Just pondering this title has begun to stir up energy. No? Whenever fear mixes in with the Flow, there is excitement created. That is why melodrama holds such an appeal. So, Breathe! Just Breathe!

The path to breaking up the tenacious hold that your solid world has for you (not on you), runs right through your fundamental fear structures. These are the fears of instability, insufficiency, out of control, fears of illness, fear of death. We are gonna have such fun!

Once more in meditative trance, which you have noted has become more profoundly silent and easier to reach, allow yourself to open to a minor distraction. Feel your body effervesce as every cell bursts with energy. Let joy expand from every part of your physical expression. Allow your skin to sparkle, your inner organs to hum, your muscles to warm and buzz. In your imagination, see your body glow and shimmer. Watch the expanding flow emanate from within you into the room you occupy. Slide back into communion once more without suppressing the feelings or images. Merely release the focus upon them, returning to the Ì AM`. You will know if it is time to once more focus upon the shimmering of your cells. When you turn your attention to it, widen the perception to include objects in the room. If there are other people with you, look in your mind's eye for their bodies to sparkle. Perhaps you will perceive their energy interacting with your own. Every meeting with others begins in this way, well before bodies near one another. Every conversation is preceded by energies interacting. As you flow in and out of the perceptual exercise, remember that it is the very Ì AM` with which you commune that is the heart of all people and objects, cells and crystals in your world. The complete contents of your imagination, even in physical manifestation, is the primal core of "you".

Practising this focus of attention is a giving of permission to experience your SELF in a more genuine way. It permits the fears which have always blocked this perception to be viewed and experienced in even more direct fashion. This will not be an overnight sensation. There are still many layers of identity built upon these fears. Just as one example, you have had glimpses of your physical body fizzing light until it disappears, literally bursting into energy and going "POOF!" You have many fear driven layers that "safeguard" you from this. Still, you long for it deep down. Trust so profound is something to aspire to and long for. It is a faith in the integrity of life itself that is blocked by your most primal fears.

The detachment we suggest in releasing melodrama is the cold sobriety that allows these primal fears to be explored. Your personhood stands in your way. Give up the self-importance of personhood, release the drive for meaning and the value of "you" so that you can perceive reality more clearly. In the days to come, your life experience will bring you opportunities to confront your self -importance (yes we hear your silent scream!) and practise this release. You have dealt with many layers of fear in your quest for SELF-awareness. This will be manageable as well, even though the ultimate goal is to lose control. Every tendril of the reins you hold on your life energy that you release lets you move more closely toward the center of You. Every tendril of the reins that you drop along the way states your faith in the flow of life to carry you along where you have always been going. It is the very nature of the Universe to seek SELF-awareness, to experience Itself consciously. You have been trying to hold back that tsunami with your infinitesimal physical body while your infinite true SELF joyously expands wherever the resistance is least pronounced, be that within your life-stream or within one or more of the numberless parallel life-streams that burst forth from the core of You.

In previous material we have introduced and expounded upon the topic of your Experiential SELF. As a useful technique for getting to the truth of your reality, taking the perspective of the "Witness" is unparalleled. The Witness does not become changed by its interactions with the Universe and it holds a moment point of awareness from which creation can burst forth with more conscious participation. We are now going in search of a deeper layer of authenticity of SELF. We seek the SELF which impinges upon the first layers of experience of creation. Each encounter with life impacts this authentic core of You and inspires and affects the expansion of you into form. Layers of personality get added to teh core of your psyche long before you know yourself to be conscious and possessed of identity. Each choice you make as these encounters take place help to shape what will eventually become your personality (a term with many levels f meaning). Still, at the core of You lies the SELF which continues to pour out into the you that you know as you constantly and powerfully.

