CHAPTER 1
You Can't Get There From Here
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could figuratively snap your fingers and be instantly transformed? To spend a few hours in meditation and in a flash of insight achieve enlightenment? If enlightenment were a fact that you could achieve, perhaps you could do just that. Because enlightenment is not a fact that can be grasped or a degree of fitness that can be reached through exercise, it is a wee bit tougher to discover.
Just as you have learned to do with every other facet of human existence, you have personalized, humanized in effect, a divine state of being. Defining it as you have, you have made it unattainable. Indeed, you have experienced many moment of true enlightenment in your life and often missed the best parts. Your present moment, staring at these words, is just such an experience if only you could allow yourself to openly receive it fully. Truly, it is not the achievement of this state of being that you seek. It is the state of being itself.
As you pursue all of your activities in life, from brushing your teeth and getting dressed at the start of the day to the most exalted spiritual practices, you apply this very same fundamental mode of perception to each and every one. You presume that the toothbrush in your hand is real, that it has substance. So too does the shirt on your back. Even your thoughts are subjected to the same modes of perception. They are yours and so very real. Your thoughts are so real to you that you act even upon the ones which never reach conscious awareness. Such thoughts are so a part of your mental landscape that they go unnoticed time after time. You would not think to question their validity. Would you stop to question whether or not you have the right to exist? Yet, when you pick up that cigarette or take the wheel of a car after a few drinks or have unprotected sex with a stranger or any of so many potential but needless risks, you act on the very real thought that you do not have the right, or the desire, to exist.
Much deeper and more subtle than this unconscious guilt lies the buried addiction to thoughts about how your world is constructed. Believing in the solidity of your world, for instance, is almost unthinkable to question. Even if you do, so much of your perception is based upon that highly shared belief that you cannot even count the conscious moments constructed upon it. It is incredibly pernicious. You even cast direct experience with your spiritual self with the beliefs of humanity. When you touch a portion of yourself that experiences a higher state of awareness than your normal waking state, you call it an angel or a spirit or Jesus or God. When you touch the thoughts of another, held together by strong emotion, you proclaim it a ghost or a spirit of the dead. They may even be the powerful thoughts of one among you and still you are sure it is a human now dead because that is more like the life you know than the possibility of thoughts having a life of their own.
If you have a visionary experience in your spiritual practice, you might react to it in one of so many ways, as an encounter with a ghost, or a spirit or an Angel or even with God. Can you, though, consider it a projection of your beliefs about reality mixed with a more subtle layer of your awareness which you have accessed in a quiet inner state? Can you imagine that absolutely every perception that you have experienced is a projection of the reality that you believe exists in fact? Even your perception of God! No matter how high your consciousness soars, you can never access the wholeness of infinity with the techniques of perception that you now use. As long as you continue to base your perception of reality on the notion that you, yourself, are real and distinct, you can only count to infinity. You cannot let go and Let God and still be real yourself. Sorry!
There is a very fundamental shift in approach needed to access the infinite self. As you near this shift, you have to ask yourself if you really want to take that final leap. After all, you are very happy. You could build on that happy state while you pursue a life that looks altogether "normal" to the world around you. You could master the principles of reality creation by taking them one at a time now that they have become familiar to you. You could build a very nice life for yourself with a little genuine effort, a life with little risk of the most primal fears that you still must face. Happiness is enticing beyond the most potent of drugs. It is at once the reward for all of your efforts to face your fears and then let go, all of your diligent study and disciplined practice and at the same time, it is your greatest obstacle. You have learned to release your angst, anger and sadness and fear. You have learned that these states are the result of choice in the moment and that you can shift into and out of them readily and at will. Can you learn to release this happiness in order to step into the vast unknown?
This is how fundamental a shift you must make to reach your goal of oneness, enlightenment, ascension, nirvana, etc. You have constructed a reality that rules your perception solely by describing it over and over in your mind, your heart, your life. Your attachment to the reality you have "always" known is self feeding. Loosing yourself from that reality, even though it is merely a description, is no small task. That, though, is the task at hand.
