Hermann Kuhn
6 - The sixth level (pramatta virata)
is our long desired breakthrough into tangible superior understanding. At the first unfolding of this stage we feel immersed in an intense vividness of the present never before experienced. Immense relief sweeps through our consciousness, dissolving all our worries and fears. We reach unknown heights of serenity, sovereignty and elation. It is as if an inner light has been switched on. - This breakthrough gives us the ultimate and solid confirmation that our path really leads to dimensions of consciousness entirely unimaginable on lower stages.
With liberating clarity we recognize how severely the thought- and emotional patterns of our past and the expectations (and dreads) we project onto the future limit our perception of the present. The immediacy with which we recognize these deep-rooted patterns enables us to consciously break free from their overshadowing influence.
One by one all concepts, emotions, preconceptions and prejudices that up to this moment locked our consciousness into narrow limits, fall off like superfluous crusts. The tight band of events we previously felt and thought was our only conceivable path, now appears like a confining tube in which our life ran from a restrictive past into an equally restricted future.[1] Our awareness begins to perceive the world outside this tube.
We recognize that the sum total of actions possible within the context of the material world is limited. We now see the entirety of our material world from an outside perspective. For the first time we become aware that our real personality is far greater than the small part we perceive of it within the frame of our incarnations.
We now are free to choose entirely new lines of thoughts and actions independent of any previous mental and emotional patterns. A feeling of universal love rises within us that is not constrained by personal expectations and demands any more. In the beginning we feel like intoxicated by the potential that now opens up for our life.
Our attention shifts from the fleeting aspect of the present to its comprehensive character. More and more we now become aware of all the associations, expectations, contents and concepts that subconsciously also resonate within us when we observe events.
We sense significances and meanings that exist beyond our senses.
In each event we confront, we recognize how much we can learn from it if we engage in it through our action, - and how much energy we need to invest to gain these insights.
Yet our experience of this superior understanding is not stable. We drift in and out of this state. One moment we are deeply immersed and shaken by the worries and fears that challenge us on lower levels, - and in the next our awareness propels us high above these narrow bounds and enables us to imperviously observe them from a distant and uninvolved perspective.
The key to stabilizing the sixth stage of development is our decision to expand beyond our emotional attachment to limiting themes of life. The initial euphoric feeling when we entered this level marks the spot (the emotion) where to direct our attention to further disentangle our consciousness from the confining material experiences it is surrounded by.
If we experience just once how the sixth stage feels like - even if only for a short time - we become able to reach it deliberately. Whenever we confront limiting emotional attachments to the lower levels, we now can consciously decide whether to keep on experiencing the familiar, cherished painful feelings or to rise to stage six.
This is not renunciation, but rather the conscious decision to remain on a higher level of understanding. We do not give up our material conditions. We do not try to remove the factors that 'produced' our attachment to lower levels, we only extract our awareness from these confining bounds. We simply choose to orient towards far more attractive, sovereign and serene dimensions within us. We let go of our emotional attachment to some parts of the material world because we recognize how much they constrain our consciousness.
The restricting conditions might well continue to exist, - but only on a lower level that now hardly holds our attention. Since we invest no further energy in them, they completely cease to engage our attention after some time.[2]
Any activity we recognize as necessary, we now perform far more efficiently since we don't allow our energy to be diverted from our objective by petty egoistic motivation any more.
We realize that all our action furthers our progress.
The greater the courage with which we let go of deepest egoistic motivations, the faster our consciousness expands.
We recognize that we waste valuable energy when we allow our attention to be distracted by irrelevant themes - often manifesting in form of pointless gossip or as the 'endless running commentary' with which our mind incessantly accompanies the banalities of daily life. We observe how this detains other people (and us) on lower levels.[3] We perceive how the contents of such chatter surround us like a cocoon that obstructs any further unfoldment of our consciousness. We consciously extract ourselves from this cocoon.
The 'incessant running commentary' ceases automatically once we begin to systematically direct our attention towards inner growth mechanisms each time we become aware that we engage in this type of pointless (inner) chatter.
Though we still experience karmic manifestations that prevent the perfect realization of the Five Freedoms, these manifestations now surface as mere temporary distractions.
The more our experience of level six stabilizes, the more trying become the emotional challenges we face, when unfulfilled desires prompt us to go back to the violent emotional density of lower levels. It seems as if ever deeper levels of attachment to sore emotions activate so we might go through them for a last time to get rid of them for good. When these temporary distractions occur, patience and perseverance always help to gain back level six.
As soon as we gain sufficient stability to experience the intensity of the present (phase 1) permanently, and we let go enough of our emotional attachment to limiting mechanisms of our material environment to perceive beyond the five outward senses, we enter phase 2. Here we oscillate between stage six and seven until we become familiar enough with the far higher energies and perceptions of stage seven to proceed further.
This exclusive selective memory of painful moments of the past influences our anticipation of what the next hour might bring us so intensely that we hardly perceive the present. Distractedly we leaf through a magazine. Yet though our eyes are reading the words, we barely understand them, our present so totally overshadowed by dire memories and dread of the future.
And then we sit in the chair. The dentist examines us briefly and states that he would not operate on us today. - All our expectations and dreads amounted to nothing. All our projections of the future needlessly obscured our very present.
In the sixth stage of development we dissolve most of this restriction of the present that previously seemed inescapable. - And the relief we feel when we get out of the chair is only a small foretaste of the excitement we will experience, when we free all our present from the restrictive memories of our past and the narrow expectations and dreads we habitually project onto our future.
Small talk definitely has its purpose. As long as we are unable to directly fine-tune our relationship with others (which is necessary for the coexistence of human beings), small talk often represents the outer occasion, while the real emotional communication happens on deeper levels (we use this mechanism on level 1 to 5). Yet during a major unfolding of our consciousness talk about these themes significantly disturbs our process of expansion.
