Blog – Evolving Beyond Mind – Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I described how “mind” is a stepping stone to something greater, and not the final frontier of our journey. Being mental beings has taken humanity a long way, but it is not by continuing to expand our mental capacity that we will move to the next evolutionary stage.

The next stage will require us to fully become spiritual beings. Sri Aurobindo, the early twentieth century Indian guru, teacher, and philosopher, said “Intuition brings to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginning of his higher knowledge. Reason only comes in afterwards to see what profit it can have of the shining harvest.”

In the mental realm, we know about Spirit. We even have some ways that we can use spiritual principles and higher ideas to create a better life for ourselves. But we don’t necessarily have an experience of ourselves as Spirit. We believe in oneness, but we don’t necessarily have an experience of oneness.

How do we move from this mental realm, of concepts and constructs, to the spiritual realm of embodiment and identification? In other words, how do we move to a place of knowing Spirit as the I Am of our being?

Metaphysical writer and Christian mystic, Joel Goldsmith, wrote in his book, The Art of Spiritual Healing, “The important point is, do you have God? Spiritually, yes, theoretically, yes, everyone has God; but if everyone had God, there would be no lack or limitation in all this world. Actually people merely have God as a potentiality or a possibility. Having God means consciously to know Him aright, consciously to tabernacle with Him, consciously to commune with Him, consciously to know Him as the very I of your being.”

To arrive at this type of spiritual consciousness, we must do as the biblical scripture in Matthew 6:33 says: “Seek first the kingdom of God and all things will be added unto you.” Instead of seeking anything outside ourselves, our whole attention is placed on knowing God within, our own divinity.

Approaching our divine nature through our mentality is not wrong, but it is only a beginning. It creates the opening for further exploration. Having a concept of the infinite is the beginning of getting to know the infinite. Having an enlarged concept opens the doorway that is not available when there isn’t even a concept of something greater.

Meditation is a great practice for transcending mind because we begin to see, experience, and understand the nature of mind. We get to see, for example, that the mind can rationalize most anything, making it not fully fit as an instrument for knowing and experiencing the highest, purest truth of our being.

We have seen the divisions in our world that come from the mind’s rationalizations and justifications, unable to reach a clearer, more unifying truth. Division arises from not understanding and fully experiencing our oneness with each other and all of life. The antidote is to come into oneness, not merely as a conceptual reality, but as our living reality.

We can ask ourselves what would my relationships look like if I truly embodied oneness, if I saw my friends, as well as those with differing points of view, as myself, as actually myself? I’m not referring here to analyzing this mentally; but rather that we live in the question, and let the question transform us.

We can sit in the stillness, not rising until we receive understanding, just as Gautama Buddha did under the Bodhi tree. It doesn’t mean we necessarily literally don’t get up from our meditation cushion, but we remain in a living meditation on our oneness and connectedness with all of life, with God, with all that is. We let that meditation take us beyond mental concepts into true understanding, understanding that escapes words, descriptions, or concepts.

Some have referred to this type of knowing as that which we know without knowing how we know, without a process of reasoning, yet we know it with every fiber of our being.

The invitation this day is to meditate and pray with the sole intention of knowing your own divinity and the divinity of all others, knowing it beyond concept to the place of deep realization and visceral experience.

Enjoy the journey.