What has been revealed to me, is that our continuation isn’t quite as it seems. We are told through religion that we either go to heaven or hell, or in the case of Eastern thought, we are reborn until enlightenment. What I’ve come to understand is a truth that mirrors my own direct experiences: What persists with us is a product of our own projections.

Physical Life as a Model

It all starts with what we know, where we exist. If we take a gander at the life around us, do we really see things as they exist? Do we really see our spouse, our kids, our neighbor? Do we really see our boss, our supervisor? Do we really see our enemies, our friends?

According to Buddhist thought, you and I do not see things clearly. In the language of the Bible, it is as though we “see through a glass darkly.”

What we perceive is a product of our own projections. Pick any person in your life right now, imagine them, and then consider this: you are only seeing a projection of that person.

Your very environment is a product of you.

To help understand this, we have a story from the East: three beings sit at a table. On the table is a glass of unknown liquid. The first being, an Angel, takes a sip and exclaims it’s Divine Nectar. The second being, a devil, takes a sip and spits it out exclaiming it’s “puss and blood!” The third being, a human, takes a sip and shrugs it off as “just water.”

The story of the three beings illustrates how our reality is a projection from within. But what energy powers those projections? It is our alignment. Alignment is everything.

Alignment

When our body, speech and mind is in alignment to fear, then we live in a fearful world. When it is in harmony with anger, we empower the radiance of an angry world at war. When alignment is harmonized with peace, then we receive the world as an empowerment of hope.

Alignment modifies our perception of people. We become neutral towards others, with the understanding that we lack the ability to see beyond our alignment.

We Are Creators

As our alignment colors our world, we begin to shape it (for better or worse). When we react to a world of our own creation, those peaks of reaction – those modulated cycles of attraction and aversion draw us further into a myth of fantasy.

Neutrality speaks truth. Modulation is the trap. Through it all, we are the creators.

You created the boss, the supervisor, the house, the apartment. These are your creations. Perhaps they exist on their own, but you don’t interact with that otherness. You interact with your creation.

In Eastern philosophy this is referred to as Maya, or Illusion. The illusionary aspect of life.

Death Follows Life

Tell me about life, and we’ll know death. As we are creators of our living world’s, so too do we create the expanded universe beyond physical existence.

Those who believe in a heaven, experience a type of heaven. Those who believe in hell, and cary the gravity of their guilt, experience hell.

For some, they see their dead relatives beckoning them onwards or warning them to return.

But is any of this “real”?

These too are projections. Imagine an empty void. In that void, your energy manifests what you expect to experience. A dead relative appears and communes with you. You feel it is “real.” What if this too is a projection?

As we interact with projections in life, will it be any different in death? Those parental figures from the “other side,” are they really them, or our projections of what we expect to find?

Even the story of a man who “expected to enter heaven” but had a hellish near-death experience, is experiencing their projections. Deep down they have a moral compass and their conscious is a silent observer. If they believe there is a hell (or they were influenced there is a hell), past actions of alignment will convey a feeling of “what is deserved.” The thief, the cruel heart, it manifests what it expects to experience. The material self may say in it’s piety, “I will enter heaven,” but the consciousness itself reminds it at death, “you did those shameful things,” and in a moment “reality” shifts. Heaven can turn to hell.

The Blue Pill

In the movie, The Matrix, the “blue pill” represented the experience of the illusion. It is the choice to live the illusion.

If everything is based on alignment and prone to illusion, why not just imagine the best (heaven) and stick with it? Great question. Why not?

Truth. The only reason to not live the illusionary hope, is the search for truth.

The materialist has the same quandary: “why should I live a life of holiness and ethical purity, when I can be manipulative and selfish? The gain is far greater living for myself.” Their illusion of gain grants them an experience in this life, but is it real? Is it lasting?

Those of us who seek the spiritual experience are really seeking truth. We just want to know what is real and to experience that reality.

Where’s God in All This?

Part of me hesitates to discuss God. My personal experience has led me to a sobering reality that what I thought was God, was really just a Greater form of me. This wasn’t comforting at first. It was isolating, it was cold.

“God,” was another projection on an energy greater than my own limited physical experience.

To talk about God, we need to first talk about us. What are you?

Self

If you define yourself as a physical person, you have limited your boundary to your body. Meditation’s great success is in the direct experience that we can experience beyond the body.

Being greater than the body, some will further limit the experience to “the soul.” The “soul” is often described as a personality self that persists on bodily death. But is this just another limiter?

Reaching further and further into experience, I came into the direct experience of the “Higher Self.” That Great Self had worn many masks. It was every spiritual experience I ever had. This being was the source of healing, the source of personal feeling of an “external Deity,” as well as the manifested force that appeared from time to time as a paranormal event.

