Celestial Bodies Within

The qualities and abilities of your soul are beyond science fiction or fantasy. Your soul is stretchy, can divide itself, can travel anywhere and remembers everything. Your soul can span across and inhabit multiple octaves of consciousness simultaneously. Your soul has free will—the most precious gift of all for those who would be creators in the playground of the Creator.

Spiritual seekers have learned various terms for aspects of our higher selves. Christic, Buddhic, Atman, I AM, Monad, Causal Body, etc. Many have gained some understanding of how these purely spiritual “bodies” both interpenetrate and exceed one another in frequency and amplitude of light energy. For most people, this is an intellectual item to consider and understand as a road map to one’s “self” but not much more. I would like to ask you to consider inhabiting these bodies consciously and learning to experience life through the lens of each of your celestial bodies.

In a previous article, I described placing your attention upon a spiritual master and pouring your love to that one in order to elevate yourself into a common space, to learn from and to absorb the radiation of that one. The same skill of placing your attention upon a lofty virtue or a master can be used to place your attention upon your Christic presence or any of the higher foci of self. “What do you picture or appeal to?” you are probably wondering. How can you form and hold as a target a part of “self” which was previously known only in a purely intellectual way?

The way it worked for me was that a particular master presented this challenge to me and then held before my inner sight during meditation, day after day, a glyph and an exalted feeling of being on this Christ Plane. All I had to do was gaze upon this glyph and absorb his radiation and I was (part of my soul substance was) drawn up into this plane. The first few times, I felt overwhelmed with impressions but oddly, somewhat blind and unable to categorize or understand anything. It was like a void. But not really.

By this time I had learned the inestimable value of persisting and doing an exercise like this day after day after day for 2-3 weeks. Sure enough, by the end of the first week I began to perceive and understand more and more of what there was to experience in this rarified realm. I think that when you do this, you are stretching or dividing your soul substance; keeping part in the waking brain-mind and pressing the rest of you into an adventure. And it requires some time for the brain-mind and the electrical circuits of the soul-brain connection to be able to convey something useful to a person steeped in our limited 3+1 dimensional thinking for many years.

I felt like a fish out of water—trying to see and navigate by just flopping on the bank. But persistence is rewarded. I won’t go into all the things you learn and master. But a key part is that you feel big—much bigger than your physical body. And you have to quit thinking of time and space as linear and limited to be able to navigate.

You can do this. Just ask. Over a long period of time I did this same exercise for my Buddhic, Atmic, Monadic and larger bodies. But I also did it for some of my lower bodies too—my astral, etheric and mental bodies. I found that if you do these sustained crash-course-like expeditions to all these places that you end up feeling whole in a way that you could never have imagined before. There really is so much that results from this that words fail.

These realms can become known to you and you can navigate them with your eyes open, walking around, seeing in multiple dimensions simultaneously. I found it worth the effort and I continue to practice.

A Magnetic Heart

Where your attention is, there flows a portion of your soul. And that which you place your attention upon is magnified.

In my earlier post I mentioned that when we place our attention completely upon the “Jewel in the Lotus” or flame of divinity within the heart chakra that this focus and ones soul “being there” causes a great change inside us. What I’ve noticed is a kind of swelling, giddy feeling and when I persist beyond this initial stage, it becomes a pronounced “magnetic” feeling in my chest cavity. This might strike you as odd that I would use an adjective like “magnetic” to describe sensations within myself. Well, I agree. But I can’t think of a more descriptive word.

So, what is useful or desirable about this “magnetic heart” state? Well, that radiance and magnetic feeling is literally God within you.  Not the “far-away God” as in, “Oh God, help me out of this mess!!” (a God separate from me). I’m talking about God which is one with all that He/She created. This “oneness with God and all of life” is something that many people have heard of and of which they have an intellectual understanding. But this burning, swelling, giddy, MAGNETIC feeling in our heart chakra is the very personal, empirical experience of that oneness between our soul and the higher self which is God.

When successful in this mediation, if you have some visual or clairvoyant sensitivity you will notice a great increase in the brightness of your aura, with the source of the light being this magnetic, bright light in your chest. You may have a sensation of spinning or pulsing in your chest area or you may notice a feeling of radiation emanating from your heart out to some distance significantly beyond your physical body. This increased spiritual light in your aura will almost certainly elevate your spiritual senses beyond what is normal for you. With practice and persistence you may develop the sense of “being everywhere” at once and feeling one with all aspects of life. Fear and worry are completely erased.

