Thinking Your Way Into a New Reality

Our minds are involved in at least three different operations: sensing, conceptualizing and intuiting. In the Hindu tradition, the sensing of the mind is part of the pranamaya kosha, or energy body. Sensations are felt experiences of contact. Whenever you touch something, see something, smell something, taste something, hear something, or even think about something, a sensation arises. Everything you come into contact with feels like something before you know what it is. Sensing is an energetic event – a transfer of energy to your nervous system. Immediately after that event we develop an idea about it. Conceptualization about the sensation is part of the manomaya kosha, or mental body. The mental body is made up of all of our understanding about things. Once we have a conceptual idea about something we know what it is and how to relate to it. Have you ever seen a small child fall down and then look toward the adults around them as if to see if it is appropriate to cry? They felt something, but haven’t decided if it is bad.

Our ideas, our thoughts and everything we can conceive of, exist in the conceptual realm of our mental body. Sensation, and conceptualization are generally familiar to us even if we sometimes fail to recognize them as separate, but they are not the only functions of the mental body. A more mysterious function of the mind is intuition. The spontaneous knowing of intuition is recognized in the Hindu tradition to be the higher mind of the vijnanamaya kosha or wisdom body. The awakening of intuition is an important part of spiritual development. Intuition is not conceptual. It is not an understanding about things. It is a direct knowing independent of words, concepts and ideas. In the wisdom body, perceiving and knowing merge. We don't perceive something and then draw a conclusion about it. We perceive something and know it at the same time.

In the practice of spiritual embodiment a great deal of emphasis is placed on the transformation of our conceptual patterns, because the way we interpret our experience is deeply conditioned and habitual, and the conclusions we draw have a profound effect on what is possible for us. The conceptual mind does not trust intuition because it needs logical proof before it can believe anything. This becomes problematic because spiritual guidance comes in intuitive leaps that we often need to trust without proof.

We are guided along the path of awakening by following intuitive openings that often don’t make sense to us at the time. We have to take, what the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called a leap of faith beyond the conceptual mind. Making this leap is not easy because our conceptual minds are loaded with antibodies that attack anomalous perceptions and alternative ideas. These antibodies exist in our thinking as doubts and suspicions about anything unknown.

Our habitual way of thinking is strongly biased toward what we already know and so it is very difficult for any experience of something new to make a lasting impact. When we're in the middle of a spiritual opening we don’t doubt it because it’s happening, but once the experience passes, all that’s left is an anomalous memory of an experience that shouldn't have been possible. That memory will immediately be swarmed by the doubting antibodies of our conceptual mind. Antibodies don’t just come from our own mind, they also come to us through the people around us.

Often spiritual openings are pushed into the subconsciousness before we even have a chance to consciously recognize them. This is why repatterning our minds is so central to spiritual work. The practice of spiritual embodiment includes instruction and guidance to help you reconfigure how you think and draw conclusions. It doesn’t tell you what to think, it helps you learn a new way of creating meaning so you can think yourself into a new reality.