Exploring the Boundaries of the Conscious Mind

You've also laid down a system for exploring every mapped level of consciousness through meditation. Now, the apparent base or foundation of this tower of consciousness begins with the Conscious mind and is a state of consciousness called the waking state or ‘our waking state’, which you describe as basic identification with the body and orientation to the environment. The center you associate with this state of consciousness as a reference point is the medulla, which you describe as, “The seat of the attention in the waking state of consciousness. When your attention is fully collected in this center, you are aware of now. This is the state of mindfulness. When you are alert and fully present, it is the ground state of attention”.

Is this waking state where consciousness begins? Does this waking state kick in when we wake up in the morning? Does the Conscious mind essentially go to sleep when we are asleep? And would you like to take a moment to define exactly what consciousness is?

George: Typically, what happens is that when you are in a sleep or a sound sleep state, your attention moves out of this waking state of consciousness. So sometimes it might move into an area of your Subconscious mind and you're having experiences from your life. Sometimes when you go deeper, you might actually travel onto some level of what we call the astral plane and you might have experiences at that level. In sound sleep, sometimes your attention will become associated with what we call the causal body, the aspect of your nature that is responsible for fixing memories in long-term storage and integrating the experiences of your day.

We can define consciousness from many different contexts. For example, if you consider a human being is the physical body, then you're going to be looking for consciousness either in the cells of that body or in the nervous system, the firing of nerves, the activity of the nervous system. If you go down a little deeper, you're going to say, well, consciousness is somehow a phenomenon of the subatomic field. If you go down deeper, you can attribute it to something taking place in what we call the information ether. It's the flow of information, the active processing of information. You can look at the resonance ether, where consciousness seems to be the present time through which the soul expresses on the life force ether. It appears to be tied to the activity of what we call the etheric body. You can extrapolate that on up depending on your viewpoint. But what we hold in Mudrashram is we go to the core of that and we say there are three conscious entities. The first conscious entity is what we call the attentional principle. The second is what we call the spirit and the third is what we call the soul. These are the carriers of the universal consciousness from which these essences derive. We say that the spirit is a spark of the divine, which is the ocean of all consciousness. The attentional principle comes from a stage we call the infinite stage up on the seventh transcendental path. And the soul is the carrier of the divine consciousness for the realm in which it dwells. When it merges into its origin, it merges into this state of all consciousness. Behind all phenomena is this ocean of consciousness and that's the ultimate derivation of what we call consciousness.

Lawrence: When we talk about the Conscious mind, it sounds like in relation to other terms that people use, like the ‘subconscious’ or the ‘unconscious’, that this is the genuine state of consciousness. The real state of consciousness that all others should be judged by. Is that an incorrect view?

George: We call it the Conscious mind because it includes your experience in the present time. The timeframe of the Conscious mind is the present, is now. When you're meditating on the centers of the Conscious mind, you become aware of what you are experiencing in the present time. If you're in the waking state of consciousness, you're aware of what's in the environment around you, what you're doing in the environment. If you start to abstract from that level, you move off the waking state of consciousness and begin following the thread of consciousness, as we call it, with your attention, then you become aware of the content of these other centers in the Conscious mind. And when you're focused on them, you become aware of what's coming up in this present moment.

The Buddhists refer to a term that they call ‘impermanence’. When you're meditating in the Conscious mind, let's say you're meditating on your feeling center, you notice that feelings arise and then they pass away. This is a continuous process going on. The Conscious mind is the aspect of our mind, which is closest to what we actually experience in our life and in our environment. This is the level of the mind that most people experience. A lot of people never go out of their Conscious mind.

Lawrence: You mentioned the feeling center, I should go through the other centers. In addition to the waking state of awareness, which you call the ground state of attention. You've identified eight additional states of awareness that collectively make up this Conscious mind as you have mapped it. Quoting from your writing, they are:

Awareness of the current unfolding moment of time as your life. (You use the point between the eyebrows as a point of reference);

Sensory awareness - awareness of the external environment through the five senses;

Body awareness – awareness of the present time experience of the physical body;

Emotional awareness - awareness of present time emotions;

Reason or thinking awareness - awareness of behavior, repertoire, analogical reasoning, deductive reasoning;

Ego awareness - ego being the integrating center of the Conscious mind. (As a side note to the listeners, George and I already dedicated an entire podcast to the ego and its various postures.);

Pre-conscious awareness - awareness of ideas, memories, images and impressions arising from the Subconscious mind.

Finally, you have the gate of the subconscious, also called the ethereal veil, which keeps the attention within the sphere of the Conscious mind. As you've stated, George, most people in their normal day-to-day lives, they're focused on their thoughts, their feelings and the various postures of the ego. In other words, they're remaining within the confines of the Conscious mind.

