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YOUR WORLD IS A METAPHOR





CHAPTER 8



Multi-dimensionality


You experience every moment as a multidimensional event, even if you are not always aware of that fact. As our title suggests, your daily experience is a metaphor for the manifestation of impulses that ripple through the fabric of reality touching all portions of your awareness right to the core of you. Even if your conscious awareness is focused on the physical world solely, your being is permeated with these impulses throughout. In some portions of yourself, you know the wholeness of each happenstance. What you choose to focus your attention upon determines how deeply you experience life consciously. You tend to become immersed in the physical orientation and can lose sight of the rest of this larger perspective easily. Using the suggestions offered to soften this focus and accept the more subtle impulses that lie beneath the gross experience in the physical world can give you access to a much larger array of information and awareness.

Take the state of being you achieve in meditation out into the world with you. Try to see every event in your life as a spiritual experience. It truly is. You are never separate from any aspect of creation unless you choose to be so, and then, only in terms of your perception. The rest of your being is still there in intimate contact with the rest of creation. See every experience as having an emotional, mental and spiritual expression as a well as a physical one. Pay attention! Notice as much of these seemingly different impulses as possible. Only practice will develop your senses and teach you to understand what the impression you get really means.

Take some time to sit quietly at the base of a tree. Make a comfortable contact with this regal being and get quiet inside. You need not ask questions though you certainly may. Remember that you cannot listen while you are talking though. Thoughts will begin to bubble up into your awareness. Listen carefully and pay attention. Let your focus of attention drift while you listen. Allow yourself to feel what you feel and think what you think. Soon you will be able to discern a difference between your thoughts while in contact with the tree and your "normal" thinking patterns. Trees are steady and honest and each species has its favorite topics. Practice here will lead you to greater understanding of how large a being you are.

Once you find out how to hear the impulses from trees, try listening to the more quixotic awarenesses of smaller plants. Try house plants and garden plants. Ask them what they need and sincerely try to provide what they request in return. Just as with people, your relationships with plants will grow and be fostered by the honest and free expression of love towards them.

Move on now to the sometimes frenetic awareness of small animals. As you walk in the outdoors or lounge with the family pet, go quiet inside and open yourself to identifying with the animals you choose. Feel in your body how its body might feel as it moves. Open your emotions to those of your friend. Let whatever impressions you get from this exercise permeate your thoughts and feelings and senses. You have no way of judging or even validating your impressions from the mineral and animal worlds so you may as well play at this without reservation.

When you play like this with minerals and plants and animals, you will find many of the points of blocked energy which affect your lower chakras. Clearing the root chakra by using crystals as a focus of this listening is relatively easy for most people. Much healing takes place without even conscious thought being needed. The animal and plant worlds bridge the gaps between the root and solar plexus as well as sharing the frequency range of the sacral chakra. By tuning in to the impulses of those kingdoms and allowing them to become your focus, you bring to the surface any stuck energy around the sacrum. Don't hold back from experiencing any emotional pain that comes to the fore during these exercises. Embrace and release the fear and pain that comes up. Using this format with people will prove even more valuable, if emotionally more intense. This is where even sincere seekers begin to struggle some.

We suggest that you take the exploration with other people slowly and carefully. It begins with remote touching. Use letter writing of any sort from the slowest to the fastest delivery. Begin with the task of honest self revelation. Use the relative anonymity to feel safe and secure. Relate courageously how you thing AND feel in the moment on the wide variety of subjects such discussions will offer you. The less that you hold back the direct expression of self, the faster you will become trusting enough to move into face to face relationships on such an honest level. Notice carefully what feelings of fear and pain emerge as a result of these honest selfrevelations. Face them squarely. You will find fear to be like a schoolyard bully. It will back down when you face up to it. You are preparing yourself for the sometimes wild and untamable excursion into direct communication with other people. Only your own fears stand in your way. Be serious about exploring these fears and you will move along swiftly.

When you begin to address your face to face relationships with honest self expression, your unaddressed fear will speak more loudly. What a wonderful opportunity to clear these fears from your being. Guard against the temptation to blame others for how you feel or to judge them for how they respond to you. Keep trusting your safety to do this work and remember how important it is to developing your awareness of spirit. Who you are is reflected in everyone you meet. You must learn to be open to that reflection to discover your true identity.

