Preface

I had promised that my next writing would be about Love, “What is Love” and I did start to write that paper to post on my blog.  At around 8000 words I realized that the paper was simply too long and contained a lot of background information which as I studied the writing I realized needed to be understood to get a grasp of how I was viewing and therefore writing about love as an energy.  I attempted to condense too many metaphysical concepts into that writing which increased the size of the writing and did not do justice to the topic or the background information.  I decided to put that writing on a back burner and start with some of the background information separately.

I have decided to start as the title states by explaining my way of understanding the mind.  Even this background topic is too much for one blog post so I will break it into chunks. This is the first chunk.

I want to stress this is truth as I see it and as with any of my writing I would ask that you take what you want and leave the rest for another time.  I am in no way saying this model of the mind is the only one which is valid nor that it would be valid for many others.  I offer this as a representation of how I frame these concepts into patterns which fit together and make sense to me, how I wrap my mind around these abstract concepts.  There are many schools of thought on the mind and how it is divided, I offer my views as another consideration.  I also understand that not everyone will accept the concept of reincarnation which is silently wrapped into my understanding of the mind.  Please take from this anything you find of value and use that to help you on your path to spiritual maturity.

The Mind vs the Brain

I often read material which uses the words brain and mind interchangeably as if they were the same thing.  I draw a distinction between the mind and the brain; I see the brain as a physical organ of the body which corresponds to the Conscious Level of the Mind.  The mind is our total being not only the physical body but includes the Mental Body, and the High Self or Superconscious division of the mind.  Together these “bodies” or divisions of the mind are our total being.

You are not your body you are the mind who occupies the body. This can be seen much as a car and driver.  When you get in your car and drive it from one location to another you do not become your car, you remain yourself and are driving a vehicle to accomplish a task of some sort.  Your mind drives your body in this lifetime while you can leave your body through concentration, dreams, and astral projection you will return to your body until it dies.  When the physical body dies so does the lowest level of your mind, the Conscious Mind.

I believe that we get a new car to drive in each lifetime we live but the mind remains and brings past understood experiences allowing us to drive the new car.  I believe we arrive in this life with a purpose in mind and choose a body and life circumstances which will best afford us the opportunity to fulfill our purpose.

Enough said, you get the idea here.  Brain != Mind. (!= means “not equal to” in SQL geek speak)

Evolution of Mind

I believe that as the universe was created so was mind I see these as one and the same in a sense.  The big bang was the birth of mind as we know it and it was the birth of the universe.  I believe that we have experienced the birth and expansion of the universe and all evolutionary steps along the way.

This took us from the initial bang through various evolutionary phases and as the physical was being formed we experienced various “Root Races” until we eventually became individuals engrossed in the physical world from one lifetime to another.  I mention root races with some hesitations, while technically correct for me there are many schools of thought which use that term differently than I understand it.  The use of the word “Race” is misleading to be sure, these were not races of people etc, these were developmental phase gates we passed through as “MIND” developed into what we have today.  This is where I see that instinct was developed.

In order to operate our human body as we do we would have had to experience many types of situations and other types of lives to “build’ our instinct.  These experiences were part of the evolution of mind and as we experienced each root race we became more individualized and incorporated more “instinctual” behavior patterns into our being.  This was more of a group type experience which is stored in the mind and which we access and use automatically or instinctually.

I don’t believe we are just animals who are born with some magical natural understanding of things on this level of life.  I believe we had to experience physical life from many perspectives to get to a point where we could occupy a mammalian body structure and survive.  I believe we have experienced much of what it took to build the instinctive patterns through a shared experience not an individualized one.

In some studies these root races were specific to time and continent but I do not see it that way. I believe this is an ongoing process in which disincarnate entities that have never experienced as individuals in the physical may still be evolving.  The information is stored in the higher levels of the mind and we draw upon that knowledge automatically without conscious attention.

As we evolved we became more individualized but still not confined to one body for one lifetime of that body, I believe we could enter and leave organisms which represented various levels of complexity.  Once we had understanding on one level we moved our attention to a more complex level.  We eventually became engrossed in the physical and the five senses and from that point on we experienced one life of one body as individual souls and we had instinct to help us survive.

As we put this together and began to experience the physical world perhaps we experienced “Amoeba” as a complete experience not a specific individual cell rather a more collective experience.  We were never a cat named Tom but have most likely experience the essence of cat as a collective.   Tom was a cat with a physical brain which also stored experiences and idiosyncratic behavior patterns we call personality.  From a “root race” perspective we experienced the collective of cat but we did not experience being Tom the cat.  We don’t need to be Tom the cat to have understanding of the collective consciousness of cat.  It was most likely not Amoeba or Cat that was our experience per se but we had to understand the basic instructions or instincts of that energy before we could incorporate it into our being as an automatic process and move to more complex understanding or instincts.

