Existentially, I am a Being-here.  The here is abstractly the world of the physical spherical surface of the planet Earth.  Concretely, the here of my Being-here is a hotel room in Bordeaux, France, where I am presently visiting.  This particular, temporary here has a view out of a window on to a square with trees, benches, walkways and compact gravel.  Cars drive back and forth on either side of the square.  The scene is vividly commonplace.  There is nothing remarkable about the immediate situation.  I have some time, so I am writing this article.  I am a human being and I have some time.  I am personally here and I am using my free time in the present manner.

 

  What am I, actually?  And what am I actually doing when writing this?  I am experiencing myself as a spiritual presence who can and should provoke you, the reader, into a new perspective on self-help.  So, who is the self who could use some help?  Is it the physical neurocognitive self of identification with the body?  Is it the mental self, the self of identification with the mind, the subtle body of emotional reactions and imaginations during the day and dreams at night?  Is it the abstract self, the self of thinking, deciding and planning during the day and of deeply asleep causality and ignorance at night as a reincarnating ego with limited consciousness and a backlog of causal projections that must be worked through?  Or is it the Divine self, the pure witness, the Supermind, the Superconscious Real Self?  Strictly speaking, it is only my Real Self that can give or receive valid help.  Ultimately, Self-help implies Self-awakening on the Superconscious level of being, following by what Aurobindo calls a Supramental Descent that transforms and fulfills the soul, mind and body.  This would of course be the attainment in Buddhism of the Three Great Bodies, the Dharmakaya, the Sambhogakaya and the Nirmanakaya.  I think we need these vital concepts from Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism to achieve full-blown Self-help, but it does not mean we will stupidly adhere to one or another of these traditions or identify the Self as a Vedantist or a Mahayana Buddhist.  Any identification with a teaching, a set of concepts, puts us on the plane of intellect in the lower causal body focused in the cognitive subtle patterns radiating in and from the physical human brain, which means that such self-identifying is basic ignorance and illusion which will only generate further useless causal/karmic feedback loops of death, afterlife psychic trips (what the Tibetans call wandering in the Bardos) and rebirth in a future physical body for further harsh life-lessons and mortality proceeding from common degeneration stemming from self-harming habits of body, mind and soul.

 

We must become completely clear that we must be our Real Self beyond any and all parochial or dogmatic identifications if we are to directly realize Self-awakening and Triple Perfection of the Triple Body.

 

My Being-here in this room as a living perspective during an expressively active period of time is an existential episode that only partially expresses my Being-there in the mind realm, causal realm and spirit realm.  In addition to the physical passage of time, there is also subtle or dream time, causal thinking or apriori time and ultimate supertime, sometimes mistakenly called “eternity” or “timelessness”.  So we all have three metaphysical Beings-there existentially in addition to our Being-here physically on the Earth through the sensate physical body; and, we have three metatimes beyond our physical experience of time that comes with the pulse of blood circulation through the human brain.  The more we wake-up to our Being-there and Metatimes, the more we can give ourselves effective Self-help.

 

Where am I now?  I am both Being-here and Being-there in both time and metatime.  The fourfold presence of my Being is much more than merely my bodily life or even my mental psychic life or my abstract causal life of pure ideas.  The very concept, I am, has this greater existential substance that pervades even my physical body and the physical environment.  Hence, for me, the physical body in a physical world has a peculiar conjoint transparency which is a virtual non-duality of both perception or mind and conceptual understanding or causal intellect.  When I am really aware of all this, the world is nothing but energy from a Carlos Castaneda perspective of magical mind, nothing but pure apriori conceptual elements from an Immanuel Kant perspective and nothing but Divine non-dual Bliss of the Self from a Vedantic perspective, or perhaps more significantly, from a Kashmiri Shaiva perspective.

 

I have had repeated direct experience of all this, so I am qualified to teach Self-help to anyone who feels drawn to learn it by reading my articles here.  Self-help has always been one of my favorite idioms because it is not limited to any particular esoteric tradition but draws upon them all in whatever way is needed.  Self-awakening benefits from universal and cosmic perspectives.  We must therefore avoid putting petty constraints on our research into spiritual truth and Self-help.  Vernon Howard thought and taught this way and so do I.

 

Now, let us say that some problem or crisis comes up in your life to test your inner strength.  Will you take it that way or will you fall again into one of the three lower reactions(?):

1.     A physical knee-jerk reaction from within your cognitive neuro-system as a totally robotic response.

2.     An emotionally upset and confused reaction from within your emotional mind as a totally animal response.

3.     An anxious, anguished intellectual reaction of endless attempts to analyze and to predict or attempt to personally control the outcome as a totally all-too-human intellectual ego response.

If you look carefully, you will see that genuine inner strength and real awareness toward the problem or crisis cannot come from any of the three lower levels, but must happen on the level of Superconscious Real Self.  And any action or behavior toward the difficult situation that does not come from the level of Superconscious Real Self will be ineffectual and may only make the problem or crisis worse than it had to be.  There is even danger that one’s lower reaction and response might regenerate the very causal feedback or karma that has been appearing as the problem or crisis.  To become physically violent, emotionally angry and hateful or intellectually cold-blooded and selfish egomaniac or pseudo-independent are especially to be avoided.  All three lower negative responses are useless and self-harming.  The more clear you are about these things and teach yourself to rise to the Real Self level of authentic inner strength and trust in the Divine plan for one’s self-realization, the more effectively will you unfold your self-illuminating inner self-guidance, which the Great Siddhayogis of India call Prakash and Adesh.  When we have these functioning on the highest level of our inner Being-there, our problems, troubles and obstacles are coming to a rapid end, which we can even outwardly witness as seemingly miraculous interventions on our behalf.  The awakening Godself on the level of Superconsciousness is amazingly powerful from within universal cosmic oneness.  You can read about this in Baird T. Spalding’s wonderful volumes on his experiences with The Masters of the Far East.