As you develop the comfort and skill of intimacy, openly sharing your perceptions of self and becoming receptive to the presence of another in your field of being, you become able to explore even farther into your multidimensional self. As we discussed in the last chapter, this whole series of explorations boil down to shifting your resonance patterns to become receptive to the various aspects of your own being. The human world vibrates normally at frequencies within the range of the solar plexus chakra. Clearing this range of vibration of stuck energy is quite a large task for most people and patience is valuable in this task. In the doing though, your relationships with self and others become more intimate and more fulfilling. The energy of your being will begin to vibrate faster, reaching frequencies of the heart chakra more often. You experience more joy and more unconditional love. At this passage, your emotional senses become more acute and more a part of your "normal" experience of life. You begin to have a more concrete sense of the energy flowing through your physical body. You can begin to exercise a conscious influence over that flow. To get there though, you really must deal with all the blocks around the social fears.

To explore the series of frequencies handled by the heart chakra, you might find yourself pursuing love relationships as a central focus of your emotional life. In such circumstances, you may come to be acutely aware of issues of vulnerability that have lurked beneath the surface of fears you unearthed in the solar plexus. Whatever form your exploration takes though, you will be impulsed to deal more directly with issues of trust and vulnerability. As you do so, you become more sensitive to the emotional flow from your partners. This is a wonderful time to begin to place your self physically, heart to heart with your partner, front to front, front to back, back to back. Feel the fluctuations, intentional and unintentional, in the pulsing flow of energy into and out of one another. The flow of feedback, verbal and otherwise, is essential. Anything held back from one another will block the flow and your exploration will be virtually halted. This is exploration into intimacy, both with self and with the aspect of self which is the "other". Its first reward is love shared, but that is only the beginning. Levels of the self heretofore left covered become available and are an intermediate signal of "penetration" of another's energies into your field of being.

The movement of growth is highly accelerated with this opening of the heart. The fear structures between the heart and the throat are not nearly as fortified as those around the solar plexus. Your culture has few who penetrate their own fears to this extent so more and more you are charting new waters here. Continuing the emotional sensitivity in the heart provides a constant source of energy with which to push to the surface the fears which block true self expression. In the early going, you will have to force yourself to speak openly your perceptions on your journey through this movement. With each pass it gets easier and the rewards in terms of self validation and acceptance become more pronounced. Your field of exploration widens to include not only your closest relationships but also interactions with strangers. You state the truth of yourself more freely and see that statement accepted. You discover that you are loved by all others, each to their own ability. The love you find outside yourself is a reflection of your self love which grows steadily.

At this phase you will feel an urge to work with groups to promote your sense of connection. Your openness becomes a beacon for those around you. You will see their sense of peace and self love grow as you express your own more freely. Meditating in groups, exploring energy in groups, expressing your deepest, most profound desires for your species and your planet, your very being, opens you even more to the largeness of your being. You can imagine what a challenge being openly expressive before strangers will be. Sharing your innermost experience in such circumstances forces you to face your fears directly. Doing so is the only way to embrace and release the withheld life force that blocks your perception of the truth of yourself. The probability of opening the throat chakra in private is minuscule at best.

At this frequency level, the perception of the truth, or the higher human mental faculty is central to your experience. Open expression creates a sort of vacuum that draws new perception. A fully functioning throat chakra allows the flow of higher mental energy to take place. Genius is the result. The ability to work with the ideation level of existence and to perceive multiple dimensions of your being begins to make sense to you. Your reality becomes based on very large ideas indeed. You develop a conceptual framework for your life experience. You start to have a sense of infinity that you can work with to understand your experience of life more fully. By the time your throat is fully open, you have cleared and released nearly all of the internal fears that have blocked your experience of reality throughout your life. Your "super ego" is nearly gone. Judgement and morality are no longer the basis of your decision making and risk is no longer the prod to your choices.

