Light is Life

There are moments when we all share bits of ourselves with others in a strong enough way that it’s felt deep inside. For some people, those moments are short and elusive. For Britney @ Miracle Of Mind (or net TV show), those moments happen on a regular basis. It’s like coming across an actress that is able to reproduce the emotions or a scene in line with the actions written in the script, Britney finds moments when the ego steps aside to let the inner knowing out. These moments are powerful and she’s made the effort to record the moments on film – so you can enjoy them too!

Not too long ago, when surfing to experience open souls, I came across a short video of Britney talking up some subject, but what caught my eye were her actions – rather than words. It’s like when you hear someone emotionally sing a song rather than technically sing the song – you feel the performance. When you feel it, you experience what’s going on rather than simply hearing it.

The experience is key here. Regardless of the words, what we can learn from Britney is that doing (lol) is exactly what she shows with each of her videos. She’s made a conscious choice to be open. Not only does she make that choice, but she shows how it’s done.

It’s not a talent, but a conscious choice. Her willingness to capture these moments on film document how easy it is and, if you pay attention, you’ll find yourself opening up in reflection with her.

Even though she calls this Turn WITHIN, not OUT, I would call it Listen, Learn and Be Love.

Can you imagine turning the camera on yourself like this? Lol….

I guess the key reason why I’m attracted to Britney’s videos is that she gives me confidence in the words – “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them”. In everyday life, it isn’t often that you find that second person to help you open up to your inner Being. When you do, the interactions can be powerful and deep. There is a special energy that is exchanged between two people when the mind gets out of the way and the Being shines through. Well, as it turns out, Britney’s already come to the conversation. She’s transcended time by gathering virtually and being available whenever you need!

I hope you listened between her words and didn’t get caught up in the technicalities for if you open your heart and just listen, you’ll feel her through space and time. If you don’t get it the first time, watch another one until you find one that resonates with you. At that point, listen & learn how it makes you feel. Pay close attention to that feeling for that is where you learn how she’s doing it.

Once that connection is learned, all that’s really left is to do it too! I don’t mean record yourself giving a sermon via YouTube, but simply opening your heart. Make yourself venerable – but with strength. Do what you know deep down inside is what you want to do. Allow yourself to do it and then, well, simply do it.

So listen, learn and all the while love. It’s easy and fun! You don’t even have to go looking for anyone for Britney is already there and waiting.

Good day.

Here is another characteristic of Your Being that you may take for granted; visualization! How visions are formed is a direct reflection between who you are and what you’ve experienced (or going to experience).

Yet, before we really get into this posting, I would encourage you to review a couple posting that are very similar. They are Input & Output – Perceiving and Creating and Intuition & Ego. The only real difference here is that we’ll be investigating vision and a bit about how that personal tool works.

Everyone knows that when light reflects off something it can be seen. The sensing process takes place with the eyes. The general process has been outlined fairly well on Wikipedia under Visual Perception:

The visual system in humans allows individuals to assimilate information from the environment. The act of seeing starts when the lens of the eye focuses an image of its surroundings onto a light-sensitive membrane in the back of the eye, called the retina. The retina is actually part of the brain that is isolated to serve as a transducer^{[citation needed]} for the conversion of patterns of light into neuronal signals. The lens of the eye focuses light on the photoreceptive cells of the retina, which detect the photons of light and respond by producing neural impulses. These signals are processed in a hierarchical fashion by different parts of the brain, from the retina upstream to central ganglia in the brain.

This first part of the definition of Visual Perception really only seems to cover the mechanics of how the body receives the light – the sensory side of things. Sure, that photon of light gets converted from one form of energy into another as it enters the body, but how do we actually see? Where is the perception based on that collection of photons?

If you follow the link on Wikipedia to Perception, we read:

Perception (from the Latin perceptio, percipio) is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information.^[1][2]

So, the perception part would be tied in with the understanding that we get from the visual sensory information. This would imply that there is action involved (on our part) with regards to being aware of what is seen rather than simply seeing it.

This kind makes sense when you think about the philosophical idea that when two people look at the same painting, they see to different things (stories, impressions, etc.). Basically, if you show two different people the exact same item (painting, photo or something else fairly large in visual imagery) they will ‘see’ different things in the picture. When you look closer at how the person actually goes about ‘seeing’ what is in that picture, what gets seen is what the person’s awareness is focused on. As the person’s awareness moves from one area of the picture (image) to another, they become consciously aware of what is in this new area.

