Overview

Brain and Mind
In my view, the brain is quite separate from the mind. The brain is a physical feature of the consciousness, whilst the mind is non-physical.
Another way to look at consciousness is that it composed of the three levels of reality: a physical level, an astral level, and a spiritual level.

The Spiritual Level
Each person has a spiritual core that is the person’s direct connection to part of God. The spiritual core is independent of the ego, and a common name for it is the higher self. In olden times the higher self was sometimes called the soul, but this usage was ambiguous. So I do not use the term the soul. I use only the term higher self.

The higher self is sometimes called the Silent Watcher. The ego experiences karma, and death and reincarnation. The higher self is a permanent reality that never dies and so is never reborn.

Five Levels of Consciousness

In my view of the ways to understand human consciousness, I categorise five levels of approach, with overlapping boundaries.

e). The physical: neurology, physiology, chemical/hormone, etc.
f ). The psychological.
g). The psychic.
h). The existential, or how the issues of freedom are handled.
i). The transpersonal, or spiritual idealisms, or sources of spiritual inspirations.

Traditionally a teacher may embrace (e), (g), and (i). What has been lacking till recently have been teachers who embrace (f ) and (h). This has been the contribution of western thinkers. The problems of understanding consciousness have been so great that so far no one has embraced all five. Perhaps this will happen sometime in the next few centuries, before the New Age of Aquarius begins to suffer from Old Age!

Thoughts in the Mind

Some of the thoughts that flow through my mind are generated by me, and there are others that are not generated by me. So how can I be responsible for those “foreign” thoughts? A better understanding is this: I may or may not be responsible for some thoughts. However, if I act on any thought, I make it mine and hence have some degree of responsibility for it. If I do not act on any foreign thought, then I am not affected by it and not responsible for it.

What baffles the average rationalist is that it is not possible to imagine a state of mind that is higher than he has ever experienced. If we assume that there are levels of spiritual development, then what I know from experience is the following: when the person’s higher self wants the person to take the next step forward to a higher state of mind, a state of mind on a higher level, then that higher self gives the person the experience of that state. From then on, the person can now realistically imagine that state when he is not currently in it. He can now use his own efforts to reach that state in the future. If we have never reached a higher level, then we cannot reach it on our own; we need our higher self to help us to reach it.

In my late 30s I went to a Buddhist week-long summer school. I have always needed space in my life – I cannot live in cramped conditions. In Buddhist theory, one of the higher states of mind is that of pure space, without any connection to time. During that summer school, when I was engaged in trying to meditate, my higher self took me to that region of mind. I experienced pure space, space without any boundaries. If a person has never experienced pure space, then it is beyond imagination. When the person “ascends” to a higher state of mind for the first time because of the influence of his higher self, then this is occurs by grace; this is what I understand the idea of grace to mean.

Another factor to consider is that those higher states of mind which we manage to attain, due to the influence of our higher self, depend on what we intensely desire. The experience given to us reflects our expectations. For example, for a person who is a Christian, if he experiences a high spiritual presence then he will interpret it as being the presence of Jesus. Whereas, if a Muslim experiences a high spiritual presence then he will interpret it as being the presence of Mohammed. In other words, the spiritual teachings that our higher self gives us are given in ways that fit into our religious tradition.

Difficulties in the Past

Buddhist theory assumes that the higher self does not exist, because the meditator cannot detect it. The same theory assumes that the ego is not permanent and has only a transient existence. These ideas were needed at the time of Buddha, in so far as they helped the person to control his negative desires and unpleasant emotions. However, they are too limited to have much significant value for the needs of the Western world once the Age of Aquarius begins.

The higher self cannot be detected or observed by any kind of perception that the ego can use, which means both ordinary perception and psychic perception (otherwise called extra-sensory perception). The ego can only intuit the higher self if that higher self wants that ego to know that the higher self exists. In this situation, the higher self manifests its influence in the experience of the Silent Watcher. Whilst the nature and reality of the ego is debatable, the reality of the higher self is obvious once that ego has experienced the Silent Watcher [¹].

