It may be that
our most important life guide is no stranger, but a self on a higher level. The
Sufis talk beautifully of the “soul of the soul”. Plotinus, the great
Neoplatonist philosopher whose teachings were introduced to me by one of my
inner companions during my adolescence, instructed that the life teacher, or
“tutelary daimon”, is a self on a level above the one where we are currently
operating. Plotinus maintained that
each of us is a “cosmos”, with access to a vast spectrum of possible levels of
consciousness, with the power to choose the levels we inhabit. Whatever level we choose, a personality on
the next level up becomes the life guardian or
personal daimon. “Our guardian is the power immediately superior to the
one we exercise, for it presides over our life without itself being active. By
the kind of life that we prefer, we choose the guardian that presides over our
life.” [Enneads iii.4, 1:236 in Guthrie trans] Plotinus also said that the
guardian helps us to fulfill the destiny we have chosen before birth and “does
not permit us to descend very far below the condition we have chosen.” [
iii.4=1:239] I find this both accurate and reassuring.
As we go through
a process of spiritual evolution, we may grow to the point where we can fuse our current personality with that
(slightly) higher self, and now progress to a relationship with a self on a yet
higher level, and so on up the scale. Through successive transformations, we
may reach a level where we are able to survey – on a continuing or even
constant basis – our relations with many aspects of our multidimensional self,
including personalities living in other places and times, without losing our
ability to navigate in our present bodies.
Take heart. I am with you always. I know
you better than you know yourself. This was the opening of communication with
an inner teacher that I recorded on the night before Halloween in 1993.
Now
we are one but may still talk as two.
This was the essence of
communication from the same inner voice, as I received it on March 13, 1995.
Over many months, I had come to know and trust that inner speaker. He had given
me a wealth of information I was able to test and verify and apply in ordinary
reality. That night, I had stretched out on my bed after applying myself to
several hours of reading and reflection on our relations with inner teachers.
What was coming through now was direct knowledge.
Your
mind on my purpose.
That was familiar language, the way
this inner voice encouraged me to give my full attention to what was coming
through. The best communication of this kind, I had learned, comes in a state
of relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. I don’t think of this as
channeling, because I am fully conscious throughout, able to ask questions and
to engage in a full dialogue when that seems appropriate. On that night, a self
that was no stranger gave me some very clear information on the main theme of
this chapter.
“When fusion takes place between a
focus personality and the Higher Self (that is to say the control personality
on the plane directly above the focus personality) the result is a step forward
in personal evolution that will revise the scales of the contacts. The Higher
Self now becomes an entity on a higher level than before.
“This progression has taken humans
from the conditions of the group soul — comparable to animals or even insects —
to higher individuation. It can take the species as a whole to a new plane.
Indeed, from this point of view you are attending the emergence of a new
species.
“Your physical equipment imposes
limitations on both consciousness and memory. The three-tiered brain joins you
to the crocodile and the horse as well as the emerging human. New structures in
the brain are being evolved. Rising on the planes brings a process of
physiological change – in the metabolism, in the composition and replacement of
cells and naturally in the chemistry and electrical engineering of the brain.
“Now we are one but may still talk as two. Beyond us, a higher,
clearer, purer intelligence is seeking to manifest and contact you as you rise
on the planes.”
This came from an inner voice of the kind we come to know and trust. As
I recorded hundreds of pages of communications from this source over the years,
I reassured myself that if I was going crazy, I was in good company. Socrates
knew such a voice, and Plutarch wrote an essay about it. The truest guide is no
stranger. As Rumi put it: “The one who knows everything is with you now, closer
than your jugular vein.”
Higher Self,
Greater Self. These are very big words. I want something smaller for the guide
on a level above my present existence. There may be many levels to the Higher
Self, ten that I know from, my own journeys, others beyond counting. The guide
I check in with most frequently lives on a level just above me. I have come to
think of him as my Double on the Balcony.
When I set out to meet him, I go to
a terrace above the world. Sometimes it is the rooftop of a tall building,
twenty stories up, or more. Often the terrace has the air of a civilized café,
operating just for us. I find him seated at a table, perhaps with a glass of
wine the color of moonlight. He is usually impeccably dressed, in a perfectly
tailored white suit or a white dinner jacket. Occasionally I have the impression that
he has a female companion; once she seemed to be an opera singer. But she is
never part of our conversation.
He is impossibly beautiful. He looks
like a man in the prime of life, maybe thirty years old, yet carrying the
knowledge of millennia. He does not judge me. He is my witness. He knows all of
my life. It is as open to him as the contents of a doll house when you remove
the back and the roof. More than this, he remembers my other lives.
I should say, rather, our other lives. Something I have
remembered, through our conversations, is that we have a twining relationship
across time. When I am in the body, in a life on Earth, he is up here, on his
balcony above the world. He still enjoys pleasures and creature comforts, but
he is not enmeshed in the confusion and clutter of the physical world. He can
sample delights that we associate with a physical body without being confined
to one. The babalawo in me, the African diviner he calls my witchdoctor, says
it has always been like this. While one of us is down in the marketplace of the
world, the other observes as a “double in heaven”.
I like that phrase, but his is a
near heaven, rather than a remote one. So how shall I describe him? I might
call him my Witness Self, or my Free Self. He is not bound by the conditions of physical life. From
his terrace, he can see the big picture. When I join him up there, I can see
the crossroads and forking paths of my life from an aerial perspective.
He shows me some navigational
challenges that lie ahead. There’s a spaghetti junction with whirling stands of
traffic going off in all direction like an exploding bowl of pasta. It’s
dizzying to look at. Inspecting this with his mildly humorous detachment, I see
the scene lift to reveal a manageable locale, the Place de la Concorde in
Paris. Now I can survey, one by one, the possible roads I can take from that
place of decision. He reminds me that when life on the ground poses difficult
choices — when I run into blockages or risk making a turn without reflecting on
where that direction will take me — I should come up here, look at things from
the higher perspective, and freeze the action while I observe myself traveling
more than one of the possible roads in order to clarify and compare the
probable outcomes.
From such encounters comes daily
practice, one I can share with others. I picture myself in the thick of a
situation where I am facing a choice or conflict or dilemma. I see myself
pausing from acting or worrying, placing myself in a quiet mental space
whatever is going on around me. I feel light coming down around me, until I am
within a column or pillar of light. This brings the sense of blessing and
protection. I sense benign energies and intelligence reaching down to me within
the pillar of light. Then there is the sense of traction, of being carried up
within the pillar. I could be carried up many levels, as if on an elevator. But
it is sufficient, for everyday navigation, to go up just one level, to that
terrace above the world.
Here I find again a Witness Self, a Free Self.
From his table, I can see a relief map of my life, and of other lives and
situations that will concern me. When the traffic patterns are hard to read, I
can have everything slow down or stop so I can study it at my leisure.
Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.
Illustration: "Double on the Balcony" by Robert Moss
