Negative Imagination and Reclaiming Love:
Welcome back everybody! This is going to be a rather dense edition, so hold onto your hats. I want to start by discussing negative imagination. The positives of developing your ability to imagine have been made clear in my previous newsletters. But, I have not really explored the negative applications of imagination that our minds engage in on a regular basis. First of all, we live in a physical world. But, our experience of that world is colored entirely by our states of consciousness.
As much as we may try not to, we will always live in an emotional world that is superimposed on our physical world. That is part of our being conscious beings. We make associations between people and objects and events in our mind and superimpose values and feelings over them. This, in a real sense, is our imagination imposing itself on our physical world. Although we cannot shut off our emotions or imagination, we can separate our perception of the physical world from our imagination. The benefits of this ability are enormous. Our imagination can literally become a crushing weight, dragging us down, by imposing negative feelings on our life in various ways.
I think the process begins with our imagination running on and on about positive possibilities of the future. We may, especially when we are young, feel very optimistic about our future and hope for a better life ahead. This becomes an imaginary overlay, which is superimposed over our idea of the physical world. However, as we get older and see that our lives are not going to match the ideal we have cherished, we may become despondent and depressed. We can then overlay a dark picture of the world over our future, crushing our happiness. This can develop into bitterness and a sense of defeat. All of this can be avoided by distinguishing the physical world from our fantasy life.
This is not a matter of wrenching our imagination out of �ideal future� fantasies, but of developing a clear, discrete perception of physical reality, that is not burdened with imagined perceptions. The next exercise will allow you to access that state of mind and make it a regular part of your life. You may be surprised at how burdened your perception of the world is with negative imagination, and feel a strong sense of relief at seeing your life as it is in a more literal sense.
Although you don�t want to have a shut down imagination, you conversely do not want to have no access to unhindered physical reality either. Use the time you have in this state of consciousness to evaluate where you are right now, what needs to be done, and then write it down in your journal and plan to do it. Making this a daily process will help you take the emotional monkey off your back and travel through life in a lighter manner. If I impose a fantasy figure on a real person, I will be hurt when they don�t behave in the way that the fantasy figure is supposed to. I will feel hurt and rejected. I am actually not having a real relationship with the person.
Likewise, turning a person into a monster can burden us with a sense of fear and disempowerment. Developing a relationship with them in reality could help us decide how we want to be involved with them in the future. Fantasies are a kind of reality, so we don�t have to treat them as being ephemeral. On the other hand, we have to develop a first-hand relationship with physical reality before we can learn to master it and navigate in it successfully.
Exercise #29: Reality Break
This exercise involves you in a direct perception of physical reality, with no fantasy projection over it. It also temporarily limits your imaginative activity to a bare minimum. Start by relaxing and having your journal and a pen handy. Count from one to eighty, with the intention of entering this state of consciousness. If you want to visualize something, see a black square with a white lightning bolt running across it from upper left to lower right. This represents physical perception breaking through fantasy projection. Once in this state, think about your life. What needs to be done? What needs to change? How do you really feel about your life as it is right now? How does your future look to you? Write down any ideas that come to you, including suggestions to yourself on what you can do physically to improve your life.
I find this exercise to be very clearing and relaxing. It is also a great source of ideas.
I said that I would talk about reclaiming love and so I shall. The trouble with getting �hurt� by people is that we can suddenly or gradually stop loving them. Each time we suffer a hurt inflicted on us by the maliciousness or carelessness of another person, we may simultaneous make an unconscious decision to love them less, in an effort to protect ourselves from future hurt. Eventually, we don�t love the person at all. Unfortunately, this leads to a bitter empty feeling and a loss of joy in life.
We may not be burdened with hatred, but our love for people in general can be gradually snuffed out as negative events involving others stack up. Soon, we don�t want to live in the world or be around people anymore. This unhappy state is not caused by others, but by our unconscious decision to love less. Each time we love less, we experience an emotional wounding, as part of our innate consciousness is forced into an unconscious state.
Love is a quality of consciousness, not something that can be �lost�, so in order to reproduce the effect of losing love, we have to enter a state of denial, where we deny part of our own consciousness, forcing it down into the depths of our subconscious mind. This �loss of consciousness� is like the experience of the fallen angels, being cast down into a state of darkness and dread after dwelling in pure light and love. Also, losing love for others in turn reduces our capacity to seek love and to be able to feel it from others, leading to a spiral of emptiness and loneliness that can only be broken by making a conscious choice to undo what has been done by ourselves. I will show you how to undo this loss in the following exercise.
