CHAPTER 6

The Compartment Department

Look at the details of your daily life. Look carefully at how each day contains mundane routines. Nearly every action of your daily life is a repetition of actions you have learned over years of practice. You rise from sleep, groggily relieve yourself, wash, perhaps brush your teeth, make coffee, light a cigarette and launch into a day filled with acts that require from you no deep thought, no self awareness and nearly no effort consciously or from deeper levels of your self. Such a life is a fine metaphor for how you live your inner life as well. Your thoughts and feelings are arranged in patterns that repeat themselves almost endlessly. These patterns create the highly structured life you lead. These patterns interfere greatly with your ability to explore your true identity.

The pathway to your whole self invariably leads through the integration of all the infinite aspects of your being. This cannot happen by accident. It is the result of conscious willingness on your part. From the darkest parts of you to the most Godly, you will have to consciously accept the all of you to accomplish this integration. You will incorporate into your personal philosophy the acceptance of your own impulse to harm self and others. You may wonder how you will do this but you will do it. Over and over you have heard that God is Love; that Love is all there is. Well, acceptance is the application of Love. Embracing what you loathe and knowing that has its rightful place in creation is a universal law. It is incontrovertible. Even the most cruel act you can imagine is an expression of God's Love. You need not understand the details but you must know the truth of that.

Because you judge, you label. Because you label, you separate. Because you separate, you disconnect. Because you disconnect, you loathe. Because you loathe, you suffer. Yuck! You must learn a new way of perceiving reality to break this spiral of suffering. You must learn unconditionality. You must call back all the compartmentalized, separated facets of your being. You must once more become whole. In your wholeness you will find peace, joy, ecstasy and bliss.

Look again at all the separate details of your life. You have created separate compartments for all the aspects of being. Your work life is separate from your home life (even if you work at home). Your love life is separate from your parental life. This list could go on forever. We hope you see the point. The result is that even the major organizations of your inner world, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies, are compartmentalized as though each were distinct and functioning independently. The more extremely you see this independence, the more out of alignment they can become. If you imagine these organizational structures as permeable balloons of different size with the physical smaller than the emotional smaller than the mental smaller than the spiritual, you can play with all the possible arrangements of these bodies. For most people, there is a general degree of intersection and overlapping of these bodies. A genuine alignment of them so that all bodies are within one another from smallest to largest is as rare as all bodies entirely separate and distinct. These major aspects of the psyche separate and leave alignment as a result of a shift of perspective from the forest to the trees. As you begin to believe in the physical universe as the "real" universe, you separate your physical body from the others. You are essentially trying to make it larger than the others and therefore your feelings are "in" your heart, and your thoughts are "in" your brain. Some have even managed to believe that their souls somehow live inside their bodies as some unconscious point source of some indefinable energy.

Granted that the very substance of each of these bodies differs vastly from one another, picturing them as balloons is not very accurate. Misalignment is not a physical phenomenon. However, it does have obvious physical consequences. Every ailment, tragedy and ill chance in life is the direct result of this misalignment. Each time you choose to repress, ignore, or exalt one bodies' impulses and do not actively offer balanced responses from the other bodies, you create misalignment. For instance, when you repress your feelings, you push your emotional body away from your physical body. The energy from the emotional body no longer runs as smoothly through your physical. When you live out thought patterns which deny your other bodies, like "I can't do that or feel that or embrace that", your mental body goes our of alignment with the others. Much like an automobile when its wheels go out of alignment, you experience aberrant wear and tear. This results in pain and suffering to one degree or another.

Are you beginning to see how large a task bringing it all back into line can be? Don't give up just yet! The actual job of aligning the bodies is not as difficult as it seems. It does, however, require a very fundamental shift in the paradigms of your life. The way that you experience your self must change dramatically, even for the most advanced student of life. To bring all the disparate pieces of your self, which you have separated with years of dissociation, back into the perspective of wholeness, you must begin to look at the universe in fundamentally different ways. You must see it from the perspective of the soul. Each time you look at the details of your life, both inner and outer, from that perspective, you call those various facets of Self a little closer to your conscious self. Each application of unconditional acceptance encourages more unity of Self.