So, even though light enters the eyes, the only thing that is ‘seen’ is what you are aware of.

This reminds me of adventures that I’ve had froggin’. At different points in my life I’ve had time to walk streams (or ponds) in order to spot frogs. There have been many times when I’ve stood (or squatted) at the water’s edge and intently looked for frogs with no success. I would thoroughly look over every spot where a frog might sit (or hide) and not see anything – until the frog moved! It is amazing how well (and long) a frog can remain outside of someone’s awareness. They can be sitting right in front of you and you just can’t see it. Even after it moves, if you take your eyes off it, that frog has the magic of blending which can make it really hard to continually remain aware if it’s location.

So even though are light organ (eyes) receives light, it is what our Being is aware of that determines if we actually see it or not.

This gets really interesting when you close your eyes and still experience ‘seeing’ things. How is it that we can get the sense of seeing when we’re not receiving light directly thorough our eyes?

The first thing that would come to mind is that you remember the image. This idea is based upon memory. You simply remember what it looked like. The concept here is that at the moment you remember the image, you are once again bringing your awareness to that experience. This is a situation where, in your mind (where ever that may be) your awareness explores the details of the image a second time.

It would seem that if this is the case – people have the ability to remember an image – it might imply that the light from the original experience becomes part of us. It’s like we eat photons! As we see, that light enters the body and gets stored. This might be more supporting data for the fact that we are light Beings (maybe see Living on Sunlight and the referenced postings). Or, maybe, it’s not the light that is stored, but rather the experience – as part of your awareness. The light was used as a tool so that your awareness could grow.

The end result of taking in all this light really has little to do with the act of visualization. The process of visualizing something is very similar to the process of intuiting something. Visualization is a direct exchange of information from Your Being into the physical world. It is the same whether you’re remembering something or visualizing something.

Maybe a simple exercise could help.

Sense we know that in order to ‘see’ something we have to bring our awareness to it, we’ll want to do just that. What I’ve found is that there are different types of sensual stimulation that overpowers the subtle energies so you have to make a conscious effort to ‘remove the noise’. Thus, I’ve found a technique during meditation that works pretty good for me right now. It goes like this.

Assume a meditative posture (this is one of the key reasons why I do yoga). You want to be sitting, maybe cross-legged or in a chair, but the most important part is that you have to be able to completely relax. I sit in Easy Pose. Some days I’ll turn my palms up, other days I’ll cup my knees. But, like I said earlier, the key thing is to be able to get relaxed. This only really happens when you have a straight vertical spine. Now close your eyes and then breathe slow and steady. Your breathing should fill your lungs but only to the point just before you feel the muscles tense up. Now breathe for a while.

During this breathing time where you make a conscious effort to remain completely relaxed, you should feel a change in energy. Or, said differently (and maybe a little more accurately), the energy that you normally use to sense everything on a daily basis is no longer needed and your awareness can expand beyond it’s normal ‘confines’. That is, if you no longer place energy into using your eyes, your sense of hearing becomes heightened. If you no longer place energy into moving your muscles, that energy doesn’t ‘cloud the pond’ so to speak allowing your awareness to explore other subtle energies.

After a little time, you’ll notice that you’re doing the right thing when you start becoming aware of things that you previously didn’t sense. An example might be that when you first start your meditation, you were aware of your posture and breathing. Yet, after a while, the sound of the birds chirping outside resonate loud and clear. Before you got into this relaxed state you had no idea about the birds playing outside, yet after minimizing the dominate energies that rule your life, the sounds they make come to the foreground and grab your attention.

It is at this point where visualizations become easy. It is at this point where you’ve calmed the energy that you emit to the point where subtle energies can be recognized. In other words, it’s like once you’ve removed the energy that creates big waves in a pond, you’re able to see the little waves. (Or when you remove the waves you make you can detect the waves others make.)

