Guided Meditation

One of the most powerful and useful tools in meditation is the “guided meditation”
If you believe that we exist on parallel universes or if you just believe that the human mind can conceive infinite outcomes of a certain scenario, is up to you.
The cert fact is that if we pose a certain question or quest to our subconscious mind, we will receive the optimum answer each time – some how :)

This is also the most difficult of the meditations techniques to perform.
It requires that you have already mastered the “relaxation” and the “contemplation” meditation.
(So you may have to wait a year or so before you try this :)
But I want to finish this series of posts on meditation, so here it is my final advice to you.
(Anything beyond this point would be for you and I, yet to be explored.)

Let’s say that you are a physicist working on the grand theory of unified physics, or whatever you are working on.
You go into your regular meditation and when you reach the state of contemplation with a good, clear visual, you gently start “guiding” the scene to the following scenario:

You are in Sweden at the Nobel Prize Ceremony and you are announced to be the winner of the Physics award for the work you have done.
You get to the podium and start explaining to the audience how you have solved and discovered whatever you want to discover.
You repeat this scenario until you are able to clearly see and understand everything.
(Incidentally many of great scientific discoveries have been made during a dream state.)

But you don’t have to be a scientist to use this method.
You can be a musician imagining the debut of your first symphony.
Or you can be a painter at the opening of your first gallery.
Or even you can imagine yourself on your first date with your future spouse.
The uses to this technique are limited only by your imagination.

Like I said before; these are my own “experiences” and this is how far I have come in my practice and understanding of the spiritual world.
There are many practices and techniques out there and you can experiment and find your own path.
I put a great deal of emphasis on practicality and not that much on religious side of spirituality.
Like my relationship with my physical father, my relationship with my spiritual father is intimate and personal.

So let me know how your practice and journey goes.
By this time I should be back from my vacation.
So I am curious of how is everybody doing?

Intern Net

I was studying to get my hypnotherapist license.
(This was about 16 years ago.) And part of the program was hands on practice.
We – the students – were encouraged to practice on anybody that would volunteer for “experimentation” – which is a really bad idea; do not volunteer!

So I was working with a friend of mine that had a strange affliction:
She was afraid of cats.
Nothing major – I thought.
Some early childhood drama involving cats that had left some buried trauma in the subconscious.

I did an induction and then started a time regression.
I asked her to regress – to go back in time – to the first time she had experienced that feeling of anxiety towards cats.
And she did.
The only problem was that she did not go to her childhood, she went to antique Egypt.

She told me this strange, and very elaborate story, of being a girl in a temple.
She was in charge of cleaning after some holy cats and she was being punished for not doing a very good job.
She could name the priestesses and describe in great detail everything in the temple.
I was completely perplexed – they did not teach us that in school.

The way I understood – up to that point – the inner workings of the human mind was like this:
The human mind is like a computer.
We have the I/O cards – eyes, ears, nose, mouth and touch.
We have a RAM – the short term memory – and we have a Hard Drive – the long term memory.
And of course we have the CPU – the part of the brain in charge of reasoning.

According to this model we are born with a BIOS – the human instincts and whatever abilities and qualities we inherited from our parents through our DNA – and everything else is programmed – learned – as we grew up.
Inside of our memories should be nothing except that, but as I was exploring this strange new world I discovered more and more things that were not supposed to be there.

So the only conclusion I could deduct is that there was something else about the brain we didn’t know about.
We are connected to an “intern net”
We are getting outside “information” in ways we are not aware of.
Here is a very interesting VIDEO for you to watch

Contemplative Meditation

Have you ever witnessed a sunset so beautiful, so majestic that it took your breath away?
Have you ever had that spiritual experience of wonder, that “wow” moment, when your mind and soul opened up to a higher understanding?
Of course that would be just for a brief moment because the instant we will feel that way we would try to analyze, to grab and hold the experience and of course that would be the end of it.

If you want to know what “contemplation meditation” feels like that would be the closest thing to it.
Contemplation meditation is an altered state of mind in which you experience a sense of wonder.

As you continue to practice the relaxation meditation you will observe on the back of your mind some strange, minute, random, things happening.
You will perceive glimpses of images and strange sparks of light.
You will perceive sounds and sensations, fragments of memories and emotions.