This change in attitude is reflected in each application of the knowing that you are God, in each validation of the truth of your ideology, in each moment of forgiveness and acceptance of your feelings and in each affirmation of your right to be here in this physical world. Each time you call your soul to be present in your experience of the moment as we have discussed previously, you bring greater unity of self into fruition.

Before each formal meditation experience, we suggest you follow this course, when it seems appropriate. Practice will make this real to you in ways that words never can. Upon reaching a relaxed state, use seven breaths to activate and spin each chakra from root to crown. Imagine each as a little tornado about 15cm. (6 inches) across at its widest and spinning clockwise (if you looked at it from outside your body). With the inhale, draw a surge of light energy into your body and let it fill you. Start with lower frequency light (red) and raise the frequency as you go up the system (orange, yellow, green, turquoise, azure, violet). With each exhale, let the energy explode out of you, filling all the chakras and your entire aura. See this in your mind's eye, feel it in your chakras, your skin and your energy field. Perhaps you will even hear the sound it makes as this energy expands out of your body. On the eighth breath, image a large whirlpool of white light coming down from overhead to envelope your body. Let its light fill you as you feel its spin throughout your body. With the eighth chakra, you are getting into non-physical dimensions which when you feel them seem to originate from no determined or pre-determined location. Let this one teach you by staying open to whatever might take place.

Now, in a series of breaths, image a sphere of light with a vortex entering your heart chakra from the front and back. With each breath, let that sphere expand to include each pair of chakras in turn. First the throat and solar plexus, then the brow and sacral, then the crown and root. Notice how you sense this expansion and keep all your senses open. Keep expanding into the non-physical. With expansion to the eight chakra, call your emotional body to align with your physical body. With the ninth call the mental body to align. With the tenth, the spiritual body. What each of these points of entry into your being (chakras) means and how it feels to you is yours to explore. With practice, you will begin to feel the energies of each in distinct ways. The last two chakras, the eleventh and twelfth, you may need to take on faith for a while. Their energies are quite ineffable. With the eleventh chakra, call on your soul (or oversoul or higher self or whatever term you find best describes this superconscious identity), to align with your physical body. With expansion into the twelfth chakra, go right to the top as you see it. Call on the Christ oversoul, or God, or the Source or the Oneness to align with your physical body. Don't be surprised if you ask yourself if this is really possible. Such questions serve a useful purpose. Go right after whatever answers you can get. Then question the answers. Taking these levels of existence on faith will make a healthy statement about your belief in your right to this degree of awareness. If you look for evidence of them in your life, you will surely find it. Remember that such exercises are not just momentary experiences. They are part of the whole of you. Their effects will extend into every aspect of your life. Looking for the patterns which such practices set in motion in your life is an important part of the growth process.

Now that you have taken this short while to clear and activate your energy field in a very conscious way, go ahead and meditate, perhaps asking your higher self for direction or following your own (ego self) agenda. You will find that the nature of your meditations will change in a fairly short time. Enjoy the adventure.

You may have recognized this exercise as very similar to the Unified Chakra Invocation offered by Ariel and Serapis Bey and others. We have offered it to you not as invocation but with options and room for expansion. As we have been discussing, reliance on routines, rituals if you will, creates limitations which are artificial. You are bound by the limits inherent in your ritualized thought, feeling and behavior. Spirit is unbounded and to have a true relationship to your spiritual self, you must break those bonds. It is important to see your spiritual exercises as doors, and not the only doors, to meeting your spiritual self. Do not be bound by those doors. Great flexibility is needed to search for and find what works for you in the moment to open to spirit. It will change without notice.

The effect of routinization in your daily life is to create puddles in the flow of spirit through you. The repetition of thought, feeling and action, draws the various forms of awareness that comprise you to coalesce and become sticky, eventually crusting over to solidify. Breaking such crusts in your field of being requires more effort than flowing with what is. This puddling effect creates compartments in your psyche. You begin to see your spiritual, mental , emotional and physical selves as somehow separate from one another. Your work life separate from your love life and so on. The exercise in reuniting these compartments into the whole of who you are makes a powerful statement of new belief that is life changing.