The next step is that you have to set an intention for the visualization. If you want to remember something, you have to ‘want’ to remember it. You have to have some type of desire to kick start the communication. For me, this is the point where I use the translator in my head to help drive the experience – yet only in a limited fashion for the energy used by the ego is a crude noisy energy that can create ‘larger waves in the pond.’ Thus, you ask, and then clean the slate so the visualization can occur. Said differently, you make room for your awareness to go to a previous experience and feel it again. Or, you make room for Your Being to share energies about what will be. In either case, if you’re in the state where you’re not putting out much energy (you’re calm) you won’t blow away the imaging that Your Being experiences.

What you might find is that this exercise is very similar to dreaming. But it is a conscious dream where you can either manipulate it or simply experience it. When you relate this to dreaming, Your Being shares visualizations with you in some type of sequence and, at some point, you become conscious that you’re dreaming. At that point, you can either let the dream continue uninterrupted or you might replay it slightly differently if you didn’t like the way it was playing out. In the dream, the visions that you have up to the point of conscious manipulation are an unaltered communication from Your Being. At and after the point of manipulation the dream is a creation influenced by the ego.

Regardless to whether you spend time visualizing or remembering, the art of getting to the point where this can happen is the same and the act of doing it is a matter of bring your awareness to that experience or desire.

After all this, the question should arise, why is this important?

Because time is immaterial to Your Being!

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Well, when you visualize something it may or may not have actually occurred. If it did occur, it’s a memory. If it has not occurred, it’s a projection. In either case, the visualization energy can stimulate a physical response allowing you to relive the feeling of a past experience or allow you to generate feelings for a future experience! The energy that generates a physical response is the energy that will fulfill your desire.

That’s right. You can visualize events that you want to experience. When your visualizations generate an emotional or physical response, you know that the experience is strong. The stronger the energy that you use for projection, the more likely (or faster) that experience will become reality.

Your inner sight is a wonderful tool that you have to relive previous experiences or shape new ones. This sight is a direct link between Your Being and your physical experiences. If you remove the noise of everyday life, you will see that your awareness can be brought to this aspect of Your Being so as to enrich your experiences and relive treasured emotional experiences.

There might have been a bit of confusion when trying to understand my precious article Intuition & Ego. In that posting, I didn’t clearly define the terms that I used and used a number of different words in order to try to explain the same (or similar) thing. Hopefully, the information below will help clarify what I’d intended to say.

To begin, I’d like to make sure my understanding of Your Being is clear. To help, I’d like to bring in what the Wikipedia has to say as a reference. But, in doing so, we have to look at how they describe Being, for I want to deal with the concept Your Being. So, the Wikipedia states:

Being (i.e. be+-ing, by synecdoche), is an English word used for conceptualizing subjective and objective aspects of reality, including those fundamental to the self —related to and somewhat interchangeable with terms like “existence” and “living“. In its objective usage —as in “a being,” or “[a] human being” —it refers to a discrete life form that has properties of mind (sentience), which are deemed to constitute a more complex state than simple organisms (i.e. that have only “life functions“).^{[citation needed]}

In abstract usage, “the being” or “one’s being” is the mind’s concept of the self as a whole entity —including both mind and body —wherein the being is in the mind, and the “body” is all sensory aspects within the being. Heidegger coined the Germanic term “dasein” for this property of being in his influential work Sein und Zeit (“this entity which each of us is himself…we shall denote by the term “dasein.””^[1]), in which he argued that being or “dasein” links one’s sense of one’s body to one’s perception of world. Heidegger, amongst others, referred to an innate language as the foundation of being, which gives signal to (and from, cf. cognition) all aspects of being.

The way that I used the word Being in the previous posting fit directly with the first part of the second paragraph where it refers to the “concept of the self”. The difference is that in that quote it’s stated that “…the being is in the mind, and the “body” is all sensory aspects within the being.”

With my current understanding, I would word this differently. Something like: Your Being encompasses all that you are including your mind, body and everything else that makes up who and what You are. Your Being is the root of who you are. Your Being is the ‘I’ in I am. In the context in which I’ll write, Your Being is a unique living entity that has a whole bunch of tools at its disposal in which to enhance the experience of life.

