Hello and welcome back for another month of fun and mental aerobics! I would like to talk about non-materialism as an idea that has the power to lift our Spirit and move our visualization practice forward monumentally. There has been a strong theme in all my work about putting the emphasis on a more mental and less physical approach to your thinking.
Mental barriers can arise in our visualized experience in as many ways as we can be chased by witches and monsters in our dreams. And both are really linked, in that they can both hurt how we feel, frustrate us and reduce our quality of life. So, let�s take a cue from Dante and trip the light fantastic through the Heaven, Purgatory and Hell of Materialism, and see what makes freedom from materialism so desirable. Then, we will talk about how to actually go about removing materialism from our mental state. To begin with, we will start with Materialism Hell.
Here, a person is cut off from their sense of being made of consciousness. They feel totally physical, and see their mental state as being completely enslaved by their physical environment and body. What is happening here is that the person�s consciousness is actually being �squeezed� into a tighter configuration. As our consciousness contains many separate consciousnesses, these desires and feelings are naturally in conflict with one another to a certain degree.
For example, we want privacy and feel vulnerable but also crave intimacy. We want freedom from work, but crave work as a form of structure. When these consciousnesses are crushed together by our materialism of mind, we experience the convergence of our fantasies, fears, phobias, etc. with our physical reality. The many voices cry out in pain, because there is an increasing sense that their needs cannot be met in the physical world. This sense of torment can be seen in people who have achieved great success and remain miserable, although they make every effort to appear happy, as well as those who have bottomed out in the game of life.
In this Hell, every voice has to be satisfied by physical events. The mind and imagination and ignored as being irrelevant. There is tremendous anger, greed and fear, as every need must be met in the physical world. The individual desires do not have room to breath, in the sense that they are all in competition with each other for time and attention. Fantasy becomes unbearably painful because it simply reminds us of all the things we don�t �have� and reality becomes painful in all the ways it doesn�t live up to our fantasy expectations. This is, in a sense, the highest form of being delusional, short of schizophrenia, in that both fantasy reality and physical reality are lost beneath the thrashing waves of our own suffocating expectation and desires. So this is not a fun place to be.
Leaving Materialism Hell, we enter Materialism Purgatory, where the landscape changes. Here, each part of our consciousness is allowed some room to breath. But, there is still the pain of failed expectations. The expansion of our consciousness is caused by our allowing ourselves to have a fantasy life. The continuation of the same problem of overlapping fantasy and physical life, and the stress of needing to have everything we want on a physical level, continues to bear down on us. On the positive side, we are not as overwhelmed and distraught by that conflict as we were before.
Entering Non-Materialism Heaven, you see consciousness expanding to the point where there is room for all aspects of consciousness to begin to be completely fulfilled. Each component of consciousness begins to find increasing satisfaction in fantasy and in reality, as needs are more successfully negotiated with reality. Intelligence begins to truly function for the first time, as innate beauty of life if finally revealed.
The reason for this being the first time it is truly revealed is that both the true value of the fantasy reality and physical reality have been up to this point overshadowed by negative emotions such as fear and anger, generated by the inability of the self to find satisfaction in the combination of physical and fantasy realities. But now, with plenty of fantasy room to explore without that baggage, real emotional and mental satisfaction can be finally tasted. And, just as a fine meal could be ruined by a pinch of sand, so was our quality of life ruined by our inability to fully use our own consciousness.
It is highly ironic that materialism, which would seemingly drive us into the physical world in a more highly attuned way, actually has the opposite effect, driving us into a state of consciousness where we can neither truly perceive the physical world. Like a VW Bug filled with clowns, we are squeezed in tight and hard pressed to negotiate the open road. Our quality of consciousness is ultimately the barometer of how �realistic� we are able to be, and getting the bulk of our needs met in the fantasy world is the key.
Exercise #32: Reducing Materialism of Consciousness
In this exercise, we will explore materialism levels and how they affect your state of consciousness. Begin by sitting or lying down in a relaxed posture. Imagine yourself lying down on a sofa in an imaginary setting. From here, you can control your level of materialism. Begin by counting from one to ten, and in doing so, reducing your materialism by twenty percent. Notice any change in your mood and outlook, and note it in your visualization journal. Now, reduce your materialism by 70%, and note the change in feeling again. As you reduce your materialism, you will note a shift toward a lighter, less anxious feeling, and a more expanded view of your life.
You may notice that you are less inclined to impose negative fantasies on your physical life, and less likely to feel badly about your current quality of life. Try and see how low you can get it. At the highest levels, you will have a very high, expanded feeling that you will want to have all the time. To do so, you will need to practice this state of consciousness on a daily basis. It is also helpful to meditate on reduced materialism. Make it a long term goal to make reduced materialism a permanent state of consciousness.
