Each level has a beginning, an illuminating insight that provides the seeker with the motivation to seek out the end understanding that caps off the chapter. The end understanding provides the seeker with a base of power with which he needs to rely on while he's learning the lessons of the next level.
For Courage, the illuminating insight is "Oh wow, it's possible to gain power in the world." You're learning the basics of applying effort. Effort counts for a lot in the world. But it's effort applied mindlessly, effort for effort's sake. You reach the end of this level, the end of the utility of mindless effort, once you can turn on and off the effort engine. You can revel in working hard. I love good hard work, once I turn on my willingness to do so.
For some people, effort is all they need. The people this level turns out, what happens to them if they don't move up, are earthy, practical folk, fun to be with and useful to have around. They're hilarious and great at instilling good work ethics in their children. Spending time around these sorts of people will gently draw you out of the lower levels and infect you with their gentle enthusiasm. If you're at higher levels, then time spent with these people is refreshing and uncomplicated.
The level of Neutrality starts with the illuminating insight, "Hard work is hard! There's got to be a better way." But if hard work is hard, not working hard is even harder. You're learning the basics of psychology, figuring out how to get along with people. Getting along allows you to pour far less effort into maintaining yourself, but making mistakes at this level destroys relationships and forces you to again kick up your effort engine and work hard once more. When you reach the end of this level, you've got a pretty safe, easy existence, but you're not terribly fulfilled. Hard work is fulfilling all on its own, but being neutral isn't.
Willingness begins with the illuminating insight, "I don't have to 'just get along', I can optimize!" This is when you learn the basics of information and learning. You've learned the value of effort, you've learned the value of getting along, now you can start utilizing all the available information more effectively.
Notice how all of these have to do with the external world. All the levels up to Love deal with it. You're generally not capable of making sense of the internal world yet. So you deal with the world as you see it. These are where the lessons are. They become real through application in the real world. You can try to skip around, but if you do that, it's a much more chaotic lifestyle.
So in Willingness you're eager to learn, and apply, the knowledge other people produce. Your vision starts to expand, the levels of Acceptance and Reason open up to you to study from. Knowledge is a powerful accelerant, effort applied here rapidly bears fruit. Progress here is fast and heady.
Each level contains all the levels within. You slowly become enlightened about a particular lesson, then you hit the limits of that lesson, so you start another adventure with a different lesson.
Very few people stay at Willingness because of how easy it is to see the upper levels. People stay at the lower levels because they never get initiated into the adventures of the higher, or they feel they don't have what it takes to live at a higher level. People who live their entire lives through the rigorous application of effort need help to see that there's better ways to live. Or they need the ego to prod them forward.
The end of Willingness comes when you start to run up against the point of diminishing returns. Your business model can't grow any more, your skill set is more than adequate. And there's lots of people dedicating their efforts to helping you. You get drawn into the community. The enthusiasm is infectious, you're starting to Accept your role in it.
Acceptance starts with the illuminating insight, "I should be doing more." The people at this level are learning the lessons of purpose. Purpose doesn't just exist inside you and it doesn't rely on others. It's a dynamic that affects both. The people learning the lessons of Acceptance are beginning to really start understanding the spiritual journey itself. Purpose is a very abstract idea, but it's very real. By the time they finish learning these lessons they have a good idea of where they want to go and how to live in harmony with their path.
A lot of people stay at Acceptance. They're interesting and insightful. They're community minded, and community takes up a lot of head space. They make amazing parents, nurturing and accepting. Movement higher than this requires a bit of ambition. It requires the willingness to cut things out of your life. Acceptance brings a lot in, it fills your life with an emotional fullness that is enormously satisfying.
Understand, the levels are adventures. People undertake them because of a restlessness that keeps them from staying still. You have to choose to move up, but when you do, entire worlds of new experiences become possible. Levels higher than Acceptance are like bonuses, caps on top of an already amazing life. They're distinguished by an increasing attention to details on the particulars, the minutiae of life. They're willing to drop attachments and chase these understandings on their own merits.
