How to experience - Accessible to most humans with well functioning sense organs easily. Visual sense being very dominant, other non visual environment is best experienced with closed eyes
2. Our own body - the envelop of life & instrument of action
How to experience - Close your eyes and imagine focusing on each part toe to head
3. Our senses & signals received as light, sound, touch, smell & taste
How to experience - Close your eyes and focus on one sense organ at a time & relish the experience
4. Our mind - that captures these signals received by senses and retrieves associated experience that has been previously stored in our memory
How to experience - Close your eyes & focus on any sound that you receive , you would find an imagery flashing in to your inner self. If you have associated emotions that were stored along with that sound, they would also be retrieved and played back.
Be aware, what is retrieved is not reality, it is merely the retrieval of stored image along side that stimulus. For example, if we close our eyes and hear same sound played via an audio system, we would experience same imagery and emotions.
5. Our intellect - Its a machine that finds an answer given a question. The answers are purely based on stored experiences & knowledge acquired in once life time. Knowledge stored is mainly data acquired, procedures learned to analyze that data. Intellect also uses stored procedures to extrapolate & fill the gaps if we do not have acquired stored knowledge in the area of asked question.
How close the answer is to the reality depends on the depth of acquired and stored knowledge in that area. Better the stored resource, better the answer is close to reality. To a question, an individual's intellect can give an answer that is very close to reality & to the other, the same individual's intellect, can give an answer that is miles away from reality depending on the domain of the question.
How to experience - Close your eyes and ask a question, you would experience the answer coming by. Try to ask different types of question, some thing that has definitive answers - example - what is 2+2?, something that is exploratory - How to cut a mango into two pieces? and something bordering on areas where we do not have any stored memories - How does halogen taste?
6. Our Ego - Ego is the one who takes position about what do we want reality to look like and gives value judgement about what is good & bad solely based on the earlier (positions). Predominantly has two layers as I have experienced - the furious guardian of physical existence, collection of acquired attitudes, values and beliefs.
Ego, keeps our intellect busy all the time in finding ways to get the world to behave in line with its positions (what it considers good/right), and keeps the body busy in pursuit of these perceived benevolent acts.
Ego also blocks the other side of the reality that is contradictory to the positions taken.
How to experience - Ask questions to yourself about things that question your survival, question the validity of fundamental beliefs that you hold. Now, experience the discomfort that you feel, that is the discomfort of ego. Now also experience the command of the ego given to your intellect to find reasons why your own questions are useless & why the contrary that is in line with your beliefs is true.
7. Our thoughts - thoughts are mainly the experience reflection screen that results from pursuits of layers of Mind, Intellect & Ego (4, 5, 6 above). For example, when mind retrieves an experience it becomes thought, when intellect provides an answer or a plan it becomes a though or when ego questions the intellect for answers or plans to perpetuate its existence or designs the process & the results become the thoughts. The thoughts lead to actions & no action takes place without a preceding thought.
How to experience - Just close your eyes and experience the imagery & experiences generated by interesting play of above 7 layers of our existence & you have reached the thought layer.
8. The unknown - Some call it soul, some the higher self, others the god within. Einstein calls it baseless speculation. I Only have experienced the glimpses of it during last stages of meditation but do not have vocabulary to describe it yet.
How to experience - Not sure if I am qualified to even explain the experiment, but the following is how it works repeatedly for me.
Close your eyes and gradually become aware of the all the 7 layers or our physical existence. Keep the life and existence flow as it does, do not concentrate on any thing, do not block any thing, do not pursue any thought. Just let the reality of your inner & outer world flow as it finds fit.
You may experience a state of strange peaceful coexistence with the world & a very illuminated experience, bordering on hallucination, may give close to 10X effect of pre-orgasm excitement. Beyond this I lack vocabulary to explain this layer or which dimension of reality does it reflect at this point.
Happy exploration!
