Written by : Ishwar Puri
We are all trying to solve our problems intellectually. We are somehow convinced that the intellect is the best source of knowledge, awareness and the capacity to resolve problems. This belief is erroneous and, therefore, a very important consideration on our journey. Let us, first of all, consider a simplified structure of human awareness and consciousness to see where intellect is placed within that structure. I’m not creating a new structure, but simply trying to create a better understanding of the terms used in these subjects. Very often there is a lack of communication because we use words which have quite different meanings. We have not the same connotation for words and, therefore, it is useful at the onset to understand what we are talking about.
Human awareness, or the capacity to be aware, consists of five broad levels.
The lowest level is what we might call the physical level, that of the physical body. We have given a name to our body and we call ourselves by our body’s name. One calls me Ishwar Puri and says, “Ishwar Puri is going to talk to us.” The correct statement would be, “This man whose body is called Ishwar Puri is going to talk to us.” If there is any other capability for awareness other than the body, it has not been named Ishwar Puri . Only this body, after birth, was so named. If I continue thinking that I am Ishwar Puri rather than my body is called Ishwar Puri , I am identifying myself with that which is not me. What is mine cannot be me — with just a simple understanding of this statement. When I say, “This is my jacket,” it cannot be me. If I say, “This is my body,” my body cannot be me. It is my body — I own it, possess it, I use it — but it cannot be me. In the same way, when I say, “These are my eyes,” it does not mean that I am the eyes. When I say, “This is my mind,” my mind does not agree, but I cannot be my mind. We are using terms with which we identify ourselves, al though it does not take very long to discover that we are not those things which we are using. This body that we use is the first level of knowledge, awareness, and contact with experience. With this body we create a relationship with the entire world. Father, son, mother, brother, children, friends — all are relationships of the body. If we did not have the body, these relationships would not exist. The father is not my father, but my body’s father. The mother is not my mother, but my body’s mother, as she gave birth to this body of mine. Therefore, when we talk of the lowest level of awareness, we are talking of the awareness arising from this physical body. The bodily awareness which we consider very important is, in fact, the lowest.
The next level of awareness is that of the senses — awareness through the sensory perception. The perception arising from the senses is also ascribed to the body while we are using the body. For instance, I say that I can see because I have eyes in the physical body; but even when I close my eyes, I can see many things. Imaginatively, I can see my home, my friends, what I was doing earlier this morning. I can even visualize and see what I will be doing tomorrow. You might say that this is imagination. I am not talking of imagination, but of vision — the capacity to have sight. That capacity to have vision and sight is not related to the physical eyes, and yet we always say that we can see only what comes in front of the eyes. Therefore, the eyes do not help us to see. The eyes limit us to what we can see because the rest we reject. Being at the physical level, we say the other vision is not seeing at all and it is imagination. Similarly with hearing — we listen with the ears, but we can listen without the ears. In fact, we are listeing without the ears all the time. We are listening to our thoughts. How else do we know what we are thinking? Our ears do not listen to these thoughts. Is the quality of listening or the very experience of listening any different from the experience of listening with the ears? It is not. Therefore, the capacity to listen, to hear, is independent of the ears. So it is true of all other sense perceptions. All sense perceptions exist per se — of their own — and we attribute these perceptions to the body — incorrectly so. If we were unconscious of the body, we would still have all of the sense perceptions. If we used our sense perceptions by themselves, without the body, that would be called the next higher level of awareness. We sometimes refer to that as the astral level of awareness.
Above that is the mental level, that which we call the causal level. We find that it is not even necessary to break up an experience into different sense perceptions to be able to have the experience. Today we are under the illusion that unless we see with the eyes, hear with the ears, touch with the hands, smell with the nose — unless we do all these things with the senses — we can’t have the experience. But we know that the mind can pick up experience without having to break it up into these functional compartments. Some experiences are such as not to lend themselves to subdivision of the senses. For instance, in an abstract experience of idealism, we can talk of idealism, understand, and then the experience of idealism comes to us. It can neither be seen, heard, touched, nor is it something that is capable of being experienced through the senses. It is being experienced directly through the mind. If you contemplate a little further, you will find that all experiences can be directly grasped through the human mind and need not be broken up. But since we have been accustomed to getting experience by breaking it up into pieces through the senses, we think that it is the senses that give us the experience. When you can have experience mentally without having to use the body or sense perceptions, we call it the mental experience or the causal experience. We call it the causal experience because it is the cause of all other experiences
The fourth stage in the levels of awareness is one we need not experience through the mind. There is one special characteristic of all experiences of the mind and all experiences below it, including the experience of the senses — the physical experiences. They all need time, space, and observe the laws of causation. Even the smallest experience will be subject to these three laws.
