The Four Rings of Light Ministry

By George A. Boyd ©2017

When a Mudrashram® Initiate or an accepted disciple gives a Light Sitting, the ministry of the Light expands through four zones:

  1. To the people present in the room – A Light Sitting can be called if there is even one person who asks the Swamis for the Light; this is set up in advance in a scheduled meeting, as we do in our Los Angeles Community Satsang Program. This Light Sitting can also be done as a webinar where there is auditory and visual contact with the Initiate or the advanced disciple authorized to do Light Sittings.
  2. To all Mudrashram® students, living or dead – The Light touches all students who have taken the Introduction to Meditation Course, the Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation, Accelerated Meditation Program, or Mudrashram® Advanced Course in Meditation—whether they have completed these programs or not, whether they are active in Mudrashram® or not, the Light will still bless them.
  3. To the community of seekers, who have sought our services – This includes those who have come for readings, consultations, webinars, or workshops, or those who have requested assistance with a Kundalini issue—the Light will bless them.
  4. To those for whom the people attending the Light Sitting extend the Light – This occurs in our Light Sittings when those present feel the suffering of others and send the Light to them (world ministry), and through intentional request, where those who are present, state or point out with the beam of intention those they wish the Initiate or advanced disciple to bless with the Light.

This circle of influence of the Light creates a force field of Grace, Light, Love, and Power that extends from the Initiates or those authorized to send the Light to those who receive it. This force field is the energetic “ashram” of our lineage, which is not limited by the physical presence of the Initiate or accepted disciple sending the Light.

Whenever the Mudrashram® Masters conjoin their Light and do the Light Sitting ministry, this force field is sent forth as waves of Grace through the Transcendental, Supracosmic, Cosmic, Transplanetary, Planetary, Subtle, and Personal [e.g., the Metaconscious, Subconscious, and Conscious levels of the mind of those receiving the Light] zones of the Consciousness to each individual in direct attunement—the Initiate or accepted disciple anchors a scintillating jet of the Light into the Soul of each on present, and those who call for the Light.

The complete Light Sitting has four parts:

  1. Reception of the Light – receiving the Light through all seven octaves [i.e., Transcendental through Personal]
  2. Performing Attunement Meditation – sending the Light to others throughout the world
  3. Opportunity for personal request – asking the Light be sent as a special blessing of the Light to those about whom participants feel concern
  4. Inspired discourse (satsang) – channeling a message from one of the Swamis sending the Light during the Light Sitting

An abbreviated Light Sitting consists only the Reception of the Light. These shortened Light Immersion sittings typify our ministry during our Community Satsang programs.

The Light Sitting has ten octaves of ministry, ranging from the most superficial to the most profound. These include:

  1. Blessing – the Light touches all centers within those receiving the Light and gently stirs them into activity
  2. Purification – the Light burns away impurities in the inner vehicles and etheric channels
  3. Healing – the Light overshadows the etheric body of the Soul and the Pranamayakosa and augments the healing activity of the individual’s life force
  4. Comfort – the Light enters the receptacle of the Moon Soul nucleus of identity and the core of human misery as the Holy Spirit, and ministers to the deep pain of the human heart
  5. Guidance – the Light awakens the Buddhic capsule of the individual, which bestows revelation, insight, understanding, and wisdom
  6. Empowerment – the Light activates an ability or power of the Superconscious mind, which enables the individual to recognize and operate the new ability
  7. Illumination – the Light raises the Kundalini Shakti of the individual to the ensouling entity, which brings about Illumination and Gnosis
  8. Karmic Transformation – the Light purifies, dissolves, transmutes, and integrates karmic material in the unconscious mind of the individual
  9. Spiritual Rapture – the Light actively moves the spirit in the channels of the Nada and brings it into alignment with the ensouling entity
  10. Initiation – the Light unfolds the ensouling entity and its aligned vehicles of consciousness to a new nodal point

Students who are actively studying, or who have completed the Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation, Accelerated Meditation Program, or Mudrashram® Advanced Course in Meditation, receive an invitation to the complete Light Sitting, which is presented via webinar. Our students receive the Light wherever they are in the world. The Initiate or accepted disciple who conducts the Light Sitting with those who attend the webinar guides participants to minster the Light throughout the world—this is our world Light ministry.

