Touching Your Core Self – Part 5
In a few simple words, what you find when you open to and allow the action of your core more fully is your best.
You may have been living only a fraction of what you are capable of. Perhaps you even killed out some of the wonder that is you. This might be because you live in a culture that murders the spirit, or because some of the lovely parts of your nature were criticised or even punished. So when you open to your core these parts are allowed to begin their emergence.
Sometimes your best might be painful to meet. This is because in some way you have lived a caricature of it, a twisted version of your own truth. Then you may have to confront what you have built or planted in your life and the life of others. This is not a punishment, simply an opportunity to rebuild something more satisfying and expressive of the spectrum of your own radiance.
Healing occurs. This may be healing of your body. But usually this starts with the healing of your psyche, the transformation of your subtler feelings, attitudes and convictions. It reaches deep into your being and brings love to the lost and hurt child you may hold within you. It releases the beautiful human animal that you are in your origins, unfolds its wisdom and insight, and blesses its natural urges, transforming and transcending them.
Most of us are suffering amnesia. Strangely, in our culture this amnesia is accepted as normal. It is normal to have forgotten our childhood, to no longer remember our birth and our life in the womb. Especially, it is considered normal to have forgotten our life in eternity. In fact people who start to remember this are sometimes diagnosed as mentally unstable. This truly is a time of blindness.
Overall, transcendence is where it takes you as your journey of growth and the power of your core flows into consciousness. For your personality, your consciousness, is like water that has been absorbed by a rock, or the heat of the sun transformed into wood or coal. The water in the rock cannot help believe it is a rock. The wonderful energy locked in the coal or wood might identify itself as black coal or a length of wood. You may completely believe you are the body and its frailties, or only see yourself as your physical looks, your sexual gender, or what other people say you are. You might measure yourself by what you achieved or failed to achieve in your schooling, by your family background, or by what work you do or how much money you have. All of those measurements are like the water that can take any shape, or the energy that could achieve all manner of things, only seeing itself as a rock or a piece of coal.
But perhaps your sense of yourself arises out of your personal misery, out of depression or emotional pain.
Is that how you see yourself? Is that the limit of what you know yourself to be? Is that the lie that you have taken to be the truth?
If that is so it is a tragedy. It is from that painful, tiny and limited world that you are rescued by the action of the core. The Core Experience enables you to transcend the prison bars of those limitations.
A man dreamt the following while allowing his core to gradually heal him:
A man now led me to a side entrance to the right of a large business building. A big door opened as he approached, as if done by a magic eye. Suddenly he nimbly ran in and did something so that two huge granite slabs at least a foot thick began to close me in. The man watched with pleasure at my plight.
My indecision stopped me acting decisively. I could easily have run back. Instead I hesitated and saw the doors close on me. I could see the man hoped I was to be imprisoned for good, buried alive between these huge granite slabs. But somehow I released the vibration – sound – a hymn, that flows through my body at night. In a way that I cannot properly describe, it made the doors powerless to trap me. Also it penetrated to the very core of the building. In the dream that seemed very significant, but I do not know in waking why.
The dream dramatically depicts the two wills operative in us as mentioned earlier. The external will wants to prevent any real change. It is involved in the ‘business’ of the material world and doesn’t want that disturbed. The dreamer had been experiencing a vibratory energy flowing through his body while he slept. This had started since he had allowed his core to express more fully. The dream illustrates how this, described in the dream as a sound, a vibration or a hymn, has the power to remove even the greatest of obstacles, the most powerful of prisons. It also told him that this power flowing in him penetrated to the fundamental substance of the building – his body. In practical terms the dream, and the process working in him, wiped away his sense of limitations in everyday situations. So many of us limit ourselves because we believe we must have someone else’s permission to do things. Perhaps that permission is in the form of an exam pass, or an acknowledgement of our capability in some form, and in this way we may hold ourselves back from allowing our own genius or creativity to arise.
The above dream mentions a vibratory experience. This may be one of the results of opening to your core as it releases your potential. A person who recorded their experiences of surrender to their core says, “There was a peculiar conscious and semiconscious experience without dream images. My hips and pubic area vibrated.”
But what emerges can vary enormously depending upon who you are and how much of yourself you bring to the surrender to the other will. For some people it comes as spontaneous physical movement. In others it is mostly an internal shifting of feelings and intuitions, perhaps occasionally arising as waking dreams of great intensity. Sometimes people describe it as ‘Amazing Grace’ that bathes them in a wonderful new life and freedom.
Breakthrough
This depicts the pilgrim breaking through the world of appearances into the transcendent realm of experience.
Sometimes the transcendent is known in silence. This following description gives a taste of this.
Then it came to me that I had to listen in deep stillness – not think, not seek to understand, not struggle, just listen. My whole being entered into silence, gently listening as one might listen to the rain falling on a lake. Then suddenly it was known – the feather blowing in the wind – the sound of one hand clapping – the essence of human existence. Open against the sky – emptiness – enormity.
This was truly an experience of enlightenment. All cares, all pain fell away from me. I had an incredible sense of freedom such as I had never experience before. Every moment of every day we are free – free to choose – free to create pain or peace – free to go or stay – free to live or die. This extraordinary experience of freedom, and of the dropping away of normal perceptions, lasted for three days. Everything looked different. I don’t mean it felt different. I mean it looked different. I remember seeing a bird flying across the sky and it was simply Bird. Maybe even that isn’t true. It was simply what it is without any name.
Here is another description of meeting that wonder.
I was in Spain at Cortijo Romero, a holiday centre. A group of us had been opening to our inner life, and supporting each other in this. When it was my turn and I began to feel what was happening inside me I suddenly remembered my father’s death. He had fallen on the garden path after working in his garage, and died there of a heart failure. Then I had a deeply felt experience of meeting death. Not just thoughts and some feelings, but like it is in dreams when you are convinced you are totally in the situation. But death was much more than I had ever imagined it to be. And as I became one with it I knew it as the essence of life in all those about me. Life and death, I knew, are the same thing. Death is life naked of forms, of body, of lies. Then I wept because it was so beautiful. It is the best in everybody that I know. I wept because I keep forgetting just how beautiful this essence of life is, this spirit of all that we see and know around us. All I usually see is the form, the body, the changing shape of things. Now I was remembering, and I knew I loved this Naked Beauty beyond anything else.
This experience transforms your feelings about death, enabling you to live your life more fully, free of fear. It transforms relationships from grasping dependence or fear of loss, into the knowledge that you are always love itself, and at your core is a gentle bliss that does not depend upon external connections or events. It brings more of you into play, whether that more is in personal growth, creativity, sport, or relationship. Every aspect of your being can be enhanced. See: Life and Death.
Touching Your Core Self – Part 6