Energy Body Ways

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Meditation can be complex subject.  Many people are selling it instead of teaching it as a progression of awareness that is supposed to set you free.

The main problem is that the practice of it often ends up the goal, instead of the state of mind.

Did you meditate today?

Is that what really matters?

The thing is that meditation, like physical or hatha yoga, is something that is designed to get you into a state where you let go of a certain kind of thinking.

You let go of a certain kind of thinking and experience the world as it is.

When you are experiencing the world this way you recognize there is

• happiness and sadness
• love and hate
• pain and pleasure
• peaks and valleys
• and everything in between

You realize that you can focus your mind, control your attention, and by doing so get a different perception of reality and your consciousness.

Unfortunately, meditation and yoga and prayer and spiritual systems can become a crutch.  They are not supposed to be a crutch, they are supposed to be training wheels. When you reach a certain point you need to let go of the training wheels.

Like with training wheels how do you know you’re ready to ride on your own?  You have to start riding naked.  You have to start doing it without the training wheels.

If you’ve been meditating for years you’re ready to expand your meditation into your everyday life and try new approaches.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking the practice is the doing.  It’s not. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re not ready.  You are.

This week spend some time without the training wheels.

Try something that is a moving, waking meditation.  Examples require staying present in the moment while remaining flexible and open.

Here are some possibilities:  play hacky sack; play music with some friends free-style (not from a set song – in other words, jam); go somewhere for awhile and don’t know where you are going – make it up as you go along; meet with people with no expectations; just go with the flow.

If you don’t need to practice this… that’s great.  But most meditators or spiritual devotees need to spend less time on a rigid practice and more on expanding that practice out into their life.

Either way, enjoy yourself.  Watch it all coming and going.

That’s what should be your meditation: existence itself.

Mind is what you inhabit at all times.  Everything else is an inference (such as the existence of the ‘material’ world).  Our language is still badly embedded with preconceptions that do not reflect or help create an accurate picture of reality.

But we know this: we are all in mind, all the time.  All our experience is in mind.  You cannot escape being in consciousness all the time.

You may bang your foot on a rock… and it is in your mind (which does not mean it is fake, or a fantasy, or any other unjustified conclusion… but it is in your mind).

You may feel love, or hate, or pain, or pleasure… and it is in your mind.  You may think electrons exist, or atoms, or molecules, or scientific models and think that this is ‘real’… but it is all in your mind.

What is in your mind may be in the minds of others, or reflected in reality, or dreams, or shared by no other.  Regardless it is ALL in your mind.

You, we, are in consciousness first and always.

The Energy Body is my term for this reality that we are always in mind, always in the energy body, experiencing through it, experiencing as it.  Influenced by, embedded within, energy which contains first and foremost… mind-consciousness-awareness; thoughts and feelings!

The Way is the way of waking up to this true, obvious reality and recognizing it for what it is, of letting the preconceptions, models, beliefs, language traps, and all else fall away to the greatest extent possible and claiming your true power.

Wikipedia has a good overview of how to develop siddhis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhi

It’s pretty straightforward how to do it.  Concentration, meditation, samadhi are the three steps; all of them used together is called samyama.  This last stage is what triggers the development of siddhis, which for practical purposes means you can do anything you want.

Now the question arises if these techniques work, and they have been around for a very long time, where are the people who can levitate, rule over others, have such extreme abilities?

In yoga it is often advised to skip pursuing siddhis as they distract one from achieving enlightenment. Yet it is hard to believe that no one in 2000 years would choose to spend a few centuries playing at being a demi-god on the planet Earth as a  brief detour on the path to enlightenment.  There is no record of this, though.  So is it like so much of yoga, clever exercises to stimulate a hash-fueled fantasy?

The evidence is clear.  From a factual view of the world these stories are nonsense and the exercises in developing siddhis are nothing more than devices to stimulate imagination, not to actually alter oneself or the world.

Unless there are some very subtle masters of mind and reality living quietly in the world… and siddhi development, always, by necessity, fosters non-attachment and a desire for privacy.

What are lucid dreams? They are usually defined as a dream in which you know you are dreaming, that is, you can consciously state to yourself that you are in a dream.  As in, “hey, I’m in a dream now, this is pretty cool.  Let’s see if I can fly!” and then … whoosh! … you’re off into the air, flying in your dream.

Astral travel is having a similar experience although usually, unless you are travelling in one of the astral planes, it is assumed that astral travelling occurs in the same reality your physical body inhabits during waking life.  This has not been proven and some think astral travel is just a form of lucid dreaming.

A waking dream is a good way of looking at astral travel.  The vividness of dreams with the conscious control of the waking state combined into one.

Our experience is first and foremost in our minds. We never live perfectly and only in the physical body; if we did we would be no more than automatons.  We live in our minds, our interpretations of the world.  We also live in other worlds…:

You also have an imaginal body. This is the body you use when daydreaming, when you imagine yourself doing something in the future, or when you do guided imagery.

When you think of yourself going on a great vacation you are using your imaginal body. When you imagine yourself in the greatest shape of your life and how you would look, you are using your imaginal body.

Second, you have a dream body. This is your body you experience when you are dreaming. This body often goes about business on its own, fulfilling its needs, relegating your conscious awareness to the backseat.

Sometimes you can even become consciously aware that you are in your dream body and dream environment while you are dreaming! This can be a lot of fun and is usually called lucid dreaming or conscious dreaming.

Both of our more mental bodies can be used to improve our performance in the physical world through rehearsal, by using the imagination or lucid dreams to practice skills or behaviours we want to experience in the ‘real’ world.

Tags: consciousness, dream body, dreams, imaginal body, imagination, living in mind