You are essence! You exist much more as the idea of you than the body of you. The idea of you is very large. It encompasses all the infinite potential that you have. All the myriad things that you could do comprise who you are. As you begin to identify with the idea of yourself, you begin to touch the parts of yourself that are exploring such potential. You discover that you do indeed expand infinitely into lives in matter that your present body knows little about. Each moment is a point of decision and while you choose one direction, holding fast to the idea of your solid world of matter, the idea of you branches into both directions that your life decision offers. There are no limits to the expansion of yourself on any level. Your belief in separation, based on fear, is the limiting factor for your perception of reality.

How to break down that belief in separation is the important question. Primary to this is to move into a larger view of yourself. Consider the validity of the idea of you. Consider the implications that your reality is as unbounded as your imagination. Stretch your imagination at every turn and practice not judging the results. Be open to exploring every passing occurrence in your inner and outer life. Flow with what life brings you, validating each moment as sacred and precious. Look for the message in that moment. There is one in every moment. Each occurrence in your life comes as an expression of the ineffable, infinite self of which you know yourself as a part.

Anyone who has ever created something artistically, which means virtually everyone, has experienced the same flow of spirit that has created your body, your feelings, your thoughts and the events you experience outside your body. Inspiration condenses to a thought, then takes on an emotional charge and compels an action to take on a form. You have experienced the various ramifications of the inspiration, sorted through the mental process of choosing what to create and how to create it. You have felt the energy of determination that sees you through the act of creation as well as the thrill of the idea, the recognition of your ability to bring it to form and the fulfilment of the job when it is done. This act of creation increases the flow of inspiration of more new ideas for creative projects which flood you if you don't block them with "I can't" or "I should". Inspiration is huge. There is always more of it than of us. The idea of you is just like this. You have separated from identifying with this creative source so much that life has become accidental to you to a greater or lesser extent. You didn't do it (life). It has done you. Of course, this is not the case but it does seem so.

Relax into a meditative state once more, perhaps calling your whole self together as we have suggested, perhaps using a favorite technique of your own. When you are quiet inside at last, step out of your body and contemplate it. Whether you create an image of your body in front of you or step out of it and face your sitting form is all the same (quite literally). As you look at yourself, include every cell. See the vast organization of awareness that rallies round the idea of you. Consider each cell alive and aware and capable of independent functioning just as you are. Consider that each cell voluntarily contributes to your existence, lovingly, knowingly. Feel the love in the room! The flow of life is such that it takes on its forms in patterned ways of its own accord. Those patterns, like a snowflake, are ever changing and unique but, like a snowflake, patterns nonetheless. You don't need to intimately know the patterns within your body (an almost impossible task for the earthbound) in order to know yourself. The awareness in each cell follows the patterns set in motion by the idea of your body, willingly. You can certainly go into any cell, with practice, and open your awareness to its awareness. Doing so will let you feel this pattern from its perspective. When you do the exercise of projecting into a painful body part that we offered you earlier, you will feel the cells of that body part, disrupted by your thoughts and feelings from that pattern they would choose to follow because it is filled with love and joy. Projecting into a healthy cell will let you touch that love and joy. Do you have enough love for yourself to feel that love now? Trying to do just that will either flood you with love or show you an emotional or mental block to that experience. Either way, we suggest you try. Pick any cell that draws you as you image your body. Focus right in on a body part or an organ and finally that one cell. Let whatever images or feelings you experience simply be while you hold the intention of meeting one cell. If you do not judge or otherwise close off your experience, you will touch that one cell. There is no doubt of it. You will not have much uniformity of experience though. Your thoughts and feelings will not be the same way twice and will always differ from those of another person. This fact does not invalidate your experience though. Flow with it and learn.

