Principle #2: Enter The Field Of Infinite Potential, The Divine Mind

This post is second in the series "7 Principles for Consciously Creating Your Life" on cultivating a life of joy, prosperity and abundance.

Some of you may have seen the popular, Oprah-acclaimed movie The Secret which claims to reveal a closely guarded ancient secret - that you are a powerful, volitional co-creator of reality. You manifest your experience directly through your thoughts and intentions, the movie asserts. Your thoughts carry a certain energy which attracts objects and experiences of similar vibration to you through the "law of attraction".

This notion of "attraction" is an imprecise approximation of the mechanics of manifestation as understood by the yogis (we'll come back to that shortly), but the overall conclusion is consistent: you create your reality in every moment.

In fact, it is the very nature of the Self to create. You are imbued with infinite creative potential. "As the great banyan tree lies in the form of potency in the seed, even so the entire universe lies as a potency in the heart of the Supreme," says the yogic text Paratrimsika. Creativity is the essence of divinity. As you awaken to your true divine nature, you can access the vast creative power inherent in the heart of your being.

There's only one problem -- most of us are still operating from individual ego identities. Our minds are cluttered with thoughts, doubts, fears, and worries which unconsciously manifest into frenzied, conflicted and chaotic lives. In order to consciously invoke your creative potential and begin manifesting a life of peace and wholeness, you must be willing to soften your addiction to the rational mind and move your awareness into the "Divine Mind." Let me explain.

The word "rational" comes from the root "ratio", to divide or particularize. The rational mind is particularized into discrete thought constructs which operate at conscious and subconscious levels to create your reality. Referred to as karma in the eastern traditions, this condition of being beholden to habituated patterns and predispositions of thought, limits your free will. Because your thought patterns are relatively fixed, your ability to create a wildly audacious new reality through the rational mind is virtually zero.

Alternately, the Divine Mind holds unbounded possibilities. The Divine Mind is an infinite field of non-dual awareness beyond thought, variously described as the superconscious mind, ultimate reality, source, emptiness, void, no-mind, universal consciousness, etc. by different traditions. It is omniscient, all-powerful and eternal. By relaxing into the thought-free Divine Mind, "you" cease to exist, becoming one with the unlimited intelligence and creative potential of the supreme Self, liberated from the small habituated patterns of ego. In this universal state, individual karma also ceases to exist (think of it as a karma-free zone) and powerful new realities are possible.

Sounds intriguing, you say, how does this work?

Let's return to the misnomer of "attraction". According to the yogis, reality is not "out there" waiting to be attracted to you. Instead, the entire phenomenal world arises from within your own consciousness. While the perception of duality created by your limited sense organs might lead you to believe you are separate from the rest of creation, even our science knows that you are mostly swirling electrons and empty space, non-different from the chair on which you are sitting or the computer screen displaying this article.

Creation is not about attracting objects to you, it's about entering the Divine Mind which holds all things simultaneously in indistinguishable unity. Here you are non-different from that which you desire to create. Thought and form are inseparable, an idea and its physical expression are indivisible. By collapsing subject and object, you become infinite. Now, the true yogic secret is revealed: if you drop a single thought into the thought-free Divine Mind, it will have atomic power to manifest.

"In the Divine Mind, energy and matter are the same. Subject and object are the same. At that level, there is truth without duality," teaches Dattatreya Siva Baba. "Go into this divine state and then visualize what you want to create. By building castles in the air, you build them in reality."

The exercise for this week is to cultivate access to Divine Mind:

Entering the Field of Infinite Potential - This exercise builds upon last week's practice of bringing awareness inward. Sit quietly and bring your attention to the spinal column. Visualize a luminous channel of light running up the spinal column, from the tailbone up to the crown of the head and out into infinite space.

The central channel is called "sushumna" in Sanskrit. It is the primary channel for awakening spiritual consciousness, as well as for distribution of vital life force energy throughout the subtle body. As you practice maintaining your awareness within the sushumna, imagine also a brilliant flame burning in the area between the two eyebrows.

If this feels difficult, you can use a series of tones discovered by the yogis to help purify and awaken this channel. The following sounds can be chanted out loud or silently while moving your awareness up the spinal column as described. Start by focusing your attention on the lower abdomen region, and tone the sound “ahhhhh,” (as in “awe”). Slowly move your awareness up the spinal column to the heart center in the center of the chest, and tone the sound “ooooooo,” (as in “tune”). Now moving your attention further up the spinal column into the throat region, tone the sound “maaaaaa” (as in “mom”). Finally, imagine a flame burning in the third eye between the two eyebrows, and tone the sound “Ommmmm” (as in “home”). Repeat this cycle as many times as you like. By awakening this channel, you open into the Divine Mind.

