One problem is that we have been brought up in a society that has programmed us to seek solutions at the level of effect instead of at the level of cause. Obviously, you will never be successful by seeking to change the movie at the level of the screen, because the screen can only reflect what is projected upon it.
The reason is that the screen is the level of effect, and what appears on it comes from a deeper level, the level of cause. What our modern societies have programmed us to believe is that the material world is both cause and effect, and thus we can change our lives by working at the level of the material world, the level of actions and conscious beliefs. Yet, in reality, the material world is very similar to the images that appear on a movie screen: That deeper level is the three levels of your mind that are beyond the level of the outer mind, what for most people is the conscious mind.
Let us say you decide that you want to change some aspect of your life. Our modern society has programmed us to believe, that if we want to solve a problem, we need to increase our understanding of the problem. So you start studying spiritual teachings, psychology or some self-help philosophy. Now, it is not the intent here to say that increasing your understanding is useless. So what is missing?
What could be missing is an understanding of cause and effect. As has been explained elsewhere, LINK there are four level of your mind.
The lowest level is the physical mind, and this is what most people are aware of. The next level up is the emotional mind, the next the mental mind and the highest level is the identity mind.
The all-important point is that these four levels form a hierarchy. The spiritual light from your higher self first flows into your identity mind. Here it is colored by the very subtle beliefs you have at this level, which means these beliefs set a framework, a mental box, for everything that comes after. As the light enters your mental body, it is already confined to a certain box, and your mental mind cannot override what comes to it from above. The conclusion is that if you seek to change your behavior by increasing your conscious understanding, you are not likely to be successful, because you are working at the level of the physical mind, which is the lowest of the four levels.
As you know, the images on a movie screen are projections of the images on the filmstrip in the projector. Yet imagine that you have four film strips, and the first film strip defines the boundaries for what can appear on the second strip and so on.
You can now see that if you truly want to change your life, you need to go to the deeper levels and make changes there. Why is this so important?
Say you decide with your conscious mind that you want to change your life. You therefore asses your situation, and you make a conscious choice to do something. Yet what is that choice based on? It is based on what you can see. The simple fact is that even with the best of intentions, we can only choose among the options we can see. As an example, say you are in a movie theater, and there is a horror movie playing on the screen.
It is a comic novel that imitates the stream of consciousness narrative techniques of writers like Henry James, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Below is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of the novel:. Or was it, he wondered, picking his nose, the result of closely studying the sentence structure of the English novelists?
One had resigned oneself to having no private language any more, but one had clung wistfully to the illusion of a personal property of events. A find and fruitless illusion, it seemed, for here, inevitably came the limousine, with its Very Important Personage, or Personages, dimly visible in the interior. We see the imitation of the typical structure of the stream-of-conscious narrative technique of Virginia Woolf. Stream of consciousness is a style of writing developed by a group of writers at the beginning of the 20th century.
The technique aspires to give readers the impression of being inside the minds of the characters.
Cambridge University Press, , page Baer, available at http: Mansel and John Veitch, ed. Webster's states that Sir Thomas More was the first to use the two words "in a sense close in meaning", and "Both of these uses of infer coexisted without comment until sometime around the end of World War I". But James was not necessarily the first to assert the concept. Furthermore, whereas James uses the phrase "the stream of thought" throughout his he dedicates an entire chapter IX to "The Stream of Thought" , in the pages of text he offers just nine instances of "stream of consciousness", in particular in consideration of the "soul".
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