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Inner
Work
For the week of June 22, 2020
Raising Consciousness
(Serving Our World Soul: 5)
What if, by your spiritual inner work, you could help make the world a better place for all? The innumerable types of inner work that purify our will or generate energies can have that effect, usually as a byproduct. However, there are spiritual practices explicitly aimed at raising the general level of our civilization. Despite being only one person among billions, the bit that we can contribute individually does matter. The following describes the first of several direct approaches to that.
Crossing the threshold into the spiritual realm, we encounter the conscious energy. We find it as the stillness inside us. Our thoughts and mental images float by within that stillness, like clouds in the sky. This is the boundless ocean of pure awareness, bringing peace, wholeness, and equanimity. The more we can open to the conscious energy, live with it and in it, the more complete we are. In consciousness our relationships deepen, because we all share in the same field of consciousness, which transcends both time and space.
In practicing this, we learn the taste of being in that inner space, which leads us to discover that consciousness is always with us. For example, if we look back into our childhood, we see that we have the same consciousness now as we did then. Many experiences have passed through this consciousness, while it has remained unchanged.
A remarkable characteristic of the conscious energy is that it can be concentrated in individuals and in groups [Ref 1]. We envision an evolved future human race that is much more conscious than we are today. Even a little more consciousness among us and our fellow human beings would have profound, beneficial impacts on our common life on this planet. We can contribute to that by means of the spiritual, meditative exercise presented below, part of which appeared in Preparing to Serve earlier in this inner work series. This is one method of direct inner service. In actual practice, we take as much time as we need to fully realize each step of this inner exercise.
- We find a quiet place and begin our sitting by building up robust, complete sensation of our whole body. We keep our attention focused in our whole body. This grounds us in the present.
- We practice energy breathing. Without changing the physical pattern of our breathing, we use our attention and intention to draw the active elements from the air into us, like shimmering particles of energy which then flow throughout our body, further building up our sensation. As we do this, we also keep some attention focused in our whole body, in the sensation of our whole body. This acts to receive and stabilize the active elements we draw in with our breath. Energy breathing also helps enable us to distinguish between this sensitive energy and the conscious energy we will work with in the coming stages of this sitting.
- Shifting gears, we sit in simple awareness of whatever arises in that awareness, letting it all come and go. Bodily sensations come and go. Sounds come and go. Thoughts, images, and emotions come and go. We do not follow or go with any of it. We sit in the stillness, this cognizant stillness, watching.
- Letting everything come and go means not identifying with any of it. The thoughts are not my thoughts. I am not thinking them. They are thinking themselves. They are just passing by. The emotions are not my emotions, not what I feel. They are generating themselves by some embedded program of reaction. They are just emotions. And we are just here, seeing it all.
- After a time, space opens within our awareness. The thoughts slow down enough to allow noticeable gaps between them. At first it seems as if there is nothing in those gaps. But that nothing is very special. It is pure awareness. It is the cognizant stillness, consciousness itself, a high spiritual energy. If our mind stays focused on thoughts, images, and emotions, then we widen our inner field of view, like zooming out a wide-angle lens, to open to the cognizant space surrounding those thoughts, images, and emotions.
- We enter the space between and around thoughts. We enter that boundless cognizant space of consciousness and abide in it. Thoughts, emotions, and sensory perceptions may come fast and loud, or soft and subtle, but they are all surrounded by the stillness. They are displayed on consciousness. We are in this consciousness, the pure awareness. This conscious energy surrounds us, as a wide, borderless, spacious, cognitive substance. It carries the qualities of peace, equanimity, wholeness, unfiltered clarity, and omnipresence. This is the conscious energy, enveloping us inwardly and outwardly. Be in that.
- Gather the conscious energy from around you into you, concentrating it in yourself. This is like pulling in space itself, to create a more potent space within you, a more potent consciousness within you. This drawing in of conscious energy is a repeated act of will, done with attention and intention, to create an inner vacuum that pulls that energy toward us, that continuum of pure awareness into us. With our will, we reach out into this cognizant substance surrounding us, and gather it into us. The cognitive space within us grows denser and richer with pure awareness. With our will we stabilize this substance of consciousness, opening our being to assimilate it.
- Practice the previous step until you are in full and robust consciousness.
- With the aid of your ability to visualize the whole planet, be everywhere on the surface of the Earth. Make this visualization real by tying it to the actual Earth. Starting from your physical location, quickly go from horizon to horizon in every direction to encompass the planet. Take the entire 3-dimensional Earth into your perceptual embrace. By being in consciousness, which transcends space and has no boundaries, we can be everywhere on the surface of our planet at once.
- Be in the conscious energy surrounding the Earth.
- Repeatedly draw the conscious energy from the surrounding space, from the pure awareness, the cognizant substance around the Earth, down to its surface. In this way we concentrate the conscious energy onto the surface of the entire Earth, so that more of it is available for all of us.
- Rest in the simple presence of non-doing.
Revised July 4, 2020.
[Ref 1]: J.G. Bennett; The Dramatic Universe, Volume 4: History , page 383.
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, page 383.
