How Not to Be a Crackpot

By George A. Boyd ©2023

Q: Why are there so many crazy, crackpot ideas that people believe in?

A: People believe in crackpot ideas—conspiracy theories and strange notions of pseudo-science, religion, and politics—because they are unable to verify what they believe. They will tell you they believe these things “on faith,” or because it is written in their scripture, or some person they regard as an authority has said it, or they got it as a revelation in an altered state of consciousness.

Verification is part of the discriminative aspect of the mind. When these inner “crap detectors” are working, they are going to deconstruct or correct these crazy notions. When these inner sentinels of the mind are sleeping or disengaged, people will drift into full crackpot mode.

What are these nodes of discernment in the mind?

  1. Sense perception – This constructs your “world picture”—what you see in your environment around you. Under normal conditions, this aspect of discernment will give you an accurate perception of what is in the space around your body and where your body is in relation to the objects around you. For example, you will recognize the stove and the dining room table in your house or apartment, and notice how far your body is from them.
  2. Reason – This is your reality-testing mechanism. It detects the truth or falsity of statements based on evidence. When people enter and remain in altered states of consciousness, this aspect of the mind shuts down, and people become susceptible to believing anything that is suggested to them. When reason is not operating, people are walking around in a hypnotic trance.
  3. Intellect – This is the part of your mind that can solve problems and model problems. To find out if something is true, you perform a test to see if the hypothesis you generate is likely correct, based on a statistical criterion you set. If your statistical test shows that something is likely true 95% out of 100%, you can deduce that it is probably true in most cases—while you can’t be entirely certain that you have proved your hypothesis, it looks like it is likely true. This is the method science uses to arrive at understanding of the world.
  4. Temple of Science – This is the collective repository of all of the tests and studies that have been done on any particular topic. When enough tests lend credence to a theory, scientific consensus accepts this as a current paradigm. For example, thousands of tests and observations have been done to verify the theory of evolution is likely correct.
  5. Illumined mind – When the Soul takes the Fourth Planetary Initiation, it fully awakens its Buddhic vehicle of consciousness. Through the heart and throat centers of this form, the Soul can detect the content of each nodal point the Soul has opened and of each Nadamic tone the spirit has purified. This generates discernment for the Way of the Soul and the Path of the spirit. Those that complete the Fourth Planetary Initiation affirm, “I am the Way and the Path.” This forms the foundation of spiritual discernment for the Planetary and Subtle bands of the Continuum.
  6. Interpenetrating Awareness – When a disciple awakens the Mahatma form on the Bridge Path, activating the medulla center of this form yields the highest discriminative awareness for all levels of the Continuum below this station on the Path. It gives instant knowledge for whatever information the disciple asks—this is like a powerful spiritual search engine that can access information about whatever spiritual topic the disciple wants to know.
  7. The Wisdom Mind of Satchitananda – In the heart center of the form of the ensouling entity of the seventh Transcendental Path, which we call Satchitananda, there is an intuitive switchboard that directly and objectively perceives the content of the mind for multiple parameters. These parameters are:
    • Knowledge of the element of earth
    • Knowledge of the element of water
    • Knowledge of the element of fire
    • Knowledge of the element of air
    • Knowledge of the element of Aether or space
    • Knowledge of the Experiential Mind, the field of memory for sense impressions and life events
    • Knowledge of Reason, the analytical and discriminative faculty
    • Knowledge of Ego (Ahamkar), the identification with the body, reason and life experiences
    • Knowledge of the Will, the principle of choice and arbiter of action
    • Knowledge of the Self: the field of the Knower, the instruments of Knowledge, and the Known
    • Knowledge of the Mythic Nucleus of Wisdom of the Subtle Realm
    • Knowledge of the Creative Nucleus of Power, the Soul of the Planetary Realm
    • Knowledge of the Omniscient Nucleus, the Monad of the Transplanetary Realm
    • Knowledge of the Compassionate Nucleus, the Astral Soul of the Cosmic Sphere
    • Knowledge of Omnipresent Nucleus, the Supracosmic Soul of the Supracosmic Sphere
    • Knowledge of the Omnipotent Nucleus, the Soul of the Bridge Path
    • Knowledge of the Path of the Violet Ray of Creation, T1
    • Knowledge of the Path of the Rose-Saffron Ray of Creation, T2
    • Knowledge of the Path of the Emerald Green Ray of Creation, T3
    • Knowledge of the Path of the Golden Yellow Ray of Creation, T4
    • Knowledge of the Path of the Royal Blue Ray of Creation, T5
    • Knowledge of the Path of the Rainbow Ray of Creation, T6
    • Knowledge of the Eternal Path of the Primal White Light Ray of Creation, T7
    • Knowledge of the Essence of Satchitananda

Nodes one through four comprise our personal and societal aspects of discernment; spiritual discernment arises from nodes five through seven. In the Subtle Realm—particularly the Lower Astral Plane—and the Psychic Realm, and the First and Second Planetary Initiations, sojourners through these realms do not have a touchstone to verify their experiences.

