There are essentially only four things we can think about. 

We can think about the physical world in which we live. That includes the current state of our body and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The physical world is born out of the past, out of all that has happened before, and the evolution of form at all levels. Once it lands in the present moment, there it is—an unalterable fact, though we have the opportunity to engineer the forms around us so that something different appears in the future. The physical world is the world of form in the present moment. Obsession with the present physical situation in a person’s life can lead to a battle with what is. 

We can think about how we and others feel, whether happy or sad, up or down, anxious or jealous. What people feel is linked to subconscious factors of mind and memory. So a person might remember something that happened, however recent or from the distant past, and the emotions associated with that memory surface too. 

Preoccupation with feelings and the memories linked to them can lead to a tailspin. It can take a person deeper and deeper into an emotional sinkhole.

We can think about thinking, our own or someone else’s. Sometimes this is called philosophizing, and the libraries of the world are filled with it. Without reference to the rest of life, thinking about thinking can become circular. It can lead to anxiety as the mind loses awareness of the larger context in which it functions.

Many people move between these three areas of thought. They think about their physical circumstances. They think about how they and other people feel about those circumstances. And they think about how they think about these things. Thought that is limited to these three things becomes a prison.

There is a fourth thing to think about that sets thought free. It integrates and uplifts all the other areas of thought. It is the realm of possibility and potential. It is the pattern of what may not yet be manifest but which could manifest if we let it.

We don’t have good names for the realm of potential. We might call it the spiritual or the realm of essence. Plato called this nonphysical essence of things the Ideal. 

The Apostle Paul put it this way:

Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

This realm of essence is not observable by the senses. You can’t find it in your feeling realm. You access it through Love—through an openness to it in your heart and mind.

When we open to this invisible realm of essence, it is not just that we are thinking about it. We are allowing it to enter us. We are inspired by it. The more that happens, the more we are aware that there is a steady stream of inspiration emerging out of the Invisible. 

The inspiration of the spiritual engages the other realms of thought. It involves the practical world of physical form. It stirs our emotions and re-constellates thought patterns in our subconscious memory bank. Through the process of inspiration, new thought forms filled with life are born.

No longer are we simply stirring the pot of emotion and memory. Our feelings are no longer at the mercy of their reaction to the current circumstance. What emerges from the spiritual is the straw that stirs the drink. It activates a mental process that begins to bring forth life-giving thought.

The unfolding pattern of the Cosmos as it relates to the realm in which we live begins to flow through consciousness. We can see the world as it is. But we also see what it is becoming. The solid forms of the world that might have looked impossible are known to be in motion, evolving inexorably to become a revelation of the invisible pattern within them.

In this process, there is a higher intelligence entering consciousness. Initially, that higher intelligence seems like it is coming from somewhere else. If you haven’t been open to it previously, how else would you experience it? 

Some of my most vivid experiences of opening to a higher intelligence have been while writing songs. It sometimes seems like I have found the song floating somewhere in the Invisible and Unheard, already fully formed. In my delight at touching it, I open to my awareness of its pulse and tone. I tug on the opening notes of its melody, and it falls out of the heaven, where I found it, into my heart and mind. I hear it with an inner ear, and it lands onto the page. 

And then I claim it as my song! It didn’t originate in my human mind or heart. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man… But I am not just this outer consciousness. The higher realms of consciousness are me too. I just didn’t know it before.

Life is like that. We have the opportunity in all of life to open in that way. Sometimes when we talk about opening to a higher love, we talk about being cracked open. A higher love melts our heart. It devastates us. It changes us. It lays to waste the way we had been feeling about ourselves and experiencing life. It transmutes our human experience.

The same thing happens when we open to a higher intelligence. It is shattering. We no longer experience ourselves as the person who has thought in a certain way most of their life—mulling things over, worrying, and being anxious. It shatters all that. It makes us think something that we never thought before. It dares us to entertain those thoughts, and not only entertain them but share them, to bring the pattern of them into the world in which we live. It dares us to live according to our awareness of the unfolding Creation we are a part of and responsible for as a creator. 

When we open to a higher intelligence, it challenges us to live from it and be guided by it. The higher intelligence that we are tapping into not only wants to come into us—it wants to move into our world. It wants to see the world through us. It wants to see other people and all the facets of our world as they are. 

That compulsion in us is far stronger than most people know. If we are not yet fully open to it, there is a battle because there is a powerful urge in us to see and know what is true in the world in which we live. And then there might be a part of us that says, No, I do not want to look, and I do not want to see. It is easier to pretend that I am an isolated human being, that I am not my brother’s or my sister’s keeper, that I am not the Creator of this world, and therefore I do not want to know. Somehow, we understand that with that knowledge comes the responsibility of a creator. With sight comes a seeing of not only what is true and lovely and beautiful but what is dysfunctional in the world in which we live. You have to see that if you want to gain sight. And yet the Creator, who is us, wants to see and know, because with that sight is the possibility of fulfilling our creatorship. It is hard to be a creator if you are blind. 

And so it is in all the facets of our life. How can I be of service to you without seeing you? How do I have a friendship if I do not open my eyes?

We are here to bring a higher intelligence into the world. We have to allow for a shattering of our ignorance to bring it. Then we begin to see the pattern of Creation. We see it unfolding. We play an active part in bringing this unfolding design to our world. 

Love is the carrier wave, and Love is the power. Riding the carrier wave of Love is the pattern of its unfoldment. Receiving that higher intelligence, we know ourselves as the Creator, bringing the unfolding pattern, which lets our world flourish. Higher intelligence brings life. 

Without knowledge of that unfolding pattern, the forms of human experience have nothing to go by. There is what is and what we do, but if we are not informed by that unfolding intelligence, the only order present is dictatorial—some sort of effort by the human mind to organize the world, unaware of the unfolding order of Creation. There is an attempt to get people to behave, including oneself. Let’s enact a law! If we are out of step with the unfolding pattern of Creation, we need laws, so the world doesn’t fall into complete chaos. But there is a higher intelligence and a higher order that is meant to guide us all, and that does not rely on human law. It only requires tuning in to that intelligence, and then it is bringing it into the world in which we live.  

That higher intelligence lets us know the victorious nature of life itself. I do not think any of us expect that we can ignore the guiding intelligence that is operative and relevant for our life and then prosper and flourish as a human being. That is not how it works. There is a higher intelligence. When we tune in to the carrier wave of Love and find the higher intelligence it is carrying, we flourish.