George: That's correct.

Lawrence: What is this gate or ethereal veil between the subconscious and the Conscious mind keeping out?

George: If you open this gateway, you're bringing in energies from the Subconscious, Metaconscious and higher mind. If you leave it open, there's some chance that your attention might be caught up and your attention abstracts into yet higher levels of the mind. You're no longer grounded, you're no longer focused. You're really in a state of trance or deep meditation when you do that. When we go up in meditation, we have you open the door and go have whatever experience you're having in the higher levels of the mind and then we have you come back and close the door behind you when you come back down.

Lawrence: Close the doors from these higher aspects of mind and return to the Conscious mind.

George: Yes. It's the gateway that leads you to the Subconscious mind.

Lawrence: You've said that the Conscious mind is present time oriented. You have the ego as the integration center of the Conscious mind. Is it fair to say that essentially people's attention is bouncing around the Conscious mind, kind of like a fly trapped in a glass case, only thinking about the present? There's really very little chance that the fly is going to fly out and travel into higher states of mind?

George: That's one way of looking at it. But most people keep their attention in the waking state of consciousness. When you have your attention in the waking state of consciousness, all of the elements that make up the Conscious mind are working in the background.

You don't necessarily have to go up and contemplate the exact experience of what it is like for the light in the room to be processed by your sensory center. You don't have to go up and monitor your feelings. You stay in the waking state of consciousness and these are activated in the background. The way you get out of the Conscious mind is you have to move your attention through all these centers of the Conscious mind and then move through that doorway, which will bring you into the Subconscious mind.

It doesn't really bounce around per se, and most people don't bounce around unless you're having like a real deep experience, like you're getting a massage or something and you're feeling the deep sensations inside your body. Or you're doing psychotherapy and the psychotherapist says ‘I want you to focus on your feelings that are coming up right now’. Or you're solving a puzzle, trying to put together a technical object or something that and you have to do a lot of fine analysis. Then you might be abstracted up into your mental center.

If you're deeply thinking about your life, you're doing introspection, you're saying, ‘what's really important to me? I have these different areas of my life, what do I really want to achieve in these different areas of my life? What is it I really want?’ Then you might be abstracted up into the ego. But for the most part, the attention is going to stay in the waking state of consciousness and all these centers are going to operate in the background.

There was a gentleman by the name of Arthur Deikman, who said that when people meditate, they de-automatize the action of consciousness. Instead of everything working seamlessly in the background and you just are experiencing, okay, I'm having a reaction to that and I'm aware of it in my waking state of consciousness, I'm not focused on that center where I'm actually sensing the energy of that feeling arising and then passing away and then the next one coming up. That's the difference between the waking state of consciousness and actually meditating; contemplating these different centers of the Conscious mind, where you're getting a deeper

experience of that. It's happening in the background, you're aware you have the feelings, but you're not fully absorbed in them.

Lawrence: So, it's background noise. It's almost like you're listening to music, but let's say you were listening to classical music and all of a sudden there's a really strong string element and you say, “oh, there's the strings”, but otherwise, it's just kind of all homogenous per se. It's not like you're focused specifically on the emotions or the thoughts or the senses unless there's a loud noise and all of a sudden, “oh, I hear something loud”, there's a bright light. You say, “oh, I'm seeing a bright light”. It's kind of just like if there's stimulus, you're going to react to it, but otherwise it just kind of all blends into a type of experience that we call our normal waking state or the normal waking state, meaning this is normal. Everything's good. We're good to go. I needed to go shopping. I need to go to work. I need to get ready for bed and when I check in, everything is working. Nothing is drawing my attention in a way that it needs to get addressed.

George: I think it's a good way to describe the experience. So, to go back to Arthur Deikman, he said that when you're in this waking state of consciousness, everything is operating together. It's like all the modules are contributing together to give you your experience in this waking state of awareness. When you meditate, you isolate each module.

You become aware of what you mentioned as the present time. Today we typically refer to this center as your awareness of body position and movement. It's a little more accurate to say what you're actually experiencing, and as you meditate on that, it does give you the sense of the continuity of your life, your movement that you're making being the enactment of your life. You become aware of each of these centers specifically in what they're doing.

You gain heightened sensitivity of your five senses. You gain heightened sensitivity of what's going on inside your body. I mean, when you're focused at that level, you can actually feel peristalsis, you can feel your heart beating, you can feel your lungs expand, you can feel what's going on in your internal organs, your muscles, your connective tissue. Same thing with the level of feelings. You're aware of the feelings that are rising and the memories that are coming up. At the mental center, you may be aware of what we call behavioral command. You may become aware of the thoughts that are where you analogize, you create a metaphor for your experience, your logical circuits. Then at the core of that, what we call your ability to test reality, to make a decision about what is real, what's not.

