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Navigating Infinity

Chapter 7

A Study in Azure

"It's fun to have fun, but you have to know how."

Since you first encountered these words as a two year old sitting on Mommy's knee with The Cat in the Hat, you have been a disciple of sorts of the practice of practice. Whether it was learning to read, throw a ball or meditate, you have gravitated towards doing the research, repeating the actions and ambitiously seeking improved results from which you have drawn great joy. Your accomplishments throughout your life have rarely arisen out of a desire for acknowledgement or praise from the world around you. Indeed, when you have received the applause of any kind, you have shunned it to a fair extent. You have tended more to achieve in order to prove your superiority to those around you, slowly learning to seek the joy of growing and accomplishing that marks the more recent years.

Throughout our conversations you have craved practices, methods and concrete advice as much if not more than abstract truths. You have actually slowed the motion into knowledge in order to practice enough to believe that you have earned the right to know. In recent years you have denied yourself the direct experience of infinity many times because access to this experience seems too easy and yet beyond what you deserve. You have carried preconceived notions about what it takes to reach such a lofty goal and of how it would be expressed in your life in the "world". And so, we give you meditations and techniques to lead to where you already are to a large extent. Yawn!

Now that you are knocking on the door of your Brow chakra opening which will allow you to perceive the infinite flow in all expressions, you still do battle with your moments of failure, your inadequacies and mysteries. You hang onto old beliefs about what "enlightenment" should look like, what miracles you ought to perform, what hidden information about your world you should be able to access. These conceptual miasmas which hold you at a distance from your goal are surely less cumbersome than they once were. Still, they capture some of your attention in almost every moment, blocking the expansion of your awareness.

All this is not to say that you are not progressing. You are. You do gain access to the flow that you seek in both meditative states and occasionally while out in the world. It is in your thinking habits in daily life where you lack discipline and repeatedly stall your expanding awareness. Although it will not be comfortable to disrupt these habits, we are going to encourage you to try anyway. We promise that your efforts will not "Poke the Bear" so to speak and promote strongly painful life experience. Unless, of course, you resist. Through every passage to opening a focus of awareness which you experience as a chakra, changes in thought patterns have taken place that have challenged you. Your Solar Plexus opening was beset with questioning and seeking abstract explanations for your life circumstances. You studied, meditated and talked about ideas while thoroughly enmeshed in physical life. The duality of these opposing preoccupations scraped and honed your intellect, slowly raising the frequency of energy through the Solar Plexus. The massive changes in life circumstances released the dichotomy of belief when you went through mid-life and sought only peace.

The Heart opening took much less time and trauma because you did not resist so much. Parenting had worked its power on you by its many demands for unconditional love. You only needed to love a handful of women who did not love you in return to let go at last. Applying the lesson to your relationship with yourself was a concurrent challenge that danced merrily into and out of form in your daily life all marked by the peace you had learned through practice.

Once the barriers in the Heart had been released, the path through the Throat asked merely for courage. Live your truth, act with integrity and express your Self honestly were the main practices. You formulated pragmatic plans to envision and create your dreams. You embraced with gratitude the fulfillment of those dreams and only went around telling everyone what you did and how for a relatively short time. Having learned to perceive and accept the validity of all the lives around you sucked the juice right out of being a guru or trying to heal others. What little effort you did put into trying to show the Way served mostly to drive home the learnings into your consciousness; kind of like the repeated proofreads and edits of our first three books together.

The years of seeming complacency when you basked in the life of your dreams served their purpose even though you did not pierce the subtlety of the growth taking place. The gap between Throat and Brow is much larger (for you) than between the centers below. Large sweeping changes in definitions that are part and parcel of centering in the Brow are barely hinted at in the other centers. Yes, you did learn the mechanisms of reality creation on the physical level. You did learn to choose and influence emotional flows and you opened yourself to unconditional love. You even learned to risk every relationship in order to speak, write and live your truth. You actually thought for a while that you were done.

