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Living in the Supermind
The following is an excerpt from a to-be-published manuscript: "Living in the Supermind" by Maurie D. Pressman, M.D. What is the Supermind? Sri Aurobindo has spoken of the Supermind as God's vast realm — a place of Mind so high that we have joined with, and experience, the power of the All-Mighty. For our purposes, we can think of the Supermind as a highly elevated plane of mind and personality that is within us and surrounds us — and is achievable. It is the locale of Goodness and Altruism and the Storehouse of the vast powers of Nature that come to us, as we realize and transcend the limitations of knowledge that our all too-great addiction to doubt and rigid over-discipline of mind, obscures from us. Ultimately the Supermind is the location where all things happen, where creation is created and thoughts are thought. This makes the Supermind a reflection of God’s mind. But this is a kind of Divinity to which we can all lay hold through exercise in the control of mind. We achieve this by training the personality to reach a higher standard, by tolerance and surrender to a higher authority, in short, by laying aside ego and opening to the Divine message. When this is achieved, we see more and more of the Higher World(s). We learn what it is to live in these regions, and to have visions of their inhabitants. Some of this information is now becoming available to our culture in general as we hear more about past lives, out-of-body experiences, and near-death happenings. These experiences are accompanied by feelings of awe, bliss, beneficence, which describes the ambience of the Higher Range. When the Supermind is present during the course of one of my group therapy sessions, I can feel an eager desire in each member to help the other. Quietude is felt as we teach and learn about our immortality, about the near-death and after-death experiences that have been described by the group members. What do my patients learn from these experiences, and how do these experiences help in daily lives? Hearing about these adventures from people in the group, who are on the same level as they, is very impressive. It is more convincing to hear from them and of their experiences, than from the therapist alone. They can more easily open to a new belief when they can corroborate what they have heard with their own self-exploration. Sometimes this kind of inquiry will cause them to run into difficulty with a spouse who may be resistant to these ideas, but at other times it produces change in the entire family. Hearing about near-death and after-death experiences helps my patients, and people generally, to lose their fear of death. They can take the visits from a dear departed relative as true happenings, and take comfort from them. They become more responsible and ethical in behavior, for the belief in a series of lives in the context of Karma will caution them that there are unbeatable consequences for their actions. It may be easy to fool other people, but not the Divine Witness who watches from above. Invariably, in my experience, this exploration into the higher spiritual realms has led my patients to develop more empathy, more intuition, and a higher standard of achievement, taking pleasure in helping their fellow-humans. I also find that my patients teach when they share. So often, when one patient talks about an out-of-body or near-death experience in group therapy, others will come forward to speak about their own. This happens so frequently that it validates each experience, while freeing the hidden fears that each person has that they are different, or perhaps even insane. One day during a transpersonal breathwork workshop (in which the group lies on the floor meditating and rapidly breathing to the tune of selected powerful music) one patient entered into the meditation experience of another. When the time came for each to share their experiences, the entire group was astounded that it was possible for two people to become so integrated and soul-sharing. This led them into a greater belief in the power that we have in the higher mind, and the holographic network in which we each share with the other. All of these things that my patients experience and share with me and with others, and everything about which I have spoken, has helped me in raising my own personality. They have helped me to find a greater peace, a more detached bliss, and a confidence that comes from being unselfconsciously a part of all humanity. There is a fable called “Footsteps” in which God promises that He will be with the traveler every step of the way. However, at the hardest times the footsteps become one set of prints rather than two. When the subject awakens and sees, he protests, “Oh God, You promised to stay with me, and in the time of my greatest need and greatest pain there was only one set of footprints.” God replies, “Yes, my son, but during those times of greatest need, I carried you.” And so it is that each of us can be like the Lord, and in our progress, we can enter and live our Supermind. We can carry others on our shoulders. In teaching what we are and what we have learned, we let others stand on our shoulders so that their journey becomes easier, their height becomes