Welcome back to another edition of visualization fun and excitement. This week I am pushing back the Healing Keys again to explore another topic. I would like to talk about the idea of infusing our perceptual experience with the direct experience that we have in Truth. The effect of this infusion is to improve our quality of life at all levels.
Let’s start our discussion by using an imaginary person, Frank, as an example. Frank lives in the physical world and is a human being like ourselves. He has a job, a car and a fairly normal existence. He lives in a “physical world” that surrounds him. He identifies with his body. He sees events as happening to him and he relates to other people differently based on his needs. He loves or hates other people based on how they make him feel, how he feels about them, their values, how they treat him and so forth.
Frank’s body is a good place to start. Frank perceives himself as a sort of floating observer that is tied to and inside of his body. When his body gets sick or injured he feels pain because he is inside his body and can’t get out. Frank doesn’t believe that he ceases to exist when his body dies, but he does think that his body is real and that he is held like a prisoner inside it until his body dies.
In actuality, Frank’s entire experience happens inside of his mind. As in a dream, the characters he encounters, their bodies and actions as well as his own are all part of that dream. Frank’s body is manufactured to give him the ability to be a person in a concrete place who has concrete experiences. He could have experiences without a body, but right now he is exploring having one.
Frank’s body is a symbol, but it is specifically the kind of symbol that the mind treats as if it were literal. Why does a person have a dream that they are shooting a gun at a thief who has just robbed their home? The experience generates an emotion in the person’s mind. But, the emotion already existed in the person when they went to sleep and has been given an avenue of expression in the dream. The self-righteous anger that the person was holding onto in waking life and had not found the means to express consciously actually generates the appropriate symbols to create a scenario that evokes that exact emotion, and thus the emotion is fulfilled by being successfully expressed by the “circumstances” generated in the dream. It’s like the meal making the chef.
The dream never fails because it always evokes the emotion it was intended to evoke. The mind knows how to play itself to exact effect. Frank’s physical waking body is likewise an exact symbol in his mind that is meant to evoke feelings that can only be had in a physical experience, or perhaps we should call it a physical dream. Like other dreams, the emotion finds its self-expression through the mind that manufactures the appropriate physical event that in turn evokes a scenario that elicits that exact feelings needing expression.
You don’t love a person so much as you love the way a person makes you feel. It is possible to grow to hate someone you used to love based on a different understanding of why they behave the way they do. Their actions remain the same but you see their motives for those actions differently, so the actions cause you to feel differently.
Our relationships with people are real but their bodies and personalities are not who they actually are. The hatred and affection we feel for various people are not our real feelings for them, as they exist in Truth. They play the game of identity along with us in exact synchronicity because we are all ultimately part of a single mind with a single intent. So, the illusory fulfillment we are engaging in is likewise engaged in as a single group mind creating exactly matching dreams.
So much of life happens between the lines, but the essence of what life really is hides entirely between the lines. Think about a person who gets on your nerves. Imagine that they are talking to you for an extended period of time. Now, imagine that they are speaking in a foreign language that you don’t understand. You hear the words but not their meanings. Can you hear in their tone of voice some single quality that stands out? Is there an abrasive anger or an intense anxiety or a crazy quality? This is the message the person is sending between the lines.
In reality, Frank doesn’t have a body. Frank, in fact, is entirely a fiction. But there is a real being behind Frank. I say that Frank is a fiction because Frank only remembers being Frank, while the real frank in Truth is unlimited in what it can know. It doesn’t need a body but it can imagine a body if it wants that illusion. It can manufacture identities but doesn’t need any of them to exist. It has a much vaster kind of identity than we think of ourselves as having.
Frank in Truth communicates directly with other beings at this level without any need for words or even thoughts. He doesn’t need to see or hear others, but he is not “blind” or “deaf.” Instead, he communicates in pure love, which is a complex language that communicates every idea within the frame of the understanding that all beings exist together in a state of love that is equal for everyone and is uncontaminated by even the idea of hatred. In our world, ideas, people, objects and bodies all exist separately from each other. In the world of Truth, beings do not live in a world of perception or symbols, so language would be meaningless, as it would only communicate unreal ideas about an unreal world. They live in an “environment” of other beings minds communicating directly with love.