Now it is on to your third adult life. The thought, that consciously creating and guiding your reality was not the full measure of human awareness, pecked away at you like a bird at a suet feeder. As wonderful as it was to be in love, to be wealthy, surrounded by family in a benevolent world full of joy and song and laughter, you knew there was yet more. You sensed that the focus on your physical reality was leaving out something that you desired even more. The pressure upon the Brow from free flows through the Throat was releasing perceptions of how much remained to be done. While you kept repeating your focus upon being in love, part of you grew in the knowing that it was blocking further meaningful growth. Even after your marriage ended you resisted the awareness that it was time to move on. You may never have made that choice voluntarily. Indeed, this practice of resistance brought you tremendous pain in the next few years. It scrubbed away at your ego, your self-esteem and your arrogant superiority. It paralyzed you and forced you to look steadily at your SELF in all its wholeness. Wasn't that fun?

The movement of energies into higher frequencies described by the opening of higher chakras is the increasing development of SELF awareness. The more open to the experience of your inner SELF you become the more open to the flow of spirit which is your true identity. Each physical center of energy gathers a collection of fears and doubts and conflicts of desire that stem the flow into its distribution channels. Limited flow means limited functions from consciousness right down to the mechanical functions of cells. Opening chakras by facing and embracing your fears (rather than suppressing them) increases the flow of consciousness to your cells. Your health physically, emotionally and mentally expands.

The chakras within your physical body serve as tuners much like radio or TV tuners. Each is made to pick up one of the three etheric "bodies" or organizations of awareness and are, in some ways, twinned in the body to allow both physical and spiritual function. The Root, Heart and Crown centers tune to the Spiritual Body, source of spiritual inspiration and universal SELF awareness. The Biosphere, Solar Plexus and Brow centers tune to the Mental Body realm and process ideation, principle and meaningfulness. The Physical Core, Sacral and Throat centers tune to the Emotional body which generates energy and powers creation. It is only in the upper centers of the body that awareness can flow directly from these three Etheric Bodies into the physical and that only with your participation. Any fear structures extant in your upper chakras will influence what and how much awareness can penetrate and enhance the lower, more physical centers.

In a rush of pure self-acceptance you opened your Heart to unconditional love. Opening your Throat was more plodding, calling for little acts of courage and much introspection followed by a disciplined pursuit of creative action. Your social fears became paramount, rising into conscious awareness to be examined, owned and released; a practice which will be ongoing even with an open Throat. As all expression into and out of physical form contains the energy of the Emotional Body, your conscious participation in the flow of emotion is now part of the equation. Mastering emotion is liberation from the tyranny of fear through faithful acceptance and steadfast growth.

Because the Brow resonates to the Mental Body and is capable of opening to the High Mental Plane, its focus is psychological. Your every thought contributes to its functioning. Thoughts that swirl and cycle form the blockages that slow the flow. Pockets of unconscious repetitive thoughts, even before they gain the density that becomes emotion, will block Brow function and lower its frequencies. The challenge is to become aware of the flow of thought without grabbing on to it and demanding meaning. Your life to date has mostly focused upon the search for meaning, the "Holy Grail" of "your Life's Purpose" and even the "Purpose of Life Itself". You have sought to figure out the "right" thing to do or say or feel. You have looked for problems and solutions. You have basically immersed your mental life in the dichotomy of illusion. Thus you have actively and consciously asserted and re-asserted the perception of physical reality. The perception of Spiritual reality has been fleeting and vague at best because the habit of the search for meaning has been a consuming addiction driving every accepted thought with only few exceptions. Fortunately, those hard-won exceptions have brought you here.

Self-Awareness in its purest expression is prior to thought itself. In opening a channel to the flow of SELF thought, all thought, will be allowed to flow unimpeded. In your deepest meditations you have taken the "Witness" role, watching unattached as the river of thought flows through you. (Just like Siddhartha, awww! ) This is how our conversations get through your insistence upon meaningfulness. Of course they end up being diatribes of meaningfulness eventually as you try to capture them and make sense of them at the same time. This habit arises from a fundamental aspect of your self-definition. It is how you differentiate yourself from others, how you measure the value of your actions. It powers one of your last persistent fear structures which is now impeding your growth. When push comes to shove, it really has no meaning at all. How intelligent you are does not matter. At all!

If you would let it go and allow the free flow of information from within, you would not need to write it down and go over and over it to glean its meaning. You could truly let go of thinking there is a "right" way to do everything instead of repeating that ad nauseam. You could allow the "world" to be whatever it is without insisting on its stability. You could express your true SELF in full faith.