Much is constructed from the gossamer threads of belief and the tendrils of faith, and reliance on the veracity of sources from whom they learn these beliefs. Until they are able to subject these beliefs to the bright light of discernment, they will cling to these beliefs despite any verification they are true. Consequently, they gently drift into the intoxicating world of the crackpot.

The Boyd Crackpot Scale

We can characterize seven different levels of drift into crackpot mind:

  1. The individual is mostly sane, but harbors odd ideas about one to three topics.
  2. The individual continues to maintain relative sanity, but has odd ideas for four to ten topics
  3. The individual begins to shift from a rational stance to conviction about his or her beliefs, which cannot be verified; more than ten odd ideas make up his or her constellation of irrational beliefs. Those initially exposed to religious or political ideas may move into this posture. Here the conviction is not complete—the individual may be persuadable at this level to come back to reality, and may have some openness to examining his or her beliefs.
  4. The individual begins to rationalize and defend his or her irrational beliefs, and rejects evidence to the contrary; at this level, an individual has become immersed in a conspiracy theory or a system of pseudo-science, political, or religious beliefs. At this level, the individual will likely push back on any attempts to dissuade him or her of the fallacy of his or her beliefs—and he or she is “locked in” to the conspiracy theory at this stage.
  5. The individual begins to believe he or she is under attack or is persecuted for holding his or her beliefs. At this level, he or she begins to adopt paranoid ideation. Those for whom suspicion and mistrust begin to pervade their view of the world may develop a paranoid personality disorder.
  6. The individual’s beliefs start to condition his or her behavior, and he or she begins to act strangely in most situations. At this level, the individual may enter into schizotypal personality disorder.
  7. The individual’s beliefs become bizarre and delusional. He or she may hear voices that tell him or her weird things; he or she may hold beliefs that are totally irrational. At this stage, the individual has migrated into paranoid schizophrenia.

Your beloved, eccentric uncle or aunt—substitute whatever relative, friend, or co-worker that is in your life that demonstrates eccentricity—who has some odd ideas, is likely operating at level one or two.

People begin to drift away from reality at level three and four. These are the people in your life that are caught up in conspiracy theories, or have come to believe in the odd notions of pseudo-science, or have been convinced to believe in a religious or political ideology. Also, people that become involved in religious cults, or hate and terrorist groups operate at these levels.

At levels five through seven, the eccentric person in your life has begun to exhibit mental illness. These individuals need professional help—unfortunately, many of them are beyond the reach of even the most skillful interventions of mental health professionals. They will remain in the upper crackpot worlds, oblivious to rationality and reality, and will abide in these states until death liberates them from this continual hypnotic trance—or until their inner illumination ignites, to dispel the lies and delusions they have come to believe.

You can avoid becoming a crackpot through subjecting your beliefs to your personal and spiritual discernment faculties, and by not simply believing in ideas that you cannot verify. Start with the foundation of what you can verify:

  • Listen to the voice of wisdom within you.
  • Apply the criteria for discerning truth.
  • Hold any ideas you cannot verify as unproven hypothesis.
  • Analyze the reasoning that underlies claims and conjectures. If it is flawed, reject it.
  • Exercise critical thinking. Do not accept ideas without fully vetting them.
  • When your Illumined Mind begins to operate, allow it to reveal what is actually there in the inner worlds and not what imagination and magical thinking constructs.
  • Verify your intuitive impressions through examining them with the direct perception of your attentional principle.

If you will develop wisdom and discernment, you will steer clear of the pitfalls of crackpot mind.

Faculties of the Soul’s Intuitive Knowledge

By George A. Boyd ©2018

In our intermediate courses, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation and the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program, we teach about the seven chords of Jnana Yoga, the octaves at which the Soul uses its innate intelligence and intuition. You can read about these seven chords of Jnana Yoga in our Library [you can get a free library membership here—if there are particular areas that interest you, please let us know on this page where you sign up for the Library.]

This intuitive thread, which has been called the Antakarana, stretches from the physical brain to the Soul. With each meditation, insight, and revelation, you activate this thread and build the Soul’s knowledge and wisdom.