Heading upwards to open the last two major entry points into physicality, the brow and the crown, lead you to your most primal fear. Perhaps a word here to clarify that these centers of energy are never long completely closed. The amount of energy flowing through them at any time shows another example of the compartmentalization or misalignment of energies we spoke of in earlier chapters. The healthy open flow of a chakra is based on the health and openness of those below and above them in frequency. All life experience takes place in cycles (spirals really but in linear terms, they appear cyclic). Each experience gets processed and integrated through the various focuses of awareness represented by each chakra to the ability of that chakra to openly receive and distribute the flow of energy of that experience and the amount of energy that gets that far in the system. The total impact to each chakra is determined or limited by the weakest link in the chain. If a particular level of awareness is blocked off by fear, it impedes the flow of awareness through all of the others. Not only will the inability to function openly in your sexuality obstruct the easy flow of relating to other people, but also will your fear of rejection (lodged in the solar plexus) impede the easy flow of enjoyment of sexual expression. If you are not experiencing the wholeness of another person by unconditionally accepting them for who they are (heart chakra function) you cannot perceive the truth of their state of being (throat). Conversely, if you are withholding the expression of the truth you do perceive, you close off the trust in your own acceptance of self, diminishing your experience of joy.

Many spiritual practices promote the opening of the higher centers such as the heart or the brow, without effectively clearing those lower in frequency first. Such practice does not allow the proper processing and integration of these higher frequencies accessed through willful acts. This leads to confusion and wild swings of mood and temper as the human energy system attempts to achieve balance internally. You may be familiar with people who suffer from such unbalanced practices. The effort to open the heart prematurely can set off the stuck energy of fear lodged in lower centers. If the work of addressing and clearing these fears has not been consciously begun, or if you aren't willing to go there, you will have a pretty wild ride in store. Focussing on the brow chakra without first working to open the throat will produce experiences which defy the understanding. Your world will seem a very frightening place to occupy. We strongly encourage a balanced approach of opening all centers and allowing life to unfold as it will to bring to the forefront precisely what you need to address to keep moving forward toward your spiritual goals.

The brow chakra, when fully functioning, is the center of perception of both the physical and the nonphysical reality that you experience every day. Here, the data of your senses both inner and outer is integrated. As you gain experience with your inner senses, the data amasses to the point of being readable. In the early going, much is received that needs to be processed and thought about to glean the sense of it. Such data can be looked at as metaphoric, not a direct perception in physical terms but a symbolic projection of nonphysical reality. Visions in meditation and dream imagery have much in common in terms of their symbolic natures. Because meditation experience has a stronger conscious component, visions in this state will be easier to interpret. As the brow opens, the result of a stronger flow upwards from the throat chakra, the dream life will become more lucid automatically. You will begin to be able to ask questions and analyse the meaning of your dreams without losing the thread which runs through them and keeps them unfolding. The world you encounter with your physical senses will begin to include data from your other bodies, emotional impressions, telepathic intersections and an inner vision or sound overlay. Learning to trust the validity of these impressions is a large part of the opening process. Again, we suggest patience.

The shifting focus of your attention to this center is every bit as subtle as the shifts into the centers of lower frequency but by this point in your journey, you have had many subtle encounters. You are well prepared to note the differences in your perception. You have a conceptual framework for them, a trust in yourself that it is safe to have such experiences and the will to move freely forward into a commonplace awareness of multi dimensionality. By releasing your resistance to expressing the truth you perceive, you gather the information you need to relate your perceptions to the physical dimension you are so familiar with. Holding back now merely perpetuates the mystery. There is enough of that in the world without your conscious, intentional contribution.

By this time you have made your way through most, if not all of the secondary fears which blocked the flow of awareness through you. You have learned to become vulnerable to the life around you and to be moved by the ineffable Will of God. Don't be fooled by the talented psychics you encounter. If they aren't living lives of resounding joy, they are not likely to be fully functional through the brow. Allow your opening to take place in its own time and maintain your focus upon your dreams. The lessons you need to learn will be presented to you in a timely manner as a result of the statement you make with your life. Much has been said about Right Living. Moral codes have been developed to describe that. Such codes are metaphors, perhaps precise for the authors of them but flexibility is needed to define those codes for yourself. Right Action is specific to your unique place in the universe. Only you can choose what that idea means in the moment. If you make your most honorable choice and it seems wrong after the fact, readjust your ideology to understand the lesson and move on. Paralysing yourself with guilt and self flagellation is of little value, runs counter to the flow of nature (making ripples in the fabric of the universe) and quite frankly hurts. There is no right and wrong in an infinite universe where all possibilities are explored. Such self recrimination is unnecessary.

