SELF-OBSERVATION AND BEYOND
Have you ever wondered if The Prosperos does, indeed, have more complete methods than other schools or spiritual groups? I’ve heard Thane say it, various mentors, students say it. But privately, my thoughts were naysayers—“Oh sure, sure. They all say that.” But guess what. I’m finding out they are right. Some groups don’t deal with the sense testimony. Other groups don’t complete their process with a release. In my life, I have learned mantras, affirmations, self-observation, various meditations, prayer, seed thoughts and some methods I don’t even remember. And one day, I learned to use all of them.
In listening to people in a number of different groups, there seems to be a common thread of something missing—I believe there is a lack of experimentation. People listen to how to conduct various methods and believe the “hearing” is the “understanding”. But understanding isn’t near complete enough without experimenting with various ways to conduct methods or to combine them in different circumstances. Sometimes you have to throw away the words to find the reality. Throw away the words in any given instance and do what feels natural, find your way in the dark without them. You can add the words later.
I am retired now, but when I worked, I had a certain way of spiritually working on myself while conducting my job that was different than when my mind was completely free. I was a medical transcriptionist in my latter work life. The work was repetitive leaving a portion of my mind free to self-observe. I can’t take credit for having the discipline to work on myself as intensely and for as long I did at that time. Life itself provided the impetus.
I received notice the IRS had emptied my bank account and was coming after me for $75,000 in back taxes. “I could hear the battering ram breaking through the front door, furniture being overturned as IRS agents rushed into my house with guns and dogs. I ran out the back door but to no avail. They were closing in fast.” This, of course, never happened. These were, however, the thoughts blasting through my mind at the time. After all, I had seen Geraldo’s IRS episodes where a woman was pushed off her front porch causing her to lose her baby with no accountability on the part of the IRS. As it turned out, they were even at the wrong house. That was my only experience with the IRS and it was vicarious.
Panic and terror became a constant companion, hour after hour, for days. My insides felt like Mexican jumping beans. When I could no longer stand it, I sat down and started meditating—dividing my attention between my solar plexus and my thoughts. It was impossible. My thoughts were a rushing river that kept overwhelming me. But I began to fight for it—bearing down, and yes, forcing my attention back to myself, back to myself, back to myself. People tell us not to force anything in our spiritual practices. So I was committing the ultimate sin—FORCE. As I kept at it, my thoughts began to slow down. Slower, slower until they came to a stop and parted like the red sea. I could feel a slightly higher energy like the beginnings of sunlight hiding behind the cloud of thought. I began to relax and calm down. But I’m hoggish by personality. If a little is good, a great deal more is better. So I started using mantras I designed for myself to hold my attention as I self-observed and to deepen my hold on the present. Deeper, higher, less and less personal. And a strange thing began to occur. I felt myself slide out of my ego and into a state of grace and euphoria, of ecstasy (and I don’t mean the pill). And it felt like someone rubbing up against me as they passed by.
No longer a part of my thoughts, I could see them clearly. And by clearly, I mean whether they measured up to truth or not and why. I could see clearly because I was rooted in truth, standing in it, looking out at the world from it. It was truth that did the looking and I began to experience instantaneous releases of my thoughts as they came up. I was so grounded in the present moment, I could feel the stirrings of almost every thought before it could fully form.
I’ve been told using mantras with self-observation is the attempt to design the outcome, as though my ego were the organizing agent and not a true sense of self. But that’s not so. The person who told me that will probably short circuit their own personal work on themselves and never learn the benefits of practicing self-observation with mantras and affirmations. Even prayer. I use all of them.
If you’re told not to use force in your spiritual practices, then you must be a good little rebellious child and use force. Or else, how will you know for yourself? It’s as important to do the things you’re told not to do as it is to do those things you’re told work. After all, you’re only rebelling against your own understanding, which you can be sure isn’t as complete and accurate as you think. There are so many incidental things to be learned when throwing caution to the wind that are not learned any other way.
