There are many mansions in my Father’s kingdom, said Jesus Christ. Here is a brief outline of the mansions of consciousness beyond the ordinary mentality and how to come into contact with them.
If we want to harness the highest, total potential of people, we will first have to understand the nature of the higher ranges of human consciousness, a consciousness beyond ordinary mentality. This article provides briefly, an outline of these deeper and higher realms of consciousness and the principles of the inner discipline to awaken them in our individual self and in the collective life.
We may broadly classify the faculties of our consciousness into four categories – the instincts and sensations of body-consciousness; emotional, dynamic and pragmatic faculties of the vital consciousness; rational, conceptive and analytical faculties of the mind-consciousness; intuitive faculties of the consciousness beyond or behind the mind. We may include the ethical and aesthetic faculties as part of the higher mental consciousness. There are two layers or level in our physical, vital and mental consciousness; surface and the subliminal. Behind or above the subliminal are the various ranges of spiritual consciousness. Thus we may classify human consciousness into three layers: surface, subliminal and spiritual.
The first and the lowest level is our surface conscious mentality, which is more or less enclosed or tied to our bodily consciousness. At this level the faculties of our consciousness are severely limited and conditioned by the grossness of our physical ego and the divisive consciousness of the mental ego expressing itself through a heavily externalised and rigidly analytical earthly intellect. This is the consciousness in which a major part of humanity lives at present. Here, the faculties of our consciousness are at the lowest level of light, power, harmony or integration.
But this is not all we are. Behind the externalised surface consciousness there is a deeper and vaster subliminal consciousness with an inner or subtle Physical, inner Vital and inner Mental Consciousness. (1) Here the faculties of our consciousness acquire a vaster range and power and becomes much more powerful, luminous, creative and intuitive.
This is because the subliminal is less circumscribed by the heaviness and grossness of our body-consciousness, and the knot of ego, though very much there, is less tight than in our surface consciousness. Thus the subliminal can easily burst out of the body-consciousness and expand into the universal. Since the subliminal mind and vital are not limited and confined to the externalised analytical intellect or the emotions of our surface being, they are much more intuitive than the surface being, with a greater capacity for knowledge, feeling and action. And finally, the faculties of the subliminal consciousness are much more integrated and harmonized than that of the surface. This subliminal is the source of all human greatness and genius. It is the source of inspiration behind all those great and eminent men and women who have gone beyond the average human mass and made important contributions to human progress in thought and action and leadership, especially in the secular life of humanity such as politics, culture and science.
The subliminal is also the source of all occult and para-psychological phenomena like extra sensory perception, telepathy, clairvoyance and telekinesis. The subliminal can see, feel or sense the supra-physical forces and things behind the visible material facts, which the ordinary mind, confined within the surface consciousness, cannot see. It has also a more conscious and direct contact with the universal mind, of which our individual mind is a receiving centre. Those who live in, or in contact with their subliminal consciousness, can sense thoughts and feelings in other minds. So the awakening of the subliminal may also lead to a greater awareness of our inner connectedness, in other words, the psychological interdependence and interaction of our mind and life. This may lead to a great progress in psychology, which in turn can bring about a psychological equivalent of the IT revolution.
However, the subliminal is only an extension of the surface consciousness with greater powers. When it emerges in the human being, it can considerably enhance the powers of consciousness but cannot transform it because the subliminal is not free from ego and desire. It may have a freer, a more powerful and magnified or a more refined ego and desire but will not be entirely off from them, for no lasting and essential transformation of the human being is possible without a radical freedom from these two central knots of bondage.
The other important factor to be noted is that the subliminal has its luminous as well as dark regions. So, in future, when the subliminal begins to manifest in the human consciousness on a large and widespread scale, it will have its positive benefits as well as grave dangers. If the luminous regions of the subliminal can do much for bringing to humanity a greater goodness than the surface consciousness, its dark regions can wrought a much greater evil than the surface consciousness is capable of doing. While the luminous regions of the subliminal can create an Einstein or a Gandhi, its dark regions can create a Hitler!
