Where Are We?

Upon reading the title for this article, the answer may seem patently obvious. We are on planet Earth. Additionally, you would be in front of your PC / laptop / smart phone reading this article. And you would be right. But that's just one level of truth.

Let's take the question a step further. Let's say you die and believe in life after death. Where are you now? Religions the world over have different terms for it. Purgatory. The bardo. The astral plane. Heaven. Hell. Call it what you will. But "where" is that, exactly?

Now for another level. Esoteric spiritual traditions state that it's not only the physical body that is mortal. Even our astral and mental bodies will eventually pass away, with the soul moving higher as it unites with its Divine Source. "Where" does that leave us?

In the examples above, as we change planes or levels of existence, what we PERCEIVE also changes but YOU yourself, or rather your consciousness, remains constant throughout it all. The different bodies pass away, but these bodies are merely ways for us to perceive a particular plane, which is why when we die we are gone from the Earth (no one perceives us with normal eyes and we don't perceive the physical world anymore) until we get another physical body through reincarnation. It would probably be better to think of the different bodies as antennas that we can use to tune in to different levels of existence, much the same way we change channels on the TV. Flip to a different channel and you see something different on your screen.

According to Master Choa Kok Sui, the soul is pure energy with consciousness. If the consciousness is constant and it's only what we perceive that changes, "when" and "where" become increasingly meaningless the "farther" we go from the physical realm. I suppose this is why esoteric traditions say that the soul exists beyond space and time, and is immortal.

Additionally, as one studies esoteric manuscripts and treatises, one will eventually come upon references to the self as the center of a wonderful universe. While science has contradicted the Bible and shown that we are not the center of the universe, I believe this assertion found in the Bible and other spiritual texts refers to something much deeper.

The ancient genius Archimedes once said: "Show me one point in the Universe and I shall lift the globe off its hinges!" In the past, mysticism and science were not considered separate, so we can infer a deeper meaning to this quote. Earlier, we had shown that the consciousness remains constant, with only the perception changing. In this way, the consciousness is like a "point" by which everything perceived revolves around it. If there was no consciousness, there would be no experience because there is no one to do the experiencing. So all events have to "center" around the consciousness. So we may say that the quote of Archimedes refers to the deeper truth that we control what is in our surroundings, the same way that the Law of Attraction works by pulling into our sphere those things that we desire, both conscious and unconscious.

According to Kabbalah, only we are responsible for what happens to us (good or bad) and that whatever we perceive outside of ourselves is merely a reflection of our inner state (our inner state represents not only our unexpressed thoughts and emotions but also our karma). If we take the view that this is because all of these outside events are centered within our sphere of consciousness, orchestrated in such a way as to present a scene for our consciousness to view and experience, then it seems Kabbalah is saying the same thing in a different way.

But how can we be at the center of everything, when obviously there are other souls, other beings out there? That is certainly a paradox, the mechanics of which are not easy to decipher at our level of consciousness. However, I believe certain clues may be found by taking a closer look at the qualities we attribute to God.

In the words of Edwin J. Dingle (founder of the Institute of Mentalphysics), in his book The Science of Mentalphysics, he states that the Creator is all the knowledge there is (OMNISCIENCE), all the presence there is (OMNIPRESENCE) and all the power there is (OMNIPOTENCE). Therefore, the universe, our surroundings, even our very selves are not separate from the Creator, because the Creator is simply all that there is.

In History Channel's The Universe, I remember one episode about the Big Bang where one scientist said that he is related to the whole solar system chemically, and related to the whole universe atomically, and he thought that was really cool. Since the Big Bang theory states that everything started from one single point, that's a very profound statement right there.

Using the Law of Correspondence ("As above, so below; as below, so above."), we are the Creator expressed in human form, the same way a granite pebble is of the same essence as the mountain it came from. Again going back to Dingle's words, since the Creator is all that there is, and we are of the same essence as the Creator, then whatever the Creator is, I AM.

