Visualization News – June 2002
Hello and welcome back! It has been a significant month of growth for me, and I hope it has been a month of growth for everyone else. I lost a friend this month, and in mourning their loss, I reawakened my emotional self . Although we were not close friends, the relationship was significant in many ways that were not clear to me until he passed.
I think that relationships can become frozen and emotionless when there are unresolved grievances between people. But the feelings are there, beneath the surface, awaiting recognition. When your heart gets clogged up with anger, you can become frozen to your feelings and feel shut out, even though it is really yourself who is doing the shutting out. I certainly learned that this month. It coincided nicely with my intense desire to experience Spirit from a feeling level.
I write about visualization and Spirit often enough, but have had difficulty recapturing the intense emotional content of my original experience with Spirit. Anyone who has done work with a deity, especially devotional work, can understand how important it is when you can’t access a closeness and connection to the deity. Even in more abstract devotion, there can be a drying up of feeling that leaves one wondering why the vitality of the experience has left you. We don’t usually frame it in this way, but emotional understanding is a huge chunk of understanding itself.
That is to say, when we say that we “understand” we may or may not mean that we feel that understanding, and it is an important difference. Being able to access deep love for the Divine is not just a matter of feeling good, it is the difference between truly understanding something about the Divine as opposed to possessing a dry, intellectual understanding that is vaporous and unsupportive of us. We can break it down in terms of actual information; consciousness is information and more information means more consciousness. So, emotional understanding is a vast area of information that we may or may not have access to, depending on where we are at.
Spirit recently shared with me some information that allowed me to open up at the Heart level and have direct, emotional experience of Spirit. This exercise can be applied to any deity, idea or Spiritual practice you are working in. Don’t be afraid to apply this, even if you are working in an emotionally detached presence or framework currently. True emotional detachment is emotional, when you really think about it. It is not about “not feeling”, but feeling fully and not being attached, so don’t be afraid to have access to this knowledge. However, please be forewarned that this exercise is emotional and potentially emotionally painful, so be prepared.
Exercise: The Core of the Stem of Experience
This exercise runs on a metaphor for experience based on the idea of the stem of a flower. The stem has an outer shell and an inner core. Seeing a cross-section of the stem of the flower, you can see that the hard outer shell gives the stem its tensile strength, and the core is the softer tissue that is vital to the function of the plant, conducting water and nutrients where they are needed.
This vital core is akin to emotional understanding, whereas the outer shell is like intellectual understanding. They are at different places on the continuum of the stem but are part of one single continuum of experience. Where the intellectual understanding defines the outer form of an idea, deity, etc., and can make value judgments and observations on them, the inner core of emotional understanding is necessary to have direct, first-hand experience of them. It is the “heart” of the understanding, and without it, large amounts of critical information are missing. So, relax and get comfortable. Count slowly from one to eighty, while listening to your favorite tape or cd. Ideally, listen to something that you find emotionally moving, and avoid anything with overtones of anger or violence.
This count will, by the time you reach eighty, put you in a “stem core” state of understanding of whatever deity or idea you are working with, which is an emotional and intellectual understanding combined. You will fully feel this understanding rather than being an abstract understanding. Count very gradually, taking time to feel any emotions that come as you count. If you feel the need to laugh or cry, do so. When you reach eighty, take note of how emotionally open you feel.
Take out your notebook and take notes on any ideas and observations on your Spiritual work that are coming to mind at this point. Remember that you may not be ready for emotional openness at this time, due to a feeling of being traumatized or angry. Work on this exercise until you reach a place that feels right for you. If you continue to have trouble, just be patient and take notes on your feelings each time you repeat this exercise. Eventually, you will get there, but you have to acknowledge deep pain, and every pain has its time and place to be resolved, so understand that each effort will produce some results, whether they are consciously observable or not.
I hope this exercise has worked well for you, and if not, don’t be discouraged. There are many great books out there in various traditions about opening the heart, and I encourage you to explore them if they move you. Remember that psychological healing, whether it is done in groups, individual therapy or on your own, is part of the Spiritual process of clearing. It is simply clearing done from the more mundane end of the spectrum upwards, rather that downwards from Spirit toward matter. Without psychological reevaluation and self-questioning, one cannot achieve the lasting change needed to make real Spiritual progress. Until next month, Aloha to you! ...and Ramon...
Visualization News – July 2002
Living at full volume means being outspoken at an appropriate level in some situations, but there is much more to it. We usually associate “loud” people with obnoxious behavior. People who demand to be heard are often grating and arrogant. We shy away from that association. Living at full volume means being fully expressive, creative, and taking action. It also means daring to do things that are out of the ordinary. It means not being apologetic for your views and feelings.
