Meditation
The goal of any spiritual practice is to open up to the enlightening and regenerative flow from the Source by being present in the now.
TO DO: Explain these all in terms of the holographic mind.
Meditation
The Nature of Meditation
Meditation is the practice of quieting the mind, and opening to the flow. Within the flow we move closer to the center of our being. Our awareness expands. Our sensitivity increases.
Yoga is a method for restraining the natural turbulence of thoughts, which otherwise impartially prevent all men . . . from glimpsing their true nature of Spirit. (Yogananda 219)AoaYwisdom • Hinduism • Yogananda
Meditation Is Awareness
Through meditation, we gain an intensified awareness that comes from a still mind. We become more present in the now.
In meditation you place yourself in a state of readiness to experience total awareness while your body is in a wakened state. . . .
When you walk in this state, you breathe in every flower, you fly with every bird, you feel every crunch beneath your feet. You find beauty and wisdom. (Walsch 162)CWG3channeled • modern • Walsch
In mindfulness one is not only restful and happy, but alert and awake. . . . [Meditation] is a serene encounter with reality. (Hanh 60)MoMwisdom • Buddhism • Hanh
Centering Awareness in the Moment
Why meditate? To live in the moment. To dwell in the harmony of things. To awaken. (Dass 5)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
The experience of life Now is the goal of Yoga. (MSI 101)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
Greater Sensitivity
The disciple becomes more sensitive, and not less so, as he nears his liberation, he becomes more tender and not more hard; for the perfect “disciple who is as the Master” is the one who answers to every thrill in the outside universe, who is touched by and responds to everything, who feels and answers to everything, who just because he desires nothing for himself is able to give everything to all. (Besant 73-74)Kclairvoyant • Theosophy • Besant
Desire diminishes sensitivity by filtering out all but that which is desired.
Knowing the True Self
The Physical Self
What is the physical self but the collection of memories that define who we are? They hold our beliefs about what we are, what the world is, and what our place is within it. It contains our conceptions of everything, built out of our past experience, including all the words we’ve attached to everything. It contains our conditioning, the things we have to do, the things we want to do, the things we can’t do. We remain the person we are because we carry this massive mental state around with us, but it almost completely obscures real experience. Rather than seeing the world truly, we see our past conceptions of the world.
We continually invest our energy into holding onto and maintaining this self. And while our thoughts are busy revisiting past experiences, we run on habit. We see things the way we always have, act the way we always have; it’s an efficient system to maintain the self we’ve built. But this limited physical self is merely a temporary shape the true self flows into. The true self ever maintains its calm wisdom, aloof from the wild emotions and activity of the physical.
We Are Awareness (Attention)
“You” are not your ears hearing the clock. You are awareness attending to your ears hearing. . . . Your awareness is different from both your thoughts and your senses. You can be free to put your awareness where you will, instead of it being grabbed, pushed, and pulled by each sense impression and thought. Meditation frees your awareness.
A being whose awareness is totally free, who does not cling to anything, is liberated. (Dass 8)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
It is not things seen which we should want to know: we should know the seer.
It is not sounds which we should want to know: we should know the hearer. (unknown 107)KauUwisdom • Vedic • unknown
The Serene Higher Self
Above this whirling mind as serene and passionless witness dwells the True Self. . . . Below there may be storms, but above there is calm, the Place of Peace. . . . So often . . . it has known birth and death, gains and losses, joys and griefs, pleasures and pains. It sees them all pass as a moving phantasmagoria, and no ripple ruffles its passionless serenity. (Besant 34)SLwisdom • Theosophy • Besant
Later still, you grow so quiet that your body disappears. Then you find that you are the mind, and this mind that you are watching is a serene, deep, beautiful, blank sky, an empty space, elegant in its purity. It is what the Tibetans call rigpa NOTE: pure awareness, the beginning of the understanding of the richness of Emptiness. (Burnham 22)EJexperiencer • modern • Burnham
From this place of calm knowing, there arises a courage absent in the often frantic physical self:
True courage, spiritual courage, is without strain, is relaxed, it is a state not ruffled, it is an outpouring steadiness, it is strong, confident, without effort, a calm benediction—for it comes from within. (Strong 69-70)LotSBwisdom • Strong
What could be stronger than the peace that stays rooted and untouched by the tormented activity whirling about it? (Maclean 29)THASchanneled • modern • Maclean
The physical self cannot disturb the peace of the higher self. The higher self is so open, the flow through it is so strong, that disturbances cannot reach it.
We Are the Mind, Not Its Forms
Meditation is a conscious effort to withdraw our focus of attention from the immediate physical and emotional distractions which we all experience in daily life and to center it within. Through such centering we gain a sense of unity with higher dimensions of the self, and this becomes a great source of strength and peace. (Karagulla and Kunz 167-168)C&HEFclairvoyant • modern • Karagulla & Kunz
There is a famous saying: “If the mind is not contrived, it is spontaneously blissful, just as water, when not agitated, is by nature transparent and clear.” (Rinpoche 72)
The waves are the very nature of the ocean. . . .
Before [your thoughts], as Dudjorn Rinpoche used to say: “Be like an old wise man, watching a child play.” (Rinpoche 74)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
Even if over-shadowed by the movements of thought or the experiences of objects, consciousness never loses its essential nature. (MSI 297)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
Attention Without Form
When attention is freed from all attachments, desires, fears, and expectations, it stops becoming other things and can at last be itself, its essential nature, which is connected with everything, everywhere.
Meditation, rightly practiced, means to withdraw all of our attention from the world, in order to immerse ourselves in the Divine Presence. (Mata 129)EtS-DMwisdom • Hinduism • Mata
Releasing the Limited Self
The individual self is universal consciousness limited by its individual memory. To reach oneness, we release each of these limits, and with every release of limitation, we become more.
In this evolutionary work, the need for effort grows less, and the joy more profound in proportion to the perfecting of our system in harmony with the universal law.
The most simple way for all people is to direct their thoughts, their desires, and motives less and less on themselves. (Yram 121)PAPOBEr • Yram
Releasing the Limited Self
Union of Selves
By releasing the limits of the physical self, we can from the physical perspective experience the higher self, and let its wisdom reflect on us. Considered this way, this release becomes a merging of selves.
YOGA is the Science of Union. . . . The union of the Waking State of Consciousness with its most expanded state. (MSI 6)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
The Experience of Release
The poet Tennyson wrote of experiences he had in his youth when his individual self “seemed to dissolve and melt away into boundless being.” This radical shift out of ordinary experience “was not a confused state,” he recalled, “but the clearest of the clear, the surest of the sure, utterly beyond words—when death was an almost laughable impossibility.” (Chopra 279)ABTMresearcher • modern • Chopra
The disappearance of “I” began to produce in me a feeling of extraordinary calmness and confidence. . . . I seemed to understand at that time that all the usual troubles, cares and anxieties are connected with the usual sensation of “I,” result from it, and, at the same time, constitute and sustain it. Therefore, when “I” disappeared, all troubles, cares and anxieties disappeared. When I felt that I did not exist, everything else became very simple and easy. (Ouspensky 297)ANMUpsychedelic • Theosophy • Ouspensky
You will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly, like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature. (Rinpoche 63)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
As we let the self slip away, our awareness begins to open up. We become more and more present in the moment. We feel as if the universe is looking out through our eyes. Through our life, we’ve invested our energy into forming the structure of the self. Having released that self, we find all that energy freed from its habitual shape. It’s freed to move and flow, and it now flows into our experience.
Without the physical self, there is no unhappiness, fear, anger, or desire to control. We find ourselves immersed in exactly what we’ve always wanted, as happiness, knowledge, love, and energy once again begin to flow naturally into us. It was there for all us along. We used it to build and maintain the limited physical self. This state of Primal Awareness is our true self.
see “Primal Awareness” in pure-essence.php.
Walking about in the physical world, it’s easy to believe that we are the physical self — limited by the body and its abilities. But in reality we are an individual focus in the amorphous, flowing, accepting, and unlimited energy of consciousness. This inner sea of which we are a part is the structureless foundation of everything. When our minds are empty of thoughts and past conceptions, this true self shows through.
We release the limited physical self by releasing the mental state that sustains it. We can forget the self through absorption in an experience. We can silence the stream of thoughts that arise from the physical self, which distract us from the moment. And we can let go of the past, which is what defines the physical self. These are different ways of saying the same thing.
Through Non-Identification
Identification Creates Attachment
The limited self can make the mistake of identifying with things outside of itself. This is an identification with whatever our focus has projected into. This happens further down the stream. When eating ice cream, we may think “I like this. I want this.” Our attention has flowed through us and projected into the ice cream. We perceive the Pure Essence there and we identify with the desired ice cream. But further up the stream is a place where our attention is still within us — it has not yet projected outward into something else. At that level, that frequency, we don’t make the mistake of identifying with the outside person or object. At this level there is no attachment.
This applies to thoughts and feelings as well. Our attention flows out into a thought. We see the essence shining there, and identify with it. It becomes something we believe, it becomes part of our identity to which we cling.
See “Misattribution of the Pure Essence” in holographic-mind.php.
If [consciousness] is working in the astral body it will be the “I” of the senses; if in the mental, it will be the “I” of the intellect. By illusion, blinded by the material that enwraps it, it identifies itself with the craving of the senses, the reasoning of the intellect, and cries, “I want,” “I think.” . . .
These sensations and thoughts themselves are only the transitory activities in the outer bodies, set up by the contact of the inner life with the outer life, of the Self with the not-Self. . . . As its evolution proceeds, as the Self develops, it gradually discovers that these physical, astral, mental centers are its instruments, not itself; it sees them as parts of the “not-Self” that it has temporarily attracted into union with it. (Besant 17-18)
Now the secret of reaching that Place of Peace lies in our learning to identify our consciousness with the True Self instead of with the apparent one. . . . We identify ourselves with our passions and desires and say we hope or we fear. We identify ourselves with our bodies. . . .
[Meditation] consists of a constant endeavor to realize our identity with our True Self, and to become self-conscious as It. (Besant 34, 36)SLwisdom • Theosophy • Besant
The goal of meditation is to free your awareness from its identification with your senses and thoughts. So freed, your awareness permeates everything but clings to nothing. (Dass 49)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
In the ceaseless release of the Ecstasy Trance, no thought or desire could pull me into identification with its smaller context. I rode a wave above and beyond them, constant in the higher energies of being.
Through Pure Awareness
There have been moments in your life when you were pure awareness. . . .
For that moment your image of yourself was lost . . . in the totality of the moment. You were not clinging to anything. You were not holding on to the experience. It was flowing. . . . At that moment you were the experience. You were the flow. There was no demarcation between you-sun-ocean-sand. You had transcended the separation that thought creates. . . .
In these moments the universe appears fresh; it is seen through innocent eyes. It all begins anew. (Dass 1-2)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
[The peak experience] naturally occurs in moments of intense absorption. . . . Through intense enjoyment or focus, all the subsidiary, random, chaotic movements of the mind still and consciousness experiences itself. (MSI 12-13)
Stillness is . . . the natural by-product of the experience of the present instant of time. . . . Union is found to be the natural experience. (MSI 203)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
“I hear the wind blow, and I feel that it was worth being born just to hear the wind blow.” — Fernando Pessoa Qwisdom • various
“Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.” — Randall Hawken Qwisdom • various
Saul: “All you have to do to have a life of great interest . . . is simply to stay in the present moment. . . . If you stay there, you will live in eternity.” (Ring 124)HTOresearcher • modern • Ring
For the experience of being fully in the moment, see “Primal Awareness” in pure-essence.php.
Pure Awareness Becomes
Pure awareness is a state of becoming in the now. Our undistracted attention naturally flows into whatever we focus on and becomes it. We take its shape, share its experience, become one with it.
When attention is focused on the past, it becomes that (again). It’s something we’ve identified with, integrated into the self, held close for protection. The goal of meditation is for attention to only become what is happening in the present moment.
When reality is perceived in its nature of ultimate perfection, the practitioner has reached a level of wisdom called non-discrimination mind—a wondrous communion in which there is no longer any distinction made between subject and object. . . . I look into the eyes of the child in the photograph, and look at the child’s expression and features closely. I feel a deep link between myself and each child, which allows me to enter a special communion with them. . . .
When your mind is liberated your heart floods with compassion. (Hanh 57-58)MoMwisdom • Buddhism • Hanh
The more you experience this freedom, the clearer the sign that the ego and the hopes and fears that keep it alive are dissolving, and the closer you will come to the infinitely generous “wisdom of egolessness.” When you live in that wisdom home, you’ll no longer find a barrier between “I” and “you,” “this” and “that,” “inside” and “outside”; you’ll have come, finally, to your true home, the state of non-duality. (Rinpoche 77)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
See “Attention Becomes” in attention.php.
Through Stillness and Silence
The now is the origin, the Source, the beginning of the microgeny. As we approach it, our consciousness expands, we join with our higher frequency selves, and enter the light of a larger reality.
In the Waking State, the mind experiences chaos; at least 50,000 incoherent thoughts a day race through everyone’s mind, many of them mutually contradictory, many of them desiring the useless or the impossible. The physical body attempts to respond to these chaotic thought patterns; the impossibility of doing this results in sickness, failure of the organs, aging and eventually death. Most of our mental energy is literally thrown away every day in this self-destructive manner. Once the mind is freed from the source of these 50,000 thoughts -- the defenses, complexes and addictive compulsions of our habitual beliefs and judgments -- the energy of complete consciousness rises up the spine, enlivening each of the seven chakras, resulting in permanent inner silence, perfect awareness of the Ascendant NOTE: pure consciousness and complete bliss. (MSI 325)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
Silencing the Mind
It is the goal of meditation to silence the unceasing noise of our thoughts, thus freeing our attention to experience the now.
When we focus on a thought, we become it. Our liquid attention takes its shape and goes into it. This projects the associated forms outwards around us.
