Hospital for Diseased Beliefs (Lower Mental Plane, Causal Body)
AC 260: December 19, 2006 (Boston)In the middle of the night, as I slept and dreamt, I found myself in a bustling hospital environment. I recognized it as a teaching and healing facility for diseased belief systems on the lower mental plane. I was being ushered through a lobby or receiving area, part of a vast network of interconnected wings and floors. It reminded me of the Longwood Medical area in Boston.
I was in a central area with a ceiling several storeys overhead. There were wide wooden reception desks on my level, overlooked by balconies. I saw tall potted plants, welcome banners, banks of elevators with shiny reflective metallic doors, windows everywhere, and thick granite columns supporting the high roof.
Throngs of people of all ages and nationalities passed by, including children in strollers with balloons and teddy bears. The place bustled with vitality, clearly not part of the Afterdeath Zone. It was a part of the lower mental plane reserved for the living.
Later, I realized that this is how the Dream Zone manifests itself on the lower mental plane. On the astral plane, our dreams primarily focus on working through our emotions. But on the lower mental plane, our dreams reflect the work we need to do on our belief systems to heal our perspective on ourselves, other people, and the world.
I was accompanied by two familiar nonphysical beings, Athena, a longtime member of my support team on the Other Side, and my spiritual teacher. Athena appeared to me as a nurse, and my spiritual teacher as a doctor, indicating not only their roles and intentions with respect to me, but also their difference in rank, Facilitator versus Overseer.
Athena welcomed me, attempting to make me feel comfortable, even as I felt somewhat disoriented. I wasn’t sure what was going on.
“You’re being admitted,” she explained.
I was alarmed, taking the hospital environment literally. Was I having a precognitive dream about some impending illness?
“There’s a procedure you need to go through,” Athena continued. “It’s part of the transition process from mastering the causal body to developing the buddhic. You need to purge from your belief system everything that stands in the way of this process.”
I suddenly noticed that I was in a wheelchair, which alarmed me further. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “A procedure? I’m in perfect health.”
“The beliefs you need to purge are like cancer,” said Athena. “They stand against your growth. They can take over the positive, life-affirming aspects of your belief system and destroy them with negative attitudes. In this treatment facility, you can reduce and eliminate such attitudes, as with radiation therapy.”
“What, you mean I have cancer?” I cried. Fear flooded my mind, temporarily preventing clear feel/think communication. Until I calmed down, I was too much in my normal ego consciousness. I took everything Athena said literally, instead of realizing that she was telling me about energy states and their functions. I felt drugged and out of it.
My teacher, the doctor, was pushing the wheelchair. “We need your consent before we continue,” he said. “I’m supporting your state of consciousness. You’re in my care. That’s why it seems that you’re in a wheelchair.
“Without my help, you might not be able to participate in or remember the procedure. That feeling of being drugged represents your resistance to my gentle mind control.
“If you were fully awake and aware in your ordinary ego consciousness, you would probably resist the procedure, since it involves reducing the degree to which that aspect of yourself controls your reactions to what’s going on inside and outside of you. On the other hand, if you could fully understand what we’re about to do and agree with its necessity, you wouldn’t need the procedure.”
I slumped in the wheelchair. “Well,” I said, “if I have cancer, then just do what you need to do.”
Athena and the doctor presented me with some paperwork that explained the procedure.
“You have to agree to this treatment,” the doctor said. “You must have full knowledge of what you’re getting into, so that you won’t feel that your free will has been violated in any way.”
I seemed to be two different people. Part of me was so depressed over having cancer that I hardly paid attention. Another part was more aware of the issues involved and willing--even eager--to consent.
They gave me a release form. Instead of asking for a signature, they needed an impress of my thumb print.
“Where’s the inkpad?” I asked.
“You don’t need one,” Athena explained. “Just as your thumb print reveals a pattern of lines unique to you and useful as a means of identification, so does your energy imprint have unique identifying qualities. That’s what we require--your energy imprint.
