Spirit Unconditional Happiness
Hello and welcome back after my long hiatus! I apologize for being gone so long but I hit a period of time where I needed to do some intense inner work and was not in a good place to write. Now I�m back and looking forward to sharing some more information with you.
In our last issue, November 2002, I spoke at great length about unconditional happiness and overcoming depression. I promised to share some advanced techniques about overcoming depression, and I will in the second part of this issue. Recently, circumstances tested me to the limit as my health, financial and work situations became challenging. This, in turn, challenged my depression, and I had to turn back on my own techniques to find some relief. I had to go through a real dark night of the soul period, but I came out of it better and wiser. There is a big difference between what you know intellectually and what you KNOW. There are logical blocks inside of us that can only be resolved by working them out like math problems. Although they express themselves as intense emotions, they are just binary dots and dashes ultimately, and the answers are equally cold and logical.
We are often left feeling desperate in bad times, and we feel like we need to answer the �Big Questions� such as why we are here, what does it all mean, etc. But ultimately, these are just masks for logical problems that lie at the very root of all our problems. They can be rather complex logical problems sometimes, but they can be overcome with a little simple logic and practice. We have to develop new and more logical habits of thought. As we change how we think, we develop an identification with the new way of thinking and our old identity slips away.
The idea of developing a new identity by establishing habit is interesting. If you start an exercise program, and you enjoy it, you will start to miss it more and more if you miss it. By contrast, if you hadn�t started the program there would be no positive experience to miss. You create something positive and then you will realize when it is missing. In the art of Zen archery, the student practices the moves over and over again until the practice becomes completely spontaneous and thoughtless. Unconditional happiness is a state of mind, but it is also a habit. The student one day after a long period of practice no longer has to �think� his way through the exercise of locking the arrow in place, pulling back and releasing. It happens without any sense of a self �doing� it, in a spontaneous series of movements. The depressed thoughts are already in a state of mastery. They happen thoughtlessly and without effort. When you master unconditional happiness through effort, you will gradually generate a new identity.
Because unconditional happiness is ultimately about finding the truth and overcoming internal ignorance, we also have to look at higher truth as well. So, the next logical step is to talk about Spirit Unconditional Happiness. This incorporates Spirit knowledge into our unconditional happiness understanding. It contains all the knowledge in ordinary unconditional happiness, and tacks on additional knowledge about the nature of Spirit. It takes us closer to the truth, and therefore it takes us farther into happiness and self-respect. It takes us even farther from depression than unconditional happiness alone. Spirit Unconditional Happiness is a great opportunity to use our problems to catapult us much farther into self-understanding. So, in the exercise below, I will discuss how to use Spirit Unconditional Happiness.
Before I present the exercise, however, I would like to mention one thing. �Insanity� in our society is the rule rather than the exception. Also, the vast majority of people who are �insane� are either not aware that they are or lying to others about it. People are, more than ever, driven to compulsively work, play and take part in other activity with the rabid passion that comes from fear. They are running away from themselves so fast that they are driven to out-perform and out-achieve others. They express themselves through rage, frustration and greed. If they are forced to stop and self-examine, they encounter horrible pain. Therefore, they work hard to keep people at a distance. They will not back down from viciously attacking anyone who dares to penetrate their barrier of �insanity� driven fear through the expression of real intimacy. They self-identify as �normal� because they function well in a society that is mainly comprised of other sick, driven people.
Anyone who is in touch with their feelings rather than living out a role is labeled �abnormal� and shunned. Negatively polarized people are glad to shed their self-hatred by dumping it on others and also use harsh, impossible ideals of behavior, that they themselves only a superficial attempt to live up to, as a weapon against those who would dare to puncture their insanity and expose them. They find elaborate mechanisms of logic to justify their greed and selfishness as admirable qualities. They tend to speak of themselves in glowing terms or to draw praise to themselves. They rarely express intimacy, vulnerability or regret. They use rage and anger to control people, or guilt tactics. They manipulate in a shallow and self-serving way without any thought of how it hurts others.
So, if you are a depressed person in a particularly bad slump, you should know that you can overcome your problem with easy, habitual effort. You don�t have to conquer your problem in one day. You need to remember, above all else, that you possess tremendous self-knowledge. You are far better off than most people who are successful, perfectly groomed and beyond reproach. This is because you will never sink to their level. You will not abdicate your responsibility to yourself nor will you treat others like puppets to be manipulated. You will not victimize others with false blame, or operate out of greed and fear. You are the hero that faces the darkness rather than turning your back on it. You will emerge victorious as long as you persevere. You are even self-aware enough to realize that you need to change and that you can really be a better person. You are miles and miles beyond those people who define themselves as normal and seek to hurt you with such careless indifference.
