Principles Spiritual Masters Live By
Principles Spiritual Masters Live By
By Keith Sherwood
Humans are Eternal Beings
You were immersed within the life force before the first tattva began, and you will continue to enjoy its benefits after the last tattva has ended. According to Vedanta, tattvas are steps in the evolution of the multiverse. Thirty-five tattvas have already passed since the beginning; we are participating in the thirty-sixth tattva. As the multiverse diversified via the tattvas, the life force remained eternally immanent sustaining everything that emerged from it. That means several things; you emerged from the life force along with everything else that exists; you can’t be separated from the life force because of something you did or failed to do, and your individual manifestation may change, but your essence will remain the same forever.
The truth is you’re an eternal being who never changes as well as a changeling who manifests an evolving set of qualities through your subtle field and physical-material body.
The qualities of your subtle field and physical-material body change because they both function within time-space, your subtle field through linear time and your physical-material body through linear-sequential time. Fortunately, you can transcend the limitations of time on both the physical-material and subtle dimensions by shifting out of time-space into eternal time. By doing that, you can merge with the life force and bath eternally within its radiance.
There is more than one way to merge with the life force. You can surrender to bliss, which emerges through Atman when Purusha (divine consciousness) and Prakriti (universal feminine energy) become one; when you let go of your attachments and experience intimacy with another person, and when you separate yourself from the ‘I’ and melt directly into union with the life force.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest, echoed these facts when he declared: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." His words suggest that he recognized that we’re eternal beings that began existence as pure consciousness and that many steps in the evolutionary process had to take place before we could be born into a physical world with a physical-material body.
Humans are Interdimensional Beings
The Rg. Veda, the earliest extant work of Indian sacred literature, declares that the cosmos exists in two states – unmanifest and manifest – and that the divine word birthed the universe into existence from a Golden Egg – which was its original cause. According to later texts, the various states of manifestation (loka) co-exist with everything that is unmanifest (aloka) and with the precursor of them both, the omni field.
According to these sacred texts, the multiverse evolved from its original state of unity into an ever more complex state of diversity by way of the tattvas, which are steps in the process of evolution. Each tattva gives birth to the next as evolution progresses, but none of the tattvas disappear; they continue to exist as a substrate. This explains why fields of consciousness, energy, and etheric matter coexist and why humans as well as all sentient beings continue to interact with them. It also explains how a spiritual adept can study cause-and-effect relationships that transcend both time and space and the limitations of the physical-material world.
To participate in the evolution of the multiverse, humans developed non-physical vehicles that allowed them to participate with other living beings in both their internal and external environment during each successive tattva. These vehicles interpenetrate a human’s physical-material body. They’re supported by subtle organs and systems that function synchronistically with one another. This makes humans interdimensional beings with the power to transform their lives and to experience their a priori state of enlightenment.
Enlightenment is a Human’s Natural State
When the seventh tattva emerged, the legion of immaterial souls who were our ancestors began to search for a suitable home on the physical-material plane. We don’t know how long it took them to develop physical-material bodies or to find a suitable home. But it’s likely that both events took place before Earth could nurture sentient life. It’s also likely that our ancestors’ original home was located in a galaxy far away.
Since time is relative on the physical-material plane, it’s hard to know exactly when our ancestors (the Seed People) became a space faring species. What we do know is that they eventually discovered Earth.
Once they arrived on our planet, they encountered hominids whose bodies hadn’t evolved sufficient mental complexity to serve as vehicles for advanced souls. Nonetheless, our ancestors saw this as an opportunity. Around two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, they used their version of Crispr and snippets of their own DNA to create a new species: homo sapiens. The members of the species were almost identical to the Seed People who genetically engineered them – and as soon as they began to reproduce, the souls of deceased Seed People began to incarnate in their offspring.
The first homo sapiens walked with God like the Seed People. They experienced bliss and were not subject to the self-doubt, confusion, and self-destructive tendencies that have plagued later generations of homo sapiens. Like their designers, they experienced pleasure, love, intimacy, and joy which they shared freely with one another, the Seed People, and the ecology of life on Earth.
According to sacred texts and legends, the Seed People remained on Earth for several generations. They interacted with homo sapiens, who like them experienced bliss consciously. During their time on Gaia, they used the life-affirming consciousness and energy they radiated in abundance to maintain the spiritual and ethical integrity of the species they’d created. They were successful until the beginning of the Kali Yuga, the fourth epoch in the cycle of yugas. However, this doesn’t change the fact that enlightenment is a human’s natural state and that sooner or later every human being will experience that blissful state once again.