You have heard these things before. Indeed, all of our conversations have included them at their core. Although the common myth among uncommon people is that there is an ultimate state of Bliss at the rainbow's end which is constant, everlasting and the final accomplishment of human existence. Even were this to be true, it would serve you to not seek such a goal. It is not consistent with the Intent of "I AM" which has no end, no ultimate realization and no goal. It is in the expanding pulsation that the Intent of SELF is experienced.

So, round and round we go, stretching, extending and growing. Every moment offers the pure potential of the void and the explosion of "I AM" into expression. As you open to conscious participation with every bit of silence, every willful turning of attention to infinity in action, every releasing of the trappings of expression physical , emotional or mental, you share in the joyous explosion, the unconditionality. But, of course, you will cycle around again into humanness with alterations and expansions of identity.

"Don't Let it Bring You Down. It's Only Castles Burning"

Not every opening is a dramatic shift; eye popping internal changes that transform you into something unexpected and marvelous. In fact, when your Throat opened fully you did not even notice it. You had practiced so consistently that the almost inconsequential shifts registered in chunks over time. There was no ceremony to mark your accomplishment. You have had many pulsating periods of stress and self-doubt that have challenged all your preconceived ideas about the subject. These flowed into your awareness only because your Throat was open and allowing it all to flow through. Now, this next layer is its own adventure and will flow more easily without your efforts to control what it is and how it "should" proceed.

With the concept of releasing the human world from your thoughts at the forefront of your mind, all the little fears that remain to you will bubble up. From the peacefulness that you have practiced for so many years, you need not wrench these fears into submission. Simply replace them as they arise with the infinite potential they contain. See each extending out of the void to expand endlessly into boundless expressions as each tiny bit is born and expires. Inside each atom is the full boundless potential of the void pulsing into and out of expression. Only your insistence on solidity keeps the vision steady and stable.

With the Brow open and clear, the vision of infinity in action is overlaid upon each perception, each thought, each expression that you lay your attention upon. Every iota of "reality" holds unconditional joy to be perceived through the Brow. Participate willingly in that perception to further your expansion of awareness.

In meditation once again, quiet your conscious mind as always. Bring your body to rest and thoughts to silence. Observe your energy field as you open and allow all of your chakras to flow and connect. From the Heart outward, let your field stretch and include all of your centers, reaching beyond your body to the core of the Earth and to the heights of your Etheric (non-physical) Bodies. There is a particularly bright spot in your field of being just behind your body at the opening to your Heart chakra. It pulses rapidly and exudes warmth and comfort. Explore it for a while. Feels its properties and try to move it around a little. You will find it moves in small ways easily but moving it for larger spans gets a different response. It will bounce back and forth or up and down as the case may be. It seems to resist movement proportional to the distance travelled. Be bold and try to raise it up to the back of your head. As it passes any blockages of fear inspired energies, it will become uncomfortable and return to its normal position with some force. Be persistent and practice over time. Do not try to predict its effects, just observe and enjoy.

While you are in the awareness of Witness, you can still function in your world. Even in moments where considered decisions are needed, you can maintain the perspective of detachment and dare we say cosmic distance from your personhood that is needed to perceive infinity in action. When you see with your inner vision that all aspects of infinity are of equal validity and none are intrinsically more meaningful than any other, then you can love all unconditionally. Without arbitrarily imposing meaningfulness upon the contents of your perception, you cease to engage in judgment. You can still interact on all levels. You simply do not engage in moral speculation.

In recent months your psychological personhood has undergone intense focus and change. You have had your social fears thrust at you by the shifting landscape of family and friends. As important people left your life, you brought these fears to the surface and scrutinized them repeatedly in the shadow of your grief. Your commitment to stepping through them without repressing the pain or its causes allowed your psychological health to improve over time. You have sought transcendence rather than succor. You have reached for greater self-awareness even during times of wallowing in the pain. You have fought for perspective instead of settling for the definitions of those around you.

