When you visualize yourself on your mind’s movie screen, are you simply watching yourself do things, or are you inside your body experiencing the world around you?
This is important for your spiritual development. Which is it? Are you simply watching your, for want of a better word avatar, go through motions, or are you actually holding eye-contact with the people you meet, seeing the sites, hearing the hears, smelling the smells, feeling the feels, tasting the tastes?
If you are an Experiencer, lucky you! Well done, and keep it up!
If you are an Observer instead of an Experiencer, tell me something, and I do not mean this in a snarky or judgmental way at all, but do you do the same thing in your life in Middle Realm? Are you observing instead of experiencing? Do you think, “Ah, a sad thing has happened, I should feel sad now,” and then you fake feeling sad because it’s expected of you?
They say, “visualize yourself standing in a forest,” so you look at an inner video of yourself standing in a forest. They don’t say, “Understand that you are right now standing in a forest in your own body inside your head.” Big difference. (Pro-tip: We create reality around us out of thin air and imagination, and so in fact, you are standing in a forest in your own body inside your head.)
There are times when it’s important, even life- or sanity-saving, to be the Observer. Absolutely a great talent to have when you are stressed out, going through trauma, contemplating self-harm, having a panic attack … anytime you need to disassociate or just distance yourself a little from what is really happening to you, it’s a great skill to have.
But not when you are doing inner work. No matter how strange or scary. You have to be the Experiencer.
And not when you are living the best, richest, and deepest parts of your life. That’s when you really need to be the Experiencer the most. Holding your children or grandchildren for the first time. Falling madly in love with the great love of your life. Standing on a stage accepting a massive standing ovation. Sinking the winning … sportsthing. Accepting a life-time achievement award. Or even saying goodbye to a parent for the last time. You don’t want any distance between you and those moments.
So why do we live with shields to maximum, inside and out?
For centuries if not millennia, we have allowed this world to be designed and controlled by people who just want wealth and power, and that approach is entirely unsustainable. For the last couple thousand years the grabbers and takers and screwer-overers have been in charge of all the resources, and the rest of us have been stuck working for them, trading our talent, our time, our dreams, and our wholeness for a paycheck – if we were lucky not to be slaves. And now most of the people I meet are suffering at some level, physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually, because the treadmill that was constructed for us is getting harder and harder to run on.
Of course you want to put a little distance on that. Who wouldn’t? Well, maybe the grabbers, takers, and screwer-overers (hereafter known as the GTSOs).
But if you are trying to develop spiritually, being the Observer all the time is going to hold you back. And the only way to grow out of the morass that the GTSOs have created for us is to develop serious skills, my people. Serious. Skills. We’ve got to develop our imaginations, our ability to concentrate, visualize, see/smell/hear/taste/feel and feel what’s really there. The imagination is not what your parents told you, or your teachers, or anyone who ever tried to control you. It’s real. It’s not a sandbox, it’s a manifesting engine. If we learn how to use it, we can change the world around us, and the more we do that, the more the world changes. It’s the only way anybody ever does anything real.
First step: Understand that you are in fact standing in a forest in your own body in your head. When you visualize, practice seeing everything from your own perspective, from the eyes in your own head. Otherwise, you are just watching a CGI avatar of yourself going through motions that mean nothing.
Second step: Get serious about building the skills in your head. Find a resource, either a book or a course, that can teach you to enhance your concentration and visualization (or however you best interact with information in the inner worlds, through feel, hearing, or vision). (Robert Bruce is an Australian mystic who has a rigorous approach and has written several books on mental development and astral projection; Gordon White, another Aussie, has some serious chops in the focus and manifest department, and also a few books very much worth reading; the Silva Mind Control Method has been around a long time and may seem a little quaint when compared to Aussies Bruce and White, but the foundation is sound and the program quite rigorous. There are many, many others; these are just the ones I have the most experience with.)
Third step: Practice until it’s comfortable, if not easy.
Fourth step: Decide how you want your world to be and start using the tools of concentration and visualization to make it happen.
You can totally do this. So can I. Let’s make it happen.