The part of me that was willing to consent took hold of the paperwork with both hands, pressing my thumbs intently against its surface. Apparently, that was enough.
“Yes,” Athena said, “it’s your intention, the willingness of your being to go forward with this procedure, that gives us permission to continue. These documents are part of an energy/ information packet, a file on this stage of your growth. They now carry the impress of your affirmative intention to continue, the signature of your being.”
As I handed the paperwork back to Athena, the receiving area of the hospital faded from view. Now the three of us stood before a gate to a walled compound. Actually, Athena and the doctor stood there--I was still in the wheelchair.
The gate was staffed by a Gatekeeper, who seemed ancient and slow, somewhat lizard-like. Though the Gatekeeper’s form was outwardly human, I could sense that his consciousness was not. He’d apparently experienced lifetimes as a human being, but his reality of origin was elsewhere.
[Gatekeepers are often of the Administrator class, between Facilitators and Overseers. This was not the first time that I’d encountered an Administrator with this nonhuman, lizard-like ident. But I have no idea where they come from or why they appear to me this way.]
The Gatekeeper examined the energy/information packet I had just “signed” to make sure that I’d given permission for the procedure and fully understood what I was getting into.
“The paperwork is satisfactory,” he said, even though part of me still had no idea what was going on. The Gatekeeper waved us through the gate.
On the other side of the gate, the compound looked like an old-fashioned mental hospital. The surrounding wall appeared to be about ten feet high, made of red brick. There were extensive, well-maintained grounds, a bright green lawn, and several widely separated red brick buildings, like dormitories.
Green often appears in my adventures to indicate that I’ve entered a nonphysical energy field dedicated to growth. The buildings were nineteenth century in style, expansive, like Victorian vacation cottages. I was reminded that mental institutions were often perceived back then as places to rest one’s nerves rather than asylums for incarcerating the insane.
Despite their old-fashioned appearance, the buildings seemed fresh, newly built. But that may have meant only that they were new to me--or, more likely, that I had just created them to represent the energies I felt in this area of nonphysical reality.
Athena and the doctor wheeled me toward one of the buildings. When we entered it, I immediately began to feel uncomfortable. The walls radiated a strange heat that made me itchy all over. I squirmed like a snake about to shed its skin. My discomfort increased as we went deeper into the building and came at last to a small treatment room.
The doctor explained what I was experiencing. “This area of nonphysical reality is set up to expose you to a higher level of closeness to the Source than your present level of evolution allows you to be comfortable with.
“The Source radiates an energy that strips away anything not consistent with it, hence your sense of wanting to shed your skin. That skin represents the aspects of your personality that stand against, or resist, the journey back to the Source.
“Because the radiation of the Source is divine love, it attempts to break down all your self-disapproval and lovability issues. Most people’s personalities contain a lot of such issues, so the love of the Source can feel overwhelming, like it’s destroying or dissolving your ego.
“In order to move from the causal body to the buddhic, you need to free yourself from all resistance to divine love as expressed on the buddhic plane. This is the procedure you’ve signed up for.
“The feeling of not being good enough to experience the bliss of total immersion in divine love lies at the core of most human beings. It’s a result not only of religious teachings about original sin, but also of confusion over why you so often don’t get what you need when you incarnate in the physical world.
“In nonphysical reality, between lifetimes, your needs are satisfied with a thought. You create your own reality instantly. You feel totally loved and understood because you’re surrounded by, and even merged with, other humans who share your values and level of spiritual development. All communication is telepathic.
“When you reenter physical reality, you’re a helpless infant. You can no longer create reality instantly with a thought. Your needs are satisfied to some extent by your parents, but only sporadically. They rarely sense and respond to your telepathic communications.
“You’re in a body that clearly separates you from others. It feels hopelessly confining, often like a prison. Love comes and goes, is offered and withheld to manipulate you. People lie to you and rationalize their often unreasonable behavior.