Now doesn't that sound familiar? I've always wondered about the two words I AM but considering the earlier part of this article it's now starting to make more sense.

In pranic healing, we are encouraged to say the following soul affirmation before meditation:

I am not the body,
I am not the emotions,
I am not the thoughts,
I am not the mind.
The mind is only a subtle instrument of the soul.
I am the soul.

I am a spiritual being of Divine Intelligence, Divine Love, Divine Power.
I am one with my Higher Soul.
I AM THAT I AM.

I am one with the Divine Spark within me.
I am a child of God,
I am connected with God,
I am one with God,
I am one with all.

I am the soul.

In the above affirmation are found beautiful and sublime truths written plain as day. But this is no mere mental exercise so a deeper realization of the truth, as with all spiritual truths, can only be achieved by experiencing it. The implications are certainly mind-boggling, and are worth more than just a passing thought.

In The World But Not Of It

According to the Buddha, the root of all suffering is attachment. This is actually the second of the Four Noble Truths. And it really does seem so. As an experiment, first imagine eating a barbecue and then throwing the barbecue stick into the garbage. No problem. Most of us wouldn't give a second thought about it.

Next, picture in your mind one of your more cherished possessions, be it a Rolex watch, your Android phone, or your parents' graduation gift to you, and imagine trying to throw it into a public garbage bin. If imagining it is too easy, then try to ACTUALLY throw it away. Assuming you do throw it, most of us would have required a supreme effort to do so. I wouldn't be surprised if you had an internal philosophical discussion about why it shouldn't be thrown away, how it would be such a waste and how much you can still make use of the item.

From the example above, we can see that the amount of pain we feel (physical, emotional or mental) is commensurate with the attachment we have to something, particularly when the prospect of losing that something is likely. However, don't start throwing away or giving away your wedding rings, your mother's jewelry or anything you deem as important. We have to take things into perspective.

We cannot avoid the fact that life is about attachment. We need it to a certain degree. If you felt no attachment to your studies, you wouldn't have had the motivation or desire to finish school. If you felt no attachment to your job, there would be no drive to excel and you probably couldn't care less if you were fired or became a bum for life. If you felt no attachment to your parents, you wouldn't care for them. For the spiritual aspirant, how then do we resolve the apparent contradiction in the Buddha's words?

I think it would help if we take a look at the works of Carlos Castaneda. For those who do not know about him, Carlos Castaneda was an American anthropologist of Peruvian descent. He achieved renown when he started writing a series of books describing his spiritual journeys in Mexico with the yaqui Indian Don Juan Matus. Don Juan called himself a sorcerer but is more accurately termed a nagual, an initiate and guardian of spiritual teachings that traces its lineage back to ancient Mexico.

In Castaneda's book A Separate Reality the following passages, as quoted from Don Juan, can be found:

A warrior (their term for an initiate) must know first that his acts are useless, and yet, he must proceed as if he didn't know it.That's a shaman's controlled folly.

Nothing being more important than anything else, a warrior chooses any act, and acts it out as if it mattered to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn't; so when he fulfills his acts, he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn't, is in no way part of his concern.

A warrior may choose to remain totally impassive and never act, and behave as if being impassive really mattered to him; he would be rightfully true at that, too, because that would also be his controlled folly.

To understand the above quotes, we need to understand that the shamans of Mexico viewed the world differently from the average person. To them, everything was an infinite expanse of energy and what we see with our everyday eyes merely reflects how we perceive or interpret that said energy. They refer to this gate of perception as the assemblage point, but it's a long topic so its discussion has to be reserved for another article.

In any case, the point is that one must act as if a particular task matters, but keep in mind that in terms of the big picture it doesn't matter at all. Not even one nickel can be brought over to the other side after you die. So you can do everything you can to excel in your work, but not to the point that work becomes your life and you forget everything else. At the end of the day you should be able to leave it all behind and focus on other aspects of your life. So you should be able to live a full life without getting ensnared by temporal pursuits.