As you go through infancy, then childhood, adolescence , early, middle and late adulthood and into senescence, you steadily grow, adjust and solidify the structure of your external psyche, a sort of battle armor which you then wear out into your world. You, for the most part, do not even notice that your inside vestments differ from what you show the world until crisis points are met where the dissonance becomes threatening. At these times you struggle to protect your inner SELF from impingement by the outside world. You show self-assurance while you are afraid, romance when you are filled with lust, integrity when you really feel greed and so on. The more distance between your identity and your personality, the more miserable you feel. These two layers of the psyche, in order to become more reconciled and aligned must depend on the Witness to reveal their very existence to you. The Experiential self is the perspective that affords you the chance to see both your inner motives and your outer actions simultaneously and to make decisions about both. Beneath your Experiential self is a core of Intent and desire that is the source of all these aspects of your psyche.

You can, at first, view this core as a sort of personality in and of itself. It holds the shape of the inner drives of your being which shine like spotlights upon your conscious awareness. It shines through the structure of your psyche, through fears and memories of fears enacted. It shines through each universe created by myriad choices and the myriad identities which you try on throughout infinity. When you look for meaning and purpose to your very existence, you look to this core and call it "Soul". It is really not so mysterious as the projection of beingness which the word has come to imply. It is also not as "perfect" as the projection assumes. It is simply the structure of the "light" which Ì AM` casts through the pattern of Intent in the Spiritual Body and the Icons of the High Mental Body before the coalescence into form takes place.

You are never out of contact with this structure of the SELF. No matter how much it gets covered up with daily concerns and existential fears, the flow of the drives from deep within continues inexorably. It is the shape of your life and the key to real SELF-awareness.

During the course of a lifetime of conscious seeking for this thing called "Soul", your exterior personality takes quite a pounding. All you fears get exposed and interacted with and the urge to protect and armor yourself in the face of them makes your conscious awareness even more stodgy and resistant to change and growth. Only your efforts to consciously face your fears and transcend them has allowed you to be open to our conversation. Only the willingness to experience in more depth the emotions of each present moment and the doubt which is cast upon every elevated idea makes it possible to glimpse the genuine SELF beneath all these outer layers of personality which you have held to be the true you for so long. This is why children and young adults rarely develop true spirituality. The preponderance of religions in your world suggests that most humans of any age do not develop true spirituality.

Look up from these pages now and in full conscious presence, notice your surroundings. What do you see, feel and hear? It's a trick question right? We cannot mean to show you what you have always experienced. Right? Huh?

Everything in your environment, right down to the finest detail is a metaphoric representation of you in this present moment. You have chosen every bit of this world of objects, indeed you have caused them. Now, you could extrapolate what metaphors are expressed by all this to get at the SELF which projects them; how new they are means this, how cluttered the space is means that, how neat or messy the space is means something else. Feng Shui can get pretty complex. However, to get to the core that does this marvelous projection into form, a more unifying attitude is called for.

As we have suggested you do in meditation, now do in your physical world. View your immediate environment as you in action. Perceive the Ì AM` as the core of all you see, hear and feel. Your environment is not the same as the next persons, even if that person actually lives with you. You see with unique vision the world with which you interact. As you look at the details of your environment you perceive the most outer layers of your SELF enacted. The more general your focus the closer you draw to the core which you seek. There is a vast difference between the myriad items that clutter a space and its warmth or sunnyness, its rich colors and homey feel. More than mere survival is provided in your environment because your inner world grows with each experience and enriches the world you perceive. As you peer out with the intent to see your deepest source of SELF expressed in the world, you will see the layers of fear placed upon a core of real Intent.

Shaking off your core of belief and fear will leave you uncomfortably naked just as releasing your SELF-protective psychological mechanisms of arrogance and greed have left you feeling like you have no skin. Your core of beliefs has shaped every item in your world. It captivates your attention through habit (addiction), drawing you away from knowing the layers of SELF beneath. At the same time, the beliefs you carry hold your world stable and firm whether you desire that or not. There is no effective way to slip the bonds of these pernicious constructs on at a time if the goal of doing so is Oneness. Your past efforts at this have served to demonstrate the elasticity of your beliefs and their arbitrary nature. Our efforts now are to peep past them to glimpse what is not arbitrary in you, your real SELF. This needs more wholesale release than you have attempted previously.