At the core of this thread there are seven essential aspects of the Soul’s intuitive wisdom. These include:

  1. Discernment – This enables your Soul to recognize its own nature and differentiate its essential nature from its vehicles of consciousness and the phenomena of the inner Planes. At the culmination of discernment, you gain Soul Realization, or Gnosis. This faculty has also been called Viveka, or spiritual discrimination.
  2. Mandalic reasoning – This faculty is anchored in the brain center of the Soul’s essential vehicle. It resembles a series of concentric circles (some perceive this center like concentric spheres) that mirror each stage of the Soul’s development—from the first nodal point of the Subtle Realm to your current state of spiritual evolution. Through mandalic reasoning, you can tap into the knowledge you have gained at each nodal point of the Path; you can also locate archetypes on different Planes that correspond with one another—this is the basis of the esoteric dictum, “As above, so below.”
  3. Multi-dimensional knowledge – This allows you to plumb the energetic thread that connects each of your vehicles of consciousness, and to access the knowledge of each of those vehicles. This operates through the seed atom of each vehicle of consciousness; it permits you to plumb the content corresponding to any nodal point in any vehicle of consciousness. This inner coordinate system allows you to locate specific content in any vehicle and to bring it up. This has been referred to holographic knowledge.
  4. Depth intuitive knowing – This enables you to know the identity state contained within each vehicle of consciousness, to declare it (e.g., the I AM declaration of Jesus in the Bible, “I am the bright and morning star”), and to empathically enter the experience of others. It is this faculty of intuitive connection that enables you to take the perspective of the Soul when you do healing, psychic readings, coaching, depth counseling or psychotherapy, or ministry.
  5. Connections with the intellect – This expresses in seven ways; most people utilize one or more of these connections with the Soul’s illumined mind to receive and communicate the information they gather:
    1. Visual-symbolic – This resembles a cascade of images or symbols that enter awareness in meditation. You need to reflect on each of these images to glean additional information about it.
    2. Verbal intuitive – This inspired verbal guidance and inspiration speaks through you and you hear yourself speaking it. This has been called satsang, channeling, or prophecy—depending whether the source of the information comes from, respectively, your own Soul, another spiritual entity, or the Divine Spirit.
    3. Silent thought reception – Here you receive guidance and direction through silent intuition. You hear the thoughts directed to you in your mind. This mode of transmission of guidance and information has been called telepathy. You commonly access this connection through asking questions to your Soul—we refer to this as the “tell me circuit.”
    4. Visual thought reception – In this connection type, when you ask the Soul a question, it moves your attention within you to the level where you can directly experience the essence about which you are curious. So, for example, if you wanted to know what is the form of the Divine at the top of the Abstract Mind Plane, your Soul would guide your attention to the level of the Continuum where you actually would behold that Being. We refer to this as the “show me” circuit.
    5. Behavioral guidance – Through this connection, you receive plans for sequences of action, blueprints for building something, or guidance for new behavior you have never practiced before. For example, this connection is activated in those who have a calling to build temples. We call this the “praxis circuit.”
    6. Creative inspiration – This is a downpour of poetry, artistic images, or literary or dramatic dialog that you capture through your particular artistic gift. You sense that your Soul is expressing through you, and you put it down, for example, through writing it, painting it, recording it, or sculpting it.
    7. Systemic view – This gives you the big picture of a system. We call this synthetic form of perception global intuitive perception. It enables you to view how all parts fit together into an integrated whole.
  6. Integration – This alchemical process enables you to change elements of your unconscious mind into an aspect of consciousness that you can utilize. You access integration through a series of evocative techniques drawn from meditation, psychotherapy, and hypnosis. When this aspect is operating, you typically will be encountering and interacting with an element of your unconscious mind, and progressively changing it until it can be re-integrated into consciousness. This form of intelligence has been called synthesis or integrative reasoning.
  7. Jnana Shakti – This is the innate energy of the Soul’s illumined mind that operates each of these six essential aspects of intuitive wisdom. This aspect is awakened during the sitting we give for Jnana Yoga in the Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation and in the introductory session of the Mudrashram® Advanced Course in Meditation.

Each of the seven chords of the Soul’s intelligence and intuitive wisdom can be accessed through evocative questioning and attentional focusing techniques. You can learn about these methods in our intermediate and advanced meditation courses.

We encourage you to study the activity of each of these faculties of your Soul’s intuitive wisdom, and to learn methods to enhance their operation. This will enable to allow your Soul’s innate genius to flower and to have full expression in your life.

On Spiritual Boundaries

By George A. Boyd © 2017

Q: Are there spiritual boundaries?

A: Boundaries at the personal level are mediated through trust and disclosure; spiritual boundaries are constructed from ethical considerations and discernment. There are seven major spiritual boundaries.

