HAP does not claim that walking the path to higher awareness is easy. However, HAP does claim that what makes it difficult is not something outside yourself but a mechanism inside yourself. Thus, by becoming aware of this mechanism, you can make it easier for yourself to make progress.

Walking the path is not something that requires special skills, intelligence or other characteristics that you are either born with or that only special people can acquire. It requires only one thing: an open mind.

Your progress depends entirely on your willingness to see something you cannot see right now, and this means you have to be willing to examine your beliefs and be open to new ideas. Thus, the more open your mind is to seeing what you cannot see now, the faster progress you can make.

Take note that having an open mind is not a matter of believing every idea you come across, but about being open to the ideas that will help you see through your personal illusions, the illusions held by your subconscious selves. It is not about seeing the splinter in the eyes of others, but about seeing the beam in your own eye.

Coming to see something you cannot see now is not a matter of acquiring intellectual understanding. It is possible to be studying teachings about the path for years or decades without actually making progress. You can know an outer teaching and be able to quote it without connecting it to yourself. You can use a teaching to project that the problem is out there without actually coming to see the illusion that is preventing you from taking the next step.

Let us look at some ways to shift your approach to the path that will make things easier for yourself.

Grasping how a self works

Imagine that you are an actor who is going to play Hamlet in a theater. You start by learning the lines by heart, meaning you are programming them into your subconscious mind. You work to grasp what the play and the role is about and build a sense of who Hamlet is. You then put on a costume and make-up and walk onto the stage. The question is: To be Hamlet or not to be Hamlet?

A good actor literally becomes Hamlet in order to play the part. When such an actor walks onto the stage, he leaves his normal identity and personality behind and takes on a new identity as Hamlet. How is this possible? Because in preparing to play the role, the actor has created a subconscious self that is Hamlet (as the actor sees it). As the actor walks onto the stage, he takes on this self and is now seeing the world through the Hamlet self.

Fortunately for the actor, there comes a time when the play ends, the audience applauds and the curtain goes down. This reminds the actor that he really isn’t Hamlet, and he can then take off the Hamlet self (and the costume and make-up) and return to his normal self, thus avoiding ending up in a mental institution.

Right now you are like an actor who has taken on your present self, your present sense of identity, in order to play the role you are playing. The problem is that there is no end to the play, there is no applause and the curtain doesn’t go down. Thus, you are trapped inside the role and cannot see how to get out. You think this is who you are and that the only way to look at the world is to see it through your current self.

Right now you are at a certain level of the 144 levels of consciousness. On this level you have a certain sense of self. What HAP is telling you is that you are not trapped in your current self, you only think you are. You are more than the role you are currently playing. It is possible to let go of this self and rise to the next level of the path. Here, you have a more expanded self that does not have the problem you are dealing with right now.

Your current self is based on a particular illusion, and the key to letting go of the self is that your conscious self comes to see the fallacy and limitations of this illusion. There is an old story of a person who is walking in a dark room and touches what she thinks is a rope. Then, the light is turned open, and the person now sees she is holding a snake. Instantly, the person lets go of the snake.

Likewise, once you come to see through an illusion, you instantly, spontaneously let go of the illusion. You will not hold on to an illusion once you realize that it is an illusion. You will instead accept the higher reality that you now see because your vision is no longer blocked by the illusion.

This may all sound good, but what’s the catch? The catch is that while you are inside your current self, you cannot see the illusion upon which the self is built.

You cannot see an illusion from inside the self, only from outside the self!

Again, consider the example of you wearing colored glasses. Your eyes are literally seeing that the sky is a different color, and this is like looking at life from inside a subconscious self. The self can never come to see, or show you, the illusion that defined the self. The moment you take off the glasses, it becomes obvious that the sky really is blue, and you immediately embrace this higher view.

This is why the teaching that you really are the conscious self is revolutionary. You of course have had a conscious self before you read this teaching, but by becoming aware of the conscious self and its ability to consciously step outside a subconscious self, you can make your progress much easier.

It is safe to say that if you are open to this website, you are not at the lower levels of consciousness, and you have probably made some progress in this lifetime. This has happened because your conscious self came to see through an illusion of a subconscious self. Once you saw through the illusion, you let go of it and thus rose to the next level of the 144 levels of consciousness.

This may have happened without you being conscious of the process. HAP simply seeks to help you make the process conscious and thus speed up your progress. Let us look at four ways to make this easier.

You are more than a human being

We will start at the identity level. Because the identity mind is the highest in vibration, it is the most difficult to change, but if you can shift your sense of identity a little bit, it will have a big impact on the mental, emotional and physical levels.

Have you ever had the experience that you feel connected to something much bigger than yourself or that your “body” is much bigger than your physical body?
Have you ever had the experience that your mind falls quiet and it is almost like you are seeing a situation from the outside, like you are witnessing the situation instead of being inside of it?
Have you ever had the sense that you have experienced a situation before or that you had dreamt that a situation would happen?
Have you ever had this strong inner feeling that something was the right thing to do or a sense of warning not to do something? Your mental mind may have been arguing against this sense, but you knew this was right.