Principle #1: Live In The Now

As promised, this week starts the series "7 Principles for Consciously Creating Your Life" on how to create more conscious, joyous and abundant lives. Many of you have asked for practical suggestions on how to initiate personal and spiritual exploration. While there is no single roadmap -- there are as many unique routes up the mountain as there are unique trekkers blazing the trail -- a few simple, universal principles can help bring us into alignment with higher sources of wisdom. Once we understand the relationship between our internal landscape (mind and thoughts) and external landscape (events and experiences) we can begin to consciously create the lives we desire.

The first principle of conscious creation may sound incredibly simplistic, but is actually quite challenging to master: Live in the Now.

The natural tendency of the human mind is to race around from one thought to another. Rather than maintaining awareness in the present moment, we spend countless hours rehashing the past and fretting over the future. Let's take a look at both...

Imagine the last time someone insulted or offended you. How long did you cycle over it in your mind? "He was wrong. It wasn't my fault. She's to blame..." If you are a like most people, the incident kicked off a deluge of internal dialogue, probably lasting hours or days, all fixated on a single (already old) moment. When you hold resentments toward others, you bind those individuals to you energetically. As you cycle over past transgressions in your mind, replaying the memories, you lock yourself in bondage to past experience. These trapped memories are stockpiled in the subconscious mind and, unbeknownst to you, subtly flavor all new experiences. Rather than living a new reality in every moment, you recycle past resentments over and over.

Alternately, if you're not rehashing the past, your mind is likely projecting out into the future, worrying about how things will play out for you. "What if you're not successful? How will you support yourself?..." You constantly fret over possible future scenarios, feeling fear and anxiety even though your fantasies have no basis in reality. Arianna recently laughingly shared a quote by Montaigne she keeps on her desk to ward off phantom fears. Liberally translated from French, it says, "There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened."

Ultimately, this mischief of the mind limits your creative power - you cannot create from the past, nor can you create in the future. You can only create in present moment...in the Now.

The Now is eternal and unbounded. It is without content. It is free from any orientation or attachment. Some traditions describe the Now as the gap between two thoughts. By slipping into the gap of the Now you can structure an entirely new experience. When you are fully attentive to the moment, you can access the field of infinite potential...where past, present and future do not dictate your reality.

Every moment is truly new. Every moment is pregnant with possibility and imbued with vast creative intelligence. Your job is to constantly empty the mind, giving up old moments in favor of unlimited possibility. No matter what has come before, a new reality is possible this moment. No matter how "bad" your day has been, you have the power to create the best day of your life.

I want to give you three exercises this week to practice staying in the Now:

Offering Forgiveness - Write down all the resentments, misunderstandings, grudges, conflicts and confusions that you are still holding onto. As you complete each page, offer forgiveness to all those on the list and ask that all old emotions, energies and memories be released and healed. Crumple the paper up and burn it in the fireplace. When the mind sees the fire consuming the paper, it will intuit that the burden is gone and the emotion of the embedded experience can be dissolved.

Cultivating Breath Awareness - The breath carries life force energy and meters the natural rhythms of the body. Sit quietly and imagine the breath traveling in a continuous circle, from the in-breath to the out-breath, round and round. Let the breath flow naturally and comfortably. Notice when the out-breath turns into the in-breath and vice versa. This process of observing the breath will quiet the activity of the mind. You will relax into the Now.

Bringing Awareness Inward - Most mystical traditions recognize the existence of an energetic body, corresponding to the physical body, which directs the inner flow of subtle energy throughout the system. The central energy channel runs parallel to the spine, from the tailbone to the top of the head, and connects the lower instinctual centers with the higher functions of intuition, spiritual sight and divine guidance.

Sit quietly and bring your attention to the spinal column. Visualize a channel of light running up the middle of the spine. Imagine your breath moving through this channel, starting at the base of the spine, moving slowly up the spinal column, then out through the top of the head. Repeat this as many times as you like. By doing this you will become aware of your inner essence, the eternal witnessing presence that rests in the Now.

New Dreams Or Old Karma: What Will You Create In 2008?

In one of my earlier posts, I wrote about my initial encounter with a revered Indian Swami who offered to teach me the yogic secrets of conscious creation.

"You will learn to create many, many things with perfect ease," said Dattatreya Siva Baba, "but you won't do it through willpower and struggle. Perfect rest is when you are creating consciously. When you are neither efforting, nor idle. The yogi knows how to create the entire universe within his own consciousness."

What does it mean to create consciously? How do we create our lives? As we begin the new year, I'd like to circle back to this topic.

Many of you would claim that we don't create our lives at all - we are simply victims of random circumstance, navigating as best we can through the unpredictable events of a chaotic universe. Others would say we are fully in charge of our lives and can create whatever we want - any of us could become millionaires tomorrow. Which is actually true?

