CHAPTER 9
Now That You're Here, Where Are You?
Have we painted for you an interesting portrait of the soul’s intersection with the physical dimension? There may seem to be many contradictions and paradoxes in the perspective we have offered. That is kind of interesting is it not? The largest contradiction may be the relationship between your conscious self and the rest of your being. Likely, you feel more disjointed now than you felt at the beginning of this book. We see this as a good thing. Your questioning will lead you to deeper understanding of your self and your own nature. The totality of your self is, indeed, available to you. It co-exists with your conscious mind even in the seemingly incongruous experience of reading these words. Countless times, within the reading of this paragraph alone, other aspects of your being take their turns at dominating the attention of your soul. You simply have not learned to catch very much of that activity with the conscious mind that you identify as yourself.
To make sense of these seemingly irreconcilable ideas, that you ARE your wholeness while you experience only your body and mind identity, a shift in perspective is called for. Searching for the awareness of other internal organizations, while you live out your Earthly life, will reveal much of the truth we share with you now. Look at your physical existence as the experience of a dream. You make up the elements and interact with them so as to see who you are in the reflection they cast. You choose the elements that you create through the beliefs you manufacture and foster about what reality is and what your place in it might be. You dream yourself in this same way and then identify so strongly with the dream that your sense of who is dreaming you is all but lost.
All the while, untold varieties of consciousness, each with the power of self-identification, experience life within and through you, injecting themselves into your moments of pause, moments you do not even know about. Those portions of your wholeness run the gamut from very close to your conscious identity to intensely foreign to the you that you know. The latter might best be compared to states which experience your life while you are lost in the deepest sleep. These organizations of consciousness are broad enough to embrace the infinite nature of your self. They experience your life as it expands into the vast potentialities of each choice, each motion of your cells, each thought and feeling. The fact that such a broad consciousness takes over while you sleep is a great blessing, ensuring your survival in the face of tremendous mental and emotional tumult that your conscious identity subjects your physical body to daily.
In order to learn to experience these more subtle flows of consciousness as you go through your days, you can begin by fostering a belief in their existence within you. In your past, attributing all of the affects of these portions of your self to God or to Angels pretty much eliminated any chance of getting to know them intimately. Being on the outside of your self, by such a definition, only some divine intercession could reveal to you the power that creates and maintains your existence. Coming to own that power can change everything. If you succeed in coming to believe that such power and wisdom exists within you and as part of you makes it possible for you to consider going in search of it in your daily life. Our work in chapter 5 is about learning to harness and use that power in your world. As your belief grows more defined and trusted, you can seek out the wisdom which guides such power. It is a wisdom which infiltrates your every conscious thought and guides your life to offer you precisely what you most need in every moment to promote the fulfilment of your deepest longings. Seeking this wisdom within yourself, you open to points of awareness that are not directly connected to your conscious mind. You open your mind and identity to a larger experience of the self.
Perhaps you have not defined learning in this way and so the process seems mysterious to you. Everything you have learned has been the result of opening your conscious identity to something new. You have found this easiest when the something new appears to come from outside of you. We have suggested that it all comes from the inside out. What appears to be outside of you is created by you, projected into the world and then you interact with it. You can, if you choose to believe it so, access something new as it swells inside you, without projecting it out into the world. The more ethereal parts of your self will not so easily project into physicality in the first place. When they do, they leave so much unseen that interpreting the metaphors of a spiritual phenomenon gets tricky at best. Look within for a broader manifestation of the spiritual. Look within your present moment’s awareness for the inclusion of other aspects of your awareness of self. Believe it possible to capture those sweeps and flows of consciousness. And so, you will.
