kriyayogamalaysia

Open To Higher Consciousness

By Rudra Shivananda

There are numerous impediments to our accessing higher truths and opening ourselves to the natural states of higher consciousness.

The most devastating hurdle is our innate ignorance. It is difficult to understand what this ignorance actually is and how it operates within us because the operation of our minds are conditioned and controlled by it and so even when we try to figure it out, we are utilizing its surrogates and being handicapped.

In order to better understand ignorance, we can look at what we can consider to be wisdom. In the broadest terms, I would consider wisdom to be the ability to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently and correctly. Ignorance operates to disrupt this process. Conventionally, it is said that wisdom increases with age, but this is actually untrue – what is confused with wisdom is actually the accumulation of experiences and information. In fact, as a person ages, ignorance is reinforced and older persons are generally unable and unwilling to correctly receive, decode or transmit new information wisely. Unfortunately, what used to take many years of ignorant living to produce, has now been compressed into a short time-frame due to the vast communication networks, free distribution of mis-information and faulty mis-education system. I hope this doesn’t sound too negative but one has to keep in mind that the culture of ignorance is the normal mode for human society for tens of thousands of years.

Our ability to receive information is impeded by the filters of our prejudices – all of us have been programmed and imprinted with certain modes of bigotries, no matter how free-thinking we consider ourselves to be. It is important for us to actively try to remove these pre-judgements that color our perceptions in order for us to be open to new information.

Our ability to decode and integrate new information is impeded by the filters of our pre-conceptions or reality beliefs. Our beliefs give us tunnel-vision and so we can only perceive a narrow segment of reality but think that we know the whole of it – we need to broaden our awareness of reality and the possibilities in our reality universe.

Our ability to transmit new information is impeded by our editorial and censorship filters. Even when one can receive new information and process it correctly, one can still be inhibited from acknowledging the new world vision and sharing it with others due to its divergence from accepted norms – one can still doubt the reality of one’s higher experience and reject the higher consciousness through self-repression. Some may be inhibited due to the fear of repercussions from peer, society or religious institutions. Others may be inhibited due to doubts about the applicability of the higher reality to the general populace – hence, secret societies and elitist approaches. It takes courage to share a new reality to others and it requires a high degree of integration of the experience of higher consciousness to do so appropriately for those struggling with lower consciousness limitations.

It is a long and difficult battle to rid one-self of ignorance operating from one’s life-programming, and it is even more liberating when one can rid one-self of the ignorance from our past karma – it is easier to understand that we are limited in our world-view and inheriting our dogmas and prejudices from our life experiences but there is a deeper factor from our past live experiences, which may be more hidden.

Paradoxically, the young child is wiser than the adult because the child is still willing and open to new experiences with less prejudice – the more we stuff ourselves with pre-conceptions, beliefs and dogmas, we lose the ability to expand the scope of our reality. We can become more and more open to higher consciousness as we reject the web of ignorance and open ourselves to the wisdom approach to new information.