My proof of the Higher Self being the source of all spiritual experience, was in a moment of Gnosis. While in personal reflection of my many spiritual and religious directions, I became aware of the “Presence of God” that I experienced in childhood Christian churches, Buddhist temples (who ironically didn’t have belief in God), in Hindu temples, in modern religions, in mystical societies and so on.

“Oh that isn’t the presence of the ‘one true god,’” someone will sneer. People can’t attest that their God would manifest to another faith… but when you let your guard down and you embrace a faith willingly and openly, the experience is there. This is why people leave one religion for another. Often they do this thinking, “Now I found the one true faith!” In time they may discover it too is laking and then find another “one true faith.” That was me. I kept finding the “one true faith,” but after a dozen times I realized there isn’t a single faith to rule them all.

How did I receive healing in body, from different faiths? How did I feel the same presence in most (if not all) aligned faiths? Some might argue that one God manifests through all traditions. But what of the Buddhist temple that has no belief in God? How did I feel that same abiding energy?

The answer was simple: it wasn’t one God speaking to me from all faiths, it was the Greater Self within me that I was bringing with me. I brought that Greater Self to the Christian church, the Buddhist temple, the Hindu temple, the Mystical society. Each time, that Greater aspect of me radiated the same loving kindness and acceptance. In the moment I thought, “here’s God!” In reality, I was finding myself.

Mundane vs. Spiritual Self (or self vs Self)

“So I’m God,” mocks the beer guzzling lack-luster fellow who sits around watching Netflix all day. No. That is not the Higher Self.

You are an expression. At one end you are infinite, and like a funnel, that infinite energy is drawn down through a pipeline until it drips into minimal droplet. That droplet is our physical experience.

The minimal self is concerned with the physical need. This is important to live, but if left to its own devices, it becomes the caretaker of illusion. It tells us “this is all there is.” With that attitude one cares less for others, and feeds only their own mouth. They may, on occasion, expand their sense of self to include a child, a spouse, a nationality, a political spectrum. Some will expand beyond those still limiting boundaries, and harmonize with the “other” (racially different, different gender, etc.) Going further, one might begin to harmonize with animal and plant, beyond the physical universe. This is one way back through the proverbial funnel, into larger expansions of “self.”

For me, I have this connection to the Greater Self. Like a constant phone call, I’m reaching back upwards and finding the influence – the guidance.

When we become self-realized, we would be a being that exists at all points along the expansion line. From the Highest, to the most minimal.

Back to God as Self

A warning in the Bible tells us of the fall of “Satan.” If you believe the story, Satan was cast down because of the audacity to desire to raise itself above “the throne of God.” Well I agree, that’s not a good thing to do… and yet the Self is God.

The story of Satan is the story of a being lacking self-awareness. Speaking in the form of ego and power, it falsely attested it was God. It’s like me, physical me who has all sorts of issues, thinking itself God.

Spiritual history is filled with guru’s and spiritual leaders, who attested they were “Divine,” only to lead their followers into perverse slavery, or even suicide.

It is not me, the physical being, that is God. It is Me, the Greatest expansion that is God.

“How can your Greatest Self be God, when I too have a Greater Self? Wouldn’t we be competing Gods!!” Yes I totally understand the problem. To answer that: return to the idea that we only relate with our projections. The boss, the spouse, the child, are projections. They may be something self-existent but what we relate to is always a projection. With that understanding, revisit the idea of God.

“But there must still be the One Creator who made it all?” If all we experience is a projection, then we’ll never see anything beyond the projection, which is really an aspect of our own nature. Not the personality of some meat body, not the personality of some “soul” not the limited scope “me” or “you” but the real deal, Higher Self. That is God as you are able to perceive and interact with God. You have yours, I have mine, your boss has his, and so on.

If you Know, You Know

This whole discussion can not be argued with philosophy, logic, or theological discourse. It can’t be done because it is outside the measurable human experience. To know if this is true (or not), one must have a direct experience of that something Greater than themselves.

That “something” may wear a mask of “Jesus” or “Guru” or “Krishna.” If you only see the mask, you’ll find everything discussed here to be false. If you have had the experience of crossing the boundaries of different faiths, and finding that deep connection with Holiness, you may start to see the shifting nature of “God.” That being who wears multiple masks.

I’ve asked my Highest Self what their experience is like. From what I gather, it’s like sitting in a dark ocean, or a luminous void. It seems to experience the physical life, through it’s manifested experience. Like memory, those experiences are recalled into being. Perhaps it can exist in multiple manifestations at once – I don’t know. What I do feel, is that it accepts me, and loves me. My experiences are viewed like memories. Like me, it has a path – a path that maybe one day I’ll understand (through cycles of self-realization).