I have spoken to quite a number of people who have occasionally and spontaneously had this deep, powerful spiritual experience and it usually is considered a highlight in the life of that one. Many seek to recapture the experience by duplicating the circumstances which they think caused the experience. Others lament and wonder why it doesn’t “just happen” all the time. For my part, I believe that many true spiritual practices, when done with great devotion, can lead to this state. I personally have experienced this burning heart/expanded consciousness after long sessions of chanting mantras or singing Hindu bhajans or other spiritual music, after long periods of prayer or by meditating in nature or upon beautiful artwork. The great benefit of the particular Heart Meditation I’m advocating here though is that it is faster and more direct than any other way I’ve found to achieve this state. I simply don’t always have time to chant or sing for hours or to be in nature or whatever “circumstance” or method that people commonly mention as the way they’ve utilized to bring them to this Samadhi experience. It’s the dilemma of many people these days that live busy lives which include so many professional and family commitments.

With practice over time I’ve learned to enter into this Magnetic Heart, expanded aura, bright lights, Samadhi experience in just 5-10 minutes and it doesn’t matter where I am. All I require is the time and space to stop talking or thinking or “engaging” in the outer world for a short time. With practice you don’t even need quiet or a peaceful setting. The two keys to success in this meditation are:

1. Develop the ability to concentrate and exclude the flow of sensory and thought data from your waking attention.
2. Keep your attention upon the tactile feelings in your heart chakra, at the level of your sternum, and rhythmically see and feel the full power and presence of God there.

As I’ve mentioned, it can be useful to press your thumb and forefinger gently into your sternum at the beginning of this meditation in order to give you a tactile feeling to focus on. It can be done very discreetly and need not call attention to you.

Please don’t feel daunted if you don’t experience all of these things in your first attempts at this. There are a number of energy circuits in your subtle bodies which may require gradual modifications or there may be blockages which must be cleared in order to accommodate this greater light. If you persist in this meditation your higher self will bring about these changes in a safe and gentle way as a result of your choice and dedication to this practice.

The Heart of Non-Duality

The single most important spiritual act I perform each day is to meditate upon my oneness with God as a locus within my heart chakra until I feel a sustained burning, swelling feeling there in the center of my chest.

I’ve mentioned tactile feeling before in previous posts. Using tactile feeling has been a very important key for me in overcoming my restless mind and to allow me to enter into deeper states of consciousness. You see, we live in a day and age of infinite distractions and due to this we all have varying degrees of both willfulness in our faculty of the attention and an atrophied will at controlling it.

Why do I say that? Try this.  Empty your mind and have no thought at all and do it for 5 solid minutes. Take mental note of when you fail and what thought it was that intruded.  You’ll find that during this time certain sounds in the room or other stimuli will cause your mental apparatus to leap into action and to begin analyzing what is going on. If you persist at the exercise you will probably begin to be able to hold your mind still for longer periods. But then, if a thought comes along which “is important” you may experience a difficulty with dismissing it. You try and then it comes back. Both of these examples show that there is a willfulness to this faculty and that our ability to truly control it is limited in some cases.

“No thought” meditation is really good for you and I recommend doing it regularly. But how do we overcome this willful, wandering mind? It’s a little like “don’t think of pink elephants”. Well, it’s a lot easier to firmly hold on to something than to try to hold on to nothing. The best way I’ve found to be in stillness and “No Thought” is to focus on a tactile feeling. You could focus on your breath or the feeling in your big toe or any discreet feeling you have in your body.  But the best tactile focus I’ve found is the burning feeling I get when I’ve spent time with my attention upon my heart chakra, feeling and knowing that God and infinite light is there and that I’m one with it all.  This serves two purposes at once:

1. It is something to focus upon which yields tactile feedback when you succeed
2. It raises your consciousness immediately and tremendously

If you meditate upon your unity with God in your heart chakra it changes something in you. There is a spiritual fiery flame there inside your heart chakra—the “Jewel in the Lotus” which can grow brighter and larger when we put our attention upon it and acknowledge our oneness with God. If you persist, it spins faster and faster and it grows larger and brighter. This is when you begin to feel it as a tangible, physical feeling in your chest area as a burning or swelling feeling. When you feel this begin to happen, persist at it, focusing your attention exactly where you feel this burning and choose to intensify the feeling. You may wish to press there on your sternum to create a tactile feeling with your finger before the flame expanding takes over and creates the burning sensation.

