Chapter 13 — The Spiritual and Scientific                                        Foundations of Higher                                             Consciousness

The Nature of the Journey

     My life has been a journey to the heart of truth. The pathway of truth is the only means by which soul can realize and experience the source of its being and what it truly is. This journey has taken me through fallow fields and others filled with a rich and wondrous bounty of insights and wisdom. All have added to my understanding of the infinite, that which I now refer to as the “ONE” or “ALL THAT IS.” When I went astray, I was pulled back to truth by events that could not have been predicted, yet whose meaning was clear when they occurred. My encounter with Graham and the reaction of the spiritual leader of Eckankar to his journal were the catalysts that set me on this part of my journey. I discovered flaws in my paradigm of the God principle, which helped me refine my understanding of myself as a spiritual being and my identity in the oneness of ALL THAT IS.

      I regret no part of this journey, for never was there a time when I was not learning and growing. During my journey’s most trying segments, I encountered spiritual deception and misleading insights into the infinite. My discovery of this deception served to give me guidance that would keep the next leg of my journey on course. I am grateful for these experiences and for the awareness they brought. Without them, I would not have the appreciation I now have of how souls can so easily be misled, and once misled, how they often fight to remain in comfortable spiritual terrain.

      Since I cleared away the confusion and deception Eckankar put in my way, my growth to higher consciousness has been breathtaking. Through intense inner and outer explorations, I have come to understand the nature of religions and the transcendent quality they all possess. By the same token, however, I have come to understand their limitations and how they can be spiritually debilitating. These insights are part of every person’s journey to the heart of truth. At the center, it is simplicity itself. Mankind surrounds this simplicity with ritual, dogma, and endless ventures into logic, which have no outcome except an infinite cycle of questions and answers. Such is the nature of the pursuit of truth when limited to the devices of the mind.

The Journey to God-Realization and the Heart of Truth

      The promise of God-Realization is not limited to incarnations of men and women. When the whole puzzle is put together, we see that all existence, from the lowest to the highest, is evolving to more advanced forms. Indeed, we are one of the channels by which it is evolving. How can one experience the love of a pet without intuiting that this beloved creature is preparing for a higher expression of itself? How can we not be aware of the conflicts that abound within our own bodies without sensing that there is something else going on quite independent of our wishes and self-interest? There is much more going on within our inner and outer bodies than we realize.

      We can see in these structures a microcosm of the entire universe. Souls are embodied in each germ and cell of our outer shell, experiencing life and learning lessons that we, as the dominant soul of this collective, are struggling to control and direct. That is why it takes so many incarnations in the human form alone to “get it all together.” Thus, our experience here is not ours alone. We live in the company of other beings that are evolving as we are evolving. The more we establish harmony with all that we are, the more everything that composes our being unfolds.

      Just as our level of awareness aids in the expansion of consciousness of other beings struggling for spiritual growth, there are souls far more advanced than us working to assist in our spiritual development. How could it be otherwise, for the Great Work of every sentient being within all universes is to assist others in the expansion of awareness? Just as there are souls behind us in the unfolding of consciousness, there are also souls ahead of us, often far ahead — not better, not greater, simply more advanced. This is the universal love system in which we have our existence. Despite events that may appear to the contrary, all events lead to growth in awareness, which, in turn, lead to God-Realization and a greater self-defined role in the running of the universes.

      It is an incredible universe that we are and in which we live. We cannot completely understand it through the prism of science with its limitations and, far too frequently, arrogant blindness (though this is rapidly changing). We can only understand the inner and outer universes through a more comprehensive process. This process involves not just scientific exploration of the outer world but also meditation and inner travel to investigate other dimensions of reality. The journey to higher consciousness requires a focus on the proper objective and an ability to look past form to the unity of everything. We learn in time that masters, like teachers, must be left behind. We learn that light and sound are but fireworks compared to the reality of the ONE.

Source — Confessions of a God Seeker: A Journey to Higher Consciousness