These Root Race memories (Past understood experiences) were stored in the subconscious collective long before we became individualized souls.  Once we became individualized we continued to evolve and eventually experienced each life in the physical world as a soul occupying a human body which is the best circumstance for our purpose of understanding self.

As the mind evolved new levels of understanding were added and we finally created the Conscious Mind.  This started with the Superconscious division of the mind, the high self, then we created the Subconscious division of mind that has several levels within it and finally the Conscious mind and our physical universe.

The Divisions of the mind

I see the mind divided into three pieces or divisions and seven levels.  The major divisions of the mind are each called minds but are actually divisions of the one mind.  The three major divisions of the mind as I see it are the Superconscious Mind (Levels 1 and 2), the Subconscious Mind (Levels 3, 4, 5, and 6) and the Conscious Mind (Seventh level of mind).  We will get more in depth with each division and the levels within each later in this series.

The superconscious came first at the same instance as Big Bang actually I see them as one and the same.  Scientists now believe that there was time and space (sort of) before the big bang and our universe is actually part of a larger multiverse.  I believe this as well and in fact this recent understanding helps me justify my intuitive belief that we create our own universe.  For  now I will say that the big bang was the creation of the Superconscious mind.  I believe the reason WE CREATED THE BIG BANG was to afford “US” or the I AM a method to experience and understand self with more depth.  We needed a vehicle and created our Higher Self or Superconscious mind as a vehicle for that experience.

When I say “We” and “Our” here I am being misleading as at this point there is no individualization of the soul.  Explaining nonlinear concepts on a linear scale is not so easy. I am no physicist I believe the Creation of the Superconscious Mind took place in the Planck era or from zero to approximately 10⁻⁴³ seconds after the big bang.

As the universe unfolded so did our mind and soon (billions of years) the Subconscious mind was created and the fours levels of mind within that were added as we experienced more density in our existence.  Finally the Conscious mind was created along with the physical world.  Our initial experience as indicated above was not as we do now, we did not incarnate into one life until that entity died we had more of a group experience at first.  Actually it took billions of years to form a planet to hold the essential ingredients for individualized experiences.

As the earth was formed and our experiences built our mind became more individualized and eventually began to get in touch with more complex physical reality such as the Amoeba.  Our mind continued to evolve until we had enough understanding to create and occupy a human body.

At first we could enter and leave the more ape like human body within the lifespan of that body and were not confined to that one existence for its life time.  Our minds evolved and to continue learning we found it necessary to become engrossed in the 5 senses in order to have more detailed experiences, we needed to be separated from the group consciousness and the subconscious mind in order to have a baseline for understanding our experiences.

To better understand the mind I think we need to look at each division and level of mind starting with the Conscious Level and then moving backward to the first level of mind within the Superconscious Mind.

The Conscious Mind

The seventh level of mind is the Conscious Mind; it is also the third division of the mind.  The conscious mind it the one you are most familiar with.  The conscious mind is our temporary learning tool allowing us to experience the physical world.  Temporary because the Conscious Mind dies when your body dies.

This is where the mind meets the brain and all those crazy hormonal and chemical reactions take place which can drive our behavior on this level.

The purpose of the brain is to store information about experiences we have in our physical life; it stores everything we experience with the five senses. The purpose of the conscious mind is to feed experiences to the subconscious mind feeding the continuous process of manifesting our desires.

The conscious mind is like a child we love, it takes patience to raise the child because the child does not understand what it needs.  It only believes it knows what it needs and gets confused quite easily between a want and a need.  The conscious mind will lie to you to get what it wants, it is up to you to be the parent and that takes will power.  It would have been easy for us to create a different type of conscious mind one that does not lie to us, one which gives us what we need but we would not learn from that.

Here is an interesting side note to point out what I am talking about. It used to be the belief that girls past the 5^th grade could not compete with boys in the areas of math and science.  Girls actually excelled before the 5^th grade but fell behind the boys from that point on.  This was used as proof that a girl’s brain was different from a boy’s after that time in life.  Studies were performed and it was eventually discovered that the reason was not that the girls brain could not learn math and science rather the lower scores in those disciplines were not due to the student at all.  What was learned was that the teaching methods changed.  Up to that point in school girls and boys were equally expected to figure out answers to questions especially questions they had a hard time understanding.  From the 5^th grade on it was found that when a boy asked a question about math or science he was told to figure it out or look it up.  When a girl would ask the same question she was simply given the answer.  The girls grades declined because they did not have to think to get the answer.  by lying to us the conscious mind affords us the opportunity to grow.