If after touching one cell, you have the strength and focus to continue, offer this cell all the love and gratitude you can muster for its willingness to contribute to your existence. Perhaps you can see that offering as a wash of white light. Perhaps it will be an emotional wave of lovingness. Perhaps you will offer it milk and cookies. As soon as you have the sensing that your offering is received, begin to back away from this cell and out of your body. Whenever you wish to heal your body of any aberrant ailment, this very personal touch will prove most effective. If you have another place in your body that you wish to visit, go right ahead. Remember to offer your love and gratitude before leaving as the intrusion brings great power to bear on a very focused awareness. You can disrupt that awareness as easily as you can heal it with love. Indeed, you do this often with your thoughts of limitation, aging, disease and separation. You won't kill yourself if you make a mistake at the cellular level, but you will be denying yourself love and joy.

Once you feel complete with exploring the cells within you, be that the first meditation or some subsequent attempt, withdraw from your body and begin to explore your emotional body. Don't block yourself with expecting to see an aura. The visible aura is more a projection of the viewer than the viewed. The viewer is translating from the emotional senses to the physical senses to create a vision of the emotional energy of the viewed. It could as clearly be done with the eyes closed if the viewer of auras chooses so. Open your emotional senses now and let whatever impression, be they images or sound or touch, come to the surface. This body is only partly described by its physical parts. It is partially in a non-physical realm as well. You may explore its physical size and shape by reaching out to it as you look at your imaged body. When you do so, feel the changes of texture and let your emotions respond without judging. When you feel the flowing, moving eddies of energy in this body, focusing on grateful. loving responses is very empowering. Allow you feeling senses to connect with this portion of your imaged self. It is you after all. The more you merge, the more integrated and joyous you will become. Explore your feeling nature while you explore this fluxing, pulsing body of energy.

You have possibly noticed that the emotional body is a bit tougher to image than an individual cell. After all, you have little to refer to in this effort. Only some drawings of what some people "see" and the vague emotional responses in your own senses may be familiar to you. Perhaps you have not bothered with this exercise because it seems hard to accomplish or, for some other reason, you have an underlying motive for avoiding it and thus avoid contact with your own feelings. We admit that there is challenge in such an exercise and offer you patience as we suggest offering patience to yourself. We remind you that a freely flowing relationship with your own emotional self is quite necessary to a fully whole state of being. Timing, however, is quite individual.

Now, before leaving the emotional body, project all the love and gratitude you can muster for all the happiness that your emotional life has given you. It doesn't matter if there are holes in those experiences, if there are times of sorrow or depression or anger. There are times of happiness. For those, now offer back your joy. Again, you can project loving light, waves of happiness or thoughts of gratitude. Genuine healing will take place.

This same approach can be used in the mental body, though it is even more non-physical than the emotional. Such exploration will offer you glimpses into the flow of your own thoughts. Perhaps you will experience them as eddies or vortexes of movement as the very effort to touch this body turns thought back onto itself. As your acuity increases, you will be led on a subtle adventure. You will find that such practice will open you to a greater awareness of the patterns of thought that you experience in daily life. Just as your cells align with the patterned flow of spirit, so do thoughts, forming bonds with like thoughts and creating more and more solid-like structures of thought. These tend to repeat through your mind like an old vinyl record with a particle stuck in a groove that sends the needle back to previous grooves until it finally jumps over (given enough motive force) to the next portion of the record. This is the old, "I've got a song running through my head and I can't shut it up" experience. It happens, unnoticed, very often. At subtle levels this is what coerces you to create a seemingly stable linear world and insulates you from direct contact with your own spirit self. If you find such an eddy of repeating thought, shower it with loving thoughts and watch it spin faster until it expands and disappears.

Loving thoughts are of the highest frequency. They represent the gaseous phase of thought energy. Everything they touch spins faster and its rate of vibration thus increases. Sometimes, this increased spin will throw little chunks of crystallized thought like a child thrown off a merry-go-round. Such a change in the status of your thinking may be experienced as disruptive at first. Eventually, it will prove healing though and we suggest you look for, and not give into unconscious attempts to avoid confronting, the truth of yourself that these chunks represent. Healing can only take place in an atmosphere of love. Love is unconditional and wholly accepting. Offering acceptance to yourself of all that you are, even the "bad" parts, allows healing to take place and a larger vision of who you are to replace the old, worn, self-imposed limits.