The illuminating insight that starts the journey into Reason is that "yes the world can be understood." The lesson is that of refinement. Refinement is different from optimization, in that when you optimize, you add stuff that works. Refinement is taking out stuff that doesn't. You clear your head of polluting influences and deal directly with the abstract. You organize your thinking into systems and use those systems to create things.
At the Reason level, your words and thoughts themselves become powerful. Before, effort was the primary vehicle for power. You learned ever more effective ways of applying it, maybe dabbled with creativity. Here the creativity starts taking primacy. When you finish learning the lessons of Reason, you're at the top of your game, your capacity for making abstract ideas effective in the real world is at its highest. Like Acceptance before it, it's perfectly fine for this adventure to take up your whole life. You don't need to start the Love journey, but it's there for anyone who wants to.
Love begins with the illuminating insight, "I really can learn to love everyone." As you're settling into facility with the abstract, the world of humanity starts to look less like a mass of chaos and more rational and knowable. People's motivations start making sense, now that you've gone through all the same trials and tribulations that they have. You really start to understand that we're all cut from the same cloth, that every mistake they've made, you've made. The refinement you began in Reason with the external world, you start to make on the soft side, the human world.
Here you deal with your emotions and your ego. Whereas before you possessed a sort of unconscious facility with them, now you need real control, because unconditional love is a very tough thing to pull off. The lesson with Love is letting go. Letting go of all the attachments you have to states and people. And when you finish, you've totally mastered yourself. This can be a journey of a lifetime as well. It will be, especially if you start with Love as the goal.
Know that it's faster to patiently work your steps than it is to skip around. It's more than possible to start the journey trying to learn unconditional love. But you're missing out on the adventure of all the previous steps, and often times the world will make you learn the lessons anyway. A lot of people try jumping straight from Acceptance to Love. But without building up the facility with the abstract that Reason provides, people's motivations will forever remain a black box. Your own motivations won't be clear half the time. You'll find it a real struggle if you try to start building your facility with the abstract by applying it to people before you apply it to one of the many systems we've created. The lessons won't stick.
Love can take your entire life, but if you've worked through the steps, Joy becomes available. Now that you know yourself, and you know people, immense quantities of energy and happiness open up to you. A new mode of life becomes possible, allowing your learnings and your sheer power you've accessed by opening up so many kinds of thought to carry you through existence. This level's illuminating insight is, "what can I achieve with all that I've learned?"
Again, it's possible to begin the adventure of Joy without going through any of the preceding levels, by molding your life after the adventures of the great sages of enlightenment. It truly is the journey of a lifetime though, taking a much longer time to gain the facility with the abstract and with people and with yourself than if you just took the prescribed path. It's getting more possible with the Internet, where people who've succeeded can write about their experiences and inspire others.
The lesson of joy is expansion. You become aware of the energy field around you and are learning how to project and control it. You rapidly lose what little that is false that's still in you, and you start truly aligning yourself with purpose. You can stay here, expanding and expanding until the entire world knows who you are. Just being who you are inspires and moves them. Or you can begin the journey of Peace.
While Joy is characterized by expansion, people on the journey of Peace contract powerfully into tiny little balls of energy. They flit through life, bouncing around, observing, witnessing, and gently pushing and pulling. They're entirely comfortable with the way the world is and know how to get by, around, through, over, and under obstacles. With Peace, your entire life gets abstracted, there's no real words that can describe it.
Peace begins when you totally and completely make peace with your ego and have nothing left to motivate you to move through the world. You lose everything binding yourself to the rest of humanity. Purpose falls away and loses its meaning. The effects they have on those around them are so abstract and so profound that really only they can see them, and they're fine with that. They can't be figured out, can't be held down. These are the Jedis of real life. The illuminating insight at the beginning of the Peace journey is, "I don't need any of this." The endpoint is total transcendence. People at the endpoint of Peace are completely free, in every sense of the word. The lesson is plasticity. You're learning how to shift, flow, bend to the occasion, in a totally different sense than when you're in Neutrality. With Peace, you're learning to have complete command over all the powers granted from all of the lessons of all of the levels.