If you had a dream where people used sand as currency, and you woke up and tried to pay for your groceries that day with a bag of sand, people would think you were insane. In the same way, symbols, objects, bodies and language would all be meaningless and valueless in a world where direct communication was possible between individuals. However, this doesn’t mean that this existence would be empty. Rather, the communication process would about how to experience an even higher and more refined degree of all-encompassing love. The discussion would be about highly abstract ideas. Every idea would be vastly complex because it would exist in reference to every other idea.
In fact, it is the world of symbols that is ultimately dull and limiting. We live in the illusion but can’t control it to get the most out of it. It creates a kind of cage that traps us. It is like having to talk about cats without using any word that means “cat.” We hem and haw, using similes and metaphors to try to convey ideas that would be simple if we could just speak directly on the subject.
Our body-symbol also limits us and holds us back. However, beyond all symbols, we could create any body we wanted and have any experience we wanted, and there would be no rules or limits. No one could be hurt by our imaginings and we would always get exactly what we want, complete fulfillment. And, we would not even need to create a body-symbol, because it ultimately has a numbing effect on our ability to feel and love. It reduces our pleasure and intimacy.
We are fixated on the idea of romantic relationships to take us higher. We seek the bliss of deep love between ourselves and another person. However, this just points out the limiting effects we are currently under. We have to weed through thousands of potential mates to find that one “right” person. Even then, the relationship could fail through miscommunication. You only get along with them as long as they don’t find someone more appealing than yourself.
The relationship ends up being a kind of contractual agreement that can be broken at any time. The best relationships can end up being torture due to either circumstances or getting on each others’ nerves. The working relationship is like a drop of water in a desert. In Truth, all relationships are totally and unconditionally intimate and loving, cannot fail or break down due to miscommunication and always achieve their highest potential. We are currently defined by our inability to achieve this kind of love. And, it can be successfully argued that true love is pure perception. To the degree that we can’t perceive the person we are in a relationship, our “love” is not even love at all but just a fantasy.
In mathematical terms, you could talk about real vs. unreal numbers. Numbers like one and two are simple, real and easy to understand. But we could create an unreal number such as (~) that could be used in equations. In terms of Truth, the kind of Love that is expressed in Truth is not like the love that we tend to think of. That is because we live in a symbolic world, or to use the mathematical idea again, we live in a world of unreal numbers.
In the world of the Truth, every idea that is expressed is about reality in some way. In our world, in which everything is a fiction, almost every idea is about that fiction, or is an unreal number if you will. Beings in the Truth can talk about the ideas we take for granted, such as natural resources, temperature, obesity or the cost of a salad, but they see such concepts as absurd. But they can talk about how such absurd concepts cause real change in a being’s consciousness by engaging them in a physical experience. In this way our unreal “reality” is given a real value.
If Frank cuts his finger, he experiences pain. Pain doesn’t exist in reality. This is because in order for there to be pain, there must be some ”thing” that can be hurt. As beings in Truth cannot hurt each other, even mentally or emotionally, there is no context for pain. Our experiences may be shared, but we only, strictly, get what we want and no being can assert upon us what we don’t want. Because no being in Truth really embodies any character or qualities except all-encompassing love, it is impossible to hurt them through criticism. They contain the wholeness of everything, and receive all the love that everyone else gets.
Identity as we understand it is based on our degree of ignorance in various ways. Our degree of insensitivity to the feelings of others, our “coldness” due to our ability to feel and express love and compassion, our rigidity in terms of being fixated on certain rituals to maintain our sense of control as a way to replace love, our biases based on ignorance about certain groups of people, our aggressiveness in terms of how we use bullying to get what we want, and so forth. We can have positive traits, but we always carry fear, greed and neurosis to some degree, and this defines our identity.