It means not protecting people from aspects of yourself that you think they would find offensive, like your Spiritual work. Spiritual discussion has often been labeled by the Spiritual community in general as being draining and negative in its effect. It is a private matter that is not to be shared. I think that is more of a criticism of using Spirituality to feed the need to endlessly and compulsively verbalize. As people with views that vary from the norm, there is a certain silent expectation that we will keep our traps shut. As we give in to this pressure, the negative, materialistic voices are heard loudly and regularly, and our own counterpoint is stifled.
Our ability to self-express is vital to who we are, whether it be through voting, letters to the editor or through creating our own web site. Our friends and family might abandon us, and our leaders may betray us, but if we leave a legacy of self-expression that comes from the best places within us, then we have succeeded in leaving behind something of value. The point of self-expression is not to overpower others, seize power and then take over in order to force people to do things our way. The point is put out there who and what we are.
As a gay man, I face many situations where I am asked to keep my “gayness” stifled in order to satisfy the desires of others to not see it. I am told that my sexuality is an “inappropriate” topic of discussion, as my “choice” is “disgusting.” If you look at all the quoted words in the last sentence, you can see how other people’s views can cast a negative light on our being. If we give in, we silently agree to not live at “full volume” and thus lose our voice and our power. If we react with anger, we get caught up in the fight for power. Either way we really lose.
However, if we refuse to not live at full volume, then we face the reactions of others and do what we need to do. It may feel right to be silent, or to ignore their discomfort and speak. If we own the power to fully express ourselves, as Spiritual beings, then we begin to cast our own light on the world and offset the negativity and darkness that is so prevalent. So, living at full volume means that you don’t shut up when you are told to. There is a certain element of civil disobedience to it. Also, we need to back our feelings up with actions. At full volume, we are taking action on our feelings and putting our creativity in solid form. We don’t worry about how other people might react, and simply find the canvas in life upon which we can do our thing. This doesn’t mean hurting people or imposing ourselves on others. It means that we use our power to take action appropriately.
In relationships, we put the cart before the horse and say ride. It often doesn’t go anywhere. This is because we are not being real in our interactions. We say what we think other people want to hear, and through this self-censorship, we no longer live at full volume. We may compensate by over-expressing certain aspects of ourselves that seem to draw a positive reaction. If you have a group of six people who are talking, there will be those that dominate discussion and those who recoil or are passive.
Some people who are aggressive in their self-expression may be under-expressing in some areas, while over-expressing in others. Some people who are excessively demure may be under-expressing as well. In that situation, nobody is really being heard! But, on the flip side, if you live at full volume, you fully express yourself and it happens in the while living and acting out of the present moment. You don’t say anything to achieve an effect, per se. Rather, you express yourself fully and in the most fluent manner possible. You make your message as accessible as possible. If you run into confrontations with others over your opinions, you don’t react in anger.
You take what is said and you only say something back if it comes from you in a creative and real place within you. You don’t self-express as a means of showing how right you are, and showing your intellectual dominance. You have to be willing to be wrong without getting caught up in shame. You don’t seek to protect yourself. You avoid anger unless it is being channeled through your creative self-expression. Art is never “right” or “wrong” and neither is what you have to say when living at full volume.
Spirit has said that every experience exists for everyone to use to generate meaning, and every work of art will generate a different kind of meaning from each person. Communication can come from that same place. As each thing you express is a work of art that comes out of the present moment interaction with others, you live in a creative state. Absolutes are not going to work that well, as tastes and feelings and emotions are expressed. Making broad statements or criticisms comes from anger and tends to backfire, as other people feel threatened by such generalized statements.
A current of “real” communication will encourage others to open up. Your dynamic energy will free you up, but just as importantly, it will free others up as well. I think that living at full volume fights shyness and depression. How can you feel defeated and creative at the same time? On the same note, how can you feel shame or guilt when you are being fully creative? Spirit has always insisted that I couldn’t come in contact with them until Spirit consciousness existed within my own consciousness.
So, how can a person receive love or any other experience that they are not ready to receive? The outflow of creative self-expression guarantees that internally you are generating a growing vacuum, a lust for knowledge and life, steadily within you. That openness internally is what allows you to receive love, happiness and life in general. A person that approaches social situations and recites news articles or trivia, or pedantically expresses their opinion is not engaged in full volume living.
