journey of Purusha and Prakriti, and I want to go through that, so you all understand what is meant by those terms. So I made a little chart of it to share with you, that might clarify it more.
(Shunyamurti writes 7 Stages of Self-Realization on whiteboard.)
OK, I gave it this title—I don’t remember if I’ve given another module with this same title; if I have forgive me, and we’ll add a different word here—but this is basically what we’re going to be looking at.
Now when I gave the teaching on Monday, I actually started with stage two, so I’m going to go back to stage one which is—in stage one, in ego-consciousness, you don’t recognize that the ego is Prakriti; the ego is not Purusha, it has nothing to do with Purusha. It’s an installed biological system that is entirely based on the identity of the physical organism. So it’s a consciousness reduced to its lowest level, where it doesn’t even recognize that there is a difference between consciousness and matter. It considers itself to be a body, it considers that that’s the only reality that there is, and it’s normal to have ups and downs, and to be angry, and sad, and depressed, and all the other emotions, and there’s simply a sense of “this is what reality is”. And so there’s no intention of changing it, it’s inertia. This is what’s called the tamasic guna, and we are now in a state at the end of Kali Yuga that is tamopradhan—that means extreme tamas, and that’s the ego in its current state.
And because Prakriti itself—which is nature, which is the five elements, which is matter in its current state of pollution and of degradation—because the ego is materialized, more than it is even mentalized, because of its identity with the body, it’s totally effected by the energies of Prakriti around the world. And as those get more dark and degraded, and more chaotic, because of all of the upheavals at a geophysical level, let alone social and political etc., the ego becomes ever more anxious, and scattered, and dissociated, in order to try to hold onto some level of functionality, but at the cost of becoming ever more fractured, and therefore eventually reaches a state where it cannot function, and there are too many thoughts, and too many conflicts internally, and those conflicts get projected, and then create negativity in the energy-field of Prakriti in the surrounding environment.
So, the second stage is really the beginning of the spiritual journey where there is a dawning recognition that consciousness is not the body, that consciousness has resources and functions and capacities to download insights, inspirations, energies, that there are such things as synchronicities in the world, that one’s dreams are meaningful, that there is a power of consciousness that is uncanny, and that cannot be explained by neurophysiology, and by science in its current primitive form. And Purusha begins to extract itself because the ego becomes unbearable—it’s too miserable, too unhappy, too angry, too sad, too anxious—and so there’s a beginning of an extraction of Purusha from Prakriti, but it doesn’t complete itself because it’s codependent on Prakriti. It still wants the jouissance of Prakriti, it wants the gratification that the material plane can offer. And because it wants that, it cannot totally separate, it can’t let go of its desire for Prakriti, and therefore it cannot ascend to the next stage.
And so until the mind is reoriented away from the ego, away from the body, until there’s a full acceptance of the inadequacy of the ego-mind to solve one’s problems, and to bring happiness, and to bring peace—until there’s a recognition that one must raise one’s consciousness and not blame others for one’s misery, and not just try to simply deny it, or take drugs to avoid it, or do something else to feel some kind of enjoyment, one is going to stay at that stage where there are occasional glimmers of wanting to extract oneself from Prakriti, but it never happens because the dependence on that gratification for the balance of the consciousness is still too strong, and it falls back into actions that then bring it back into stage one. And at stage two, there’s more agony of a feeling of failure, and a feeling of impossibility, that then creates a depression.
So, when the Purusha can get over its depression and get on with the business of raising its consciousness, it becomes Sat Purusha: at a certain point, it will extract itself enough from Prakriti that it will recognize that Prakriti is actually maya; that it’s actually an illusion and a mirage, and a false world, a simulation, that it has no essence, and there’s nothing to be gotten from it. So this is when the first level of empowerment comes, when the Purusha becomes purified enough to want nothing to do with maya, and there’s a complete separation. OK, that fission is the first stage of a process that will then become fusion at a higher level. And so there has to be the first fission and separation—this is why all of the affirmations: “I am not the body. I am not the mind. I am not this and that,” you know, neti neti—but one doesn’t know who one is, but at least one knows who one is not, and what one is not. And so that’s when the real journey begins in earnest.