Desperation is another good teacher. When the cookie dough hits the fan, its amazing what we throw together to start trying to save our sanity. And you better believe it won’t be by the book. Your pride be all like, “Christianity is a lie. I don’t pray!” Then something happens and the first words out of your mouth are, “Dear God,….”
If my mind is free and on leisure time, then work on myself constitutes the written forms of our methods. But when unable to devote my entire attention to self-work, the following is what I put together for myself.
If my mind was being caught up by something I couldn’t accept, I would use the simple mantra, “I accept everything just as it is.” While keeping my attention on my thoughts, I also kept my attention on every word I said in my mind, letting the meaning of it wash over me. I repeated this over and over and over. As lower energy began to give way to higher, I gained enough attention for my solar plexus, my arising automatic thoughts and the deliberate use of mantras, all three. If I found myself gritching about not wanting to be doing what I was doing or being where I was that day, I used the mantra, “The only time is now, the only place is here.”
As I stuck with this, I began to look forward to work. I spent several months engaged in intense self-work. During that time, I happened to be around a born-again preacher who went from trying to always prove what I believe wrong to saying, “I don’t know what it is, but you have hold of something I don’t.” That wasn’t the last time I involved myself in intense and prolonged self-observation, Translation, RHS, prayer, affirmations, etc. And I attribute those periods with having a huge influence on what happened next.
One day, while working but not involved in spiritual practices, something got my attention. I worked at home and so I was alone most days. It was very quiet. I stopped work and pushed back from my desk thinking I may have heard something. But as I sat there, I realized that wasn’t it. What had gotten my attention was that I was happy. I was told by someone who should know better that happiness does not exist. Just observe it. But for the first time in my life, or rather since childhood, I WAS happy. And this happiness was not connected to anything. It came from being. I began to smile as I realized I had been happy for a while and hadn’t even noticed. It was natural and without effort. Then I felt something further. I felt something depart. I think of it as a dark figure, a whole identity I have labeled “rage”. It stood up from that chair, turned and walked out the door. With its departure, a whole new world opened for me.
The ever-ready panther that lived inside me was no longer hiding in wait, ready to strike at the slightest threat. Backed by rage and anger, even my casual states of being were never relaxing. Consciousness at rest, for me, was no better than a state of low unease, and was quick to rise to any conceived threat. Starting in my teenage years, I became moody and reactionary which only got worse as I grew older. I could often be difficult and combative.
Like many people I knew, I had the game of life all figured out. Not in so many words. It was more of an unconscious acceptance of terms to live by. Whenever something undesirable happened, the first thing that needed to get done was to determine who was responsible and accuse them, or accuse someone first then determine if they were responsible. Or just accuse them whether you determine they are responsible or not. But someone has to be accused. The second part of that was to be sure it wasn’t yourself being accused. If that were the case, I would launch into deflecting, lying, and gas lighting to avoid being caught. Inherent in those parameters to live by was the absolute obsession with being “right”.
I never knew that was pretend life—pretend life because all of it is based on lies. It is a computer program that determines every thought, every act, none of which comes from oneself. When I was no longer caught in this computer program, I could see it from an internal distance—an impersonal computer program that I saw acting out for others. They were saying the same things I had, thinking the same things, acting the same way, verbatim. Even using the exact words I used. It’s very eerie to see that. For me, it was mind-blowing. Oh I knew my actions were being determined by a computer program, but that was intellectual knowledge, something I had been told. I hadn’t seen it for myself until I was no longer a part of it.
Experimentation brings discoveries—discoveries that coalesce and become you, change you. When that happens, those things you understood only intellectually change. When they become real for you, move into your soul, you will understand them differently than theoretical understanding and much more vastly. When understanding comes from your soul and not your mind, you can’t be misled. When people tell you what’s what now, you will see whether they have credible knowledge or not. You won’t waste your time following the limited advice of intellectual understanding, be it your own or others.
One of the things accomplished when knowledge moves into the heart is what I call certainty. But that is another paper. Maybe I’ll call it “Certainty and Beyond”. But you can be certain—"I’ll be back!”