Credit: Arum
Sometimes we can only see things in retrospect. Let’s assume that we’re looking back on our Third-Dimensional minds and wanting to understand them. What was that? How did I do that? And why?
Werner Erhard gives one of the best discussions of the Third-Dimensional mind and how it operates that I’ve seen. A little complex but comprehensive. Here it is.
“The mind is a linear arrangement of multisensory, total records of successive moments of now. Its purpose, its design function is survival: the survival of the being and anything which it considers itself to be.
“When the being identifies itself with its mind, we call this state of affairs the ego and it means that the mind’s purpose becomes the survival of the mind itself.
“For the mind to survive, it tries to keep itself intact. It seeks agreement and tries to avoid disagreement. It wants to dominate and to avoid domination. It wants to justify its points of view, conclusions, decisions, and avoid invalidation. … Running through it all, over it all, is the unending effort of the mind to prove itself right.” (1)
So why don’t we say that this is where we came from? No questions asked. No explanations needed.
In effect we were responding to our memories of things – Werner would have called it steering by the rear-view mirror. Looking always to the past.
And the past is this “linear arrangement of multisensory, total records of successive moments of now.” What a great description of a series of vasanas. A myriad of snapshots all filed under feeling state.
Our sole function, when we operate as ego-mind-only, rather than heart-consciousness, is to survive.
Well, yes. When I was penniless last month all I could think of at that moment was survival. Things became very real all of a sudden, where before I had been relaxed. Survival became all I could think about.
I had a heightened experience of the ego-mind focusing on the “survival of the being and anything which it considers itself to be.”
Werner goes on to give our repertoire, numbers, acts, and routines:
“It seeks agreement and tries to avoid disagreement. It wants to dominate and to avoid domination. It wants to justify its points of view, conclusions, decisions, and avoid invalidation. It wants to be right. Running through it all, over it all, is the unending effort of the mind to prove itself right.” (2)
And to survive.
It’s easy to see these ways of being when they’re exaggerated in the dictatorial personality. Such a one dominates and avoids being dominated, demands agreement and won’t tolerate disagreement, and seeks to justify himself and invalidate his “enemies.”
Let me draw a line in the sand here. On one side of the line is where we came from as the survival-oriented, Third-Dimensional ego-mind.
On the other side of the line is the service-oriented, Fourth- and Fifth-Dimensional purified mind.
Coming from that state of being, life is harmonious. People tell the truth but tell it kindly. They help each other wherever they can and no one takes advantage of another.
No one would think of forcing another to do something against their will. It would not occur to anyone.
People share their agendas and philosophies but without an air of enrollment. Everyone honors their own path and that of others, without trespass of any kind.
What fuels it all? What makes it all easy and effortless? Love. Higher-dimensional, transformative Love. Love heals all wounds, quiets all minds, and warms all hearts.
We no longer have to work by manipulation, laying traps, undermining what we don’t like, etc. We no longer have to remain at the level of the survival-fixated ego-mind. We can love at least one level up, at the level of experience.
Experiential knowledge has more juice to it, more power, more persuasiveness than merely-intellectual knowledge. Before we make our decisions involving another, we usually want to know how they feel. Our greatest reward from a task completed is not what money can buy but how we feel. Experiential knowledge is intimate.
Beyond it is realizational knowledge, open to fewer of us because it requires at least initially a rigor that few of us are prepared to give.
Realizational knowledge is highly persuasive; in fact conclusive. We now know something for certain.
After my 1987 vision, I said to myself that I now know one thing: That enlightenment is the purpose of life.
I knew nothing else in the same way that I knew that. With certainty. With conclusiveness. That’s the impact of realization.
But I’m only suggesting moving things up a notch, into the experiential. Here how we feel becomes important.
All of that is on this side of the line separating the survival-focused Third-Dimensional ego-mind and the service-oriented Fourth- and Fifth-Dimensional purified mind, that draws its strength from its own love, drawn up from the endless well in the heart.
Thank you to the ego-mind for having done its job, all these millennia, of keeping me safe. As frightening as the journey has been at times, fright is just fright. I now know I’ll survive.
Bless you and happy retirement.
I can take the wheel.
Footnotes
(1) Luke Rhineheart, The Book of est. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976, 174.
(2) Loc. cit.