As we have discussed, each level of awareness within the whole of you has its own senses. Your emotional body senses energy as your physical body senses the solid world. Your mental body senses thought and the spiritual body senses essence. In each case, the actual experience of these senses is very unique. It is the wildly unique nature of the senses in each body which may leave you a bit confused. The senses of the emotional body can tell you the tone and texture of your emotional environment, both inside and outside of your physical body, just as your physical senses tell you what is what in your solid world. This input, though, does not have genuine physical form. It may appear otherwise, however. You may experience energetic motion visually as your intellect and your imagination conjure a context for the impulses from your emotional senses. This same process may result in experiences of other physical senses that mock the non-physical or cast a representation of the direct experience of energy, thought or essence. Now, this is not to say that a projection into a known medium is wrong by any means. This is the very process through which your solid world comes into being. We mean only that such a projection sets limits on how much of the non-physical reality, which is all through and about you, that you can perceive and understand.
You may not be able to imagine how you could possibly experience reality through any other means than the senses you have trained since childhood. Any other input would almost seem to have to come through the same contextual array. Emotions would have to have shape and colour, so you would see auras. Thoughts must have a voice so you hear them as words. Essences must have a person and maybe even a form. Mustn't they? Casting the non-physical into physical terms is very limiting. You do have a choice in this though. You can begin by changing your definitions. Refuse to be limited by the description of spirit in physical terms. Begin to assume that there must be more to it. In a way, we suggest a sceptical kind of approach but without the sceptical attitude which says pretty much that there must be less to it. We remind you most strongly that matter does NOT create spirit. The scientific approach that there must be a physical explanation for all phenomena is laughably self-limiting. Such an attitude is an attempt to keep at a distance a definition which might require a change in your approach to reality. Change is scary but it is also an inexorable fact. Change is the only constant in an expanding universe.
Now, we suggest that you define even the most mundane event in your daily life as a metaphor for the movement of spirit into matter. This definition alone will open you to a vast resource of extra-sensory input. Your individual predilections will give this input shape and substance, so to speak. If you are visual, your imagination will conjure images that will represent the motion of the non-physical environment. If you are predominantly verbal, you will hear words forming as though from another inner voice. If you are tactile first and foremost, you will feel the movement as impulses to motion. The trick is to identify these impulses as distinct from your physical senses. Validate their reality without resorting to the need for a physical interpretation. Your imagination, for instance, is a sense, every bit as genuine as your eyes and ears. It allows you entry into a layer of reality which is a building block to the physical world. The experiences that your imagination conjure are very real and capable of expanding infinitely. By allowing the input of all the other senses, which you now mostly define as "just my imagination," to have validity, you become receptive to so much more of the infinite potential of your conscious awareness.
To effect change in so fundamental a definition of what is real, requires a genuine effort. It need not be work, mind you, just effort. You must be willing to suspend defining even the most common perception in the same old way that you have always defined it before. You can then begin to see how your perception is influenced by your old definitions. You will eventually get right down to recognizing that the solid world only appears solid because you have learned to define it that way. Let's not rush ahead too fast though. We do have a ways to go first.
In "Metaphors," we explained how your definition of yourself, which you invest with emotional energy in every moment, sets up a field of energy around you. This field shapes, supports and maintains a physical body composed of billions of individual life forms. The you that you experience is not any of these life forms. You simply get to experience this gestalt, the mass events taking place within this field of thought and feeling called energy. Imagine being at a football game with 60,000 other people except that you are the game, able to experience all of the people location and actions all at once, with your identity including all that, and much more at once. Kind of mind blowing eh? That is much like what you are in relation to your body. You experience your body from a dimension of thought and feeling, an energy field, not from within the body itself. The illusion created by the senses of sight, touch, hearing, tasting and smelling that you exist IN your body is just that, an illusion. It IS a particularly compelling illusion but an illusion nonetheless.