When you're in the waking state, you're not aware of these specifically as modules or activities within consciousness. You're aware of all of them working together seamlessly. That's why we say you're fully automatized when you're in the waking state of consciousness. When you're meditating, you're de-automatized because you're focused on individual units of the Conscious mind, whatever your attention is focused on.

Lawrence: That brings to mind mindfulness practice, Buddhist mindfulness practice - or Vipassana meditation - where it sounds like they're actually taking apart the Conscious mind and they're looking at the thoughts in the present moment or they're looking at the emotions in the present moment or they're focused on the breath in the present moment. How is that helpful as a meditator to focus on these different aspects of the Conscious mind and is that indeed what they're doing?

George: The first step in meditation is collecting your attention at the waking state of consciousness. You can imagine your attention is spread out in the room. You do some type of a practice, watching your breath. In our tradition, we use a little sniff breath (we call it the Hansa breath), or maybe just concentrated visualizing. You're bringing it into a sphere or a ball. That's where it begins. And when your attention is fully collected and you're present, that's a state of mindfulness. Now the next step is then you apply that to something, you monitor some level of your mind. You do walking meditation and that's where you're monitoring this body position and movement.

You can also have a heightened experience of your senses by focusing on that center, by monitoring what you're experiencing in the present time. You can process what's going on inside your body in the present time. You can focus on your feelings in the present time and just notice what arises and passes away, arises and passes away. This is the nature of your experience in the Conscious mind or the thoughts that are arising and passing away or what your ego is processing.

We say the ego has a variety of ‘I am’ statements, “I am a parent”, “I am a businessman”, “I am a member of a walking club”, “I am a rock collector”. The ego is thinking in the present time, it's processing, “what am I doing in this area of my life? What do I need to change? What do I need to augment?” Maybe you're thinking about your finances and your ego is thinking “what do I do to make sure that I'm getting sufficient income this month? What do I need to change or tweak or what are some other things I might do?” This process of Vipassana as it's experienced in the Conscious mind is basically just a monitoring of what's arising in this present time. You have to focus at that level and notice what's coming up.

The practices of mindfulness and Vipassana as they are traditionally taught to Westerners typically don't take people out of that zone of the Conscious mind. But it does give you the impression that what we think of as a permanent stable structure is really a continuous impermanent flow. That's the thing that you get from doing these initial stages of meditation. And again, Vipassana can be taken up into higher levels as well to the point where you're actually meditating way up on a Supercosmic path. But you start the process by learning it in this Conscious mind.

Lawrence: Would the goal then be to become aware of these impermanent aspects and kind of wake to the realization that, oh, I thought I was a continuous being, but no, things are changing constantly. My thoughts are changing constantly, my feelings, I can process through them. When they see that these are impermanent, then that creates contrast, I would think this evokes further inquiry or exploration to find something that is permanent, to explore that idea of permanence further. Because obviously we like to think of ourselves as permanent, not impermanent.

George: What I can say in most Buddhist systems, they do not focus the attention on what we call integration centers, except perhaps for what we call the heart mind or the Supercosmic seed atom that is on a Buddhist path. The meditations will typically skip over the ego in some cases, or they'll skip over the self or they'll skip over the soul. Instead they will focus the attention on a seed atom on a Supercosmic path. They will describe that in great detail about what the experience is. People come to identify with that and they take that viewpoint and then from there they begin processing, transforming and moving closer to whatever they see on the inner horizon.

Lawrence: Are they using Vipassana in that process?

George: We talk about several different levels of Vipassana. The first layer of Vipassana operates in the Conscious mind. If you process through all of the material that's coming up, most people experience what we call a breakthrough experience. You basically move through that band of the mind and all of a sudden, your attention just pops up to a new level.

What we see happening is that typically when you process in the Conscious mind, your attention is going to pop up and it's going to enter this stage of consciousness we refer to as being. There's the self, which is the core of the personality. It's the active form of the self and then we have ‘being’, which is the passive form of the self. This is where you have a sense that you're one with everything around you. You're in a state of peace.

Then you may have another breakthrough experience, which will lead you up to a center in the abstract mind plane, which is where you become aware of the present time, where there's an interface between the higher self or soul and human life. This is where the thoughts, the intentions, the guidance of the soul come onto this particular center. In many New Age groups, many new thought groups, they look to this center as a state of enlightenment because you're in touch with the soul. You're aware of the soul's thoughts, its creative power, which is activated within you.