As long as we seek to get the approval and love of negative people we will fail. They don�t have any love to give, because, they are not in touch with themselves at that emotional level yet. Their approval is meaningless as it is not a real expression of how they feel, but an attempt to use us for their own ends. Therefore, we should find love and satisfaction within ourselves through overcoming our depression. Then, and only then, will we be in a good place to look for someone to love us and affirm us.
Exercise: Learning Spirit Unconditional Happiness
If you have not already, it is absolutely essential that you read and do the exercise from the November 2002 issue before you do these exercises. That is where I explain unconditional happiness in detail.
This is not actually a �one-time sit down and do it� kind of exercise, but an extended practice to be performed over a period of time. Although it seems like a lot of work, it actually breaks down into small, manageable chunks of time and effort, so don�t feel overwhelmed. It is important to remember that you will not always feel great when you enter directly into unconditional happiness. That does not mean that you do not have that knowledge to work with. If you are �physically depressed,� I have found that it takes a while to readjust your body. So, don�t be put off if you don�t get an immediate rush of positive feeling from entering unconditional happiness.
Step 1: If it has been a while, re-read the November 2002 issue of Visualization News.
Step 2: If you have not already done so, go to my main page and read the introductory chapters on Spirit that I have posted. This material is located at http://www.geocities.com/visualizenews/spiritindex.html.
Step 3: Practice exploring Spirit by being a Spirit being in your imagination. Get familiar with the quality and feel of that state of consciousness and the Spirit environment. Begin to develop a sense of what your Spirit self is.
Step 4: Buy a blank book and use it exclusively to work on your depression. At least once per day, have your book handy and enter into Spirit Unconditional Happiness by counting into it. If you have taken the above steps, you should have sufficient understanding to generate this state of consciousness. Allow the state to just emerge without having to exactly decide what it is or how it would feel beforehand. Now, while in this state, find a basic question that tends to draw you into depression. It could be something like �what is the point of all this effort,� or �why do I feel like I am always fighting an uphill battle against life.� When you have picked one question, write it in your blank book. Then, answer the question from the Spirit Unconditional Happiness state of consciousness. Write out the complete response, keeping it as simple and straightforward as possible. You should trust that the state will come to you without having been in it before if you have read and explored Spirit as I suggested above.
Step 5: Memorize the question and response. During the following day, practice asking yourself the question and then answering the question with the memorized response. Do this several times a day for a few days, until you experience a sense of having answered the question in your own mind at the same time you were asking the question. Then, go back to your book and repeat steps 4 � 6 with a new question. Make this a habit until you experience significant relief from your depression. Also, practice at random intervals throughout the day entering into Spirit Unconditional Happiness state.
Here are some additional thoughts to play with as you do your Spirit Unconditional Happiness work.
Now that you are armed with the basic information you need to use Spirit Unconditional Happiness, here are a few basic generalizations to work with. Don�t worry about memorizing these ideas, just consider them for now.
A) You have a unique contribution to make in life. There are things that you and you alone can do. Some of these things might seem small and ordinary, but they might have a huge impact on the lives of others. Your contribution is valuable.
B) Existence is vast and unexplored. Although one approach or one way of life, or even one way of thinking may prove to be no longer right for you, there is always vast and unexplored territory of creativity in both life and consciousness. As you explore becoming a Spirit being in a human form, you will realize your role as an explorer and innovator.
C) You can become the creator of your own life to a certain extent. You should set goals and write down your desires, even the �ridiculous� ones. Include your fantasies and your farfetched dreams. You should give them to Spirit to bring into manifestation. By doing this, you become an artist of your own life, building a network of desires that are coming into being. You can use Spirit consciousness to explore more deeply your role in life as artist and creator. By putting effort into self-understanding, you can specifically hasten the manifestation of your desires by overcoming the internal elements that prevent you from having what you want. As far as external limitations go, you may be able to incorporate your goals and dreams in unexpected ways, even if you have certain limitations imposed on you that seem to prevent it. Don�t give up on your future. I will talk about this subject in greater detail at a later time.
D) All experiences, including pain, have vast levels of meaning and value. No experience is �meaningless.� In fact, all experiences are made of consciousness, which in turn is purely meaningful. Any pain can be transformed through Spirit consciousness into other, more pleasant forms of fulfillment that you can explore in the future. You can explore all experiences, ideas and feelings at many different levels and in many different ways. You can explore the richness of life more and more as you increase your understanding of consciousness. This all may sound a bit unreal, but just file this information away for now.