Those who cannot attend will get the same beneficial results listening to a recording of the webinar. Advanced students, who have developed sensitivity to the Light, can benefit from sitting during the period of the Light transmission, if they are unable to attend the webinar.

The Light Sitting is a special Grace from the Masters of the lineage. For those who attend, the Light may purify their inner vehicles, transmute their karma, uplift their spirit—and for those granted Initiation during the Light Sitting—unfold their Soul and its aligned vehicles of consciousness to a new nodal point, effectively accelerating their spiritual evolution. Those who wish to speed up their spiritual progress and receive direct contact with the Masters of the lineage, we cannot recommend attendance at Light Sittings highly enough.

Ways People Experience the Astral Body

By George A. Boyd © 2017

Across the Seven Rays, there are seven alternate ways for interfacing with the astral body. These are briefly described below:

1st Ray – You interface with the astral body via the deep body awareness center. You access your astral body through relaxation and suggestion. Hypnosis and autohypnosis use this type. Mudrashram® teaches a technique for autohypnosis in its intermediate courses, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course Meditation and the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program.

2nd Ray – You interface with the astral body during dreaming, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This access point is through the heart center of the vehicle below waking awareness, where attention resides during dreaming sleep. Those who use this method frequently keep dream journals, and commonly undergo training in lucid dreaming. Schools of psychotherapy that analyze dreams and that ask people to remember and monitor their dreams adopt these methods.

3rd Ray – You interface with the astral body through the etheric switchboard of the Metaconscious mind. Volition directs the astral body to give suggestion to the physical body for healing or to give information about the what the body is experiencing, to visualize ideas and alternative scenarios, to trace issues back through your life narrative and personal unconscious, or to personify subpersonalities or dramatic characters. Your Metaconscious mind operates this practical form of utilizing the astral body.

4th Ray – You interface with the astral body through the solar plexus brain. This pathway promotes conscious astral projection experiences. Occult and psychic schools that train people in psychic skills—such as healing, channeling, and doing readings and remote viewing—employ this pathway. Psychoactive drug use passively awakens this pathway.

5th Ray – You interface with the astral body through the medulla center of the system of chakras in the Subconscious mind. When your attention travels through this portal, you study the operation of the astral body, examine how its senses and movement work, and experiment with using intention to control it. You activate this body when you move your attentional principle out of its ground state in the pituitary center of the Subconscious mind—on any of the Seven Ray tracks—and it directly responds to suggestions and commands that your intention anchors. The direct projection technique that we teach in our intermediate courses awakens the astral body in this manner.

6th Ray – You interface with the astral body though your spirit—you experience the astral body in this perspective as a covering over your spirit that you drop when you reach a certain level on the Nadamic Path. Meditation schools that emphasize Nada Yoga practice, particularly the traditions anchored on the first through fifth Transcendental Paths view the astral body in this fashion.

7th Ray – You interface with the astral body through your attentional principle—you perceive your astral body through this viewpoint as a covering over your attentional principle that it drops at the top of the Psychic Realm. When you operate through this view, you can activate a variety of inner abilities and do readings through astral body, both through contemplating the chakras within it and through viewing different bands of the mind and the Planes of the Continuum. Schools that train in metavisional sight exploit this approach. We train our advanced students in Mudrashram® how to access the visioning abilities available through this perspective in our “Another Look at Inner Vision” series.

Mudrashram® trains its students in several of these methods that access the astral body in our intermediate classes. We teach a First Ray autohypnosis technique. We tap the Third Ray perspective when we introduce our evocative Rainbow Technique. We show you the direct projection method of Raja Yoga, which is a Fifth Ray technique.

In the Mudrashram® Advanced Course in Meditation, we introduce our students to the coverings over the spirit in our Advanced Nada Yoga module, which examines the Sixth Ray perspective. We also train our students in the Seventh Ray approach in our advanced webinar series, which students that complete the advanced course can study.

We generally steer aspirants away from the Fourth Ray solar plexus pathway. While your attention can readily enter the astral body through this pathway, it commonly has little control over your experience—either where the astral body travels or whom it encounters. Psychoactive drug use shares this pathway, and similarly, triggers a passive astral projection experience.

There is some risk in adopting passive astral travel methods. You sometimes can encounter malevolent entities in the inner Planes—particularly on the Lower Astral Plane—who may attempt to take over your physical body (possession) or inflict emotional torment and severe mental confusion (psychic attack). The “bad trips” that those who ingest psychedelic drugs report are examples of these types of experiences.