These “anomalies” popping up randomly, without any rhyme or reason, are the workings of your subconscious mind starting to surface into your conscious mind.
Actually the process would be exactly the opposite; your conscious mind is starting to peer, dive into your subconscious :)

We are using less than 10% of our brain power to reason and think.
The other 90% of our brain is running everything else from the complex system we call the human body to mental tasks like memory and emotion management.
We take all that work for granted.
We never think much about our immune system or digestive system, unless something wrong happens to us.
We also get only some glimpses of the workings of the subconscious mind when accidentally we become aware of our dreams.

So as we are practicing in our meditation this process of “contemplation” will be a natural progression.
You do not have to do anything special just to be aware of the “grabbing” and “analyzing” tendencies of your mind and gently let go.
In time, the little spark and glimpses will become clear images and you will enter what many call a “lucid dreaming” state.
This will be your first real exploration of your subconscious mind.

Here is a good video: HOW TO MEDITATE
The video would be fantastic if it did not make any references to religion but that is my personal preference :)
Have fun and keep up the practice!

Magic

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke
“Any sufficiently badly-written science is indistinguishable from magic.”
Aaron Allston

I do not like to look at things in a scientific manner and don’t like to look at them in a superstitious manner either.
I always like to look at things in a rational manner.

By that I mean that I do not believe in magic and supernatural as explanation for the spiritual occurrences.
Magic and supernatural are just labels we attach to things we do not understand.
There is nothing super or sub natural.
God itself is as natural as nature can be.

Of course I do not take the scientific point view on spirituality either.
Just because you say something doesn’t exists you can’t make it disappear.
I’m sorry but the world we live in is not only a material world; it is as much or even more a spiritual world and the scientific community will have to come to grips with that reality sooner or latter.

If we look of some of the things that we thought were “magic” a long time ago, like talking bushes and magic mirrors that showed images from far away, we realize that they are not “magic” anymore.
We send pictures through radio waves, talk on telephones, make birthday cards that sing and fly to the moon.

“That is no magic” you will say “That is just technology” but try to explain that to a tribesman living in the Amazon jungle and he will tell you that it is magic.
Walking on water is magic to us not because it is supernatural but because we don’t understand how it is done.
Once you understand how something is done, it is not magic any longer.

We know so little about the human mind and about the spiritual world.
Actually know more about our oceans and about the universe than about our mind.
We have not even scratched the surface of the spiritual world.
We are about were alchemist were before modern chemistry arise:
90% superstition and about 10 % knowledge.

So you might look at this and see a dismal situation.
Or you can look at it and see a great opportunity.
Ether or we have a lot of work ahead of us.
I hope you are practicing your meditation technique ;)

Relaxation Meditation

“Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.”
Swami Sivananda

Like I mentioned in my last post “meditation” is just a label describing a certain state of mind.
We all have experienced this altered state of mind in a natural occurring form.
If you have ever exhausted yourself on a mental task – like doing your taxes or working long hours on computer – you might have experienced a momentary lapse of reason.
You might have found yourself staring at the computer screen with nothing in your mind at all.

If the brain was a muscle, meditation would be the complete relaxation and let go, completely limp of the brain.
It is the cessation of all conscious thought.
Or to put it in the simplest form – relaxation meditation is “spacing out” at will.

The first thing to do is to find a comfortable position.
There are many schools of meditation that insist in specific positions of meditation – the most mentioned being the “lotus” position.
But since I suffer from a lower back pain and being allergic to religious dogma I prefer lying on my back in my bed – which also gives me a really good excuse to fall asleep – another good side benefit of meditation.

The second step is tricking your mind into not thinking – which, if you think of it, is an oxymoron since you can’t control your mind not to be in control.
So the trick is to focus your mind on something else than your own thought process.
Once again there are different techniques.
The classical method is the breathing method.

In this method you follow, watch or concentrate on the air coming through your nose into your body and going out. Some people count, time, the length of inhale and exhale but I found that distracting to the process of quieting down of the mind.

Personally I prefer the “OM” meditation.
I have a CD with an "OM" chant for 15 -20 min.
I play the CD while I’m comfortably lying in my bed with my eyes closed and in my mind I join the chorus of monks in their chant.
The hamming will produce an instant cessations of the thought process.
The mind will quiet down and enter a state of total relaxation.

Here is a place you can download a clean OM CHANT
This kind of meditation is not much of a spiritual journey but it is an essential step in preparing your mind to become that vehicle of exploration.
You may choose to stay at this level and enjoy all the health benefits of meditation.
Or you may choose to go further in your practice and step into the ocean of spirituality.