A member of the study group asked, “how to establish one’s self on the Bhumis?” In other words, how to mature on the Path of Awakening.

The response given was, “It’s simple: Know your mind.”

The Western psychological model has long divided the human psycho-spiritual person into a mind (cognitive and intellectual processes), emotions (high/low/and everything in between), behavior, and a body which long ago deemed to be nothing but a machine. This view of a human being is reductive, highly inaccurate, and does not represent the complexity of a human being at any point in his/her life. It also is non-invocative of personal reflection, or reviewing of beliefs and reference points that are the bricks and mortar of our daily projected reality. Furthermore, and most significant, a person is a collected aggregation of all that he or she has encountered through all of this life and all lives before. Our body, energy and thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions all work through together, interconnected and interdependent. There is no firewall between the mind that thinks it’s thinking and the emotions or sensations that catalyzed a thought. So, to say, “It’s simple: know your mind,” is a very big statement.

Everyone in the study group is/was long-term students of the Master DK’s works through Alice Bailey. That being the case, I used the conceptual reference of what DK called “the Constitution of Man” to make plain the fullness of “know your mind.”

– There’s a reason why the Master DK named the aggregate of the personality “the mental unit” and visually gave the depiction of it, as a working repository, on the 4th subplane of Manas. “Mental unit” indicates: a) a perceived unified whole of various component parts; b) that all those components -no matter how they demonstrate or appear- are mental -in that all experiences, inner and outer, go through the prism of the “mental unit”, this aggregated collection of perceptions and experiences born of the 18 subplanes.  Are these truly existent? To the Monad/Buddha Nature of course not. To the personality, yes, of course. Hence why the term confusion is used in the BuddhaDharma.

– Each moment is nothing other than intrinsic buddha nature emanating vibrations of own-nature. Due to confusion/fixation/habits of consciousness therefore automated perception, we confused beings don’t recognize own-vibrations of own-nature as that which is on display.

That “all that appears and (appears to) exist” is none other than buddha nature expressing is incontrovertible, even if inconceivable. If this is not so, then all beings are subject to the whims of demi-gods, gods, and spirits. One might, then, question what about karma? a) Karma is not whimsical. b) Karma is also a display of own-nature. What else could it be?

The point is that own-nature/buddha nature is constantly, patiently, unendingly offering the mirror of Awareness to the “mental unit” clouded by all that obscures self-knowing.

Every human being would all be well-served by a Rolfing-style self-reflection on how did I get here? (whether one is experiencing temporary happiness right now, suffering, or a mixture, as well as uncertainty regarding everything. There is only “one ground” to our reality. And, until we have exhausted and dissolved all confusions and mindlessness, that ground is the 18 subplanes of “the mental unit.”

– Therefore, know your mind.