I would also like to clarify what it means to sense something for it’s a pretty abstract concept that most people have come to understand as being fairly limited. To me, there are clear differences between a sense organ and the act of sensing. One is the tool and the other is how it interacts with Your Being. The Wikipedia has also made the distinction where they list “Sense” and “Sense (disambiguation)”. From Sense, we read the sense organ type definition:

Senses are the physiological capacities within organisms that provide inputs for perception.

From Sense (disambiguation) we read:

A sense in biology and psychology, is a physiological method of perception. In common usage, a sense may also mean an understanding or awareness of something in particular.

This second definition is in line with what I’m referring to when I write sensing. But to fill it out more, sensing, and the act of perception, are really closely intertwined. For when you perceive something, you’ve applied your understanding to what you’ve sensed. The semiformal definition of perception comes across like:

Perception (from the Latin perceptio, percipio) is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information.^[1][2] All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs.^[3] For example, vision involves light striking the retinas of the eyes, smell is mediated by odor molecules and hearing involves pressure waves. Perception is not the passive receipt of these signals, but can be shaped by learning, memory and expectation.^[4][5] Perception involves these “top-down” effects as well as the “bottom-up” process of processing sensory input.^[5] Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system, but subjectively seems mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness.^[3]

This definition is mostly in line with my understanding. The part that I somewhat disagree with is the part “All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs.^[3]”. If the definition of nervous system was Your Being and they dropped the part about “… which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs” I might feel better about what’s been collectively written.

I might write the definition like; Perception is the process of understanding or becoming aware of sensory information. Perception is a conscious activity, yet sensory stimulation quite often happens outside of conscious awareness.

Let’s now bring these three together.

• Your Being perceives by sensing.  

That came together pretty easy! In a way, it seems so simple. This, to me, is the input side of life.

Because during the process of life we interact with our environment, there is a similar path for the output side of life.

To get a better feel for this let’s play with the idea of creativity. What does it mean to create? The common idea for creativity (similar to the common five senses) comes across like this:

Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new (a product, a solution, a work of art, a novel, a joke, etc.) that has some kind of value. What counts as “new” may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs. What counts as “valuable” is similarly defined in a variety of ways.

If you look at this common definition while keeping the idea of senses in mind, you’ll get the feeling that the type of things that they list as being ‘created’ are things that are clearly discoverable by the standard five senses.

To get a better feel for how I’m using it, we want to go a little deeper.

It is generally thought that “creativity” in Western culture was originally seen as a matter of divine inspiration.^[1]

Following the link to divine inspiration we can see that they broke it up into different sections. The one that looks most promising is:

Epiphany (feeling), the sudden realization or comprehension of the essence or meaning of something

Linking again:

An epiphany (from the ancient Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epiphaneia, “manifestation, striking appearance”) is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something. The term is used in either a philosophical or literal sense to signify that the claimant has “found the last piece of the puzzle and now sees the whole picture,” or has new information or experience, often insignificant by itself, that illuminates a deeper or numinous foundational frame of reference.

What we see here is that when someone has an epiphany, they have a sudden realization or comprehension of something. Simply put, how I would interpret this is that Your Being suddenly becames conscious of something (new). The knowledge or understanding that already existed now becomes something you can consciously act upon.

And if you’re taking notes, this is similar to what we saw in the previous posting regarding intuition!

When we go to put these ideas together, I generally refer to creativity as the process by which Your Being transfers knowledge or understanding (which is generally thought of as an epiphany or intuitive understanding) where you actively express that new understanding in some form. Typically, someone may verbalize the experience to someone, it may be written down or acted out or felt. In general, it is the act where Your Being communicates in a way that is detected consciously and acted upon.

Thus we have our output path:

• Your Being creates consciously.

 

The thing that unites these two different key characteristics that make up how you function is energy! I will leave the energy discussion for another day, but for Your Being to be able to either receive or transmit information, that information, however subtle it is, needs to flow to the tools that we have that can interpret it.

The most interesting part is not the energy, but rather the energy flow. The energy flow is what we experience and call life! That is what needs to happen for us to either sense or create something. The stronger the energy flow, the larger the impression on Your Being. If the energy flow is subtle, than the more stimulating energy flows need to be calmed so that the tools that receive the subtle flows can actually sense or intuit it!

I am so looking forward to expanding upon these ideas with more detailed postings. For now, I hope you have a better understanding with regards to the words I used in my previous posting (and some even earlier postings).