Hello and welcome back! Today I will be continuing with part six of a nine-part series on the theme of internal healing. I have to admit that I generated this material as part of my attempt to heal myself of a chronic health condition. Although these techniques have been very valuable to me, they haven’t healed me physically, so at this point you should think of them as purely healing to the psyche. There are twenty-six “healing keys” in all, but we will only be discussing the fifteenth through seventeenth keys in this edition, which is plenty to work with over several sittings. In fact, I would recommend breaking it up over at least three sessions if possible. For February 2004, I will roll out numbers eighteen through twenty of the “Healing Keys.”
Before I discuss the fifteenth healing key, I want to explain the meditation that you will use with all the healing keys. The meditation is specific to this exercise, although it could be used in other contexts. We will call it the “healing lock” meditation. This meditation will specifically work with each “healing key” in the best possible way to release its maximum positive impact on you. Begin by getting relaxed and have a notebook and pen handy.
Visualize a gold or copper circle with a black (old fashioned) keyhole design in the middle (see above). As you breath in, say internally, “I am in healing lock meditation on…,” here you breath out slowly, saying internally, “…the healing key of ____healing____ .” You will fill those spaces in with the name of the healing key, which is always described in the form “x healing y.” Conceptualize this meditation as being the perfect lock for the key to operate in, the perfect means to achieve the healing. Simply plug in the name of the healing key after reading the description and memorizing its basic meaning. If you have insights during your meditation, you can jot them down at the end of the meditation period.
The fifteenth healing key is freedom from guilt healing the ability to play. The ability to play is something fundamental to our being and part of what we need to enjoy being alive. As adults we sometimes forget this as we get caught up in greed and “necessity.” It isn’t just the act of play itself that satisfies, but the spirit of the act that conveys the benefits. Without that spirit the activity doesn’t offer more than superficial relief from stress.
The whole being, who we are, is all about desire. We are made up of desires that motivate and drive us to do things. These desires come out of us constantly in our thoughts and actions. We desire anger and so we feel angry and victimized. We desire depression and so we feel depressed and victimized. We hold the key to our state of identification at all times and that key is our own desire. What we desire we get.
Play creates by compelling us to de-stress through role-playing. This allows us to escape our habitual identification and express more positive desires directly. There is very little suspension of gratification in play, so in turn there is a kind of coming-back to who you really are in a fundamentally honest way. Play relieves us of the artificiality of suspending our desires to do things we don’t want to do.
Guilt is a creation of the adult mind aimed at socializing us. It is really a thinly coated layer of fear. We hold ourselves to this fear because we don’t want to be fully accountable for our actions and our role in society. Instead, we want to be imprisoned by the beliefs and attitudes of others and to be brainwashed, held down and generally oppressed by a system that doesn’t care about us. Why do we have this insane desire? Because we fear what the responsibility really means for us. We fear the unknown. We want the safety of the cage and the reassurance of a small box over our head.
Guilt is the surest way to enforce this system of thought. We tell ourselves that other people cause us to feel embarrassed or shamed if we don’t live up to their standards. The fear of punishment we feel as children becomes the more sophisticated guilt feels of adulthood. Guilt should be separated from conscience or empathy by observing the differences. Guilt operates through fear while empathy shows us the other person’s pain and makes us want to be a better person.
Guilt blocks play by causing us to become, through constant fear, more and more identified with the person we have convinced ourselves that we are in our adult lives. The job, the marriage and the friendships all define us. We are too scared to speak our minds, free our attitudes and live our truth. Any attempt to do these things could lead to being shamed in our significant relationships. Guilt draws tighter and tighter lines around our identity.
What happens to desires when they are suppressed? Do they sit idly by and do nothing, or do they actively attempt to get what they want through other, more subconscious means? Obviously desire only knows what it wants and never stops trying to get it. Frustration and rage build up as desire is continually thwarted. The mechanics of repression are set in motion and soon we are bitter, tired and frustrated. The stresses on the system take multiple tolls on us and the relationships we have.
Guilt is a shield against yourself. It is a protection against the truth of who you are. It is a denial of the power of your own conscience to teach you, replacing this natural process with an unnatural one. As if a stranger had moved into your home and started managing how you spent your money and free time, so does guilt move in and dominate your life in a pushy, bullying manner. When you finally identify with your own guilt you cannot even see this silent enemy as it wreaks havoc on your life.
