CHAPTER 9
Hey! Do you own this piece of $%#&?
So, how are you doing with opening to joy? Have you made some headway into defining it as easy? Free? Your right to experience? Do you occasionally manage to get out of your own way long enough to feel the flow of pure joyous love pouring through you into expression in your world? Have you realized that having that love pour through you has nothing to do with the details of your human life; that this is who you are, not what you do? Have you found that you can be who you most dearly want to be right now?
WELL! WHY THE HELL NOT?
It is time you started writing your own books. In these books write down just what you do believe about who you are and the world you inhabit. Learn to express the truth of yourself unreservedly. Open yourself to everything that you have decided about who you are. Look around at your life to see in very graphic terms what that decision looks like and write it all down. If you have read this far and still cannot answer the questions at the top of the page, you are lying to yourself in a very big way. There is no point in refusing to own your life. If you don't own it, you cannot change it. You are stuck praying to some external God to release you from your agony. So, write it all down like it is really yours. Who are you?
Defining yourself gives you real creative power. Do this seriously and you will soon give up the pen. There is truly nothing of your experience which does not deserve inclusion in your self-definition. This includes your imaginative experience, your dreams, what you have read or been told, every thought and feeling. All are genuine pieces of who you believe yourself to be. Pushing your imagination into the spiritual as you have done with this book widens your sense of Self dramatically. How well do you remember this breadth of Self while you brush your teeth, do your job or fight with your spouse? Doesn't it seem strange that it might take some discipline to practice feeling limitless joy for big chunks of your day? Why define the mundane aspects of living like making the bed, doing the laundry or driving the car as something less than a spiritual experience? Are you not a spiritual being? If you can imagine it, you are it. You are monster and saint, devil and angel, human and spirit. Are you willing to own it?
Yes, even while treading this glorious journey of self-discovery, you will have times of pain and strife. Your limiting beliefs are always a part of who you are. Even when you consciously embrace and release the old, self-destructive definitions of who you are and what the world is, you will revisit them again as you conjure a life that sparks them anew. If you are willing to own those beliefs and consciously examine them as they come up, you can freely choose who you want to be, what you want to experience. In this fashion, old beliefs lose the power you have given them by relegating them to unconscious layers of your Self. From there, they have been projected into your world as seemingly separate, powerful circumstances beyond your control. When such a belief, like the one that states you have to earn whatever you receive, even God's love, is projected unconsciously, you find it hard to understand why you got fired from your job, why your spouse is angry at you, why you keep getting hurt in the gym. When you open to such a belief, own it and willingly experience it in action, you become able to sense its presence in your thinking and feeling. You can then choose something else and thus change your experience. If you do not, you will never hit the lottery, be truly loved for who you really are or be able to accept the gift of life unreservedly and ensure health, and vitality for your body, mind and feelings.
What are the beliefs that have structured your reality? Where does guilt rear its head in your life? Of what are you ashamed? When do you believe you have to do something in order to have what you want? What is the price you must pay for joy in this moment? What do you believe that you do not know? Why can you not know everything? See the limits built into beliefs that inspire guilt. Write these beliefs down. Then you can begin to design new beliefs to replace them whenever they come up.
Taking on such a task as confronting your limiting beliefs makes a powerful creative statement. It proclaims that it is safe in your universe to see your whole Self. It proclaims that you have the power and skill to find such limits within yourself. It proclaims that you deserve to become liberated from them. It proclaims a faith in your Self that can power you through whatever comes next.
Every idea expands into myriad implications. That is simply because an idea is much larger than any thought construct can contain. It is a spiritual phenomena in mental body form. No sooner does it form into thought than it, in part, expands back to spirit. Thought is subtle and expansive accordingly. Compared to emotional or physical phenomena thought is very ethereal and formless. Compared to spirit, thought is dense and highly structured. Placing limits on ideas by stating hard and fast definitions, demanding proof or judging the rightness or wrongness of them thwarts the expanding flow. Such self-limiting also thoroughly occupies your mind. Anything that you seek to limit or refuse slows the flow of a very tangible movement of spirit. Such slowing creates density as the constant streams of creative awareness impact the pocket of resisted motion. Density takes on weight and weight, at the level of thought and feeling is experienced as fear. All in all, habits of thinking , like careful measuring, dwelling on one thing exclusively for prolonged periods (worry) or recycling an idea over and over ("I can't, I can't") becomes self-destructive, fear driven obsession on a subtle level. Well before you recognize experiencing fear in its many forms, you have created it in the quiet reaches of your mind as a result of such habits.