Well, that is it for today. I hope you have found this useful and interesting. Until next month! Love, Chris
Visualization News - May 2002
I'm sorry for the delay this month. I had a crazy April, and I will just leave it at that. I'd like to talk about visualization and manifestation. It can be difficult to use visualization as a means to manifest things in our lives for a number of reasons. We may not pursue what we truly want because doubt that we can ever get it. We may doubt that we want what we are trying to manifest because we think that it may not bring us happiness, or that it may complicate our lives. It can also feel as if we are only addressing one piece of a larger puzzle.
What does happiness look like for us? It is entirely personal, but can be difficult to pin down. We can also have difficulty because we are used to relating to the world in terms of having other peoples� values shoved down our throats. We may feel like we haven�t lived enough to really pin down what we want yet. Let�s face it; part of the charm of life is knowing that positive unexpected events await you. When you feel like you have your whole life planned out, something within you dies. I was certainly plagued with all these problems in my visualization-manifestation efforts. To address these issues I have created a visualization practice for the purpose of manifestation that addresses these concerns.
What does it take to manifest anything? The desire for it will get you there if you are patient enough to sustain your hope and effort over a long period of time. You have to perform you visualization practice consistently all the way through to the complete fulfillment of your project or you can fall short of completely getting what you want. Also, you are really trying to manifest a feeling rather than a thing. For example, you may crave the feeling of sailing but be fixated on owning a sailboat.
You don�t have to own one in order to have the experience. You could have a friend who happily shares their boat with you, or you might be able to rent one, or whatever the case may be. Or, the feeling you crave may be just being in a natural setting, free from worry. It just depends on the person. The nature of desire is entirely personal, but our approach to fulfilling it tends to be completely impersonal. We identify a thing to get to a feeling, when we should be identifying the feeling first, then associating it with a scene, things, people, events, etc. that will convey that feeling into our life.
Below is a description of a visualization exercise that I created that meets these criteria. The entire process should begin with visualizing yourself as being in Spirit, as this is the frame of consciousness that the process will come from. Please visit www.geocities.com/visualizenews/spirit.html for an explanation of the idea of Spirit if you are not familiar with it. Place yourself in Spirit plane. Then, focus on a feeling that you really want. Take some time to do this with care.
Make the feeling very passionate, real and �sexy�. Then, let that feeling become a place around you, and a scene, and a setting, and a mood, and even a long-standing situation. Let it fill every pore of this experience. Make the feeling real and don�t worry about the scene being somewhat idealized. You can conceptualize this process by looking at how dreams are formed. Dreams convey emotions, and these emotions are experienced as living scenes where your identity, the people you interact with, your environment, and so forth, are all there with the express purpose of conveying an emotion. The witch that paralyzes you or the roll of twenty-dollar bills you unexpectedly find in your pocket are there to evoke a strong emotional response. You will start with just a feeling, then the scene will flesh out around you. Take note of whatever happens and move forward, allowing more and more detail to come in, until you have a specific scene, and you know what your identity is in that scene.
Then, own this experience internally. In your mind, while holding both the feeling and the image, mentally yell �THIS is my Guiding Star; my guiding star that guides me towards this state of fulfillment.� Then, release the feeling and the image both. Let it flow away from you and form into the image of a bright star in the night sky above you. Over time, you will �get� it more, in terms of having it manifest more powerfully, more often, and for longer periods of time in your life and consciousness. It is now a star in your sky for the rest of your life, drawing you to it. You never have to redo this exercise for this particular desire or even think about it again. You can repeat this process for every major feeling you desire.
In the world of passion and emotions, there is no time, so the effect is very long term. Time does not cause it to decay in the same way that you might lose interest in acquiring a physical thing over time. Manifestation happens in the physical, but it happens from the emotional level, and that place is painted in broad strokes of time that far exceed a single human lifetime. Even if you later forget about this visualization, it will continue to draw you forward into its energy more and more over time, until it is fulfilled completely. The only thing that will stop it is a radical change in your emotional desires. You will have the opportunity, if you live long enough, to explore these feelings in you physical life, on many different occasions. Passion is the only thing that can draw you, because movement through consciousness and life is desire, and passion is the essence of desire. It will be there after you �die�, and you can experience it in a non-physical state there, or in a physical state in a future lifetime if you still desire.
You can�t let the realities along the way stop you from following your guiding star. It may involve twists and turns, but you are always moving fast toward reaching it. Actually, with the guiding star, part of the pleasure is the sense of expectation that it is coming, the pleasure of receiving the actual manifestation, and then receiving it more and more and more. Never give up, even when reality seems to prevent your wish. As long as that feeling excites you, it has the power to draw you back over and over again. It can overcome ANY obstacle in your path, and has the power of the unexpected. When our mind paints prison bars on our future, we can look up and remind ourselves that life always contains the unexpected and the miraculous.
