Obviously, you will never be successful by seeking to change the movie at the level of the screen, because the screen can only reflect what is projected upon it. The reason is that the screen is the level of effect, and what appears on it comes from a deeper level, the level of cause. What our modern societies have programmed us to believe is that the material world is both cause and effect, and thus we can change our lives by working at the level of the material world, the level of actions and conscious beliefs.
Yet, in reality, the material world is very similar to the images that appear on a movie screen: projections that come from a deeper level of cause. That deeper level is the three levels of your mind that are beyond the level of the outer mind, what for most people is the conscious mind.
Let us say you decide that you want to change some aspect of your life. Our modern society has programmed us to believe, that if we want to solve a problem, we need to increase our understanding of the problem. So you start studying spiritual teachings, psychology or some self-help philosophy.
Now, it is not the intent here to say that increasing your understanding is useless. However, it is a readily observable fact that there are numerous people who have a great understanding of spiritual topics or psychology, yet they still can’t change basic patterns in their lives. So what is missing?
What could be missing is an understanding of cause and effect. As has been explained elsewhere, LINK there are four level of your mind. The lowest level is the physical mind, and this is what most people are aware of. The next level up is the emotional mind, the next the mental mind and the highest level is the identity mind.
The all-important point is that these four levels form a hierarchy. The spiritual light from your higher self first flows into your identity mind. Here it is colored by the very subtle beliefs you have at this level, which means these beliefs set a framework, a mental box, for everything that comes after.
As the light enters your mental body, it is already confined to a certain box, and your mental mind cannot override what comes to it from above. Your mental body also colors the light, meaning it is even more “set in stone” when it enters your emotional mind and so on.
The conclusion is that if you seek to change your behavior by increasing your conscious understanding, you are not likely to be successful, because you are working at the level of the physical mind, which is the lowest of the four levels.
As you know, the images on a movie screen are projections of the images on the filmstrip in the projector. Yet imagine that you have four film strips, and the first film strip defines the boundaries for what can appear on the second strip and so on. You can now see that if you truly want to change your life, you need to go to the deeper levels and make changes there.
Why is this so important? Say you decide with your conscious mind that you want to change your life. You therefore asses your situation, and you make a conscious choice to do something. Yet what is that choice based on? It is based on what you can see. The simple fact is that even with the best of intentions, we can only choose among the options we can see.
As an example, say you are in a movie theater, and there is a horror movie playing on the screen. You want to change the movie, and you are sitting by a control panel that will supposedly allow you to do that. In fact, the owner of the movie theater claims that the control panel gives you the power to change the movie into anything you want.
The control panel contains a number of lighted buttons. Red buttons allow you to select various horror movies, blue buttons allow you to select from a variety of action movies, pink buttons allow you to select romantic comedies and so on. The problem is that you don’t know that you are wearing colored glasses, that filter out any light frequency besides red. The other buttons really are there, so theoretically you do have all options open to you. Yet in actuality, you can only choose among the options you can see. Which means you can change the movie from one horror movie to another, but you can never get out of that genre.
So what is the key to changing your situation? It is to expand the number of options you can see. And what is the key to doing that? It is to remove the perception filters that block out certain options. And these perception filters are located in the four levels of your mind, with the filters in the identity mind having by far the greatest impact on your life.
How do you even get started on seeing the perception filters in the higher levels of your mind? Well, the essential key is to realize that seeing a perception filter is NOT a matter of intellectual understanding. In fact, expanding your intellectual understanding of spirituality or psychology can have the opposite effect. The reason being that understanding is at the level of the conscious mind. And in order to see beyond this level, you need to still the conscious mind. So putting more knowledge into the conscious mind can increase the turbulence and make it more difficult to go beyond that level.
Transcending a perception filter is a matter of “seeing,” of experiencing, how your view of life is colored by a certain belief and how this limits you. Once you see how you limit yourself, you will spontaneously make the decision to let go of the belief and replace it with the higher reality that you now see (you can’t see that a belief is limiting you until you see the higher reality).
Transcendence Tools are based on a very simple recognition. The real key to transcending our limitations is to uncover and consciously transcend our perception filters at the higher levels of the mind. The reason is that these perception filters form the filmstrips through which we co-create our own circumstances. They are the cause, and what is going on in the material world and our conscious minds is simply the effect. To change the movie on the screen, simply change the filmstrip in the projector.
As explained elsewhere, it is extremely helpful to transform the low-frequency energies that block your vision of a limiting belief. That is why most spiritual teachers recommend some form of spiritual practice designed to transform or release low-frequency energy. Transcendence Tools will do this also.
Yet beyond this, Transcendence Tools are based on the recognition that the very core of your lower being is something called the Conscious You. And while the name is just a name, the essential point is that the core of your being is pure awareness. This means that you do NOT have to look at life only through the perception filters found at the four levels of your mind.
You can learn to return to the state of pure awareness, so that instead of seeing through your perception filters, you can now look directly at the perception filters. It is like looking at a house from the outside instead of looking at the world from inside the house. In other words, the Conscious You has projected itself into your current perception filters, but it has the capacity to project itself outside of them.
While you are inside the perception filters, you can NEVER see the perception filters. It is only when you have an experience of inner stillness, of a state of consciousness beyond the normal, that you can see what you normally see through. And this is when you will now make true progress, because you can now begin to transcend your perception filters instead of seeking to defend them as reality. You can realize that you are wearing yellow glasses, instead of spending the rest of your life trying to convince other people that the sky really is green.
This is truly why some spiritual teachers recommend meditation or other practices aimed at stilling the mind. This is why some teachers seek to shock their students into seeing things with new eyes, from a new perspective. For example, the entire practice of Zen is aimed at tricking the mind to step outside of its normal perception filters, so the student realizes that there is an alternative to the way he or she normally sees everything.
Do you see, that the key to spiritual progress is NOT to acquire more and more knowledge? Instead, it is to purify the mind of the perception filters we have created as a reaction to the current conditions in the material world. This is the only way we can fulfill our intended role of being co-creators who, instead of creating within the framework defined by current conditions, keep our vision pure, so we can cause the material world to transcend its current limitations.
In reality, you are who you are—you are who your higher self sees you as being. Yet in the here and now, you are who you think you are—and you make choices based on what you see. The key to changing your life experience is to change who you think you are, so you see who you really are. Only then can you see all of the options available to you and only then can you choose freely.
Copyright © 2012 by Kim Michaels