We suggest exploring this imaginative romp through your physical, emotional and mental bodies until it becomes "normal" for you to throw your attention to them in daily life. Follow the impulse to explore gladly for there is so much to be learned and it is such a joyful exercise.

Consider now that nearly your every thought and feeling and action is influenced by the inner and outer routines of your life. The breaking up of yourself into parts that populate each moment of your existence is devilishly pervasive. How can you turn this paradigm around? As we have practised in these pages, reaching out for glimpses of your wholeness of being creates an alternative perspective to apply to your daily life. Taking the time to experience more fully each moment, be it pleasurable or painful, affords a larger glimpse of that moment. Because your physical self, which you most identify with, is most akin to a holographic projection from your spiritual self, the power of creation originates from everywhere in infinity. There is no one projector you can point to or blame. You cannot shut off or block off a source of your experience. Life comes at you from all directions, inside and out. Accepting life, even when you don't understand its implications, is the healthiest way to grow more joyous.

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In a meditative state once more, imagine yourself in a complete sphere of light. Imagine that every point on this sphere is a tiny but powerful flashlight pointed right at you. On the surface of each flashlight is a picture of you made from the idea of you and translated into the perspective of each flashlight. Where the beams of light intersect, this image is manifested within the sphere. There you are, a self projected image made from the idea (essence) of you. Now, this sphere represents only the physical dimension. Imagine now that outside that sphere is another, larger one lined with flashlights that beam emotional energy instead of physical light. From this sphere, your myriad feelings about yourself are beamed at your body in the center of the sphere. These feelings influence the making of your body intensely. Your body responds to them in each moment. Are you seeing the implications?

Spirit expands infinitely in all directions. In the direction of manifestation where you reside, spirit becomes inspiration (the spiritual body is formed, holographically, though this is a metaphor). The inspiration becomes an idea and the mental body is formed. The idea condenses into feelings forming the emotional body. The feeling energies condense to an act of physical creation. Simple right? The point of fact is that even before inspiration, you are. This process does not take time to accomplish. Remember our dream analogy? The people and things in your dream do not need to be constructed from raw materials as you know them. They appear without effort simultaneously to the inspiration, idea, and feeling attached to them. Interpreting the metaphors of your life is just like interpreting your dreams. You need only become conversant in the language of feeling and thought and inspiration. The touch of spirit has meaning. That touch is pure, expansive, loving joy.

When you have a feeling that you find less than pleasurable, how do you respond? Do you look at it from a variety of angles like the projections in the spheres? Do you deny its existence and consciously or unconsciously avoid experiencing it as much as possible? If the latter is sometimes true, and let's face it, it certainly is, you are creating internal compartments and limiting your experience of all that you are. You are choosing to define your experience instead of living it. You are saying that this projector is OK but that one is faulty. Then you put a screen in front of the "bad" image and assume its light no longer exists. The first place to approach this issue is the point of definition. By practising non-judgement of your experience, you refuse to label or define it. You open yourself to its wholeness so much more. Perhaps you have noticed that occasionally you have had experiences in meditation that defy definition. Perhaps you have gone blank, even passed out. Perhaps you have lapsed into dreams that you cannot recall when you wake. Perhaps you have held great long conversations with some aspect of your being that melt away instantly. Think of such events as practice in accepting without defining the experience of life. As long as you rail with frustration over such "meaningless" experience, the more you will be locked out of the essence of them. Then you can apply this same attitude to the myriad events of daily life that are mysterious to you. When their meaning escapes you, fall back on trust that it will eventually come to you when you reach the state of awareness that generated that holographic display in the first place.

When we speak of the four fundamental bodies that comprise your individuality, we refer to points on a continuum of the organization of awareness. They represent the basic compartments of self-hood that you yourself have created. The whole point of human existence is to integrate your experience within these compartments and accept the wholeness of life. Defining some thoughts as "evil" some feelings as "yucky", and some sensations as painful is self-limiting in terms of this wholeness. We encourage you to change your definitions in each moment to perceive God in all events inner and outer. You can enjoy the Oneness in THIS VERY MOMENT by simply relaxing on all levels and accepting the impulses of spirit that are the very stuff of the universe.

To Chapter Seven