Finding Truth with the Intellect

By George A. Boyd ©2018

Q: Is it possible to find truth with the intellect?

A: The intellect can provide us conceptual models of the truth, but remains removed from the essence of spiritual reality. To find spiritual truth requires that you unite your attention with your immortal spiritual essences and your objects of meditation.

What can the intellect contribute to the quest for truth? There are several strategies that the intellect uses to search for truths that lie beyond its level of immediate comprehension:

  1. Frame – A frame establishes what are the relevant factors to consider. If you want to know about God, you may wish to exclude information about chimpanzees.
  2. Meaning – The quest for meaning seeks to uncover the connotation and implications of a conceptual idea. For example, you might seek to understand what the word God means to a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew, and look for their common and dissimilar beliefs about what God is like.
  3. Associations – Associations form the basis of knowing how two factors correlate with each other, and how multiple factors inter-correlate with each item in a matrix or array. Participation in religious rituals, engaging in prayer, and attending worship ceremonies appears to highly correlate with belief in God.
  4. Apparent causation – This strategy identified an outcome and traces back the associated factors to an event or actor that appears to have been their cause. The universe appears to have originated from a immensely tiny point from which emerged the Big Bang. In some cosmologies, there was a Creator that planned and manifested the universe—in these viewpoints, God is the Power that created the universe.
  5. Historical, anthropological, and philological analysis – This strategy looks for the historical background of an idea, how it expresses in culture, and how the concept changes as it appears in new languages. You might explore how the Hindu God Shiva, who first is identified in the archaeological excavations of the Indus Valley civilization, about 3500 BCE—and mentioned in the Vedas that were written in the Sanskrit language—this same phrase, Shiva, appears in the Hebrew language, and means to sit in remembrance of someone who has died.
  6. Looking to an expert or authoritative source – You may believe that a particular person or a book is an authoritative source, and you derive your belief that something is true based on that source. You may believe that The Holy Bible or The Koran is the true revelation of God, and you will look to that scripture as your touchstone of truth.
  7. Model – Here you create a synthesis that ties together all factors and how they inter-correlate, assign appropriate causation, and develop an explanatory theory that accounts for the relationships of all factors.

The intellect presents information in writing, through speech, via mathematical formulae, graphics, visual images, or symbols. While it can communicate spiritual ideas, it remains ever disconnected from the actual essence it is describing in words and pictures.

Knowing this, the meditator lets the intellectual concept indicate the essence that is the object of meditation. Through depth meditation, the aspirant gains union with this object upon which he contemplates, and knows the truth of it beyond the words that describe it.

The Seven Steps of Meditation

By George A. Boyd © 2017

Most people have heard of mindfulness, but they are not aware there are deeper stages of meditation. Mindfulness is the first step on the ladder of meditation. Here are the seven steps of meditation:

  1. Mindfulness – In the first step of meditation, you collect your attention and learn to be present. Once you are present, you can begin to monitor your experience in the present time, or apply your focused concentration to the task at hand.
  2. Contemplation – In this step, you move your attention along the thread of consciousness, and contemplate the content arising at deeper layers of your mind. We teach this practice in our beginning meditation course, The Introduction to Meditation Program, and in our intermediate courses, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation, or the by-mail or online Accelerated Meditation Program.
  3. Awakening – As you progress in contemplation, you reach the stage where you can unite your attention with the three immortal principles of consciousness: your witnessing consciousness (attentional principle), your loving spiritual heart (spirit), and your blissful, wise, and compassionate Higher Self (Soul). In the awakening process, you first encounter this immortal essence within you; then you unite your attention with it; and finally, you become one with it and identify with it. We teach you how to awaken your immortal essences in our intermediate classes.
  4. Transformation – You learn how to unfold your spiritual potentials through transformation. You learn how to travel in full consciousness as your attentional principle and view all of the levels of your Soul’s consciousness, which we call the Superconscious mind. You learn how to free your spirit and enable it to travel back to its Origin on the inner streams of light and sound. You learn how to move your Soul from its current position on the Great Continuum of Consciousness to a new, higher state of development. You learn how to do this in our intermediate courses.
  5. Realization – As a result of transformation, your Soul’s unfoldment allows you to understand something new. You begin to have profound insights. You gain new abilities. Your love and compassion expands to embrace a wider circle. Your experience in meditation brings these gifts to you. You learn to deepen this process of gaining understanding and insight, expanding the circle of your love, and discovering your Soul’s abilities in the Mudrashram® Advanced Course in Meditation.
  6. Ministry – As you continue to unfold your spiritual potentials, you begin to be able to minister the Light of Spirit, You learn how to express your ministry through spiritual healing, counseling, teaching, guiding, doing intuitive readings, and ultimately, awakening the spiritual potentials of others. We train others in spiritual ministry in our advanced webinars and our teacher training programs.
  7. Mastery – When you complete your journey of development, you arrive into the Presence of the Divine, where you are anointed and empowered to help others move through these other six steps.

If you wish to learn how to learn the full spectrum of meditation practices—beyond mindfulness—we invite you to learn more about our Integral meditation system through reading the articles available on this website, studying our books, and listening to and watching our webinars. If what we teach resonates with you, we welcome you to join us for the great adventure of depth meditation, and we can assist you move through all these seven stages to arrive at the shores of spiritual Mastery.