Minds Greater Than You

To learn from them we must first recognize them. But how?

Suppose for a moment that telepathy weren’t only real, but easy and straight-forward.

That we could open a connection to another mind and look around: put ourselves in another’s head and experience what he feels, senses and thinks. We could move around in someone else’s mind, understand deeply and viscerally his inner world.

This is easy enough to imagine if we assume that we are capable of understanding such a mind. That is, if it is close enough to our own thoughtscape, or how our own mind used to be: if at some point we had similar thoughts, similar impressions and feelings, similar ways of looking at the world.

In other words, for it to work we would need to have had similar experiences to a degree; we’d need to be at the same level or above in terms of our development: not just of our mental development, but our overall progression towards wisdom and truth, towards subtle understanding and subtle perception.

But what if the person we explore telepathically is above us? Further developed?

Then such a person would have experiences we never had, and couldn’t even imagine having. So, to make his inner world intelligible at all to us, this person would have to deliberately “tone down” or “focus” his mind in a certain way so that we won’t get overloaded with a form of perception that could only seem utterly foreign to us.

We know this from our daily life, even without telepathy. For example, we can often perfectly predict what people who hold certain ideologies will say about various issues. Once you learn how a certain type of mind works through repeated interaction, you know the template: it doesn’t seem foreign at all. This is especially true if you yourself went through phases in your life where you thought along similar lines.

The dynamic holds true for feelings, sensations and another’s overall “mind architecture.” This doesn’t mean we can’t learn something new by probing someone’s mind; it just means that we can understand it, get to know what’s going on.

However, someone who is very advanced will present to us a mind that is multidimensional; that mind might be able to look at the world from all kinds of angles simultaneously, and the person’s ultra-subtle feelings, to which he is receptive, will mitigate between those angles, producing sensations that are incomprehensible to us. We simply are not there yet. Also, the way such a person chooses where to direct his attention, how to use his mind, how to move around in his mind-space, might happen based on criteria that we have no clue about and can’t, for the life of us, figure out.

Where we think issue-based, problem-based, ego-based, driven by circumstances and immediate needs or how good certain thoughts feel in the moment, such an advanced mind may think in (to us) unimaginable broadness, Being-based, his gaze directed outwards, driven by the sunlight flowing through the cracks of existence in the form of supremely subtle sensations he has learned to read accurately through many years of experience and perfection. How could a lesser mind even begin to grasp what’s going on in such a person?

It overloads us, bewilders us, makes us miserable.

There’s an interesting lesson here. Namely that we can’t understand our betters, our true betters. Their utterances, their actions are a mystery to us, or, since we can’t even grasp that, they seem wrong, pitiful, weak, aggressive, even repulsive.

From all this follows a peculiar conundrum: if we want to advance, how can we learn from those wiser than us if we can’t recognize them, and their words and actions seem erratic or even sinful to us? This is why various esoteric and mainstream religious traditions operate with harsh discipleship and discipline: as an adept, you make a gamble, a leap of faith, and submit to a spiritual master, guru, priest or religious hierarchy completely and unquestioningly. You suspend your critical mind, in recognition that you have no way of understanding a higher mind, and therefore no basis for criticism. To advance, you must trust and pay with giving up parts of your egoic instincts and drives. You willingly submit to authority in the hope that you will learn something down the road that you can’t learn by yourself because your thinking — your whole being — is screwed up, low in development as it is.

Needless to say, this is dangerous business. Abuses of this sort of relationship are legion; countless fake or corrupted religions, cults, mystery schools and so on attest to that. Then again, if the stakes are high, so is the potential reward; there’s nothing free in this universe.

Another conundrum: the freest spirits are often those most suited for learning from someone truly more advanced; yet they are also often those who treasure their freedom most and are therefore most resistant to submitting to any authority, especially if this authority threatens their ego. Their free spirit is their greatest asset, but potentially their greatest curse too. Abusive master-disciple relationships are legion, it is true, but so are “free spirits” getting sucked into darkness and hell on earth because of hubris, arrogance and overestimation of their own development.

So, what to do? If we can’t recognize higher minds, and indeed they can seem strange or even evil to us, how can we identify them? And how to distinguish them from the dark minds sucking us into their destructive games?

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