“As you try to figure all this out, it’s no wonder that you come to a couple of devastatingly wrong conclusions, which then become the core of your personality: You’re not getting the love you need, so there’s something wrong with you or the world. You’re simply not good enough. You’re unlovable.
“From that point forward, your modus operandi is to gain the approval and love of others, which often goes against the growth needs of your soul. You develop a false personality based on seeking such approval.
“True personality is your life purpose. Discovering and living from that purpose brings you closer to Source.
“Once on the spiritual path, you desire the love of the Source more than that of other humans. But to access higher levels of that love, you need to burn away false personality.
“That process comes to a head at the point when you master the causal body. All false personality must be burned off before you can proceed to the lessons of mastering the buddhic body. This is the point at which you now find yourself.
“It’s not easy to burn away false personality. It has been around practically since birth. It’s so deeply ingrained that you may not be able to detect it.
“The best way to eradicate false personality is to expose you to a higher level of bliss--the divine love of the Source--than you feel comfortable with. False personality squirms under this exposure so that you can identify and deal with it. The trick, however, is not to overwhelm you with this love, since it can terrify you.
“Remember Rilke’s angel, whose embrace is the beginning of terror, but also indescribably beautiful, “because it serenely disdains to annihilate.” The procedure we have in mind will place you in exactly the position described by Rilke--a little more divine love than you can comfortably bear, almost annihilating, but only to the false aspects of your personality.
”If you think of the divine love of the Source as light, then the procedure is designed to eliminate the dark and shadowy areas from your being--those resistant to the light. It only feels like annihilation to people who completely identify with those shadowy areas.”
With that, Athena and the doctor wheeled me into the treatment room, withdrew, and closed the door. The room was small, just large enough for me and my wheelchair, and otherwise unfurnished. The radiation from the Source was more intense here. I experienced acute discomfort, but not pain.
I felt afraid, knowing that the treatment would profoundly alter my perception of myself and the world, and might prove isolating. I was even a little ashamed at the stuff I had to face and burn away.
I could sense that there wasn’t a lot of it, after so many years of purging my negative emotions and unfulfilled desires and working on my belief system in dreams and other spiritual exercises. But what was left was deeply woven into the fabric of my being--the core of my resistance to being and becoming who I truly am at every level, the part of me that wants to turn away from the Source.
As I absorbed the radiation from the walls, squirming all the while, I pondered the human condition. From the perspective of my friends in Otherwhere, our desire to turn away from the Source, though typical, was crazy. Why turn away from divine love and bliss? But we do--and that was one reason why I saw the facility I was in as a mental hospital.
While the treatment proceeded, I could monitor its effects on my energy body, as if I had X-ray vision. The dark aspects of myself shrank gradually, until they were the size of a large shadowy salamander in the area of my heart, always trying to hide within or behind it.
In medieval alchemy, salamanders were linked to the element of fire. They could resist and survive within it--a sign of how resistant this darkness at the core of my being was to the fire of divine love attempting to burn it away.
I wasn’t able to eliminate it entirely. But while the treatment proceeded on my causal body, I was somehow simultaneously aware of my physical body.
Now I understood why I felt like two different people during the discussion with Athena and my spiritual teacher about the procedure I was signing up for. The part of me that assented was the self I am in my causal body. The part that was confused and doubtful was who I am in the physical body. For the procedure to work, I needed to maintain a connection between my causal and physical bodies.
As I squirmed within the radiation, wanting somehow to shed my skin, my feelings of discomfort in the causal body were transferred to my physical body and released. I was grounding the darkness within me by using the physical body as a lightning rod. I spent most of the night in this process.
[For months afterwards, my dreams often seemed to be identifying and purging resistances of various kinds. Even my waking life participated in the process. Current events would trigger old issues from the past that had to be reexamined, understood from a new perspective, and released.
For much of this time of purification, I could barely feel the presence of my inner spiritual teacher. Sometimes I even seemed to forget about him for weeks.]