There are two aspects of making progress towards higher awareness:

• You need to unmask the subconscious selves, see the illusion they are based on and shift your consciousness.
• You need to free yourself from the fear-based energies that have accumulated in the subconscious mind.

1st leg: self-observation

There are many valid and constructive ways to describe the path towards higher awareness. Unfortunately, there are also some descriptions that cannot produce results. This is true for those descriptions that say the path is automatic or mechanical.

For example, fundamentalist Christianity says that if you believe in the Bible and follow certain outer rules, you are guaranteed to be saved, even if you don’t change your consciousness. Also, some say that if you perform certain exercises long enough, you are guaranteed to reach a higher state of consciousness.

Such claims are unrealistic for one simple reason: They ignore free will. The Earth is an educational institution and you learn by making choices and experiencing the results. You make choices based on your present level of consciousness, and regardless of what the consequences are, you have an opportunity to raise your consciousness.

The only way to graduate from “Schoolroom Earth” is to raise your consciousness to the highest level possible, and that is not a mechanical process. It can only be done consciously by you learning to make higher choices. You cannot unconsciously reach higher awareness.

So regardless of the claims that someone has a shortcut, there is only one way to make progress, and it is to observe yourself and your reactions. You need to come to see something in yourself and decide that you are willing to change. You need to reach a turning point where you stop projecting that the problem is outside yourself and instead look at what you can change inside yourself.

There are two ways to reach this turning point:

• The School of Hard Knocks. This is where you allow external circumstances (that you think have nothing to do with your own choices) to force you to a point where you “hit bottom.” You realize: “I simply can’t do this anymore.” And then, you decide you are willing to look at what you can change inside yourself. Obviously, this way of learning involves a lot of suffering and hardship, and HAP is designed to give you an alternative.
• The Inner Path. This is where you consciously decide that you are indeed willing to look at yourself before being forces by external circumstances to do so. You open yourself to seeing what you can change in your own mind. You can make this decision at any time. HAP obviously cannot make the decision for you, but it can explain what the decision entails and give you practical tools to walk this inner path.

Once you decide to engage in self-observation, there are many ways for you to start seeing what is going on in your psyche:

• Real-life situations can be a great help. You can observe your relationships with other people and look for reaction patterns that repeat themselves. Behind every such pattern is a pair of subconscious selves.
• There are many books and courses on psychology and self-help that can give you insights into how your psychology functions.
• The teachings of HAP on this website and the many books that are based on the HAP teachings.
• The most valuable source of inner guidance is your intuition. As explained, intuition is the process where your conscious self steps outside the subconscious selves and receives an insight, perspective or frame of reference from your higher self. Your higher self is not inside your perception filter and is not blinded by your subconscious selves. HAP will teach you how to improve your intuition.

2nd leg: Transforming psychic energy

One problem that many people have is that if you decide to take a look at yourself, you are overwhelmed by negative emotional energy. This can be tied to a traumatic experience where something happened to you or where you made a mistake. Normally, you suppress this energy, but when you look into your subconscious mind, it comes up to the conscious level, which can be overwhelming and unpleasant.

The reason for this phenomenon is, of course, that fear-based energy has accumulated in your subconscious mind or energy field. The way to deal with this energy is to learn how to transform the energy into a higher vibration. Once the energy is raised, it will not be painful.

As was explained in the section on energy-based psychology, you are conscious because there is a stream of high-vibration energy flowing from your higher self through the four levels of your mind. As the energy flows, its vibration will be changed by your subconscious selves.

Fear-based energy cannot flow back up but will accumulate in your emotional, mental and identity minds. Here, it will gradually form a vortex or maelstrom that creates a constant tension. It will also pull on your conscious mind, for example a vortex of anger energy will make you more prone to react with anger.

In order to make maximum progress, it is essential for you to find a way to overcome this accumulated psychic energy, so you can make free choices instead of being pulled into fear-based reactionary patterns.

The mechanics of doing this are well described by science in a field called wave dynamics. When two waves meet or when two energy fields interact, they will react in one of the following ways:

• If the vibrations of the waves are not matched, they will pass through each other without interacting.
• If they are matched, they will create an interference pattern. This will change the vibration of both waves, or one can say that a new wave is generated.

The conclusion is that if you have a pool of fear-based energy in your emotional body, the way to overcome it is to direct a wave of higher vibrations into it. If the higher energy is properly matched, the result will be an interference pattern that raises the vibration of the fear-based energy. Once the vibration is raised, the energy can again flow upwards, and it will not be trapped in your mind.

This leads to the realization that in order to make maximum progress on the path, you need to find an efficient technique for transforming psychic energy by raising its vibration. Fortunately, the need to transform psychic energy has been know for a long time, and various cultures have developed techniques for doing this.

There are many valid techniques available, and you need to find one or several that appeal to you. Examples are: Meditation, mind-fullness, yoga, chanting, visualization etcetera.

HAP will present you with techniques for transforming energy, but first we need to have a deeper understanding of what kind of beings we are and the totality of the world we live in.