Most people have had some experience like this, and it happens when your conscious self temporarily steps outside your physical body and emotional mental and identity minds. You are actually experiencing that you are an actor who is more than the costume and the role.

Such experiences indicate that you are inside a role, namely the role of playing a human being, whatever that means in your family, society and culture. When you look around the world, you see that all societies have a pretty limited definition of what it means to be a human being. You are supposed to believe certain things, act certain ways and definitely not step outside of the role defined for you and played by all other people.

The shift that will make the path easier for you is if you can accept that you are not the kind of person defined by your outer role. You are a different kind of being who has only stepped into the role. You can gradually remove all pieces of the costume and make-up so that you become more free. In fact, you can return to the being that you really are, the way you saw yourself before you stepped into the role. Doing this will also mean you free yourself from all of the limitations, struggles and suffering defined by your role.

Most people see themselves as static beings. You were born with a certain personality, and as you grow up you are affected by outer situations. By the time you reach adulthood, you are who you are and there is nothing you can do about it. The first shift you can make is that you come to see yourself NOT as a fixed being but as a changeable being.

Not only are you changeable, you are changeable by your own efforts. You do not have to remain the same person for the rest of your life. You can engage in a conscious, systematic path to raise yourself above the personality you have inherited or that has been forced upon you. You can be who you want to be, not who your society tells you to be.

Changing your sense of identity is a gradual process and you cannot shift your identity too quickly. Yet we can at least outline some of the stages you will go through as you walk the path towards higher awareness. Obviously, attaining a higher level of awareness means you attain a new sense of who you are and what kind of being you are:

Many people start the path because they are facing a particular problem and they would like to be free of it. This can be an addiction, a physical disease, a mental disease, traumas, psychological issues that are painful or other limiting conditions. At this stage you see yourself as a victim of circumstances beyond your control.
As you climb higher on the path, overcome the sense of being a victim because you experience that there is always something you can do about your situation. You can always work on changing yourself, and this will either change your situation or change the way you experience the situation.
Climbing even higher makes it obvious that you are not a material being and you are not a human being as defined in your society. You are something more, meaning you can free yourself from these outer limitations. At this stage you are still focused on freeing yourself from outer limitations, and this is the stage between the 48th and 96th levels of consciousness.
At some point you become more aware that you did not come from earth but originated in some other realm. You are not a material or human being, but a different kind of being. You entered your physical body and personality from the outside, meaning you have not become the body or the personality. Your goal now becomes to free yourself from the limitations of this role, but not in order to get away from anything. Instead your goal become to return to your original state of freedom. You are walking towards something more, not away from something less.
You will also gradually become aware that you had an existence before you came into this lifetime. This means you had a purpose even a plan for what you wanted to accomplish in this lifetime. This involves overcoming certain psychological conditions (selves) and it involves doing something positive, making a contribution to improving life on earth.
Finally, you will become aware that as you entered the Earth from another realm, you can permanently leave the eEarth behind and return to that realm. For some people, this will become an important goal, which requires a specific approach to the path that will be explained later.

The bottom line is that you are more than your current self, and that is why you can free yourself from any and all limitations of your current sense of identity. Yet you cannot do this as long as you see yourself from inside your current self.

You are more than your beliefs and world view

At the mental level, you have the intellectual mind that is very good at analyzing everything, lining up the pros and cons. The analytical mind can be a productive tool on the path to higher awareness, especially because it is good at exposing inconsistencies in your beliefs.

As we have seen, subconscious selves are created in pairs, and each pair is based on a dualistic polarity with two opposites. This means that one self is based on one belief and the other self is based on a belief that is opposite. These two beliefs are incompatible, mutually exclusive.

Yet because you have both selves, you are actually holding two incompatible beliefs at the same time. You don’t see this because you shift from one self to another. When you are inside one self, you cannot see the validity of the belief of the opposite self, and thus you cannot see that there is an inconsistency in your world view. Holding two incompatible beliefs without seeing it is what psychologists call “cogninite dissonance.”

The intellect is good at exposing such inconsistencies and thus you can use this to become aware of your subconscious selves. In fact, you have probably already done this without being conscious of the process. Again, by becoming aware of this, you can speed up your progress.

Let us look at some simple examples of incompatible selves:

I am a good Christian because I believe that we should not to do others what we don’t want others to do to us.
It is acceptable to kill those who oppose the spread of Christianity, so that all people can come to believe that we should not to do others what we don’t want others to do to us.

I am not a superstitious fool because I believe that my mind is the product of my brain and my genetic inheritance.
It is necessary to convince religious people that they are fools, so that they can change their minds (that are a product of their brains and genetic inheritance).

It is very selfish to cut other people off in traffic.
When I am in a hurry, it is OK for me to cut off other people in traffic; they should really see that I am in a hurry and give way.