The idea of an objective world is just such a habit of the mind. In spite of all you have learned to date, that habitual thought pattern returns you constantly to looking outside yourself to explain your experience. Even while you proclaim your creative responsibility, your mind conjures reasons and rationales that cast the responsibility for your experience onto other people, situations, history, physics or God. You may catch such motions and choose creatively, taking on the power to change your experience, but those subtle habits continue. How then do you free yourself from their heavy handed rule?
Foster silence! Practice it in meditation. Let whatever form your practice takes lead you into silence. At some point, you must let go of form to get there. If you use a mantra, for example, follow it deeper into quieter places in the mind. Capture the sound before it becomes sound or word or idea. Pursue that mantra into silence, using it as a device and not an end in itself. Treasure the pockets of silence that you encounter after you have left them. You won't know you are in them until you have left them. If your intent for your meditation is to go into silence, you will eventually get there. Along the way you will discover the patterns of the mind that we speak of here. Your awareness will shift and change many times; rising to waking consciousness and falling once more into meditative states. You will see how thought catches your attention and begins to cycle, feeding itself and taking on density. When it does, it becomes more difficult to get yourself settled into your mantra again. At such times you have the chance to learn the most powerful tool in the mental body array. Letting go.
The Yin and Yang of higher mental body awareness is the release of thought and the intent to silence. As long as you intend to think (an almost constant state), you cannot release thought. Therefore, your habitual thoughts rule your experience. You stay in the lower mental body. You certainly can become more aware of your thoughts at more subtle levels, even within this intent. You can reach states of brilliance that will improve your life dramatically. You have done that often, if unconsciously. This book you read is but one example. There are built-in limitations to this habit of thought, though, that are barriers to your highest aspirations. Treating thought like a King is no more effective than treating feelings or expression like royalty. It may look so on cursory glance, but even the most subtle thought is but a condensed flow of spirit. Only in silence is spirit loud enough to hear.
Our friend here writes these words using a technique we would recommend. His approach is not always consistent. Many moments of waking consciousness encroach upon the dialogue but many flashes of spirit break through. When he switches his mental gears to listening, the conversation in his mind quiets. It then becomes possible for our impulses to enter his awareness. His mind must once more engage to put words to the ideas we offer him in whole chunks. He will scribble madly for several moments to get as much on paper as he can until he realizes he is once more a bit lost for words and must sit and wait. He remembers learning this process in meditation when he began having visionary experiences. He was swept away with them at first, not even being able to remember the details. It was much like waking from dreams which faded before him as the room he sat in took over the landscape. To capture the experience, he found he needed to stop and review and then push on. This process took many attempts before he learned not to derail the train of imagery and thought. Finally, he learned to ask questions while watching the flow of image and idea. Both the imagery and the chain of narrative in his mind would respond to the questions. His experience became wholly interactive. The interplay of listening and intending illustrated by asking questions and waiting for the response from within provided a creative experience of the deeper levels of his mind.
Today he no longer goes after visionary experiences. He prefers contact such as this which comes couched in more concrete metaphors. These conceptualizations are less shrouded in personal imagery, less difficult to interpret and express. His belief that he can access wisdom more directly makes it possible to reach for us inside himself. His willingness to listen, to set aside his intellect and his fear in order to be open to our input has been fundamental to our conversation, out of which three books have emerged. An honor for he and we!
The most powerful aspect of silence is the absolute faith it asks of you. To assert your safety so strongly by ceasing the internal conversation which maintains your universe is an act of infinite power. It is the power to liberate. Through this pursuit, you can free yourself from the tyranny of a world built entirely upon your past concepts of Self. You maintain this perceptual set with the constant repetition of mental constructs. To shut off the mind, even for the briefest time, creates a point of power by releasing those cycling conceptual structures of which you are almost entirely unaware.