And this opens up the vistas of Enlightenment. This is the largest level, spanning 300 points on the scale. That means there's a lot of lessons, and a lot of growth there, even after you've transcended every earthly lesson. You're dealing directly with divinity. Your words are so potent that written down, they inspire just like a person at the level of Joy does with his physical presence. I don't know what the illuminating insight is, perhaps "I could be a god." After you've achieved transcendence, such a statement or desire doesn't seem so far-fetched. Instead of grabbing attention by expanding your spiritual field of influence, your Atman, as a person in Joy would, you channel the glory of the Source directly, purely, becoming a beacon. Instead of you aligning with the Source, the world starts to align with you.
I believe it's possible to get Enlightened in this lifetime if you want. You have to really, really really want it though, enough to have faith in the lessons you're learning and to move up with conviction. I believe there are certain accelerants that make progress much faster, certain truths that transcend even the levels. For example, total, absolute honesty will propel you through to the end of any adventure. Accepting everything the world gives you, as is, speaking only from the highest level you know. If you can do that, and maintain your sense of ambition, you'll keep moving up. But the second you start to forget the process, to lose momentum, you can easily tumble down. But that too, is a part of the journey. If you tumble down, that means you really didn't learn the lesson.
So have faith, believe in yourself, and you'll gain momentum. Never lose your sense of adventure. And if you don't want to move up, that's fine too. These are adventures, not commandments.
---------I want to write more about the between points, the place where you've mastered the lessons of one level and have the choice to move up or stay put. I think pretty few people stick around to earn complete mastery of a level. This is where the scale model starts to break down a bit. Let's look at Courage and Neutrality. You might stay in Courage mode for ten years, really mastering the lessons of hard work and effort. At the end of those ten years, you really and truly are at 249. Or you might get to 238 and decide that you want to start working smarter. You stay at 238 but begin working on the higher lessons. You won't find it as easy to master Neutrality if you do this, but it's still doable. But if you skip Neutrality and try instead to start learning immediately without understanding basic psychology, you'll have to pull yourself up much higher using the new learning. A lot of the learning you'll read will assume you can get along with people, and it won't work otherwise.
Mastery of any of the Power levels is a nice place to be. I love visiting my grandparents because they're exactly the sort of salt-of-the earth folk that have mastered Courage that I described earlier. They can get along with people, but they don't rely on that, because they love hard work.
Mastery means you have zero problems using the lessons of that level to live your life around. The seeker tends to move up before he achieves full mastery, as soon as he sees another way is possible. What I like to do is spend lots of time among the lower levels, they help me to learn the lessons I missed on my meteoric rise through the levels. I think I've about mastered Courage, less so on Neutrality, really high on Willingness, bout middle of the road on Acceptance, high on Reason, medium high on Love, and low on both Joy and Peace. My unique life caused me to spend less time learning social niceties, instead seeking truth within. But now that I'm actively seeking the lessons and secrets of Joy and Peace, the lessons of the lower levels are starting to fill in for me. Peace is what I really aim to master, so that's where I say I am.
------I don't experience stage fright, so I'm not at all sure which level's lessons will fix the underlying issue concerning it. I probably would approach that problem by starting a journey in the field of public speaking. This will start you fresh off at Courage. By working the basic steps of public speaking, you'll slowly start to master it. If you really liked public speaking, you could carry on the pursuit of it into the Neutrality level, by networking with other public speakers and getting a little more involved in that world.
If you were to choose to do this, then your general vibration level would stay the same as you usually are, but your effectiveness will only be in the 200 range. But because your general level is higher, you'll have an easier time of it.
