This marvelous story, written in terms to which you can relate, sums up nicely the image you hold of the trek towards and into "enlightenment". It illustrates how tenaciously you hold onto your identification with the firmness of your world. It upholds the path to enlightenment as a lifelong struggle (maybe many lives long). It affirms enlightenment to be an achievement reached through effort and knowledge and a touch of divine intervention. It even asserts that only very few who struggle and practice and learn the mysteries of life can hope to cross that threshold and know the true inner peace and joy.

We tell you now, as emphatically as we know how (in words) that enlightenment is who and what you are right now! It is intrinsic to consciousness. The awareness of Oneness is the most primal awareness of all. There is no "I AM" without it. All That Is is ONE! Each and every pulsing awareness from which all of creation springs is ONE. You see all of creation as the "Myriad Things", separate and independent because you choose to see it that way. You have come to identify even your own source of being, your own SELF as separate and independent. The very source through which you can directly experience the Oneness of All Things, the perfection of the Infinite, you have divorced from your own definition of SELF.

So, Stop That!

Everything you have learned in your lifetime is but a story. It contains only portions of truth, as do all stories. None of your stories, be they history, science, religion or your own feelings, contain the wholeness of truth. So why base your identity upon them? Why not recognize that these myriad little lies do not describe who you are or what your world is made of?

We have shown you that even your physical environment is produced through the lens of your identity, projected upon the fabric of the universe. We have offered step by step instructions in how to manipulate your projections into form intentionally. We have delivered occasional guidance in choosing what to create and what to ignore in order to bring you to this moment, ready to step away from identifying with your body, mind and spirit. By surviving both the highs and lows of human experience and realizing the futility of enmeshing yourself in them over and over again just to prove to yourself that you Do Not Know What You Do Not Know, you have encircled your SELF, which can experience the wholeness of being, the Oneness of All That Is.

Your life experience has followed your natural predilections into being, no more, no less. These predilections are mere patterns of motion, set by the first glimmer of consciousness out of which you emerge. They form the iconography which you have followed into psyche and physicality. They are neither good nor evil; valid but equal to all other patterns. Though you have lived them as personal, they are definitely Not Personal. They just ARE. They suggest your pathways to wholeness as they suggest your every expanding step through life, but they do not power them or command your choices. They do not require your journey at all nor do they inhibit it. Wholeness is already what you ARE.

These patterns, predilections, images through which you have projected your identity into being comprise the melodrama of life which has held you spellbound and convinced you of your Eternal Aloneness. You carry into each moment each experience shaped by these impersonal patterns and you judge your SELF by the standards you have extrapolated from them. The farther away you see the goal, the wholeness of your beingness, the longer and more daunting that goal appears. The melodramas of life in your world command your attention and draw it away from this ultimate aim.

We use the term melodrama to illustrate how ridiculously unimportant the actions, feelings and thoughts you engage, which are focused upon your life in the physical world, really are. All of your mundane concerns are driven by fears that are inspired by past melodramas and projected into future melodramas. Whether you have enough money, people, love, safety and so on are concerns which mean absolutely nothing in the experience of your SELF in the infinite universe. At their best, these concerns are distractions from the quest for the truth of you; an entertainment form like the weather, the machinations of the human horde, the drive for food or sex or sleep or a good B.M.

From the perspective of real self-awareness, these dramas do not describe any but the most peripheral aspects of the SELF. When you see the perfection of the universe, the total inclusiveness of infinity and the boundless consciousness that you ultimately are, the minutiae of daily human living can be seen as the meaningless trivia that they are. For you there is a choice to be made in every moment. What is the core of thought, feeling and action? Now! If you choose, as is your right, to live in the world you see as if it is real and important and life threatening at every turn if you do not, in this very moment, then you shall have melodrama. You shall play a role in the soap opera of your own creation. You can go to church, praise God, study self-help books, even give classes in such things, but you are still caught up in meaninglessness. You will still be mired in unanswered questions and still separated from who you really are.

An enlightened being is simply every being. To know enlightenment is to open to SELF without condition. It is a choice, in the moment, available to everyone. So, the active side of the effort to navigate infinity lies in every moment. Choose that focus as your core thought, your primal intent; over and over again. Choose to focus on life as navigating infinity, not just in meditation or conversation with your New Age friends. Choose that core as you brush your teeth, cook your meals, vacuum your home, ply your trade, drive your car and so on. See these activities and the fears they kick up for what they truly are, symbols of your identity in action. Many of these symbolic projections into reality will be cherished ones, things you love to do or feel or think. Beliefs are such as these, so oft repeated as to become unconscious, tenacious and sometime even literally etched in stone. Do not be fooled! Even your beloved activities, inner and outer, are meaningless in the light of your infinite depth. The good news is that when each arises in your thoughts, feelings or circumstances in the world, the very next moment you have the choice. What is your core identity? What is your primal intent? Who are you really?