Thus the subliminal is not the highest potential or power of our being. Behind and above the subliminal lies a vast range of the spiritual consciousness. The spiritual is not a single white monotone of peace and bliss as some spiritual traditions imagine it to be. As Jesus Christ said, “There are many mansions in my Father’s Kingdom” The “Father’s Kingdom” is the spiritual realm, the parent of our being, which contains many landmarks, levels, ranges, worlds “Mansions”.
The first major spiritual mansion or landmark within the individual is what is called the “Psychic being” in Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Psychology. Behind the subliminal, in the deepest and innermost core of our being, lies the true spiritual centre of our individuality. It is this true self in us which is probably the truth behind the “soul” of religions. This psychic being is the source of man’s higher aspirations for truth, beauty, goodness, harmony, love and unity.
In this spiritual perspective, the real source of all moral and aesthetic aspiration for truth and right, goodness and beauty, is not the ethical and aesthetic being in the mind but the spiritual self beyond the mind. The ethical and aesthetic being and their moral notions, conscience, and sensitivities are partial, diminished or very often, faulty reflections and constructions of the deeper and truer perceptions and aspiration of the psychic being in man. The ethical and aesthetic being in the mind, like other emotional or intellectual faculties, are instruments constructed by the more or less ignorant mind for expressing the evolving soul in man. They become true and perfect only to the extent to which they are under the influence of the psychic being or the spiritual self.
The psychic being is the source of sainthood; it is the part of our being or consciousness, which creates the saint or such spiritual personalities with a deep and pure love for God and man and all creation. But, apart from these spiritual results, the psychic being has also some important pragmatic implications for the secular life of humanity. It is the source of highest harmony and integration in the human being. Only the psychic being, when it comes forward and takes full and conscious control of our life, can bring about a complete and perfect integration of our physical, vital and mental being and all its faculties and create a harmonious whole of our being and life. The other pragmatic result of psychic awakening is an unerring inner guidance, discrimination and intuition. Our whole being is illumined and clarified by a light of truth which illumines and clarifies every movement and corner of our consciousness, gives the right thought and feeling, right response to every situation and an intuition which can resolve all contradiction, dualities and dilemmas in a higher synthesis.
However, our spiritual potentials are not limited to the psychic being. There are also many levels of spiritual mind beyond the rational mind. If the psychic being is the source of the saint, the spiritual mind is the source of the seer and sage. The spiritual mind is in direct contact with the Cosmic Mind of the Spirit. The human mind can, when it is able to open itself or rise to the spiritual mind, merge into or identify with the cosmic mind and participate in its universal knowledge, power and vastness. In the spiritual mind, the deepest, highest and universal truth of the self and the world are revealed to the human mind at various levels of direct insight, inner vision or intuition. And beyond the spiritual mind lies what Sri Aurobindo calls the “Supermind” which is the creative source of the universe.
This brings us to the practical question – what is the path or discipline for awakening these higher ranges of consciousness that are not usually manifest in most of us. The answer for this question will be discussed in greater detail in one of the regular features of this e-magazine – Self-management. So here we will briefly indicate the main principles of the discipline.
The first principle is Inner Silence; especially of the surface mind. But peace or silence cannot be sustained without purity. So the second principle is purity, which means a certain amount of freedom from ego, desire, greed, selfishness and attachment to the thoughts, emotions and impulses of the surface mind.
The third principle is a constant and vigilant self-observation leading to increasing self-knowledge. The fourth principle is internalisation, which means shifting the operating centre of consciousness from the surface mentality to the deeper or inner levels of our being through a path of meditation, work or devotion. An important part of this discipline is to acquire the ability to turn inward and remain in a state of passive and receptive silence to receive the inner intuition, guidance or inspiration from these deeper and higher ranges of consciousness. To harness the highest and total human potential in an organization or collective, this four-fold discipline has to become an integral part of the education and training of individuals.
