The Fourth Dimensional Self - The Soul

Dear Subscribers,

There were, as usual, quite a wide range of responses to the email about life on this Planet (and elsewhere) — including several links to sites discussing giants. The point, however, is not whether giants ever lived on Earth but whether or not they had souls. If you missed the article or had trouble reading it, the archived version is online:

http://www.soaringspiritwithtears.com/journal/original_home.html

The complaints about formatting of emails are strange. If you are one of the ones having problems, please check the settings in your email client as well as your preferences by updating your subscription and specifying whether you prefer html or plain text formatting. The emails are launched with 12 pixel Verdana fonts but if this is not what you are seeing, it is probably because of the settings on the mail client you are using.

Now, to continue the story. Many of you want to know how memories that are hidden can be accessed. There are countless techniques. The first one I heard about was in my early college days when I was studying Eastern philosophy (and anthropology) at the University of Hawaii. The method discussed by one of the professors involved training your memory to go back over every detail you can imagine, starting with a minute ago and an hour ago and what you had for breakfast and what you did yesterday. After about 20 years of such practice, you would remember past lives. I was in my teens still so twenty years sounded like a long time and I was distracted by other priorities. I remember wrestling with the temptation but, frankly, curious as I was, the process itself sounded boring, and I was disinclined to try, but I felt just a tad uncomfortable about the decision.

As fate would have it, Isabel Hickey visited Hawaii in the 70s and demonstrated something called the Awareness Technique. I was an observer and the subject was a very dear friend with the same degree of Pisces rising as myself. The first observation I made was that I needed to move farther and farther away so as not to intrude on her experience because on a spiritual level, we were very much like sisters, so much so that her parents sometimes called me by her name. I wound up on a balcony looking down. Izzie explained that the person who developed the Awareness Technique was in a hospital, unable to remember his name. I heard her loud and clear and was very careful when using this method, but, of course, all who watched her demonstration wanted to see what would come up if they were facilitated. In short, I got into this, but you might say, just one toe went into the water because, by that time, I was well aware of all the people who had gone way out on a limb and couldn't get back.

The Awareness Technique involves expanding the aura and learning to move freely in a wider area and then lifting out of the familiar space and coming back in a different space. I can probably word this better but not without laying some foundation first. As the aura is expanded, memories do emerge, mostly emotional memories from earlier in this life. However, once people lift out, they merge with something very bright that has some recognizable features, including lots of rays projecting in a multitude of directions. When identified with this bright space, people are aware that they can explore certain rays but they know without any explanation that they are absolutely forbidden to venture out on other rays. I want to underscore this. In this state of awareness, they simply know that they have permission to explore x, y, and z but that they are prohibited from looking elsewhere. Perhaps even more important is that they are completely obedient, meaning in that state, no one has motivation to do what is not allowed. I think arguments can be made that once beyond the ego, this will always be the case, i.e., only the ego can defy natural law. Every other part of our existence conforms to the will of the Creator.

Several particulars of the Awareness Technique grabbed my attention. What was more interesting to me than the past lives were the dimensional shifts that — based on language — I realized were happening. Having studied philosophy, comparative religion, and quite a lot of metaphysics, I was more or less on a first name basis with the aura and terms such as subconscious and superconscious but I had, at that time, never heard of dimensions. A fourth dimensional "self" was responding to questions by referencing the third dimensional self. Until that time, I did not know we live in a third dimensional reality. I was aware of other states of consciousness, but I did not equate them to dimensions. What is important here is that the language came from the subject, who was also not aware of the concept, and it was presented by that individual's own higher self, what we would call the soul.

It therefore occurred to me that if the fourth dimensional self was privy to insights about the third dimension, there must be other dimensions so why not see what happens if in the altered state one is prompted to explore these states. Keep in mind, this was the 70s in Hawaii and a lot of material that is practically mainstream now hadn't come out yet. I owned a tiny, tiny metaphysical bookstore in those days and thought I had read practically every book on such subjects. For the record, however, I want to say, this was a step along a much wider and longer path and I have not kept the books nor allowed myself to get stuck with thoughts that have outlived their usefulness.