This large electromagnetic field which shapes, supports and maintains your physical body also has a shape. This shape (so to speak as it is not a wholly physical phenomena) is constructed out of your thoughts and feelings. It is as changeable as your thoughts and feelings and as stable as the beliefs you hold dear which structure your thoughts and feelings. The energetic field, so uniquely shaped, interacts with the electromagnetic fields around you, the people and things of the world. Like Lego's, or atoms for the more scientifically minded, those that fit your shape will be attracted in some part and those that do not fit will drift on by. Events in your life unfold in just this way as well. Those that fit into the shape of your beliefs and thoughts and feelings (your shape) will touch your life. Those events that just don't fit your shape will just not touch you.
We would liken this effect to a homemade electromagnet built by coiling a copper wire around a piece of iron and attaching the ends of the wire to a battery. The electricity represents your thoughts and feelings which spring out of your self-definition. These thoughts and feelings ionize the energy flow in and around your physical body, thus magnetizing you in a pattern which is consistent with those thoughts and feelings; in the same way that the piece of iron is magnetized in a pattern consistent with the power of the battery and the shape of the iron (previous creative forces). When you shake some iron filings around the magnet, they line up in a shape consistent with this magnetic field around the piece of iron. In a human life, people, things and circumstances line up in your life consistent with the thoughts and emotions invested in them, that you have applied to yourself. It is your electro-magnetic field that shapes the events in your life. It is your self-definition that shapes your electro-magnetic field. Change the definition and you change everything in your life to one degree or another.
As you transform your energetic shape by choosing new feelings from which to operate in life, new people and events will come into your life because they fit your new shape. Old ones will drop away because they no longer fit. The more clearly you hold the thoughts and feelings of your dreams coming true, without the conflicting desires and beliefs which muddle your shape, the more clear the shape of you becomes. That will draw people and events that fit nicely into your new life. It is all up to you to create that shape. Simply grant yourself the experience of it RIGHT NOW!
It is that simple and that powerful.
We challenge you now to look carefully at your self-definition, not just the contents, beliefs, ideas and feelings that inhabit the box that you have placed yourself within, but also the forms of which this definition is constructed. Every belief, thought and feeling which is part of your definition of yourself is cast in human terms. Words, symbols, emotions and gestures comprise your concept of yourself. Pretty much nothing that you think, feel or do is expressed in spirit's terms. This is by no means wrong, but it is self-limiting in the extreme. We will ask that you investigate a radical shift in your perspective in the pages that follow. Offer yourself patience and compassion. The very roots of your perception will be shaken before we finish here. You see, we chose carefully the title of this chapter. From your present perceptual framework, infinity is quite completely out of your grasp. You can only access metaphors of the infinite with words or feelings. The fullness of essence needs a totally new and unique language.
Now, this new language may certainly be translated into human terms, cast into metaphors. You are not isolated from the spiritual realm by any means. It does require, though, that you suspend your perceptual framework even further than to cease judging what you perceive. To access the language of sprit, so to speak, you must leave all perceptual prejudices behind. You must enter a state of total silence. You must experience directly the blinking on and off of your own existence. This entails an act of total surrender, complete acquiescence to the Will of God. You must boldly step beyond your identity into not-being to experience the fullness of being which lies beyond your humanness.
**********************************
We invite you to enter a meditative state, like you have done so many times before. This time, set aside all of your human agenda. There will be no questions, no search for meaning or visions or experience of any kind. Make no judgements of your experience or hold onto anything that comes to mind. Do not repeat a mantra or consider the nature of your thoughts or monitor your breathing. All of the meditative tricks your have learned over the years must be set aside. Have faith in your ability, honed with practice, and simply let go. Let go of all of your thoughts, sensations and images. Let go of everything that tries to grab your attention. Let go of the cool visions and far-out mystical impulses. Let the silence grow. If you fall asleep, let that go too. All is well within the silence. Your true state of being has no obligations to the world around you, physical or spiritual.
