Limitations of the Types of Knowing

By George A. Boyd ©2018

Q: There are so many crazy ideas that come out of religion and mysticism! Why would anyone want to venture into that territory and become a complete cuckoo?

A: We base our sense of reality—what is true, what is knowable, what is valid to believe—on different mental faculties that we use to determine what is real. Each of these types of knowing has limitations. Each type of knowing has a particular strength, but it isn’t helpful outside these parameters. Let’s look at some of these types of knowing and what their strengths and limitations are:

  1. Reason – This faculty of knowing operates through the mental seed atom in your Conscious mind. It is one of the primary tools you use to determine whether something is true. It uses logical tests to determine what is true; if your logic is fallacious, you may come to a wrong conclusion. It also helps you test reality—what is real in the environment around you. Optical illusions, stage magic, and people engineering what information you receive, however, can fool your reality testing. Reason is based on the information you receive from your senses or the instruments you use to extend them: it can’t detect anything beyond these limits, so the range of what it can know is limited.
  2. Memory – This faculty of knowing dwells in your Subconscious mind, and records your experience as it occurs. You can highlight certain aspects of your experience as more important to remember, as when you are studying information for which you will be tested. Certain highly emotional and meaningful events in your life will be more memorable. You use mnemonic cues to recall memory; if you don’t give the right cue, you cannot recall the information you have stored. Since memory stores its information in the biological hard drive of your brain, if your brain becomes damaged, you may not be able to recall what you have experienced or learned. Since memory records associations and these associations can change over time, you may incorrectly recall what actually happened to you.
  3. Intellect – This faculty of knowing exists in your Metaconscious mind, and uses your intelligence to operate certain problem solving skills. It allows you to solve problems using mathematics. You can use deductive, inductive, dialectical, and synthetic reasoning to reflect on ideas and uncover their meaning and interrelationships. You can form a hypothesis, and subject your conjecture to testing to determine whether it’s true. You can communicate your ideas verbally, in writing, and through symbols. Your level of education, which conditions how many problem solving and communication strategies you learn, may limit the problems you can solve—for example, if you only learned college algebra, you would not be able to solve problems in trigonometry or calculus. Certain neurological conditions may limit your ability to use intellectual problem solving skills, and suppress the operation of your native intelligence. If you have incorrect data or ask questions that do not yield a correct solution, your intellect may not be able to solve your problem.
  4. Collective Scientific Knowledge – This repository of the collective knowledge of humanity dwells on the Temple of Science Subplane of the Abstract Mind Plane in the Superconscious mind. Our knowledge continues to grow as scientists investigate different aspects of the physical world, our bodies, and our mental functioning. This knowledge is stored in journals, disseminated in seminars and professional conferences, discussed in books, taught in classrooms, and subjected to analysis and re-analysis, critique and testing. We continue to update this knowledge as we learn more. Sometimes we find that something we concluded was true based on our testing was inaccurate, and we have to revise our theories and beliefs about something we had accepted as true. Science is developing new technologies to penetrate deeper into the world and ourselves; it never arrives at a final truth; it continually revises its theories as we learn more, and discover that what we formerly believed was inaccurate or flawed.
  5. Psychic Sensing – Psychic sensing operates in your vehicle on the Psychic Realm of the Superconscious mind. It synthesizes three streams of knowing: the data coming from the senses of your astral body, the operation of the intuitive knowing of your “psychic eye,” and the intuitive guidance received from spiritual guides. It initially appears as a series of images, felt impressions, or words of intuitive guidance that you can hear. If you do psychic readings for others, you communicate these images, impressions, and words to others. Projections from your unconscious mind, and fantasy and imagination readily contaminate your faculties of psychic sensing and intuition.
  6. Illumined mind – Your Illumined Mind or Buddhi fully operates on the Buddhic Plane, to which your Soul has access when it takes the Fourth Planetary Initiation. However, this faculty of mandalic reasoning and discernment operates partially through out the Soul’s spiritual sojourn, expanding its range of penetrating intuitive knowledge as you evolve spiritually. Like scientific knowledge, your Illumined Mind continually revises your sense of what exists in the Superconscious mind as you continue to progress upon the spiritual Path. You tap this vast reservoir of intuitive knowledge in the deepest stages of meditation—this state of mind has been called Samadhi, Illumination, or Enlightenment—in which the Soul reveals to you what it is experiencing on the Higher Planes. This is the most important faculty by which you come to know your Soul and to gain knowledge about the spiritual worlds. Because much of this knowledge has never been framed in language, much of it is ineffable—you cannot put this ecstatic downpour of supernal knowledge into words.
  7. Soul Gnosis – This state of Oneness and Mystic Union has been called Gnosis and Realization. It brings about the direct experience of who you are at your core. This experience is difficult to access for many people, so those who enter this state are relatively rare. While you can enter into union with the Soul in the deepest stages of meditation, you may not be able to derive contextual clues, e.g., where you are on the Path. Since these states of Soul Union are highly blissful and ecstatic, it is possible for some individuals to believe that they have attained the highest stages of spiritual development and Mastery, when in fact, they are in a relatively rudimentary stage of development. If spiritual aspirants do not adequately prepare for this experience, they can become grandiose and delusional.

The faculties of reason, memory, and intellect are your passports to scientific knowledge, which comprise levels one to four of knowing. Meditation gives you the keys to knowing types five through seven, which are beyond the ken of science—you might consider them as trans-scientific modalities of knowing.

We suggest that the rigor of scientific study and testing can be applied to your spiritual quest, as well. You can strive to verify each element of your psychic sensing, your intuitive knowledge, and your Soul’s actual station on the Path. If spirituality can be approached in this way, you can gather more valid and less cuckoo information.

As to why someone might want to embark on the spiritual journey? It is your highest potential that yearns to be actualized. It calls you to the greatest adventure, if you will hearken to its voice. It is your next step of growth beyond the threshold of science, which only considers information derived from study of the physical universe, and excludes the entire realm of spiritual experience.

No one can convince you to explore these realms if you are afraid of entering them, if you are doubtful of their existence, and you cannot conceive of their value for your human experience. When that day dawns, you can enter the portals of Light and learn to reunite with your Soul, and transform it through each stage of the Path, to ultimately attain Liberation and Mastery.

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