By George A. Boyd © 2017
Q: You use the term, “nucleus of identity,” frequently in your writing. I’m still not clear what this is.
A: We often refer people to our article, “Understanding Nodal Points and Nuclei of Identity,” to define what a nucleus of identity is. The easiest way to understand this is that the Soul has four quadrants of activity. You can visualize this as a pie cut into quarters.
We call these four quadrants, the Poles of Being.
Pole One
On the first pole, at zero degrees, is the Soul. When you meditate upon this pole, you are contemplating the essence we generically call the ensouling entity, on its own Plane. Depending on where on the Continuum of Consciousness you place your attention, you will encounter one of 13 ensouling entities.
For example, if you put your attention in the Planetary Realm, you will encounter the ensouling entity that is called the Planetary Soul. We simply refer to this essence as the Soul, since this is the cutting edge for so many people. Some refer to the Planetary Soul as the Higher Self, the God Immanent, the Transpersonal Self, or the Atma.
If you put your attention in the Cosmic Sphere, you’ll encounter your Astral Soul on this pole. Please see our article on the Great Continuum of Consciousness to learn about the 13 ensouling entities.
In Mudrashram®, we teach our students to meditate on their ensouling entity that is infused with the animating force of the Divine Spirit—this is what we call the cutting edge of spirituality.
In the stream of light where the ensouling entity exists are the nodal points of the Path that the ensouling entity has awakened, and it dwells in a nodal point. By identifying where the ensouling entity is on its Path, we can determine how far it has to go to reach Liberation.
People who meditate on the ensouling entity typically meditate on the brain chakra—or on the Transcerebral chakra, which is the center above the top of the head—to encounter this essence. The path of unfolding the ensouling entity has been called the brain path.
Pole Two
If you rotate your attention 90 degrees to the right (clockwise), you come upon the second pole. Here you identify as the spirit. People also call this spiritual essence the spiritual heart, inner spiritual awareness, the loving heart, or Surat.
If you were to drop your attention into the inner streams of light and sound we call the Nada, you would ride up this current into the spirit that is associated with your cutting edge of spirituality. [This technique is called Surat Dhyan. We teach it in our intermediate meditation courses.]
But like the ensouling entity, you can focus on this spiritual essence at different levels of the Continuum. We call these discrete segments where the Nada begins and ends, domains—we have mapped twelve domains on the Continuum. [Please see our article on the Great Continuum of Consciousness about the 12 domains of the spirit.]
People usually associate the spirit with meditation upon the area of the heart, but some domains begin where you feel your spirit at the point between the eyebrows or even the navel. The practice of opening the channels of the Nada through moving your spirit along them, ultimately to the source of the spirit, has been called the heart path.
Pole Three
If you rotate your attention another 90 degrees to the right to 180º, you encounter the pile of being of the vehicles of consciousness of your Superconscious mind. It is on this pole that you encounter the integration centers we call nuclei of identity.
We have located nuclei of identity in the first through fourth Planetary Initiations, the first through fifth Cosmic Initiations, and on each Supracosmic Path. People who meditate on the spinal axis, sometimes called the cerebrospinal axis, the spinal tube, Sushumna, or the chakras typically come to identify with a nucleus of identity, instead of the Soul or the spirit.
Probably the three most common nuclei of identity with which people identify are:
- The nucleus of identity of the First Planetary Initiation, which has been called the Christ Child, Christ Consciousness, or nephesh. [In our writings, we commonly refer to this nucleus of identity as the Moon Soul.] Christians and Jews focus their attention on this center and commune with the forms of God that can be known in the First Exoteric Initiation and the First Mesoteric Initiation.
- The nucleus of identity of the First Cosmic Initiation, which has been called cosmic consciousness or the Atman. Disciples of Yogi Preceptors identify with this center.
- The Supracosmic seed atom of each active Supracosmic Path: Buddhists, Shaivite and Vaisnavite Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Jains—among others—typically identify with the seed atom of their Supracosmic Path. [For a full listing of these Supracosmic Paths, see our article “Faiths of the Supracosmic Sphere” in the Library section of our website. If you haven’t done so already, sign up for a free Library membership. For a full listing of nuclei of identity, read the article on our website, “Nodal points and nuclei of identity,” which you can access on our Open Stacks page.]
Pole Four
Finally, if you rotate another 90 degrees to 270º, you come to the fourth pole. This is divided into an upper and lower zone.
The upper zone contains your attention, the thread of consciousness, and the principle of intention and consciousness, which we call the attentional principle. This essence has been called the inner witnessing consciousness, the third eye, or Nirat.
The lower zone contains your personality and your life. This is where you encounter the two personal integration centers, the ego [the personal identification center that is embedded in your experience of your life, in what we call the Conscious mind] and the Self [the personal identification that governs your entire personality; it dwells in the Metaconscious mind]. This zone also includes the bands of the unconscious mind that express in your life—this is the level of the mind that psychologists call the shadow.
The attentional principle dwells in the system of chakras of the Subconscious mind slightly above the point between the eyebrows. It is from this perspective that you behold the thread of consciousness that travels through each band of the mind. It is from this perspective of the fourth pole that you view the map of the Great Continuum of Consciousness.
We encourage aspirants to familiarize themselves with the perspectives on each of these four poles of being. In the Mudrashram® system of Integral meditation, we uniquely train you to work on all four poles of being and give you meditation tools that actualize you personally and spiritually. You learn these methods in our intermediate courses, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation or the by-mail or online Accelerated Meditation Program.