These experiences leave you shaken and traumatized. We suggest it is better to avoid them through only using a controlled astral travel method, such as the Fifth Ray, direct projection method.

The Third Ray will-governed approach, and the Seventh Ray visioning activation approach are also safe meditation practices, as they keep the astral body under the control of volition, or the intention and suggestion of the attentional principle.

The spirit’s ability to make use of its astral covering in the Sixth Ray perspective is similarly under the control of its conative principle—which we call, the wish. This wish-activated interface with its astral covering does not involve the spirit passively wandering through the dimensional worlds on the Nadamic Path.

The First Ray approach of self-hypnosis and hetero-hypnosis is likewise generally safe, as your astral body will respond to your—or your hypnotist’s—suggestion, provided that neither of you lead the astral body into areas of the unconscious mind or the astral Planes where it might encounter negative entities that are beyond your ability to control.

The Second Ray dream methods, since a therapist supervises them, generally do not lead to problems; if you do have nightmares or other dysphoric dream experiences, they can be readily debriefed and deconstructed to promote your understanding and integration of them. Since most lucid dreaming methods attempt to get the subject in dreams—your attentional principle—to wake up and control the experience, these methods should also not get you into trouble.

We encourage you to become familiar with all seven interfaces with your astral body, so that you may understand this vehicle that you inhabit during the states of dreaming, hypnosis, and meditation, and when you perform psychic readings. If you endeavor to explore the solar plexus pathway of passive astral projection, we encourage you to only do so in a guided meditation that a Light bearer supervises, so you can travel under protection, and safely enter the current of the Astral Light without being waylaid during your journey.

Evaluating the Outcome of Spiritual Development

By George A. Boyd ©2017

Q: How can aspirants evaluate whether they are gaining the maximum benefit from transformation practices they are doing, or from the reception of Light Immersion?

A: The practical question that seekers can ask themselves is: “I’ve transformed my spiritual essence, but what am I now doing with it?”

Those that do no transformation and remain within the range of the delimited karmic parameters for their current life may develop knowledge, wisdom, virtue, and selected abilities intensively, but do not actualize the whole range of their Soul’s potentials.

Those that perform transformational meditation practices or receive the translating Divine Light through attunement progress far beyond the limits that a karmic-driven life can experience, but the development of their potentials of wisdom, love, and power is less intensive.

The key marker of transformation in aspirants or disciples who accelerate the spiritual evolution of a spiritual essence [e.g., nucleus of identity, spirit, or ensouling entity] is that they dissolve and transmute the karma behind that essence, and this allows that essence to move to successive nodal points along its track.

In spiritual traditions that utilize a transformational method to unfold a spiritual essence, we can measure the amount of karma they dissolve, transmute, and integrate along the delineated track upon which this essence unfolds by the relative progress of that essence towards its origin on that track.

If the transformational method affects the ensouling entity, we can view the unfolding of that ensouling entity along its track—which is called, the Way—and note its progress relative to its origin on that level of the Continuum. This is the Great Work of the First Pole of Being.

If the transformational method affects the spirit, we can view the opening of the Nadamic channels, and note the spirit’s progress in its Domain relative to its Source. We can also observe whether there is a guide actively working with the spirit and assisting it to return to the Divine Source that emanated it. This is the Great Work of the Second Pole of Being.

If the transformational method affects a nucleus of identity, we can note the movement of that nucleus of identity along its source, relative to the state of Mastery and Liberation for that essence. We can also look for whether the anointing of an Initiate [e.g., a spiritual Master] dwells in that center. This is the Great Work of the Third Pole of Being.

[In the Mudrashram® system of Integral meditation, we do not move nuclei of identity apart from the other vehicles of consciousness arrayed on the axis of being, but unfold these integration centers of the Superconscious mind in synchrony with the movement of each vehicle of consciousness aligned with the ensouling entity. However, many spiritual traditions do develop nuclei of identity independently—and they emphasize this type of transformation.]