The passive side of this focus of attention is where the answer to these questions can be uncovered. In the dark, silent realm of spirit, pre-thought, pre-identity, pre-historic on the most intimate level, here is where your core SELF resides. It is from here, in silence that your SELF explodes into infinite experience. The vastness of "I AM", ever bursting forth, forming infinite universes and infinite yous, permeates every idea of you, every cell, every experience. You can open yourself to the awareness of your infinite SELF, the "I AM". You just cannot manage that while you are asserting that you are the focal point of your life in the world. You will not know yourself as All That Is while you grant meaningfulness to the world like you have in this lifetime.

There are no details of your life which are more important, valid or real than all the rest. Even the most mundane activity, eating, sleeping, passing wastes et al are melodrama luring you away from the focus upon awakening to your true desire. Every moment of communion with the core of your awareness, the great "I AM", opens more of your SELF to the infinite mind from which you spring. The more you refer to this deepest source of SELF instead of answering the pull of the melodrama and granting of reality to its trappings, the more you will be filled by the ever expanding love and joy.

We are not just blowing smoke at you with the imagery. The direct experience of infinity always leaves its mark on your inner SELF. It trains you to look for and find the inexorably expanding love which is the primal nature of consciousness. Even when your immersion in the mire of physical life is most compelling, the faintest hint of this unconditional love has given hope and light a pathway home. This is amplified with each moment of inner silence, each effort to open to your inner SELF and each burst of infinite consciousness to which you strive.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to consistently and consciously pull back the energy you have invested in the life of your body. All of the circumstances of that life, the relationships, the striving for security, the greed for experience, are to be known for the meaningless distractions that they have been and now are. You need not stop living or join a monastery but you can withdraw your emotional, energetic investment in all that you do in your world. Grab the opportunity in each moment to recognize the metaphors enacted in your world, how they describe your definition of SELF and reality. Draw back to yourself your attachment to this ersatz "reality".

Begin a practice once a day of instituting a moment's pause with a deep breath. Take in all the sights and sounds of that moment, all the feelings and thoughts, all of the iconic definitions that inspire these experiences, the entire gamut of invested intent which powers the experience of the present moment. Reach out to the sides of your body with both hands. With cupped fingers scoop your arm's length hands, inhaling as you do, around to directly in front of your heart and then pull them in to the center of your chest as you exhale. Release all of the meaningfulness with which you have imbued the present moment. Take it back in through your heart. Know it all for the illusion that it is. Then go on with your day.

Think of this single breath as a cleanse of your spirit, a letting go of all that does not matter. With practice you will begin to notice more and more that your ties to what you have called "reality" will loosen. You have invested every waking moment of your life (and many not so waking) in this "reality". Do not expect it to dissolve before your eyes. You are opening a window in your reality to peer into the infinite, your true home. You can rely upon this simple technique to relieve the angst of life in your world. A single breath and letting go; let it lead you to a moment of profound silence, fleeting but impactful.

Note:
The following passage was written after the end of Chapter 13 to expand upon the topic of melodrama. As such, it represents another turn of the wheel and may make some leaps that I could not make at the beginning of the journey.

What differentiates melodrama from the simple act of witnessing your world and noticing the events and thoughts and feelings attached is your emotional investment in your identity. You have been constructing your identity from primal thought and every impact of the infinite upon it. As this definition of SELF grows, it expands beyond the borders of mind, heart and body into the complex description of your entire world and your place in it. It sets up masses of feedback loops of your projections and searches for meaning as you scramble to understand and make decisions. These loops become ever more solid collections of life experience until they act upon your consciousness in the present moment. These collections remain fluid and charged and their contents shift and evolve and cross connect with other collections. Still, as they grow, they take larger roles in the creative processes of your experience.

Imagine a group of bubbles with such labels as Inadequacy, Insufficiency or Insecurity. These are adult labels but they describe collections of experience beginning in earliest childhood and augmented every day since. Your present day experience is instantly affected by the most relevant bubbles of past experience. The thoughts and feelings from the totality of life experiences so engaged begin to cascade throughout your psyche, sparking your thoughts and feelings in the present. All of your definitions of who you are, relative to these collections of fear based assessments from your past carried by your consciousness, impact your present moment. This is melodrama!

You have always had the option to be overwhelmed by this cascade of thought and feeling. In your youth it was thoroughly automatic if less powerful. As you grow up you include more and more self-determined responses to the stirred up fears that pummel your identity. To these collections you have added reasoned arguments and understanding that release some of the angst lodged in your bubbles. Just as often your reason has buttressed and made more concrete your fears. Both motions create cause for pause and reflection and push you toward transcendence. It has certainly been a bumpy ride in the direction of mature loving and forgiving.

