By George A. Boyd ©2018
Many aspirants and disciples try to figure out where they are on the Path. There are a variety of strategies to ascertain this. These strategies include:
- You see your Soul and the track it is on. You delineate the Plane, Subplane, and nodal point where it dwells.
- A spiritual being—a Guru, spiritual guide, angel, Ascended Master, or the Holy Spirit—tells you where you are on the Path, and you believe this being.
- Your Soul’s discerning intuition tells you where it is on the Path, and you believe what it tells you.
- You experience the phenomena associated with a particular Subplane—for example, we describe the content of each Subplane of the Superconscious mind in the Mudrashram® Correspondence Course. You have intuitive insights, or develop spiritual abilities or virtues that are appropriate to that level—this corroborates your intuition about where your Soul is on the Path.
- You study each vehicle of consciousness, each Subplane, and each nodal point methodically. As a result, you are able to exactly locate where your Soul is on the Continuum. [The Mudrashram® Correspondence Course gives information about each nodal point, vehicle of consciousness, Subplane, Plane, and Division of the Great Continuum of Consciousness.]
- You experience Samadhi, complete union with your Soul. Your Illumined Mind discerns your exact level on the Path.
- You use a series of correspondences. You trace the seed atoms of your vehicles of consciousness up to your Soul. You know contextually from these correspondences that you are on a particular location of the Path.
Type one is possible for those aspirants and disciples who have developed clear inner seeing. While it is perhaps the most direct method, if their facility with inner seeing does not permit it, this type is inaccessible to many meditators who have not developed this faculty.
Type two, listening to a spiritual being, potentially introduces some errors. Different spiritual teachers may identify a particular spiritual essence as the core of who you are, and will note the progress of that essence towards its origin. For example:
- Yogi Preceptors will see you as cosmic consciousness, and will note its progress through the Cosmic Body, relative to Brahman in the brain chakra of this form. They will guide your attention to unite with your cosmic consciousness.
- Supracosmic Gurus look to the seed atom on their Path, and notes your progress towards the origin of this essence. A Transcendental Path Sat Guru will view your spirit, and notice what portion of the Nadamic channels that you have purified.
- In Mudrashram®, in contrast, we identify your ensouling entity that is at your cutting edge of spirituality and reveal to you where it is on the Great Continuum of Consciousness.
Type three, your Soul’s intuition, may misinterpret similar themes and phenomena, and wrongly place your location on the Path. For example, the theme of three mountains with a sun behind appears
- At the top of the Lower Astral Subplane of the Subtle Realm
- On the bridge between the golden sun at the top of the Wisdom Plane and the doorway to the First Planetary Initiation
- In the Second Cosmic Initiation, as the veil over the presence of cosmic soul awareness
- On the Second Transcendental Path, as the abode of the Lord of the Causal Plane
- On the Seventh Transcendental Path, as one of the stages you encounter when remembering and reuniting attention with Satchitananda
So without contextual understanding of the Great Continuum of Consciousness, and recognition of your cutting edge ensouling entity, your intuition can lead you astray as to where you are on the Path.
Type four, having experiential phenomena characteristic to a particular stage on the Path, can give you clear indicators of where you are on the Path. But like type three, it is subject to the potential error of mistaking the phenomena, abilities, knowledge, or virtues of one Plane for another. For example, the power of levitation, appears:
- As a special Grace for a Saint in the courts of the Lord in the First Mesoteric Initiation
- As a power of the Ascended Master in the Second Initiation
- As a power that the Soul encounters on the Fifth Initiation
- As a power that is anchored in the Ideational Plane in the First Cosmic Initiation
- As a power that is released upon attainment of a particular stage on selected Supracosmic or Transcendental Paths
Type five, study of each band of the mind and each vehicle of consciousness, can give you exact knowledge of where the Soul is, but most aspirants and disciples do not have access to the Mudrashram® Correspondence Course, where you perform this methodical vehicle-by-vehicle and level-by-level study.
Type six, entering into Samadhi, is well beyond the proficiency of most beginning meditators. We introduce you to the different levels of Samadhi in our Samadhi Week Program, which those who complete our advanced meditation program, the Mudrashram® Advanced Course in Meditation, are eligible to study.
Type seven, locating the Soul through its reflections on each Plane, requires that you be able to access the seed atom of each vehicle of consciousness your Soul animates and a recognition of where each of these seed atoms dwell in relation to the Soul. This implies that you have a perspective or model that reveals to you that when a seed atom appears in a certain way, it is at a certain level, which indicates your Soul has evolved to a certain stage.
For example, if your Moon Soul or Christ Child nucleus of identity is in the second ring in the Courts of the Lord in the First Mesoteric Initiation, it means your Soul is taking the Second Initiation. This same one-to-one correspondence appears at each vehicle of consciousness, and can be used as a bridge to unite your attention with the Soul, and to also identify where the Soul is on the Path.
We teach this method for identifying seed atoms of each vehicle of consciousness in the Mudrashram® Advanced Course in Meditation. Those without the contextual knowledge of the Great Continuum of Consciousness, however, may not be able to use this method to clearly target where the Soul dwells.
We recommend that you learn about each of these methods and identify one that enables you to track the progress of your Soul reliably. It is possible for you to know beyond a shadow of a doubt where your Soul dwells and the Rays that animate and express your Soul through your personality.
