THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM – Chapter 27

So let’s take a look at that.

I observe that most people think of their Individual Life as an experience and an expression of the body and the mind. There are not many people who think in terms of the experience and expression of their soul.

They may know that they have a soul, but they do not often (if ever) have an experience of it—and to talk in terms of having an expression of it seems almost like speaking in a foreign language of something they don’t understand.

As with our Collective Life, our Individual Life is comprised of three spheres. And as with our Collective Life, if our Individual Life is out of balance, dominated by one of the other two spheres (body or mind), it’s not going to be very fulfilling for us, or very meaningful.

The reason that the world is the way it is, and our individual lives are so difficult to live right now that they don’t make sense much of the time, is that we’re using only two-thirds of our three-part being. We have not learned to get in touch and stay in touch with our soul.

If we pay attention only, or primarily, to our body, we will experience our Individual Life as largely a physical experience, having not much purpose other than physical pleasure and physical survival.

If we pay attention only, or primarily, to our mind, we will experience our Individual Life as largely a mental experience, having not much purpose other than mental exploration and mental processing. Indeed, we will imagine that we are here on a Mission of the Mind. “I think, therefore I am,” said Descartes, and many humans believe that life begins and ends there.

I would want to turn around Descartes’ famous statement and make it: “I am, therefore I think.”

I am…what…though? That is the question. Beingism offers an answer. I am what I say I am. I am what I am being, right now.

This level of life expression, however, takes great courage, and in my experience it is rarely possible to achieve it in fullness using the mind alone. The mind must consort with the soul and the body—all three aspects of our being must become involved in a “love triangle”—for the expression and the experience to be complete.

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What the dyad denies

Living your life from the place of soul can tell you many things that living your life from the place of mind and body alone cannot. Most of us spend most of our time with our body and our mind, and very little time with our soul. This is not true of everyone, but it is true of the majority of the 6.9 billion people on the earth, if my own observations of life are correct.

The result of this is that we experience Individual Life largely from this dyad—the sphere of the body and the sphere of the mind. Not exclusively, but largely. (And, in fact, for some, exclusively.)

The challenge in living Individual Life as a dyad is that we deny ourselves the wisdom of the soul. The soul knows things that the body and the mind do not; cannot.

When we live our life from our soul we instantly know the answers to the Four Fundamental Questions of Life: Who we are…where we are…why we came here (to this place called “earth” and, indeed, to this very moment)…and what we intend to do about that. We choose a State of Being and we step into that. We become a Beingist.

In those moments we see what the present moment was created for, and we then use the mind to decide whether we wish to express the beingness we chose to express when the moment was created, or whether we now choose to express something else.

Each moment in life was co-created for us by the lot of us to allow all of us to express an aspect of divinity. When we peer deeply into each moment, we can see what that moment was designed to allow us to express. We then make up our mind whether we choose to do that. This is called Free Choice. We are not required to express what the moment was designed to allow us to express, we simply have an opportunity to do so.

Should we choose to ignore the opportunity, however, the soul will continue to co-design similar moments and similar opportunities with other souls until we eventually decide to express and experience the Aspect of Divinity that such moments were created and designed to allow us to express and experience.

This explains why there is such a thing as Time (we have broken apart EverMoment into segments, so that we have plenty of opportunities to experience the Self fully), and it also explains why some of us live “patterns” in our lives, running into the same kinds of circumstances and situations over and over.

We will continue running into them so long as the soul seeks to experience a particular Aspect of Divinity in a particular way, and the mind choose not to do so at this time—or not to do so fully.

Yet when we bring the soul into our Individual Life fully, we suddenly see the patterns we have been running—and we see the reasons for them. That is, we see just what the soul is trying to allow the mind to heal, so that the mind can get fully out of its “story” and let the soul do what it came to do.

Once you are ready to truly devote your days and times to what your soul came here to do (as opposed to what your mind is telling you that you are supposed to be doing), you will find your life unimaginably enriched and expanded, filled with meaning and with purpose, and empowered to be expressed through very high States of Being.

And this is not, of course, about ignoring the body and the mind. All three aspects of your being ask for nourishment, and—as in your Collective Life, it is important to keep all three aspects of your Individual Life in balance. So exercise often (or at least a little!), eat well, watch carefully what you are “feeding” your mind (What kinds of television programs are you watching? What movies do you see? Do you read a bit in a wonderful book of inspiration each day?)

While the exploration at hand deals primarily with the soul and how to bring it into your everyday life, remember that we are talking about the triad here. Soul, mind, and body, yes?

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Falling in love with life

Let me back up just a bit and explain how I got to this place; the place from which I am telling you these things.

I have never understood why I was here. From the time I was a child, I never understood that. Who am I? What am I doing here Why is living in this place so hard for so many people so much of the time?