With that as the ultimate outcome of pursuing silence, there are also many benefits to be reaped along the way. As you bring your mind to ever more quiet states, you become receptive to more subtle levels of thought. The surface layers where thoughts become words, sounds and images present ideas at their most complex. Many words are needed to explore a whole concept and pursue its varied implications. This is the strength of academic training. Manipulating words to rationalize and communicate ideas is a science in itself. Even this writing is based upon such training for without it, words that could touch upon the vastness of infinity could not be found. Still, not everyone fits comfortably into this activity. Even though your culture prizes this kind of thinking above all others, it is not necessarily the most effective approach to the uses of the mind. Creative thinking is captured at much quieter layers of the mind. By training your mind to capture whole concepts at once by relaxing the iron grip of rational thought and quietly wandering the mental landscape, brand new possibilities can be explored. While not all such creative thinkers are also strong rational, pragmatic mental skills, those that can do both regularly build successful, happy lives. Even the most logical scientific skeptics can increase their creative potential by pursuing this meditative quiet.
The creativity that you can gain access to with this simple practice will go through many layers as you go along. The most concrete form of practical focus lies on the surface. Recalling where you left objects, your best friend's phone number and the TV schedule for the week become the more common aspects of your life. Artistic creativity lies beneath that layer and there you can access creative solutions to any problem which absorbs your attention. You will teach yourself to recognize this layer of your mind and to set and act upon your intent to find solutions long before you reach total silence. The pursuit itself will bring you past the creative layer from both directions many times.
Deeper in the mental body lies the layer of conceptualization from which your perception of the world springs forth. When you reach this layer consistently, you will find ideas about reality which are repeated endlessly while rarely reaching the surface of your mind unless provoked by studious questioning and concentrated effort. Meditation being such an effortless activity, we suggest more of the latter and less of the former. Still, any attempt to pierce more deeply into the workings of your own mind will bring positive results in the long run.
Once you recognize the nature of those hamster wheel thoughts which construct your reality, endlessly repeating until they form your internal landscape which is then projected into your external landscape, you can begin to decide which thoughts just gotta go. If you inject a new concept which you can wholeheartedly embrace when you encounter one of the cycle of antiquated ideas, you can make your whole world change for the better. You may have had more practice injecting ideas which describe your fears of course. Still, you can turn that around with a simple act of choice.
Now, some of your harsh conceptions of reality can be captured at surface levels of awareness. After all, they do produce the world you perceive in all of its confusing complexity. The program we have offered you in these writings will make many of those habitual patterns of thought pretty obvious to you. Hearing yourself think "I can't" for the umpteenth time today will give you much to play with as you work deeper into your mind.
The deeper layer that we address here is one where such ideas as solidity, security, linearity and identity interact with more basic thrusts of the mind like "I and Thou" which is the concept of separateness. The deep choices you make about who you are take place here. These choices are only reflected at the surface levels where your act of defining yourself and your world bubbles into words and rationalizations. The journey from your infinite awareness to the consciousness you call "me" gathers clutter massively along the way.
This process is akin to a highway with a thousand entrance ramps but only one exit. The constant influx of interacting traffic brings perception to a near standstill. The influx of thought energy in the deepest levels is fast moving, nearly automatic and easily integrated into the flow of meaning from your spiritual Self. Layered upon such flow are the increasingly more dense fears and the effects of fears. Ideas are slowed by these pockets of holding back. They do not integrate easily into the flow of traffic. The more congested the mind by belief, fear and the cycling of thoughts which create belief and fear, the slower the traffic flow and the more difficult it is to integrate ideas which do not fit into established patterns. Creative solutions become more difficult to entertain in an atmosphere of such fear and contrary belief. It is like merging traffic into a road already congested. Everything must slow and strain to bring new traffic into a lane clogged by bunched up, lock-stepped patterns. Just like a traffic report on the radio, most of your conscious attention goes to the clogged highways and backed up progress. It is the results of fear and internal conflict that draw your attention most fully. Do you see why meditation can be so effective? You turn away from the top layers of your mind and begin to observe the faster, freer flow.
Perhaps you wonder why, with all of your spiritual growth, you do not experience miracles of some sort, be it creative bursts of spontaneous manifestation (like the biblical loaves and fishes) or of miraculous healings or psychic revealings. You may even question what you have worked so hard to believe about life if it offers you so few changes in the world you perceive. Should not the solidity of three dimensional existence be undermined more by all this knowledge? We would offer you assurance that it indeed has. The solidity of your world is certainly undermined. The questioning itself is symbolic of this trend. Your growth is toward increasing subtly of awareness. Your identity is growing larger as you integrate deeper levels of the Self into your definition of who you are. You are most certainly opening to new worlds, those of emotion, mind and spirit. Trying to prove your spiritual attainment with miracles is a path with many pitfalls. It asks you to cast new ideas into form, disrupting old ones, at the more subtle levels. Referring back to the highway metaphor, to manifest the supernatural is to force a big truck into the flow of cars and a big pile-up will generally occur. Just how self-aware, well-adjusted and spiritually wise are the psychics that you know about? How happy are those seeking to experience a life vastly different than the one they presently live? How ready are you to have the very underpinnings of your reality disrupted? Is that not what you have known to be called insanity? Perhaps that is not such an attractive goal after all.
