We don’t really know where we are in this journey. You can’t really say, “I’m at a higher level,” or “I’m at the ultimate level,” or “I’m even a beginner” because you don’t know how you’ve been struck before by the powers of Heaven. 

Excerpted from a teaching given by Marshall Vian Summers called “Knowledge: The Spiritual Mind Within All of Us,” recorded May 11, 2019 in Boulder CO, USA.

We don’t really know where we are in this journey. You can’t really say, “I’m at a higher level,” or “I’m at the ultimate level,” or “I’m even a beginner” because you don’t know how you’ve been struck before by the powers of Heaven. You might have been struck when you were seven-years-old, something that stood out amongst all your other experiences, which are all like dross that don’t really even matter. But one or two things stand out from your early life. Something struck you. It may not make sense, may not fit into your idea of yourself, but there it was. And that stayed with you.

So even being a beginner is hard to tell. Some people who are beginners come to The Way of Knowledge actually having some real experiences of Knowledge. They just don’t know they had an experience of Knowledge. Other people come filled with spiritual idealism, thinking that Knowledge is guiding them at all times, and they are really a beginner. But they can’t accept that they are a beginner because they’ve invested so much in building up this idea of themselves. This personal mind now becomes a personal spiritual mind. It’s very grand. It’s very special. And all that has to be undone. It’s all stuff in the way now. It’s whether you have a simple mask or a complex mask, a simple mind or a complex mind.

So we have the intellect, this worldly mind, that the world has shaped and we have shaped through our response to it. Then we have the deeper Mind, which the New Message calls Knowledge, which represents the eternal part of you, the part of you that lives beyond time and space. It’s connected to your Source and to those who sent you into the world to begin with.

This is not a resource you can use to enhance your life. It’s far more powerful than your intellect. And it’s incorruptible. It cannot be corrupted by the world or any force in the universe. Can anyone really honestly say that they personally cannot be corrupted by any force in the world or force in the universe? But Knowledge being beyond our normal definitions, functioning on its own with its own dynamic, is something that we have a hard time understanding. So we’ll talk about understanding as we go forward.

The essential element of our personal mind is to survive, first of all, and to try to find fulfillment living in physical reality, which is very hard to do for an immortal being whose almost entire existence has been outside of physical reality. I’m talking about you. It’s like trying to live your whole life in a tiny little trailer, you know, the kind of trailer that a car pulls? You’re going to find all purpose, meaning and direction within this little tiny trailer? You, who have lived in the expanse, are going to try to now recreate purpose, meaning and direction in this very constrained and changeable environment?

The personal mind is fundamentally based in fear—the fear of not having, the fear of loss. It has no real security. It has no real permanence. Tied to the body, it experiences all the pains of the body, which are real and cannot be fully avoided. It is facing an uncertain and dangerous world where nothing is really very assured, where honest and meaningful relationships seem to be hard to find, competing with all other minds who are trying to do the same thing. And what you have is a pretty chaotic reality despite the appearance of stability that we all try to create and have for ourselves, understandably. It is really chaotic. This is why you can’t create your own reality because you’re living in a reality that everyone else is creating.