The mind has three parts. This is a classification only for understanding the subject, so don’t take seriously that there are actually three minds. I am using this analysis to show the structure of levels of awareness. The mind has a lower part which picks up the elements of sense perception from the senses. It does nothing but absorb that which comes to it. Now when I say the mind is absorbing what is coming, please remember that frames of experience that come from the senses by themselves have no meaning until the mind interprets them. It is very strange in that if you are shown merely the pictures of what the eyes see, the few flashes of what the eyes see, the few sounds that the ears hear, the phonetic sounds and a few other sensory experiences that we have, it will make no sense at all. It is the lower part of the mind that picks up these pictures, puts them together and gives meaning to them.
The middle aspect of the human mind is the part that performs what is called reasoning, argument, logic, inferencing, and is called the thinking mind. This part of the mind is functioning all the time while we are alive, day and night, whether we are awake or asleep. Thinking is the origination of words in the middle of the mind, a stream of words continues through the mind at all times. This function of the mind is called the thinking part and is a continuous process.
The upper part of the mind does what we call creation or creativity. The creative mind is the portion that is rearranging the elements of sense perception with — and sometimes without — the assistance of the thoughts into new patterns and putting them forward. And we say what a beautiful creativity we have. It is nothing that is created except the pattern. The design is new but the elements of creation are the same. Now, the point that I am making is that all of these three functions of the human mind — sensing , thinking, and creating — require time and space and they obey the laws of causation. It is the next higher level of awareness which we in the Orient call the awareness of the soul or spiritual awareness that transcends the limitations of time, space, and causation. In the West , I find that there are very few people who will distinguish between the human mind and the human soul. Very often they regard the two terms as synonymous. In fact, the qualitative difference is so great that there is no commonality or overlap of the two. The mind, as I have explained, functions only in time, space and causation . The soul of every individual human being has the capacity to have experience which has no time, space, or causation.
There are three main functions which the human soul performs.
The first is spiritual intuition. The intuitive spirit in each of us which gives us a sudden flash — that hunch of knowledge does not take any time, does not occur in space and has no cause. Intuition isn’t there and then suddenly it is! Very often it is quite inconsistent with what the mind has been reasoning. The mind says, “ It should happen like this.” Suddenly, an intuitive flash comes which is inconsistent with what the mind has just said. The intuitive flash does not belong to the realm of time, space, or causation.
The second function of the soul is love. When we have the experience of love — that great experience that makes us lose our identity and takes our entire awareness into the one we love — it does not occur in time, space, or causation. Love was not there, and then it is! When love is there, we think about it and ask, “How is it there?” The thought is in time, space, and causation. The contemplation of what has happened requires time, space, and causation because that is the mind thinking about what has happened. Very often, the mind destroys the love that was beyond time, space, and causation by thinking about what has happened. But the quality of love is such that it does not subject itself to the laws of time, space, and causation.
The third example is that of aesthetic experience or beauty. When you see beauty in something the experience is identical with love. It does not subject itself to any laws of time, space, or causation. These experiences of intuition, love, and beauty do not come from the mind. They arise from a higher level of awareness which we consider as spiritual awareness which comes from the soul of man and not from the mind of man. It arises from a deeper part of the human self and is above the intellect.
Lastly, there is the fifth level of awareness . An inadequacy at the fourth level is that it is still subject to the law of individuation. Even if you appreciate the beauty, it is you that individually appreciates the beauty. You, the individual, separate unto yourself. Even the experience of love is your own experience of love as an individual. The intuition or intuitive awareness is an individual’s intuitive knowledge. Individuation itself becomes a weakness of awareness, an inadequacy of awareness, a cover upon awareness. At the fifth level of awareness, this cover is removed and we have what we might call total consciousness or the consciousness of totality. It is here that the discovery is made that the entire picture of experience is drawn up by one author and he is the author of all — and there is no such thing as any wall between one individual and another. The highest level of awareness transcends individuation.
I have briefly described these levels to tell you how we have the capacity to have awareness at different levels. It does not mean that we are using different levels at different times. All are being used together at the same time. We have the physical body, the senses, the mind, the soul, totality — all together. The whole drama of life is going on with this entire complex of awareness put together. The intellect with which we take so much pride and pain — the reasoning mind — is a limitation to our reaching the highest levels of awareness. All of our educational processes, our system of civilizing ourselves, seem to be directed toward sharpening the instruments and tools of intellect. We don’t seem to do anything with the other levels of awareness. The result is that we grow up into a distorted form where we rely far more upon the intellect than on any other form of awareness, including the intuitive form or the spiritual form. The great capacity for awareness which lies hidden in the human being, available through the intuitive power, the power of love and joy and beauty is destroyed by an excessive use of the intellect.