In one of my articles about How Thoughts Can Entangle, I explained how thinking about something creates energy cords from our energy body to the object of our thoughts. Things that don't receive our full attention can have their energetic cords easily severed, while those that we think more about and have desire for have thicker energy cords and are therefore harder to cut (please refer to the example at the start of this article).

The key is one's ability to detach oneself, and this is where all the different spiritual traditions and practices come in. In the course of one's development along the spiritual path, the goal is to acquire, if not master, the ability to attach and detach at will. This is controlled folly in the sense that you participate in the "folly" of temporal matters but can withdraw from them as necessary.

Notice how the spiritual traditions talk about the spiritual cords that connect us to our Higher Soul. When the Higher Soul withdraws these cords, the moment called physical death occurs. The more we are attached to temporal things and pursuits, the more energy cords we have. Since these are not physical specimens, the death of the physical body does not remove these cords. This makes it harder for the Higher Soul to pull the incarnated soul "up" and so a process of purification is needed to get rid of this "dead weight" and this is what we know of as Purgatory, meaning, to purge.

So looking again at the Buddha's words, we can say it in another way: the root of all suffering is the inability to detach. Now the meaning becomes clearer and more practical for everyday living. You may enjoy what life has to offer, and marvel at its wonders. We all should. But know it for what it is, a blink in the eye of eternity.

Be in the world, but not of it. Control your "folly."

Like A Bolt of Lightning

One of the most difficult aspects about the spiritual path is that it's sometimes hard to determine exactly how much progress one has made. Of course, there are the obvious indicators of spiritual progress such as the development of the virtues, being at peace with oneself and others, etc. But other matters, such as achieving illumination and enlightenment as well as development of the higher subtle bodies, don't present any easy markers of progress. It's not like weightlifting where you can track how much weight you're lifting now versus last week then adjust your workout accordingly.

Therefore, perseverance in the spiritual path is crucial in order to succeed. It's also important to keep an open mind and be aware, because sometimes the direction of one's path can make unexpected turns.

I suppose the best way to illustrate what I'm saying is through an example, and I think one of the better examples would be the story of Mikao Usui, the modern progenitor of Reiki. I say "modern progenitor" because the healing system known now as Reiki has been in existence for thousands of years and has been called by different names, just like pranic healing. Which brings me to one other thing: you may be asking why a pranic healer is talking about Reiki. And I say, why not? Can you imagine if the only type of food in the world was meatball spaghetti? What if I wanted pesto, or friend chicken? Diversity is the spice of life.

We may not understand all the workings of the Universe, but one thing we can be sure of is that everything has its place, and each piece that we find and explore only adds to the wonder that is Creation. Spreading Light to the world is not a competition and any sense of ownership we may have about certain achievements are merely an illusion of duality (you can digest this phrase at your leisure, but for now let's get back on topic).

Before we proceed further, we need to cover some relatively recent history in order to get a more accurate rendition of events. The reason for this will be explained later.

Reiki was introduced to the West by a Japanese-American immigrant by the name of Mrs. Hawayo Takata. She had gone to Japan in the early 1930s and discovered Reiki when she was looking for an alternative means to cure her illness. She then proceeded to learn Reiki under Chujiro Hayashi, a contemporary of Mikao Usui (Mr. Usui had died in 1926). In 1937, just a few years before the outbreak of World War 2, Mrs. Takata returned to Hawaii in order to teach Reiki.

In the 1990s, some Reiki practitioners wanted to do more research on the history of Reiki and through this process discovered that Mrs. Takata took certain liberties in relating how Mikao Usui discovered Reiki. She also embellished certain details about Mikao Usui's life. This development motivated the researchers to gather more information and even visit Japan in order to get a clearer understanding of Reiki's history. The reason it took so long for the different pieces to be put together was influenced by two factors:

1. Mrs. Takata mentioned that all Reiki teachers in Japan had died as a result of World War 2, so she was the sole surviving source of Reiki in the world. Moreover, she forbade any more research into the history of Reiki. Out of respect for her wishes, early authors of Reiki books went with the "official" history as related by Mrs. Takata. It was only after Mrs. Takata's death in 1980 that the restrictions against further research slowly eased.