Guilt cripples your ability to feel, snuffing out any feelings with fear. Guilt stifles spontaneity by constantly forcing you to fulfill a role. Guilt teaches you to fear other people which in turn stifles love. Guilt cripples role-playing by making you fear your own impulses and where they might take you. Guilt stands between you and Heaven because Heaven is completely about fulfillment in the now in harmony with others under one Mind. How can the One, which expresses itself as the many, be at war with itself? How can your friends and partner be in conflict with you? It is simply impossible. Therefore our perception of conflict must be based on a false self.
To remove guilt we must first understand the most fundamental desire of it. Guilt only desires conformity with others and for your real self to disappear under a sea of humanity. “Fear your fellow man,” is the catch-phrase of guilt. To disarm this fear, we must trust that there is a better way to live and use logic to demonstrate it. Then, with practice, we can live that new reality.
But, rather than doing things in this order, let’s just skip all of this and try something more to the point. The alternative to guilt is desire. The truth is that what you desire is in complete harmony with what everyone else desires, when you know yourself. If you desire to hurt others then you have to still feel that other people frustrate you at some level. You live entirely in your mind and always have. You can’t hurt anyone and you only live what you desire.
To live desire rather than guilt, we only have to desire to live that way. However, that experience must be completely free from guilt in order to be successful. Imagine a large metal shield in front of you, blocking out the sun and leaving you in darkness. Say, “I desire to live my desires rather than living in guilt.” Do this until the shield has shrunk down to nothingness. f
You may have an uncharacteristically warm feeling in your chest/heart area as you do this. The sun of love and warmth and freedom can now shine down on you. Now you are free to play. Play is exactly what Spiritual beings do, because there is no power or authority standing over them telling them what to do. They do what they want and what they want is Higher Will by default. Whether they are engaged in “work” or “play,” it is all play in a sense.
The reason for this is complex but also simple. Reality is the greatest show on earth, but also just a show. Spiritual beings live in this knowledge. They are still fulfilled in knowing that they, as separate beings, are not real. They are all That Which Is and they know it, but they are more fulfilled than any physical being. They can truly play with identity and roles in a much more free and profound way than we can. We can experience all this freedom in our imagination, until such time as we fully wake up and realize that imagination is the only real aspect of our physical experience.
In this meditation, begin by doing the shield meditation described above. After removing the shield, use the glowing feeling of well-being and love as the object of your meditation as you meditate on the key-hole. Remember that becoming your real self does not make you a monster but a vulnerable and open person who can experience life to the fullest and who can discover their full potential through being themselves.
Healing key sixteen is pure desire healing our service to others. This seems like an odd statement, but it is in fact entirely accurate. The most fundamental thing we can know about ourselves is that we are made up of desires. All beings exist as ideas within a greater idea, which we can call God or That Which Is, or whatever we wish.
Being all one under this one idea, in Spirit we are not in conflict. In fact, as each of us fulfills our desires we in turn involve others in that fulfillment, thereby fulfilling their desires. Such a perfectly coordinated dance would be impossible in any world except one in which everything is absolutely synchronized. The dance of our desires is in fact only one dance and thus it can only be perfectly synchronized. The one idea that enfolds all of us fulfills its desires through our fulfillment, and we in turn fulfill our desires as well.
The absence of a single timeline in Spirit is a major factor in making this possible. Every desire we fulfill creates fulfillment for many other beings. Our experiences are observed by other beings in Spirit and they use those experiences for their own personal fulfillment in any manner they see fit. The lack of privacy in Spirit is disconcerting at first, until you realize that there is no shame or guilt in the fulfillment of our desires there, that we can never hurt anyone there and that our desire fulfillment is the key to helping many other beings.
In the physical paradigm, the act of service is tantamount to sacrifice. We give and we give and we give some more, wearing ourselves out for the benefit of others. In all this sacrifice we fail to acknowledge our own desires are what drive us to do this. Perhaps we need the ego boost to think we are good or need to feel superior to those who are “bad.” Perhaps we feel dirty and sinful and need to prove that we deserve to go on living despite the self-hatred we have been taught and we serve to cleanse ourselves. At any rate we are driven in service by desire, but there is dishonesty and self-delusion as we cover up our real motivations to our own eyes.
This kind of service is really a service to a non-spiritual idea about the world. We seek to fix the world that is non-spiritual and broken by feeding and caring for it. There is a sort of utopian idealism about the physical world, that somehow it can be saved and redeemed if we would only try harder. However, the physical world is a delusion that is entirely mental and is not a “place” so much as a state of mind. It can’t be nurtured and coddled back to health if we can’t acknowledge what it truly is. We are at war with the spiritual reality behind the physical world and thus we sacrifice and serve.