There are of course numerous examples of cognitive dissonance, and HAP will describe more of them later.

As good as the intellect is at exposing incompatibilities, it cannot actually help you rise to a higher level of consciousness. We earlier talked about black-and-white thinking, which convinces people that their world view is the only right one and that all others are completely wrong. They cannot see any gradations in between right and wrong.

The intellect is very good at defining gradations between the two dualistic polarities. If you go back a few centuries, most people were religious and had a black-and-white approach to life. The, followed a period where more and more people came to see the inconsistencies in religious doctrines, leading to the more rational modern society.

Yet many people have gone into seeing themselves as agnostics, meaning they believe it is impossible to say what is reality and unreality, true and false, at least in an absolute sense. This could be called gray thinking, and it is a result of using the intellect to see the pros and cons of any idea without being able to determine what to actually do. This can be a disempowering and paralyzing approach to life, and it will not allow you to raise your consciousness to the next level.

The way out is to realize that black-and-white thinking and gray thinking form their own dualistic polarity. There is simply one self that thinks in terms of black and white and the opposite self thinks in terms of a grayscale. The conscious self has the ability to step outside both of these selves and take a different approach.

In order to grasp this approach, it is necessary to consider that walking the path to higher awareness is NOT a matter of finding some absolute truth. The reason is that there is always a HIGHER level of awareness where you see something you do not see now. This means that as long as you are on earth, you will not be able to grasp any absolute truth, so you would do better if you can set aside this quest.

This can be difficult because you have a self programmed to establish a sense of security, and it uses your world view to do so. Obviously, only a world view based on an absolute truth will give you ultimate security. This, it is likely that the beginning stages, this need for security will still be strong, meaning you are walking the path and studying teachings in the hope that this will one day give you ultimate security.

If you can make the conscious decision to shift out of this, you can accept hat the path is about talking the next step, not about rising to some final step. If you are at the 48thy level of consciousness, you have one illusion that is keeping you trapped at that level. Your task is to come to see through this illusion, so you rise to the 49th level.

At the 49th level, you do see something that you did not see at the 48th level, but this is not an ultimate truth. There is still a very long way from the 49th to the 144th level, and for each of those steps there is an illusion to see through. Even at the 144th level, you do not see ultimate truth, but you do rise to a level of aware4ness beyond all of the problems on Earth.

What you can do is to shift your approach to the path from an idealistic approach to a practical approach. The question is: “What will help me see the next illusion and shift to the next level up?”

The answer is that the intellect can help you see through an illusion, but it cannot shift your awareness. Intellectually understanding an illusion can help the conscious self step outside the self based on the illusion. Yet it is not intellectual understanding that causes the self to shift its perspective. That only happens through your intuitive faculties where you literally step outside the self and see the self from the outside. You are not simply understanding the illusion while still being inside the self.

This shifting becomes easier when you realize that you are more than your beliefs and world view, more than any argument your intellect can come up with. Thus, instead of allowing a self to fiercely defend your current beliefs, you can consciously open yourself to the ideas that will help you shift outside your current sense of self.

It is not about defending your current ” absolute truth” or acquiring a higher “absolute truth.” It is about seeing through your current illusion and acquiring the illusion on the next level of consciousness. Then continuing until you have seen through the last illusion that keeps you tied to Earth.

You are more than your feelings

Emotion has been called “energy in motion.” One way that a subconscious self keeps your conscious mind inside the self is by projecting emotional energy at you. As long as the energy is moving, you are pulled into the self. For example, as long as you feel angry, you cannot step outside the self and consider whether you really want to feel any or whether you want to take action based on being angry.

Many people have for all of their lives been trapped in such emotional reactionary patterns. Obviously, this will not help you raise your awareness and improve your Life Experience.

You can do much to break such reactionary patterns by looking a them in moments where you are not overpowered by emotions. You can use the intellect to do this and also to expose the inconsistencies behind emotions. For example:

A good Christian should not be angry.
When my Christian faith is attacked, anger is the only possible response.

In other words, for every possible fear-based emotion, there is a pair of subconscious selves. One self says you should not have this emotion, and the other justifies that you have it in certain situations. Once you see this, it becomes easier for the conscious self to step outside the selves, to pull the subconscious selves out of their hiding place.

HAP will later present you with some very powerful techniques for reducing the pull that emotional energy has on your conscious self.

Eventually, you will come to experience that the conscious self is more than your emotions, and that is why you can step outside of emotions. You can learn to see through the energy veil formed by emotional energy so you can see the selves hiding behind the veil and thus see the incompatibility in the beliefs of these selves. This can help you arrive at the point where you shift out of the selves.

What you can do is to adopt the attitude that you do not want to be trapped in your emotional reactionary patters. You do not want to react the same way that most people in your society do. Why should the fact that most people are angry, unhappy or feel like victims mean that you should feel the same way? Walking the path to higher awareness is about rising beyond all reactionary patterns, so that you are free to choose your reaction to any situation.