This state of not being that you pursue is not a single immersion into enlightenment. It is cumulative. The moments of silence add up over time. Your exposure to such a degree of internal acceptance and peace will accrue interest. Even the moments of the day when a deep breath offers you a milli-second of silent relief from your human perspective will be added to the savings account you are constructing. Moments of genius flare from this silence. Your true inspiration, which holds the inexorable power of creation bursts from this act of stepping out of humanness into the divine. However, you cannot go into silence looking for inspiration. Your agenda will prevent you from reaching such a state.
This is an act of total trust that we are suggesting. You must set aside all of your attachment to your physical life to reach this state of being. In effect, you must be willing to die in order to live in the realm of spirit. It is no surprise that most who travel this way choose to step gingerly into these waters. Their depths are limitless after all. You certainly can take small steps, testing the waters as you go. Each step will increase your trust. You will learn that the integrity of your being is established and far from your human identity. It is secure beyond your physical death. You can safely step out of the human world. You can even return afterwards. In the beginning, you have no conscious choice in that matter. Later in your journey, you will indeed make that choice in full knowledge that one direction is neither better nor worse than any other. Live, die, it is all the same. For now though, in the interest of growth, continuing to live has more value and so you shall. Fear not!
Within the silence you will find no landmarks. You may construct some of your own as you blink on and off, into and out of what you define as lucidity. These landmarks will be a desperate attempt to interpret spirit in human terms, however bizarre those terms may appear. This intermediate stage requires that you withhold judgement or interpretation beyond the recognition that your perception is a projection. True silence contains nothing of the familiar. Work steadily towards letting go of the familiar, though wildly strange, perceptions that accompany your efforts. In silence you are exposed to the universe at large, not just the portion of it that you have learned to perceive. That exposure alone places a pressure on your beingness that expands your conscious awareness. You will eventually become capable of being conscious while in such a state. The progress expands, though not geometrically, something akin to that. Each step has the potential of expanding beyond the parameters of the step before.
The crucial aspect of all of this effort is the complete release of all of your attachments to the universe that you know. All of your expectations must be set aside. The depth of those expectations is remarkable though. This is a major leap and yet a very simple one. No magnificent mental gymnastics are required. No amazing talent is needed. You need only faith; faith that you will return to the identity you have created when your moment of silence is done. All of the work that you have done to reach this juncture in your journey has been aimed at developing your faith in the benevolence of the universe. It is a wonderful paradox that to reach this exalted conclusion, you have had to live life as a warrior. You have pitted yourself against life and the world around you, demanding from it what you have decided that you want. You have taken on responsibility for your experience of existence and sought to act with integrity and creative power. Your ability to embrace life has been directly proportional to how wholly you embrace your own power. This power, however, has not been the result of your actions. It exists as an intrinsic part of your being. You have learned to align with your wholeness enough to tap a portion of this creative force and seen its power in action. Trust has grown as a result. This next passage will use every bit of that trust and more. Now you must give it all up!
You see, this entire transition into silence is a leap into the creative process. Even though you are the centre of this process, you know only a tiny portion of the process of creation of which you are actually the hub. As you step into the vast silence of your unconscious mind, you loose the power of creation to manifest intent without the conflicting impulses of your conscious awareness. You have focused your conscious mind on controlling your perception of reality and manipulating everything in it to ensure your safety. Because your conscious agenda conflicts often with your unconscious intent, it is a most unfathomable mystery to you how your experience is created. In order to reach your present state of awareness, where you have assumed responsibility for creating your reality, you have had to make a leap of faith beyond the mystery of why. Now, you will open some of that mystery by releasing your death grip on your reality which your conscious awareness has insisted upon.
Essentially, we are telling you that within your unconscious awareness lies the agenda of your soul. Even though your culture has taught that the unconscious holds all of the demons that your imagination can haunt you with, these demons are simply part of the whole of you which you have tried to deny. The soul embraces the wholeness, the good and the bad, the positive and the negative, the Yin and the Yang. It seeks to express the wholeness by creating balance in your perceptions of reality. Your conscious choice to embrace whatever reality you perceive opens the door to perceiving wholeness. Setting aside your conscious agenda to immerse yourself in the silence of the unconscious, throws the door wide open. The soul can then pour out into your world unhindered. Yes, you will get to see the dark side of the wholeness as well as the light. Embrace that as well and true self discovery becomes possible.