Exercise #30: Undoing Loss of Love
Relax and get comfortable. Choose the three people in your personal history who you think of as having hurt you the most. Start with one person out of the three and imagine you are going back in time to before you were born. Now, you can imagine yourself as seeing your whole future before you. You can see the person as they were when they hurt you, or as you see them now. You feel total love for this person. Use a short count if you are having trouble getting to this place. When you are there, see the person from a loving standpoint. Say, �just as I chose to stop loving ___ totally, so I now choose to undo that loss of love and love him/her completely forever.
I choose to love them no matter how they hurt me in the future, because there is no reason I should have to suffer emotional pain and loss of consciousness due to their mistakes. I will love them and stand up for myself as well.� This will not make you a doormat, but will actually help reduce future hurt from this person. Seeing them more truly as they are, you will be better equipped to deal with them effectively. You will also understand why they hurt you and see a picture of events that is closer to reality. This exercise can later be applied not only to individuals, but to whole groups of people, and even the whole Human Race. Write any perceptions down in your journal, and then repeat the process for the other two people.
Exercise #31: The Four Flames of Love
This exercise is titled �The Four Flames of Love�, which can be seen in graphic form at www.geocities.com/visualizenews/love.jpg. Please click this link first before reading on. You might find it helpful to print this picture out for further reference.
The four flames of love, when ignited, light the fifth flame, which is True Love. This is a model of how to activate love by entering into four understandings. When I talk about counting into these understandings, I mean that you count slowling from one to eighty, with the intention of fully grasping the understanding at eighty. If you are working with being your Spirit self, as discussed in previous issues, you can enter these understandings in a one to five count. Please do not be put off if these four ideas seem rather obvious; it is not a matter of intellectually getting it, but of grasping it at an emotional level.
The (top) first flame of love is being aware that you suffer, and that just as you suffer, so do others. They may suffer in ways that you do not, or more deeply, also. That is obvious, but I am talking about an emotional awareness of this understanding. To achieve this understanding, count from one to eighty into it as we did above. With practice, we can make it second nature. Take notes in your visualization journal of any insights that come through as you do this. Repeat this process for the following three other flames of love.
The second (left-hand) flame is the understanding that when you are able to drop blame by seeing that all actions arise out of bondage to ignorance, you are able to drop anger as well and feel loving compassion for others. All of our actions come out of who we are encountering external world experiences, and reacting. We may resist external pressure, but we cannot escape the confines of the limitations of our current knowledge at any particular time. We can't overcome our ignorance in the present moment. Being limited by who we are, we can feel compassion for ourselves and others as we make mistakes. We see that everything that others do, they do because it is the best they are capable of at that moment, even if it means they are hurting themselves and others. This type of compassion does not mean that we do not punish people who commit crimes, but it means that we understand how limited they are. What seems obvious to us may be the deepest mystery to others. Dropping the blame process, we can free ourselves from anger.
The third (right-hand) flame is the understanding that we, as beings made of consciousness, have an innate and passionate continual desire to be loved and to give love; it is our essential nature when we strip away distortions of our consciousness. As we become less "material" and more simply beings made of consciousness, we become more and more about love. This is because we are denied nothing, have nothing to hide, and no barriers to our happiness. In this state, we love naturally and love to receive love constantly. Beings may choose to lose love in order to learn lessons in physical reality, but they will eventually return to love.
The fourth (bottom) flame is the understanding that in every situation it is better to be receptive to love than to choose not to. That is to say, you can learn to understand that there are endless opportunities for more love, and we should take them all. If we understand all the ways that love benefits us, we will understand that it is always better to have more of it in our consciousness. To learn that our past hurt is coming from our experience of loss of love, rather than the emotional hurt itself, we will stop fearing love and be able to embrace it.
When you have entered into all four states of understanding, you are experiencing True Love. I recommend printing the picture and posting it on a wall to remind you continually of the process. I would like to say a special thank you to my therapist Scott, who has worked so hard to help me understand the value of loving others and compassion. Until next month, thanks again to everybody for taking the time to listen!
