This is the fifth in a six-part article. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 6 are all available for review – or reading for the first time!
Relax
Most of us can benefit from taking more time to relax, to tune into what’s going on inside. Relax one or more times a day. It can be done in minutes throughout the day. There are some fine relaxation, attunement, mindfulness, and mantra-meditation techniques available. Or simply sit, close your eyes, relax all your muscles, and feel what’s going on in your chest area. Release the tension in your heart and lungs. With a little practice you will be able to recenter yourself within seconds. It is not difficult.
If you can make fifteen or twenty minutes available, especially at the same time each day, sit in a comfortable chair or lie down if possible, close your eyes, and let go of pressing thoughts. With a few exhales of your breath, feel all your muscles relax. When you exhale, let your lungs stay relaxed and empty for several seconds – do this only a few times, then breathe normally. Feel your heart rate slow down. Feel the tension in your body melt away. (If you buy a simple blood pressure monitor from a pharmacy, you will be able to measure this directly.) Relax your thinking. Be an indifferent witness to stray thoughts. They don’t matter. Notice yourself expanding, but not in a physical sense. It is not a feeling of getting larger in the room or floating upward in the room, sky, or outer space. Those are time-space concepts. Your expansion is interdimensional. That is vague, yes, but that’s okay.
Just relax and feel limitations slip away. Be open to the goodness that is in and around you all the time. That is how we experience God. Relaxation is a time for simple openness. Repeat to yourself, “I am now and always open to the love and support of my whole self. I am my whole self.” Let yourself feel a sense of completeness and peace. Let whatever happens, happen. Even if you seem to sleep briefly, that’s okay, it may not be normal sleep.
If you wish, during periods of deep attunement you can create quiet feelings of goodness and contentment. Simply think words such as – be gentle, be happy, be loving, be helpful. Think the word easily and then for a few seconds let the underlying feeling happen without effort. Think each word a couple of times. Slowly cycle through this list a few times. This will be subtle yet potent. Modify the list if you wish. Try thinking me as soul, and let soft feelings of perfection and love filter in. Deeper feelings will come more automatically with practice over time. Regular periods of such gently guided relaxation will benefit your daily life.
We usually think of attunement practices as being done with our eyes closed, but doing them with our eyes open can be beneficial. If we can create calmness and love with our eyes closed in a quiet place, we can do the same thing with our eyes open amidst activity. It is not difficult. Settle down, ground yourself, open your heart. In a relaxed and simple way, notice your surroundings, listen, observe the sky, trees, landscape, animals, people. Recognize and appreciate the beauty and goodness in that particular place.
Create a feeling of love in your heart and let it infuse your perception of yourself and the things around you. Try doing this for one minute once an hour. In time, you might see that everything is vibrating with a soft interconnectedness. That is the real purpose of attunement practice – to bring our inner feelings of stillness, connection, and love out into our daily interactions. This can be a wonderful lifelong endeavor.
You can attune anytime, anywhere. When you get in your car, sit for a minute before driving. Don’t turn on the radio. When you arrive at your destination, sit for a minute. You can sense calmness even while focusing on something else. Of course, as soon as you fully reengage in the world, some of that inner peace may be stretched by the demands of living. And that’s okay. There is an old saying, “It’s easy to be a saint on a mountaintop.”
During periods of deep relaxation, you may gain insight and inspiration. Be open to your inner voice when the outer distractions have been reduced, although it is a good idea to later evaluate such insights in the light of reason before acting on them. It can help to leave the television, telephone, and other devices off a little longer. Listen to yourself a little more. Keep your entertainment content kind and uplifting, not uncaring or violent – that which you focus on grows stronger in your life.
When Earth’s demands test your limits, remember that this is what you eagerly signed up for. Just keep your physical, mental, and emotional energies well balanced. Let your inner wisdom guide you. Do what works for you, what makes you and others happy, what you deem to be goodness. And sometimes, you don’t have to do anything at all – just be.
