Tag Archives: inner seeing

Contemplation for Discernment

Posted on by

By George A. Boyd ©2023

Two of the key tasks for disciples are (a) to develop the ability to see inner spiritual essence and recognize them, and (b) to know their own spiritual nature exactly. For this clear seeing and exact knowledge, they can extrapolate from their own axis of being to recognize these same centers in others. Once they can do this, they can act as a spiritual guide.

Contemplation of twelve different elements of spirituality expands the capacity of inner seeing and recognition, and permits disciples to clearly discern these elements in themselves and others:

  1. The ensouling entity on its own Plane
  2. Chakras of the ensouling entity’s essential form
  3. Seed atoms and chakras of the Superconscious mind’s vehicles of consciousness—in certain of these forms, one can view the nucleus of identity within them
  4. The Self at the nucleus of the personality
  5. Seed atoms and chakras of the Metaconscious and Subconscious mind’s vehicles of consciousness
  6. The ego in its seven aspects
  7. Seed atoms and chakras of the Conscious mind’s vehicles of consciousness
  8. Contemplation of the spirit in each of the twelve Domains
  9. Contemplation of a spiritual guide form
  10. Contemplation of an angel
  11. Contemplation of the spiritual essences and vehicles of consciousness of a Master
  12. Contemplation of the Universal Consciousness of the Divine on different Plane

We encourage you to use this contemplative template to study your own nature. Those who have completed one of our intermediate meditation classes—the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation and the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program—will benefit from using the Mudrashram® Correspondence Course to help you with this study.

Aim for exact knowledge and clarity for each of the octaves of being: Personal—comprising the Conscious, Subconscious, and Metaconscious mind; and the Subtle, Planetary, Transplanetary, Cosmic, and your aligned Supracosmic and Transcendental Paths that make up your Superconscious mind. You can view a basic map of these levels of the mind in the article, “The Great Continuum of Consciousness,” which can be viewed on our Open Stacks page.

Visioning

Posted on by

By George A. Boyd © 2017

One of the key abilities of a leader is the ability to envision the future for his enterprise. Coaches also use this ability when they clearly visualize the next steps of growth for their clients. It is also a key aspect of goal setting. It is used in the creative arts. It is used in meditation. These varieties of visioning are described below.

  1. A strategy to achieve an objective – You use a tactical plan to implement the strategy and you measure its outcome. You frame a successful outcome as a victory; you consider an unsuccessful outcome as a defeat. Military planners use this type of visioning, as do many executives of successful companies.
  2. A continuum of growth and development – You have progressive realizations, make courageous decisions, and take constructive actions that allow you to mature into a desired future state in which you achieve something you ant to be do, or have. This process of development occurs over time, and moves forward unevenly, as you encounter inner and outer obstacles that impede your progress. You live into this life goal, and establish markers to know you have achieved it. Coaches and developmental psychologists embrace this perspective.
  3. A vision of the collective future of individuals, groups, or humanity – Through inner visions, revelations, or inspiration, you have a vision of the future. This can be your own future, for other people, for selected groups (e.g., the Jewish prophets foretelling the future for the Jews through the prophecies recorded in the Bible), or for all of humanity. Those given the gift of prophecy assert that God has granted them this ability; seers and prophets of different religious and spiritual traditions claim to possess this gift. In the modern scientific era, those who study future trends and make predictions of the future are called futurists. Those who study trends using mathematical models attempt to predict the most likely outcomes in their area of expertise: these model-based prognostications appear, for example, in meteorology, economics and finance, and insurance actuarial reports.
  4. Artistic visioning – Sculptors who visualize the finished sculpture in a block of unfinished marble or a painter who beholds his finished vision on a blank canvas use this type of visioning. Architects also utilize it when they conceive of a completed building in all of its details; as do fashion designers when they perceive an image of their elegant garment, and interior designers when they imagine the decor of a home. This bestows the ability to employ 2-D (surface), 3-D (solid or space), and 4-D (changes of a solid or space over time) visualization.
  5. Goals list – You create a goals list when you write down what you plan to achieve in each area of your life. You operationalize this through having daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly checklists that you mark as you complete each of your written goals. You review your progress periodically and make changes to your plans as circumstances change.
  6. Religious and actualization visioning – In religious visioning, you imagine what it might like to be a saint, to be in heaven, or to have attained the summit of perfection in your spiritual tradition. In the humanistic vision of actualization, you imagine what your ideal life will be like in rich sensory detail—you might concretize this vision through a “vision board” in which you place images of what you desire to continually remind yourself of what you hope to achieve. You might use prayer to augment your religious visioning; affirmations enhance your visions of personal actualization.
  7. Inner seeing – Meditation awakens this type of visioning, which includes activating the subtle senses of your astral body (astral visioning), contemplating with the “mind’s eye” (attentional visioning), opening the innate vision of your attentional principle (metavision) and your spirit (heart sight), turning on the octaves of personal and transpersonal intuition (intuitional perception), and realizing the Soul in its own nature (Gnosis, the dawning of enlightenment or core sight).