As your primal consciousness takes on the gravity of mentality and thus forming the High Mental Body, it forms the layers of Ideals that were discussed by Plato. At first, basic paradoxes of AM and AM NOT, BEING and VOID, LOVE and FEAR and the like are established and become Icons. These are ideation of infinite scope, without flesh and form in any way. They thicken with contact with the flow of Intent in Spirit. They take on new layers such as YIN and YANG, MOTHER and FATHER, GOOD and EVIL, CREATOR and CREATED. The innate drive of consciousness, to experience Itself keeps this coalescing process moving inward, adding layer upon layer, forming the remainder of the High Mental Plane. The you that pours through this structure is the core of your psyche that we seek together. It is evolving as it is impacted by the vast array of psychic expressions emerging from its creative flow. It is evolving as it is impacted by the countless parallel expressions which flow into and through it. You are but one of the countless expressions bursting from your core SELF. This is why letting go of your individuality is so important.

Your personality, the details of your inner and outer life, form much farther along in the process of coalescence. Your attention to such stands in the way of your desire to become aware of your true SELF. The still soft voice that whispers in your quietest moments and is so very familiar yet seemingly distinct from your personality is the truth of you. It takes you soaring through abstract thought. It powers your curiosity and imagination. This inner game of hide and seek draws you deeper towards your core and your source of being. Behind every belief about what makes up your world, the core of abstract truth calls to you to look deeper. It does not matter how you came about constructing the beliefs that shape your reality. Whether impressed upon you by parents, teachers, clergy and so forth or developed by your own conscious discipline, these structures must be released from the tyranny of your personhood. Yes your world will change! So?

Imagine if you will the worst case scenario of your world view crumbling in your quest for your core SELF. The world sputters and shimmers as it loses the arbitrary meaning and emotional investment with which you have imbued its creation. You begin to have more conscious contact with other life-streams which pour through your High Mental Body. You see implications of your immediate decisions played out in life experiences which are you and yet not you. This can only happen when your decisions have lost enough emotional charge. Your immediate physical environment appears more plastic and translucent, affording glimpses of alternate expressions. Anchored in your core consciousness, there is no madness here, only a broadening of experience. Psychic-like phenomena becomes commonplace as the walls you have insisted upon between the you that you have known and the "yous" all around you thins to transparency.

You have already had some such experiences which you have called "psychic" so we offer nothing shocking here. Recall if you will perceiving your apartment filled with packing boxes as you pondered moving in with a lover many years ago. The perception persisted for a few days as an overlay to your physical home. As the choice to not move grew more dominant, the overlay faded. The emotional charge was so great that it forced the issue to completion and the relationship ended. It could have gone the other way and in many life-streams it did just that. As the pulsing of your life force brings you into and out of many circumstances of varying emotional charge, such experience can grow more common if you allow it to be so. Be on the lookout for decisions which are more charged than normal. Be open to releasing the urge to be "right" as you ponder them. Look for the quiet core of you as it pours into mind and feeling. Allow what will be to be and see what happens. Let go of the details so that you can perceive the breadth of possibility. Accept that all aspects of the decision process will be experienced at your core and that none are "right". Step away from your personality as you ponder your decision and see how your inner SELF expresses through the lens of choice. What inner drives are being explored? What powers and seeks expression? By all means, have fun with it each and every time.

So, worst case? Well, death right? You let go of your world and you die! Do you suppose that letting go would somehow make the death experience different than doing battle to the last breath? Do you suppose that practising the death experience by letting go of your world will somehow anger "God"? Are you concerned you might miss something? There is that grand defence again. Do you suppose that the you of your personality would be tragic to lose? Is not that your arrogance rearing up? Really! What is so scary about death? You have touched your core SELF enough to perceive that you exist before your world exists. You know that even without your world, you have a benevolent pulsing and aware source of consciousness from which your thoughts and feelings emerge; a source which is becoming more and more familiar through these exercises and practices.