Several details of the material coming out through the Awareness Technique do, however, still seem relevant but the landscape is really enormous and difficult to describe in a few sentences. When one explores another existence, one has the consciousness one had at that time. For the moment, it's irrelevant whether those existences were past lives, parallel existences, or even explorations of existences that are not part of one's direct personal history. I am trying to keep every door open so that we hypothesize the possibility that one could be looking at someone else's past life, but here are some details worthy of consideration.

If a person comes down in a lifetime in which he or she was illiterate, the individual truly cannot read. I will give an example of this. When trying to determine where someone was in both time and space, I asked the subject to describe what she was seeing. Asking someone to go home is usually very safe because the person will have had a home and a family and it's therefore close to 100% certain that the instruction will be followed. The subject in this instance described a house that looked something like a Swiss chalet and there were some numbers over the doorway but she couldn't read them. She could copy them, i.e., draw the numbers on paper as she saw them, but she could not, using the consciousness of that time, say what the numbers were. However, in another exploration, an individual may find himself or herself in a library, surrounded by books that are clearly no longer in print. The person can open a book and read fluently regardless of the languages known in this lifetime. In short, somewhere in our vastly expanded consciousness, there is a record of everything we once knew.

As I said in the post over the weekend, learning to prompt is more than half the art because the facilitator could be something like a scientific researcher who is skeptical of such matters and therefore asks rather flat-footed questions that provide details about architecture, apparel, family relationships, political tensions, or psychological fall out but fail to elicit what the relevance is to incarnational journey.

What I found with the Awareness Technique and the variations I dared to innovate was that the first and second dimensions would be somewhat comparable to what some call the subconscious or instinctual selves. They are highly personal and belong to emotional responses the individual has had to life events. All of our opinions about food, other people, certain gestures or inflections in the voice, and even some very deep fears are in these dimensions. Having worked with this material for over 35 years, I can say that healing of the issues in the first and second dimensional selves requires interaction with the third and fourth dimensional selves or another individual. There does not seem to be a way for the problems in these regions to self correct. Let me make this concrete. Let's say someone died of a snake bite or was burned at the stake. Telling that person that his fear of snakes is irrational is not just insensitive but psychologically incompetent. The fears may be exaggerated but they are based on personal experience and the amount of suffering carrying over from the past could be immense.

Let me try to explain this carefully. First there is the terror of the snake bite, then the pain, then the fear of protracted suffering, the fear of loss of life, the fear of leaving one's family and friends, maybe the fear of leaving children without a parent, and even the fear of not completing one's destiny. It's not therefore irrational. It is personal. We might try therefore to give this an even more meaningful context. Supposing we have someone like Steve Irwin who appeared to be absolutely fearless around animals of all descriptions but who met his end through a stingray. His end startled the world and probably him as well. If he is reborn with a fear of water or a fear of sudden death or a fear of not completing his mission in life, it would be understandable, not irrational.

So, what the therapist needs to do is draw a line between historic fact (or imagination because it actually doesn't matter which it is from a psychological perspective) and current probabilities. For instance, there are no snakes in Hawaii so if one wants to feel safe with one's primary terror, Hawaii might be a good place for that particular terror. It's less skillful than accepting the past and dealing with the issues. Let's look at fire and come back to snakes.

The Inquisition no longer burns people at the stake and sati is outlawed in modern India so the odds of being burned alive are vastly less today than they might have been historically. However, there is napalm and then there are other fiery weapons and so on and so forth so drawing the line requires recognition of nuance. Fortunately, the subconscious is very clear about details and it can readily distinguish between persecution of women and war. Telling someone to "forget it" is horrible advice. First of all, it's judgmental. Secondly, it's rude and insensitive. Most importantly, it's impossible. Nothing is ever completely forgotten so if there is a heaven or a hell, it is first of all in our memories, which is another excellent reason for filtering input. The art here is receptivity to what is relevant and constructive and discrimination over what is clutter and perhaps also polluting and reinfecting. This is but one excellent argument for getting rid of the TV.