Patanjali: “Yoga is the restricting of the fluctuations of mind-stuff. . . . Then the seer [that is, the Self] abideth in himself. At other times [that is, in all other conditions] the Self taketh the same form as the fluctuations [of mind-stuff].” (Patajali 22)TYSDwisdom • Tibetan • Dvagpo-Lharje
The breath and the restless mind, I saw, were like storms which lashed the ocean of light into waves of material forms—earth, sky, human beings, animals, birds, trees. No perception of the Infinite as One Light could be had except by calming those storms. As often as I silenced the two natural tumults, I beheld the multitudinous waves of creation melt into one lucent sea. (Yogananda 145)AoaYwisdom • Hinduism • Yogananda
Milarepa: “By leaving the mind in its natural state, without causing it to assume form (ideas, mentations, ways of perceiving) the first dawning of Knowledge appear. By keeping the mind relaxed, flowing like the peaceful water of a river, Reality is reflected therein.” (Godwin 219)LDerresearcher • modern • Godwin
One of the most intractable obstacles [Sri Aurobindo] had to overcome to accomplish his goal was to learn how to silence the endless chatter of words and thoughts that flow unceasingly through the normal human mind. . . . As Sri Aurobindo put it, to discover the “new country within us” we must first learn how “to leave the old one behind.” (Talbot 263)HUscientific, researcher • modern • Talbot
If you think you are master of your mind watch your mind when you try to still it. (Strong 19)LotSBwisdom • Strong
Stilling the movements of the mind leads to Union. . . .
When the surface of the lake is still, it reflects the full moon above it perfectly. When the water is troubled, the one moon appears as many. (MSI 12-13)
Desires lead outward, into activity, whereas consciousness moving inward causes the mind to become stable and still. (MSI 80)
When the movements subside completely, the mind is like a transparent crystal. — Patajali (MSI 86)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
They clear thoughts out of their mind and wait to receive. . . . “You cannot hear the voice of Oneness when you are busy talking.” (Morgan 163)MMwisdom • modern • Morgan
The Silencing Power of Marijuana
When I first smoked marijuana, the first thing that hit me was the silence. I was absolutely floored that the constant myriad voices and thoughts — the ceaseless internal babble — was gone. It had stopped. I had long ago forgotten what it was like to be free from that constant assault of thoughts. My mind was silent and clear. It was mine again. The silence was so profound it felt like a presence. My attention was all mine to direct.
We went outside and a new snowfall had started. Everything was pure and beautiful. I realized that I hadn’t seen the world clearly in quite some time. The noise of distractions had kept me in my head. But now my vision leapt out from me. It landed on the branches of trees, it reached out and touched people, embraced the snowflakes. It was strong, clear, real.
In other experiences with marijuana, I reconnected with a time when my mind was always this clear — when I was an infant, a baby, a toddler; when I lived day-to-day in this crystal-clear world of undistracted wonder.
See “Marijuana - My First Time” in pure-essence.php and “How Marijuana Works” in pure-essence.php.
to deliver the taster from self-consciousness.
Hashish is a form of marijuana. It was popular in the Mideast during Rumi’s time, roughly a thousand years ago.
The Fullness of Emptiness
The Source is pouring itself out eternally and equally to all. Its torrent is so strong, nothing can approach it. Unless we ourselves are empty — only then can we reach it.
This is an emptiness of everything that blocks the flow.
If my soul were as open and expansive as one of the seraphim NOTE: angels, who have nothing in themselves because they are completely empty and receptive, then God would pour himself out as fully in me as in that seraphic soul. (Eckhart 91)
The Spirit flows just as completely into the soul as the soul empties itself. (Eckhart 363)Bwisdom • modern, Christian • Eckhart
Ascendant Consciousness NOTE: pure consciousness, awareness with no thought moving, is not empty, is not a void, it is the state of complete fullness, of Being, the Source of everything. (MSI 90)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
We cannot pay attention to primal radiance, because there is nothing separate to pay attention to. . . . And yet this radiance cannot be ignored, because it is pure attention. (Hixon 196)CHresearcher • modern • Hixon
We can see the light of attention when we remove all distraction from our minds. When the full light of our attention is with us, the world is lit by a beautiful internal radiance. We no longer feel alone. The light of consciousness is alive, open, free, and flowing, connecting us with everything and everyone around us.
Distracted by Thoughts (The Past)
Once there was an ancient king who, upon the day of his coronation felt that all his hopes had come to fulfillment, for he was crowned after many years of waiting, king of a great realm. As he sat in the cathedral in his vestments, his orb and scepter in his hands, his crown upon his head, he saw a fault in the uniform one of his generals was wearing and his mind was taken to that and he forgot that he was at the great moment of his life and the moment passed him by. (Strong 151)LotSBwisdom • Strong
If you recall your fault
You will forget your lord. . . .
What blocks you from me in the world
Will block you from me in the afterworld. (Niffari 292)EIM-Nwisdom • Islamic • Niffari
One restless movement of my body, or my slight lapse into absent-mindedness, sufficed to put an abrupt period to Master’s exposition.
“You are not here. . . . You were not fully with me. In your mental background you were creating three institutions. One was a sylvan retreat on a plain, another on a hilltop, a third by the ocean.”
Those vaguely formulated thoughts had indeed been present almost subconsciously. . . .
“Your architectural dreams will materialize later. Now is the time for study!” . . .
Since early youth I had had enigmatic glimpses of three buildings, each in a different setting. (Yogananda 115-117)AoaYwisdom • Hinduism • Yogananda
The typical experience of the adult human mind is that awareness is rarely in the present moment. . . . Instead of being caught by regret for the past or worry for the future, we are free to experience life as it is right now . . . free from the limitations imposed by past experience. (MSI 9)
What is the root of sorrow? A mind that is caught by the past. (MSI 78)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
Thoughts and concepts are all that block us from always being, quite simply, in the absolute. (Rinpoche 164)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
Distracted by Senses (The Present)
When the goal is an internal focus, the senses, when abided to, can pull focus back to the physical. Sometimes this is the direction of my focus when I am in a state of Deep Attention. At other times, it is an outward focus, experiencing the physical world. Insights flow equally in both focuses.
A yogi must be able to pass into, and continue in, the superconsciousness, regardless of multitudinous distractions. . . . Whether in the buzz of insects or the pervasive glare of daylight, the testimony of the senses must be barred. Sound and sight come then indeed, but to worlds fairer than the banished Eden. (Yogananda 111)AoaYwisdom • Hinduism • Yogananda
“I call in and invite God and His angels thither, and when they are there I neglect God and His angels for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.”
- Careless Devotions, John Donne, 1573-1631 (Strong 76)LotSBwisdom • Strong
Through Releasing the Past
The physical self is defined by our past experiences. Releasing past experiences is synonymous with releasing the self. It is done by silencing the mind, where the past constantly projects echoes into the present. The more we do this, the more the pestering light of those memories lose their power.
When uninterrupted by our own past experiences, the light of our attention shines fully into our present experience. We perceive a higher, truer reality.
John: “Meditation is the attempt to expand from subjective memory, which is the perimeters of defined personality, or the ego itself, into higher dimensions and perimeters of the self. It is simply an exercise of facilitating memory to gain access to these higher dimensions and recall the natural order of things that you are already within the center of.” (Ryerson and Harolde 214)SCchanneled • modern • Ryerson & Harolde
[Clear perception] implies . . . that previous experience and belief are not coloring the reality seen as it is Now. . . . Slip beyond the limitation of our past and see life as it truly is right Now. (MSI 24)
After the previous impressions are eradicated so that objects can be seen as they really are, the awareness begins to appreciate subtler or more delicate levels of the reality of the focus of attention. . . .
Bliss increases as subtlety of experience increases, for every new level of perception is more perfect, more beautiful, more glorious than the one before. . . .
The process of knowing refines through the mechanics of blissful experience until everything is perceived clothed in celestial light. (MSI 92-93)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
This light is also perceived after the meltdown of all mental structures (built by past experience) caused by LSD and psilocybin.
You are each conditioned by your background and enclosed in its memory. . . . You are more than that small pattern of behavior created by your past. . . . Be alert to life, and then its communications can run through you like a ripple of laughter, or a deep deep understanding. (Maclean 148)THASchanneled • modern • Maclean
Continuous Release
Continuous release is the essence of the Ecstasy Trance. We come fully into the moment by completely releasing everything that went before. It is only through this continuous release that we can remain close to the now, and this release must be moment to moment, for in our first moment our souls will be filled with discovery and ecstasy — but we must release that, and release what we feel and discover next, too. This is the ecstasy of being fully in the now. Whatever we cling onto will drop away from the now like a fading light.
Suspension of Expectation
It is interesting to note that while meditators do enter a state of deep rest, the attention/awareness increases rather than decreases. When a sound was produced periodically to a nonmeditator, the brain waves showed a gradual acclimation to the noise—less and less reaction until it was effectively “tuned out.” The meditator, on the other hand, while meditating, reacted freshly to the sound each time it was made. (Judith 396)WoLiresearcher • modern • Judith
The meditator has achieved suspension of expectation, a complete return to the now after each new stimulus. Context has shortened enough that the memory of the last sound has disappeared into the past. It no longer projects an expectation of its reoccurence.
By releasing expectations we can free up our attention for new experiences. Realize that the present situation is not like all the others. This is a whole new opportunity to experience life and express ourselves in a new way. In this very moment we can make a new choice, do something unexpected.
The Effects of Meditation
With quietness can come waves of bliss and rapture. . . . You may feel yourself leaving your body and rising into realms above your head. . . . Your body may tingle or shake. . . . You somehow know things though you can’t explain how. (Dass 145)
Even the beginnings of an inner quiet and calm allow you to see much more. You get a new sense of how you create and control your universe. You stop reacting to events simply with blind patterns and habits of thought. Your life becomes more creative. (Dass 152)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
Gaining Perspective
Problems shrink away within a larger context. They are reduced to nothing through perspective. In the vastness of consciousness spanning beyond the physical universe, what matter are our little troubles?
Greater Context
I increased the period of meditation . . . completely overpowered by the wonder and glory of the vision which . . . carried me to a supersensory plane where, caressed by lustrous waves of indescribable rapture, I found myself immersed in the boundless oceans of unconditioned being. . . .
It seemed on every such occasion as if I or the invisible cognitive self in me, leaving its safe anchorage in the flesh, was carried by the strong outgoing tide of a lustrous consciousness towards an existence of such immensity and power as made everything I could conceive of on earth tame and trite in comparison: an existence where, untroubled by an idea of bondage or limitation, I found myself lost in an amazing immaterial universe so stupendous in extent, so sublime and marvelous in nature, that the human element still left in me . . . stared in amazement and trembled with awe. (Krishna 265)LWKmeditator • Hinduism • Krishna
On every visit to the supersensible realm I am so overwhelmed by the mystery and the wonder of it that everything else of this world, everything conceived by us of the next, every fact and incident of my life save this, every momentous event of history, every ambition and desire, and above all even my own existence, life and death, appear to be trite and trivial before the indescribable glory, the unfathomable mystery, and the unimaginable extent of the marvelous ocean of life. . . .
In the course of a few weeks, unable to resist the fascination of the newly found subliminal existence, I found myself powerless to come out of my contemplative moods. Except for a few hours of irregular sleep at night they were continuously upon me for the whole day, making it almost impossible for me to apply my mind to anything. I ate mechanically . . . and when obliged to speak talked and heard like a man who is engrossed in watching a most fascinating drama enacted before him and returns laconic answers to the comments of those seated beside him, often without comprehending and remembering fully what is said. (Krishna 297-298)
Compared to the reality of this oceanic consciousness the gigantic cosmos appears to be like variously patterned clouds sailing across the face of a sun of infinite dimensions. (Krishna 359)LWKmeditator • Hinduism • Krishna
This reveals in part why we forget the greater reality outside the physical. We would be unable to focus on our physical life if our perceptions were unlimited and we had access to all knowledge.
The quietness meditation brings your life is like pulling back from the movie. (Dass 20)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
Gradually . . . small troubles that upset most people continually in daily life pass unnoticed. (Besant 35)SLwisdom • Theosophy • Besant
In some hearts a whisper sometimes sounds softly, saying that all the seeming clash and rush is but the struggle of shadows thrown upon a screen; that social success, business triumph, public admiration are trivial things at best, bubbles floating down a tossing stream. (Besant 31-32)SLwisdom • Theosophy • Besant
What you took so seriously before—ambitions, plans, expectations, doubts, and passions—no longer have any deep and anxious hold on you. . . .
Remaining in the clarity and confidence of Rigpa NOTE: pure awareness allows all your thoughts and emotions to liberate naturally and effortlessly within its vast expanse. (Rinpoche 164)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
The silence habitual to Sri Yukteswar was caused by his deep perceptions of the Infinite. . . . “In shallow men the fish of little thoughts cause much commotion. In oceanic minds the whales of inspiration make hardly a ruffle.” (Yogananda 118)AoaYwisdom • Hinduism • Yogananda
The sense of being part of a greater whole helps us to free ourselves from the common delusion that we are the center of everything, and from being preoccupied with ourselves. (Karagulla and Kunz 168)C&HEFclairvoyant • modern • Karagulla & Kunz
The Perspective of Time
The broadened perspective granted by meditation is similar to the more balanced judgment we gain over time. The emotions fade and what’s left is our memory of the actions, which can be seen with fresh clarity.
Distance in time as well as distance in space gives balanced judgement on life. After ten years have slipped away, we look back at the trials, the joys, the hopes, the disappointments of that earlier time and we marvel that we spent so much of our energy on things of so little worth. . . . Today we look back without a quiver on an agony that nearly shattered our life. . . .
Must we be at the mercy of these passing objects? Or, though we must dwell among them in space and be surrounded with them in time, can we find the Place of Peace, as though we were far away? We can. (Besant 32-33)SLwisdom • Theosophy • Besant
Perspective on Desires
We mistake the Pure Essence as coming from certain objects, people, or experiences. But when we find ourselves floating within an unlimited sea of it, we know for a fact that those forms are not necessary.
Once you get a glimpse of that [revelation], once you have even a momentary experience of it, you will be very clear that nothing outside of yourself can compare with what is within you; that no feeling you get from any exterior stimulation or source is anything like the total bliss of communion within. (Walsch 166)FWGchanneled • modern • Walsch
The supreme detachment occurs when awareness of the Ascendant NOTE: pure consciousness cuts asunder all attachment. — Patanjali (MSI 43)
To the enlightened, any change in the relative Universe, the domain of the Seen, does not and cannot overshadow the bliss of continual contact with the Ascendant. This is why the enlightened do not overmuch grieve or rejoice in the changes of the relative Universe. (MSI 139)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
When you experience bliss, it’s a sign that desire has temporarily dissolved. (Rinpoche 75)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
Melting Away Attachment
Perhaps one of the most direct and important effects of meditation is how the incoming flow allows the past to disappear into the past. The now becomes so full, there is no room for the past to interrupt it.
