PART TWO: SELF-INQUIRY AND THE PATH TO SELF-REALIZATION

Lot's of people keep complaining to me about their overactive minds and how it interferes with self-inquiry, meditation, or even peace and quiet.

But just keep up any practice of looking or feeling within.

Looking within will reveal inner space or emptiness, while continued looking within will reveal the light of Consciousness and will illuminate that Void.

Feeling within, first be becoming increasingly aware of your body's inner and outer sensations, breathe, heartbeat, pains, will lead to an ability to go deeper into the Subtle Body energies, the experience of the I Am sensation which leads directly to self by just staying in the I Am.

This descent into Self can be a long journey for some, or very raPid for a few, but once you are this deep into your inner experience, your spirit, your inner life, the mind will no longer be a problem.

It is as if you are a submarine on the surface of the ocean in a hurricane.  Once it begins to dive deep enough, the waves begin to affect it less and less.  Once the submarine reaches a depth of 200 feet, nothing on the surface touches it, moves it, affects it.

The same is true with your mind.  Once you get into the subtle body energies, the meridian and chi energies, you are at a level where the mind begins to disappear as the center of your life.  You begin to live from your heart and gut, and the energies and emotions become the primary means by which you interact with the world. Your heart grows “tentacles” of Subtle Body perceptions which constantly and lovingly scan the world around you.  You “touch” the world in a direct way that previously was called intuition, but now is the trusted way that you access the world.

Grasping hold of the I Am sensation, you just stay there as much and as often as possible.  As you do, you sink deeper into the I Am sensation, and it grows into a sense of presence that pervades and surrounds your body.  You now have a second “psychic” of Subtle Body which becomes more real to you than your physical body, more intimate, closer to what you feel as you.

The I Am Sensation Tunnel to Self

Sinking within and becoming aware of your inner life and the Subtle Body leads to increasing and often unexpected release of previously buried memories, traumas, emotions, and more importantly, the resistances to experiencing them.  These resistances are the hardened psychic blocks by which you originally walled off and denied psychic pain.  As the resistances are experienced, and the buried experiences and emotions themselves begin to leak through the defenses, you have now entered a level that is similar to what is encountered after years of deep analysis.

Some call this shadow work, but really it is just a new previously hidden area of the totality of Self.

The work you do in this area is incredibly important because the buried defenses, the psychic walls holding certain emotions and memories away from awareness, take an enormous amount of psychic energy to maintain.  Becoming aware of the leaking emotions, especially depressive moods, anxiety, rage, etc., will allow one to become aware of the psychic resistances that have walled them from awareness.

Now staying in the I Am as much as possible, you gently probe those walls, which “feel” like a subtle body hardness, and they begin to soften letting more and more of the blocked feelings and memories into awareness.

This becomes a balancing act.  Even while staying in the I Am sensation, falling deeper and deeper into the inner emptiness, the sense of presence, and the tunnel of the I Am, the resistances begin to melt, the hidden emotions are felt, and the sense of I Am gets stronger and one begins to feel the Self as arising from within.

The balancing comes in finding the right “temperature” for your own self-investigation.  Do you like it hot and heavy, or slow, gentle, and warm?  You have to find your own way through your own inner maze, you own ability to tolerate pain, emotions, psychic visions, fears, depression, etc. Each element adds to your inner growth.  By growth, I mean reclaiming your pristine state before its development was sidetracked by trauma followed by erecting psychic defenses, which also affects your physical body as psychic defenses are usually primarily ways of walling off emotions through contracting muscle groups in your body.  In effect, by the age of 40 you have become crippled through locked muscles and joints.  The more shadow work you do, the deeper you will be able to sink into your I Am sensation, allowing you, the seeker, to get closer to your prize: the full experience of yourself as God and as an individual human.

There is so very much that can be written about this kind of inner work, and a guide is very important.  I learned how to do this kind of “psychological level” shadow work with Eric Reitz, who was my personal psychotherapist for seven years, and my mentor in graduate school while working on a doctorate in clinical psychology.

This level is also that of psychoses and serious neuroses, personality disorders such as schizoid disorders, manic depression, major depression, schizophrenia and schizoaffective states.

Therefore each person has a different path through this level, but most everyone will have to spend time and energy here reclaiming lost parts of their entire Self through this shadow work to gain increase integration and strengthened sense of self which eventually becomes Self-Realization, the discovery of the divinity of your own sentience, your own life.

The essence of this part of the path is to always remember the I am sensation, stay with it no matter what else arises in terms of emotions, defenses, fears, depression, etc.  Remember, each feeling and image that arises is a message from a lost part of yourself.  It is not necessary to gather in all lost parts before Self-Realization, but only to have a clear and direct path to an awakening of the Self-experience.  There is an infinite amount of time after Self-realization to gradually complete the integration at you own pace, and it becomes infinitely easier to do this work after you have become realized, because, by then you know who and what you are without any doubt and with extraordinary power as your existence.

STAY TUNED FOR PART THREE: LOVING YOURSELF AND SELF-REALIZATION