The intellect plays a very important role in understanding and for this there is no better instrument. I have drawn a picture of the five levels of awareness in such a way that it should appeal to your intellect. Had I not broken it into five parts you would not have liked it be cause the function of your intellect is to break down. We call it analysis. The soul of man, a higher level of awareness, functions not by breaking down but by joining, or synthesis. In synthesis, we see the beauty of the whole. Through analysis, we can understand the mechanics of the parts, but lose the beauty. Consider another example — a lovely painting. You can look at the painting and immediately see a beauty. Now take the painting and cut it into narrow strips and then make even smaller squares of it. We can then examine the small parts thoroughly. Examine them at length and we will not see the beauty of the original painting which we observed earlier in a split second. We can come to understand the parts, the mechanics, the color, weight, and other scientific analysis. We will have intellectualized the painting by cutting it into pieces . What are we doing to life? Life is a beautiful painting and we are cutting it into pieces — parts of todays, tomorrows, of here and there, of this and that. We are applying scissors of the intellect to chop life into smaller pieces and then wondering where the beauty of life lies. If we can pull ourselves together and see life in its totality, the beauty would reappear. That will require not the intellect, but the spirit of man, the soul of man to look at it. The intellect can never see totality. The intellect is our greatest barrier to our seeing our own self. The intellect convinces us that we are the mind. Intellect says, “The shirt that I am wearing is me, the body that I am wearing is me.” These absurdities are accepted as truth because we rely upon the intellect. We must use intellect only to a point — for understanding. Intellect will allow me to communicate with you. There should be a reasonable balance between the use of the intellect and the use of the higher faculties of human awareness. The best contribution that intellect can make to human awareness is to say, “I can go this far and no farther.” Let us develop intellect in order that intellect can discover its own limitations.
In the spiritual development of man towards higher awareness the mind has been the greatest obstruction; but when it has understood its obstructive role, it has been the greatest help. The point to remember is that the mind does not have consciousness. There is but one being in our body. Consciousness is derived only from the soul. Look back from the time of birth until the present — how much of our time have we spent with experience and how much time have we spent with the experiencer?
There was once a king with a great army — in those days, a king was only as big as his army. But there was no war! The neighboring kings were peaceful, and he had a difficult time convincing himself he was king because his army was not fighting any battles. So he decided to set up mock battles within his kingdom in order to have the feeling that he was king. But mock battles would be no fun. The battles should be made realistic and made to take place in the presence of all the people. People would then say, “What are you doing, King?” And they would make him stop — as people will. Therefore, he decided to build a large fortress with high walls all around it. On the inside of the fortress, the king constructed an area where he could array his forces. Inside the fortress, the king built townships with their own walls and waterways. The mock battles within looked very real. Now the king, when building the outside walls, left small chinks and openings in the wall. The people of the kingdom now began to peep inside through the openings. What was happening was not real, but the people liked to watch very much and they believed the battles to be real. Soon they would not leave the wall. They would take turns watching and spent their entire lives looking through the holes in the wall. They had glued themselves to the openings and had forgotten their own true existences. They could not then even turn about to see who it was that was stuck to this experience.
Some people read good intellectual books. The books say that you should begin from within, and yet we read more books — from the outside! The books we read tell us that if we wish to see what is behind the eyes we must first find some one who has seen behind the eyes. Another book will tell us to worship the Lord who is inside of each of us — and off we go outside to a church or temple to worship the l or d who is inside of us! After reading the books, listening to lectures, and hearing the preachers, we begin to think about it with all the intellectual comprehension and we continue to go outside. It is this quality of the intellect that keeps us outside and so creates our problems. The human mind has one immediate failing though — it is fond of pleasure. This weakness is also a strength in that the pleasures we see in the mock world can be replaced with the pleasures we can observe in the real world inside. Once we turn our intellect within, it will not wish to come outside again and it becomes the strength of the human mind. One of the greatest gifts that God gave man is the power of attention. The capability of our attention means that we can be here and not elsewhere. We can pick up part of an experience and exclude the rest. We can manipulate our attention to control which experiences we would attend to and those which we would not. Through the use of the mechanism of attention, we can change the direction of the intellect from within outside to outside within .
There are two areas of the spiritual journey where we become blocked and a special human effort is required. The first is the transition of our attention from outside to within. The second comes at a much higher level, when we transcend from individuation to totality.
Written by : Ishwar Puri
Ishwar Puri is the founder and principal speaker for the Institute for the Study of Human Awareness. For more than forty years he has conducted lectures, workshops, and other events
on the nature of consciousness and human awareness. His lectures and teachings have been recorded and transcribed into numerous books and other materials. Each of his many lecture presentations is founded upon his own unique experience and he expresses himself with humility and love as his guide. His broad range of lecture topics include science, art, religion, philosophy, human relations, education, health, human awareness, and consciousness.
Ishwar Puri attended Harvard University prior to retiring from service with the Government Services of India. He later established citizenship in the United States of America. He continues to serve as a consultant, board chairman, and senior advisor to a number of corporations worldwide.
Ishwar Puri is a devoted disciple of the Great Master Hazur Sawan Singh Ji. The Institute for the Study of Human Awareness provides a venue by which Ishwar Puri can carry on his work by way of speaking engagements and the dissemination of educational materials.
Here is the link to their website : http://ishanews.org
