We began this course of training, so many years ago, using the system of energy centers known as chakras as a main theme of metaphors to inspire your growth into the awareness that you have longed for in this life. The quest which continued with this tome has focused on the processes of opening these centers and deconstructing the barriers of fear which blocked them. We have shared back and forth the insights and awarenesses which have become available upon these openings and offered spurs to continue to move along to the next stages.

Now that the openings have been experienced and you have settled into practices which afford the occasional experience of Oneness, we have been turning our focus to the next stage of practice, centering. We have used this term before so it does not surprise you that there are deeper layers of meaning to the term and its uses. We caution you to expect no easy pathways to traverse in the process of elevating the central core of your identity to the next level of awareness.

The simple fact that you experience yourself as a physical body in a physical world illustrates the effect of a centering in the root center. It is an infant stage experience both within your life and within the larger array of life experiences that extend toward and away from you with all of the influences they bear.We state this with intentional vagueness so as not to mire you down with needless speculations about how your early stage manifestations may have been (or are) experienced. (All events occur at the speed of infinity! All is One) Duh!

When centered upon survival, you experience gravity as the overwhelming power that controls your conscious self. You have occasional short glimpses of interactions with other, similar, consciousnesses, utterly outside of yourself. Here the drive to survive the onslaught of the world is central to everything. Much of your experience in this center is habitual and you have learned to slide fairly seamlessly in and out of this focus, especially when behind the wheel.

The movement of your identity to the Sacral Chakra begins with fear driven attempts to manipulate the beings and things around your body to get your needs satisfied. While obvious in the behavior of infants, the ramifications in the span of life are a little more subtle. Still, when you peer out at the human horde, many examples are on display with the gamut of expressions of this centering played out in your neighborhood, community, country and world, on the news, arts and entertainment and so on. None of this is wrong or pernicious or threatening to you and yours. It simply exists. As your world grows and your interactions with it expand, you learn to slide back and forth with your identity and reach upward as needed.

Examples of centering in the Sacrum are very common as the child grows. Life is still solidly physical but more fully interactive and fully lived. Survival becomes less pressing and less of a core issue. Manipulating is central. There is a great deal of creative activity extending outward from the Sacral identification in the crafting and manufacturing of physical things. From the simplest to most sublime, the focus on manipulating matter to build good lives, free from the survival fears, motivates much of this centering. These motives spur most efforts to manipulate other people as well. Most sexuality contains the ingredient of manipulation towards ends beyond survival of the species. The layers of sophistication of motive extend a long ways before any altruistic impulses come into play. There is an extensive "us vs. them" perspective at play throughout this stage of awareness. Dogs are eating dogs here in a vast array of expressions.

Less numerous though expanding examples in your world are those arrising from the Solar Plexus centering. This reflects science overtaking religion, intellect becoming elevated over emotion, invention ascending over manufacturing and so on. Perception is shaped by hierarchies of humans here. One's place, purpose and meaning become described by the human horde. The pursuit of status and wealth even among the poor and working classes is a core pursuit. While "Good" and "Evil" are central to the Sacrum, "right" and "wrong" are big deals to the intellect, even if more vague. The Solar Plexus revels in shades of gray and all the wrangling they can provide.

Much of the intellectual control exerted by this focus of identity is still driven by deep emotional swells and dark burgeonings of fear most primal.The intellect wishes to do battle with baser urges and pushes them into the world of matter in the effort to exert more control. Much of modern life is a display of these processes. The relationship of emotion and intellect is an uneasy one for most who identify themselves as "intelligent" beings.

Again, there is a wide variety of expressions arising from this centering. Those just beginning to experience this center behave quite differently from those close to expanding beyond it. Bits of influence of expanded awareness appear as increased sophistication and generosity of spirit. Even while engaged in the rat race, the talent and desire to look beyond at humanity and ideology grows. People start to talk about "The Heart" and bandy platitudes and cliches about wisdom that they struggle to live. The biggest hurdle is apparent in this trend because the real issue is the increased suppression of emotional experience as the intellect struggles for control. Much gets pushed into unconsciousness and pops up (or bleeds through) to mystify and interfere with the best laid plans. This is a difficult stage as the desire toward enlightenment begins to emerge and wrestle with the still strong pull of gravity and physicality with all of its well learned battle strategies.

Certainly, there is much that can be said about these physical stages of identification. This review, lengthy though it may seem, was merely to introduce the topic of Heart Chakra centering. Powered by the Spiritual Body, the Heart is the final centering which affords a physical experience. Once fully focused here, the pull of gravity no longer forces the manifestation of the SELF into a body. This is the goal you pursue.

Now there is no definite line of transition from the human centering of the Solar Plexus to the transcendant centering of the Heart. Indeed, there can be what seems like lifetimes of straddling the two perspectives before you step out of viewing yourself as human. In the higher stages of Solar Plexus centering, you have defined your reality as personal, springing from your very own desires and fears. You have also insisted that the manifestations thereof be real and solid even if they are only yours. It has been necessary for you to pass through this perspective to find within the vast creative power that consciousness wields. Your rising awareness experiences the accumulation of perspectives of humanity. Until you eclipse the importance of human experience and its attendant reality you will not fully enter the next stage of your transcendence.

You are the human race! All of human experience is your experience.

All of your experience of the world is played out in human form. All of humanity's experience is played out within you. By insisting that being human is a physical expression, you limit your horizontal expansion toward infinity. The desires and fears which flow through you into form are of the same ilk and the same source as those which power all of human expression. They are fully accessible to you within the silence between thoughts. Certainly the limitless flow is a bigger phenomenon than the empowered thought stream upon which you choose to build your life. It is only your obstinacy and resistence that hides this awareness from you in daily life.

