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Let’s go on a journey. Let’s explore this sense of SELF we all seem to share. It’s a journey called The Mountains of the Mind. The opposite condition to climbing these mountains is a state we could call, “Lost in the World”. That’s the state that most of us spend our lives in, rocked and buffeted by the physical and emotional weather of our lives.
To begin this, become conscious of what you are experiencing now. First of all what is your mood? Are you happy, sad or indifferent? Next, are you physically comfortable, perhaps too hot or too cold; or you may be uncomfortably hunched over your computer keyboard?
Now, consider what you can hear. Are there sounds in the room, perhaps you have music playing. Let your attention wander further; are there any background noises? Perhaps the birds are chirping outside or maybe there are children playing elsewhere in the house or outside in the street?
As you move through these states of experience, become aware that there is one level of you that is WATCHING the other levels. It has recorded the mental answers you gave to the questions above. It is starting to separate out the different sense impressions that you have received since we began this journey of exploration.
We left out the sense of sight. So now, become aware that, just as your physical eyes are reading this text, something else is making meaning out of the signals that are coming back to your eyes in the form of beams of light from the objects in front of you. The light beams affect your senses but the meaning is a creation of your MIND.
This first level of the Self is what we call the Ordinary Mind. Science says that the mind is just a result of the brain’s activity, though it freely admits it has no idea as to how it comes about.
Mystics take a different view and have always known that the Mind is something altogether different from the brain. This certainty is based, not on faith, but on their experiences of the wondrous world that lies beyond the ordinary consciousness.
The Mind needs the brain in order to work its will in the physical world, but the Mind is not the brain and the Will comes from somewhere even higher in the vehicles of your self.
Let’s go deeper into this realm. Feel a calmness in this new perspective you have, a sense of rightness, perhaps a homecoming. This is the edge of the real you, free from the constant nagging of the world around you. Go into this calmness and feel the world drop away, closing your eyes and sensing the peace and wholeness that are the living heart of this level of consciousness. There is an intimate relationship between your inner state and what you actually experience in the world. It was summed up in an ancient saying, “Change your thoughts and you change your world!”.
Now try to extend this calm awareness outwards, back from its centre and into the body again. Become aware of the different functions in your body. The air-based breathing rhythms, the fluid of your blood, the radiant energy of the heat being generated by your metabolism, the way the solid, cellular parts of your body are woven together into elastic tissue and organs by a vast and subconscious intelligence that serves you every second of your life.
Why does it do this?
It does this because its name is Nature and its life is your life; and for nearly four billion years it has been preparing life on Earth to be a fitting vehicle for the INNER SELF that can now express itself through this body of yours - a body composed of the best of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms that have gone before.
But you are none of these, though your ordinary mind is linked in life to their everyday functioning. You are something deeper within yourself that has individuality - a level of choice and responsibility that no animal, however loving, can share. This deeper self, beyond the ordinary mind is the SOUL, and finding the individual Soul, and extending its personality outward into our lives, is the quest of every Rosicrucian. The Soul is the only part of us that has access to the Mountains of the Mind. It is a landscape that, once glimpsed, is never forgotten. From that moment on, the quest of your life will change and the outward, and ultimately unsatisfying things of the world, will be relegated to second place behind a renewal of the inner joy dawning forever over those inner peaks.
It’s a journey best shared. Come with us. We’re a gentle, loving organisation that operates on a not-for-profit basis. What you see here is what you get.
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