Prayer and Dogma
We are always surrounded by unlimited love and support, but our openness to them can vary depending on the choices we make in every moment. Our openness is to love, not to being told what to do; it is not a surrendering. We sometimes think of prayer as asking someone else for specific answers for ourselves or others, but this is our life to live; no one else will live it for us. This is a subtle yet important understanding. Clarity, better decision-making, and wisdom are not granted to us from the outside. They come from living life attentively and being open to our larger selves. We are not given more love and support because we ask for them; that would mean that some love is normally being withheld. If our friend is having a hard time, they are not cheated of God’s full blessing if we don’t ask for it in sufficient quantity or quality. Be open to love, be helpful to those you can, and trust that the unseen knows how to be and what to do.
We have many texts containing many precepts that are said to be the true and eternal word of God. Which text we are taught to believe, if any, is largely determined by the culture in which we are raised. There are some similarities between texts, but there are many significant differences. Because of their assumed infallibility, these differences cause serious and irreconcilable separation between those who believe one text and those who believe something different.
The claim of eternal infallibility leaves little room for growth. When there is the command to denounce or punish those who believe or act differently, we have three choices: denounce them; disobey God by not denouncing them; or admit that the teaching is not infallible, which can be difficult if believing it is part of our identity. Don’t let the fear of stretching your identity stifle your learning. If we admit that our favorite belief (or nonbelief) system is fallible, then we are left with having to decide what is true for us and what is not true for us in every moment. And that is exactly how it should be. That is how we grow. Life is challenging. If it were boring, we wouldn’t bother.
When pondering the many available spiritual philosophies or prayer or meditation techniques, you are likely to encounter rules that imply that to be spiritual or to grow spiritually you need to do specific things in specific ways at specific times. Maybe you don’t. Maybe it’s not that complicated. Before accepting rules, evaluate their underlying justification. Choose your rules yourself, consciously, deliberately. Oftentimes, focusing on obeying all the rules for becoming spiritual distracts us from simply being spiritual, from simply living life.
The language of spirituality and the language of science will not be kept separate forever. The lines are already blurring and, in time, a common spiritual/scientific terminology will emerge. Many respected scientists in many disciplines already suspect this. They see that they cannot adequately explain many of the subtlest aspects of physical existence and life itself without considering that which is beyond conventional science. They understand that the big picture is much larger than we have yet imagined.
Enlightenment
Enlightenment is another good and useful word, but it should be clearly defined. A person is enlightened if they perceive their eternal nature and the oneness of existence even while fully engaged in the joys and necessities of Earth-life. As souls, we perceive this oneness – there is nothing we need to do to become enlightened. When we enter Earth as a human, we usually block (veil) the perception of oneness from the personality so that Earth-life can be lived on its own level. Because this blocking is done intentionally, for good reasons, the purpose of our current lives on Earth generally must be something other than enlightenment. If it were important that this personality be enlightened, we would make it that way. In fact, we have all had lifetimes in which that was the case, and those lifetimes were created for specific and perfect reasons. But even enlightenment is not an end to experience, learning, and growth.*
We live the life we now have in the best way we can. That is the purpose of life. Our purpose in choosing this limited time-space experience is not to hurry back to eternal awareness. If we try to hurry, we might miss something useful, temporarily. We are here to filter the eternal through our day-to-day, subjective human experience and to share in that experience with others.
We all develop particular interests in life, and if we choose to pursue an understanding of life’s mysteries, such as enlightenment, that can be a very enriching way to spend our time. But there is nothing wrong with not having a strong interest in enlightenment, souls, or God. As souls, we see that Earth-life is an amazing experience no matter what our human interests might be.
*It could be mentioned here that ‘perfecting’ our human personality is not a prerequisite to experiencing something of eternal realities.
This is the end of Part 5. If you wish, you may read the entire article as a free download at LifeInTimeSpace.com
