CHAPTER 4

The Razor's Edge

You stand now on the precipice my friend, on the very edges of your reality. There is a movement afoot that depends upon your efforts now to understand your own nature. The deeper you peer into your identity, the more quickly do the paradigms of your reality change. As the title of this writing suggests, your perception of reality is a metaphor for the contraction of infinity into the finite. Even these terms are inaccurate because the finite does not really exist. It only seems so. As you expand your identity into the infinite being that you are, the way that you perceive your world and your place in it changes dramatically.

Choosing to proclaim yourself a spiritual being having a physical experience removes the randomness of events in your life. Each occurrence becomes meaningful. Each encounter with another, each event, speaks directly to your soul. As you follow the path to self awareness, you begin to sense more and more the spacious being that you really are. You see yourself reflected in everything around you. Your sense of isolation, locked away from the rest of creation in your finite body, is released to reveal the intimacy of your connection to the entire universe that you perceive. Imagine that the stars in the night sky, so many millions of light years away, are really you. This is the truth of your identity. The word essence most clearly defines who you are. The most fundamental meaning of things is your true identity. When you define yourself so, the sacredness of your existence becomes central to your life in this dimension. We urge you to begin to worship yourself for the divine creature that you are.

It is a fine, sharp, blade that you stand upon in this life. From one perspective, identified with your physical body, your very existence is a statement of limitation. Your being is extended only to the edges of your skin, your life only to the edges of the influence you have exerted upon the world by your words and actions. And, when it is over, it is over. Every mis-step places you in mortal danger, threatening to make meaningless all your life's endeavors. From this perspective, the hoarding of resources, the gross amassing of monies, the pursuit of physical pleasures and comfort and the striving for status and power, all without much regard for the needs of your fellow beings on the planet, makes perfect sense. From the intense perception of limitedness comes the fear of insufficiency. There can never be enough of anything to fulfill such a meaningless existence.

The other side of this blade, the identification with the essence of things solid and imaginary, carries an awareness of the intensely impersonal nature of creation. Its motions are unconditional and without pity. It matters not to the essence of you what you say or do. Your perception of reality means nothing to your soul. As a soul, you pour your essence infinitely outward in pure joyous expansion. Where it goes and what effect it has is unimportant. It goes everywhere and does everything. You have personalized your soul as you have personalized your self. Even though this is a natural part of the flow into physicalness, to individuate and personalize, it is a source of fear and unhappiness to live this out now.

As you perch upon this razor between you and your self, every squirm to one side or another can bring you discomfort and even pain. To one side and you experience trauma and fear. To the other side and you find your beliefs in reality undermined, your world view becomes unstable. The longing in your heart for meaning and joy draws you inexorably toward spirit. The fact that you are drawn through the experience of pain along the way encourages you to drag your heels every step of the way. Each time you lean towards the light, the blade of truth slices you a little more.

The quality of thought can be viewed in terms of frequency much like the quality of light or sound. The term quality does not suggest that some thoughts are "good" and others "bad". It is used to differentiate one focus of thought from another. Thoughts geared to the physical plane, thoughts of money, power over others, physical manipulations and your body, are of a lower frequency then thoughts of philosophy, ecstasy and even moral judgements. Turning your thoughts to the greater reality of your being shines a light into the darkness inside you. Each low frequency fear and trauma that you dwell upon or act out of unconsciously will be activated by this light. Higher frequencies moving through you add motive force to whatever they touch inside you. How you respond to this movement will determine your ability in the present to experience happiness.

Think of your energy field as a conduit, a pipe which carries the water of spirit through you into all the little pipes getting progressively more fine and finite until your physical body is manifested. The spiritual body is huge and carries all the energies of the universe in its magnetic field. The other bodies, mental, emotional and physical become progressively smaller and more selective. They are impacted by the spiritual energy of the universe but they only register the frequencies to which they are able to resonate. As your consciousness reaches out to the more subtle energies of spirit, it activates the various bodies in ways commensurate with the subtlety of your thought. That is to say that when you overcome physical sensation as the main focus of your awareness and begin to really feel your feelings, your emotional body becomes more active. The plaque on the walls of its pipes begins to flake off and become conscious. This plaque, repressed feelings of pain and fear, demands your attention. Your whole world is colored by this demand. If you continue to repress the experience of this old stuck, grungy energy, it begins to clog up the pipe at sensitive points in your emotional set. You feel just awful. How can a spiritual exercise produce such pain and depression? More importantly, how can you move through that pain as quickly and easily as possible?