1. The subliminal of Integral psychology is not the same as the subconscious of modern psychology. The subconscious is something below and less consciousness than the surface conscious mind; it is dark, infrarational and instinctive. But the subliminal is behind the surface mentality and it is much more luminous, conscious and intuitive with greater capacity for knowledge than the rationality of the surface being. For example, Freudian psychology belongs predominantly to the subconscious. But the psychology of Carl Jung contains many concepts and experiences that belong to the subliminal. However Jungian psychology makes no distinction between the subconscious and subliminal, clubbing them together in an omnibus term “Unconscious”. But he subliminal cannot be called as “Unconscious” because it is much more conscious than the surface mentality.
A core characteristic of FDT is the Launch Configuration. Having a clear understanding of how it works, will enable you to understand how the FDT builds your projects. This is an unique FDT feature that other IDEs can't even touch.
Customizable Launch Configurations gives developers a great deal of power and flexibility. While it would be much easier for beginners to have FDT force a particular file structure and naming conventions, as they become more and more familiar with FDT ( or any IDE ) they are eventually going to want to have things work their way. Here are some important concepts to understand when working with Launch Configurations:
Developers can set ANY class to act the Main or Document class of a project. As long as the Class exists within any source folder, it can be set as the Class to build your application (if it's a class that doesn't inherit from Sprite, FDT will throw a compile error).
You can easily change the name of the output .SWF to anything you want without having to alter any compiler arguments yourself.
A project does not itself contain launch or compile settings; instead, a project has one or more launch configurations (saved as files in your .settings folder) which contain the settings FDT will use to compile your .SWFs.
That last point is probably the most different when coming from other IDEs. The best way to explain this is to demonstrate it.
After importing the project created in the Basic AS3 Tutorial ( or creating your own ), expand the launch folder located within the .settings folder . Here you can see the Main.launch file that contains launch settings for this project. Now, delete that file ( don't worry we'll make plenty more ) . Make sure no file is open in the Editor ( if the Main.as class is open in the Editor close it ) then click on the Run button within the menu bar .
What's going on is, neither FDT nor our project themselves know how to compile a .SWF or .SWC. They rely on a Launch Configuration to tell them what settings to use in order to compile anything. FDT or a particular project are just like a plane and all your code are the passengers. In this scenario, think of the Launch Configurations as the pilot who know where to fly and how to get there. Just like a plane can have multiple pilots, FDT can have multiple launch configurations.
In both the Basic AS3 Tutorial and the Flex / Air Tutorial, it was demonstrated how FDT can create a Launch Configuration automatically by running the from the Flash Explorer or by running from the Editor . Instead we'll create a configuration completely from scratch. Begin by choosing Run Configurations... . What will appear is FDT's Launch Configurations window. Select FDT SWF Application and click on the New launch configuration icon at the top .
For this example, I didn't have the project selected in the Flash Explorer and FDT didn't automatically fill in the Project field and gave the configuration a generic name of New_configuration .
Fill in a name for the configuration, I'll name this one launch_1, and click the Browse button to choose a project . FDT will ask you to choose a project for this configuration, we only have one project open so only one appears, and click OK . FDT will now warn you that You must choose a Main Class! - choose one by clicking on the Browse... button . Just like with choosing a Project before, chose your Main class here - only one file appears because our project only has one Class in it . Now FDT tells us You must choose a swf output file! . If you were to click Browse... this time, FDT will ask you to choose an already existing file. Let's not do this and instead create a new one. Fill in bin/launch_1.swf in the Output field. bin is the name and path of the folder I want to use and launch_1.swf is the name I want to give the .SWF .
After hitting Run, FDT will compile your .SWF. What you'll notice is, you can see the compilation output in the Console View and see the launch_1.swf in the bin folder . What you also probably notice is:
While this may seem like an error or a hassle to deal with, this is actually a gem of a situation. We need to tell FDT what to do, if anything, after compiling our .SWF. As we'll soon see, we can start to do some really cool stuff. For now, lets get to viewing our .SWF.