I feel that when you persist at this and do it over a period of time you will find that you have developed the “Merkaba” for yourself and that you’ll soon begin to experience some of the benefits attributed to the Merkaba (look it up....). Another interesting development is that you will begin to truly understand and experience non-duality or “unity” consciousness. You’ll feel and see your oneness with all life and fear and doubt will be missing while you are in this state.

Try it….you’ll like it.

I AM Changing….

An important skill to cultivate in meditation is the ability to deftly and consciously Accept the spiritual radiation offered from divine sources and to Accept the change that it brings within you.

In addition to the guidance and inspiration that you can receive by meditating with a spiritual Master you will soon begin to realize another benefit. With each repeated session of meditating with your Master you will from time to time notice that you feel very refreshed afterwards. Perhaps you’ll notice a “lightness” or pleasant swelling or spinning sensation in your head and heart area. It makes you feel happy and you find yourself confident and free from fear or worry.  This is the result of the Master’s radiation of pure electronic Light into your aura. This electronic Light can have a profound effect upon the purity of your aura and the clarity of your emotions and thought.  It could be likened to a stream of pure water pouring into a cup of muddy water.  After a little while the mud has been flushed out and only pure water remains.

The effects of this purifying radiation often last for the rest of the day and can really make a difference in your overall happiness and spiritual wellbeing.  But beyond the relatively short term effects, this solar radiation, when imbibed with the intent to “become” that light and to “change me” to permanently be more and more like that Master, affects permanent change in you. The conscious intent and repetition are the keys.

The conscious intent and repetition are the keys. It was not a mistake that I repeated that last sentence. It is very easy to drink water from a glass in a passive or thoughtless way.  And, it is very easy to just “try” things like this a few times and then move on to something else.  But there is a monumental difference between imbibing something good for you and in imbibing it with the persistent thought and feeling of the good effects you desire and expect from it. And there is also a very strong cumulative effect upon you when you practice a particular spiritual exercise every day for at least 2 weeks.

If you eat a vitamin and you contemplate and accept the good, permanent, health-giving effects it will bring to you, I believe that you will multiply the good effects of that vitamin by a startling amount. Likewise, if you drink in the beautiful radiation of a spiritual Master and hold the persistent thought and feeling that it is “changing me permanently”, then your repeated practice of this yoga will indeed change you over time in very noticeable ways. Try this every day for two weeks and take note of the stupendous changes that happened to you. Perhaps consider keeping a journal of your experiences while practicing this.

Another aspect of this is in learning to accept in a tactile way. It’s like closing a circuit so that something flows—and feeling the currents flowing. A baby bird who opens her mouth and accepts food from her mother has a definite, tactile feeling of accepting the food, right?  Ponder this and learn to “do it”. When consciously accepting, the way I start out is by pressing out with a ray of love and gratitude to the Master from my heart which I can both see and feel. Immediately, I feel a return current like a fire hose of delightful radiant light energy pouring into my being. And as I persist at holding this circuit open with my attention and gratitude, the fire hose continues to shower my being.  So, in my experience it is something more than briefly and simply thinking or saying “I accept”. A rhythmic and persistent flowing of gratitude over this ray of my attention keeps the line open for a stupendous shower of light. Try doing this every day for at least two weeks and really try to feel it. Perhaps commit to yourself that you will persist in this meditation each day “until you can feel it”. This strategy brought me rapid results.

Try it with different Masters. Try it with the sun or a star. Try it with your own divine self. Try to feel the qualitative and quantitative differences between these different sources. Conscious intent and repetition (practice) are the keys.

I Hear You!

In the last article I mentioned the great efficacy of contemplating a virtue and that when practiced repeatedly over many days for a particular virtue that very great and permanent benefits can be gained.

To me, meditation is a “Yoga” and there are perhaps many different Yogas within the domain of silent meditation. Yoga means to “Yoke” oneself to something. In the practices that I’m speaking about we are yoking ourselves to various elements of the purely spiritual world in order to increase and magnify within our personal worlds whatever benefit those spiritual sources have to offer.

What if we shift to yoking our attention to an exalted spiritual being? There are a couple of ways to get started with this.