higher. Their vision becomes wider because we transmit our experience. This desire to share and grow is why I am writing this book. When we witness the one-world global communication that has so quickly arrived; when we see the growing efforts of human beings to help one other; when we see the Human Rights Movement and groups such as Habitat for Humanity; when we see the emergence of belief in an afterlife embraced by 60% or more of Americans; when see all of these things, we know that the world culture is rising. Along with this is a growing belief in and use of the power of intuition. When we witness all of this, and the increasing hunger of our population for more, we can know that we are on the edge of the Supermind. This is a time of Superlearning, Super-control through Biofeedback, Supermemory, Super-speed reading. These are evidences of the power of the Higher Mind. It is true that inspired learning and true healing come about only through a quiet and totally relaxed mind, but these high achievements arrive on the scene when we have learned to trust, to have faith in the divine mind that we carry. Furthermore, we have witnessed a burgeoning of psychotherapies. This is a move toward introspection, self-understanding, and self-improvement, all of which define the paving on the road to spiritual ascendance. This growing preoccupation is accompanied by our sensing of the immense capacity of our minds. Though we may not realize it, the Supermind and Superworld are all around us, and accessible, now. The Supermind is within us. It is we, ourselves. It is found in the thought realm, which has many planes, as does our so-called reality. Like an ascendant balloon, we can, if we wish, rise through these many planes, from the most material, on into the more rarified atmospheres of the higher and more aesthetic regions. As we do so, we surge upward and see a more expansive, beautiful vista than we had dreamed possible. These vistas are the very ones that we enter and then transcend in the after-death world. But we inhabit these realms all the time, if we could only realize it. What is the Soul? In popular descriptions, the soul and the spirit are used interchangeably, but they are not the same. The spirit is the divine spark, a part of God Himself, infusing every part of creation, most certainly including humankind. Because the Divine is all-powerful, all-knowing, It does not experience. One can only experience, become conscious, and know (in our sense) by having limitations. Accordingly, in order to know His creations, God becomes us and walks among us. In order to experience existence, bodies were acquired by the high energies of Creation; these were developed by stepping down the unimaginable and unbearably potent energies of the Divine, creating bodies at a lower and lower level of vibration. In due course these planes of energy were known as the planes of the causal, the mental and the astral bodies. The causal body is the same as the soul. It functions as if it were a step-down transformer, receiving energy from above and lowering its vibrations to acceptable and tolerable levels. Much like the skin, the soul faces in two directions: above to receive, and below to create and communicate. The soul therefore receives instructions from above and transmits them to what is below, down to the physical body and the human brain. The soul is also a storage house for the high experiences of humanity. It is that agency, that intelligence that decides to reincarnate in order to further the job of purifying the human condition so that an individual may experience a continued ascent in a return to God. Human experiences are dissipated if they are of a lower order, but the higher-order experiences are stored in the causal body, where they are saved to incarnate in a later body to further enlightened experience. Thus, the soul is distinguished from the Spirit, the Divine Essence. What are Visions from the Soul? In meditation, or any activity in which we surrender our selfconscious self to an openess, we leave the ordinary mind that teaches us to be material, logical, and overly-doubting. Then we enter a realm of quietude in which we can receive from a higher place — a higher mind, the All-Mind. This is Inspiration and it is accompanied by visions. These visions are thought-imaginings, and they often contain superior messages, accompanied by an intuitive thrill and illumination. The more we seek them through a love-surrender to the Higher Will, the more they appear. Maurie D. Pressman, M.D. Maurie D. Pressman, M.D. is the author of Enter the Supermind, Visions From the Soul and co-author (with Patricia Joudry) of Twin Souls: A Guide to Finding Your True Spiritual Partner. Dr. Pressman is Emeritus Chairman of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Temple University Health Sciences Center. He is Medical Director at the Center for Psychiatric Wellness, clinics that operate in Philadelphia and Haddonfield, N.J. These clinics bridge traditional and spiritual psychotherapy. Dr. Pressman can be reached at 200 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106; telephone: 215/922-0204; fax: 215/922-3008; email: mauriedavid@earthlink.net; website: www.mauriepressman.com. |
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