In many spiritual traditions, the Initiates that supervise aspirants and disciples upon their Path simply train their chelas to unfold a spiritual essence on one pole of being. For example:

  • They may give a mantra that unfolds a nucleus of identity
  • They may use Kundalini to awaken a nucleus of identity or ensouling entity to bring about realization of this essence. Some traditions may use the Shakti component of the Kundalini energy to unfold this essence.
  • They may bestow attunements to unfold a nucleus of identity; or an ensouling entity, with or without its associated vehicles of consciousness.
  • They may awaken the spirit in one of the twelve Domains and lead it along the channels of the Nada in that segment of the Continuum.

In the Mudrashram® system of Integral meditation, we unfold these three poles in synchrony: the Soul, with its vehicles of consciousness and the nuclei of identity within those vehicles are transformed to the same nodal point, together with the spirit upon the segment of the Nada contiguous to the band of the Continuum in which the ensouling entity dwells. This development is keyed to the cutting edge of spirituality—other spiritual traditions often do not adopt this pattern of coordinated expansion of aspirants’ and disciples’ spiritual evolutionary potentials.

What are you doing with your spiritual development?

When spiritual unfoldment occurs in aspirants and disciples, there is a fundamental change in the capacity of those who experience this transformation. This new capacity embraces:

  • A new viewpoint or perspective on the universe
  • Deeper love and compassion
  • New abilities that arise at discrete stages of the Path
  • New insights, understanding, wisdom, and discernment
  • Greater purification of inner vehicles, enhanced character, and greater freedom from karmic impediments
  • The embodiment of greater life and awareness

As spiritual transformation of these aspirants and disciples is taking place, we need to ask, “What do they do with this expanded capacity that their transformation bestows?” There are several patterns we observe in these individuals:

Scenario one – They do nothing with it, but develop and retain these new aspects of the Soul’s love, wisdom, and power for the assumption of Mastery at a further stage on the Path. In this scenario, we say that the components of their new capacity are “sealed and readied for the Master’s use.”

Scenario two – They use their new knowledge and abilities, and their enhanced love and compassion to work on issues of their personality, so they can fulfill desires, work out issues and traumas that impact their functioning, have greater personal happiness, or enhance their serenity, well-being, wealth, and success. These ones typically have been held back from actualizing their personal potential; spiritual transformation enables them to remove those obstacles.

Scenario three – They embody saintly virtues and live a holy, loving life of selfless service to others.

Scenario four – They express their new insights and realizations creatively in the artistic fields of dance, music, poetry, fiction or non-fiction literature, painting, sculpture, drama, and other forms of creative expression.

Scenario five – They concretize their new understanding as mathematical models; engage in scientific exploration to expand upon their insights to gain new knowledge, and apply this knowledge to produce technological innovation.

Scenario six – They work to bring others to their spiritual Path, and they do a variety of services for the spiritual organization to which they belong. They may make financial gifts, volunteer their time and effort, and do projects that assist the supervising Initiates of the Path move their mission forward.

Scenario seven – They develop and utilize helping modalities to assist others. These helping abilities include healing, intuitive or psychic readings, psychotherapy, hypnosis, counseling, coaching, spiritual ministry, spiritual teaching, or initiation and Light Immersion.

We would ask you to examine:

  • In which of these ways are you expressing your spiritual development?
  • How has your expression of your Soul’s capacity changed since you began this program of transformation?
  • Has your spiritual unfolding led you to actively develop new skills and to acquire new knowledge, so you can enhance your capacity to serve in a helping modality?
  • How has your spiritual transformation affected your creative expression?
  • Has your inner metamorphosis affected your creative expressions? What has changed?
  • Has it improved your character and refined the way you relate to other people? How?
  • Has your development along this Path affected your altruistic motivation, your wish to help and serve others? Has it increased your desire to do selfless service out of love, to assuage the suffering of others?
  • In what ways has your spiritual advancement affected your personal life? Has your spiritual unfolding helped you overcome bad habits? Has it enabled you to recover from traumatic experiences, and enhanced your resilience to cope with the challenges and vicissitudes of life? Has it spurred you to overcome deficits in your education, or to master the developmental challenges that you missed in your upbringing? Has it helped you surmount the obstacles to your happiness and success?

Considering you are putting a lot of time and effort into unfolding along the Path you have chosen, we believe that it is important that you have something to show for your efforts. We ask you to reflect on how your inner transformation is expressing outwardly to touch you and the lives of others—how it is improving your life and the lives of others, and making a difference in the world.