It is a little odd how immersion in silence can allow you to access your creative power. Silence, by its very nature, is peaceful and pliant and unattached. Your exposure to this profound state of rest affects your experience of life in quiet, subtle ways that appear most magical. Your perspective changes, not through crisis and trauma as it often has before. You quite naturally flow into happy states of awareness, making choices that fulfill your primal desires. Just being in silence aligns your identity with your divine self, a little bit at a time at first and then in larger and larger increment. The reason is quite simple. By seeking the silence, you are asking for the awareness of your soul. Asking is all that you need do. By asking, we don't mean wishful thinking or flights of fancy. You must want it enough to put the desire into action. It is not the action that makes the magic though. It is the singular focus of intent that the action simply represents that brings on this mysterious change. That is why no particular ritual is needed.
Now, if you go in search of silence to gain something, like power or wisdom or knowledge, you will effectively hamstring yourself. This agenda will automatically set limits on your experience. Still, such practical goals can motivate you to action. They will also reap results and thereby prove enticing and distracting. We suggest that you seek something less limited and exclusive than a manifestation. As a spiritual being, you are not bound by the surfaces of things. Your ability to perceive creation is infinite. You can access the very essence of creation in all of its aspects. We suggest that you seek inner silence because within the silence there is awareness so subtle it can reach out to infinity to explore the wholeness of your infinite self. Such awareness is so subtle that only in silence can you knowingly touch it. Afterward, even through the mundane chatter of your conscious mind, the awareness comes bubbling up to the surface in ever increasing increment and volume. This process is foreign to your conscious mind but don't be fooled. It is very real and very life changing.
********************************************************
We end this chapter with an exercise most basic. Find a comfortable place to sit and with eyes closed, in a quiet place, begin to focus on your breathing. Use your out breath to stir you to release all of your tension. Begin with your physical body, letting go of tension in your body with each out breath. Then open your awareness to your emotional body, all of the cares of the day and the ambient emotional climate of your present experience. Release all of it as you breathe. Widen your awareness into your mental body. Notice the flow of thought without attaching your mind to any of it. Let go of all of the thought by releasing any which surface to your awareness. None of them will lead you to the silence you are seeking. Let them go like fallen leaves on a river. Finally, expand your awareness to your spiritual body. Experience the flow of your intent. Your purposes in this exercise, for instance, will lead you here. Once more, release whatever you find here, any desire you have for knowledge, experience or power. Simply move back into the quiet release of the out breath whenever you find yourself thinking, feeling, sensing or intending. Let the silence be an end in itself and release yourself into its vastness.
Your every thought and feeling, no matter how large or divine they may be, are boxes wrapped around an infinite essence in an attempt to contain, describe and control the ineffable wholeness that you are. Even the most exalted thought is a limitation on the wholeness of spirit. All of your meditative efforts thus far have been designed to enlarge the boxes of your thoughts. Your internal experience has made your thoughts broader, more inclusive and more loving of self and creation as a whole (which is one and the same). We ask now that you release spirit from the limits of your thoughts by releasing thought itself. You cannot imagine how this effort will change the nature of your existence. Therefore, do not try to imagine it. The results are not contained within the limits of your imagination after all.
So, let it go. This is the ultimate act of faith. You cannot guess where this will lead or how the intent of your spiritual self will play out if you follow this advice. Only practice will prove its value. You have matured with an image of life as the result of cause and effect, of earning your rewards on Earth and in Heaven. This acquiescence to the expansiveness of your own spirit is virtually effortless, the antithesis of effort actually, and it brings unbounded rewards. Often we challenge you to accept the peace, the love and the joy which acceptance of your own divinity will bring to you. When you step into silence, you choose to experience that divinity directly. It is a bold and courageous act and we applaud you for it.
Click Here to Take a Peek at:
On to Chapter 2
Journeys Archive |
Guestbook | Home 