  1. Non-injury – Non-injury means not forcing your will on another, not causing injury in thought, word, and deed. Lack of observance of this principle demarks those who work in the Lower Astral, the so-called Occult traditions, in contrast to those who work beyond the Lower Astral.
  2. Group cohesiveness – This is recognizing that certain individuals are a member of a group based on adherence to certain beliefs, doctrines, and practices. This differentiates one group from another.
  3. Plenum content discernment – This is an ability to recognize the content of the inner Planes and to discern the themes that make up a Subplane, and the collection of themes that constitute a Plane. This is primary spiritual discernment. [We teach this in a series of webinars on this topic available to intermediate students.]
  4. Vehicular content discernment – This is the ability to recognize the content of your inner vehicles of consciousness of the Conscious, Subconscious, Metaconscious, and Superconscious mind, and perceive those vehicles embedded in the matrix of the unconscious mind. This is secondary spiritual discernment. [We train you to cultivate this type of discernment in the Introduction to Meditation course, and in the Mudrashram® Correspondence Course.]
  5. Conscious essence discernment – This enables you to behold and recognize your attention, your ego, your attentional principle, your Self, your spirit, your nuclei of identity, and your Soul, both within yourself and in others. [We introduce you to personal identification centers (ego and Self), attention, and Soul in the Introduction to Meditation course. We go deeper into this examination in our intermediate courses, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation and the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program, where you learn about the attentional principle and the spirit. You study nuclei of identity in the Mudrashram® Advanced Course in Meditation.]
  6. Spiritual relationship discernment – This enables you to detect the attunements or energetic connections that identify someone as a disciple of a spiritual teacher. Spiritual teachers of other traditions, who recognize these energetic markers, do not work with these disciples, recognizing they are under the supervision and responsible stewardship of another Initiate. This allows individuals to develop spiritually in an orderly way on the Path.

We note that not observing this rule leads to a kind of spiritual promiscuity, where disciples of one tradition are subject to the ministry and influence of other traditions. This can result in a number of untoward consequences, including:

  • Developing imbalances in spiritual vehicles
  • Intuitive bifurcation – opening streams of intuition on more than one octave of the Continuum, or for more than one spiritual Path
  • Cognitive confusion – not knowing which worldview, beliefs, or values espoused by different teachings is correct
  • Emotional conflict – this leads to conflicted loyalties and wavering commitment
  • Behavioral inhibition – when you do not know which set of beliefs or guidelines to follow, this leads to passivity and immobility—you cannot move forward in your life if you don’t know which way to go is correct
  1. Discernment of the Divine Will – this enables you to know which conative impulse arises from the different octaves of your mind, and which emanates from the Divine. Those who operate outside the circle of Planetary Initiation, on the Probationary Path—comprising the Biophysical Universe, Abstract Mind Plane, Psychic Realm, and Wisdom Plane in the Planetary Realm—and in the Subtle Realm, their own choice largely governs what their lives become. When you enter the stream of the Planetary Initiations, you begin to become conscious of the Divine Will. Those who contemplate the Moon Soul or Christ Child nucleus of identity can hear the whispering of the Divine Will, even before their Soul has taken the First Planetary Initiation.

Initiates, who draw into the Presence of the Divine, receive direct communication of the Divine Will. They are immersed in it. It is clearly transmitted to them.

Those stages of spiritual Mastery where the Divine Will can be known directly include:

  1. Adepts and Adept Masters (Planetary Hierarchy)
  2. Yogi Preceptors (Zone of Mastery in the First Cosmic Initiation)
  3. Light Masters (Zone of Mastery in the Second Cosmic Initiation)
  4. Cosmic Masters (Cosmic Hierarchy)
  5. Supracosmic Master or Guru (Mastery of one Supracosmic Path under the aegis of the Supreme Guru)
  6. Transcendental Path Master or Sat Guru (Mastery of one Transcendental Path and becoming an emissary and conduit for the Grace and Power of the Divine at that level)
  7. Multiplane Master or Adi Sat Guru (Mastery of the six other octaves of Mastery, with the ability to know the Divine Will and minister at each of these levels)

Occult Adepts, who operate in the Lower Astral Plane, are emissaries of the Dark Force, called Kal or Satan. They operate outside of the Divine Will; they are responsive to the will of the Being who embodies the Dark Force. Their activity constructs and holds in place the maelstrom of collective evil that we call the Lower Astral Plane.

It is a primary task for beginning aspirants to gain discernment of the first two types of spiritual boundaries. Advanced aspirants and disciples need to develop discernment for the remaining five.

You need to develop your ability to discern these spiritual boundaries within your self and others, respect group identification and established spiritual relationships, and endeavor to follow the Divine Will that leads you to completion of your Soul Purpose and fulfillment of your spiritual destiny.