Likewise, the reality or non-reality of God cannot be decided by relying directly on any kind of perception. We have to approach the truth of God indirectly, such as focusing on the fact that the splendour of the universe cannot be the result of random activity and so has obviously been designed.
We may believe that either God exists or does not exist. If we want to establish how accurate our belief about God is, we have first to analyse our psychological reasons for believing what we believe. For example:

Our psychological issues will shape, even determine, what we are prepared to believe about God and reality. Only when we resolve these psychological issues by learning to accept life, with all its joys and sorrows, can we begin to let our genuine feelings about God emerge.

In my case, I have always regarded myself as being a rebellious mystic. Mysticism is my path, not meditation. Meditation focuses on controlling the mind, whereas mysticism focuses on controlling the emotions. At first, during my 20s and 30s, I was something of a puritan, preferring asceticism to materialism. I have learned to moderate my asceticism by removing the hatred of materialism that usually underlies it. Now I recognise that materialism has its rightful place in the scheme of things.

A Unified Theory of Consciousness

Consciousness has three parts: the physical body, the astral body (emotions and desires) and the psychic body (how we use our will, plus extra-sensory perception). The difficult one here is the astral body, or what we know today as the field of psychology. The ancients had some knowledge of the physical body and a lot of knowledge of the psychic body. But very little knowledge of psychology. So they could not handle the astral body and taught that it had to be bypassed or subdued by the serious spiritual seeker. The focus on doing penance and menial work became a popular religious way of handling unwanted desires. The world as we see it was taught to be irrelevant and a distraction from the serious work of meditation.

This denial of the importance of the material world led eventually to the rise of materialism as the dialectical antidote [²]. Hence I see the exaggeration of materialism today simply as the opposite of the exaggeration of world-denial taught in the past. Materialism has its place in the spiritual view of reality. There is nothing wrong in trying to attain a comfortable level of material security. As usual with most things, materialism only goes wrong when its importance is grossly exaggerated.

In my view, once psychology becomes a mainstream topic for spiritual seekers, then they can return to a higher focus. Once they know how to handle the psychological problems that the spiritual journey causes, then they can expect to follow an “holistic” spiritual journey, embracing the physical body, the astral body and the psychic body into one comprehensive and unified theory of consciousness.

The Higher Mind and Self Awareness

I regard the higher mind as having two factors: logical reasoning (more usually thought of as rationality) and intuition. Intuition is pattern thinking (right-brain activity), whereas rationality is sequence thinking (left-brain activity). Logical analysis uses up a lot of mental energy and so long spells of analysis tire the mind; when I feel mentally exhausted, I switch to non-logical thinking and prefer to watch video films or play music. This is a switch from left-brain activity to right-brain activity. Intuition uses very little mental energy, since basically the mind is free-wheeling and works best when the person is relaxed.

As a generalisation, most people have an undeveloped left brain, and so prefer intuitive thinking, especially as it does not exhaust them. Whereas most scientists and philosophers have an undeveloped right brain. Ideally, the best balance for daily life is in using either logic or intuition as the situation requires. What inhibits the correct understanding of the place of intuition for scientists and academics is the fear that they will be labelled as being irrational by their peers, and hence their career will come to a stop.

In developing self-awareness we have to step outside the confines of sequence thinking and allow pattern thinking to take its rightful place as part of our armoury of intellectual tools. Self-awareness implies that we are becoming aware of how our subconscious mind is influencing our thinking, actions, and behaviours. The basic tool for self-discovery is intuition, but intuition is not perfect. So we use our rationality to check and verify the correctness of our intuitions. Another way of looking at this is that intuition enables us to discover hidden ways of the mind, and rationality enables us to identify self-deception and faulty assumptions.