This can also be thought of as melting away attachment, as the energy invested into enlarging past experience by bringing them back into the present is allowed to fade away without further attention.
From the Ascendant NOTE: pure consciousness, the Supreme Being wipes away the deep impressions thatset (sic) in motion the fundamental tendencies. . . .
Fundamental tendencies consist of ignorance, ego, desire, aversion and obstinacy. . . .
The perfect orderliness contained in the Absolute disallows the continuance of any disorder. (MSI 59-61)
Only present impressions of Ascendant Consciousness dissolve the stress of the past; only the continual experience of the Now prevents the formation of new stresses. . . .
It is the tightly bound areas inside that lead to dysfunctional life in every way. . . . The impressions born of [Ascendant Consciousness] not only overshadow and melt away all the past impressions of limitation, pain and suffering, they prevent the formation of new impressions of limitation, pain and suffering.
Because the weight of the bliss of the experience of the present is so great, no other experience can begin to challenge it. . . .
One drop of experience is worth an ocean of analysis. One moment of Eternity is worth a Universe of Time. (MSI 101-102)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
When [Brahman] NOTE: the Source is seen in his immanence and transcendence, then the ties that have bound the heart are unloosened, the doubts of the mind vanish. (unknown 79)MuUwisdom • Vedic • unknown
How can desires remain when we are so full?
See “Washing Away Past Experience” in attention.php.
Sense of Connection
All personal contact with the multidimensional God, all legitimate moments of mystic consciousness, will always have a unifying effect. They will not, therefore, isolate the individual involved, but instead will enlarge his perceptions until he will experience the reality and uniqueness of as many other aspects of reality of which he is capable.
He will feel, therefore, less isolated and less set apart. He will not regard himself as being above others because of the experience. On the contrary he will be swept along in a gestalt of comprehension in which he realizes his own oneness with All That Is. (Roberts 208-209)SSchanneled • modern • Seth
Energy and Lightness
The confidence, the contentment, the spacious serenity, the strength, the profound humor, and the certainty that arise from directly realizing the View of Rigpa NOTE: pure awareness is the greatest treasure of life, the ultimate happiness, which once attained, nothing can destroy, not even death. (Rinpoche 166)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
In this new space we have a lightness, an ease in carrying out our daily lives, an ability to keep a certain sense of humor about our predicaments. . . .
We begin to feel a little bit like gods on earth, for where we see sadness and suffering around us, we are able to empathize and still feel lightness and joy. It’s as if the world is made for our delight, and even our own troubles become a source of amusement. When we look one another in the eye there is clarity and honesty. We have a certain degree of inner peace. (Dass 159-160)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
If practiced daily, meditation can alter habits which create tension and can make a definite change in the personality and health of the individual. This is reflected in the chakras, as their rhythm will alter and new energy will flow in, thus helping to break destructive habit patterns. The chakras will begin to function together in harmony, and this in turn brings additional energy into the whole system. Even if one is tired when sitting down to mediate at the end of the day, one feels not only relaxed but energized afterwards. (Karagulla and Kunz 168)C&HEFclairvoyant • modern • Karagulla & Kunz
Ecstatic Joy
This kind of ecstatic joy is not only fulfilling in itself, but serves to expand the now and push the past further into the past.
Words cannot describe the joy of the soul whose impurities are cleansed in deep contemplation - who is one with his Atman, his own Spirit. Only those who feel this joy know what it is. (unknown 103)MaiUwisdom • Vedic • unknown
The body becomes still, the breath slows down, and the mind becomes interiorized to such an extent that everything else—thoughts, emotions, and sensations—recedes into the background. We enter into a state of great peace. . . . That peace is the first sign of God’s presence. . . .
Your consciousness expands beyond the body. . . . You behold a world of great joy—such intoxicating bliss, such overwhelming love of God. And you say, “Oh, my God, if only people knew what You are. If just once they knew the joy! You are the Love that is expressed through all human forms of love.” (Mata 129-131)EtS-DMwisdom • Hinduism • Mata
If you could only know how simple, how tender, how radiant is the feeling of oneness with your indwelling Spirit! (Strong 141)LotSBwisdom • Strong
Nyoshul Khenpo: “If you were to gather all the glory, enjoyment, pleasure, and happiness of the world and put it all together, it would not approach one tiny fraction of the bliss that you experience upon realizing the nature of mind.” (Rinpoche 363)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
I had drunk the cup of suffering to the dregs to come upon a resplendent, never-ending source of unutterable joy and peace lying hidden in my interior. (Krishna 293)LWKmeditator • Hinduism • Krishna
Clarity
Your mind is so clear. It’s so nice. My mind just took everything down and worked everything out for me the first time, without having to go through it more than once. After a while everything I was experiencing got to where it meant something to me in some way. (Moody 53)LALresearcher • modern • Moody
This clarity allows you to see the factors that determine your choices from moment to moment. (Dass 24)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
Physiological Effects
EEG Measurements
The most noteworthy finding of [Transcendental Meditation] studies seemed to show up in the EEG measuring of brain-wave patterns. In ordinary waking consciousness, brain waves are random and chaotic, and most commonly in the beta frequency. . . .
Meditation changes this dramatically. Immediately upon beginning, the meditation subjects showed increased alpha waves (brainwaves characteristic of a relaxed state of mind) which began at the back of the brain and moved forward. After a few minutes, the alpha waves increased in amplitude. The back and the front of the brain became synchronized in phase as did the left and right hemispheres. This resonance continued and in many cases theta appeared (a deeper state than alpha) especially in those more experienced with the practice. In the most advanced meditators, alpha was found to occur more frequently in a normal, waking state, and with greater amplitude. (Judith 395-396)WoLiresearcher • modern • Judith
Physiological Effects of Deep Rest
In meditation we enter a state of deep physical restfulness. In this regenerative state, we breathe calmly and freely. We don’t spend our attention focusing into and replaying past experiences.
Meditation has physiological effects as well. Oxygen intake decreased by 16-18 percent, heart rate decreased by 25 percent and blood pressure was lowered, all of which are controlled by the autonomic nervous system, controller of involuntary processes.
The effects of the decreases are basically that the body enters a state of deep rest—far deeper than what it receives in sleep. This rest then allows for greater alertness in waking consciousness. (Judith 396)WoLiresearcher • modern • Judith
When thought is experiencing Absolute, Unbounded Being, awareness of the body ceases. . . . (If there is still some faint mental activity, there can be the experience of feeling bodiless, or of floating in space, or feeling that the body is huge.) . . . Respiration falls and the heart slows. In the state of complete Ascendance NOTE: pure awareness, the body’s activity stills completely. (MSI 51)
Decrease of the rate of breathing is the natural by-product of the awareness being established in the Absolute. . . .
Even in the first few days of practice, it is common to experience very deep rest -- typically about twice as deep as the deepest sleep at night. And this occurs within just the fifteen or twenty minutes that are normally spent Ascending NOTE: experiencing pure consciousness. Because of this very deep rest, stress starts dissolving from the nervous system; as the body becomes less and less stressed, the over-all physiological rate drops. . . . Stress and tension quickly vanish.
The breath drops during the practice of Ascension because less effort is required to think at subtler levels in the mind. . . .
As the modifications of outer and inner breathing still, the volume becomes inobservable, the duration becomes long and the frequency becomes rare. — Patanjali
. . . Less and less oxygen is consumed, meaning the metabolic rate is dropping. (MSI 180-181)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
The above is in contrast to our states of attachment, when the mind wanders into thoughts of fears and desires, and the breath either increases from the stimulation of the thought, or freezes completely, starving us of oxygen when we need it most.
TM NOTE: transcendental meditation subjects went into a state of rest twice as deep as deep sleep. Moreover, they did so very quickly, usually within ten minutes after shutting their eyes, compared to the four to six hours it takes us to reach our deepest relaxation in sleep. . . .
TM meditators visited doctors and entered hospitals only half as often as did those in the control group. Across-the-board reductions were seen in thirteen major health categories, including more than 80 percent less heart disease and more than 50 percent less cancer than in the controls. (Chopra 164-165)ABTMresearcher • modern • Chopra
Release of Stress
There is one mind-body technique that goes directly to the root of the stress response by releasing the remembered stresses that trigger new stress: meditation. (Chopra 162)ABTMresearcher • modern • Chopra
When the mind begins its inward march, there may be times when large quantities of stress are dissolving from the nervous system and the body. . . .
Dissolving of stress activates memory. . . . It can at times be slightly rough, particularly if there is much guilt about past actions performed or permitted. . . . As these stresses dissolve, they can trigger past memories or current feelings of anger, greed or delusion. (MSI 156, 158)
One naturally rises in this perfect harmony. . . . How is this done? By removing stress from the nervous system (from the perspective of the body) or from expansion of consciousness to the Infinite (from the perspective of the mind). (MSI 192)
It is a common experience during the practice of Ascension NOTE: experiencing pure consciousness for ancient memories to drift through with perfect vividness. This is a spontaneous result of stress dissolving. (MSI 220)
As the impressions of the Absolute become deeper and clearer, the other impressions of stress and limitation are overshadowed and replaced. . . .
Physical stress and mental impressions of lack and insufficiency are the same thing, seen from two different perspectives. . . . They cease to function for us as we remove our attention from them. (MSI 308-309)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
Alfred MacPherson: “The physical body basically needs positive reinforcement that everything is all right. It is the body that experiences mortality, not the mind or the spirit. Once you calm the body, or meet its basic needs through meditation, the mind can then access higher memory, or the spirit, which is your inner guide.” (Ryerson and Harolde 223)SCchanneled • modern • Ryerson & Harolde
The Paths to Higher Consciousness
There Is No Path
We Are What We Seek
“This fundamental and universal consciousness you and all beings possess fully at every moment. It is your simple and bare awareness in this moment before you manipulate it, name it, judge it. . . . It is always the case prior to your attempts to grasp it. And therefore, ultimately, there is no path to this primary, basic, and ultimate consciousness. There is no way to walk to your own feet.” -Luke Wilber (Hixon ix)CHresearcher • modern • Hixon
This is a holographic truth. It is up the stream from our physical selves. When looking for the light itself, the simple act of looking shuts it out.
Ramana teaches: You speak of various paths as if you were somewhere and the Self were somewhere else and you had to go and attain it. But in fact the Self is here and now and you are it always. . . . Any spiritual Path we follow is an illusion, because, as a path, it purports to lead us away from where we are. (Hixon 56)
Writes Plotinus: We investigate [the One’s] presence and Its existence as if It were a stranger, projected into our imaginary “place” from some depth or height. . . .
The One is here and now, not a stranger, not even an other, but the very nature of what we are. (Hixon 95)CHresearcher • modern • Hixon
Moving Up the Stream
Because the Spirit never changes it is still the same, and is just as independent of existing conditions now as it was in the beginning; and so we must pass over all existing conditions, however apparently adverse, and go straight to the Spirit as the originator of new forms and new conditions. (Troward 91)DLwisdom • New Thought • Troward
Up the stream of the microgeny, we behold reality before it becomes shadowed by thoughts and preconceptions, in its true natural formless splendor.
Realizing Present Enlightenment
We are enlightened, right now, at higher frequencies of consciousness. We need only let go of ourselves to reach it.
“I am enlightened, and always have been, simultaneously with the beginning of the universe.” — The Buddha’s first words after realizing the truth Qwisdom • various
When the Buddha was attaining Enlightenment, he observed, ‘Strange, indeed, it is, for I see that in reality all creatures are Enlightened, are Buddhas’. . . .
Garmapa, another great master of Mahamudra, taught:
‘Although the sentient beings themselves dwell in the realm of Buddhahood,
They fail to realize this, and so they wander, lost in the Sangsara NOTE: the world.’ (Marett xxxvii)TYSDwisdom • Tibetan • Dvagpo-Lharje
It’s a matter of realization, of remembering. Our more or less troubled lives are a step on the pathway of an already-enlightened soul. In its desire for experience and expansion of self, it chose to temporarily forget itself in order to experience this life and to grow from that experience.
He who looks to the future for his final perfection is chained to the past. . . .
You, who are one with Me, are perfect now, and always were perfect. (Benner 169-170)ILchanneled • New Thought • Benner
I was led into what appeared to be higher and higher realms. Each realm was more magnificent than the one before. Each was harder and harder to perceive. Each was becoming apparently thinner and of less form. My guide Heyoan led me. . . .
I tried to reach into the door of the Holy of Holies. . . .
Heyoan: “It is not a matter of trying to reach; it is a matter of allowing oneself to be where one already is.” (Brennan 181-182)HoLclairvoyant • modern • Brennan
The center of ourselves is, at this very moment, fully enlightened.
Enlightenment Is Effortless
Enlightenment is effortless. What’s more difficult than constantly resisting, fighting, denying, and feeling afraid? The easy path is letting go. Overcoming habit is the only difficulty. Our higher self is as close as our breathing. After a thousand years in ignorance and darkness, we can return in a moment to the Source.
We travel through enlightenment to get to every moment we experience.
Every smallest moment of the microgeny begins with us being the Source, knowing everything, with all the energy of the universe within us. It is only way out here in the slow and distant physical that we imagine we are something other than that.
I say to you that now, this instant, is the great opportunity for you to step forth, out of this outer turmoil, into the great peace and blessings of God, and clothe yourself with the light of God. (Spalding 48-49)MotFE3wisdom • Spalding
You may return to Me whenever you wish. Now, while you are with the body, or after you have left it. You may return to the One . . . whenever it pleases you. (Walsch 76)CWG3channeled • modern • Walsch
Any effort during Ascension NOTE: experiencing pure consciousness, even the slightest, only serves to keep the awareness on the gross and tires the mind. (MSI 54)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
Anything Can Be Meditation
“As children, the play of the sun on rippling water brought us before God’s throne. Did you ever see an infant gaze at a lightbulb or the moon? Spiritual techniques are discovered naturally by infants and little children: holding their breath, staring unblinking, standing on their heads, imitating animals, turning in circles, sitting unmoving, and repeating phrases over and over until all else ceases to exist. Stop thinking that meditation is anything special. Stop thinking all together. Look at the world around you as if you had just arrived on Planet Earth. Observe the rocks in their natural formations, the trees rooted in the ground, their branches reaching to the sky, the plants, animals and the interrelationships of each to the other.”
—Surya Singer (Dass 62-63)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
The Path of Letting Go
I’ll use the term “path” to refer to techniques of returning to that higher self.
