By George A. Boyd © 2017
Q: What keeps people from experiencing the Soul (Higher Self) and God (Universal Self)?
A: There are three major things that keep you from experiencing the Soul and God.
- You need to move your attention from your waking state of awareness to your Soul and to the form of God you wish to experience. We call this practice of focusing your attention upon your Soul and letting your awareness fully open into its presence, Adi Atma Dhyan, which means to contemplate your Soul on its own Plane. When you contemplate one of the forms that God dwells on the inner Planes, it is called Bhagwan Dhyan—in this meditation, you move from contemplating the microcosm of your own Soul to the Great Life that pervades the Macrocosm. If your attention doesn’t go to where your Soul is, and where the form of God you wish to contemplate is, you don’t experience these essences.
- You experience obstacles in your mind that block the progress of your attention beyond a certain point in meditation, which hinders you from uniting your attention with the Soul and with the Divine. We detail the ways in can contact the Soul in our blog article, “Ways you can connect with the Soul”. We describe the stages of encountering God in our blog article, “How to Contact God”.
- Your ability to see within may be limited, so you might feel the presence of the Soul or God, but you don’t hear anything or see anything when your attention reaches that depth. We have developed several webinars to help you learn to see within. We recommend that you start with two of these webinars, “The Vision Workshop” and “The Mystery of God Workshop.” You can take both of these webinars in the Public Webinar Section of our website. [Click on the link for Public Webinars to access the page.]
For many people beginning the practice of meditation, they have not built the inner roadmap of the different focal points along the thread of consciousness. This thread leads through the different layers of the Conscious, Subconscious, and Metaconscious mind at the Self at the core of your personality. Then this thread tracks upward to through the Superconscious mind to the presence of your Soul. If you follow this thread into the higher unconscious behind your Soul, you will find the forms of God on each Plane of Light, and ultimately reach the seed of calling, which marks the place where your Soul completes its spiritual mission.
We train you to build this inner map for the Conscious, Subconscious, and Metaconscious mind in the Introduction to Meditation course.
In our intermediate courses, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation, and our by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program, you learn to travel in full consciousness to your Soul and beyond it to its seed of calling on the other side of the higher unconscious.
Once you complete one of our intermediate courses, we teach you in a guided meditation format how to explore the Superconscious mind in the Mudrashram® Advanced Course in Meditation and the Satsang Program Home Study Course. This is the next step in training for those who complete one of our intermediate courses.
Those who have completed one of the intermediate courses, and wish to make a detailed and comprehensive study of the nodal points in each level of the Great Continuum of Consciousness, can take our master consciousness studies course, the Mudrashram® Correspondence Course.
Once you build this inner map through your experience of the different focal points, you can then select the focal point you want to contemplate, project your attention to that inner location, and tune your attention into it. This brings you full awareness of this object of meditation; with practice, you will gain union with it.
Your Soul dwells in one of these focal points. The form of God that you can experience on each Plane of Light dwells in another. Once you master this ability to move your attention to the place you intend, you can know your Soul, you can know God, and you can travel to every level of the Great Continuum of Consciousness. When you achieve this, God will not be a mystery to you—you will consciously recognize this Being that pervades the Macrocosm at each of level of the Continuum.