We, as spiritual beings on a path to enlightenment need to “figure it out” to learn our lessons.  If we were given the answers without trial and error we would not learn and therefore would not come to any understandings in this life and would not fulfill our purpose on this level.  There would be no progression of understanding.

We need the conscious mind to lie to us so we learn to expand our sphere of influence or dominion over it.  Our task is to raise the child of the conscious mind into a disciplined adult who is in control of the vehicle which is our lifetime.  We can then take the understood experiences into our next life and enhance them until each aspect of our self is fully understood and we ascend to the heavens or whatever happens next.  I believe that energy does not stop expressing so some form of existence must follow this.

A marathon runner gets a lot of feedback from the body while running, little messages from the conscious mind telling the runner they are too tired to keep running, they must rest etc.  It is our responsibility to use will power to tell the body it is wrong and to keep going or to stop.  If we are simply tired and have trained so we know our limitations then we can use our will power to coach ourselves into continuing the run. The Conscious Mind is lying to us by saying we cannot go on when our training and experience tells us we can.

The conscious mind is tricky and a great manipulator, what if we are not tired rather we are injured?

We must be adult about using will power and not tell the body to keep running when it is actually injured.  If the runner is starting the rigorous training process for their first marathon and the body says “My Knee hurts” it may be a good idea to listen to it, stop running, and check with the trainer or a doctor about the knee.  Not doing that will teach us a lesson too but the lesson will not help us compete in the race.

We may think we are being an adult and using will power while we are actually being a stubborn little child whose ego won’t allow for the injury.  That stubborn child is the conscious mind lying to us saying I can FORCE myself to do this.  This may lead to injuries which prevent the runner from being able to compete in the marathon causing them to stop running while they heal.

Will power is not forcing energy it is about allowing it to continue.  Learning to use the will is an important lesson and it usually takes us many lifetimes to begin to bring the will under control.  That is not to say you cannot do so in this life if you practice with it.  Who is to say what your past understood experience has been with will power?

The conscious mind has two parts per se, the Conscious Function and the Unconscious Function (called the unconscious mind by most).  I want to point out here that I draw a huge distinction between the Subconscious Mind and the Unconscious mind.  The unconscious mind is not a division or level of mind as we are discussing here.  The subconscious is a division and will be discussed in part 2 of The Mind.  The unconscious mind is actually a function of the Conscious mind and dies when the body dies while the subconscious mind is permanent and we carry that on to our future lives.

I do not like the name Unconscious Mind because it implies that it is separate from the Conscious Level of mind, I use the term because that is what people are used to hearing but I would simply call it the Unconscious function of the Conscious Mind.

The Unconscious Function of the Conscious Mind

Our five senses are constantly active and constantly streaming information into our brain. The brain can still produce a sense for the mind to process even when the corresponding organs of that sense are not working. We have all heard stories of a person who had heightened abilities in other senses once they have lost one or more. While the brain likes to use the eyes to see and the ears to hear it can find workarounds.

One may argue that a blind person has no visual input which is true from one perspective but there are still senses which create visual images in the mind and the person can still learn to “visualize” images which they have not experienced with input from the eyes. Helen Keller could paint beautiful paintings even while blind, deaf and mute. She did have visual input as a child but used her senses of touch to “see” the object of her art.

Another example of this is a young deaf man I know who has no hearing at all but he can still dance. In fact he can dance and spin poi which involves swinging burning weights through the air to the beat of music. He was a member of a troop of performance artists and performed alongside others. Spinning fire as it is also called is not something to be taken lightly but he managed to do so without hurting himself, is fellow performers or the audience. From a spectator perspective people did not know he was deaf until we told them so as we waved our hands to clap for him. This young man could “hear” the music through his sense of touch, the bass of the music vibrated and he could feel that. He could not hear but had the sense of hearing anyway.

As we are constantly receiving multiple streams of data from the five senses and cannot possibly focus our conscious attention on each piece of data streamed at one time. With that in mind we needed a place to store the data.  This storage facility is a function of the unconscious mind; it stores all the pieces of data from our senses, it is like a database.  Without this we would go crazy, literally crazy.