If you continue to process at this level, you may even move up to a higher level where you're aware of the great void of what we call ‘nirvana’ in the Western tradition, the great void beyond where the soul was born. You will come up into the awareness of the Supercosmic seed atom of that Buddhist path. This is a level where you gain a sense of identity. This is where you sense that, okay, I am this wayfarer upon the path and that as I continue this process, I move closer to the source, eventually I'm going to merge into the origin. I'm going to experience this state of Buddhahood.

Lawrence: I think people have either one of two viewpoints on how spiritual unfoldment happens. One would be that you bring your waking state or your ego with you. You're traveling in the Conscious mind. Not much is going to change. We've identified ourselves so much with the various postures of the ego, with our normal waking state, with our emotions, with our thoughts, etc, that we say, “well, this is who I am and I'm going to heaven as I am, or I'm going to nirvana as I am. Not much is going to change. I'm just going to be bigger and better”. Another point of view is that you're going to drop the ego completely. Not only that, but the ego actually dies at death. it's not permanent. Our real state of being is one far beyond what we experience as this Conscious mind, as this ego.

George: You've talked about two different perspectives. One of the things that happens when you identify with your ego is, you essentially become the center of your universe. Everything is referred to as “is this good for me? Is this bad for me? If there's something like a God, well, then he has to fulfill my desires. If I follow what he tells me to do, then he's going to take me to heaven or I'm going to experience some heavenly state”. In the other perspective, we talk about ego death, destroying the ego. I've done a lot of writing on this subject, but what happens is typically people are taught to keep their attention in an altered state of consciousness. This might be identifying with the soul in the planetary realm and keeping your attention in union with that essence.

Lawrence: As an approach to meditation?

George: Yes. They might identify with a center we call a nucleus of identity, which is an integration center in the Superconscious mind. They might focus on what we call the moon soul, Christ child or Christ consciousness, which is prevalent in your Jewish and Christian religions. They might learn to focus their attention and identify with what we call cosmic consciousness, which is the form of identification, the integration center we find in the first cosmic initiation. They might identify with the seed atom on the Supercosmic path, or they might identify with the spirit on a transcendental path.

When you keep your attention in these altered states of consciousness, several things can happen. It doesn't happen for everybody, but one of the first things you start experiencing is what we call dissociation. That means you're no longer feeling your feelings. You're no longer really having the experience of your human life anymore. You're having a higher order experience. You're focused on what your spirit is experiencing, what's coming up in this present time on this Supercosmic path. The next thing that you often see is what we call derealization. This is an experience that the world is unreal. You might also experience depersonalization. This is where you feel like your life and your ego embedded in your life and the self is unreal. If you're totally focused on developing yourself at this higher level, you might lose any desire to do anything in the world. This is what we call demotivation.

Sometimes what you experience is you also experience a complete numbing, a deadening of your emotions so you don't feel anything at all. Then at the deepest stage of this, when this dysfunction becomes truly life shattering, we have the experience of ego death where you no longer have a sense of your life, a sense of your personality. You're only identified with this spiritual essence. And in effect, it would be very difficult for you to function in any way.

When people reach the stage of ego death, they're able to stay in the state of bliss and spiritual union, mystic union. But it's very difficult for them to carry out the activities of their daily life. They certainly could not work at a complex job or handle all the issues that go along with raising children. And again, often what you see is you also see changes in the structure of identity.

People can become very paranoid, feel the world is attacking them or other people are attacking them. They might become delusional. They might feel that they are a godlike being and they can manifest whatever they want out of thin air and they don't have to work or do anything. People become very delusional if they keep their attention in these altered states of consciousness.

Lawrence: The ego is the integration center of the Conscious mind and is what keeps us functional, is what you're saying. Keeps us from lapsing from responsibility, from looking at the world as an illusion that really is of no concern. But is there an integration center at a higher state of mind that's perhaps more functional than what we experience as the ego? Meaning we would experience functioning at a much higher level, more intelligence, more insight, the gifts of the spirit, the gifts of enlightenment. People talk about that term ‘enlightenment’. Well, enlightenment kind of sounds like you're operating at a higher level. I assume that there's an integration center at a higher level that somehow makes things operate.

George: Let's think about this for a moment. When you're identified with and operating from the ego, you only have access to the abilities of your Conscious mind. If you operate from the Self, you additionally add the abilities of your Metaconscious mind. When you connect with your soul or higher self, then you also add to that the abilities, the knowledge, the virtues that come out of your Higher Mind. Rather than try to destroy the ego, instead, what we want to do is we want to prepare the personality to become an instrument for those gifts of the Higher Mind.

Let me see if I can create an example. You are meant to be a gifted poet, but in the eighth grade, you're not very good with language. You go on in high school and learn more about writing. You take some creative writing classes in college and you begin to experiment with writing poetry. Then your gift kicks in and you become a channel of the soul. So there has to be some preparation at the level of the personality. If you have the insight in the Higher Mind about what you need to do to do brain surgery, obviously there's a lot of preparation that has to take place. You're practicing on cadavers, you're practicing on models and then doing fine dissections and actually recognizing the parts before anyone is going to let you do brain surgery on anyone.