Just as matter has three states of being, solid, liquid and gaseous, energy, thought and spirit have three analogous states of being. Just as your body is predominantly liquid, so too must your emotional, metal and spiritual bodies be fundamentally fluid. As crystallization of matter within your body produces physical illness such as arthritis, arteriosclerosis and cancer, hardened crystallized emotional energy produces habitual unconscious emotional responses to life. These run the gamut from repression to some pretty pernicious neuroses. Each unconscious, knee-jerk response to life such as anger, blaming, guilt and resentment represents a solidified chunk of emotional energy. Applying higher frequency (spiritualised) energy to these crystals such as forgiveness, unconditional love or even a kind thought, will wear away at the solidity. Pieces may flake off and go careening through your emotional experience stirring up anger or tears for no apparent reason. You may feel a great deal of fear resulting from these unidentified feelings. If allowed to continue moving within you by not fighting or repressing these feelings, they become more fluid. It is simply a matter of motion. The faster and freer things move, the higher the frequency they achieve. The inner friction of these gloms of energy against one another makes them become more fluid like heating solid matter makes it fluid.

Look inward to your experience of emotional pain and fear. See how repetitive it has been? Ever wonder why you keep having the same kinds of life experience; one bad relationship after another (why don't they love me?), difficult bosses, boring jobs, undependable friends, financial hardships? All this repetition is the result of replaying the same emotional crystals over and over. Applying forgiveness and acceptance (spiritual energy) to these crystals will relieve you of these patterned experiences. Small increments yield slower results. We recommend spiritual disciplines and practices such as meditation, yoga, service work and the like because such large doses of spiritual energy will move you through from crystal to fluid emotional energy more quickly and easily.

As a more fluid state is attained emotionally, more of your energy will approach the gaseous state. This is the emotional state we to refer to as joy. In early stages of the experience of joy, this gaseous state can be very volatile. You can quickly vacillate between joy and tears, feeling pinnacles of both states with very short intervals in between. Your life circumstances will mirror these states providing plenty of sparks for both. Taking a lover who then dumps you, for instance, sparks both states. Life can feel like an emotional roller coaster. Your precarious perch on the razor's edge of spiritual growth both cuts and thrills. Be patient and loving with yourself and push on through by turning ever more towards your spiritual identity. As each experience of fear bubbles up into your awareness, apply your awareness of spirit to it. Remind yourself of your principles. Remind yourself of your evolving values and have faith, growing all the time, that you are safe in this world. This is only energy that you are experiencing. Where there is no resistance there is no harm. Eventually, the roller coaster will settle down. Your soaring high moments will become more commonplace but less distant from your "normal" state of consciousness. The plunging lows too will be less tumultuous and painful. You will become more adept at allowing them to pass through your life. Continue to apply forgiveness and acceptance to yourself and to the reflections of yourself that life provides you through other people. The more you practice this clearing of stuck, crystallized emotional energy, the more peaceful and joyous your daily life becomes. You will begin actively seeking out these chunks of fear and pain lodged inside yourself in order to be released from them. Joy is very addictive!

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Just as the movement from physical pleasure to emotional joy marks a distinct evolutionary step, so too does the movement from emotional joy into mental ecstasy. At this level of subtlety, you break down the crystallized thought patterns, the "I can'ts" and "I shoulds" that unconsciously rule your life. You develop the mental monitoring skills to become aware of these solidified thoughts, hardened by repetition. You consciously find and replace them with the more fluid and more accurate thoughts of which your personal philosophy of life is built. Fluid thought is more expansive. It reaches out in time and space to grant a wider perspective. You see your life in more wholeness. When you ask yourself, "What will it matter in a hundred years?", you are applying fluidity to your thinking and decision making. When you ask,"What does this mean to my soul?", you apply even more fluidity. Such thinking erodes the solidity of thought that leads to pain and fear in the emotional body and finally to pain and illness in the physical.