When death does become your reality, you will be confronted by your core SELF which is the object of our quest together. You will indeed lose the focus upon the details of your world in exchange for the chance to be fully immersed in your true SELF. Practising releasing the melodrama of physical life affords you the chance to become increasingly familiar with this true SELF and the transition will be brief and easy. You will be free to explore myriad life-streams emerging from your deepest SELF. You will awaken to your true nature as from a dream and realize that your one little life is neither lost nor important.

So, once more peer out at your immediate environment. Look past the fine detail and with your inner senses open wide, perceive the source of the objects around you. Perceive how this space expresses who you are, your desire for order, beauty, affluence, social acceptance, ease of living and so on. Perceive how these underlying expressions are muddled by more surface fears of losing something if you let go, lethargy arising from self-doubt and self-loathing, even the seeking of comfort from the clutter and soil. Recognize the fact that many other environments in which you comfortably live fulfill these same surface desires and fears. In the same way many physical expressions of you exist to fulfill the deeper desires and more subtle fears of your core SELF. Determine to address your environment in a way that removes the nagging, muddling surface fears and opens more to the deeper desires being fulfilled for comfort, beauty and order. Do so consciously. Then bask in your surroundings before moving on to the next thing. In other words, go clean your room man!

There now! Having removed most of the clutter and dirt in your space, look now with appreciation at the rooms you occupy. Notice the warmth, the quiet. Enjoy the rich colors of wood and tile and the soft light of day through the windows. Attend to the feelings of security that this space offers as well as its utility. There is a combination of elegance and hominess here that speaks volumes about who you are inside. Without the chatter of surface meanings in the flotsam of daily life, you can sense the underlying comfort, the purposeful equipment and the overall beauty of your environment.

This is an excellent metaphor for the difference between your waking daily consciousness and your deep inner core SELF. Setting aside the myriad distractions of human life leaves the warmth, the beauty, the expansive lovingness of the primal, spiritual source of "you". It is comfort in essence. Just as you do in your meditation practice, when you realize that your focus has wandered into the muck of human perspective, return to this peaceful center of openness that is your core SELF. Your senses may not offer you great swells of response to it, but what you do sense will be the true reality of "you" and of your Universe. Once so focused, you can peer out at your world and notice how this fundamental awareness is manifest before you.

Even though you have been meditating for many years, you really have not been looking for this connection. This is the practice that will release you from the prison of beliefs that shape your world and hold you captive to it. To be wildly free of the constraints of three dimensions you will turn your attention to the "you" that is "OUT THERE". You will forego the pull of the details that flood your senses and your imagination. Use appreciation as the vehicle that powers you into the core of each moment's experience in order to find your SELF expressed therein. The shimmer we have mentioned is you, your true SELF out of which your world is constructed. As you open to the perception of the "you" that you bask in during meditation, the illusions of solidity and individuation will gradually break down. The glow which is available to be perceived then is "you". The SELF has all of your attributes, just like the room you sit in now, warmth, usefulness, beauty, security, comfort, open acceptance and so on. The dark side of your fears, like the proverbial devil, is in the details. Let the details go and those fears, tied to the surface of things, will go unseen.

Look again at the room around you. Bask in the glow of the feelings this passage has conjured for you. Notice how appreciation has expanded your awareness of what is reflected in the room. Imagine how this experience can change your interactions with other people, places and situations. Go in your mind's eye into work, play, family and public and open to this act of embracing all as your SELF. Love as unconditionally as your core SELF loves. Release the stranglehold of details to find what really matters. You can see and enjoy the flow of traffic, the bracing cold of winter wind, the pulsing of noise. The glow of "you" in every object reeks with familiarity.

Your most important task in life is to break free from the description of the world that you have been feeding on from the very beginning. Your craving for safety has driven the development of this description and the need for the agreement of everyone around you. You have required that you be tamed so that the icons you have built, to reflect back at you the scared little boy inside, will like and take care of you. You even extend that effort to us which is too funny!

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Flight of the Eagle
P.O. Box 63, Station A
Fredericton NB Canada E3B 4Y2
info@flightoftheeagle.ca