You may recall that the events of recent years that have brought you so much anguish were actually called for from deep within. Long before your major partner relationships crumbled you began to see that they held you back from seeking freedom from the human form. Indeed, you thought you had decided to abrogate the quest out of loyalty to your promises and vows. You need not have been so surprised at how things turned out since your quest began long before those promises were made. A fair portion of your grief arose from your response to the perceived failure of your roles and not an actual flaw in your character. Of course much of your pain was related to your fear of inadequacy as that is among the last hurdles in your quest.

The tail end of your grieving processes was marked by the internal task of addressing and releasing your major psychological defense mechanism; arrogance. You have used this as both shield and sword since your early years. You kept the world at arm's length with it and used it to bolster your confidence and self-esteem. Much like learning unconditional love by loving without reward, leaving behind your armor of arrogance required living in and with complete vulnerability. To see the "world" as it truly is requires total openness to it. All definitions, preconceived notions and expectations have to be transcended. All potential threats have to be embraced. All fears have to be stepped through. At first, living without a skin as it were has seemed like a never ending bath in acid. You pulsed between self-condemnation and certainty that there would be no recovery. Only glimmers of the real joy that you had learned and once knew daily could sneak past the inner battleground of your transformation process. You asked for that, remember. You wanted access to your true SELF that hid behind the façade of superiority. It was, as it turned out, easier to learn that you are not superior than to face the underlying layers of inadequacy that have haunted you since childhood.

Your willingness to take this dictation with little censorship is a measure of your ability to clearly see SELF in true light. You as personality is no more important, meaningful or worthy of love than any other. Since love is unconditional anyway, it does not matter a whit! It only mattered in your mind.

Seeing through the Brow means seeing beyond the façade of humanity. It means directly perceiving that all are One, each aspects of the wholeness of SELF, of the consciousness begun with "I AM". It means that all mental and emotional fear structures be experienced and transcended so that a healthy and natural state of being be lived through you. As you open the Brow, you become a channel of sorts for the layers of SELF much larger than your humanity, with greater vision and more expanded Intent. Perhaps you will even learn to co-habitate with spiders and snakes. Well, at least learn to let them live.

(Note: I am pretty sure that I will be the last to know if this process of releasing my defenses has made of me a better or nicer person. For certain, during the bulk of the grief cycle I was in retreat from every interaction and could become harsh when cornered and retreat became impossible. Time will tell right?)

One of the most powerful blocks to seeing your world infused with infinity in action is also one that has been chipped away at throughout your quest. When you finally manage to lose its hold on your awareness you will be liberated indeed. Its tendrils have woven deeply into your identity and influence every interaction in your world, yet have no basis in fact or reality. You have been challenged by it from both sides of the equation and lived out the dueling deadly "sins" all your life.

So, let go of your self-importance already. You habitually place yourself in the center of the universe as if the rest of infinity might care. You only exist because infinity would not be infinite without you. Not such a point of pride that what? The universe is not to be measured by how its functioning affects you or how you choose to perceive it. You are neither better nor worse than the most powerful or wealthy person or the most meager insect under your feet. In the face of the unconditional love of an infinitely expanding consciousness you are an equal participant among all the bits and pieces of existence.

When you find yourself stymied in your efforts to perceive beyond the known elements of your world, blocked out as it were from observing the underlying reality in the world you have created, it is your addiction to how your world has always been (revolving around you) that stands in your way. There is a position between Pride and Despair where you can stand and Witness life unfolding without ownership or victimhood. It is an alternative to your addiction to solidity and as such will take much practice as you already know and many starts and stops; just like breaking away from any powerful addiction.

Launch anew into the role of Witness. Every time you think to, look out at your world as the overlay of thoughts and beliefs. Look to see the infinite possibilities that are beneath the surface of everything you turn your attention towards. You need not react to your world as it unfolds. The little pockets of fear that spring up will just as surely pass if you simply let them. Else they will grind in and out of your reality when you react to them. Even as on the tennis court, your best responses rise out of thoughtlessness, reflexively making shots or setting up points. Only when you start thinking does the game get difficult for you. Consider how often you safely drive your car, so lost in thought that you miss turns or reflexively dodge potholes or other drivers. You have even come to not speeding up beyond posted limits when a favorite song plays and inspires you to bellow along. Adding a component of actively trying to perceive infinity in action in the world as you live your life will not seem such a task for long.