In Mudrashram®, we teach you how to activate this seventh variety of visioning, the different types of inner vision. You can experience an overview of these types in “The Vision Workshop,” which is available in the Public Webinar area of our website. You learn specific techniques for activating attentional, metavisional, and heart sight in our intermediate classes, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation and the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program. We also teach techniques for activating your transpersonal octave of intuition in our intermediate courses and in our advanced course, the Mudrashram® Advanced Course in Meditation—you will also learn a technique for activating Gnosis (core sight) in our advanced course.

We recommend that you familiarize yourself with all seven types of visioning, and learn how to use those varieties that support you in your career and in your personal and spiritual life. Visioning is a powerful tool at your disposal: use it to create success and personal growth in all aspects of your life.

 

How You Can Activate Your Inner Seeing Power

Posted on by

By George A. Boyd ©2018

Q: How do people see auras and visions of the spiritual worlds? Is that a special Gift from God, or can anyone learn to do this?

A: Behind physical vision are seven other layers of vision:

  1. The vision of your astral body
  2. Your mind’s eye: what you “see” with your attention
  3. Your personal intuition, which allows you to see what is going on at each level of your personality
  4. The vision of your intentional consciousness, or attentional principle, which we call metavision
  5. The vision of your spirit, which we call heart sight
  6. The vast intuitive vision of your Higher Mind, or Buddhic capsule, that enables your Soul to “see” all of the realms it has opened up as it journeys across the Superconscious mind
  7. The simultaneous vision of each of these different levels from core sight, the Soul’s innate vision

Most people are familiar with the first three types of vision, your astral vision, your attentional vision, and your personal intuition. For example:

When you are asleep and your physical eyes are closed, yet you see the images and scenery of your dreams. This is astral vision. You also use this type of vision when you enter the state of hypnosis, or do astral projection.

You may have experienced listening to a lecture and you were only aware of the content of what the speaker was teaching you. This is attentional vision, which allows you to “see” ideas and associations. You can train this faculty in meditation to explore each level of your mind and activate the higher octaves of vision.

Personal intuition allows you to check in each level of your Conscious, Subconscious, and Metaconscious mind, so you can monitor what you are experiencing. You might check into your feelings, the voice of logic, or your conscience, to help you decide what is the best course of action to take.

By focusing your attention on your attentional principle, your spirit, and your Soul, you can begin to activate vision types 4 to 7.

Realize that all of these forms of vision are operating just behind your physical vision in progressively deeper layers. To tap these other layers of vision, you need to (a) focus your attention there, (b) allow your awareness to open into this level of the mind, and (c) let your sensory energies withdraw into this deeper layer of the mind, where this higher order of vision operates.

What is true for vision is also true for the other senses—hearing, taste and smell (these conjoin in the deeper aspects of inner sensing), and touch—when you are able to withdraw your sensory currents into these deeper layers of the mind, these other subtle senses begin to function.

This withdrawal of sensory currents is called Pratyahara in Yoga Philosophy. You do this when you fall off to sleep, or when you enter a state of hypnosis—this allows you to activate the senses of your astral body.

When you collect your attention and concentrate upon the mental schema of something you are learning, you use attentional seeing. When you are deeply concentrated, you are just aware of what you are learning.

Your astral body’s vision regularly sees auras. If you travel in your astral body through the physical universe into what we call the Astral Light, it is possible to behold the inhabitants and scenery of the dimensional worlds or “Astral Planes.”

If you would like to learn more about the different levels of vision, you may enjoy the Vision Workshop, which is one of our Public Access Webinars. You can order it on our website, and read the notes and listen to the guided meditations, so you can learn how to access these deeper levels of sight.

For those of you who have not meditated before, and would like to learn to use attentional sight to explore the levels of the Conscious, Subconscious, and Metaconscious mind—beyond just focusing on a mental schema for a subject you are learning in school or on a project you are doing for your work—you can learn how to do this in our beginning meditation program, the Introduction to Meditation Program. This is available online, or you can do an in-person class with one of our trained Introduction to Meditation teachers.

If you have meditated before, and you would like to learn techniques to awaken your immortal spiritual essences and activate your four highest octaves of sight, you can take one of our intermediate classes, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation or the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program.

If you can learn to focus your attention and withdraw your senses, anyone can learn to see auras and view the inner Planes—and with time and practice, to fully utilize each of your seven inner octaves of sensing.

Overcoming Spiritual Blindness

Posted on by

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.