The yogis would say the following: As long as you identify with the individual human experience, you will continue to live a limited karmic reality. However, once you recognize your true identity as the Supreme Self, you can manifest anything you desire simply through the movement of your own consciousness. You will understand there is no separation between subject (perceiver) and object (perceived), hence you are non-different from that which you desire, as everything exists inside your own consciousness.

Unfortunately, until you realize your true nature, you are bound to live a karmic reality. Many people associate karma with the law of cause and effect. What comes around goes around, right? But the concept of karma is actually a more subtle and profound concept. Karma is literally translated as "action." It is a set of very fine, subtle impulses within the mind - the sum total of your thoughts, memories, and desires - that cause you to think and act in certain ways.

These karmic imprints (your subtle desires, attachments, beliefs, perceptions) are like seeds that carry your future. The thoughts and actions you initiated in the past created your present, and your present actions will produce a set of effects that will manifest in the future. Just as the acorn carries a full oak tree within it, your karmas will mature in time into full-grown experiences. According to the yogis, your thoughts create your physical experience whether your realize it or not. Everything you are going through today is an expression of past aspirations either at a conscious or unconscious level.

You might think of this phenomenon as a bit like flying a plane on karmic autopilot - all the coordinates are dialed in for your most probable destiny based on your habits or predispositions of mind. Someone has a predisposition to become a stock broker, another a gardener. Someone else has a predisposition for loving relationships, another for drama. These are not random arrangements, according to the yogis. Every movement, every idea, every obstacle, every breakthrough is a result of your inherent predilections.

If you're creating experiences you don't like you might say, "Well, I'll just think different thoughts...," and that would be a likely solution to the problem. The challenge is that the mind is habituated in its patterns. Bill Gates has different thought patterns than you do. And you have different thought patterns than a violent criminal. If the criminal could sustain the same thoughts as Bill Gates over an extended period of time, he would indeed create a similar reality. But we all suffer from attention deficit disorder. Your predisposed patterns of thinking pull you back to the same reality time and again.

So what if you don't like your autopilot destiny? Can you change it? Yes.

Powerful creation is your untapped birthright, but it requires two fundamental commitments: One, it requires a willingness to loosen your attachment to your existing habits and patterns of thought. And, two, it requires surrendering your individual identity in order to open to the unlimited creativity of the supreme Self.

Liberation is not only the recognition of one's true nature, but also the freedom to create your experience without predisposition, unencumbered by limitation of any kind. Over the coming weeks, I'd like to explore a process for cultivating this creative freedom with you. I'll be offering 7 Principles for Creating a Conscious Life. Stay tuned.

The New Year: Start With Sweet Surrender

The turn of the New Year is naturally a time for reflection -- reflection on the events and choices of the past year, as well as a time for setting intentions for the year ahead. While many people ring in the New Year with wild celebration, I typically spend it in meditation and relative solitude. This quiet hibernation is a time for going within and pondering priorities for the next cycle.

As you reflect on your own resolutions for 2008, I'd like to pose an invitation. Rather than focusing on the mundane -- losing weight, kicking that smoking habit, or getting to the gym more often -- I invite you to be more audacious.

Commit to listening to the voice that stirs your soul.

Commit to living your highest calling.

What will it take? It will take something very simple, yet incredibly difficult. It will take laying down your personal agendas -- surrendering your story line, your illusory sense of control, your limited conceptions of what you should achieve -- and listening alertly to the deeper voice that whispers within you.

Restricted by conceptions and pre-dispositions about what is possible, your ego agendas are simply too small for you. At best, the ego can help you to acquire some expensive toys and moments of pleasure. But, no matter how accomplished you are, your little goals are only a tiny flicker of the divine splendor of your immortal Self. When your personal agendas fall away, the universal can enter.

For me, there is no higher calling than to listen to the deepest impulse stirring one's soul. To tap the inner currents and follow them without reserve or condition. To write a blank check to the Self.

And so I offer my personal meditation, and invite you on a similar journey:

I offer my life to this calling. I commit to it despite the terror. I tremble with the knowing that everything is irrevocably changed by this single commitment. No matter what happens to me - whether I am made to look the fool, whether my path is anonymous and devoid of grandeur, whether I am betrayed in the worst of ways - I serve no other master than this divine voice.

I die to myself. I am attached neither to life in this body nor to any picture of what I will be called to do beyond this moment. And in this moment I listen intently. I merge into the moment and flow with it. My individual identity, my personality, is no match for the consuming currents of the Divine Will. I surrender to that will. I am dissolved into nothing, at once becoming everything. The divine voice has seduced me from my self-imposed limitation, from the narrow sense of my possession of life, into the vastness of all Being. It has annihilated me, and I am free.