2. The Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai (the organization founded by Usui after he discovered Reiki) went underground after World War 2 because the Americans banned all forms of alternative healing practices. Only Western medicine was to be used although later on some alternative healing modalities such as acupuncture went through a tedious accreditation process so that they could be publicly practiced again. The Gakkai did not choose this route and instead became a secret society, so secret in fact that hardly anyone in Japan knew about the existence of the organization. Therefore, it was difficult to get any corroborating information about Reiki in Japan.

Fortunately, the researchers mentioned earlier were eventually able to make contact with members of the Gakkai, resulting in more accurate information coming to light. All the details of the revised history as well as the background material can be found at the website of The International Center for Reiki Training. All the information was taken from the book Reiki The Healing Touch by William Lee Rand.

With the above clarification out of the way, let's take a look at certain details of Mikao Usui's life that pertain to the topic I am talking about. The records say that Misao Usui discovered Reiki when he went on a 21-day meditation retreat in Mt. Kurama, where he had started his studies in Buddhism as a child. Interestingly, Mr. Usui did not go to the retreat to learn a healing system. In 1922, Mr. Usui was experiencing a life crisis both in business and personal matters, so he went on the retreat in order to find a way to resolve his problems.

According to the revised history, during one of Usui's meditations, great energy poured down through his crown chakra, filling him with spiritual light along with an understanding of how to solve his personal problems. In his excitement, Usui started running down the mountain and in the process stubbed his toe on a rock. Just like any normal person with a stubbed toe, Usui reached down to cup the bleeding toe in his hand. On doing this, Usui felt energy course through his hand into the toe, stopping the bleeding immediately and making the pain disappear. This is when Usui realized that he had been given the gift of healing (in charismatic Christian parlance, one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit). For the next four years, Mikao Usui devoted his life to spreading Reiki and healing as many people as he could before dying of a stroke in 1926 at the age of 62. But the seed he had planted continued to grow as Reiki is one of the most recognizable energy healing systems in the world today.

Based on the description of great energy coming down to the crown and being filled with spiritual light, we can infer that Masao Usui achieved spiritual illumination or at least a certain degree of it. Not only that, it was the beginning of his soul mission of spreading Reiki to the world. If you would notice, Mikao Usui received illumination at the late age of 58 years old, and while 4 years may not seem like much time to fulfill a spiritual mission (one he seemingly did not ask for, at that), when you are spiritually empowered you don't really need a lot of time.

What does this show us? For one, manifestation of spiritual progress can come like a bolt of lightning out of nowhere and lead us into something we were not even looking for. Second, even though we may not know it, we are being guided in life and led somewhere. If not for Usui's personal problems, he wouldn't have gone on that crucial retreat. If not for stubbing his toe, he wouldn't have immediately discovered the healing energy he was given. More often than not, problems in life are also signals from our Higher Selves to urge us towards a certain direction. Third, illumination is such a coveted spiritual achievement among those who haven't had it, but higher spiritual achievement is a responsibility and involves some type of world service. This is why it can take several lifetimes of preparation and why progress may not always be apparent right until before the moment arrives.

The key then is to always be faithful in our spiritual practice. Like what Jesus said, we know neither the day nor the time, and He will come like a thief in the night. For all we know, any one of us may be called to greater spiritual service tomorrow. This is why we need to be still and be aware of the urgings of our Higher Selves.

Of course, progress in the spiritual path is much facilitated when one is following a true spiritual tradition. In this case, the meditations and techniques are safer and proven, and one also has the wisdom of the guru and his spiritual lineage to rely upon.

Ironically, I learned one of the more subtle twists about persevering on the spiritual path through a boxing website. In that website, the author states that one's goal isn't success. Success is inevitable as long as one perseveres long enough. Rather, the goal is to stay motivated.

Stay true to the course, and someday in this lifetime we may just get that lightning bolt of illumination.