There has to be a preparation of the personality to allow these gifts to express. So that when you are able to express them, you have the language for it, you're using your intelligence, you're channeling this information in a structured way. If you channel information in an unstructured way, then a lot of people will think that you're completely crazy. We develop the personality so we can begin to channel these things.

If you are a tarot card reader, you learn to read the tarot cards, you learn to listen to the inner voice that tells you the meaning of the tarot cards. And you deliver it in a structured way. You do a particular reading. Same thing is true if you're an artist. You learn the different ways of using paint and applying it to a canvas. You learn that first and then the soul can express its genius through you. That's the way that that works.

It doesn't happen where all of a sudden you go in the Higher Mind and you start automatically doing some miraculous thing. There has to be a preparation first at the level of personality so you have a conduit for expression.

Lawrence: Well, you kind of made a case that certain types of spiritual practice can damage the functioning of the Conscious mind.

George: Yes, especially those that keep the attention locked in an altered state of consciousness. When we train people in meditation, we say, I like to use the analogy that when you drive and you go to work, you don't stay at work. You come back home. The same way when you go into meditation, you do whatever you're going to do. You're going to do your contemplation or maybe do some type of a transformational method or you might do some working with some issues in your mind from that level. You do whatever you're going to do and then you come back to your waking state of consciousness. Just like when you go to work, you do whatever work you're going to do and then you come back home. Come back home to your waking state of consciousness.

Lawrence: I think more people would be faced with the problem of how to leave the waking state of consciousness than get back to it. There's a natural gravity that pulls you back and people complain about this when they're practicing meditation. They're bothered by their thoughts. They're bothered by the details of their life that keep coming up in their mind. They're thinking about all the details of their life. “Did I do this? Oh, I need to do that”. Or they're fantasizing. They're not traveling very far even though they're meditating.

George: Yes. Those individuals who have successfully exited the Conscious mind and have been taught to remain focused on a particular essence in the Superconscious mind: the wave of the present time, the moon soul, the Christ child, cosmic consciousness, the seed atom of a Supercosmic path.

They may do practices at one of those levels where you can create a state of imbalance. Now that becomes the focus of your life and your mind. You're only thinking about that. You're only thinking about making spiritual progress. And something shifts so that you're no longer in this axis of soul, personality, ego - the aspect that operates in your actual life, your conscious life experience. Instead, you're focused now on a higher essence.

What happens if you continue those types of practices, your attention becomes fixed in that level. You're experiencing everything from that, what we call an altered state of consciousness. For most people, if they've not meditated before, there is a challenge in moving from the waking state of consciousness to get out of the Conscious mind, to move through the Subconscious mind and the Metaconscious mind and to move into the Superconscious mind. In our courses, we teach you specific methods to do that, but there's a training process. You need to be able to monitor and then release and then consciously move to the next center.

I like to say it's analogous to being in a glass elevator. You see everything around you as you move from floor to floor. You see the content that's on that floor, but you don't stay there. The elevator continues to rise until you reach your particular destination, which is your object for meditation. If your object for meditation is that you want to meditate on the Self at the core of the Metaconscious mind, at the core of the personality, then you take your elevator up to that level. As you go up, you monitor the content at each level, but you don’t stop. You don’t just get completely absorbed at another level and just stay there and not reach your destination. You keep your intention. You maintain your objective. You move up through all these different levels until you reach the level that you have decided to do your contemplation or spiritual work at.

Lawrence: You've written, “the seed atoms of the Conscious mind anchor the energy of the Kundalini Shakti in the ground state of awareness, in the body, which is the physical seed item, in the emotional field, which is the emotional seed atom, in the mental field, which is the mental seed atom, and in the ego, which is the egoic seed atom”. Can you explain what a seed atom is and how it functions?

George: A seed atom is the place that demarks the area that you have turned into light and consciousness and the area that is unconscious. It is a center through which an integrating center can operate through (that vehicle of consciousness). We also see the seed atom when you move along the thread of consciousness, when you lock into that focal point, you're actually contemplating that seed atom. It is a center that essentially influences the activity and the integrity of each level of the mind. It's a place from which your integrating center can operate on that level.

Let's use an example. There's a seed atom within your sensory center and you have lost your hairbrush. You recognize that at the level of the ego, you say, “I've got to comb my hair, I've got to go to work, I've got to find my hairbrush”. From the level of the ego, you're giving a suggestion to your sensory center, “find an object that looks like a hairbrush, do a scan and look for it”. When you find the hairbrush, then you brush your hair. You can give suggestion through this. And again, it is the point through which the activity of the vehicle is focalized.