Non-Attachment, Letting Go
Letting go of attachment to both bad and good experiences is the secret to happiness. We miss the present when our attention is caught up in past experiences. This is why non-attachment is so important. We must release the energy tied up in fears and desires (specific searches) so that it’s available to us in the now.
“The problem is not enjoyment; the problem is attachment.” — Tilopa Qwisdom • various
Traditionally . . . it’s not the negative experiences but the good ones that bring obstacles. . . . I was in the middle of a very powerful experience. . . . I was becoming attached to the experience: that attachment, like any other, has to be cut through. What we have to learn, in both meditation and in life, is to be free of attachment to the good experiences and free of aversion to the bad ones. (Rinpoche 76)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
In order for an individual to consciously let go of a thing, he must have something that he feels is stronger to which he can anchor. (King 52)IADchanneled • Theosophy • Germain
Attachment is caused by misattribution of the Pure Essence. see “Misattribution of the Pure Essence” in holographic-mind.php.
Non-Attachment to Results
Another form of attachment is attachment to the outcome of any situation.
When an action has been done with our best judgement and strength and with pure intent, then we should let it go, metaphorically, and feel no anxiety about its results. (Besant 35)SLwisdom • Theosophy • Besant
Be steadfast in your duty, O Arjuna, and abandon all attachment to success or failure. (Vyasa 36)BGwisdom • Hindusim • ancient
To live your life without expectation—without the need for specific results—that is freedom. (Walsch 101)CWG1channeled • modern • Walsch
Non-Attachment to Pleasure
From The Supreme Path of Discipleship: The Precepts of the Gurus:
3) For him who is freed from attachment to worldly luxuries, it is the same whether he practice asceticism or not. . . .
5) For him who hath attained the mastery of his mind, it is the same whether he partake of the pleasures of the world or not. (Dvagpo-Lharje 91)TYSDwisdom • Tibetan • Dvagpo-Lharje
Forgiveness — Nonattachment to Pain
Holding a grudge is holding onto a negative experience. Forgiveness is letting it go. Holding on to unkind treatment keeps it present in our experience.
Forgiveness becomes easier when we realize everyone has their own lessons to learn, and their own challenges to meet. With understanding and empathy, we can empathize with the erring party to the extent that we understand that if we had the same beliefs and were in the same circumstances, we would have done the same thing they did. This is in fact the higher truth of the situation. Seeing it this way, we can forgive, let go of the pain we feel, and move on.
It’s also important to understand that often when someone lashes out against another, that they may be interacting with a projection. They may be projecting some quality or other person onto us and responding to that, rather than who we really are.
“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong.” — Ghandi Qwisdom • various
The weak of mind can become consumed by the negativity, unable to turn their attention from it.
Angels (channeled): Divine consciousness sees . . . to the source of the contraction, to the source of the pain and the choices made as the result of that pain. (Fairchilde 133)VftAchanneled • modern • Fairchilde
There is a lesson when we encounter someone acting out of fear. If we can prevent our own fear from being triggered, we can step back and try to understand where their fear is coming from. We can help rather than joining in.
In order to forgive hate, he centered his attention on love. This was not only when it touched his life, but when he saw it manifest in the world about him. (Spalding 107)MotFE2wisdom • Spalding
Forgiven sins are blotted out. It is as if they are overlaid by new understanding, by a new direction in life. . . . The educational part of the experience remains. (Eadie 116)EbtLNDEr • modern • Eadie
Mindfulness — Non-Attachment to Thoughts
One of the first steps in silencing our thoughts is becoming aware of them. Mindfulness is a practice in which we focus on observing the thoughts that arise in our minds, noting them, and letting them pass by without engagement. In this way, we learn not to identify with our thoughts — they are not us. We are the observer, and can choose whether or not to engage with them.
The arising of thoughts is a natural process. The goal is not resistance but non-engagement.
From The Nirvanic Path, “Yoga of One-Pointedness”:
49) In the next practice, the leaving unshaped whatever concept or idea appeareth, the procedure is to be indifferent to the thought, allowing it to do as it liketh, neither falling under its influence, nor attempting to impede it. Let the mind act as its shepherd [or watchman]; and go on meditating. . . .
53) The Master of Doctrines, hath said,
‘If the mind be left relaxed, it attaineth tranquility;
If water be left undisturbed, it attaineth clearness.’ . . .
67) Whatever visions or apparitional appearances may arise, are neither to be held on to through showing liking for them nor inhibited through dislike. (Dvagpo-Lharje 129-133)
87) Whatever thoughts, or concepts, or obscuring [or disturbing] passions arise are neither to be abandoned nor allowed to control one; they are to be allowed to arise without one’s trying to direct [or shape] them. (Dvagpo-Lharje 138)TYSDwisdom • Tibetan • Dvagpo-Lharje
Resistance is just another way of focusing on a thought.
Concentration is the root skill in all meditation practices. . . .
Place a candle in front of you . . . and focus on the flame. As you look at the flame, countless thoughts will float by about the candle, the flame, meditation, sounds you hear, feelings in your body, and so forth. In each case you notice the thought, let it go, and merely come back to an awareness of the candle flame. By gently but firmly trying to keep your attention focused on the candle flame, you begin to see your thoughts and senses grabbing at your awareness. (Dass 48)
Now as you sit comfortably, you mind wanders. It turns to fantasies, memories. You think, what is this about, this meditation? What am I doing? If you don’t hold on to any of these thoughts, but just let them keep flowing by, you are already in the act of meditation. This is it. You’re doing it. But one of these thoughts may grab at you and lead you off into plans, fantasies, memories, or problem solving. Then you’re just thinking, not meditating. (Dass 45)
Some people may find it helpful to label the thinking process in a more precise way, to note different kinds of thoughts, whether “planning” or “imagining” or “remembering.” This sharpens the focus of attention. . . . When they are noticed with precision and balance they have no power to disturb the mind.
Thoughts should not be treated as obstacles or hindrances. They are just another object of mindfulness, another object of meditation. . . .
Suzuki Roshi in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind writes: . . . “Do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything. . . . Many sensations come, many thoughts or images arise but they are just waves from your own mind.” (Dass 88-89)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
It is important to view [emotions], and your thoughts . . . with an acceptance and generosity that are as open and spacious as possible. (Rinpoche 61)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
It is helpful to make a mental note of “thinking, thinking” every time a thought arises. . . . The thought is the thinker. There is no one behind it. The thought is thinking itself. It comes uninvited. . . . As soon as you are mindful of a thought, it disappears. (Dass 88)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
Being mindful in this way, we remain disengaged from the content of the thought. We instead only engage with the appearance of the thought. We watch their appearances as a scientist might.
See “The Recurrence of Strong Experiences” in attention.php.
Non-Attachment to Emotions
Even in the greatest yogin, sorrow and joy still arise just as before. The difference between an ordinary person and the yogin is how they view their emotions and react to them. An ordinary person will instinctively accept or reject them, and so arouse the attachment or aversion that will result in accumulation of negative karma NOTE: habits of thought. A yogin, however, perceives everything that rises in its natural, pristine state, without allowing grasping to enter his or her perception.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche describes a yogin walking through a garden. He is completely awake to the splendor and beauty of the flowers, and relishes their colors, shapes, and scents. But there is no trace of clinging nor any “afterthought” in his mind. (Rinpoche 165-166)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
The key point is that attention continues to “become” each new experience. We live more fully in every moment by not allowing what happened in the past to obscure the present. There is no “afterthought” to even the best or worst experience, because our emotional state remained stable throughout. It didn’t burn brighter at those times such that its memory returns to us. The experience drops away out of memory, without taking away from the next.
If the yogin were to exit the garden and walk up to a river, but her attention remained fixed on the memory of the flowers, it would obscure her experience of the river.
My obsessions with sexuality, achievement, love, and dependency, haven’t all gone away. What has gone is my preoccupation and my identification with them. Now they are merely quaint and fascinating. . . . These feelings now simply arise and pass away, without my resisting or clinging to them. More and more I am just awareness. . . .
I am involved with it all, yet I cling to none of it. It is what it is. (Dass 13)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
Of course there are rough as well as gentle waves in the ocean; strong emotions come, like anger, desire, jealousy. The real practitioner recognizes them not as a disturbance or obstacle, but as a great opportunity. The fact that you react to arisings such as these with habitual tendencies of attachment and aversion is a sign not only that you are distracted, but also that you do not have the recognition and have lost the ground of Rigpa NOTE: pure awareness. To react to emotions in this way empowers them and binds us even tighter in the chains of delusion. . . . See right through them as soon as they arise, to what they really are: the vivid and electric manifestation of the energy of Rigpa itself. As you gradually learn to do this, even the most turbulent emotions fail to seize hold of you and dissolve. (Rinpoche 161)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
What this does is it allows our thought form atmosphere to gradually clear as these habitual thoughts are deprived of attention, causing them to slowly melt away.
Acceptance and Resistance
There are basically two ways to cope with uncertainty—acceptance and resistance. Acceptance means that you allow events to unfold around you and react to them spontaneously, without suppression. Resistance means that you try to change events from what they really are. . . .
Resistance gives rise to a telltale behavior pattern—control. (Chopra 173-174)ABTMresearcher • modern • Chopra
Acceptance
With acceptance, we are present and open, and see and accept what is really before us, regardless of what we want, fear, or expect. We integrate it into our context without trying to change it.
Embracing Change
Dr. Peebles: To experience change in your life is to grow, to go beyond what was safe once upon a time. . . .
This is the greatest joy of the divine experience to the universe—to be aware, to be conscious, to be participating with that change. On the contrary, the greatest pain in the universe is to resist the very same. (Pendleton 183)TDAchanneled • modern • Pendleton
Resistance
Resistance is caused by an attachment to something else, something or someone other than what is before us.
Resistance focuses attention on whatever we are resisting. It is charged up by negative emotion. Like any other focus, the larger it grows, the more it pulls at our attention. And since it is a form of rejection, it causes us to close, to harden, to step out of the flow. Resistance includes any kind of condemnation, rejection, or denial.
For example, when there is the sound of a squeaky wheelbarrow passing by, nonresistance lets the sound pass through us without reaching our attention. Resistance focuses attention on that sound, and we become present there. It irritates us more and more. It pulls us from what we want to be focusing on. We think about how to stop it.
To specifically avoid something is just as much a search as searching for it. Whatever is in our mind, either to find or to not find, is being sought just the same with the exact same kind of filter. Whatever attention focuses on becomes our experience, imagined or not. That “what if” situation we’re imagining? It’s actually happening in our mind.
Think of the classic saying “Don’t think of a monkey”. It makes us instantly think of a monkey. There is no such thing as negative attention. There is only attention or nothing. When we resist or deny something, we have to hold it constantly in our attention. We have to know exactly where it is so it can be properly avoided.
Projection can be a component of resistance. When we are projecting what we want, every difference between that and what we see can become a point of resistance.
For more on resistance, see “Tunneling: Expansion and Contraction” in flow-into-us.php.
It is far better that one explode and get a thing off his mind than to hold the feeling within of resentment. . . . From My standpoint, I see what is registering in your feelings, and therefore on the Inner Atmosphere. . . .
It is most important to do something to keep yourselves from harboring a feeling against persons, places, things or conditions, for these build and record on the Inner Atmosphere. (King 281)IADchanneled • Theosophy • Germain
Neale: “That which you condemn, you keep in place.” (Walsch 118)FWGchanneled • modern • Walsch
A true Master does not “give up” something. A true Master simply sets it aside, as he would do with anything for which he no longer has any use. . . .
There are those who say that to know God you must overcome all earthly passions. Yet to understand and accept them is enough. What you resist persists. . . .
Often a person on what you call a spiritual path looks like he has renounced all earthly passion. . . . What he has done is understand it, see the illusion, and step aside from the passions that do not serve him. (Walsch 100-101)
Never resist anything. . . . By your resistance you . . . plant it more firmly in place. (Walsch 103)CWG1channeled • modern • Walsch
Attention and Nonattention
Mastering Our Focus
We must learn to become aware of and master of where our attention is focused. When it is drawn uncontrollably to the loudest and brightest experiences, negative or positive, we have lost control of ourselves and our experience.
Unnecessary thinking is one of the chief evils of our inner life. How often it happens that some thought gets into our mind, and the mind, having no power to throw it out turns the thought over and over endlessly, just as a stream turns a stone over and over in its bed. . . .
When the “disciple” has learned not to think, he is taught to think—to think of what he wants to think of, and not of anything that comes into his head. (Ouspensky 229)ANMUpsychedelic • Theosophy • Ouspensky
Our business is to hold the attention free to rest within our own Self-control, compelling it by the conscious action to rest on whatsoever we choose. (King 93)IADchanneled • Theosophy • Germain
The disciple sooner or later realizes that he must be able actually to stand guard at the door of his mind and admit only the thoughts and feelings he desires to entertain, and then must learn so to rule and train his mind that it thinks and holds only the perfected thoughts he wishes to outmanifest in his body and affairs. . . . NOTE: This is done through non-attention rather than resistance
Without such control conscious functioning on the soul and higher planes is impossible. . . .
One who is master of his own mind . . . has compelled and taught it to serve him. . . . Weaker souls are the slaves of their minds—of their thoughts and emotions. (Benner 200-202)WttKchanneled • New Thought • Benner
Non-Attention on Undesirable Things
Attention enlarges. Whatever we focus on becomes our experience, and our actions follow in response to that.
We create in the physical whatever we focus on. Fear slows our consciousness, and we perceive the world as a dark, threatening place. In the physical, we try to take control to protect ourselves from those dark thoughts, and in so doing, we spread those fears and work to create a highly controlled and heavily armed world, the very kind of world conducive to creating more pain.
With our attention on higher frequencies, we see ideal worlds of peace and happiness, and in the physical, do our best to bring about those worlds here by increasing freedom and spreading love.
When the individual allows himself or herself to continue to criticize, condemn or judge another of his fellow beings, he is not only injuring the other person, but is unknowingly admitting into his own experience the very element that he is seeing wrong in the other person. . . .
Whatever the conscious attention is fixed firmly upon, that quality is impelled into the experience of the individual. Whatever an individual sees with deep feeling within another individual, he forces into his own experience. This is the indisputable proof of why the only desirable feeling to be sent out from any individual is the Presence of Divine Love—and I mean by that, Pure, Unselfish Love. . . .
