The structure of consciousness is like “Chinese boxes,” smaller ones inside larger ones, in regress, for several levels of decreasing density and increasing dimension & life force. Each next-larger box contains all the boxes smaller than itself.

In addition, the smallest box of consciousness is the most dense. This is the body and the somatic correlates of the personality, the stuff we call “character structure.” “Mind” is less dense than, and contains the physical body and psychosoma. “Collective mind” contains all individuated minds and also permeates all of them, right down into the psychosoma — and acts upon them.

Each next-larger box also completely permeates all the smaller, denser boxes, and acts upon them, influencing how they express, but beyond the level of Mind, these realms are wholly impersonal, formless, and boundless, beyond time/space, and basically not affected by anything happening at the denser levels even though totally interpenetrating and existentiating/precipitating them.

All of us exist in and AS all of the boxes all the time; we’re just mostly unconscious of the larger ones because the smaller ones are very, very dense. So when an authentic breakthrough in awareness is made to a larger box, it’s not dissociative, because that level contains all the denser levels within it, including the body, as part of its totality. You’re not “going anywhere” that is separate from here.

But the sensate, felt-identity inherent to the larger levels also perceives the denser levels as being much more constrained, containing much-less life force, and basically just less fundamental because of their more-transitory nature.

The feeling of opening awareness to the formless levels is often, “YES, this who I truly am, and who I have always really been!” It is intrinsically, profoundly meaningful — not as a reaction-against or an avoidance-of our messy humanity, but just by itself. It feels like the “coming home” that we’ve always longed-for but was somehow always unreachable or ‘way-too-brief.

There’s a feeling of limitless freedom and of deep, deep peace, often with a soft, melting gratitude and compassion for how the insults and wounds of human life let to this moment, how the contents of the different boxes were orchestrated in the soul’s symphony.

Transits like this have to happen many times, in different sectors of the personality, for the breakthroughs to become integrated into life and the felt-identity. Once is not enough, but once is often enough that one can’t-not-know what happened — and enough to totally upset the applecart of one’s life.

The revelation of one’s deeper identity as being inherently pure, sinless, and fundamentally untouched by the events of “the story” can be deeply and profoundly healing. At a certain point, the fear of death dissipates because one knows, beyond the shadow of doubt, that something more deeply-real about oneself persists after the body can no longer hold the soul in connection with physicality. This also marks the healing of the “abandonment wound” because one is never more than a breath or two from enfoldment in a boundlessly-cherishing and wholly trustworthy Presence.

And these repeated transits exert a gradually erosive effect on the character armor through both the shift in felt-identity and on the subtle energy underpinning it. The shift in felt-identity to the larger spheres of one’s being also give the trust-in-the-process and the place on which to “stand” from which to make the necessary deep dives into one’s personal hell and meet its demons.

And yeah, when most people “meditate” or do mantra, they aren’t doing this. That’s partly from ineffective teaching/mentoring (including not having a teacher), and there ARE a lot people of trying to escape themselves instead of completing themselves, of doing a self-hypnosis technique and calling it “meditation,” or just making entertaining pictures in their heads. Many are deeply wounded and do need a body-centric psychotherapy to release enough of the noise and chaos in the nervous-system so that they can do truly transformational spiritual practice that includes grounding and integration.

There’s also a distinction to be made between the established, tested ancient traditions and the New Age nonsense having its antecedent in early 20^th-Century Western occultism. The ancient traditions have time-tested practices and trained teachers who know how exactly how the practices work, whereas the New Age stuff has little real substance and the teachers are mostly self-appointed.

The problem I see with many accidentally-enlightened teachers is that they are each creating their approach on-the-fly, and making mistakes that they would not be making had they been mentored by — and accountable to — elders in a developed and tested tradition that has already encountered pretty-much all the problems and developed solutions for them. They are teaching what they know from what worked for them, and missing the mark with students who are not like them.

Some people just don’t have the capacity — or the courage born of necessity — to do the deep dive into their personal darkness and let the encounter transform them in unforeseen/uncontrollable ways.

So they remain at the surface of their experience, maybe engaging performative spiritual or psychological work, but never letting it shatter them in the way that frees them from their egoic homeostasis.

And that freedom only comes with shattering.

I honestly do not know what the active factor is — except that there are just some people who need truth more than they desire comfort or reassurance.

The notion of Twin Flames is all over the psychic/occult landscape, the idea that there is somehow one soul manifesting in two bodies. There are hours of videos devoted to the idea, and why a Twin “runs” and how they can be brought back.

But the notion is founded on a limited premise: That the two are somehow meant to be together. And that’s not necessarily the case.

If there really IS such a thing, if the two of you are one soul in two bodies, you are never truly separate in the first place. Not in the reality of the Soul.

Twin Flames meet in physicality to catalyze certain things in each other, and when that purpose is fulfilled, you separate so that the process can complete and your egos not become dependent on each other and arrest the process.

The resonance between the two of you is deeply compelling, but it’s so that you come to know more-fully who you really are and to complete yourself, not that you are destined to be together in bliss and complete each other in co-dependence.

How you deal with being alone and waiting is a great recipe for your growth or for your suffering, and regardless of some psychic reader telling you that your Twin’s relationship with someone-else is somehow wrong, your Twin has their own work to do that is being catalyzed by that relationship — and free will is a thing and there is no guarantee that your personalities will be compatible if your Twin exits that relationship.

And interference in the free will of another human being through psychic power is spiritually unlawful, so don’t even think about trying to use the “Law of Attraction” or some-such to get your Twin back. If you’re even tempted to use it, it is all-the-more necessary for your Twin to have “run,” so that you can grow up.

So attend to the work of completing yourself within yourself, of developing an authentic autonomy so that you have a happiness that truly belongs to you.