It is time we discussed the effects of efforts to open the Brow without adequately clearing the centers below. The psychological clarity needed to function with an open Brow Chakra is developed by moving the fear structures in lower centers with higher frequency energies. For instance, without releasing the Heart Chakra to access unconditional love and acceptance, you cannot perceive the equality of all things in the Brow. Indeed, only unconditional acceptance of SELF makes it possible to set aside egocentric identity. Understanding your place in the Universe from an open Throat affords the impetus to release the fear structures blocking the Brow. Without open understanding everything can look like a miracle or even foster looking for miracles as proof of spiritual achievement.

When we began our conversation you were clearing the Solar Plexus. Your intellectual seeking drew you deeply into New Age themes and ideology. Your conception of the Universe included all sorts of artificial hierarchies that were merely elevated versions of religious iconography. Angels and halos, trans-mutational miracles, saints and gurus, ascended masters, psychic phenomena; all these and more influenced your thinking and your definitions of SELF. Only after your Heart opening did you begin to release these interpretations of matters of the spirit. In the light of unconditionality, these ways of differentiating people and their experiences began to lose meaningfulness.

To bypass steps like open hearted unconditional love on the way to opening the Brow will provide some remarkable experiences of possibilities illuminated by glimpses of infinity revealing not wholeness but the projection of poorly evolved iconologies. You could start seeing things that you expect to see, auras perhaps or ghosts and with a strong enough intellect force your perception to prove accurate without even considering that you are projecting into your reality your unquestioned beliefs. You may desire some position of status as teacher or guru to satisfy some fear of inadequacy or other unexamined psychological issues. You might wish to be an energy healer, give psychic readings or speak with the dead and project these into form all because the doors to unconditional love (Heart) and universal understanding (Throat) are not yet open.

Now none of these common New Age scenarios are inherently wrong. All are valid pathways towards wholeness. So too is the Catholic priesthood, televangelism or political activism or science etc. All, when consistently questioned, will lead you to higher frequencies of ideation. The point of the discussion is that attempts to open the Brow without the clearing and opening of the lower centers of fears, traumas and misinterpretations of infinity can result in wild divergences in your quest for SELF awareness. So if you suspect that Brow Chakra opening might well lead you to exalted states of being where you know all and see all and glow with the light from within and ascend bodily into heaven, you may want to go back to page 1 of Your World is a Metaphor and review the basics.


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On those days when you feel a little off, when the weight of life in the world seems beyond you to bear, try this meditation to reconnect with your whole SELF and find your core of peace once more.

Enter the meditative state with a few deepening breaths and your call to wholeness, "I AM". Envision your body inside the trunk of an infinitely large tree of light and thought whose roots reach down to cover the Earth and down into the very core of the idea of your planet. The trunk reaches up beyond the atmosphere and the branches reach out into the vastness of the cosmos. All of creation rests within this Tree of Life. All the myriad things are its leaves. All lives ever lived and ever to be are its seeds forever showering down to the Earth. Here you are in its body expanding into its every function and into the very idea of life itself. This is the all One Being in which you participate, in which All That Is participates. Through this being you are intimately and equally in constant contact with every person, place and thing; every molecule in existence just like the cells of your body participate in constant contact with your inner SELF. Inside the Tree of Life you are truly grounded and elevated simultaneously. You are absolved of all responsibility, relieved of all conceptions and beliefs, all fears and dreams. Inside the Tree of Life you know that all is in perfection. Explore here and explore often for here you will find the strength, courage and wisdom that you seek.

The creation story in the Judeo-Christian Bible has led ensuing cultures a bit astray by placing all the attention upon the purloined apple. While the obvious result of defying the edict to not go there is the human condition as you know it, the untold tale about the Tree of Life as the pathway back to the Garden is far more important to you now. Contemplating the nature of the Tree of Life will expand your world view as much as the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil has contracted it over millennia. The icons of Good and Evil as we have discussed are an early step in the mad rush away from Oneness. Follow them at your peril. Well, that is melodramatic isn't it? The point is that every moment devoted to judgment, to perceiving people and things as separate from SELF and one another leads you away from your ultimate desire; to know SELF. Practice perceiving people and things inside the Tree of Life. Allow the imagery to encompass All That Is as it encompasses you. Practice perceiving that All That Is is you. Not that you are in charge but included.

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