The Multiverse Exists Within Your Perception
If you already existed before the first tattva as Vedanta suggests, then it’s not a great leap to declare that the multiverse exists within your perception. In his tome, ‘The Process of Yoga,’ Swami Krishnananda explains that:
“The world is contained within consciousness, and that is why it is capable of being known. Knowing is nothing but the entry of the object into the knowing principle. The object enters into knowledge, or consciousness, and then it becomes known. When there is a union of the object with the subject, the object is known to exist. The world enters our consciousness, and then we say that the world exists.”
Yogic adepts were among the first to recognize this fundamental truth. They explained that, by shifting your orientation from one level of consciousness to another, you could experience phenomena without the limitations of linear-sequential time in loka (the manifest universe), aloka (the unmanifest universe), and the omni field which birthed them both.
Although Krishnananda focuses on objects, it’s not only material things that are the subject of knowledge. An adept with sufficient skill can perceive fluctuations in a person’s subtle field. Then they can heal the disease on the subtle levels where it originated and mitigate all subsequent symptoms.
Karma is Not Only a Principle; It’s a Substance
From ancient texts and recently conducted research, we now know that karma is more than the principle that declares, “You will reap what you sow.” It’s an active substance that can accumulate in your subtle field and disrupt its functions. In fact, it’s this substance, in the form of karmic baggage, that attracts you to objects, energy fields, and human beings and then binds you to them. By its power to create subtle attachments, karmic baggage can influence your physical health and spiritual well-being.
When viewed on the subtle levels, karmic baggage can look like waves, cords, or small pools of consciousness, energy, and etheric matter that are active and can move – especially when stimulated by someone’s mental attention. Because of their density and their ability to move, they can block life-affirming fields from radiating freely, the same way dirt can block air radiating through an air filter.
What distinguishes karmic baggage from life-affirming fields of consciousness, energy, and etheric matter are its individual qualities, which include self-limiting feelings, emotions, ideas, beliefs, and core values that block – and in many cases counterfeit – the functions of your authentic mind.
It might surprise you to learn that, like everyone else, you carry karmic baggage in your subtle field. It’s the stuff that creates pressure and muscle ache when you’re stressed and produces anxiety, self-doubt, and confusion when its consciously or unconsciously activated. In fact, the presence of karmic baggage in your subtle field is one of the principle causes of suffering and physical disease.
Karmic baggage not only causes suffering and disease; it also disrupts intimate relationships. It does that by creating attitudes, beliefs, feelings, and inauthentic desires that disrupt your experience of pleasure, love, intimacy, and joy.
You’ve Incarnated Many Times
Death is closely related to out of body experiences, which include lucid dreaming, astral projection, and near-death experiences. Although their causes may vary, all out-of-body experiences, including death, have two things in common. They separate a person from the physical-material universe, and they catapult them into a domain of primordial life we call “interspace.” However, death is different from other out of body experiences in one significant way; it’s part of a repetitive cycle of life, death, and rebirth. All people participate in this repetitive cycle until they become consciously aware of their a priori state of enlightenment.
Although the universe we call home is vast, it’s only one of an infinite number of universes that float in the endless sea of interspace. You and everyone else on Earth are eternal beings because you exist simultaneously in your home universe and the space in between, i.e., interspace. While you’re alive (and awake), your center of awareness is your home universe. Once you sleep, leave your body, or die, your center of awareness becomes interspace.
Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’re continuously interacting with interspace. This means that interspace affects you when you’re alive and when you’re dead. In fact, it’s your interactions with interspace that sheds light on why you sleep, what you experience between incarnations, and why so many people are convinced on a visceral level that they will live forever.
To understand the relationship you have to interspace, you need to recognize that it’s both a location and a condition. As a location, interspace occupies all the time-space between the universes that float within it. As a condition, interspace exists as a series of interpenetrating fields within your personal field of consciousness, energy, and matter. These fields influence your sleep patterns, your cycle of life, death and rebirth, your breath, your access to the life force (which determines your level of vitality and personal power), and your relationship to your light body (which is your vehicle of manifestation and self-expression when your dead). It also influences your relationship to Atman (which regulates your access to bliss).
To enhance your relationship to interspace while you’re alive, you must recognize, like the adepts of Yoga and Taoism did before you, that life didn’t emerge from an inert universe. On the contrary, our universe and everything else that exists emerged from Life. This means that the foundation of your existence is Life, and nothing can separate you from Life. In fact, when you make the transition from life into death, Life continues to be the foundation of your existence. This explains why a person’s life can be renewed time and again through the process of reincarnation and why you’ve existed since before the beginning and will continue to exist after the end.