One way is to simply choose a spiritual Master, preferably one who is ascended and no longer in embodiment and to form a mental image of that one while in silent, eyes-closed meditation and to simply hold the image steady and gaze upon it. If your mental or emotional bodies are misbehaving you may struggle with seeing this image morph into other forms. This is a form of wandering mind and can be overcome by a combination of gently reconstructing the image of your Master and also sending a feeling of love and gratitude to that actual Master and reinforcing for some time this feeling within you of loving this elder brother or sister. I’ve found that using positive emotions such as love and gratitude and centering/holding my attention upon these feelings can really help to stabilize a connection that I’m building with a spiritual being.

Once this connection is stabilized and you have some momentum at this practice you will begin to experience some amazing things. New ideas will come to you, apparently from within your own being which is not the result of a wandering mind. This is how telepathy begins. When you really are absorbed in the feeling experience of loving your Master and gazing upon that one, but you begin to simultaneously see, on another level, visions or iconic information, this is how telepathy works.

I choose to observe this info and act upon it without mental analysis and I’d encourage you to consider doing this also. If you begin to analyze what you are receiving, comparing it to what you “know”, you will be “lowering” (in frequency) the locus of your attention which will cause the quality or even the authenticity of the communication to degrade rapidly. This is because the mental body is inherently lower in frequency than the meeting ground where we successfully conduct such “meetings”. I found it best to write down my experiences after the meditation was over and to ponder things then—rather than analyze the info during the experience.

Obviously, if you feel that you are receiving instructions to do something which is against your values then it may be that you are receiving something from lower frequency regions and you should not act upon them. The key here is the feeling that accompanies what you receive. When you are receiving something that is from heavenly sources it will impart a very positive feeling to you and there is a buoyant impression of light and happiness. Ponder it all as you write it down later and you will know the truth of things.

What I tend to receive during these sessions is suggestions for new avenues of mastering or healing myself and ideas for doing good works. Basically, everything I’ve learned that I’m blogging about here was received in this way and then practiced and developed later. I would suggest keeping to yourself what you receive and to consider it “for you”. You can avoid lots of potential traps involving your ego or perhaps inadvertently misleading others or creating karma for yourself if you keep what you receive between you and your teacher.

Another way to approach this is to choose something that you’d like to improve at or learn, spiritually-speaking. Raise yourself up in your meditation first by simply loving God and all creation and quieting all the elements of your being. Then make the request to be tutored on the topic you’ve chosen. Then wait quietly with no other thoughts. Emanate gratitude for what you anticipate receiving.

For the most part I do not actually see human forms when beings of light come to instruct me. I am working with them in a formless realm of pure spirit. It may be very different for you. I do see energy, motion, color patterns and iconic or archetypal imagery which are the basic way of telepathic communication. I usually do not ask “who is this?” that is teaching me—preferring to focus all of my attention upon being an efficient receiver. But essentially the experience is the same as the one above. You have attracted to yourself a light-being who comes and spends time with you in a very beautiful type of communion, teaching you as an elder brother or sister would.

I think this activity can best be described as “listening”. It works best when we practice being good listeners.

Are you feeling the Love Yet?

Developing tactile feeling beyond the confines of the physical body opens a kind of mystical doorway which can only be mastered and experienced if you have made progress disciplining your attention.

On my path of discovery I was next led to develop the art of contemplating and amplifying virtues. I happened to choose as my first subject the virtue of Divine Love. I chose this because I sensed that it would bring me balance. But it proved to be a springboard to so many other unique avenues that I would advocate starting here to anyone who isn’t sure where to start.

Using my new ability to concentrate very deeply upon a subject, I contemplated Divine Love for several weeks in my 30 minutes-per-day meditation sessions. During this contemplation I would often find synonyms for Divine Love offered to me by invisible hearts and minds which I then devoured in my absorption of their meaning and feeling. Gradually I began to notice that I was seeing colors in my inner vision and feeling these subtle gradations and expressions of Divine Love. I was then led to focus more and more upon the tactile feeling of the presence of these Divine Love lights and I was shown how to dial up or down the visual and heat intensity of these flames through the faculty of my feeling body coupled with some help from visualization. I practiced this rheostat effect a lot and also I practiced creating pillars of these flames in front of me and holding them steady for as long as possible.