It matters not whether it is a person or inanimate object, the moment you see an imperfection, you are forcing that quality into your own experience. (King 237-239)IADchanneled • Theosophy • Germain
We must be careful here that we are not engaging in denial — still condemning but pretending what we condemn doesn’t exist. Rather, the goal is to stop condemning through acceptance and understanding. When we see selfish behavior, we must understand that a lesson is underway for that person, that perhaps with our help the situation can be improved.
[The Great Master] wishes Me to tell you that: “. . . The easiest way to overcome disturbance is to turn away from a thing—and forget it.” . . .
To wrong activities say: “That is not correct,” and then quickly pass it off. This avoids a disturbance which builds. . . .
The quickest way to stop any kind of disturbance is to stop discussing it. (King 279-280)
“For the benefit of the beloved students, I urge them not to discuss discordant things any more than is enough to understand a situation. Then turn completely from it and never let it hold your attention again.” — Cha Ara (Cha Ara 296)
When it is necessary to discuss some condition to understand it, immediately follow by withdrawing any power that has been given it. (King 185)IADchanneled • Theosophy • Germain
The goal is to resolve the situation and then put it in the past, giving it no further thought or attention. It then no longer has the ability to disturb us and detract from our present experience.
Every one of us has taken upon himself the condition of the experience through which we have passed. This is what is now hampering us and I for one am through with that thing, it is no part of me whatsoever. . . . I step forth out of this condition into a higher and better condition and let go. I am entirely through with it. (Spalding 46)MotFE3wisdom • Spalding
Being Controlled by Negativity
We give away our own power when we let negativity control us. When it succeeds in pulling at our attention, we then become it, we get drawn up into it and intensify it.
If other people can make me angry, I am not the master of myself. (Steiner 32)HTKHWclairvoyant • modern • Steiner
When you have a problem, pay it no mind. And when you are surrounded by negativity, negative forces, and negative emotions, do not mind a thing. . . .
You are controlled by it, because you are minding it. (Walsch 195)FWGchanneled • modern • Walsch
The only way you can ever bring about this change in thinking, is by first changing your attitude toward all these things you now think are not what they ought to be.
That is, if they are unsatisfactory or obnoxious to you and affect you so as to cause you discomfort of body or disturbance of mind, —why, stop thinking that they can so affect or disturb you. . . .
It is only by your thinking these other things, by allowing these inharmonious thoughts to enter your mind and by so doing giving them the power so to affect or disturb you, that they have any such influence over you. When you stop thinking into them this power . . . they will at once disappear into the nothingness from which you created them by your thinking. (Benner 76-77)ILchanneled • New Thought • Benner
To discuss the seeming inability, shortcomings, or faults of your friends and associates but builds that element upon which your discussion rests within your own consciousness, and also adds to the appearance which seems to be in the other individual. . . .
Few understand that when their attention is called to some destructive thing, how much and how often they allow the attention to go back to it; or if another has displeased them in some way, how much and how often the attention returns to that incident. (King 93-94)
When you allow the attention to become fixed upon a thing, you that moment give it power to act in your world. (King 99)IADchanneled • Theosophy • Germain
Thinking of his weakness keeps the image of it before him. . . .
Never look at that which you do not wish to experience. (Holmes 185-186)
NO PERSON WHOSE ENTIRE TIME IS SPENT IN THE CONTEMPLATION OF LIMITATION CAN DEMONSTRATE FREEDOM FROM SUCH LIMITATION! (Holmes 267)SoMwisdom • New Thought • Holmes
The Path of Love and Connection
Spirituality Through Physical Life
When I first met His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who brought TM NOTE: transcendental meditation to the West, he made a deep impression on me with one overriding point: Spirituality is not meant to be separate from the body. . . .
Spirituality must also be sensuous, because a spiritual person is one who lives fully in the present moment, which means living fully in the body. . . .
Prejudice against the body runs contrary to the way that Nature fashioned us. Nature balanced mind, body, and spirit as co-creators of our personal reality. (Chopra 167-168)ABTMresearcher • modern • Chopra
We came here to experience life, not to miss it by being focused internally on the light. I feel that the goal of working hard spiritually so we never have to come back again misses the point of why we are here in the first place.
Spontaneous Joy
You become much more conscious of My presence when you do these things; when you smile or love or sing or dance or write from your heart. This is the highest version of Who I Am, and when you are expressing these qualities, you are expressing Me. (Walsch 22)
People have this idea that God is never humorous, cannot laugh, and that everybody has to act very sacred around the Divine. I wish you would all lighten up a bit. All of you. Laugh at yourself. . . .
Joy is the soul. The soul is that which you would call joy. Pure joy. Endless joy. Unadulterated, unlimited, unrestricted joy. That is the nature of the soul. . . .
A smile is a window to your soul. Laughter is the door. (Walsch 263)FWGchanneled • modern • Walsch
I was to discover that many so-called unspiritual people were far more attuned than I was. (Maclean 33)THASchanneled • modern • Maclean
We can be deeply spiritual without having a single thought about spirituality. All it takes is being open and present in the moment.
Living Through Habit and Obligation
What fun life is! . . . We see you humans going greyly about your designs, doing things without zest because ‘they have to be done’, and we marvel that the sparkling life given you could be so filtered down and disguised. . . . We should love to shake this sluggishness out of you to make you see that life is ever brighter, flowing, creative, blooming, waxing and waning, eternally one.
Leading a life of bliss entails canceling other engagements you have made through habit to your body, to convention and the social code, and to others’ opinions. (Maclean 28)THASchanneled • modern • Maclean
Love and Connection
Love flows naturally when we are open. Love is embracing, accepting, becoming. Love is the essential feeling that brings us into the stream of life, into the moment.
Sharing happiness with others is deeply satisfying. The best act is to make another smile or laugh. This draws them out of themselves and into the moment with us.
See “Love, Expansion, Being In The Now” in flow-into-us.php.
Pure love is Who You Are.
When you express pure love, you give yourself the direct experience of Who You Are. It is the greatest gift. It looks as if you are giving a gift to others, and you are giving it to your Self. That is because there is no one else in the room. It only looks as if there is. Pure love allows you to see the truth. (Walsch 236)FWGchanneled • modern • Walsch
Devotion balances the more impersonal wisdom that comes from most kinds of meditation. It allows us to cultivate our humanity while we transform our consciousness. This outflowing of the heart toward the object of our devotion facilitates most other methods as well, through the flow of loving energy. (Dass 66)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
This Limitless, Mighty Power of God cannot intrude Its Wondrous Powers into your outer use—except by your invitation. There is only one kind of invitation that can reach it and loose it, and that is your feeling of deep devotion and Love. (King 28)IADchanneled • Theosophy • Germain
That feeling causes us to open. An essential part of our individuality is the ability to pull back and close up. We are never forced to open.
All life, all minds, all centers of consciousness, which means all manifest things, are parts of and one with God’s Mind, in which all live, move and have their being. . . . Only by so living that Love is allowed to rule, motivate and direct all activities of the human consciousness can it come into conscious oneness with His Mind. (Benner 165)WttKchanneled • New Thought • Benner
“As we love unselfishly, we have the complete ocean of Cosmic Love with us. . . . There is no greater power on earth or in heaven than pure love.” (Spalding 44)MotFE2wisdom • Spalding
This is because love naturally flows through us when we are open. Love is the emotional interpretation of the flow from the Source, which is only limited by how open we are.
Come to Me along the path of your heart. . . . You will never find Me in your mind. (Walsch 94)CWG1channeled • modern • Walsch
“To love another person is to see the face of God.” — Les Miserables Qwisdom • various
Unconditional Love
Imagine a being standing before you . . . a being in whom you feel the wisdom that comes from an intimate harmony with the universe.
Despite all of the impurities to which you cling, despite all your feelings of unworthiness, such a being loves you unconditionally. To sit before such a being, or to imagine such a being sitting in your heart, to be with that being and return the love, to see yourself reflected in such compassionate, unjudging eyes, to open more and more, as if to a beloved, to carry on imaginary conversations with such a being, opens you to compassion, tranquility, warmth, patience, to all the qualities of a free being. (Dass 66-67)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
Dr. Peebles: To contact your higher self is to love you as you are right now. . . .
You will discover not only forgiveness, but, beyond that, loving allowance. For if you forgive, you will have had to judge in the first place, won’t you? And to allow, you don’t even start to judge. And when we say judge, we are speaking of condemnation. (Pendleton 108)TDAchanneled • modern • Pendleton
Loving Others
Life is always a matter of giving. To draw on the Universal life that flows freely throughout infinite space is the privilege of anyone and his way of living life should be to receive from this source and then give it out to all who are around him, inspiring them to seek life where he has found it. (Spalding 135)MotFE4wisdom • Spalding
Only those who are bound to nothing for themselves can be bound to everyone in the name of the One Life. (Besant 73)Kclairvoyant • Theosophy • Besant
Acceptance and Seeing Perfection
To be focused in the now, loving someone, means we are taking them in with every sense, watching every movement. We smell them, feel their breath, hear their voice. We want to learn everything about them, to know intimately how they feel and what they think. We shine our full attention upon them (without projection). This is love.
We see the Pure Essence in objects and experiences through our attention and acceptance (love). Acceptance is key, because we want to have experience without conditions or projections. Whatever is, we accept and embrace it because it’s the now, the only place where the Pure Essence exists.
We behold our pure nature when we see someone or something as “perfect” or “beautiful” as it is. Doing so opens the Pure Essence to flow by removing all filters and expectations on our experience.
Appreciation
Being appreciative and thankful is also a position of being open. It is a form of love.
We should be continually appreciative and thankful. Thankfulness creates a very special circular energy in our lives—a creative flow of giving and receiving. (McKnight 94)CJOBEr • modern • McKnight
Compassion
“A human being is part of the whole called by us “Universe”; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to enhance all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” — Albert Einstein Qwisdom • various
The sooner one develops compassion in this journey, the better. Compassion lets us appreciate that each individual is doing what he or she must do. (Dass 155)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
Act as if you were all One. Just start acting that way tomorrow. See everyone as “you,” just having a difficult time. See everyone as “you,” just wanting a fair chance. See everyone as “you,” just having different experience. (Walsch 312)CWG3channeled • modern • Walsch
One powerful way to evoke compassion . . . is to think of others as exactly the same as you. . . .
When someone is suffering . . . put yourself unflinchingly in his or her place. . . .
Imagine one of your dearest friends, or someone you really love, in that person’s place. (Rinpoche 196-197)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
Hank: “One of the things that I discovered that is very important is patience toward other human beings and realizing that you yourself may be in that situation sometime.” (Ring 69)HTOresearcher • modern • Ring
The Path of Understanding
Study and Understanding
For some, higher consciousness comes through reading, study, and understanding. We become inspired as realizations occur to us and pieces fall into place. We begin to remember. When this happens, I often feel tingling waves sweeping across my body, accompanied by a feeling of lightness.
Success Is Guaranteed
Success Is Guaranteed
One of the most calming realizations is that in the long term, success is guaranteed. We will learn, we will grow, we will progress, and we will open to a greater and greater love.
Failures are only temporary setbacks that prime us for making different choices the next time.
Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke: “I saw that . . . the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain.” (Burnham 86)EJexperiencer • modern • Burnham
Dr. Peebles: Celebrate, celebrate—for you are eternal. You cannot fail, and all of the challenges of Earth are nothing but schoolbooks in a big school called Planet Earth, where you are guaranteed graduation . . . eventually. (Pendleton 230)
Dr. Peebles: Your free will can make it sooner or later, according to your growth. (Pendleton 246)TDAchanneled • modern • Pendleton
Dr. Peebles: So whether you are the Baptist or the Buddhist, the atheist or the skeptic, or the believer . . . whether you are a criminal, in social terms, or whether you are law-abiding, each and every one of them contains their lessons to self-realization, divine realization, and it is impossible to avoid the pathway of God. . . . You can hate God or you can believe in no God, and you still are creating very real techniques of thought that will move you closer to God. (Pendleton 94)TDAchanneled • modern • Pendleton
Growth is certain; it cannot be ultimately prevented. (Besant 21)SLwisdom • Theosophy • Besant
Michael (channeled): As long as you are willing to learn from your mistakes, you can’t make any. (Fairchilde 100)VftAchanneled • modern • Fairchilde
Freedom from Desire
The Nature of Desire
We desire whatever we believe the Pure Essence is in. The human experience is essentially boxing up the Pure Essence in forms and conditions and then chasing after it. As we seek it in the outside world, our Specific Search filter dims anything that isn’t what we’re looking for, further reinforcing the illusion.
Thought can direct, create, or dissolve desire.
Desire or emotion is the motive power in us and stands ever between thought and action. Intellect sees, but it does not move. . . . We would “want” to reach the highest, since without this wanting we shall make no progress at all. (Besant 21)SLwisdom • Theosophy • Besant
As we increase in spiritual development, our desires continue (else we would not act), but they become directed towards spiritual, universal things.
Desire is the mainspring of action. We could not move a single finger unless we had a desire to move it. . . .
A desire is but an awareness of something we lack or need to make our life more enjoyable. . . . Where there is nothing to gain there is no desire, and consequently no action. (Goddard 193-194)Rmystic • New Thought • Goddard
It is not so much that man or nature seeks to satisfy needs, but to exuberantly, rambunctiously seek pleasure—and through following its pleasure each organism finds and satisfies its needs as well. . . .
There is a great pleasure to be found in both work and play, in excitement and calm, in exertion and rest, yet the word “pleasure” itself has often fallen into disrepute, and is frowned at by the virtuous. (Roberts 463)DEVF2channeled • modern • Seth
You will find a lot of this attitude in religious or spiritual texts — the denial and rejection of the very body and world we came here to experience and learn from.
Desire to Know
Because of this restless desire to know—this urge to unfold its consciousness into the fullness of realization, [the soul] ever seeks opportunity and means to grow and unfold in wisdom. . . . This urge is the urge of all life—the cause of all growth, for it is the Idea ensouled in the heart of each living thing which must grow and unfold Itself until It attains and expresses the fullness and perfection of Its nature. That is the law of life. (Benner 162)WttKchanneled • New Thought • Benner
Desire and Wisdom
The reincarnating self lives beyond the astral, the realm of emotions, and does not suffer the physically-oriented constrictions of consciousness that the physical waking self does. Thus it is not bound by viewpoints and habits based on desire and fear.