Get back to the Run Configurations window and click on the Start tab . Check the box next to Open URI after compilation and click Browse to choose which .swf to launch after compilation . Next choose what you want FDT to use to view the .swf, lets use the External SWF Viewer, and make sure that the viewer's width and height match your .SWF . When ready, click Run to launch your .swf .
FDT enables you to easily choose different ways of viewing your application. For web based projects, you can use either:
You can also point to any type of file, e.g. HTML & >SWF. This enables developer to choose a webserver/ HTML page to view content that has their just compiled target SWF embedded. This is handy when the 'Browser' target has been chosen.
Before choosing the Adobe Flash Player as you're viewer, you'll need to set the location of it via FDT's preferences.
One last thing we need to cover before getting into more advanced topics with launchers, is to learn about saving our configurations. Saving configurations is important when we want to share or archive our projects to use later. If we were to delete our project right now, we wouldn't have our launch configuration to use at a later time or if we hand off the project to someone else.
Saving configurations is straightforward and simple. Begin by once again opening the Run Configurations window and then choosing the Common tab . Check the Shared file: radio button and then select Browse... . Choose the launch folder ( you can choose any folder you like ) , and run the configuration once again . After the configuration runs, your .swf will render and FDT will have created a launch configuration within the launch folder.
There's no doubt that at some point you're going to want to adjust some compiler settings. Some things you may want to change include:
*note: FDT's new compiling process requires that the -default-size argument be entered slightly differently than what is documented within the Flex API. Use the above syntax (note the comma: , ) as a template to change the width and height.
A quick note here, notice how the External SWF Viewer's size is still 550x400. Our .SWF is launching at 800x600 and this will cause some odd scaling issues. To correct this, return to the Start tab of the Run Configurations window and adjust the width and height of the External SWF View to match your .SWF's default size .
If you remember earlier, we discussed how FDT's launcher setup doesn't force developers to have their project compile and launch in any specific way. Let's demonstrate this by simply creating another launch configuration that uses the same source code, but outputs a different .SWF name. Return to the Run Configurations window, select the launch_1 configuration and click the duplicate icon on the top . Rename it to launch_2 and change the Output field to make a new .swf named launch_2.swf .
Notice how this is using the same Main.as class as before, but we are creating a different .SWF. Run this configuration and notice how FDT will create a new launch configuration for us and save it within the launch folder and create a new launch_2.swf for us.
Now we are going to put all of this together and demonstrate a clever way of using multiple launch configurations, compiler options, and the new Launcher Chain.
To get started, I'm going to clean things up a bit and delete these launch configurations and output .SWFs . Next I'll create a new class, Ball, and copy the code from Main.as.
A third launch configuration was created to compile our Main.as class which will load two other .SWFs ( which don't exist yet ).
The third launch configuration includes a custom Launcher Chain that will make sure the other two launch configurations (Blue_Ball and Red_Ball) will run first.
FDT compiled two .SWFs for us, and didn't open them up (because we disabled launch URI... ) - applying specific compiler arguments to each.
In FDT you can add and use all Web Browsers which are installed on your Computer to view your compiled .SWF files. You have also the choice to use FDT's internal Web Browser. To add a new Web Browser, open the Preferences Dialog by clicking Menu FDT 4 and then Preferences. Expand tree General and select Web Browser. Click button New to launch Add External Web Browser dialog. To add Firefox Browser enter the Browser name into Name field as well as the Location and the Parameters to launch . Click button OK to apply the changes. You can do the same with Safari and other Web Browsers.
Due to an issue in Eclipse you can't add Google's Chrome Browser like the other ones. Refer to [1] and [2] for more information.
Click button New to launch Add External Web Browser dialog. To add Google Chrome Browser enter the Browser name into Name field as well as the Location and the Parameters to launch . Click button OK to apply the changes.
As you can see, there's a lot of potential here within FDT's launcher, and launcher chain. Feel free to experiment and let us know what you do with it!