Most people have some vague understanding now of post traumatic stress syndrome. What is less understood is exactly where the trigger points are and what they might activate. For example, after I was in Vietnam, I often awakened during the night because the rain on the metal roof reminded me of machine gun fire. It's not "irrational" but the moment I realized it was rain, not war, I could sleep soundly. What I have learned over the years is that every one of these personal memories has to be addressed and healed.

When I had the spider bites in 1995, I forced myself to study spiders and later all dangerous creatures with venom. Eventually, I demanded an interview with the spider, psychically, of course, since she must have long since gone missing. We had one of the most profound discussions of my entire life, every bit the equivalent of a Native American vision quest or shamanic experience, but you have to be very steady, very receptive, and very clear to listen to what "the enemy" has to say. It turned out she wasn't the enemy at all. However, she did have the power to change my life inalterably and this is truly an immense power so to reduce the randomness of experience and go beyond what seems capricious and maybe even hostile, one has to go to the level where there is an explanation and this comes either from the explanations of the adversaries or from one's own higher self because on some really curious and controversial level, we have agreed to the experiences we are having and that is about as self-destructive and defeating as we can imagine unless we learn something so valuable that we are motivated to change the script or the interpretation placed on experience.

Commentary

My professional experience suggests that one can often achieve as much in a single or series of altered consciousness experiences as one does in years of conventional therapy. The reason is that there is vastly more information and better organization of information in the unconscious realms. In addition, one can draw the historical line between then and now and this is invaluable. However, knowing does not relieve anyone of the need to cure so the pressure to deal with the issues can often be addressed after a few hours rather than months or years of inquiry. This became important to me when working with people with life threatening diseases because there were so few therapists trained to get to the heart of the matter instantly. I would remind therapists that the clock is ticking so they need to realize that patients may succumb to the illness if the proper information is not elicited and resolved quickly. There are, of course, some famous therapists, but try finding a competent one in Timbuktu.

There are going to be sequels to this post because I have only touched on the very first elements of one technique. Of all the emails I received that were espousing particular points of view, the one I appreciated the most referred to the value of clinical experience as opposed to theories and so on and so forth. We all have pet beliefs and these were instilled in us by parents, teachers, priests, and the politicians and power brokers who manipulate our civilization. What is therefore compelling about altered states is the purity of the information. To date, knock on wood, I have never witnessed a recall that the subject found irrelevant. If the person brought up the memory, even if facilitated by me or someone else, the relevance is clear and helpful. What is even more remarkable is when scoffers decide to prove there is nothing to this work and then find themselves completely transformed by what they discover . . . because one of the more interesting observations I have made is that the habit of intense focus and concentration is actually a benefit in the altered states. If people are superficial and they jump from one stimulating image to another, they will end up with fragments that are hard to piece together whereas those with more ability to concentrate tend to bring up the equivalent of tomes of information.

I would like to end on a high note. As noted, right "above" the third dimension is a fourth dimensional awareness. The best way I could describe this consciousness is that the fourth dimensional self is an idealized version of the third dimensional "reality". You might say that this consciousness is oneself with the flaws removed. It is actually very, very close to the third dimension and relatively easily accessible. Moreover, it is likely that absolutely everyone would already be sliding effortlessly between the third and fourth dimensions were it not for the endless bombardment on our third dimensional selves, some of which penetrate down into the first and second dimensions. If you don't believe me, try removing every fear you have. Just imagine for a moment a world without disease, without war, without perils, without financial worries, without hunger, without violence, without risks. Fill the empty space with reflection, contemplation, respect, harmony, love, friendliness, compassion, and bliss. That is your fourth dimension and it's practically at your finger tips, right there inside you ready to bloom.

Many blessings,

Ingrid