Developing the Impersonal Mind and Symbolic Sight

Taken from Anatomy of the Spirit by Caroline Myss PhD

The Nearings and Sogyal Rinpoche have tapped into the power of the impersonal mind. Describing consciousness on paper has its limitations, however, because of spirituality’s ineffable qualities. As the zen koan says “If you can say what it is, that’s not it.”

I remember clearly the professor who introduced me to Buddhist and Hindu thought. As a final exam, she took all five of us students to a remote weekend retreat facility and issued the rules : no speaking allowed, and no clocks or wristwatches. During the night she would awaken a student, ask the student to assume a yogic position, then ask questions: how does a Christian speak about the nature of God? How does a Buddhist speak about the nature of reality? What is the truth of eternal life? What is the purpose of this life? The questions were deep and penetrating. It wasn’t the quality of our responses that she was evaluation’ rather, it was our attachment to any particular school of thought. If she sensed that we were attached to one form of truth more than another, we had failed to learn the lesson of her class : all truth is the same at the level of truth itself. That it becomes ‘enculturated’ is an illusion. For her, this was the essence of what it means to become conscious to seek truth that is detached from its social or cultural form. In looking back at her influence upon me, I credit her with laying the groundwork for my own abilities in symbolic sight.

How can we work with our own minds to refine our mental perceptual system and become skilled at penetrating illusion? As with all worthy goals, some form of discipline is required to make any substantial progress. The following case represents the wrong way of going about the task of becoming more conscious.

Oliver was a very successful businessman, but he had reached a point in his life where he wanted to do something that had more meaning. So he tried working in various projects that represented meaningful social activities. None felt right to him. He prayed for guidance as to what to do with his life. Finally he arranged a visit with an internationally famous spiritual master. The visit lasted all of ten minutes, during which this spiritual master told Oliver that his task was to ‘wait and become ready.’ So he ‘waited’ – he waited in Paris and Rome, in the Orient. He waited in first-class hotels and while sipping cappuccinos on the Riviera. Finally, he decided that his instruction to ‘wait’ was useless. He returned to visiting projects and writing checks to support them. But his heart remained empty. In my opinion, the spiritual master gave him the one instruction that he could not fulfill by buying something. Had he been able to ‘wait’ in a spiritual sense, to ‘go inside’ and accept whatever humble steps he was asked to take, he would have begun to get his answer.

In many ways the spiritual challenge of ‘waiting’ and becoming a different quality of person makes more of a contribution to this world than financing a new hospital. This may be difficult to understand. We are unaccustomed to giving value to what we cannot see, and we cannot see the power emitted from a healthy psyche. Thus, those whose work is ‘waiting and becoming’ can often appear useless.

But ‘waiting and becoming’ is the symbolic meaning of being ‘called to ordination’ – that is, allowing the Divine to awaken part of your spirit that contains the essence of what you are capable of contributing to others as well as to yourself. The woman who became known as Peace Pilgrim embodies this spiritual process of allowing the Diving to open a doorway.

Peace Pilgrim, which is the only name this woman used for the last twenty-five years of her life, lived a humble and deeply spiritual life, during which she prayed to be shown a path of service. At fifity-two she listened to her inner guidance, which directed her to walk across the country continually on behalf of peace. These were her ‘ordination’ instructions. And so, owning only ‘the shirt on her back’, she began to walk, and she ‘walked until given a place to rest and ate only what she was offered’. Her life became a statement of the power of trusting God completely to provide for one’s needs.

During her twenty-five-year pilgrimage Peace Pilgrim touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, who were awed by her remarkable rapport with Divine intervention. I heard her tell two stories that touched me deeply. Once as she was walking down a country road, the temperature dropped rapidly. She was unprepared for this sudden change and became chilled to the bone. She was not hear any place in which she could find shelter. Then she heard a voice that said to her “go under the next bridge’. She did as instructed and there she found a large box, big enough for her to rest in. inside the box were a pillow and blanket. In relaying this story, she assumed I would understand that these items had been placed there by God.

Peace Pilgrim commented that through her life she had gone through cycles of learning about conflict. She had had to experience external conflict first, the internal conflict. When she had finally surrendered her life to God, she was blessed with the gift of learning without conflict. Peace Pilgrim became a source of endless wisdom, which is the essence of the sefirah of Hokhmah, and of Divine understanding and reasoning, which is the essence of Binah. She became the epitome of the ordained spirit, fluent in symbolic sight, and living in complete harmony and trust with the Divine. Her instructions to others were, in keeping with the nature of truth, ever so simple : “I don’t eat junk food and I don’t think junk thoughts’. Translation : Honour the body, honour the mind, honour the spirit.

Developing the impersonal mind is a lifetime task, partly because it is such a substantial challenge and partly because it takes us into the depths of our illusions and fears. We have to reconstruct ourselves from the inside out, a process that always brings about numerous changes in our lives. I have yet to find a person pursuing a path of conscious awakening who has not experienced a time of ‘waiting’, during which his or her interior is reconstructed. And as with all matters of the spirit, once we start along the path, there is no turning back.

The following instructions provide a starting point for developing the impersonal mind and achieving symbolic sight, the ability to see through illusion and grasp the energy power behind the scenes. As I drew up these instructions, I kept in mind the sefirot that resonate with the sixth chakra, Hokhmah and Binah. Following these steps may help you attain symbolic sight and increase your ability to reach the dimension of Divine reasoning :

• Develop a practice of introspection, and work to become conscious of what you believe and why
• Keep an open mind and learn to become aware when your mind is ‘shutting down’
• Recognise defensiveness as an attempt to keep new insights from entering your mental field
• Interpret all situations and relationships as having a symbolic importance, even if you cannot immediately understand what it is
• Become open to receiving guidance and insight through your dreams
• Work toward releasing any thoughts that promote self-pity or anger, or that blame another person for anything that has happened to you
• Practice detachment. Make decisions based upon the wisest assessment you can in the immediate moment, rather than working to create a • specific outcome
• Refrain from all judgements – not just those rendered against people and situations, but those that concern the size or importance of tasks. Rather, remind yourself continually of the higher truth that you cannot possibly see all the facts or details of any situation, not visualise the long-term consequences of your actions
• Learn to recognise when you are being influenced by a fear pattern. Immediately detach from that fear by observing its influence on your mind and emotions, then make choices that weaken the influence of those fears
• Detach from all values that support the belief that success in life means achieving certain goals. Instead, view a successful life as a process of achieving self-control and the capacity to work through the challenges life brings you. Visualise success as an energy force rather than a physical one
• Act on your inner guidance and give up your need for ‘proof’ that your inner guidance is authentic. The more you ask for proof, the less likely you are to receive any
• Keep all your attention in the present moment – refrain from living in the past or worrying about the future. Learn to trust what you cannot see far more than what you can see