The will, guided by the clear-eyed intelligence, points to the lofty ideal. . . . The desire-nature does not want to reach it, is lethargic before it, not seeing its beauty. . . . The lower “I” is moved by the attraction of the moment rather than by the recorded results of the past that sway the higher “I.” (Besant 20)SLwisdom • Theosophy • Besant
It’s similar to one’s level of maturity. When born, we begin to develop a new physical self, shaped by our new body and environment. It begins with only self-concern. This new physical self has not yet integrated with our higher self. At the level of the baby to the toddler, this new self is concerned with a rush of pleasure now with no care for the future. It considers only itself and does not see or identify with others or even its own continuity into the future. “I am here now, enjoying myself fully.” That eating a ton of candy now may give it a stomach ache later does not concern it — that’s the future, not now. A broader, more mature self recognizes this continuity and takes into consideration the effects on tomorrow. An even higher self recognizes the continuity of self across lifetimes. This growth comes through experience.
In a similar way, a higher self considers the effect of any action not just on itself but on friends and family, then broadens this consideration to acquaintances, animals, and finally into every living thing. In this way, the self becomes less concerned with immediate pleasure and more with long-term pleasure. We expand the self as our wisdom grows.
Fulfilling and Mastering Desires
All who have any desire left to reach to the without must do so until that desire is no longer apparent. (King 263)IADchanneled • Theosophy • Germain
A person who is not disturbed by the incessant flow of desires . . . can alone achieve peace, and not the man who strives to satisfy such desires. (Vyasa 41)BGwisdom • Hindusim • ancient
Fulfilling desires strengthens them.
Enlightenment and Mystical Experience
What Enlightenment Is
The Buddha, asked once who he was, responded, “I am awake.” (Burnham 95)EJexperiencer • modern • Burnham
“Enlightenment is when a wave realizes it is the ocean.” — Thich Nhat Hanh Qwisdom • various
In Vibrational Terms
On a vibrational level, enlightenment could be thought of as the omnipresence of a wave-form with infinite frequency and infinite amplitude. (Judith 278)
If we postulate that each chakra represents a dimension of smaller and faster vibration, we theoretically reach a plane in the crown chakra where we have a wave of infinite speed and no wavelength, allowing it to be everywhere at once. (Judith 370)WoLiresearcher • modern • Judith
This can also be seen as a position so close to the microgeny that it is just emerging into time and space. Where time barely exists, the frequency is infinite. Where space barely exists, the amplitude is infinite.
The Many Labels of Mystical Experiences
In mystical states utterly different people in utterly different conditions learn one and the same thing and, what is still more striking, in mystical states there is no difference of religions. All the experiences are absolutely identical; the difference can be only in language and form of the description. (Ouspensky 18)ANMUpsychedelic • Theosophy • Ouspensky
Ascendant Consciousness NOTE: pure consciousness is the experience of the conscious mind settling down into its own essential nature. . . .
Ascendant Consciousness is called satori in Japan, Samadhi in India, the One or the Absolute or the Transcendent or the Infinite or Unbounded Awareness or Pure Consciousness in English. (MSI 6-7)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
Transcendent States of Being
Mystical experiences are experiences which transcend the boundaries of the physical self. They occur along a spectrum as consciousness moves up the stream of the microgeny, increasing in frequency. They often include blissful experiences of light, heat, energy, the flow, expansion, intensified consciousness, intuition, direct knowing, observations of the nature of consciousness and reality, and the experience of unity with everything.
All these different experiences are aspects of the same experience. How we experience it is determined by our particular focus. We may experience several of these at once, or focus entirely on one aspect.
NOTE: Should these be scattered about into the sections they go with best? The parts they reveal best?
The first of the great initiations . . . is the awakening of consciousness in the spiritual world, in the world where consciousness identifies itself with the life, and ceases to identify itself with the forms. . . . The characteristic of this awakening is a feeling of sudden expansion and of widening out beyond habitual limits. . . . The feeling of a marvelous peace dawns, surpassing anything the world can dream of.
With the falling away of limitations comes an increased intensity of life, as though life flowed in from every side. . . . This is an expansion so marvelous that consciousness feels as though it had never known itself before. . . .
The initiate knows the full meaning of the phrase “the unity of humanity,” and feels what it is to live in all that lives and moves. (Besant 137-138)SLwisdom • Theosophy • Besant
Feelings of Expansion
A feeling of expansion is a common part of transcendent mystical experience. This expansion is the result of our opening up, tunneling forward. Our energy expands outward as the Source is allowed to flow out more strongly through us. This is often accompanied by feeling positive and energized.
This expansion is due to an increase of our focus in psychological time. We become more present, we happen more frequently, and our sense impressions stack up and overflow their boundaries.
Our attention expands whatever we focus on. The stronger and longer the focus of awareness, the further out the energy sphere expands, making more connections. Along with this comes a clarity. We’re expanding into a clearer holographic reality. We see more truly, with more real universal context.
When we deeply focus on a sensation, we feel as if we are expanding outwards forever. I expanded like a balloon when focusing on a taste. That focus is strong enough to repeat the sensation, expanding the experience within psychological time so that it overflows. It’s part of tunneling forward. As we focus on something, our flowing energy expands out beyond that focus, beyond “us”, embracing us in a safe place of our own energy.
Jane: “I feel like my head is real big now, and going around to the right and spinning.” (Roberts 32)
Rob: Jane finds her “massive feelings,” as she calls them, not only instructive physically, but exhilarating indeed when they encompass revelatory or transcendent states of consciousness. . . .
[Jane’s] boundaries of awareness seemed to have expanded. (Butts 226)URchanneled • modern • Seth
The cellular consciousness experiences itself as eternal. . . . Part of Ruburt’s feeling of massiveness comes from the mass [life-to-death] experience of the body, existing all at once. Therefore to him the body feels larger. (Roberts 745-746)UR2channeled • modern • Seth
A Zone of Trust
Within that expanding sphere of energy flowing out of us, we feel safe. It is a comfort zone, a zone of familiarity and trust of all things within it. This is the feeling of tunneling forward, where we are so full of the energy flowing through us that nothing negative can reach us (see “Tunneling: Expansion and Contraction” in flow-into-us.php).
Everything within that sphere of expanding energy feels connected to us, a part of us. Through that feeling of expansion we become more by accepting the things within this expansion as a part of ourselves. The larger the expansion, the more we encompass, the more we become. This isn’t the typical type of “becoming” which is reaching out with our attention to a specific thing and merging with it. This is more of a relaxation into the now without a specific focus.
One time I felt this strongly I was high in Tappan Square in Oberlin. I felt that this expanding sphere was me, and everything inside it (including my physical self) was within this expanded me, a part of me. I felt I could sing or dance there in public and not feel the least intimidated by fear.
See also “Love, Expansion, Being In The Now” in flow-into-us.php.
Melting in Ecstasy
Our consciousness (the flow from the Source) begins as free-flowing liquid light, able to flow into and take the form of any experience. As we progress through physical life, more of our consciousness freezes up into the hardened structures of habits and attachments from the past which form our physical conception of self. This leaves less of that consciousness free to flow into and experience life.
The essence of the experience of ecstasy is the melting away of these structures through an experience like melting from heat (LSD, psilocybin) or like waves of energy washing them away (the Ecstasy Trance). As these melt away, we come forward into the flowing heat of the now, our consciousness freed to move as a whole, able to rise up the stream of the microgeny towards the Source.
It washes away our limitations, makes us whole again, and nothing has ever felt so good.
See “The Ecstasy Trance” in flow-into-us.php.
Hugh Lynn’s wife Sally went through a difficult birth in which both she and her baby almost died. After some time Hugh’s parents died. Then with much worry Hugh and Sally made the difficult decision to try for another baby:
As I prayed, a Light went on—a brilliant white Light in the corner of the room. . . . And in it were my mother’s face, and my father’s face, and they were alive, full of energy and vitality. Dad spoke to me—not in words, but in my head. He smiled and said, “Hugh Lynn, you should not worry, you shouldn’t be concerned. It’s going to be all right. We are going to show you what Love can do.”
He smiled, and Mother smiled, and they moved. They moved in this Light, and as it touched me, I lost consciousness as I know consciousness. I lost it completely. But I became aware of my father, and my mother, and of their essence, and my essence. And we were all together in what I’d call an ecstasy, a state of tremendous emotion, beauty, and ecstasy. . . . Then we moved—all three of us with the Light into Sally’s body and the body of this unborn child. The ecstasy increased until it was overpowering, and it swept over me like waves rolling over top (sic). I couldn’t stand it—I mean there was nothing left of me. I was out of my body—I was in this other body. And the Life was there in the body of this child—the essence—all five of us together, and it was like being all together.
Then there was a pull, and we moved out of Sally’s body, and I was on the bed again, and the Light was in the corner, and Dad and Mother were there.
I was crying, choked, I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t say anything. Dad grinned at me. He didn’t smile, he grinned, a big, wide grin. And he said, “You see? You see what Love can do?”
Mother smiled and said “It’s gonna be all right. It’s gonna be a boy, and it’s gonna be all right.”
Then the Light went out, and I sat there, sobbing.
Sally woke up, turned over, grabbed hold of my hand, and squeezed it very hard. Before I could say a word, she said, “Hugh Lynn, it’s gonna be all right. I’ve had a beautiful dream of your mother and father. We’re going to have a son. It’s gonna be all right.”
And it was. (Lynn and Cayce 184-186)NDchanneled • modern • Lynn & Cayce
Through Heat
[Catherine Fieschi of Genoa] wrote of the fire of the love of God that draws and binds the soul to Himself “with a love that by itself could annihilate the immortal soul.” Then,
The soul becomes like gold
that becomes purer as it is fired,
all dross being cast out. (Burnham 61)
The medieval mystic Richard Rolle: “I can’t tell you how astonished I was when I felt my heart grow warm for the first time. It was a real warmth, too, not an imaginary one: I seemed kindled with a fire that I could feel with my senses. . . . I melted with joy and wanted my love to increase still more, especially because of the pleasurable sensations of interior sweetness that poured into my soul with this spiritual flame.” (Burnham 99)EJexperiencer • modern • Burnham
See “The Meltdown” in pure-essence.php.
Through Waves of Light
At night, going to sleep, and sometimes also early in the morning just on awakening, I would feel wave after wave of light pour through me, pulsating, as if I were being washed inside and out by light. (Burnham 138)
With that I was immersed in a sweetness words cannot express. I could hear the singing of the planets, and wave after wave of light washed over me. . . . I was the light as well, without distinction of self or of being washed. (Burnham 78)EJexperiencer • modern • Burnham
Through Surges of Energy
As Monroe comes closer and closer to the Source, he feels this ecstasy as his limited self is washed away:
Moving inward bit by bit . . . like swimming upstream. . . .
. . . the spiral becomes tighter, tighter . . . narrowing, very narrow . . . the current is stronger . . . hard to move against . . . but still moving . . . ahead of me the vortex point . . . too small, can’t get through it . . . concentrate energy . . . skip . . . skip. . . .
. . . a surge deep inside me . . . another, larger . . . it hurts but it is beautiful. . . .
(and a part of me is left behind)
. . . skip . . . skip . . . a larger surge . . . hurts terribly all through me, but so beautiful, so exquisitely beautiful . . . nothing can be so magnificent as this. . . .
(I lose another part of what I was)
. . . skip . . . another surge . . . nothing can hurt so deeply . . . nothing can be so all-encompassing in joy . . . but I can’t stand much more. . . .
(not much of the old me left)
. . . skip . . . the greatest surge . . . this is it, this is it . . . there is nothing greater than what I feel, nothing so total, total joy, total beauty, total. . . .
. . . the dream NOTE: the physical universe is fading quickly. (Monroe 210-211)UJOBEr • modern • Monroe
For the full experience, see “The Aperture and Emitter” in purpose-of-life.php.
Oneness and Connection
The light of consciousness flows from our common Source into every separate self, connecting us at the very root level of our existence. It bridges and connects all of existence, melting away the illusion of separation.
Whenever we have an experience of timeless union, it is due to a complete focus in the now. The completeness of that focus means that all past context has dropped away — we have reached zero context. We’ve left behind our personal memory — that which makes us individual, and we have become universal. Without the weight of that individual identity, we have become completely mobile in a higher dimension.
This is a picture in miniature of the entire astral experience — that in itself being a map of our emotional attachments. Without them, we reach zero context and unity with the Source in the moment.
Sometimes I found myself in another world. On such occasions the whole of the ordinary world changed in a very subtle and strange way. . . . I took everything emotionally, reacted to everything emotionally. Further, in this new world which surrounded me, there was nothing separate, nothing that had no connection with other things or with me personally. All things were connected with one another, and not accidentally, but by incomprehensible chains of causes and effects. . . . Everything was living, everything was conscious of itself. Everything spoke to me and I could speak to everything. (Ouspensky 287)ANMUpsychedelic • Theosophy • Ouspensky
Jean Houston: “There were no visions. . . . Yet everything became a part of a single Unity, a glorious symphonic resonance in which every part of the universe was a part of and illuminated every other part, and I knew that in some way it all worked together and was very good. . . . I had awakened to a consciousness that spanned centuries and was on intimate terms with the universe. Everything mattered. Nothing was alien or irrelevant or distant. The farthest star was right next door, and the deepest mystery was mystically seen . . . as if I knew everything, as if I was everything.”
A door slammed and her father entered the house laughing. Everything exploded into laughter. “Great roars of hilarity. . . . Laughter leavened every atom and every star until I saw the universe inspirited and spiraled by joy.” (Burnham 130-131)EJexperiencer • modern • Burnham
I put on my robe and sandals and walked down the hill. As I walked, I experienced such ecstasy. I was in total love and awe with every leaf, every cloud, every blade of grass, every living creature. Everything was alive. I felt the pulsation of the pebbles on the path. (Kübler-Ross 12)EtS-EKR • modern • Kübler-Ross
Everything suddenly went quiet in the outside world, as when a wind stops. My mind became calm as well. My body was frozen to the spot. All I could do was look straight up into the trees. Life became dear to me. “If this is it,” I thought, “I may as well enjoy every little bit I can.” I saw the green of the trees and the blue of the skies. The green jumped out of the trees at me in such beauty, such richness! The sky was indescribable! The world was so huge at my back! Up until this point in my life I had been used to the concept of “me” here and “the world” out there. Now, we had somehow merged. . . .
