Levels of consciousness

(Kadamba Kanana Swami, September 2013, Cape Town, South Africa, BYS Lecture)

I’m thinking about Carl Jung who in an interview was asked, “Mr Jung, would you say that you believe in God?”

That’s a basic question when you interview Carl Jung because everybody knows that Jung was very religious.

But Jung said, “No, I don’t believe in God.”

The interviewer was shocked. Shocked! How could he say this? Jung? What happened? Did he lose his faith?

Then Jung said, “No, I don’t believe in God. I know that God exists!”

Now we’ve come to the fourth level. On the fourth level, we go beyond belief – we go to the level of experience. Here we break through into a mystical realm, a realm where there is an experience of a higher reality, where there is an experience of divinity that goes beyond theory.

I’ll quickly do a resume in numbers. In level one we are concerned with basic survival; in level two, with relationships; in level three, with enquiry into the purpose of life; and level four is actually a knowing of the mystical reality and having an experience of divinity. In level five, we have a full experience of living in that reality. In level five, one lives in one’s spiritual identity, and one is in this world as a liberated soul. Externally one may be here, but internally, one is in the eternal spiritual reality. So these are the levels of consciousness that are depicted in the vedic literature.