Have you ever wondered about the level of enlightenment of your soul?
Not only age characterize your soul, but also the level of consciousness. Its identification will allow you to understand the next truth about yourself.
What is consciousness itself? What does it mean that someone is more conscious and someone else less?
This is an identity identifier. It is the knowledge that you share with yourself. Experiencing yourself. It is a state in which you are aware of the existence of the environment, the existence of yourself, the existence of your thought processes, the existence of your mental life, as well as the consciousness of your conscious self.
In this article, you will:
- Learn what the Great Chain of Existence is: matter, life, mind, soul, and spirit.
- Understand the definitions of Flat Earth or the concept of a world made only of matter.
- Learn 7 levels of consciousness: existence, physical championship, empowerment, compassion, wisdom, unity, and the gate to eternity.
It’s the movie that plays inside your head. This film, has the smell, taste, touch, body sensations, hunger, pain, orgasm, emotions, memories, and scenes from the past, with the constant voice of an internal narrator, whose central character is you reliving all this directly.
Man has been trying to understand consciousness for centuries.
Levels of cognition.
Our reality is a combination of levels of existence, levels of cognition stretching from matter to body, mind, soul to spirit. Each higher level includes (contains in itself) lower levels, but also exceeds them, just as every event in the world is intertwined with each other, and all are ultimately covered by the Spirit, God, Goddess, Tao, Brahman, and Absolute. So this is a concept of the whole in whole, contained in whole, reaching to divinity. Something like Russian matryoshkas.
Each higher level contains lower levels but also includes new features that do not appear in previous levels.
Thus, for example, an animated animal body contains matter in its structure, but it also adds impressions, feelings, and emotions that do not occur in the rocks.
Although the human mind contains impressions, feelings, and emotions, it also adds higher cognitive abilities, such as reason and logic, that do not occur in plants or animals.
Although the soul contains within itself the mind and its structure, it also adds higher cognition and effects, such as archetypal illumination and vision that do not occur in the rational mind. And so on.
These levels are not rigidly separated and isolated, but like the colors of the rainbow, they pass smoothly into each other. Going through them does not run linearly or according to any set pattern. Individual development is very fluid and changeable. We can be at different levels in different circumstances.
Great Chain of Existence.
The levels, depending on the school, are from 5 to 12. All of them form the basis of all the great world traditions of wisdom.
Hustom Smith, the world’s leading authority in the field of comparative religion, distinguished these five levels and called them the Great Chain of Existence. Each of them has a specific branch of knowledge related to it:
- Matter – Physics
- Life – Biology
- Mind – Psychology, Philosophy
- Soul – Theology (examines the soul and its relationship with god)
- Spirit – Mysticism (examines a formless deity, or a pure emptiness that even exceeds the god and soul)
At each of these levels, what you think is your “self” changes radically. When consciousness is identified with the physical body we have the ego body – you identify with your impulses, feelings, or direct physical sensations.
While consciousness identifies with the mind, we have an ego – a conceptual, mental, narrative sense of self including role-playing and compliance with rules.
When consciousness identifies with the subtle level, we have a soul – an extra-individual sense of “self” that begins to go beyond the usual conventional level.
While consciousness develops even further and identifies with non-dual reality, we have a spirit.
In other words, whether you believe in the soul or not depends on your level of consciousness.
If you are firmly anchored in your ego, you do not believe in souls, simple.
Flat Earth
Unfortunately, the concept of the Great Chain of Existence in our Western world completely froze with the advent of modernism and it was replaced with the theory of a “flat earth”, or the concept of a world consisting essentially of matter only. This material world can only be studied by science. So, it came to the fact that the worldview called scientific materialism became, in whole or in part, our (people of the Western world) dominant official philosophy.
In this way, we became the first great civilization in the history of the human race, which refused the reality of the Great Chain of Existence. Modernism killed God, commercialized the world, abolished qualitative differences, introduced brutal capitalism, replaced quality with quantity, caused a loss of value and meaning, fragmentation of the living space, existential fear, and unconquered and coarse materialism.
But it also gave us liberal democracies, ideals of freedom, equality,
Currently, however, we can observe a renewed interest in the Great Chain of Existence. There is a time for a “marriage of mind and soul”, as it was aptly described by the eminent contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber.
To find your level of soul awareness, check another, the following classification:
Level 1 – Existence
The initial level of creation from which all souls begin to experience existence.
Level 2 – Physical championship.
The first level is where you have the first impression of conscious awareness. Here you most often exist as a plant or animal and you develop in physical form in your instincts and emotions.
Level 3 – Empowerment.
This is the level at which you become human. You get a body with a brain capable of comprehensive thinking. At this level, you begin to understand your nature. This is the place of ego, intellect, knowledge about oneself, and self-empowerment.
Level 4 – Compassion.
At this level, you go through your ego and make a qualitative change in understanding love. This is the stage humanity is facing now. To make this transition you must purify your low self and anchor in love. Your body will become more sensitive and less dense. Food, sounds, light, smells, emotions of others, and negative energy can start to overwhelm you, so you will have to learn to take care of yourself in a new way. The main task here is to master
Level 5 – Wisdom.
The basic developmental option of this stage of consciousness is the mastery of the spiritual sphere. Here, you will understand your soul, your non-physical self. You will understand who you are and what your life is about physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Your body will change to become lighter than matter. The world will change from a physical to an energy world. You will get a light body. You will be able to create what you need and want thanks to the natural power of your being, not thanks to the use of technology.
Level 6 – Unity.
This level will teach you to understand what it means to unite. Individual knowledge will be combined into a collective consciousness. This is the first stage where there is total unconditional love. To yourself, to others, and to everything. You will start to understand what it means to be one. The main goal of this stage is cosmic knowledge.
Level 7 – Gates to eternity.
At this stage, you understand the essence of creation and who you are in it. You will merge with god. You will be in perfection and will unite with everything that is, unite with god. No longer you will see yourself as an individual. You will be whole. You will remember who you have always been and will unite with everything that exists.
It takes millions of lives to walk through all levels of consciousness.
Unfortunately, this process can’t speed up. Sometimes you can experience flashes of higher consciousness. This is called a mystical experience. They give a foretaste of what awaits you. They make us long to reach a higher level and motivate us to become more ourselves.
You certainly identify with one of these levels. This is your so-called “spiritual station”. Most of the time, however, we hesitate between these levels, because it is not a typical rigid hierarchy.
You can also have the impression that you are rooted in one of the higher levels and you are probably wondering how you got there since most of humanity is still on the 3rd level. If so, you may be a volunteer who came here to help others in evolution. You must understand that it is not you who exists in the universe, but that you are the universe that begins to be aware of yourself.
Source:
Paige Bartholomew „The Divine Path of Soul Evolution“, awakingpeople.com,
„Spektrum świadomości. Podstawowe poziomy lub fale”. integralna.blogspot.com, www.integralna.blogspot.com/2014/09/spektrum-swiadomosci.html
Ken Wilber “The Marriage of Sense and Soul. Integrating Science and Religion”, („Małżeństwo rozumu z duszą. Integracja nauki i religii”, Jacek Santorski&Co, Warszawa, 2003).