E) Our entire life experience is made of consciousness. We can use Spirit consciousness to interpret our life situations as if they were dreams. Every person and event in our life is a metaphor for some aspect of how we are feeling. In fact, our entire life is made of consciousness, but more specifically, our own consciousness. We can never be victims of other people. They are simply involved to the degree that we allow them to be. We can ultimately experience our life as our own creation in consciousness. As we take back ownership of our life, we also regain our self-esteem.
F) We have infinite time to play with experience. Beyond the �physical world� we will be able to fulfill all our desires. But we will be able to experience the fulfillment of many desires in this lifetime. Even if our life has been unsatisfying to us up to this point, we can experience a great deal of fulfillment in the future as we change our state of consciousness. With no time limit imposed on us, we can know that we will be fulfilled after we die, and that we can also experience fulfillment in the physical world in certain ways as well. Time is just a function of consciousness, so there is infinite time to desire, plan and create. We can set very ambitious goals, and perhaps in some cases be surprised at how little time it takes to achieve them.
G) There are as many different levels of experience for us to explore as we can possibly conceive of. We can dare to give reality to our imagination and create the worlds that we would like to experience, without limitations. We can learn from these worlds and improve our life. We can experience our physical lives on many different levels of metaphor. We can begin to experience ourselves as unlimited beings even as we explore our limited physical experience.
H) You can become your own oversoul and learn about yourself from a completely different perspective. You can become involved in the development of your own physical personality as an ongoing project, with your involvement being both the object of that development and the consciousness that is seeking to develop it. You can begin to identify yourself as a multi-leveled being who exists with a purpose and a plan for self-development.
I) You live in a world of words and thoughts that can sometimes limit you. You can build your own vocabulary, creating new words and ideas to define your own experience. You can use those words to explore vast new frontiers of your own experience. By shattering the limits of cultural paradigms and using your own vocabulary to define yourself, you become both more unique and more self-created.
J) In infinite space, every point is the center of the universe. You can experience being the center of all life and having everything in the world be about you. Although this seems like the ultimate form of egotism, it is just one of many ways of looking at things. This viewpoint can empower you as you begin to see the full importance and significance of your life. This is just a stepping stone to appreciating the full meaning of your life.
K) You can, as discussed above, explore and generate many different selves and lives. You can give these other selves and lives their own focuses, dreams and challenges. You can place them in very different settings. As you give them more reality, you can study the mirroring of themes between one world and the other. You can experience being a fully multidimensional person with real relationships and goals on many different levels. The reality of these worlds is only limited by your own degree of permission and the development of habits of identity.
L) You can explore the unique perspectives of other people you know, seeing through their eyes and developing empathy for them. You can bring together, in your consciousness work, yourself and other people, or groups of people, or multiple selves, all into a single, new cumulative being. You can in this way additively combine all the knowledge that makes up one person and another, creating a new and unique entity with special knowledge.
M) Remember that you are always doing the best you can do at all times, and that you always have. This is also true of other people. Recognize and appreciate the reality of your limitations, moment to moment and you will enjoy complete compassion for yourself and others.
Visualization News - April 2003
Beyond Consciousness and Identity
Hello and welcome back! In this issue I will be discussing Spirit and the idea of going beyond ordinary limits of thought and perception. So, if you have not already done so, or are new to this newsletter, please read my introductory information on Spirit at http://www.geocities.com/visualizenews/spiritindex.html. Ok, so lets gets started. Today we will be butchering a lot of sacred cows. I�m speaking of those ideas about reality that we take for granted. These limiting ideas can become invisible walls that block our perception and trap us in materialism of thought; they also limit our visualization experience.
When we get past the more physical aspects of our visualization, such as mastering our ability to visualize with our eyes open, and to see all colors and shades, we move on to more abstract aspects of the practice. These have to do with the boundaries of where we can go and what we can do in our visualized worlds. Any limitation in this world is an unnecessary burden that must be overthrown. Why have any limitations in our own mind-created world?
We want to know as much as possible, and explore without boundaries. In order to do that we must overcome the physical world modes of thought that weigh us down. These start at the most basic levels, such as freeing our minds enough to explore the bizarre and �absurd.� Then, we allow ourselves to engage more fully in fantasy. Then we turn our attention to even more abstract layers of our thinking. We consider the subtle materialism that lurks behind our mind unchallenged and we turn it over to see what is underneath. So now we are at this point and we have overturned all the obvious and some not-very-obvious sources of materialism in our thinking.