While you might for a time, travel upon your Path as silently and invisibly as a submarine, we suggest that it is also valuable for you to surface periodically to bring into expression some of your spiritual essence’s new abilities, wisdom and knowledge, and love.

How to Verify Your Inner Experiences

Many people have inner experiences using guided meditations and intention-driven meditations, but not all of these experiences are genuine—many are based on fantasy, wishful thinking, and sometimes, outright delusion. This article will show you how to find out what is stable, abiding, and trustworthy in meditation, and what is not.

How You Verify Empirical Experiences

You have a wide variety of methods to verify and validate experiences you have through the senses, which are called empirical experiences.

  1. Direct sensory prehension – You see, hear, smell, taste, or touch something and you recognize it. You recognize your cell phone when you see it.
  2. Consensual validation – Other people sense the same thing. You go into a flower shop with three friends: they all smell the bouquet of 12 red roses, and all recognize that they smell roses.
  3. Testing – You believe something might be true, but you are not sure. You use a scientific testing protocol to test your assumption.
  4. Technological augmentation of the senses – Use of microscopes, telescopes, or devices that detect wavelengths of light that are beyond your sensory threshold are examples of ways you augment your senses to gather data.
  5. Investigation – You analyze data and evidence to determine the truth about an event that occurred in the past.
  6. Logical reasoning – You use the principles of deductive reasoning to think through whether a statement or argument is true.
  7. Mathematical modeling and proof – You use mathematics to solve problems and to build models that explain the operation of a physical process, or use statistics and probability theory to determine the likelihood of an event occurring.

These methods verify what you experience in the external world; the world that your senses detect and can weigh and measure. But these do not enable you to validate your internal, or subjective experience.

Orders of Subjective Experience

You have seven orders of subjective experiences:

  1. Witnessing mental or emotional activity arising within the field of awareness – This is the most common inner experience, where you become aware of what you are thinking and what you are feeling. You do not have to enter an altered state of awareness through meditation, prayer, or hypnosis to have this experience.
  2. Witnessing content at different levels of the mind – In this scenario, your attention moves along the thread of consciousness, and you become aware of the content at different levels of your mind. Each level, which appears as an inner form or vehicle (rupa), has different content. You notice that the content, of which you become aware, is distinctive from any other level.
  3. Witnessing revealed or communicated content – This type of inner experience arises when you encounter deeper aspects of your mind that communicate information to you, for example, your Soul tells you something. These experiences also occur when you encounter different numinous beings—guides, angels, spirits, Masters, and aspects of the Divine—in meditation. When this information comes from your Soul’s own realization, we call it inspired discourse or satsang. When it comes from other spiritual entities, we call it revelation, channeling, prophecy, or telepathic guidance.
  4. Identity realization – This occurs when you encounter one of the core essences within you: when you encounter your Self, the integration center of your personality; your attentional principle, the essence of consciousness and intention; your spirit, the essence of love and virtue; a nucleus of identity, an integration center in the Superconscious mind; or your Soul, the Divine Essence within you. You realize that this is the core of who you truly are—that makes you a unique individual.
  5. Unconscious encounter – This type is an encounter with the material that lies outside of the lighted area of your consciousness. These include non-integrated aspects of your personality, which appear as subpersonalities, archetypes, and fantasy.
  6. Mnemonic reconstruction – This occurs when you retrieve information or experiences from memory. You are able to recall parts of what you learned or experienced; in some cases, this memory may be contaminated or distorted.
  7. Liminal or hypnotic experiences – You have these types of subjective experiences when you are in the state of sleep, reverie, hypnosis, somnolent meditative states (Yoganidra), or under the influence of a psychoactive drug. The material arises passively in this state, and you have little ability to influence the experience.
    Each of these subjective experiences is mediated through one of your conscious principles: your attention, your attentional principle, your spirit, or your Soul. None of these experiences can be fully empirically verified. They are real to you, however, since you experience them.

Inner experience may be true and accurate, or inaccuracies or fantasy may contaminate it. Your challenge is, as a meditator, is to determine what is reliable and what is subject to error.