Let me give you another example. There's a seed atom in your physical body. Through that seed atom, your integrating center can say, “okay, you're really agitated right now. You're really under stress. I want you to sit and relax” and you give a suggestion for your body to relax. The muscles of the body begin to let go of their tension. You begin to slow your breathing. Then as you do that, the other indicia, the other indicators of stress begin to lower in the body. You give suggestion to these centers. When we meditate, we also are focusing on that seed atom.

I like to say that we can do what we call a dimensional shift in meditation. The very first aspect, the first dimension is when you become aware that your attention is following this thread of consciousness and you're locking into a point. As you begin to breathe into this, you begin to contemplate, you start to become aware of the content, second dimension. You're focusing on the seed atom in your physical body, this body awareness center of the Conscious mind. Suddenly you start becoming aware of different sensations that are happening in your body. Maybe you feel some tension in the muscle or you feel some pain in your lower back. And you're just getting kind of random impressions. As you go deeper and you shift into third dimension, you become aware that this is actually a shell of energy, that there's actually a form that is associated with this.

This form has different functions within it. As you shift into the fourth dimension, you become aware of the actual present time experience, what's going on inside that vehicle of consciousness. You're actually aware at each moment what's arising in the present time. This is where the Vipassana kicks in this fourth dimension. The fifth dimension is when you become aware of the integrating center that operates through that. Imagine the hub of a wheel. The hub of the wheel in the Conscious mind goes out to your waking state of consciousness and to your body position and movement awareness center, to your sensory center. The hub goes out to your deep body awareness center, to your feeling center, your mental center, and it’s all integrated in that personal integration center we call the ego.

The same thing is true at higher orders. You become aware in that fifth dimension of what it is that stands behind this phenomenon that's operating it. When you reach the sixth dimension, you can actually look at these things from a detached viewpoint. From the standpoint of your attentional principle, you can look at yourself or you can look at your ego, you can examine it as if you were looking at a phenomenon.

Lawrence: Is the Conscious mind also a vehicle of consciousness?

George: The Conscious mind is a field of awareness and activity that contains multiple vehicles of consciousness, multiple forms through which you are operating. For example, you have a form that represents your waking state of consciousness, a form which represents your sensory center, a form that represents your deep body awareness. When you shift the dimensional viewing of your attention, you can become aware of these forms. You can actually study, what actually happens within this form? What is the nature of the material that lies in the unawakened aspect of this form we call the unconscious mind? You can actively become aware of its activity, of its structure, that's that third dimension. You might say that the Conscious mind is a container for all of these vehicles of consciousness that make up the functioning, the global functioning of the Conscious mind.

Lawrence: What is the relationship of a seed atom to a form?

George: The seed atom is the center that dwells within the form. Let's imagine that a form that we experience when we shift into this third dimensional focus. Let's say we're meditating on the feeling center of the Conscious mind. From one perspective, we're seeing that there's a thread of consciousness that comes to that seed atom. When attention rests there, that's where it is contemplating what we call a focal point. This seed atom is operating through this conscious, awakened, cleared section of that form.

We say there's a conscious, clear section, and then there's a darkened, unawakened section that contains the material in our unconscious mind. It's also through this center that you're able to activate whatever abilities that you've gained within that vehicle. For meditating on the seed atom of the deep body awareness center, you're going to notice that from this state of development, you're aware of certain anatomical areas of your body.

Theoretically, you could even give suggestion to them from this seed atom. It is the principle that both delineates the awakened portion of a vehicle from the unconscious portion. It is the focal point for meditation, where you're able to actually monitor what's in this vehicle of consciousness. It is also the center through which your integration center is able to activate the different faculties that exist within it to give suggestion, as it were, for these levels.

Lawrence: Now you've also identified levels of consciousness below the Conscious mind, which we refer to as the infraconscious, and you identify an interesting series of states of consciousness below the Conscious mind. I'd like to go through these one by one.

The first state of consciousness below the Conscious mind you call the hypnotic dream state of consciousness. Then you have the dreaming state of consciousness, which is where rapid eye movement occurs. The sound sleep state of consciousness. The coma state of consciousness. The doorway to death. The connection to the animal kingdom, plant kingdom, mineral kingdom. Finally, you have the wheel of time, which is a mirror of the development of your cutting edge and ensouling entity. How would you characterize infraconsciousness? Is this the foundation that the Conscious mind rests on?

George: The way I would describe it is, these are alternate states of consciousness that people experience. Most people are familiar with this hypnotic dream state. When you take a nap, for example, you're not going into deep dreaming, you're just kind of relaxing, your senses are withdrawing, your body is becoming energized as you recharge, and so you wake up from that and you're more energized, you're not quite so tired. It's not particularly a profound state of sleep. You can be readily aroused from it.

