We live in a world with multiple levels. As someone said recently, we are playing three-dimensional chess. Or perhaps four-dimensional, five-dimensional, or more.

There is a physical layer to our world. And then layers of thought, personality, and emotion.

At a cultural level, there are the spheres of politics, media, and finance.

We are also navigating subtler levels of human experience. There are waves of feeling that wash through the collective unconscious, as Carl Jung called it. There are powerful urges that move groups of people. They may be hard to define, and yet we feel them inside ourselves and witness them at work in people around us.

Astrology attempts to name the influences that move and shape the subtler levels of human experience. At times, astrological reports can seem to be insightful. But they don’t necessarily put us in touch with the causative forces at work at the higher ranges of our multi-level chess game.

All the levels of the chess game of life are relevant to the experience of a thriving life. Beginning with the physical level—our own body and the physical reality around us—it is all an opportunity for creativity. And if there is a level of experience we ignore or don’t engage with creatively, our experience suffers.

The physical level seems hard to ignore. You can see it and touch it. The higher the level, the less subject it is to being observed with the physical senses. And the easier it is to miss.

Cause and effect are working through all levels of Reality. The system is made so that the higher levels influence lower levels—not that it always works that way. In human experience, consciousness is a significant part of the means by which cause and effect operate. So, if there are gaps in human awareness, the causative factors that influence the world can’t do so in the way they otherwise would.

With gaps in awareness, the tendency for the individual is to view lower levels of the chess game as the cause of their experience. I am feeling this because they did that. But that person is only one chess piece on a seven-dimensional chess board. That situation is only a tiny part of what is happening at one level of the multi-level Reality.

We may also notice that the way we think about things has a habit of narrowing to lower levels of experience, as if everything that is going on for us can be explained by what is happening at the practical and personal level. Something is going on between another person and us. And so, we pin what we are experiencing on the personal—what that person said or did. We may even ascribe to them the attitudes and feelings we think they have about us. This quickly leads to a sense of victimhood.

In relating to other people, is there something personal going on? Of course. The art of navigating that level of the chess board is to be present and engaged at a personal level while being aware of higher levels of experience that bring power, Presence, and wisdom to the personal. In fact, the resolution at the personal level relies on those higher causative factors. And without them, there is no answer to the personal.

The solution to what is working out for us as an individual comes from higher levels of awareness. It comes because we bring in higher wisdom. We see something more than the back-and-forth of the personal. We bring a higher Love.

Higher Love is connected to the Presence of the Higher Self. Love has little meaning unrelated to the One from whom it comes. Higher Love emanates from the Presence of Higher Self, whom we could refer to as the Wonderful One Within.   

Is that not the fun of it? Whatever kind of relationship it is, the enjoyment of it comes from our investment of a higher power, Presence, and wisdom into it. Whatever the nature of the relationship, from the personal or the romantic, to business and creative enterprise, there is the delight of power, Presence, and wisdom that we have to bring and that we have to enjoy in each other.

There is so much going on in the field of consciousness. And yet, how that field can shrink just because of what people choose to focus on.

I watched the morning news earlier. Exactly how deeply do we need to go into balloons? Something is happening in consciousness, and it gets focused on spy balloons. There is turbulence in consciousness, and it is attributed to that. That turbulence plays out in politics, war, and the media. If you are a politician or news commentator, apparently your job is to stir the pot. But what is the turbulence, really? And what is really causing it?

We can feel the turbulence that is present in consciousness. We can feel it in our immediate field of awareness and perceive it out there in the world. Is it really all about the Chinese floating their spy balloons over us, or all about the Republicans, the Democrats, or the Russians?

Exactly how many dimensions are we playing at? Yes, there are the immediate and the practical, and if you are in the U.S. Air Force, perhaps it ends up being your job to shoot down a spy balloon. Okay, if you have got to shoot down the spy balloon, go ahead and shoot it down. But the great majority of us don’t find ourselves in that position. And is that really all that is going on here?

There are causative forces at work in human consciousness. For some religious people, those forces get pinned on the Devil. For the politically active, perhaps they are pinned on the opposite political party. I’m not denying that cause and effect are at work all through the seven-dimensional chessboard. But we are not open to seeing and knowing what is happening if we pin it all on one person, entity, or chess piece at one level of the board.

At the deepest level of the human soul, we intuitively know what is transpiring. We are part of it. We are what is going on. We are the cause of the turbulence.

Within us all, there is creative power and intelligence. There is Beingness and Presence—the Presence of the Creator. Of course, the minute you use a word like that, people might think they know who and what that is. But there is something within us all and within all things that has the compulsion to create. Those electrons keep spinning in every atom of your body. The power of Creation is in all things, working through all things, including us.

When we tune in to that awareness, we become attuned to the reality of it. We abide in it and begin to know it as ourselves in expression. The wisdom of it guides us. The Love of it moves our hearts and expresses through us. It changes us. It is the power of Creation that we know as human beings and that we are sharing together.

When we awaken to it, there is a Presence that was not there before for us. It is not just my human personality as I have known myself to be. There is a Higher Presence I am knowing. And I am getting the big idea that that is who I am. I am the Creator. That is the most real thing about me—that Presence, that Beingness. It is at work through me, as it is through all people.

That is my extrapolation. It is working through me—it must be working through everyone. It is working through us all, and it wants what it wants. And what does it want? To create, to express—to be; to manifest, to evolve, to make something beautiful. Our whole planet is evidence of that. There is the creative urge, and it creates this beauty and wonder, thriving! That compulsion is in us. Even if a person has lost touch with it, life’s urge is in us all.

So where does all the turbulence come from? The turbulence that you and I feel daily, which we might attribute to spy balloons or something else?

There is our own human energy field, and then what we share with each other and, ultimately, with all of humankind. So what happened there? Why does that field have turbulence? We could speculate and we could theorize. We could pin it on this or that, from a religious perspective. It was the apple and Adam and Eve. From an anthropological perspective, we might think it is something else. From a historical perspective, we could talk about the wounding of humankind, and the impact of slavery, patriarchy, and prejudice. But whatever the history of it is, whatever the historical antecedents are of how human consciousness got the way it is, it is the way it is now, and it is simply malfunctioning. The causative elements of Creation aren’t working easily through our seven-dimensional chessboard. And so there is turbulence.

The only answer is to wake up, to become conscious of the power and Presence and wisdom that is right there to tune in to. And when you tune in to it, the unnatural turbulence generated from the gaps in human awareness dissipates.

Where did it go? We are part of a body of humanity that is, in many respects, unconscious. It is conscious only of lower levels of experience, so it blames the turbulence it experiences on those levels.

What a distraction! Because as long as you believe that, you are helpless to do anything about it. You cannot chase down the spy balloon. You really cannot do too much about the Chinese. And if you did, would that do away with the turbulence?

The crux of the matter is to awaken to ourselves, knowing ourselves as the Creator. Does that mean that all the other levels of the chessboard go away? It does not. Does it mean there is nothing to do about the practical and the personal, the political, the legal, and all the things we face in our lives? No, it does not mean that.

All the levels of human experience do not go away when a person comes to know that they are an expression of the Presence of the Creator. They simply become the field into which the expression of that Presence is brought.

My observation is that the more that happens for a person, the more effective they are at every dimension of the chessboard. The usual story goes like this: If you become spiritual or religious, you become useless in the world. Not really. When you become truly spiritual, you gain power, Presence, and wisdom that you begin to bring to every facet of your life experience—to every level of the chessboard.