How You Verify Inner Experiences

Inner experiences that are accurate, true, and reliable are stable and abiding, and are consistent. They do not change each time you encounter that object of meditation. Their structure and location remains consistent. Elements of the mind that are stable and abiding include:

  • The essences of consciousness—attention, attentional principle, spirit, and Soul
  • Essences you encounter in identity realization
  • The thread of consciousness and focal points along it
  • The structures that make up the forms or inner vehicles of consciousness
  • The nodal points upon the Path of the Soul
  • The corresponding Nadamic tones on the Path of the spirit
  • The tracks along which the seed atoms and their inner vehicles unfold
  • The origin of the essences of consciousness and the vehicles of consciousness
  • The landmarks that demark Subplanes, Planes, and Divisions of the Great Continuum of Consciousness, or of the Domains of the spirit
  • The Presence of the Divine in Its many forms at different levels of the Continuum

One of our objectives for the Mudrashram® Correspondence Course was to delineate these abiding structures and essences of the mind. Whereas this framework is consistent, the content arising from these levels of experience varies widely, both in different meditations by the same individual and meditations that other people have.

To verify your inner experiences:

  1. You need to identify the source of the content that arises – Does it come from your own conscious thinking and emotional processes, your unconscious mind, from one of your essences of consciousness, or is it a numinous encounter with another being?
  2. You need to determine the truth of what is communicated or shown to you – If a guide reveals to you that, in ancient Atlantis, 42,000 years ago, they were using flying saucers and particle beam weapons, you would have no way to verify the veracity of this statement. Archeological evidence reveals that primitive man at this time was using stone tools and had no written language; you might conclude that it is highly unlikely these primitive people had a highly advanced technological civilization—and your guide has a richly developed imagination.
  3. You need to assess the motivation for making the communication – This inner assessment filter aims to screen out whether there is any malign or covert attempt to deceive you, mislead you, or manipulate you. These hidden agendas might show up if a member of a religion or cult is attempting to convert you to adopt their religious faith; if you are dealing with a charlatan or con-man, who wants you to buy their questionable services or products; or someone who is genuinely delusional, who wants you to validate their warped perception of the world and reality.
  4. You need to ascertain whether the object of meditation is stable and abiding – If you are meditating on the focal point of your feeling center, you should find it at the same location on the thread of consciousness, even though the content that arises there may vary in each meditation. You should find that your attentional principle does not vanish out of existence during your meditation, but it demonstrates the same essential characteristics—consciousness, intention, and the abilities for communication, contemplation, suggestion, empathy, and affirmation.
  5. You need to validate that the object of meditation is consistent – the vehicles and essences of your consciousness do not do things that their nature and structure does not permit them to do. For example, your Soul does not hop around to different tracks on the Continuum; your spirit does not rise in the channel of the Kundalini.
  6. You need to notice your own projection of your needs and wishes – your unconscious mind can weave fantastic stories and use imagination to create almost anything out of the matter of the astral Plenum—you can conjure wizards, spirits, guides, Ascended Masters, angels, and God with this highly creative aspect of your mind. To find out if this is happening, you have to consciously monitor this aspect of your mind until it settles down and stops projecting. When you reach the stage of inner stillness and silence, you should then notice what you perceive—without the overlay of fantasy and wild imagination.
  7. You need to determine whether information that is given under authority is legitimate – People representing different metaphysical, religious, and spiritual teachings refer to advanced spiritual beings—Saints, Masters, Gurus, and Sat Gurus—as their ultimate authority; they may also cite esoteric texts or scriptures as conveying the revelations of God. If an authority says something, you should be able to verify it. For example, if an authority says that one of the forms of God is a being of great Love and brilliant Light in the center of a sea of crystal, you should be able to find that location within where this Being exists, and this Being should not vanish from sight when you say, “Boo!”

Unfortunately, much of what is conveyed in New Age teachings, which arise in the Psychic Realm, is contaminated by fantasy and imagination. William Blake referred to this band of the Continuum as the realm of the Divine Imagination. However, other bands of the Continuum are not immune to the fantasy-weaving projections of the unconscious mind, either.

It is your task as an aspirant to sort through this sea of implausible contentions and suppositions, and to verify what is true and abiding—what you can validate—and to suspend or reject the rest. We encourage you to think about the strategies articulated in this article, and adopt them to arrive at a core of truth and accurate knowledge that will form the stable bedrock of your progressively expanding spiritual perception and discernment.

Overcoming Spiritual Blindness

George A. Boyd © 2017

Q: Some people cannot see within, even despite years of meditation? What causes this spiritual blindness?