When you go into dreaming state, what we call the rapid eye movement or the deeper state of dreaming, this is where you actually begin to travel. We say the attention is absorbed in the astral body. Your eyes are closed, but you're seeing through your astral eyes, you're hearing through your astral ears, and you move to some level of the mind. You might travel to some earlier stage of life. You might move to some scenario that's somewhere on the astral plane where you're having interaction with a series of characters. You might move to a particular place where you go to like what they call a school on the inner plane. You might have instruction at that level from an advanced disciple of your tradition or maybe even the spiritual master or initiate of that tradition.

At the next level, you reach a stage where you're not receiving any input from any level of the mind. You move into the state of unconsciousness. In this level, we're really in touch with what we call the causal body. And the action of the causal body is to fix your day's experiences into long-term memory to help you process whatever went on during the day and help you clear that and to bring everything back to a state of harmony and homeostasis to the degree that that's possible. You're not aware of anything. Your attention is completely absorbed in a very deep state of the unconscious mind. You're really not aware of any content.

When we move below that, we talk about the coma state. In this state, your life energy is withdrawn just into the what we call the brain stem, the basic neurological structures that keep the body alive. You can't move, your senses are not operating, you can't think. Typically, what happens is individuals report when they're in a coma, they actually travel to some inner dimension and they have some type of experience at that level. But for us observing their body from the outside, it looks like they're at the basically clinging to life. Their vegetative functions are still operating, but there's no active consciousness operating.

Then there’s the doorway of death. When an individual dies, all the energy is shunted out of these other states of consciousness and it's drawn up into the soul. The soul withdraws its energy from its different vehicles of consciousness in the Conscious, Subconscious and Metaconscious mind. It basically switches that off. It moves into its core state that existed before you were born. When the soul reincarnates, it turns on the switch again to connect you with a new body, a new personality. You construct a new life, a new personality, a new instrument of expression in a new incarnation.

When we go below that, we find that there is an opening or a channel that connects us with the animal kingdom, plant kingdom, mineral kingdom. Our consciousness normally doesn't go down to that level, our attention doesn't go down to that level, but we're aware of that.

Let's say that you were in an animal form, your attention would be in that animal body, in that animal structure of consciousness. You would look at your inner horizon and you would see this center that dwells in the human form. When you're in the human form, you can look at that from, you can look at the entire kingdom from without. You can have a sense of affinity for the animals, for the plants, for the minerals. We all experience that.

Now the lowest center, the wheel of time center, essentially tunes up as you evolve spiritually. Our attention typically doesn't drop below the solar plexus center, which is a sound sleep state. In a state of coma, it might go down to the navel center. When we die, attention is simply drawn out and you're taken up into the spiritual dimensions where your soul dwells.

Most of us don't experience coma, mercifully. People will experience death of this particular life at some point. You will renew the process if that is necessary for you, you take a new incarnation.

Lawrence: When I read this material, it kind of gave me the impression that the attention is kind of like mercury in a thermometer and it can go up or it can go down. Right now, we're talking about the lowest states that the mercury or the attention can drop. Is that kind of a fair analogy?

George: I guess I probably wouldn't use the analogy of mercury, but I would say that this focus of your mind is in a different state when you're in the waking state of consciousness than when you're in a hypnotic dream state. It moves and you're focused on something else. When you're dreaming, you relax yourself and you're going into this much deeper state where you're completely absorbed in the phenomena of whatever you're experiencing through your astral body sound sleep state, you're going into this state of deep unconsciousness.

I wanted to point out that as a counterpoint to this attentional focus dropping down in meditation, that attentional focus goes beyond the waking state and it rises up. When it unites with your attentional principle, you have the experience of waking up within and realizing this state of union with the attentional principle. When you are awake as the attentional principle, you discover that this state of consciousness is continuous. Whether your attention is in the waking state, whether you're in hypnotic dreaming, whether you're in rapid eye movement dreaming, whether you're in sound sleep, whether you're in coma, this state of consciousness is stable through all the different stages of movement of the attention. This is the state that the yogis refer to as Turiya. Turiya means that you are eternally awake within. In meditation, we reach a state which transcends these stages of waking, dreaming, sound sleep consciousness. We reach a state which is always awake.

Lawrence: No matter what state your body is in.

George: That's correct. You might be actually, if you're united with the attentional principle. Let's say that you're sleeping, your body is relaxing, it's recharging this process of the causal integrating your day's experiences, your memories, that's all taking place, but your attention is not completely absorbed in that process, instead your attention is united with the attentional principle itself.

