Here's an exercise for your Sunday morning. You will be experiencing a series of "jumps." Do not rush this experiment. Take one jump at a time. The more you take your time, the more powerful will your results be. If possible, get someone to read this experiment's instructions to you as you sit with eyes closed and follow them. Have them read in a quiet voice, and have the reader pause after every step, and have a hand signal that you must give for the reader to start the next step. If you have no one to help like this, then read the step, and then close your eyes and follow that step's instructions until you feel you're ready to try the next step.
Close your eyes and feel the various parts of your body. Try to distinguish the sensations of the more inner parts from the sensations coming from the parts of your body that are reporting contact with your clothing, the chair you are sitting on, the floor being sensed beneath your feet, etc. Try to feel the inside of your head, between your eyes, inside the nasal passages, the deeper parts of your mouth cavity. Try to feel your eardrums actually capturing sounds. Feel -- don't listen -- feel your eardrums being moved by the sound waves crashing into them. Feel the inside of your throat and neck. Practice "scooting around the body" to "visit" these various sensations. Jump One. After a few minutes of this practice, now, in your mind's eye, with eyes still closed, imagine that you can sense yourself ranging throughout your immediate environment as if it were also your body. Pretend you are getting "reports" or "sensations" or "some sort of information" from the nearby objects in the room. To whatever extent you can, sense the presence of the objects of the room -- even though your eyes are closed. This sense may simply be a conviction on your part that you "know" that the desk is "there." Pretend you can "somehow" feel the desk, the chair, the floor, the other furniture in the room, and finally feel the presence of the walls of the room like "another skin" around you. Scoot around the room like this for a few minutes with your imagination. Feel that the room is completely filled with your aliveness, your consciousness. Sense that every speck of space in the room has you within it. Jump Two. After a few minutes, "break out" of the room. Pretend that you now can range freely around the entire structure of the building you are in. Do NOT imagine yourself traveling around the building like a ghost; instead, actually feel that you are being in every part of the building simultaneously -- JUST LIKE YOU NOW FEEL YOU ARE IN EVERY PART OF YOUR BODY. Fill the building with "you," with your living presence. Take a minute or two to gain a bit of comfort doing this, or rather, BEING this. Jump Three. Now take a breath, let it out, and as you breathe out, fill up your neighborhood with consciousness. Pretend you are the life breath, the soul, of the entire area in which you live. All the buildings, all the people, all the animals, the wind, EVERYTHING is filled with your spirit. Scoot around in your imagination for a few minutes. Everywhere you go, there you are already. Like your hands or feet have always been filled with you, feel the various "parts of you" in the neighborhood being similarly filled. But, understand that everything is instantly available to you by merely putting your attention on it. There's no "waiting" for more distant "parts of you" to "report in." No part of you is farther from you in terms of time. Jump Four. After a little comfort is gained, take another deep breath and fill up all the land around you with awareness as you exhale. Blossom yourself to huge proportion. Pretend that the seacoasts are like your toe and finger tips. Feel the immense dynamism of the detailed world that is full with your loving grace and support. Feel like the one soul that pervades everything. See that everything is IMMEDIATELY available to you -- just a glancing or listening and instantly that part of you reports in with some data. Imagine smelling the sea air on one coast, instantly seeing a silent bird gliding up a mountain slope and then immediately hearing the waves of the other coast. Jump Five. Now, take another deep breath, and fill the Earth with your spirit. Say "hello" to the universe as you "try on" your Earth-body. Open your spiritual eyes to scan the vast reaches around you. Feel the majesty of your new self, a magnificent planet with billions upon billions of lives complexly intertwined. Feel the serenity of space as you bask in the pleasure of being so vibrantly alive with awareness. Jump Six. Fill up the universe. Do not waste time with filling only our galaxy, fill the whole of space and time. Fill it all. Pretend that the billions of galaxies are like cells of your body. Delight in the fullness of your almost infinite resources. Countless lives experiencing an endless parade of feelings, emotions, thoughts, birth and death. Feel the intimate ownership of everything. Instantly across billions of light years of distance you find yourself "already there" wherever you gaze. Feel how far beyond ordinary concerns you are. Millions of your units are dying and millions are being born. Incredible changes are happening by the instant, but you are unchanged by any of it. You are filling up everything. You support all. Glory surrounds you like a cloud of light. Jump Seven. See that the magnificence of all this is merely an object that is within your attention. The immensity that you are, with your myriad bodies and the wisdom of millions of cultures, is but a small blip, just something to perceive, a THING, a very tiny precious jewel in a vast infinite consciousness that is completely unbounded by any limitations. Feel yourself to be, as you have always been, an all pervading awareness that is everywhere, every time simultaneously. You contain all of it, and it is exceedingly small compared to the vastness of your presence. Know yourself to be pure, absolute and beyond everything. Jump Eight. Give up all conceptualizations, feelings, sensations, memories, values, qualities, and physicality. You are that that is beyond all these things including the consciousness that is aware of them for you. Understand that consciousness loves the universe and loves creating thoughts about it and presenting them to YOU. See that the infinite resourcefulness of consciousness is there for you to witness as it conveys the universe to you. See that these thoughts about consciousness and its infinity are being created by consciousness, not you. You are the witness of it all, the soul of consciousness, the source of consciousness itself. You cannot be described, but yet you are. Beyond all concept, you are. Completely beyond. Jump Nine. From out of this infinity, watch as consciousness seeks to please you -- even though you do not need any THING. Watch as consciousness brings to you the vision of one of your bodies sitting in a room with eyes closed with its small individual spark of consciousness. Watch as consciousness introduces this individual to the unlimited potentiality of itself. Feel the surge of pure love that consciousness has for this small spark. Watch the blessing of pure compassion flood this individual as the entirety of creation is found securely and comfortably residing within. Feel the circle being completed.
