On the Importance of Using Consciousness Consciously

★First, aim for the intermediate class in using life

Once ordinary people reach a certain age, they should consciously manage how they use their consciousness day to day, so that they can graduate from the beginner class (stage) of using life—where their emotions are swayed by others’ words and actions—and move up to the intermediate class (state of mind) of using life, where they can observe in detail, with a calm heart, what they themselves are thinking about others’ words and actions.

What many people fall into is this: because they’re living without really thinking about it, they base their lives on instinctive things—eating when hungry, acting on impulse when sexual desire arises, sleeping when sleepy—and on top of that, following the stirrings of emotional thoughts stuck to the physical body, they get angry and glad, sad and happy, envious and boastful, arrogant and crushed.

When people are in that state of consciousness, they have strayed far from divinity, the essence of life, so they’re swayed by every word and action of others, sending their emotional thoughts up and down like a roller coaster.

That state is what we call “handing over the power of your life to others.”

What matters is what you think and what you thought. What others did or didn’t do doesn’t in the least determine where your heart goes—not really.

★To move up to the advanced class in using life

Once you understand this, you skip over the lower and middle levels of the astral world and the spiritual world, and your state of consciousness comes to live in one leap in the upper level of the spiritual world, just short of the divine world.

In terms of the example of using life we gave at the beginning, that means moving up to the advanced class, and your field of consciousness greatly expands.

Then the task that remains for people who have come that far (to the advanced class of using life) is to clean away the “remnants of form”—assumptions and fixations—which won’t be corrected unless you notice them yourself.

They’re leftovers from the days of living stuck to the physical body, but for many physical human beings, shackles of thought of the “it must be like this” or “this is how it should be” kind are deeply caked onto the heart and thoroughly get in the way of the expression of free, unobstructed divine consciousness.

In the actual upper level of the spiritual world too, there are many such people who have locked themselves in prisons of their own assumptions and fixations and can’t use their consciousness freely.

They are the likes of hermit sages and ascetics, who have become stuck in their own forms and can’t “enter through the form and come out of the form.”

Looking at such people, whether they are human beings living in physical bodies or spirit people living in the upper spiritual world and below, all we can do is pray, “May their state of mind be freed from its attachments even one day sooner.”

Because unless the person notices for themselves, however much those around them set things up for them, they can’t step up from there.