Lawrence: I think a lot of people associate dreaming with the Subconscious mind, but here you're suggesting that the subconscious is not directly tied to this state of consciousness.

George: What happens when you're dreaming? You're traveling in your astral body. You may journey in your astral body through this zone, what we call the temporal mnemonic zone of the mind. You're traveling back to some earlier time in your life. Maybe you're remembering when you were a little child and you went to a carousel and you were riding the horses and you were at this amusement park and you got up on the Ferris wheel and it took you way up above and you saw all the stuff that you saw. Maybe you were with somebody that was a dear friend. Maybe you met different characters in that particular realm.

Your astral body is traveling to that level of the mind, you're doing some type of dream construction at that level and it can migrate to other levels as well. You can go to levels on the astral plane where you're actually in a whole other scenario.

Lawrence: The dreaming state of consciousness, specifically, is that connected to or not connected to the Subconscious mind?

George: Okay, you are journeying, so when your attention goes down to that center, your attention is being absorbed in your astral body. Then the astral body is moving and typically the astral body will move through certain levels of the Subconscious mind. You are quite accurate in saying that yes, attention goes into the Subconscious mind. But for you to do that, typically you have to go through this process of going to sleep where you bring your attention down to the level where you can access this doorway to the Subconscious mind.

If you come down to this infra-conscious level and then you're absorbed in the astral body, the astral body will move and you go to some level of the Subconscious mind. Typically you might go up into the Superconscious mind when you have very deep dreams and you're processing something at some very deep level of the mind.

Lawrence: I kind of thought the infra-conscious was below, but maybe I'm trying to make this too linear because a lot of times when we're talking about one area, all of a sudden, a higher area gets associated with it. That's just my perception that the Subconscious and Metaconscious levels of mind are higher than the Conscious mind. That the Superconscious mind is higher than Subconscious mind, etc. Should I be looking at the infra-conscious as the lowest state of consciousness?

George: The infra-conscious is the area below our waking state of consciousness. In that there are a variety of portals to different types of experience, just as when you go above the waking state of consciousness, you're getting a glimpse of different levels of your mind, different vehicles of consciousness, different seed atoms. We're describing it from the standpoint of what is the phenomena that occurs when that center becomes active. You're dropping down from the waking state of consciousness or you're rising up in a state of meditation.

Lawrence: There are a lot of examples in life where we think in linear terms. Like grade school proceeds middle school, which proceeds high school, which proceeds college, which proceeds graduate school. We think in linear terms about a lot of things, and I think a lot of people think of it in terms of spiritual evolution, that there's an experience where you become more and more and better and pure and more virtuous and smarter and more knowledgeable and ultimately more enlightened. It's kind of like it's a linear experience. But consciousness, even though you have it written out in sections, it doesn't seem like it's linear.

George: I think maybe it'd be useful to think of these stages of the infraconscious mind as being portals to a particular type of experience. Everyone is familiar with taking a nap and you just relax, you know, you're still semi-conscious of maybe what's going around you, but you're relaxed and you feel you are kind of just recharging yourself. When you go into dream state, it's a portal to what we call the state of the astral body, which dwells effectively in the Subconscious mind. You're making that transition to the astral body, and then you're moving through some band of the mind connected with that astral vision, that astral hearing, that astral sensation, which gives you the experience of dreaming. Your eyes are closed, you're not seeing any physical object, but you're seeing some object within. That's your astral vision working.

When you're in that dreaming state, your attention moves into the astral body. And then depending on how deeply you're immersed in that experience, it depends on the level that you're experiencing through your astral senses, through your astral sense of movement. Most people talk about having a flying dream. Obviously, your body is not flying. What is flying? The astral body is not tied to the physical body, it can fly.

Depending on the level to which the astral body separates from its alignment with the physical, to that degree, you're going to have that greater depth of dreaming experience. The withdrawal may be simply into the temporal mnemonic zone, in which case you're going to relive a life memory and maybe elaborate it in some way through the dream work.

You might go to some deeper level where you're having a remembrance of a past life, or maybe you're going to some deeper level and you're traveling to some dimensional world on the astral plane where you have some very fantastic experiences.

The reason that this doesn't seem a linear process is mainly because we're not viewing it from the standpoint of the attention moving either below the waking state of consciousness or rising up in the Conscious mind, to the Subconscious mind, to the Metaconscious mind, into the Superconscious mind. That is a linear process.

Each deeper center reveals another aspect of our mind. You're going to a different level and you're finding a different module of your mind working. We can say that those modules are above this waking state of consciousness, along the thread of consciousness, or we can say that these modules are below. We have a certain form of experience that we have as our attention moves into those modules below the waking state of consciousness or the modules above the waking state of consciousness.