Armed with the knowledge that every life experience is a reflection of your identity in action, you have the power to withdraw your attention from the cascade of past experience and the angst lodged within it. We have called this feedback looping process melodrama as opposed to witnessing. Every experience which inspires an emotional charge presents an opportunity to indulge in the fiction of your past description of your world and your place in it. That description includes all of your related and resonating experience but is based upon your limited awareness of reality and its infinite roots. By stepping beyond those feedback loops to an awareness of your real identity, the emotional charges are released, new pathways of response are constructed and the bubbles of fear induced experience lose their energy.

We have offered you softer, gentler terms to cajole you towards full awareness of this but as you open your Brow and gaze upon your reflection you can see and more forcefully experience a fundamental truth. Your world is a lie! It is a lie you have told yourself since your very first screaming moments of conscious experience in three dimensions. Your first blinding by physical light, first pain of cold and being poked and handled, of being trapped in the confines of a tiny physical space were shocks beyond comprehension. You respond to everything. Experience is overwhelming! So you instantly seek succor. This then is the basis of the lie.

Now you have a construct that is as overwhelming as your very first moments of individuality. You have made a hugely complex world with billions of other yous, millions of species of living things and ever-changing environmental conditions. And it is all a lie. The huge cast of characters in your little fictions is laughably tiny in the face of infinity. It seems almost manageable at times when you have dared to peer inward and find only you and the infinite potential in every moment. So you go screaming back into your body and a safer identity; safer only because it is so much more familiar.

Every foray into introspection ends with you going back to the light. The lure of the lie is the rush to safety. Even the joy of communion with All That Is! has taken a long while to become compelling enough to entice you away from your teeny little familiar and light-filled world. The more you have opened your inner senses and activated your higher centers of awareness, the more obvious it has become that your tiny body cannot contain you. Your little world only holds a small portion of your vast SELF.

It is time to end the charade! It is time to stop thinking about your physical world. It is time to stop feeling the fear and hope about your physical world. It is time to stop acting in your physical world as if it were real. It is all a fiction!

It is time to make every moment in a body be an act of rebellion. Bring your total awareness to every breath. Tune in to every pulse of your higher senses, not to interpret your physical senses but to supercede them. Stop the world! There are huge movements of non-physical truth in every moment of physical experience. That bird singing on a wire outside your window expresses volumes about the flow of the infinite through your construct of a world. In its brief calling, it sings of the flow of seasons, shifting temperatures, the instinctual urges of territoriality, the search for mating and procreation, the pure joy of singing and on and on. Volumes can be filled by each single moment. Stopping to read those volumes is a perfect metaphor for how you have lived most of your earthly life.

One of the main drivers of melodrama in your life is the culturally ingrained habit of anthropomorphization. You have projected human definitions upon the fabric of the universe to explain everything that happens. The entire cosmology of most humans, including you, has taken shape through the process, be it arising from "God" or from Science.

Everything your species "knows" about life and creation has derived from this process of projection. The rare examples of information gathered directly from the source of life itself have been mostly ignored or quashed with petty dispute and derision. The development of New Age thinking has amalgamated science and theism to be the foundation stones to exploration. Some insights into reality creation have resulted, much like your own in year's past. Still, the plethora of Archangels, Gods and Quantum theory have only served to muddle and make vague the role of consciousness in the creation story.

This habit also can be traced through the cultural iconography of your entertainment forms which have far more influence than credited thus far. Made up principles like Justice and Fairness and Romantic Love abound throughout human cultures because of their melodramatic affect. These get projected into "heavens" and hierarchies of divinity as well as their opposite, devilish, number. They also become basic drivers of social convention and interaction. The fiction of daily living obscures the most basic facts of creation, making it nearly impossible to become fully empowered to live the life of your dreams much less feel safe and secure and loved and fulfilled.

Releasing these projections and the melodrama they uphold is going to be challenging. Their tendrils have penetrated into every aspect of human life. Indeed, they dictate all of human life with only a few exceptions. To return to unity with your true SELF, you will spend great effort to renounce and release your human self. You will see it more and more as the grand obstacle that it is. You will leave behind your personhood along with your fears. You will renounce your history along with the accumulated details that have bolstered your identity. You will cease the constant chatter of your intellect, your anxiety and your beliefs.

All of your life to now has been built upon your relationship to the gravity well which is the Earth. It is this which requires of you a body that births and dies, that moves through "time" and "space". Because you compare it to yourself, it seems inert and lifeless and finite. You project onto it the opposite of divinity and the blame for most of your human woes. The temptations of the flesh are its domain and your ashes are its reward. It is the origin of the fallen angel myths and the underground Devil that haunts your nightmares. Good luck with that!

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