John 8:23 Meaning He Said to Them

Beneath and above are not two places but two ways of seeing, the low view that believes in the world of separation and the high view that looks from love. A mind of this world takes the body and its fears for reality and lives as though guilt were the truth of things. A mind not of this world looks past all that to what love created, and rests there.

What is being drawn is the line between the two teachers within. One belongs to the dream and speaks for fear; the other belongs to truth and speaks for love. The whole of awakening is the mind's quiet passage from the first way of seeing to the second, from beneath to above, without the world itself moving at all.

Beneath: the low way of seeing that takes the world of separation for the truth, the level on which the mind believes in guilt Above: the way of seeing that looks from love, unbound by the body and the world, the level on which the mind knows only innocence

There are two dimensions in every human being. One is made of form: the body, the thoughts, the endless circumstances that most people mistake for their whole identity. The other is the awareness in which all of that appears, and it is bound to no place and no condition. To be from above is to know yourself as that awareness rather than as the passing content of your life.

When you are identified only with form, the world moves you completely. The moment you sense the still presence behind your thinking, you are no longer wholly of this world, because you have found in yourself something that circumstance can never touch.

"From beneath" and "from above" are two ways of standing, not two places. To be from beneath is to take the visible world as the final word, to read your life off your circumstances and believe the facts made you. Most people live there without noticing.

To be from above is to know your awareness sits over the facts, not under them. The world of things is an effect, and consciousness is the cause it hangs from. A man rooted in this does not argue with conditions as though they held authority; he knows the state he occupies is the higher ground the conditions answer to. The crowd cannot hear it because they are still reading upward from appearances. Awareness is the origin, and the seen world is its outcome, never the other way around.

Beneath and above are not 2 places but 2 levels within one person: the lower consciousness rooted in the body and its appetites, and the higher awareness that descends from the center of light. To be from beneath is to identify wholly with the flesh and the outer world of the senses, taking that surface for the whole of oneself.

The voice speaking from above is the higher self declaring its own origin, the awareness that belongs to the inner realm of spirit and is not bound to the world of matter and passing form. What sounds like a man setting himself against his listeners is the higher nature within naming the gap between the light at the center and the lower self that has not yet risen to meet it. Every person holds both, and the whole work is to move from the level beneath to the level above.

Beneath: the lower consciousness rooted in the body and the world of the senses Above: the higher awareness descending from the inner center of light World: the outer realm of matter and passing form, the plane the lower self takes for the whole of itself