“Man is a center of Consciousness in the great One Life of the universe. His soul has climbed a great many steps before it reached its present position and stage of unfoldment. And it will pass through many more steps until it is entirely free and delivered from the necessity of its swaddling clothes.
“I his mental being man contains traces of all that has gone before—all the experiences of himself and the great race movement of which he is a part. Likewise, his mind contains faculties and mental planes which have not as yet unfolded into consciousness. … All of these mental possessions, however, are useful and valuable to him, even the lowest.” ~William Walker Atkinson
Consciousness Center
Yes we are each a consciousness center to some degree. And consciousness exists at various levels. Atkinson talks about consciousness mostly in the terms of the scientific and medical communities who think of consciousness and sub-conscious as the two levels. In other words, they see consciousness as that which we are consciously aware of when awake. Everything else, they say, is sub-conscious.
In Cosolargy and some other spiritual schools, we use the term differently. We refer to that limited knowledge of the brain-mind as Intellect, and consciousness as that higher form of truth and knowledge that comes from higher realms.
Mr. Atkinson talks next about the soul climbing a great many steps. We can assume that he is talking about consciousness. So he seems to be connecting the soul with consciousness, and we agree. While intellect is primarily a brain function, consciousness is found mostly in the soul. This means that consciousness is a spiritual rather than a material knowledge.
Stairway to Heaven
A stairway leading to Heaven is a common symbol for spiritual growth. A variation of it is even featured in the Broadway hit musical Cats. But Atkinson is using an interesting interpretation of this concept. Rather than seeing those stairs to heaven as merely steps on the path of spiritual growth, he see them s levels of consciousness. While unusual, it is probably a valid way to look at it. After all, another way to think of climbing those stair to heaven is to say that we are reaching higher levels of consciousness. As a consciousness center, we each have to grow in consciousness level by level. Eventually we hope to reach that ultimate level called Christ Consciousness or Cosmic Consciousness.
Awakening Consciousness Center Facilities
Atkinson says that we have faculties that have not yet unfolded. To start with, most of us have not yet awakened our spirit and soul from the dormant state it is in when we are born on the plain of matter. So the first step to awakening higher states of consciousness is to awaken the spirit and soul using the light of the spiritual sun.
Once we have done that, we have already become a consciousness center. But we shouldn’t stop with that. Like the person who gets a job in the mail room and slowly climbs to the executive suite, we need to continuously work at raising our level of consciousness. While we must all do this at our own speed, we should all be doing it regularly. Just as another man cannot exercise for us, we can’t sit back and wait for the consciousness center of the world to reach a level where we are forced to get involved or perish. Instead of waiting for it to happen, become one of those actively making it happen.
The post Consciousness Center in Man and the Universe appeared first on Solar Wind.