Simultaneously though I was also encouraged to practice reaching out with a kind of tactile/auric feeling to touch a wall in the room I was in. After some practice with this I was encouraged to practice reaching out and touching one wall AND the opposite wall simultaneously—effectively stretching my normal 6-foot-reach paradigm out to 15 feet. This creates some rather bewildering sensations at first because what you’re actually doing is expanding your aura and changing the long-accepted paradigm of “me” as a discreet, fixed 6 foot tall body to “me” as an expandable, unbounded energy being. The next stop is to reach out and touch a distant mountain peak—and then another peak on the other side of the valley and so on. It’s really important to practice this often and cultivate the tactile feeling of being larger and “variable in size” so to speak.

The combination of these two new skills leads to the ability to not only generate a great fiery presence of Divine Love (or whatever virtue you choose to develop) at will, but to then bless and enfold a large area with this beautiful light. You do this by expanding your aura and “being” (with your tactile, feeling nature) that flame-presence for a room, a city block or something larger! At this point, if you have been engaged in a regular decree practice for many years you will probably find that giving your decrees is VERY DIFFERENT! I’ll leave it at that!

Developing tactile feeling beyond the confines of the physical form is the key to the expansion and control of the aura. Please don’t underestimate the value of frequently practicing this in the odd, otherwise wasted time in your life while waiting for others, etc.

The Control of the Faculty of the Attention is the Key to Adeptship!

The most profitable decision I have ever made was to learn to meditate.

For many people the word meditation brings to mind the image and idea of a person sitting peacefully with eyes closed and perhaps “de-stressing” by disengaging from everything. It can do that. But over the course of a number of articles I will share here you will see that resting and de-stressing is not the most remarkable result of meditation, especially if you stick with it over a period of time. Instead, I’d like to suggest the possibility of an enormously active and fruitful inner work involving energy, travel, learning, expanding and ultimately, the mastery of every element of ones being as the fruit of meditation. I’d like to convince you that meditation is the next spiritual practice that you should choose to focus on and to stick with it past the “tried it” phase and into the “oh, my, gosh!” stage. I’m convinced that by then you’ll need no further convincing or coaching in order to choose meditation as a lifelong practice.

It has been my experience that if a person desires spiritual mastery all that’s really needed is the commitment to meditate for perhaps 30 minutes a day. I truly believe that if you made that commitment to yourself right now—you set aside 30 minutes and then showed up for the 30 minute slot at least 5 out of 7 days, that you would attract to yourself a number of angels and spiritual masters who are eager to teach you everything you require to become a spiritual adept, if that is your intent. I further predict that after some initial time spent gaining a rudimentary control over your subtle faculties, that you would move into perhaps the most exciting spiritual adventure you can even imagine right now.

I did just that. I didn’t read any books or seek any earthly teachers in order to learn meditation. I just sat down one day and I asked Jesus to sit with me, to protect me and to teach me to meditate. And He did.

The first thing conveyed to me was the requirement that I be able to fix my attention upon something—anything, and to hold it there without straining or wandering. So I practiced resting my attention upon various physical objects and mental concepts in a restful, observant mode. The main skills to develop at first are:

1. Hold the attention still without straining—and if your attention wanders bring it back gently and lovingly, without feelings of frustration
2. Develop the ability to observe and notice quickly if your attention wanders. Don’t underestimate this one!

After doing this for some weeks I began to notice that I was much more aware of what we call the “faculty of the attention”. It was beginning to feel like a discreet, tactile part of me (like my hand)—and I could concentrate much longer on a concept or object. I began to be able to hold my attention for many minutes at a time without catching myself involuntarily wandering into a thread of thought—my mind was beginning to come into harmony with a higher part of my “self” that was observing and directing the exercise.

I consider what I have just shared to be a foundational, absolutely crucial skill to gain—the ability to concentrate gently upon a single subject and to gain a strong sense of observing and directing all of your component parts, subtle and physical, from a point “above it all”.

If you would like to come on this journey with me I’d strongly advocate that you stop reading now and actually do what I’m describing for at least several weeks or until you have actually gained some momentum at entering the disciplined state that I described above. Perhaps you are there already or way past that point. Be honest with yourself though! For a number of weeks I admit that I would catch my mind wandering away about 50 times in 30 minutes. The process of getting that count down to only a dozen is very much like strengthening a muscle and there isn’t any substitute for this exercise. If you can honestly hold your attention upon a single subject for 30 minutes and you catch your mind wandering only a dozen (or fewer) times, then move on to the next installment.

If you plan to breeze through and just read all of this without actually doing it and mastering it I have to say that I feel kind of sad about that.