Now, we are ready to face even more basic assumptions. First is the very idea of consciousness itself. Consciousness is a word that describes a phenomenon we can observe in action. People have consciousness and thus they can manipulate their environments. From a Spirit perspective, there is no such thing as consciousness. The word suggests that there is a dual existence that is divided between conscious and non-conscious beings. The �consciousness� that perceives itself as being �in a body� and �in an environment� which it can interact with is entirely perceptual but not factual. It is much like a strip of paper that is twisted 180 degrees at one end and tied in a loop. This moebius strip has no real �beginning� or �end.� Although it has two sides when any segment of the paper strip is examined, it technically only has one side. That one side expresses itself in two ways. �Consciousness� perceives duality but there is only one thing and all qualities of perception come out of that thing. The term consciousness refers to the dualistic perception of It to It. But in the end, there is no consciousness or environment, only It. However, that It is something more conscious than even our conception of consciousness.
No object can be removed from the fabric of reality of which it is a part. A penny contains within it the entire universe, because the idea of the penny contains the idea of the whole universe containing the penny. Therefore you can�t say that the conscious person picking up the penny is a �primary� reality and the inanimate penny is a secondary reality, because all realities are ultimately It. So how does this viewpoint help us with our visualization, and how can we hold such an abstract concept in our mind?
First, lets address the issue of holding this understanding in some real way throughout the day. To begin with, we must create in our imagination a Spirit environment that is entirely beyond the concept of consciousness. As a being native to this place, we will have a built in understanding of this environment.
Get a piece of paper and write down the following: �when I think of being conscious, this is what I think about myself.� Write down all the ideas that come to mind when you think of being conscious. For example, you might think� �I feel pleasure and pain because I am conscious. I experience a flow of time. I can think about my actions and judge myself.� Now, create the Spirit environment beyond the concept of consciousness and make yourself a native being there. See through this being�s eyes for a moment, and get used to the sensation of being in this body. I found this state took a bit of getting used to, as it was confusing at first, but I settled in with a little practice. When you feel reasonably comfortable, look at your sheet of paper and ask yourself as this native being to respond to the statements that you wrote about your perception of yourself as conscious, but in his/her own terms. But, before they answer to those statements, respond to the statement �I am conscious.�
As that native being, you might say, for example, �consciousness is a qualitative statement about what I am.� In other words, it is descriptive but not a separate thing in and of itself. It would be like saying, �the sky is blue.� It would indicate an observation of a quality but would not be a �thing� separate from you or anything else.
In response to the statement �I feel pleasure and pain because I am conscious,� as that being you might say, �If a hand touches the water and produces ripples, they represent the overlapping of �hand� experience with �water� experience. The energy that produces the ripple is not the same thing as the form of the ripple itself. Self, pleasure and pain are like perceptions of the ripple, they hide the more fundamental reality that causes the ripple. There is always a more fundamental �quality� to reality that generates the more illusory qualities that the world has, such as identity and materialism, and things and �consciousness.� We can look behind the curtain in these qualities of reality to find even more fundamental qualities. But, there is no magician. The curtains go on forever into more and more creative and complex worlds and levels of understanding. Like a camera that is aimed at itself and projects what it sees, there is just an infinity of layers but no final resolution. And ultimately there is no thing or things in reality, or even people, but simply different qualities. A �person� is a quality of being that contains the quality of �consciousness� and having a �body� and living in a �physical� �world.� There is an endless topography of qualities, overflowing and overlapping, but there is no �thing� that holds those qualities. And being the perceiver is itself just another quality of this experience. As an example, if you were to pound a thin layer of copper with an ice pick, you would produce a dimple. The dimple would stand out in the surrounding environment of the copper. But, as much as it is an individual thing, perceptually, it is actually just a different quality to the copper, i.e. the shape that the copper is pounded into.
Perform this exercise for yourself with the questions I listed above and then write down your responses as this Spirit being that is beyond the concept of consciousness. Now, lets take a look at how this understanding helps us with our visualization practice. The benefit is that we can now experience our consciousness in a non-localized way. We can explore the world in a state beyond being a �person� in an �environment.� We can experience the liquid interchange of consciousness between ourselves and others with no ego boundaries. We can merge with higher beings or others at Spirit level and become something more than a �person.� We can play with our �selfness� as just one of many qualities that we can manipulate, and combine qualities to explore new combinations of experience. In short, it allows us to break the rules at an even more fundamental level. Goodbye until next month!