The question is not how we can best serve Spirit, but how in fact we could ever for even one moment STOP serving Spirit. The answer is that we are a sub-idea of a greater idea. In the context of that idea we can only serve it as well as serving all other ideas. We can never be in conflict with others and we can never do anything that does not serve others. To see conflict is to misunderstand that the physical world exists only in our imagination. As inescapable as it seems, we have to ultimately weed out our identification with it by building a Spirit identity to take its place and ultimately wake up to what we have been doing from the very beginning, avoiding the truth.
When we are angry it is because we want to be angry. When we are angry we experience anger, sadness and depression as well as fear and confusion and a feeling of victimization. We can only experience these things when we desire anger. Anger leads us away from pure internal fulfillment and desire, which is how we serve others. Our desires are natural to us and in pursuing them we serve everyone. However, to the degree that our desires are contaminated by anger we cannot know what we want, because we have painted a picture of the world that is distorted and so we are distorted along with it.
Let’s take a sample situation. You are at work and a coworker is harsh and unfair to you. They verbally attack you and try to intimidate you. You get angry, then depressed, then fearful of how this will play out. Will you lose your job and if so can you ever find another one? The mind reels as the negative possibilities play out in your head. What happened here was your desire for anger playing out. You don’t want to stop being angry because you want to pursue “justice,” but in this situation “justice” is just a cover for your anger.
The moment, the very second that you desire to identify with Spirit more than you desire to experience anger, you will do so. Only desire can keep you in anger and even if your anger appears to rule you, in truth it is only because you think that you can win that you continue to revisit anger again and again. The question of how to stop wanting anger is the beginning of freedom. Let’s look at a metaphor for anger to better understand.
Let’s say that being angry is like being in Hell, which is true on multiple levels. One day we choose anger and so we are cast into Hell. There we are attacked by others and tortured. Then, we are set free by others who we band together with and we attack those who tortured us, enslaving them and punishing them. We experience hatred, fear, depression, desperation and horror as we encounter one bad situation after another. We are never safe or free and we are always suffering. Any small victories are overridden by the fact that we are trapped in Hell.
Given a situation such as this, wouldn’t we want to escape Hell altogether rather than sticking around and trying to “win” in an unfixable game with no rewards worth having and no possible end to our suffering? If there wasn’t some pleasure in anger we wouldn’t pursue it, but if we realize how negatively anger has impacted our life we see that it was never anything but Hell on earth. That realization is key to giving anger up.
Leaving anger means forgiving the game, in the sense that we will probably leave feeling like a “loser.” But the truth is that anger produces few winners and many losers. Ultimately even the anger “winners” lose and suffer and fall down in disgrace. This is the real nature of the game of anger. Giving up anger is the key to revealing our true desires. Now that we are free to engage others as co-players in the game of fulfillment there is nothing we cannot imagine and have.
Entering into this state of pure desire suggests hedonism. However, once basic fantasies and desires are met the more sophisticated and advanced desires within us can emerge. This clearing leads to the exploration of beauty, Spirituality and higher meaning. In these pursuits we naturally explore higher experiences and thus we serve everyone in our exploration. But even our most basic and uncomplicated desires will benefit others as they are played out.
We must redefine service as an act of pure desire fulfillment. Then there is no sacrifice and no resulting resentment. We give out of the pure joy of giving in a million different ways and even better, we do not seek to define any aspect of our life as being only “self-serving.” We enrich others as we enrich ourselves. Think outside the time box and the “matter” box and you will understand. Imagine taking one simple action, such as eating a piece of candy. That simple act reaches out through all history, healing everyone and everything in the past, present and future if it is done in a state of higher understanding. You spread the understanding you get. The greatest service is to satisfy your desire to know the truth about yourself.
The seventeenth healing key is soul binding healing sexuality. Soul binding is a term that we will use to describe the coming together of two souls as one. In this state of unity we will experience a metamorphosis of consciousness as we redefine who we are and what we are capable of being. To clarify, we are not asserting that there is any such thing as a soul per se, but because it is a term we understand to mean the non-physical “body,” we will use it.
To heal sexuality we must understand what sexuality is trying to do. It is an attempt to become as one with another person. Certain sexual fetishes can lead in the direction of pain or rape, but these are desires distorted by anger. We are fundamentally ideas, not bodies, and our basic form is beyond any form whatsoever. However, we can use form as we wish to fulfill our desires. It is a pleasure to add your being to another’s when that process does not in any way diminish you and you experience an addition of information to the idea that you are.
