Access the hidden layers of reality.
It’s time to open your mind to magic that surrounds you.
Imagine No Religion: Consciousness Creates Reality — Chapter Six.
OPEN YOUR MIND
THERE ARE MANY HIDDEN LAYERS to reality besides the physical, temporal, mental, and emotional. These layers have become hidden through our choice of beliefs. We are the ones that avoid them by not focusing on them. They are not innately hidden. We have come to hide from them. We do this through a belief they are not real or not important. If we do happen to perceive one of these hidden layers, we have powerful mechanisms that tell us we did not perceive what we think we just did. These mechanisms primarily operate through the fear of being insane, abnormal, or different, as well as the fear of being perceived by others as weird, imbalanced, a liar, or mentally ill. This fear drives our ability to quickly and effectively dismiss what we do not understand.
The good news for explorers of consciousness is that if you evolve your belief system by opening your mind to include more than is immediately apparent to your biological senses, you will soon start to perceptually translate these hidden layers back into your conscious experience.
Fear stops us from seeing clearly. When you do not fear something, you do not fear seeing all that it is with clarity.
A part of being embodied is experiencing a narrowly focused perception that concentrates on our physical, mental, and emotional realities. However, this does not mean that we only experience that which is physical, emotional, and mental. It means that no matter what we experience, we tend to translate it purely into the physical, emotional, and mental. For example, news cameras collapse reality into audio with a visual focus, yet there is far more you would have experienced had you been at the news event yourself. However, a sense of smell may still be conveyed by the looks on people’s faces, seeing their actions, or hearing what they say. Scent information remains present in the news recording but in a highly attenuated form. This is how it is with our spirit’s experience being collapsed into our biologically functioning senses. One aspect of awakening to your spirit is accessing its unrestricted perception. This is why spiritual awakening is such an enriching experience.
To access the hidden layers of reality — through what is typically called intuitive, psychic, or inner senses — you do not need any special knowledge or gift. You do not even need to know what to expect. All you need is an open mind. You cannot do this by trying to be open. Openness is not like a muscle you can work to build. Openness is about not being in fear. An open mind is met through the transformation and release of fear. Being open is the natural state. Fear narrows/closes perception.
- An open mind is not limited by fear.
- An open mind is curious and seeks what is unknown instead of projecting what it fears onto the unknown.
- An open mind assigns space for new meanings instead of trying to make all experiences fit into what is already known.
- An open mind wants to expand and change, whereas closed minds atrophy through a need for consistency.
When your mind opens, it is not that you will instantly experience a new layer of reality as if someone turned on the light in a dark room. It is that you start to experience new physical, emotional, and mental sensations that feel slightly different or unusual. This is not only in terms of the actual sensation, but also in terms of where the sensation feels to be coming from. This new level of perception is subtle at first and will require you to be vigilant with your open mind. For example…
- You may have memories unexpectedly emerge/wander into your mind through which you find yourself remembering a particular realization that offers you a meaningful perspective on a current situation.
- You may start experiencing a new depth of emotional excitement around a particular choice or an unexpected emotional resistance to a specific person (which has no logical reason).
- You may start to see a kaleidoscope of colors around people or feel the energy in an object (a feeling akin to heat combined with magnetics).
It is typically how this sensation unexpectedly enters your perception and comes from somewhere slightly different that becomes the most unmistakable sign you are opening yourself to experience something new. How you react to that perceived newness will determine if the experiences build or are blocked. If you fear — rather than welcome — the sensations, you will either cease to notice them or produce a mental reason to diminish or dismiss them.
The purpose of the mind (beyond allowing for the unconsciousness necessary for embodiment) is to make sense of your experience and assign it meaning. This creates your personal experience of meaning — meanings you live within and are a part of how you form your unique experience of self. To help achieve this, our minds automatically fill in gaps or inconsistencies in our experience to hide any perceived discrepancies or anomalies. Any information the mind cannot assign an acceptable meaning to is quickly dismissed by a value judgment through which it deems the information not to matter. Something that is seen may be dismissed as a trick of the light. Something that is heard may be imagined to be a TV in another room. Something felt unexpectedly, like a painful memory, may be interpreted as a message of personal weakness that should be ignored as a sign of strength.
To be open to wider perception, be curious … be open to change … be open to new things … be welcoming of your experiences.
When in mortal form, you can emulate a closed system as much as you like (by being a separate embodied individual who stands alone). However, beyond your embodied focus, you are an open system. All consciousness is limitless/infinite/borderless because, when seen without fear, all consciousness is one. In your heart, you are eternal consciousness outside the illusion of separation. This means that…
All things flow through you, regardless of whether you acknowledge them.