In “Your World is a Metaphor” we suggested that belief itself is something of an enemy of growth. Belief creates a box to hold your experience of life. Belief in the Judeo-Christian God creates a box of a certain size and shape. Belief in the Hindu Gods creates a box of another size and shape. Our suggestion is to come to remove the boxes altogether by progressively fostering new and larger beliefs about who you are and who God is. Each new belief is then to be questioned, explored and expanded. Believing yourself able to grasp spiritual aspects of your own self will lead you to believing you are those aspects. This in turn will lead you toward more direct experience of your infinite self. Keep your eye on the journey. The destination is infinitely far away. It is not hopelessly far, just infinitely far. You are well able to fulfill your longing for awareness of self.
Now, as you foster your belief that you CAN capture different kinds of consciousness that exist within your spacious self and which peek out into your present moments even as you live your conscious identity, you gather skills which make fulfilling this belief possible. For instance, you have developed certain abilities to notice the contents of your imagination while you function physically. You multi-task so to speak. You visualize the outcome of your actions while you act and perhaps harbour a fantasy or two at the same time. You can experience a variety of internal images, thoughts and feelings while performing fairly complex physical acts.
Opening to even more subtle flows during your days will not be too great a challenge for you. The ethereal impulses of spirit are the well from which these activities of your mind are drawn. Indeed, they are the well from which all of your activities, inner and outer, spring. They are not mysterious monsters to which you have no connection. Open yourself to noticing your impulses before they become thoughts and are subjected to rationalization. You may need to work backwards sometimes by catching yourself in rationalizing what you want to do, constructing logical frameworks that justify and validate your impulses. Really become familiar with the process. Develop your trust that such cumbersome internal gymnastics are unnecessary. Then, when you do catch yourself at the beginning of that process, you can explore the experience of the impulse more directly. Trust that it is safe to embrace the impulse without worrying it into form. Feel the flow of the impulse and decide, based on the feeling, to act on it or not. Trust your safety and keep catching the flow of impulse at earlier and earlier stages. By suspending the coarser stages of rationalization and then feeling and focusing on the impulses themselves, the consciousness from which the impulses spring will become more familiar to you.
This skill development activity is very similar to other courses we have suggested. Meditation skills which lead you to greater familiarity with your thought processes are of the same ilk. Becoming consciously aware in your dreams is another similar set of skills. This course of inquiry is very much one of opening your conscious identity to the inclusion of your dreaming self. If you open yourself right now to the flow of consciousness to which the cells of your body align themselves to form your body, accepting the benign intent of that consciousness, you tap a portion of this dreaming self. Do this in a meditative state, exploring what that consciousness intends without projecting anything, fear or the urge to control. Open to this very real portion of your self. You don’t need a formal meditation ritual to throw yourself open to such flows. Simple intention, directed by belief will get you there.
Happy Hunting!
Now, our program is far from complete. All growth flows through pulsing rhythms of the universe as a whole. You will digest this program and move on. We will offer that growing in your knowledge of who you are prepares you to become open to the vastness of who you are not. Just as your conscious mind tends to look right past any consciousness which is not itself, or like itself, you are prevented from and protected from accessing what in the universe is not you. You cannot go off into the universes that you cannot assemble into your own internal language. Neither can such universes overrun you or do you harm. Our suggestions lead you towards a growing conviction about your complete safety in this universe.
Still, as you become whole and secure in your inherent integrity, your desire to expand beyond your own rather exalted confines will grow. As infinitely large as you are, you will begin to look beyond your personal universe to see what really is “out there.” While you are presently still very much a babe in the woods when it comes to this metaphysical exploration, you will begin to make some real sense of the universe as you find the perimeters of your very spacious self. There is an infinite universe beyond the infinite universe that is you. You simply need to know the contours of your self first before you can accurately chart what is beyond your own creation.
When you push your way outside of the bubble of your own psyche, you will find worlds stranger even than the dark pulsing of after death states. They will have intersections with your internal senses that defy logic or understanding. There will be worlds which have no parts reminiscent of physicality; worlds where thought constructs shift and change the landscape as freely and quickly as thoughts in your conscious mind shift about now. There will be worlds where time is a very different construct, some pulsing painfully slowly and others speeding through existence at a fever pitch. The point of such exploration is to develop larger and larger frameworks for your own world which you can use in your growth and joy. You will not touch these worlds until you loosen your grip on your identity as a three dimensional being, a human. These are NOT human worlds.