I saw the rich brown of the Earth all around me and with more than just my eyes. I could actually feel the distant curve of the Earth beyond our normally and perceived horizons. In fact, there were no horizons . . . just distances and depths to be explored . . . vast root systems and unexplored caverns. I could just begin to feel towns and touch people reaching out on the other side of this planet, when images started coming to me from my immediate surroundings. I saw into the past here. I could see and feel Native Americans enjoying the challenges of nature, enjoying the trees, squirrels and life in ways that I knew and in ways that I had not been familiar with. I could smell the rich old peat of the Earth that they were breathing into their own nostrils and the different scents of the tree bark. . . .
I was being filled by something else much bigger that was above me, something much more important that I found myself moving toward. I was floating freely upward through the different layers of the atmosphere like a dandelion seed-puff floating in a gentle breeze. I could see beyond the clouds. Then from all around and in every direction, I could feel a mature love beyond my age and beyond that of my parents years and beyond even that of my grandparents. All of life seemed to be connected to this deep love that was far beyond anything any human could generate. I remember myself thinking, “This must be what people have been trying to describe as God for centuries without success,” because I felt I was now going into God’s presence and it was beyond anything I had ever been told in church or had ever imagined. This mature love permeated my entire being and defies description. It is beyond thought or words. It is a state of BEING. It IS and I was BECOMING just by virtue of moving into His presence. . . .
I could feel something of His awesome power animating all of the world. The Earth was all alive by virtue of His very existence. Even the rocks were as vibrantly alive as anything else on this planet. IANDS-CNDEr • modern • "Cougar"
Instantly, everything changes. I am no longer a human Being in a body of light; I am without form, without shape. I am the surging rush of Spirit that flows as water over every waterfall on the planet. I am falling, tumbling—water as light, light as water, water as oxygen, oxygen as water, every drop, every molecule—as One. . . . The great purpose of life on Earth is to combine with, and radiate forth, the creative power of Unconditional Love. . . .
I sing my Song of vibrating, harmonic Silence. . . .
I touch the consciousness of every fish, of every bird, of every creature of the water. . . . It is I who sings in the body of every human, every creature of the Earth, every drop of rain, each wisp of mist and fog. . . .
Without warning, my all-embracing experience of the Spirit of Water becomes centered and focused within my human psyche. (Roads 46-48)IaTROBEr, LDer • modern • Roads
Experiencing the Flow
Only moments earlier, the trees had been normal trees, albeit with independent movement. Now, they are columns of energy, engaged in a flow both up, toward the stars, and down, into the earth. The flow is constant, its energy defined by the seasons of a physical Earth. Sometimes strong and powerful in the movement of Spring and Summer, other times slow and gentle as Lacey and Winter energies are expressed. But never static—always there is movement.
There is also a flux of color in the moving streams of energy, color that constantly changes through the known spectrum and beyond. Irresistibly, I am drawn toward the trees, dancing as though a mote of light into the wondrous streams of energy. . . .
I seem to lose my body, traveling as a mote of Light within a column of tree energy into the stars. I experience no journey or time, yet I am surrounded by countless stars, and feel my connection with them. . . .
To the tree, death is an illusion, for life is movement, not form. (Roads 55-57)IaTROBEr, LDer • modern • Roads
A student: “I was at the source of awareness, enlightenment, and existence, manifested in a form of energy linking all objects animate and inanimate. . . . I felt morally elevated to a state of pure and simple existence flowing like a continuous current through a waterfall, going deeper and deeper within all existence while feeling more and more at peace and content. . . . I was surrounded by meaning and freed from the despair of meaninglessness, guilt, and time.” (Edge 158)BMSresearchers • modern • Tart
A family relation had died and young Ramana decided to explore directly the experience of death. His motive stemmed more from curiosity than any feeling of bereavement. Ramana removed all his clothes, lay on the floor of his room, and with tremendous intensity, imagined his body dead. He closed his eyes, simulating the state of deep sleep. Suddenly there flashed into view, timeless and complete, the primal awareness that lies at the Source of our being, the Ultimate Consciousness that is the Source of Being itself.
This proved not to be an isolated trance. The radiant flow of this primal awareness continued to be experienced throughout Ramana’s waking, dream, and dreamless sleep. It was focused in the spiritual center Ramana later called the Heart, two fingers to the right of the breastbone. . . .
He would remain motionless for days at a time, neither eating nor sleeping, totally absorbed in the current of primal awareness from which all phenomena emerge and into which they disappear again like bubbles in a stream. (Hixon 42-43)CHresearcher • modern • Hixon
Opening to Beauty
Open your eyes and experience the beauty around you. Let your mind be free of thought or comparison. Feel the warmth of the air, the coolness of the breeze, the sound of birds, the smell of the fresh air. Do not classify, label, or compare what you experience. Imagine you are looking out into this world for the first time. In this way everything you experience is without comparison.
To the mind without thought, everything is intrinsically beautiful.
I sat in the park today, after running. My mind was clear as I looked at everything, realizing how beautiful everything was — the sky, the trees, the people, the city. And it was effortless. I wasn’t looking for beauty. It was just there!
And what a change. . . . I had become the master of negativity. I knew all the scams, the capitalist tricks, the sensationalist media full of garbage, the fall of America, the dying natural world, the poisoned food, and automaton masses. My thoughts had become an everlasting incisive bitter mental commentary on the world around us. An endless list of reasons to shut out the world at any given moment.
Now the city was a wonder of the cooperation of mankind; the previously despicable people so amusing, so cute, so human that I loved them all. And so I began a new experiment — to see the beauty in everything.
When we are lifted out of ourselves, looking into the beauty of a flower or a sunset or the amazing shape of a shell, this is an experience of the deva NOTE: nature spirit world. Consciousness of beauty brings you into oneness with any part of the universe, they have said. (Maclean 229)GHLcompilation • modern • many
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Bus to the Beach 2000
Buttercup then moves diagonal from us and the blonde girl leans over and gives her a friendly kiss on the cheek. I look from the blonde, to her little sister, to Buttercup, comparing their beauty, and each one I stare at becomes extremely beautiful, ideal. Pretty neat. It’s my first memory of looking for beauty in dreams.
Access to All Knowledge
On every such occasion I am made to feel as if the observer in me, or speaking more precisely, my lustrous conscious self, is floating, with but an extremely dim idea of the corporeal frame, in a vividly bright conscious plane, every fragment of which represents a boundless world of knowledge, embracing the present, past, and future, commanding all the sciences, philosophies, and arts ever known or that will be known in the ages to come, all concentrated and contained in a point existing here and everywhere, now and always, a formless, measureless ocean of wisdom from which, drop by drop, knowledge has filtered and will continue to filter into the human brain. (Krishna 297)LWKmeditator • Hinduism • Krishna
During a NDE:
Instantly [Benedict] was pulled by light away from the tunnel, far away from earth, past stars and galaxies, past imaginery (sic) and physical realities, to a multiangled overview of all worlds and all creation, and past even that to the edge of existence where vibrations cease. He saw all wars from their beginnings, race as personality clusters, species operating like cells in a greater whole. By merging into the matrix of his soul, he confronted the “NO THING” from which all things emerge. Benedict saw planetary energy systems in detail and how human thoughts influence these systems in a simultaneous interplay between past, present, and future. He learned that the earth is a great cosmic being. (Atwater 77)BtLNDEr, researcher • modern • Atwater
My consciousness “arose” until it was within the unmanifest mind of God. This was indescribable bliss and completeness. There was no time in the unmanifest . . . and all knowledge and wisdom was mine. (Beaumont 7)VS-FBNDEr • modern • Beaumont
See “How The Source Speaks To Us” in flow-into-us.php.
Networks of Associations
When absolutely everything is connected and open to us, how do we decide what to focus on? Consciousness “moves” by changing focus. It does this through networks of associations between people, ideas, places, feelings, and so on. It’s very much like the wandering of our minds. Outside the physical, we’re not constrained by the body constantly refocusing us on when and where we are.
Seeing Behind Forms
This is the view of our higher self, outside of physical reality. It’s 360° omnidirectional vision that is not blocked by physical forms. From this point of view we can usually see the light of consciousness maintaining the physical world.
See “Understanding Immersive Perception” in higher-sense-perception.php.
[Master Mahasaya] gently slapped my chest over the heart.
A transforming silence ensued. . . . By some strange miracle . . . the pedestrians as well as the passing trolley cars, automobiles . . . were all in noiseless transit. As though possessing an omnipresent eye, I beheld the scenes which were behind me, and to each side, as easily as those in front. . . . Like a glow of fire dimly seen beneath a thin coat of ashes, a mellow luminescence permeated the panoramic view.
My own body seemed nothing more than one of the many shadows, though it was motionless, while the others flitted mutely to and fro. Several boys, friends of mine, approached and passed on; though they had looked directly at me, it was without recognition
The unique pantomime brought me an inexpressible ecstasy. I drank deep from some blissful fount. Suddenly my chest received another soft blow from Master Mahasaya. The pandemonium of the world burst upon my unwilling ears. I staggered, as though harshly awakened from a gossamer dream. (Yogananda 81)AoaYwisdom • Hinduism • Yogananda
Norman was lost in the wilderness:
“Suddenly, I wasn’t alone. I became intensely aware of the thousands and thousands of trees around me. Their forms gradually dissolved until I could see what I call their ‘life force.’ They were no longer just trees but were undulating, vibrating, making a sound as if they were humming. They were still trees, but something more as well.”
“A peacefulness fell upon me. . . .
“After a while, a sort of wind came up, and we all swayed to it, naturally.” (Miller 53)ADresearcher • modern • Miller
The Holographic Beam
[Sri Yukteswar] struck me gently on my chest above the heart.
My body became immovably rooted; breath was drawn out of my lungs as if by some huge magnet. Soul and mind instantly lost their physical bondage, and streamed out like a fluid piercing light from my every pore. The flesh was as though dead, yet in my intense awareness I knew that never before had I been fully alive. My sense of identity . . . embraced the circumambient atoms. People on distant streets seemed to be moving gently over my own remote periphery. The roots of plants and trees appeared through a dim transparency of the soil; I discerned the inward flow of their sap. . . .
My ordinary frontal vision was now changed to a vast spherical sight, simultaneously all-perceptive. . . .
All objects within my panoramic gaze trembled and vibrated like quick motion pictures. My body, Master’s, the pillared courtyard, the furniture and floor, the trees and sunshine, occasionally became violently agitated, until all melted into a luminescent sea; even as sugar crystals, thrown into a glass of water, dissolve after being shaken. The unifying light alternated with materializations of form, the metamorphoses revealing the law of cause and effect in creation.
An oceanic joy broke upon calm endless shores of my soul. The Spirit of God, I realized, is exhaustless Bliss; His body is countless tissues of light. A swelling glory within me began to envelop towns, continents, the earth, solar and stellar systems, tenuous nebulae, and floating universes. The entire cosmos, gently luminous, like a city seen afar at night, glimmered within the infinitude of my being. The sharply etched global outlines faded somewhat at the farthest edges; there I could see a mellow radiance, ever-undiminished. It was indescribably subtle; the planetary pictures were formed of a grosser light.
The divine dispersion of rays poured from an Eternal Source, blazing into galaxies, transfigured with ineffable auras. Again and again I saw the creative beams condense into constellations, then resolve into sheets of transparent flame. By rhythmic reversion, sextillion worlds passed into diaphanous luster; fire became firmament.
I cognized the center of the empyrean as a point of intuitive perception in my heart. Irradiating splendor issued from my nucleus to every part of the universal structure. . . . The creative voice of God I heard resounding as Aum, the vibration of the Cosmic Motor.
Suddenly the breath returned to my lungs. With a disappointment almost unbearable, I realized that my infinite immensity was lost. (Yogananda 143-144)AoaYwisdom • Hinduism • Yogananda
In the middle of the meal. . . . I had gradually passed off, without becoming aware of it, into a condition of exaltation and self expansion . . . with the modification that in place of a roaring noise in my ears there was now a cadence like the humming of a swarm of bees, enchanting and melodious, and the encircling glow was replaced by a penetrating silvery radiance. . . .
I had expanded in an indescribable manner into a titanic personality, conscious from within of an immediate and direct contact with an intensely conscious universe. . . . My body, the chair I was sitting on, the table in front of me, the room enclosed by walls, the lawn outside and the space beyond, including the earth and sky, appeared to be most amazingly mere phantoms in this real, interpenetrating, and all pervasive ocean of existence which . . . seemed to be simultaneously unbounded, stretching out immeasurably in all direction, and yet no bigger than an infinitely small point.
From this marvelous point the entire existence, of which my body and its surroundings were a part, poured out like radiation, as if a reflection as vast as my conception of the cosmos were thrown out upon infinity by a projector no bigger than a pinpoint, the entire intensely active and gigantic world picture dependent on the beams issuing from it. . . .
I was intensely aware internally of a marvelous being so concentratedly and massively conscious as to outluster and outstature infinitely the cosmic image present before me, not only in point of extent and brightness, but in point of reality and substance as well. The phenomenal world, ceaselessly in motion, characterized by creation, incessant change, and dissolution, receded into the background and assumed the appearance of an extremely thin, rapidly melting layer of foam upon a substantial rolling ocean of life, a veil of exceedingly fine vapor before an infinitely large conscious sun. . . . It showed the previously all-dominating cosmos reduced to the state of a transitory appearance. . . .
I awoke from the semi-trance condition after about half an hour. . . . There were intervals of deeper and lesser penetration not distinguishable by the flow of time but by the state of immanence, which, at the point of the deepest penetration, assumed such an awe-inspiring, almighty, all knowing, blissful, and at the same time absolutely motionless, intangible, and formless character that the invisible line demarcating the material world and the boundless, all-conscious Reality ceased to exist, the two fusing into one; the mighty ocean sucked up by a drop. (Krishna 290-292)LWKmeditator • Hinduism • Krishna
The Light
Perceiving the Light
The brightness of the light is due to the frequency of consciousness. The higher the frequency, the brighter the light.
Russian weightlifter, Uri Vlasov, states:
“At the peak of tremendous . . . effort while the blood is pounding in your head, all suddenly becomes quiet within you. Everything seems clearer and whiter than ever before, as if great spotlights had been turned on. . . . At that moment you have the conviction that you contain all the power in the world . . . you have wings. There is no more precious moment in life than this, the white moment, and you will work very hard for years just to taste it again.” (White 96)BMSresearchers • modern • Tart
Within Dreams
A mantle of light was perceptible in the dreams also. . . .
Extraordinarily vivid dreams became habitual with me. The bright luster in my head, always present during wakefulness, continued undiminished during sleep; if anything, more clearly apparent and more active during the night than during the day. The moment I rested my head on the pillow and closed my eyes to invite sleep, the first object to draw my attention was the cranial glow, clearly distinguishable in darkness, not stationary and steady but spreading out and narrowing down like a whirlpool or swirling water in a shining sun. . . .
