Three elements of consciousness are impressing themselves on me at the moment as a kind of complete way to see an important life process. They are: realized knowledge, heart consciousness, and fairness.
Realized Knowledge
Werner Erhard used to talk about dimensions of certainty. Our sense of knowing becomes more certain as we move up a ladder of consciousness from mystery to belief to original thoughts, feelings, knowledge born of action, not-knowing, observing and then what he called “natural knowing.” Natural knowing is the same as what I call realized knowledge.
I’ve spoken of intellectual knowledge yielding to experiential knowledge (what he meant by feelings and knowledge born of action) and experiential knowledge yielding to realized knowledge.
Buddhists have a slightly different model, the most relevant parts of which are cita-maya-panna, or knowledge born of hearsay and our thinking processes, and bhavana-maya-panna, or realized knowledge.
We usually think of these things in a linear way. So realized knowledge would be seen as further down the road from intellectual knowledge. But that doesn’t capture what is being referred to.
When we enter into the realm, if only briefly, to which realization is the doorway, everything about our modes of experiencing is transformed. It isn’t just different. It’s enhanced, expanded, and actualized in ways that are not merely different but unavailable before.
Realized knowledge results in clarity, certainty and confidence. We know at those moments in a way we never did before and doubt vanishes before it.
Realized knowledge is no different than Fifth-Dimensional knowledge. The difference is that we have it only in moments while for them it’s everyday life.
Heart Consciousness
The heart knows through love. But again, I’m not talking about romantic love or even the impersonal love of friendship. I’m talking about transformational love.
Transformational love lifts one (usually briefly again) into a higher dimension. So it too is a doorway into the same higher dimension where things are known with clarity, certainty and confidence.
Transformational love lifts, elevates and renews. It isn’t bound necessarily to realization. It’s full and complete within itself and needs no trigger but itself.
An experience of transformational love is all that’s needed to show one that love cannot be gotten from another, that love comes from within. Granted that this whole world is composed of love so that love is everything, within and without, still our special connection to it comes from our own heart, from within.
Just as our Self is the All-Self and only illusion convinces us otherwise, so is our heart THE Heart and only illusion convinces us otherwise.
Going deeper and deeper into our heart brings us at last to the Heart of all. For that reason we can say that all exists within the heart.
There’s an inner universe, which I’ve seen. In some kind of crazy inversion, we go within to find the same universe that exists without. (1) We think of the heart as the doorway to transforming love, but it’s the doorway to much else besides.
Fairness
Having sat on the adjudicative bench and having studied the law from that vantage point, I feel confident in saying that what underlies all justice systems is the notion of fairness. We need a moral guide even more now, as we emerge from illusion, than we did when we were mired in it.
Because now, as we begin to experience states of being and awareness that can at times be sublime, we think less and less. A friend reminded me the other day that I needed to renew my passport. The mere thought of filling out paperwork almost did me in.
So little of what I do these days is of the nature of the bureaucratic things we were enmeshed in in former years. I’m sitting here right now, watching the sun come up over Vancouver, and I haven’t a pre-existing thought in my mind. My hands type as the thoughts come to me, but they come to me newly, not in a linear fashion, and without an ounce of effort.
There is no more room for me at this moment to reason things out in ways I might have done before. I need one easily-remembered standard to live by, to ensure that I live a moral life where many of my older-dimensional ways of doing things no longer appeal to me and no longer work. Fairness is that standard.
The essence of fairness is equal sharing. The essence of fairness is taking into account the other person’s situation and dealing with that person out of what’s deserved or appropriate in light of their situation. Disabled people get special treatment on the bus, as do seniors and young children. And we see that as fair, given their situation.
If fairness were in place all over the world, this world would work and laws would not be needed. So fairness is the one easily-remembered standard that I embrace as the third leg on this tripod, the way I intend to meet and treat with my world.
Realized knowledge, heart consciousness and fairness blend together in a way that I can’t describe. The three of them open areas of myself that were inaccessible in the sluggish density of the Third Dimension. For me, they’re a fully-developed, fully-comprehensive basis for being and doing in a higher-dimensional world.
If you wish to see it from the standpoint of spiritual practice, realized knowledge is the wisdom path, which Hindus call jnana yoga. Love is the devotional path, which Hindus call bhakti yoga. And fairness is indispensable to the path of service, which Hindus call seva and karma yoga.
Footnotes
(1) I assume what I saw was the same univesre that exists without, but I don’t know for sure.