The expression of who and what you are is not reality! It is time to acknowledge the dream to be just a dream. Each time you enter the silent state of Oneness, whether it be immersion in it or bouncing off of it like a skipping stone, you experience the true reality from which all the meaningless drivel springs.

Unlike the misconceptions about the Heart that so permeate your culture, the Chakra itself is not a source of intelligence. The advice to "listen to your heart" is non-sensical at best. The Chakra is much like the physical organ in that its function is to open and close, thereby allowing the movement of the flow of spirit in both upward and downward directions. Its degree of openness fluctuates constantly in response to your fears and resistance in your thoughts and feelings on the one hand and your varying willingness to perceive and understand higher truths of your existence. The awareness of the Heart function is non-judgmental. It does not break down into feeling or intelligence. It simply blocks the flow of fear or opens to the flow of love. In other words, it protects you from the stark awareness of infinity.

Also, like the physical organ, the Heart Chakra develops habitual settings that affect your willful projections when you diverge from the "normal" perspectives that you have maintained with force over time. As stodgy as it seems, you have needed to massage this "muscle" to relax and open by dismantling your fears and insistent preconceptions. It has been work, has it not? Surely you can see that the misconceptions about the Heart stem from the battle between intelligence and emotion which rages inside you.

To progress through the lower centers, the tettering that you experience now between Heart and Solar Plexus identification also takes place between the Solar Plexus and Sacrum. Indeed, much of human culture is described by this fluctuation process. With more and more emphasis put upon the intellect, feelings have been often squelched and denied, seen as inferior if not evil. By the same token, tribal cultures have been labeled as backwards and inferior as they depend upon emotional focus more than those cultures with which you identify. In the earlier stages of this growth into higher frequencies, being unaware of your emotions, what feels good and what does not, holds back the flow of truth (spirit) making the intellect less successful and creative. "Follow your heart" is just a step towards a higher state of awareness.

Breaking out of Solar Plexus centering is the product of shifting your attention to the larger awareness of reality than mere human expression. The inner forces that power manifestation are far more broad and more inclusive than the universe of physical objects. The shades of each thought and feeling are played out in the drama of humanity before you. They spring from the reality of you into limitless forms and expressions. This is very distracting! It is so distracting that you repeatedly miss the reality of you while you cherry pick the options to display "out" in the world. Focusing your attention on these flows of desire and fear in all of their vast variety brings you to the greater reality of your SELF.

All of the focus upon manifesting your desires and creating the life of your dreams was about becoming more conscious of your desires and fears that lay deep within your psyche and that power your life experience and your world. Until you began to learn how to intentionally manifest your desires you were only vaguely, if at all, aware of them. You were definitely unaware of their source and their vast breadth. The practice of manifesting trained you to command your thoughts and emotions more and more. This brought you into the realm of your deeper motives. It is when you learned to stop your thoughts and the feelings they powered that being with the intents of your spirit and the desire that those intents power became possible.

So this is the layer that we urge you to make your home. You have thus far lived mostly in your thoughts, doing battle with their contents and creative power. Doing so has limited your joy and fulfillment just as living in your emotions did before that. Though your thinking does wax rather lofty, it does slow down your experiencing of SELF, capture your attention and drag it away from that experiencing. Interestingly, this is all just a well worn habit. It is not ordained or required. You are just used to it. While it is going to make writing down the more meaningful contents of your consciousness more difficult, it is time to move on from thinking as the primary source of your identity.

Now, focusing your identity in the Heart will allow you to cycle into and out of other centers both more and less familiar. The Heart is a reference point first and foremost. You center there when you go into silence, when you recall unconditional love and when you experience the profound acceptance of the present moment. From there you can choose to share in the experience of other people, of the natural world and its beauty and of higher realms of understanding and perception. You can choose to perceive the patterning of energy from which your world springs. This is what is often called the "Astral Plane". People and things are intents, desires and ideas long before they are manifest. Then, by thinking, they take on form and physicality.

Being centered in the Heart, you can perceive the patterning not only of forms but of the actions to be performed. From there you can capture the big picture of all of creation, what it means, what it intends and how it all fits together. Then you can express that, live with it in the world and be the totality of SELF. Of course, it eventually will be of little importance to you. Expressing or simply being there is truly enough.

To help you along the way, we suggest the following motions be performed before your meditations to clear and open the Heart and gather the energy of creation to elevate your experience. These moves can be added to the ones we have previously prescribed or done alone as you see fit. All of the motions we offer can be adjusted, rearranged and/or augmented as you grow. No rules! It is your intent while in motion that holds the greatest potential. Focus upon the affect that each move can have while you are doing it. Treat the unseen potential as very real for greatest value.

These movements will galvanize your attention, making whatever you focus upon next more directed and whole. There is so much more to living in your Heart than platitudes and cliches (works of the intellect after all). There is no thought or feeling in conjunction with unconditional acceptance. If you expect or experience some rosy love and light revelation, you just are not there. True Heart centered awareness is total acceptance of the present moment. You will dissect and analyze experiences after the fact but during there is only Now.

The largest obstacle that stands between you and this state as a constant perspective is your habitual fears that your reality is not safe. This has been the center of your efforts to evolve since infancy and continues to exert its pressure as you mature. It has also driven your efforts to learn to manifest your dreams and desires into form, to gain control over your feelings and your thoughts and to do battle with your entrenched identity.

So, while you practice reaching states of open-ness to the present moment, consciously turn away from fearing the world around you. Let go of the idea of danger in the streets, terror about aging and dying and striving to make sure that others love you. Round and round, like scraping that soccer ball with your hands, cycle from attending to your fears and reach for total acceptance of Now! Then you can reach out and express the SELF.

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