Our conscious attention can only focus on one thing at a time our unconscious is necessary so we can have a storehouse of information about our experiences and perhaps bring those into our conscious attention when needed. I know people believe they can multi-task and focus their attention on more than one thing at a time but what is actually going on as I understand it is that they are jumping from one focus to another so rapidly that they believe they are multi-tasking.   As we move into a world where the machines do in fact multi task our need to learn concentration increases.

The unconscious is where our attention is directed in a hypnotic state.  This is where we go to retrieve details about an event that we can’t consciously remember.  It is not that the data was not stored it is that we did not focus our conscious attention on that data as it was received and it is not stored in the correct database.

We can capture pieces of the unconscious stream by using our conscious attention as the event takes place or as indicated above we can go back later and capture those memories using hypnosis and we can so through our ability to concentrate.  The latter takes discipline and practice; you must practice and exercise the muscle of concentration just as a runner must practice running while training for a marathon.

There are exercises you can do to build your muscle of concentration and make it a tool of your conscious mind. I recommend that you find such an exercise and practice with it daily.  If there were one discipline I would recommend over all others it is that of concentration.

The Conscious Function of the Conscious Mind

This is also called the Conscious mind part of the Conscious mind but to be honest that makes no sense to me so I rename it the Conscious function.  This is also not accurate but as long as you get the idea of the function of that area of mind it matters not what we call it.  The unconscious and the conscious are both parts of the conscious mind each having a different function.

While the unconscious stores everything our physical world has to offer the conscious function is to store selective pieces of that data.  We store these selective memories in our long and short memory banks.  Again as with the unconscious when we die these memories die with us.  Some of these experiences may become stored in our subconscious mind as well as we move from experiencing them to understanding them.

YOU ARE WHERE YOUR ATTENTION IS!  This is one of the most important statements in this writing.  It is a short, simple statement that it is it holds the secret of so much more.

Your attention is as an object which you can place anywhere you want.  You can place it on another object in the physical, you can focus it on a past memory stored in the unconscious and you can learn to control your attention and learn to place it on the inner levels of mind within the subconscious and eventually the superconscious divisions of mind.

You are where your attention is, worth repeating.  YOU ARE WHERE YOUR ATTENTION IS.  Guess what discipline will help you place your attention where you want it to be?  If you guessed “concentration” then you were correct.  You are not your body, you are your mind.  You have chosen to experience this life at this time in your current body for a reason.  The body is the vehicle for you to use to gain an understanding of self to discover the reason and exploit it.

Using self-discipline you can learn concentration and using concentrating you can do much more.  Here are some examples.

• Improve your work skills
• Improve communication with others – Active Listening
• Learn new tasks rapidly so improve your life skills
• Learn to tell the body that you can complete the last three miles of a marathon.
• You can learn to control your attitudes and hold the images of your desires in mind and then after you release the image it can manifest into your life.
• You can learn to focus your attention on the inner levels of your mind and experience Astral Projection
• You can do the same and experience Lucid Dreaming with a purpose.
• You can learn to place your attention far within the higher levels of mind and learn to listen to the Higher Self or whatever name you give that energy.  This is A form of meditation
• You can learn to focus your attention on others and “read” their aura
• You could perform a reading on someone’s health and then turn the energy around and project healing energy back to them and assist them in understanding the lesson of their illness so they may heal.
• You can do anything you can imagine if you practice concentration and learn to direct your energy using the Universal Laws
• To quote Jesus of Nazareth, “I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.”
• Any action you perform can be enhanced the more you pay attention to what you are doing.

All of these everyday and apparently phenomenal feats can be performed by using concentration many also require additional knowledge but concentration is the basic tool.  For instance, to learn to heal you must not only use concentration you must understand the energy involved and how to direct in a responsible way.  Actually you do not have to learn to do that in a responsible way you can Force the energy and cause healing but you own the ramifications for doing so and I would not recommend it.  That stubborn little child who is lying to you may tell you it is OK to heal someone without their permission but that is the deceiver talking.

The challenge of the Conscious Mind is discipline, you must learn to be the driver of the vehicle and if you take the time and put in the effort I will say you will realize a tenfold return on that energy and our life will be in your hands not in the hands of others or your body.  “Tenfold” is not a math statement it is not multiplication it means, “Complete” the energy will return to you in a complete cycle according to the attitude and mental image you held when you projected it.

When I taught metaphysics the first lesson I gave was on concentration and the first exercise I gave was practiced by each student for years even as they learned more complex lessons and control.  You cannot practice enough.

People talk of MIND CONTROL but mind control is about concentration and self discipline.  It is not about controlling someone else’s mind it is about disciplining your mind to be in tune with subtle energies which you interact with each day.

Part two of this paper will follow soon and will pick up where this has left us.