As all change is inspired at your spiritual source, the properties of that layer of your awareness are integral to the process of change. In that layer, there is unconditional acceptance of what is. Does desiring your life to be vastly different reflect unconditional acceptance? For change at the physical level to manifest, loving what is and accepting the present moment is a very creative position. Paradoxical though it seems, things cannot change in any substantial, healthy way without you first loving the way things are. Such acceptance allows release of the old pattern so that a new one can take shape from the deepest parts of you. Truly embrace the world you know right now and you can choose a new world to experience. Assume that you are not aware of many layers of fear that contribute to the life you presently perceive. Assume that such layers of fear will be released in a timely fashion which you cannot predict. Such assumption allows those fears to be released. Without acceptance, even of fear, there is no release.
This practice of unconditional acceptance brings you deeper into your mental body. The landscape there can be very different than any you have previously encountered. There are no words. Ideas are accessed in their wholeness with infinite implications to be explored. Projecting preconceived notions onto such ethereal processes only serves to thwart your ability to perceive them. Any insistence on the solidity of your definitions blocks your access to creative thought. In other words, if you already know the TRUTH, you are closed to learning anything new. And, something new is created in every moment.
This realm of the mind, as the builder of worlds, has tremendous creative power. Just like the physical world you perceive, even this subtle universe of thought reflects the identity you project. The fears that you experience in the spiritual body filter the expansive joy of your Soul as it condenses into the mental body. Here, where the idea of you coalesces, your fundamental ambivalence, the Yin and Yang of you takes on greater shape and size. You explore your identity constantly in the mental realm. You project with your imagination into many worlds, not just the physical world. You explore who you are in the light of many suns. As you have constructed the world you have thought always existed, even before there was a you, your imagination, filtered through the idea of the physical world, has expanded wherever you have been willing to give it power. Hence, your world, as you have known it, has grown constantly. Put more simply, look at how your ideas about your world have grown through the years. You explore its history, size and shape; the laws which govern it and the possible attributes of the being that created it. With every such exploration your actual world has grown, becoming more real and solid to you on so many levels.
As you move more deeply into your own mind, look for the kernels of identity that pre-date your physical world. Seek out the idea of yourself as a spirit, a ghost if you will. You have no physical body, no shape or form. You are an idea. As you become aware of the idea of you and begin to explore its implications, you creatively project the infinite possibilities for expression that an idea can expand into. Your predilections, inclinations and fears lend structure to these explorations and creative imaginings which resonate to these attributes take precedence. They get repeated and through repetition take on greater form. You perceive yourself as human with hands, feet, opposable thumbs and so on because you resonate as an idea with such expression. You get mesmerized so to speak and build upon such a focus. You could have easily focused upon antennae and exoskeleton and evolved an insectoid form from which to express your identity as a being. Indeed, as you imagine such a form, your spiritual Self explores that as well. What you see at any level of your Self, is a projection of who you define yourself to be. That is why you are now looking for your Self and away from your many and varied expressions. All those people out there are among the infinite expressions of your Self that you experience in worlds inner and outer.
Your movement into silence cuts through even these most subtle layers of mind then. Where you begin to form worlds to explore is already imprinted with identity. That imprint has already limited your direct experience of infinity. Only silence brings you beyond the existential fear of separation from God Self. Only silence comes from the intent to accept what is unconditionally. Thought attempts to capture spirit and thus is inherently limiting. Releasing thought allows infinite expansion of the Self, accepts that as identity and thus releases all of the worlds that thought creates. In the moment of silence, all things become possible, potential.
Full circle we have come once more. By owning your world in this present moment, you make it possible to own all worlds. Enlarge your identity to embrace all that you perceive, inwardly and outwardly and you gain access to unlimited joy and creative power. Strange, is it not, that owning creative responsibility for that clerk's angry explosion in your face could lead to ultimate joy? Something so small as admitting that "I created that!" can open doors to infinity. Something so small as letting go of thought for a while can open doors to the wholeness of your Self.
On to Chapter 10:
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