As you shift the center of your focus to the brow, you will encounter a fear most primal. Its most rudimentary manifestation is as the fear of death. By rudimentary, we do not mean merely that this fear is first experienced in this form. We mean that as it becomes more dense than the fear of death, it takes on sufficient attributes to be interpreted otherwise, as a fear of vulnerability, pain, abandonment, rejection and so on. It gathers more and more attributes as life experience sparks the fears of the past experiences. In earliest infancy, before the awareness of separation becomes crystallized enough for a baby to have a sense of aliveness, this fear is a most subtle and nebulous sense of shock. The birthing process alone crystallizes this meaningless shock and sets the stage for the long journey back to the unity that is lived in the womb. The birthing experience wrenches the infant from this unity with the mother, feeling her emotions, tasting in a way her inner life. An immediate identity crisis begins as the infant seeks its way to discover just what has changed. It is barraged with sense data that is beyond comprehending. With brilliant simplicity, it learns to differentiate pleasure from pain, other from self, waking from dreaming.

The very first self aware though "I Am!" carries with it a small portion of the primal fear of being "I Am Not!" From this are all other fears built. Exploring the flow of information gathered in the brow brings this primal fear to the fore. The direct experience of nonphysical reality at first undermines the identity and a tendency to block the flow of data in this center is very common. Impressions come rarely and sporadically while this fear remains unconscious. Only those experiences which seem manageable and understandable will be allowed. By the time you have reached full functioning in this center of perception, you will have become quite accustomed to allowing the flow of energy through your fears to take place without resistance. The layers loosen and release to expose this existential fear. You can imagine that facing annihilation at a premature stage of development would be terrifying indeed. Be patient with your progress and let the future unfold as it will.

Now you are perceiving the unseen universe that permeates and underscores the physical world. Each encounter as you open the brow affords more information with which to interpret this vast unknown. However, this realm of the mystical, ethereal reality is not your final focus of awareness. You must yet step through another door to reach your goal. There is a giant leap of faith needed to vault your final fear into the unity of spirit. This state of being pulls you through this door into full openness. The final stage of immersion into Multi dimensionality comes with the full openness of the brow and the raising of awareness in the crown.

With the experience of unity with all of creation, you expand outwards in all directions. As you progress toward your goal, you get glimpses of this state, enticing you forwards. The crown opening is often described as Kundalini Rising. This simply means that the full spectrum of awareness that humans have access to is, momentarily at least, flowing freely. You will have to trust that this is the awareness of your soul. You will have to trust that your identity will not be forever lost in this mad rush into infinity. You can imagine that such trust is very rare and will be well earned. The process though, is free, without price. It hinges upon your willingness to allow it to take place. Each event hones your trust until you fulfill the desire of your soul for wholeness.

As you can deduce, this job of living in a multidimensional universe is not so different than your daily life on Earth. The nature of sensation, feeling, thought and inspiration does not change radically when you become enlightened. You quite simply experience these senses at their most subtle degrees. There is little difference between the gentle play of your imagination and the experience of your spiritual self. You simply do not trust that the ramblings of your imagination take you to a portion of reality as valid as your physical one. We assure you that they do. On your way, you will experience the ability to perceive many layers at once. You will find that by practising viewing your experience from the perspective of your soul, you become able to use information from higher frequency levels of your own being to understand and live your physical life more fully. You will come to a concrete understanding of ideas that have been mere words until now. The universe really is love. You have defined that idea in very physical terms. Generally, you see it in terms of doing. The essence of love is in being. You will find it remarkably impersonal. It holds no distrust. It is pure expansion and it underlies all of creation. It is the purest of joys. Can you allow yourself access to such unqualified bliss?


To Chapter Nine


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