The development of self-awareness always puts a person through a lot of emotional adversity, because the person is being made aware not only of his strengths but also of his weaknesses and limitations. Coming to terms with our limitations is highly stressful to a person who is idealistic. We become confused, which only means that the subconscious mind is getting very active and is strongly influencing our normal consciousness. Then we begin to realise that our image of ourself does not reflect what we are finding out about ourself, and so our sense of identity is shaken.

Purpose of High States of Mind in our Youth

Sometimes, especially in our early youth, we experience some high states of mind, and even states of enlightenment. Then after a time they disappear and we wonder why. We try to access them again, but because we never really understood why they happened to us, we find that we cannot succeed. We think that something has gone wrong in our life which stops these states occurring to us again.

My view is this: except in special conditions, the states that we access in our youth are not designed to remain permanently with us during our active middle age and only reappear, perhaps, when we retire. The reason is that such states will interfere with what social tasks we have to face in life. A state of bliss and tranquillity is not a good state of mind to indulge in when you have to get out of bed in the morning and go to work.

For example, during my 40s I practised meditation in the morning and it made me feel very good. I went to work in this state of mind and then everything seemed to go wrong. I eventually realised that the state of meditation increased my sensitivity not only to my own mind, but also to the minds of other people. So when I went to work, I picked up all the negative hostility that goes through people’s minds when they resent having to go to work. When I realised this I had to stop meditation – though I suppose it would have been all right to continue with meditation but only if I did it in the evening. By morning, the increased level of sensitivity that the meditation had given me the previous evening would have dissipated, so that I would not have picked up excessive amounts of hostility from people when I went to work.

In general, the states of mind we access in our youth are designed to inspire us, so that we continue with our spiritual practice even when life gets hard for us. Another way to look at such states is that they will only become permanent features of our life when we have learned to handle them effectively in everyday life. If they appear too frequently and we cannot handle them in our social life, then such states will corrupt us, or a better way to think of it is that such states will empower not only our good desires but also our “bad” desires.

As an example, think of the 1960s. In the west, Britain was going through its hippie period. Pop stars were attracted to Indian gurus, and several gurus came to Britain. Unfortunately, these gurus could not handle the high levels of material desires, wealth and fame that a Western life produces. So nearly all these gurus were corrupted by their fame and wealth, and usually they had to return to India in order to recover their previous good states of mind.

My advice is to continue with your spiritual practices, but do not expect success until the future. What is more important for you is to be able to function adequately in social life – to be able to have good relationships, and to be able to resolve harmoniously all the problems that relationships bring. So long as you find it hard to face the frustrations and difficulties of social life, it is best that higher states of mind do not appear to you. In the past, when meditators found it hard to face their social difficulties they retired into solitude. This worked in the past but is unlikely to work anymore today. The reason is that in the past there were no ways of resolving difficult problems, but nowadays you can learn psychology as a means of resolving problems. A spiritual life can be very hard, mainly because it does not allow a person to run away from his problems; instead it usually makes him face up to them sooner or later. Spirituality is not a means to avoid problems, and hence a spiritual life can sometimes bring a lot of distress to a person. I suggest that you look upon any bliss and tranquillity you have already experienced as being an indication of what you are likely to experience more regularly when your commitment to active social and work life is over and you can live life more leisurely, or even retire.

So long as you are desperate to experience high states of mind again, you are likely to fail. The reason for this is that desperation indicates that you are trying to use these states as a means of escape from the difficulties of life. When it no longer matters whether you experience them or not, then you may begin to experience them again.

[¹]. I describe my experience of the Silent Watcher in my book Landmarks of Spirituality, section Orientations. [1]

[²]. I use the dialectic in its Hegelian version, as thesis, antithesis (or opposite), and resolution. As in my example, world denial is the thesis, excessive materialism is the antithesis, and somehow we have to resolve and balance the dilemma between them. [2]

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Ian Heath
London, UK

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Overview of Consciousness