So, Frank in our world cuts his finger and suffers, but there is simultaneously the Frank in Truth that also has this experience but doesn’t suffer from it. In Truth there is no suffering and never was, even in imagination. Frank in Truth has to imagine a false identity as Frank in physicality in order for him to have an identity that can be embodied and thus experience pain. Pain is what the mind in Truth imagines actual pain would be like if it could exist, but the identity in Truth can’t experience suffering.
The best that the mind in Truth can do is to imagine that it is a being that can experience pain. You are such a being, but you feel that if you know anything it is that suffering is real. But your own mind hides the truth that you are not actually “you” and you have never suffered in your whole life. The mind essentially lies to itself in order to achieve an effect.
If the mind was actually able to create suffering for itself by imagining it, then in essence suffering would be in some way real and the rules of reality would have changed. So, the mind must hide the part of its awareness that is always in Truth from itself in order to create a facsimile of suffering. The mind must lie to itself in such a way that it imagines that it suffers even when it doesn’t. It continuously remains in Truth and doesn’t suffer, but it creates a kind of memory block from moment to moment so that the part of the consciousness that is involved in the illusion only remembers the portions of the experience that fall in that range. The mind in Truth remembers both experiences and does not suffer from them.
Rather than saying a memory block, it might be more accurate to say that the mind focuses its attention away from the Truth and on what it is imagining. It does this by suppressing its own mental process and sort of shutting down, allowing it to interact with an internal world of “physical” experience. With each passing moment the mind spikes from a low point of physical imagining to a high point of being in truth and then back down again. And, like a movie that makes many static pictures move, the mind makes static thoughts take life by blocking its own awareness of these high points during the time when it is in each low point. It can’t prevent itself from coming back to Truth, but it can control the nature of the illusion.
This is all rather complex and difficult to fathom, but it is an important point. It would be frightening to approach Frank and tell him flat out that he is not who he thinks he is. We find a kind of security in the familiarity of our identity, even when it causes us to suffer. The mind in physical identity constantly seeks an alternative to going back to the Truth. It is filled with desires, and most of them have to do with finding ways of extending the experience of illusion. Ironically, the suffering we run from is entirely housed in our own identity, as our “self” is the brutal prison guard that never forgives and never releases us. We have to dismantle the false self that we think we desire.
Our experience in Truth and our experience in perception coexist. When we advance in our practice, we begin to use our experience in perception as a kind of conductive material that carries the electrical charge of our identity in Truth. Perception is the perfect conductor for Truth, but not visa versa. Our identity in Truth, as it grows more pronounced in us, shows us the ultimate instability, lack of peace, lack of joy and lack of fulfillment in the perceptual world. At the same time it allows us to have a more fulfilling experience in this illusion by showing us how we are getting what we want all the time.
If we have a miserable life but love the sexual experience, we might seek out constant sexual gratification as a means of finding some joy in our bleak existence. But, with each orgasm, we would find that we have hit our head on a kind of glass ceiling, and once again we have to come crashing down again. Our desire to escape suffering can drive us to this kind of compulsion or it can drive us to abandon the glass ceiling and crashing through it go higher. That doesn’t mean giving up sex, it just means giving up on sex or any other kind of sensual fulfillment as an end unto itself.
Exercise: Reaffirmation of Identity in Truth
This is a verbal exercise to be carried out periodically throughout the day. This allows you to make adjustments to your identity, shifting from the perceptual / physical end of the spectrum to the Identity in Truth end of the spectrum. About once every two hours or so, say…
“I will now count from one to five, and by the time I reach five, my degree of identification with my Identity in Truth will be such that I will be completely happy. One, two, three, four, five.”
To flesh this out, understand that as beings in a perceptual world we cannot comfortably leap from perception to pure being in Truth. Instead, we undergo a kind of step-climbing process, consciously working our way out of identification with perception and physicality and into identification with Truth. This exercise allows us to temporarily stretch in that direction and reap the benefits from it. In so doing, it shows us the possibilities for happiness and well-being that are inherent in such a progression. Keep notes on how this exercise changes your state of mind and how you think about your life and relationships while under its influence. Enjoy!