As an idea, additional true information leads to pleasure. Loss of information leads to pain. Sexuality is an attempt to get at another person as an idea and merge with them. But the act itself tends to reinforce the idea that we are just bodies, incapable of such intense connection. If we partially succeed it is due to our own fantasy projection onto the person combined with getting the behaviors we want from that person. But the fulfillment is in the idea of merging.
Healing sexuality is removing the physicality from it by degrees and introducing soul binding to the process. As we discussed in earlier healing keys, we are moving towards building a Spirit identity. This identity becomes our new body and we actually learn to identify with it more and more over time. We begin to realize that our body is a part of our mind that is involved in thinking of itself as physical. We experience new freedom in our Spirit body, and part of that freedom is sexual freedom.
As we eliminate one contaminating idea after another from our Spirit body our identification with it increases and its power to improve our internal state grows. Also, it becomes more important for us to seek sexual gratification in Spirit. As we overcome guilt and see the pleasure in it, we can appreciate the beauty in the idea of melding with other Spirit beings in love. We can heal sexuality by engaging in it at Spirit level.
We have not admitted to ourselves the depth of our emotional desire to bond in love with others. We have allowed ourselves the physical expression of the desire because we have been so filled with fear and disconnection with others through our anger. But, being free of that anger we can focus on love and getting into it. Our woundedness is expressed through relationship problems, sexual dissatisfaction and venereal diseases, to name a few. These conditions are symptomatic of the greater problem of lack of love and a belief in the limiting properties of the body, which is in turn linked to anger. Anger anchors us in the physical concept by creating a world where conflict is possible.
In fact, no such world is possible but the illusion of it is made possible by our desire to engage in anger. When we get a venereal disease we are not only experiencing pain and fear and physical suffering, but the effects of anger on our mind. Because love is actually the most completely abstract concept in reality it is also the highest and most powerful. Therefore love can draw us up and out of anger and pain through showing us that the physical is not there and our true body is entirely in Spirit.
As sexual diseases can draw limits on our relationships and our ability to find “love” through sexual relationships, it also forces us to look at what does and doesn’t work. Venereal diseases are an idea, and that idea forces us to feel the pain behind our sexual exploration in the physical. Even if we don’t get a venereal disease, we know that we can and that it could kill us. We might even have a partner we love and trust, but these feelings don’t guarantee that the partner won’t stray. You could still become sick.
The problem is not in certain people, their sexual behaviors or physical life. The problem is attitudinal and emotional. We are in pain about sexuality because it is not leading to lasting fulfillment. Even great sex with multiple and attractive partners with no diseases is still fraught with an underlying desperation. No matter how beautiful the contact there cannot be the love we really crave. And as we all know, no thing in reality can satisfactorily replace another. Love is no exception.
The pretenses of sexuality, which are our elaborate fantasies overlaying real people, are ultimately unsuccessful attempts to find happiness in a lie. Lies ultimately ring hollow to us as we realize that we must find a solution in reality. Fantasies bring pain when we use them to deny the reality of the people we sleep with. By finding partners who are engaging in the same fantasies we can create beautiful and enhanced fantasy experiences. However, the pain will ultimately emerge and demand our attention. The only question is, how long can we hide it?
There is a real solution because love is completely abstract. It needs no body to love and we don’t have to be physical to experience it. In fact as our Spirit identity we can reach new and unimaginable heights of love and intimacy with others. If Spirit is the true form of other people then we will be pleased with the people we meet there. Because, as we go beyond just having a Spirit form and exploring it we can actually engage in Spirit level relationships. These relationships are entirely real, in fact more “real” than physical relationships. You will be astounded and pleased at the depth and intensity of these relationships.
You may, in fact, actually meet the person you are in contact with at the Spirit level. As you slowly and cautiously engage in your first Spirit relationship it will occur to you that you have never really explored even the tamest limits of sexuality and intimacy. Using the touch to deliver love itself and to engulf your partner in love you can go higher and higher together. This is a building with no ceiling. And as you begin to really understand what love really is your will realize how much you have missed it.
Along with all of this you can explore the intellectual and emotional dynamics of a liberated relationship. Of course it will not be completely liberated until you transform your Spirit identity by removing all traces of materialism from it. Your partner in Spirit can evolve along with your transformation. Don’t worry if relationships come and go. The point is not consistency but fulfillment. Allow fulfillment to happen by not limiting the shape and form of the relationship.
Use the meditation to deepen your understanding of everything we have talked about here until it feels like second nature and you viscerally know it in your heart. Then you will naturally want a Spirit life. Take me home!