A: There are a number of causes. Some have to do with incorrect meditation technique. Some have to do with encountering inner blocks or barriers—or the mind seems to defend against interiorization. Some have difficulty transcending the structures of belief that they have constructed, or moving beyond the content of the mind. Some never move far enough the thread of consciousness to activate the immortal essences—the attentional principle, the spirit, and the Soul—so the sight of these conscious principles of their nature never awakens.

There are several types of spiritual blindness that you may encounter:

  1. Your awareness awakens, but your attention remains fixed in the waking state of awareness. You remember the altered state of awareness, but you don’t go there as your attention.
  2. Your attention travels within, but then meets a barrier that it cannot surmount. This barrier blocks further inward progress, so the attention remains separated from the attentional principle, the spirit, and the Soul—and these spiritual essences do not awaken.
  3. Your attention does not lift from the waking state of awareness, because you cannot access the thread of consciousness through any pathway. [See the article, “The Journey Inward” — this describes twelve different tracks through which you can interiorize. This article is published in our book, A Mudrashram® Reader: Understanding Integral Meditation.] As a result of inability to enter the doorway to the thread of consciousness at the point between the eyebrows, you remain only conscious of your brain, and do not enter an altered state of awareness.
  4. Your attention remains at the waking state of awareness, because your awareness remains blocked below the seat of the attention at the medulla center, and does not rise into thread of consciousness.
  5. You engage in intellectual thinking or reflection, emotional expectation or reaction, and imagination or visualization—without moving your attention at all. You are immersed in the content arising from your vehicles of consciousness, but do not move your attention through it and transcend it. You must isolate and focus your attention to move beyond the content of these strata of the mind. You also experience this content immersion, when you are locked in the prison of belief. [See our web log article, “Breaking through the Bubble of Belief.”]
  6. Your attentional principle journeys into the higher vehicles of the Subconscious, Metaconscious, and Superconscious mind, but you are not aware of its experience, because your attention remains separated from it. Similarly, your spirit moves into the channels of the Nada, but its experience is also veiled from you, because you are not able to unite your attention with your spirit.
  7. Elements in your unconscious mind actively veil and block your deeper incursions beyond a certain level along the thread of consciousness, effectively pushing your attention back; this occurs whenever you try to penetrate beyond a certain point. [Unlike type two, which is a gate or barrier along the thread of consciousness—like the gateway to the Subconscious mind center—that your attention cannot get through; in type seven, there is an emergence from your unconscious that blocks your further interiorization, which sabotages your attempts to move your attention beyond where that unconscious mind material arises.] Karma drives this type. It appears to stem from two scenarios in your past lives:
  • You have a trauma associated with meditation in a past life. For example, you were killed when you were sitting for meditation.
  • You did evil deeds to those on the spiritual path. For example, you were cruel to monks, nuns, priests, or holy wanderers (sadhus).

Overcoming these Hindrances

These types of inner blindness can be overcome.

  • For types one, three, and five, you must work on collecting your attention and following the thread of consciousness with your attention. If you do this successfully, attentional seeing will begin to arise.
  • For type two, you need to practice alternative methods to surmount or get through the barrier upon the thread of consciousness. [We discuss these remedies in the Mudrashram® Correspondence Course.]
  • For type four, to get your awareness to rise into the seat of attention and up into the thread of consciousness, you need to work out the blockage. Some have found that body-mind modalities such as body work, breath work, Hatha Yoga, or martial arts helps them move through this blockage.
  • For type six, you must train your attention to unite with your attentional principle or spirit through moving through each focal point up to where these spiritual essences dwell.
  • For type seven, you may benefit from psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, or coaching to help you work out these issues that block you from moving beyond the level of your mind where this trauma is embedded. You can also work with them yourself using the invocational techniques and the methods of Jnana Yoga and Agni Yoga that we teach in our intermediate courses, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation and the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program.

If you are suffering from a type of spiritual blindness, where you cannot see anything within in your meditations, we encourage you to:

  • Identify the type of spiritual blindness that you are experiencing
  • Practice the remedy that we suggest above
  • Try alternative methods to move your attention along the thread of consciousness [vide “The Journey Inward”]
  • Have a consultation with someone who specializes in helping you rehabilitate inner vision, if you cannot remedy this problem yourself

It is possible to rehabilitate your inner sight. We urge you to not give up until you find an answer, because inner vision is your birthright.