This form of self-aggrandizement often leads to humiliation as other people can see through the ploy to gain respect through being “knowledgeable.” The problem is not so much what is being said as the absence of real self-expression that is taking place. That pedantic tone is boring and it imposes itself on others, rather than generating an active, dynamic state of consciousness that everyone present add to and relate to.
I remember a great example of this that I was involved with in college. I took a sculpture class, and had a great idea for a project, which involved a wooden spiral staircase with a silhouetted businessman descending and then shattering at the base of the stairs. The sculpture was called, “Devolution, a Solution to Evolution.” I thought it was amazingly clever. But, the class didn’t react well and the teacher criticized the design on a practical level. I was furious, because I felt like I wasn’t getting the recognition I deserved. This was a perfect example of not self-expressing creatively in the moment. It was a heavy-handed attempt to garner praise.
I pedantically explained the design and what it meant, but the response was still negative. Learning my lesson, I later designed a chessboard with raised squares at different levels, painted, and topped with fighting army men. The blocks were painted in silver and gold and topped with black. It looked like a city during a war, and there was a flag at the bottom center. I expressed a few ideas about how the work made me feel, to the class. I invited everyone to interpret it and add their own evaluation to it.
The class members and teacher were intrigued by the project, and enjoyed adding their own input about what the piece might mean. By leaving the meaning open to others, there was room for everyone to play with the energy of the self-expression. By not demanding, but only suggesting, I left room for movement. By not demanding that the piece be one single static thing to everyone, it was able to become many things to many people. Living at full volume is all about leaving room for discussion and movement in your self-expression.
If our whole lives are ultimately a Spiritual experience, then we can’t refuse to be ourselves fully, based on the idea that one mode of self-expression is more Spiritual than another. Taking risks is part of the Spiritual process. Being sexual and emotional is part of living at full volume. I am still fighting my own inner Puritan that wants to prevent me from fully enjoying my sexual feelings. Living at full volume means being fully sensual. As far as sexual risk-taking goes, I believe you have to be careful what you do in the physical world. But regardless of whether or not you are in a relationship or sexually active with others, you need to fully own your own sexual feelings and allow your sexual fantasy life to operate at full volume. You may be surprised at how prudish your previous mindset seems when you move to full volume living.
Not fully expressing yourself prevents people from getting to know you, by generating a lack of intimacy. Or, even worse, you may project a false self to others that has no substance for them to build on. Being you fully and putting yourself out there is important. If living at full volume ends certain relationships with people temporarily, or even permanently, then so be it. Creative energy will carry you to new and more dynamic interactions. The world is full of billions of people. All those people deserve to know you fully, rather than a ghost of yourself. And likewise you can benefit from really knowing them. Intellectually, as you operate at full volume, your life will begin to feel very full, even if you are relatively isolated. Your mind will burn with ideas and desires and there will never be enough time to explore them all. Your sense of touching and tasting the world will become more vital, and your avenues of self-exploration will open, as will your need to go out and interact with others. In the following exercise, I will discuss how you can shift into full volume living.
Exercise: Full Volume Living
In this exercise we will learn how to enter Full Volume Living as an idea, and then live it. To begin with I will share with you a tool that I have probably discussed before, but I will recap it. The “Supplementary” Scale is a tool to measure progress beyond 100%. This means that it allows you to get to a 100% desired effect, and then take it deeper. Begin by getting relaxed. Visualize a thermometer in front of you. It is numbered from zero at the bottom to 200 at the top. The mercury will rise as you enter the desired effect; but after 100 going upward, it will be taking you deeper into that 100% effect, grounding you in it more completely.
See the mercury at near zero, and count upwards to yourself, wishing to enter into Full Volume Living. Watch the mercury rise until it reaches 100. At this point, you are in the desired state. Now, continue to count upward until the mercury reaches 200. This takes you deeper and deeper into that desired effect. Now you are in full volume living. You can refresh this at any point by doing a brief visualization. After practice, you should be able to enter this state in a matter of two to three seconds, and stay there for an extended period of time. It will help to actively think about the state and notice how it is different from how you normally feel.
You might want to experiment by going to a party or other social situation and striking up a conversation with someone while in this state. If you make an effort to stay in this state, you will notice that you express yourself more fluently and forwardly. Notice how others react to you in this state. You might even want to take a few notes on the experience afterwards to add to your journal later. Remember that the positive or negative reactions of others are just the paints that are added to your creative joint project of having a discussion. Don’t be threatened by or deny other peoples’ creative power. The value of creativity transcends pleasure and pain.
Please check out my new Spirit page. I promise it is up and looking good! Check it out at www.geocities.com/visualizenews/.