But you still have to start at Courage. If you think your Reason level in some other field is adequate to let you start off at Willingness in public speaking, then you'll go out and buy all kinds of books and tapes and stuff, and get absolutely nowhere. You have to get comfortable with the basics, or the books and stuff won't help you.
You in fact don't gain the facility with the abstract necessary for you to start out at levels other than Courage in new fields until somewhere around Joy. Speaking from personal experience, I'm trying to do this right now. Not even my general brain at Reason could understand all fields well enough to assume I'd be able to pick up the basics in the blink of an eye, though my ego would have told me I could!
----------Like I said, your general vibration remains around the same, but your effectiveness scuba diving was still that of the beginner. You picked up the basics quickly, but all that means is that you mastered Courage in that field. To progress higher, you would need to start networking with other scuba divers and doing a lot better job of it with a lot less effort. Eventually you'd become a scuba teacher, and scuba would become a part of your life. You'd get involved in the community and bring up other scuba instructors. At that point you'd have Accepted Scuba as a major part of your life.
-------You'll get to Willingness when you start taking something seriously. Right now you're dabbling in lots of different areas. Your power stays low because you're not really using any of these things to make your way through the world. You're not making them real. One way you could cross over into Willingness right now would be to turn your music into a career, to gig, make money, and sustain yourself that way.
Neutrality is about networking and being social. Acceptance is about building community.
----They're states, and they're also perspectives, up to the point of consciousness level 600. At 600 the perceiving part of consciousness is all that's left of the ego. And that goes too at 700.
But states they remain.
----They're states, and they're also perspectives, up to the point of consciousness level 600. At 600 the perceiving part of consciousness is all that's left of the ego. And that goes too at 700.
But states they remain.
After 600 there are still qualities of your former self that you have to give up to move on. From 600-699 a person's identity is wrapped up in being "the observer," which is a subtle expression of ego that must be identified and surrendered. From 700-849 is complete Oneness, awareness doesn't present itself as an observer, there's no division of mind left.
That's where it get's weird. Hawkins says there's aspects of the collective unconscious, not of the individual, that must be identified and transcended. They manifest physically. Jesus sweat blood.
After 850, no systems of belief remain, no organizational paradigms, no nothing.
Everything is subjective at those levels, meaning they cannot be usefully described to another person.
That's where it get's weird. Hawkins says there's aspects of the collective unconscious, not of the individual, that must be identified and transcended. They manifest physically. Jesus sweat blood.
After 850, no systems of belief remain, no organizational paradigms, no nothing.
Everything is subjective at those levels, meaning they cannot be usefully described to another person.
----So, the major work of all the levels from Courage to Acceptance is dropping positionalities. A positionality is a false dichotomy the ego holds. A great example is "either you're for the criminals or you're for the victims."
Each positionality consists of an aversion, This position is ego-based and limiting. They're created in childhood from experiences that threaten the ego-mind.
One way to liberate the blocked energy contained in the above positionality is to adopt the position, "all people, including criminals, deserve the best conditions to grow spiritually,"
The end result is Acceptance.
Thing is, even when you're at Acceptance, you'll still find positionalities that limit, because you still have a ego-mind to transcend. But once you're at Acceptance, you're so used to the process of finding positionalities, they practically liberate themselves as soon as they're found.
------ The watcher is transcended at 700, where the body/mind simply bes, propelled only by spirit. You're basically a vessel to be used by God,
Levels higher than that involve incorporating aspects of divinity directly into the body/mind. Advancement is random and uncontrollable, as there is no ego to propel itself forward. If God wants you there, He'll put you there.
At 1000 you're God Himself, a level only reached by Jesus in the last 2000 years, and Buddha before Him.
Levels higher than that involve incorporating aspects of divinity directly into the body/mind. Advancement is random and uncontrollable, as there is no ego to propel itself forward. If God wants you there, He'll put you there.
At 1000 you're God Himself, a level only reached by Jesus in the last 2000 years, and Buddha before Him.
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