From upper mind comes the function of God in your work, your inner spiritual direction, a check on the direction of spiritual guidance.
This Upper Mind helps to distinguish the many guides of directions and work from the lower mind, emotional mind heart, impulses, wants, patterns, habits.
Without this discernment it is most difficult to follow the spiritual path. Without inner guidance and the upper mind of discernment you can easily fall into old patterns, desires and thoughts which are from the lower aspects of yourself.
With the upper mind activated, constant awareness can be practiced, although when I say constant that is only the aim. If you can achieve constant awareness of your thoughts and whims then you have achieved the impossible. Try it and see how many minutes or seconds you can do it for to check on all your thoughts?
There is still chance, coincidence and intuition as a more instant happening, but care and honesty still needs to be practiced to sort the Real from the imagined, the upper from the lower paths.
Lower forms of guidance can be mistaken for true guidance. Distractions to true guidance of heart emotions, over active mind, fear, anxiety, familiarity, lust, greed, family patterns and influences, status, dreams, instincts, ego. These can all disguise themselves very well as guidance from above.
All these many voices, blocks and pushes are hard to see through and they create the reality of duality. This duality is like a left and right. As you oscillate between the two points over endless times you eventually narrow them down to form the constant middle path of true spirituality. As practice builds so the oscillations reduce and the path becomes clearer and the distractions weaker.
Constant awareness can help sort out these conflicts of direction of left and right and eventually you start to become aware of the upper mind and its guiding force of the central path in-between Left and Right.
As if that is not a problem in itself, what I must point out, a problem I have found and I have seen in other people which adds a further issue and belies common sense.
This problem really lies in two strands.
The first is the closer you get to knowing God you find out that his guidance can be like a yo yo just like your mind. But this is God’s yo-yo, not yours and so it appears that this yo-yoing and contradictory guidance is to shake the mind off the trail so that you come to rely and rest in him instead of the comfort of your own, all too familiar mind.
It’s like God wants you to rest in him, lean on Him and trust him even if it makes no sense and the Mind cannot follow. The mind not following is of course the whole point if you are to move the mind out of the way to see God clearer and find this beautiful Bliss.
The second problem is also equally hard to distinguish. This inner guidance however you receive it seem to sometimes get stuck in a rut and only seems to get jolted out of this rut by some external event, trigger or someone will say something that triggers a thought of a change of direction. Or many people may say the same thing over and over.
So how to deal with the external event ? Of course it’s all comes down to discernment and being open to the path. But how to distinguish the frivolous chat or nagging advice and scepticism which is not of the path from the persistent call of the path through another person or events. I really don’t know the answer to that one. But I have learnt to keep an open ear and awareness and to keep checking the inner guidance as much as I can.
Another check to this guide I have found is the feeling, the inner feeling. Does it match ? Can you see it happening ahead. What does it feel like ? Are you being pushed that way by your guidance or by you old habits. It’s a tough one to judge, especially if you are about to start a new challenge as this can be such a challenge to take on that it feels so wrong and fearful and it requires a great push, clarity and guidance to go ahead.