To be open is to choose new choices, and that is to choose change. To be open to change is to be open to the unfolding of All That You Are. Because, even when you express All That You Are in mortal form, you will still change, for All That You Are is an expression of change. It is the journey of a human life. To be open to change is to allow the unknown. Choose to transform your fears by embracing the unknown. Only a person with a mind that is open to change is open to a reality created in transparency and conscious awareness. You are an evolving journey, not a destination. Your life describes a transformation of self over time.
Open your mind to discover what you are beyond the physical.
To close this brief but important chapter, I want to share some words I wrote many years ago to express my gnostic experience without relying on spiritual language. I hope it conveys how this gift of perception — that is available to you — is not all about ‘being spiritual.’ It is simply about realizing there is more to life than our biological senses tell us.
‘STUFF’
When I write, this stuff just comes out. I can look at the world and see all this stuff. I can see stuff about anything I focus on. And all this stuff is just amazing. This stuff has just become clearer and clearer because that is all I can really say about how I do it. I have just sought to become clearer and clearer, both in how I see life and how I express life — both sides of the mirror. I have been exploring clarity. The clearer you become, the more stuff you start seeing. And you see stuff that is basically just magic that you are seeing it. I can’t adequately describe how incredible it is to perceive reality in the way that I am. I simply want to try to describe the path and offer the choice to see how amazing and incredible this world truly is. Not because my way of seeing things is better, but because it is so joyous and amazing to experience the world in the way that I do.
This stuff is amazing.
I have gone through some shitty and bumpy stuff to awaken. I have been angry at times. I have felt alienated at times. But now that I am here, I can see how totally worth it this journey has been — to get to this clarity … to get to this freedom of vision … to get to this feeling of joy … to see all this incredible, amazing, fantastic stuff. Until now, I have been attached to people hearing my message of awakening. I have now polished this wound away as I know this ‘stuff’ is available to anyone who wants it. When someone wants to see this amazing stuff — that is all around us — they will bring themselves to see that stuff with or without my help. Now that I am clear, I know it to be my joy to continue to express my clarity in ever more diverse ways. I am joyful to be a bridge to all this stuff.
Additional Commentary/Bonus Text:
I thought I would share an unbelievable article that is bound to poke skeptics to go with this short article.
Magic Surrounds Us — How my biggest hero coined the name Story.
I chose my name when I was 23. My chosen name is Story Waters. My birth name is Ben Lower. I changed my name because I went through a dramatic shift in self at 17. When I went to university at 18, I reinvented myself from the bullied victim I was known for being at school. I did this because I no longer felt like my former self, and it felt like my name no longer fitted me. Renaming myself was a powerful part of solidifying how I had changed. Ben felt defeated by bullies and unwanted by his parents. Story stood up for himself and decided that those who did not love him were afraid.
While studying for my Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (which I did not complete, as the next thing I did after changing my name was leave university five years through a six-year doctorate), I was working a part-time job doing market research. I remember sitting at my desk writing possibilities for a new name until I wrote down Story. I instantly loved it as I was exploring the idea that we are each the architects of our lives, and as I wanted to be a writer, this translated as we are each a story that we are writing. This idea that we are each a story made it feel exciting to call myself Story — it does what it says on the packet!
My last name — Waters — I came up with by simply trying many nature / hippy sounding words to go with Story. I think Waters ultimately won out because it “sounded right” due to its closeness to “stormy waters” (so it rolls off the tongue). So, that is how I came up with my name. Nothing dramatic. It didn’t feel intuitive or led by my inner guidance at the time. It felt like a practical exercise in writing down names until one “looked” right.
TIP: Don’t refer to someone’s birth name as their real name. My real name is Story. My legal name is Story. My birth name is Ben.
An incredible person called Jane Roberts was not only my teacher (through her books) but also my biggest hero. She wrote many spiritual philosophy books in partnership with a consciousness named Seth. She also wrote several lesser-known fiction books, including a series called “The Oversoul Seven Trilogy.”
I did not discover Jane Roberts until after I left university (a year after choosing my new name), and even then, it was several years until I discovered that one character in her book — a female angel — was called Story. This is the first recording I have ever found of any person, fictional or real, to be called Story, and it was by the person I not only most admire but feel most connected to in terms of my inner experience of reality.
And, as if that weren’t enough, in this book, there is also a character named Roger who leaves his corporate job to become a pastel portrait artist. It just so happens that my husband’s name is Roger, and he left his corporate job to become a visionary artist…the main medium being pastels and the main subject matter being portraits.
It is just completely unbelievable!
But then so is what I do.
AUDIOBOOK read by Story available on Amazon ($6.29)
From paperback/hardcover: ‘One Consciousness: The Book of Introductions’ Check out my full library with free mp3 at https://limitlessness.com