Breaking up these crystals of thought which focus on your physical and emotional self by turning your attention to your spiritual self, you will find that the routines of your life are disrupted. This can be disconcerting. You may even question your stability at times. Remember that stability too is a thought. You have defined stability in terms of your belief in your body as your identity. As this belief is transformed you will have to redefine more concepts than just that of stability. You are changing the nature of your existence with this work.

Hand in hand with this increasing mental fluidity goes a growing understanding and trust of your wholeness and your integrity. You see yourself as more than a mere body. You are an idea. You exist in the mind of God. You have never had control over that. You are piercing the illusion of individuality in gradual increments. Each ecstatic experience is rooted in the awareness of oneness. The mind shifts into the gaseous state and expands outwards to grasp whole ideas. Eventually, it expands to grasp at the wholeness of existence itself. You experience the connection of self with All That Is. This vapor state in turn breaks up more crystals of thought that you hold in your mental body to leave a more balanced, predominantly fluid state. Your thoughts flow unhindered more and more. Your thoughts become the very razor that your emotional and physical bodies have perched upon.

In order to achieve incarnation in the first place, your spiritual body had to flow into a more solid state, pulsing in and out of fluid balance to maintain the connection from Source to matter. This flow is habitual as well and well it should be for the purposes of physical experience. There is an addiction of sorts to creativity in this body that keeps thrusting into matter. It provides a flow constantly that often interferes with your knowing that you are indeed spirit. You experience existential doubt as a result of this patterned flow. This body must receive its healing from the top down so to speak. To break the crystals of this steady flow into matter and relieve the bonds of the physical universe requires you to call your soul to come closer to you. As the pure awareness of the soul penetrates your energy field at the call of your body, heart and mind, its frequency which is beyond frequency stirs the spiritual body into faster motion affording you the experience of knowing. Your true identity comes to you at this passage. You assume this identity as smoothly as you assume a body now. This is the job of the spiritual body. It is the funnel of awareness into identity.

Each effort you have made to nurture your body, your emotions, and your mind constitutes a call for the presence of your soul. Now, a direct call speeds this process up even more. "I call for my oversoul to align with my physical, emotional and mental bodies", causes the process of gaining fluidity in all these bodies to accelerate. Indeed, every thought, word and deed into which you throw yourself "heart and soul" becomes a commanding call for your soul to enter your conscious awareness.

Go back to the exercise in chapter 2 when you chose a life pattern you wished to change. As you contemplate the ideal circumstance you wrote down, search deeply within yourself for the feeling of absolute commitment to this ideal. It serves you not to choose some fantasy, some "wouldn't it be nice", daydream for this exercise. Choose an ideal that is fundamental to your identity, be that love, wealth, spirituality or service, whatever. Find the feeling of absolute commitment to this ideal. You will achieve this ideal if it kills you kind of commitment. You know that people who have reached this level of commitment have achieved the seemingly impossible. We only ask that you work "towards" this feeling. Throw your heart and soul into this idea for only just the moment. Observe how this feeling blossoms into images and sensation of the accomplishment. With practice, you will find your feet following a path that opens magically before you towards this ideal. All the strain and obstacles that you fear block your path are mere crystallized thought and feeling that will be broken up by the flow of spirit through this deep commitment. Practice this feeling often. Reach out to your most exalted aspirations. No goal that you can dream is too large to be made a reality.

You sit at the edge of a new reality. You are preparing to step off this solid world and assume your identity as spirit. This is not a small task, but too, it is not an unattainable goal. Your soul is ready to meet you half way. In your terms, it longs for you as you long for it. Its terms, of course, defy description. Your longing though is a part of the call you make inwardly to your soul that speeds up the motion back to spirit. There are no real reasons to hesitate or to fear. They are illusions that you bear through life. All That Is, is you and you CAN dare to dream that identity.

To Chapter Five