The dreams were wonderful and always occurred against a shining background, formed by the widespread luminous glow inside, which also lent a strange phosphorescence to the dream images. Every night during sleep I was transported to a glittering fairyland where, garbed in luster, I glided from place to place, as light as a feather. . . . The incidents were of the usual character common to dreams. . . . Although strange, fanciful and fantastic, they possessed a visionary character, surrounded by landscapes of a vastness and magnificence seldom seen in real life.
In my dreams I usually experienced a feeling of security and contentment, with the absence of anything in the least disturbing or disharmonious. (Krishna 233-234)
Every night during slumber I roamed in enchanting empyrean regions of heavenly life. (Krishna 242)LWKmeditator • Hinduism • Krishna
Jane: “As I fell off to sleep. . . . I found myself seeing Congress Park very clearly, yet I wasn’t there yet, and my head kept throbbing in a way that wasn’t physical—as if I heard rather than felt the throbs. This was accompanied by a buzzing noise and other loud sounds that I now accept as characteristic of certain kinds of projection. My head felt full of a white light. Everything in my astral visions was opaque white, instead of dark. . . .
“My sight was operating perfectly, but it took a while before my hearing worked. I worked at getting clearer focus and really enjoyed walking down the park paths.
“All the while, I was very conscious of the white light that was beginning to bother me. It seemed to fill my entire head, growing more and more intense. A funny whooshing sound inside my head also distracted me and my head itself began to feel fantastically light. The more I tried to concentrate in my environment, the stronger these effects grew. . . .
“Ignoring the light, I willed myself to go to the house of the Linden family, across town. Instantly I found myself there on the porch. For a moment I wondered if I was in the right place, then I saw that the old side porch had been completely removed and another front porch added. Was this a distortion or hallucination? I willed all hallucinations to vanish, but everything remained the same. This usually means that the environment is a “real” location. . . . I decided to go inside.
“At this point the pulsations of the white light inside my head quickened and grew very powerful. I felt for a moment as if my consciousness could really be swept away or as if I could really have difficulty getting back to my body.” (Roberts 357-359)SD&Pchanneled • modern • Seth
For how the light is experienced in near-death experiences, see “The Light” in ndes.php.
Beyond the Physical Universe
I will describe here . . . an ascent to the One that occurred to me, through spiritual imagination, while meditating with Mother Serena. . . .
I gradually became aware that I was rising higher in consciousness. While ascending, I could still hear Mother Serena praying. . . . This spiritual ascension translated itself vividly into the image of an elevator. The elevator was passing various floors, heavenly realms that I could have stopped to explore, but an aspiration to glimpse its ultimate destination kept me on this visionary elevator. Finally the car reached the top floor, its doors opened, and I stepped into a realm of golden light. My body was of the same color and nature as this light. . . . Noticing a stairway that circled upward and was lost in the intensity of golden light, I began to climb, realizing that as I ascended, the light became more dense. . . . My body blended with the light, and soon there was no body, only golden intensity. I was still aware of myself as an individual center of consciousness. . . .
The next move resembled osmosis through a membrane and occurred spontaneously, without planning or effort. With no sensation of abruptness, there was the other side of the membrane. All was clear. The heavy golden density of Being was gone, dissipated as though one were to move directly from summer humidity to autumn clarity. The golden light had generated a certain excitement or ecstasy, but now there was none—only clear brightness, natural and buoyant. . . . The clarity appeared white, or faintly opaque, because there was nothing to be seen through this clarity that would make it appear transparent. And because there was nothing to be seen, there was no sense of distance or vastness—only a sense of completeness. . . .
After an interval of simple brightness that revealed nothing beyond itself, the question arose, How long have you been here? These words, seeming to filter through from another level of consciousness, kindled an immediate sensation of laughter, because it was delightfully apparent that no such concept could be applied. . . . After another immeasurable interval, a second question arose: Why would one ever leave this Clear Light? As if in response to the query, a bubble appeared, floating through the brightness. . . . Within this bubble there stretched a rainbow, which revealed itself as the entire structure of Being- all the planes, all the souls, all the sentient beings, civilizations, and galaxies. The whole structure was totally insubstantial. The bubble, unstable as it floated, changed shape constantly, looking as if it might burst at any moment. Its delicacy was poignant. And the seamless brightness of the One shone directly through this transparent bubble of Being. Then a current of loving concern welled up, concern for the beings on these various planets and planes of rainbow light. That concern became more and more intense, building to a climax. Suddenly I found myself once more in the golden realm, understanding that I had been taken back through the membrane into this floating bubble which is Being.
My sense of individuality reawakened as soon as I perceived the golden light. Yet I knew that I had been returned to Being not by attachment to my individuality but through commitment to all life. (Hixon 105-108)CHresearcher • modern • Hixon
It seems that the dense golden light is the emotional level of being. This is a higher frequency of the physical universe and the home of our individuality within it. Coming out of the bubble, Hixon exited the physical universe and his physical self into the clarity of his higher self.
We Are the Light
The fifteenth-century Sufi mystic, Shamsoddin Lahiji, experienced this cosmic light in a lucid dream, and felt that “The whole universe, in the structure it presents, consists of light.” He tells of rays of light which joined within him and rapidly pulled the whole of his being upward. After reaching what he called the Sphere of Spheres, he finds himself covered in light without quality or dimension and he is simply annihilated to himself and appears to cease to exist at all. “But,” he continues, “once I had found my super existence in God, I saw that this absolute light was I. Whatever fills the universe is I; other than myself there is nothing. The eternal being, the demiurge of the universe, is I.” (Godwin 84)LDerresearcher • modern • Godwin
Intensified Light and Senses
In each instance, the person is observing physical reality further up the stream. The light is brighter, the senses are clearer, more sensitive, and knowing flows directly into them.
For a moment I felt as if I were no longer in my physical body. The light coming into the room became much brighter. The plants took on a deep intensity. A passionate energy enveloped my total being, and I felt more alive than I’d ever been. This was total bliss. Thoughts of love and compassion for all life rushed through my head. (Browne 103-104)RotOSclairvoyant • modern • Browne
On my way to the office, I happened to look at the front block of the Rajgarh Palace . . . taking in my glance the sky as well as the roof and the upper part of the building. I looked casually at first, then, struck by something strange in their appearance, more attentively, unable to withdraw my gaze, and finally rooted to the spot I stared in amazement at the spectacle. . . .
I was looking at a scene familiar to me . . . but what I now saw was . . . a scene belonging not to the earth but to some fairyland, for the ancient, weather-stained front of the building, unadorned and commonplace, and the arch of the sky above it, bathed in the clear light of the sun, were both lit with a brilliant silvery luster that lent a beauty and a glory to both and created a marvelous light-and-shade effect impossible to describe. Wonder-struck, I turned my eyes in other directions, fascinated by the silvery shine, which glorified everything. . . .
I walked out onto the verandah . . . looking at the fine view. . . .
The magnified dimensions of the picture and the slightly chalky appearance of the objects were both present, but the dusty haze before my eyes had vanished and instead I was gazing fascinatedly at an extraordinarily rich blend of color and shade, shining with a silvery luster which lent an indescribable beauty to the scene. . . .
A surge of emotion too deep for words filled my whole being and tears gathered in my eyes in spite of myself. . . . The fascinating luster . . . was a projection of my own internal radiance.
A bright silvery sheen around every object, across the entire field of view, became a permanent feature of my vision. The azure dome of the sky . . . had a purity of color and a brightness impossible to describe. . . .
Sounds . . . possessed now an exotic quality and a distinctiveness that lent to music and melody a greater sweetness and to noise and clamor a more disagreeable harshness. . . . The olfactory, gustatory, and tactile centers as well exhibited a peculiar sensitivity and acuteness, clearly perceptible, but in point of magnitude nothing compared to what happened with my sight. . . .
The same quaint streets and buildings, the same Ganges with its swiftly flowing sapphire water . . . the whole assemblage lit with a glitter like that of freshly fallen snow when the sun shines upon it. . . .
With my inner vision I could distinctly perceive the flow of lucent currents of vital energy through the network of nerves in my body. A living silvery flame with a delicate gold tinge was clearly perceptible in the interior of my brain across the forehead. My thought images were vividly bright, and every object recalled to memory possessed radiance in the same manner as the concrete form. (Krishna 228-232)LWKmeditator • Hinduism • Krishna
He realizes the source is the light of his attention: “The fascinating luster was a projection of my own internal radiance.”
E.G.M. Richie: “Every leaf, every tree, every stone in every building was a sun unto itself, emanating love. This was no mere mental perception. It was a physical feeling that penetrated to my very core. . . . I knew that every particle of which I was composed vibrated in harmony with this magnificent loving power. Only my thoughts, somehow, stood at a distance, observing. I wandered about dazed, eyes wide. Never had anything living or otherwise shimmered with such a dance of vibrancy. And the blue sky and the sunlight crowned it all. My thoughts screamed with profound joy. My mind exploded, over and over, with this rush of infinitely profound awareness. . . . All Being was, in the last analysis, composed of the substance of Love.” (Atwater 92)BtLNDEr, researcher • modern • Atwater
Seeing Source Patterns
Jane: “Then, between one moment and the next, the world literally changed for me. . . . It’s like the old world but infinitely richer, more ‘now,’ built better, and with much greater depth. . . .
“Each person who passes the car is more than three-dimensional, super-real in this time. . . . It’s as if before I’ve seen only a part of people or things. . . .
“I could look at each person and sense his or her ‘model’ and all the variations, and see how the model was here and now in the person.” (Roberts 380-381)
I have experienced this many times on psychedelics.
Wanting to Share It
and say again, and it’s all I say,
I wish everyone
could know what I know” (Rumi 165)ERwisdom • Sufism • Rumi
This is an aftereffect of most mystical experiences. For suddenly the world has changed, expanded, and we realize it is so much bigger and more beautiful than we thought it was. We want to shout it from the rooftops.
See “Wanting To Tell the World” in ndes.php.
What to Do with Enlightenment?
Returning from Pure Consciousness
As soon as awareness returns from the Absolute, individual existence wakes up again due to previous impressions. The individual remembers that he/she is an individual, experiences bliss, and then gradually moves outward, back to the surface level of thinking. (MSI 50)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
Returning from higher consciousness, we become the selves we knew previously through our refocusing into the physical frequencies and thus the return of our physical memory. Our self is defined by our past experiences and the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that they cause in us.
Everyday Enlightenment
Gradually . . . the barrier between meditation and everyday life will crumble, the contrast between them will dissolve, and you will find yourself increasingly in your natural pure presence, without distraction. . . .
To integrate meditation in action is the whole ground and point of purpose of meditation. (Rinpoche 78)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
Perfection is to sit among people, sell and buy, marry and have children; and yet never leave the presence of God even for one moment.
- Imam Rabbani, Quoting Sayyid Al-Kharraz (Burnham 251)EJexperiencer • modern • Burnham
The Hasidic master disappears into God’s Life by transforming ordinary daily existence into the holy dance of ecstasy, by perceiving God only. (Hixon 110-111)
The Tantric practitioner does not reject the world dream. The Tantric Way is to continue to dream the universe, which is Ultimate Consciousness engaged in ecstatic worship of Itself. (Hixon 37)CHresearcher • modern • Hixon
I like the Zen story in which the disciple asked his master:
“Master, how do you put enlightenment into action? How do you practice it in everyday life?”
“By eating and by sleeping,” replied the master.
“But Master, everybody sleeps and everybody eats.”
“But not everybody eats when they eat, and not everybody sleeps when they sleep.” . . .
Be completely present in all your actions. (Rinpoche 79)TBoLDwisdom • Tibetan • Rinpoche
[Lawrence] found the magic in everything, be it philosophy or a field of grain. He could love equally every action he performed. . . . It was a blessing to be in his company and an honor to be his student. (Browne 146-147)RotOSclairvoyant • modern • Browne
“After the ecstasy, the laundry” — Zen saying Qwisdom • various
“Before enlightenment, chop wood, draw water; after enlightenment, chop wood, draw water.” — Zen saying Qwisdom • various
In the process of Enlightenment there is indeed a point when we become ecstatic over rediscovering the One, but this excitement eventually disappears as we understand more clearly that the One is fully present through every state of consciousness, transcendental and mundane. (Hixon 104)CHresearcher • modern • Hixon
Natural Inner Guidance
The focus of a totally free being is guided by the need of the moment. . . . For such a being, life is a constant unfolding. No need to think about what to do. It’s all intuitive. It’s as simple as the innocence and freshness that a young child experiences. Only in this silence—the silence that lies behind thought—can one hear the symphony of the universe, can one hear the whisper of the Word, can one approach the inner temple wherein dwells the soul. (Dass 214)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
Whenever the joy of meditation has returned subconsciously during my active hours, I have been subtly directed to adopt the right course in everything. (Yogananda 149)AoaYwisdom • Hinduism • Yogananda
Becoming a Light for Others
There is nothing left to do but Be, allowing the flow of creation to pass through us unobstructed. . . . The individual has become an incarnate expression of All-That-Is. A life of service and cooperation with Cosmic Forces begins and continues forever. (MSI 341)Ewisdom • modern, Hindu • Isham
From The Nirvanic Path, “Yoga of the Uncreated”:
90) After having attained Liberation, there cometh infinite compassion for all those sentient beings who have not as yet recognized the true nature of their own mind. (Dvagpo-Lharje 139)TYSDwisdom • Tibetan • Dvagpo-Lharje
After one arrives at the summit, after going through the total transformation of being, after becoming free of fear, doubt, confusion, and self-consciousness, there is yet one more step to the completion of that journey: the return to the valley below, to the every-day world. Who it is that returns is not who began the climb in the first place. The being that comes back is quietness itself, is compassion and wisdom, is the truth of the ages. Whatever humble or elevated position that being holds within the community, he or she becomes a light for others on the way, a statement of the freedom that comes from having touched the top of the mountain. (Dass 211)JoAwisdom • modern • Dass
This love, with no fear and no criticism, starts from within and radiates out into levels of others’ consciousness. (McKnight 143)CJOBEr • modern • McKnight
Opening to Beauty: I’ve no doubt this is a very powerful dream technique. Spiritually, it is very powerful, as that focus on appreciation opens us to higher energy and awareness, greater connection and communication. It focuses us in the now.