Well before you directly contact reality beyond the human world, you will make inroads into expanding your identity to include your entire present reality. You will be aware in every moment that all that you perceive is you. The more deeply experienced this knowledge becomes, the more joyous will your world be. Identity is the key! You can start at this very moment to shift your identity out of human terms. You can begin to seek self as the being who is experiencing human form. There you will find the answers to all of your questions. Turn constantly to that source of your self. Withdraw from the world around you. Being in the world but not of it is not such a large undertaking. It is simply a recognition that the world around you no longer defines or determines who you are. Every experience you have, both internal and external, is a metaphor, a reflection from the far larger spiritual being that you are. The more you look there for the answers you most dearly seek, the more successful your search will be.
The language of the soul is at once new and sparkling and yet deeply familiar, like a dream from childhood. You will not learn that language through your intellect. Being open to feeling and intuition is the course to follow now. This is not a matter of skill, either. Practice and attention are the main ingredients for learning to hear and understand the deep longings of your soul. Your patience in this learning is symbolic of your faith that it will come in time. Your feeling nature harbours a source of great joy. Every attempt to practice giving it attention opens you to more joy in your life. Yes, there are other feelings lurking there, feelings of fear and hurt and guilt. They are part of you and always will be. Nothing is ever lost. They only have the power that you give them though. Push them away and they will hunt you down like a dog!
Unconditional love is the medium through which the soul speaks to you, just like air is the medium for sound to travel through or light the medium for seeing these words. You cannot learn the language without being able to negotiate the medium in which it is spoken. Acclimatise to the medium by applying it to yourself. You do not need to understand yourself or even like yourself. Love unconditional, remember? Once you learn to live there by placing yourself squarely in your heart, you will have the answer to every question. These mysteries that you wish so to unravel are the call from your soul to open to the wholeness of your self. You are closed to the answers until you love without condition, demands or strings. Until then, you will get partial answers only. That is all that you are open to.
We have included this little review as reminder that all of reality, as you know it, is about you. No-thing is only what it seems to be. Every manifestation you experience is a message from your spiritual self. That doesn’t mean that you are supposed to decipher and reason out an explanation for every manifestation. It is plenty just to open to experiencing the moment as fully as you can, trusting in your safety to do so. In this openness, the understanding will follow automatically. Make yourself vulnerable to life, open and trusting as a small child at play in his/her parent’s backyard. What you do not yet understand, have faith that you will in its own time have the truth revealed. Choose to experience the most wonderful reality you can imagine and keep choosing that. Whenever you find yourself in experience that you are not enjoying, go back to that exalted vision of Heaven on Earth, as only you can conceive it. Trust that it will be yours, that you deserve to live that just because you exist. Enjoy living it in your heart and mind. Let that vision grow every time you contemplate it. Contemplate it often. When you have questions about who you are, where you are, and how you fit in to the scheme of things, imagine those questions answered, just because you want them answered. Be open to the flow of life that is already there and ongoing. You don’t need to make it happen. You don’t need to create reality through your effort. You can simply choose the reality you want and faithfully let it unfold.
So, where are you now? You are several steps beyond the threshold of a new world. The harsh light of physicality is behind you, casting its glare into the warm silent motion of spirit; throwing its illusions at you still. As you move into this spacious new world, your inner senses will acclimatise to the seeming darkness of the light non-physical. Your trust will grow with each step as you feel your way along like the newly blind learning to walk again. Even flailing around in the dark, you are finding more joy in life than ever before. That too will grow simply as a function of your growing openness to it.
It is such a pleasure to share this journey with you. Your joy is our joy in very real ways. We offer gratitude eternal for each opportunity you extend to us to share in your unfolding.
Kuthumi
On to The Q & A