As I looked around me all I saw was a lot of unhappiness and fear, worry and apprehension among people. Mind you, this began for me when I was seven. I couldn’t understand why my Mom and my Dad could not seem to get along, and why there was always fighting in the house.

When I got to school, I couldn’t understand why the kids on the playground were always being mean. Later, in high school, I couldn’t understand why so many of my classmates seemed to be worried all the time — about grades, about passing or failing, about that Big Test on Friday, about whether He or She was going to like them, about who would go to the prom, and about…yes, about sex, and how to enter into that whole experience without also getting into deep trouble…

All of this was going on all around me and I never understood what all the commotion was about. But as life went on, I began to understand more and more. Bad Things began happening to me. I was (and continue to be) amazingly “lucky” much of the time, but even with that, I couldn’t seem to get out of the way of some oncoming trains. Life was racing towards me just like everybody else…it just took a little longer for it to get to me, I guess.

But by the time I was 30, I had caught up with all the others in the Struggle Quotient. I had had my share of bad times v. good times…and I no longer looked at others as if they were from Mars, wondering why they just couldn’t “get it,” amazed that they couldn’t just “be happy.”

Now I knew. Now I understood. And now I wondered why I just couldn’t “get it,” and why I couldn’t just “be happy!”

I could make this story even longer, but I won’t. I’ll just jump ahead to the day when I began having my conversations with God. I asked God, What happened? I was so ‘clear’ as a child. Even as a younger man, I really “had it.” What happened? And God said, in essence, “You lost your way. You stopped believing what you intuitively understood as a child — that life was meant to be happy. That you can have anything you want. And, most of all, that it’s not about any of this anyway.”

Life is not about what we think it’s about. I knew that. I knew that as a kid, and I lost it. Now God had come to give that back to me; to bring that awareness back to me. I suddenly realized that 98% of the world’s people (myself included) were spending 98% of their time on things that don’t matter; on things that have nothing to do with anything at all—least of all, the reason that we’re here.

I realized that life was no longer making any sense—and that it hadn’t made any sense for years, since I was young. Then God told me why. “Life will never make any sense to you,” God said, “if you’re going to continue to consider it from the standpoint of your Mind alone.”

Life was being experienced by me as a dyad. I had been moving through it as if I were comprised of just two parts: body and mind. I’d left my soul completely out of the equation.

This was not true when I was young. As a child, there was a part of me (which I now, as an adult, call my soul) which felt a certain way at a very deep level—a level way below my thinking mind. That place in me felt good about life. It felt love for all things and for every person. I can remember loving my pillow, for heaven sake. And plants in my room. And even the ants that I watched with fascination out in the backyard as a child. I fell in love with the sky and the clouds and the snowflakes and my Red Ryder wagon.

Can you relate to what I am telling you? I’m telling you that I loved everything around me with the innocence and purity of a child who didn’t see and couldn’t understand anything negative—and who couldn’t comprehend why other people didn’t see the world the way he did.

Most children run out of this perspective somewhere around age nine. Others perhaps later, in their teens. Believe it or not, I held this perspective until I was about 22. Don’t ask me why. I just never let go of it until my mind kicked it out of me, beat it out of me, dragged it out of me One Thought At A Time.

Yet now I’m back where I was as a child. Like Merlin, I somehow seem to be “youthening,” rather than aging, in my mind. And I know why that is. It’s because I have joined my mind back up with its long lost buddy…my soul.

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How to guarantee you’re never happy for long

One of the biggest secrets I was given in Conversations with God was this: If you live your life as a function of your body and your mind, without a daily awareness of and collaboration with your soul, you will never be continuously happy. Not for more than a moment here and a moment there. Long-term joy will elude you all the days of your life. Because you are not here to experience yourself as a two-part being. You are here to experience the Totality of Who You Are.

Life will not, it will never, make sense to your mind. But to your mind and your soul put together, life will suddenly not only make sense, it will make joy. It will cause you to be very, very happy, peaceful, wonderfully expressed and, sometimes, even fully realized. It will make you fully…how can I say this….fully….fulfilled. And this will occur no matter what is going on around you.

Yet you must begin to “take in” life, to view life, to embrace life as an experience of the soul, which needs, wants, requires, and lacks nothing; which wishes for nothing; which yearns for nothing; which seeks and reaches for nothing except exactly what is happening Right Here, Right Now—knowing that what is happening Right Here, Right Now has been brought TO the soul BY the soul (individually and collectively) so that the Totality of You might decide, announce, express and experience Who You Really Are.
In this knowing you will bless, bless, bless your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, and live in the rich, quiet, joyful awareness that you possessed when you were seven: that God is on your side, that life was meant to be happy, that it is possible to be happy no matter what is going on (although we are talking about reaching a certain level of mastery here), and that your journey on earth, and the moments and experiences therein, are but a tiny portion of your everlasting and eternal existence in the blissful and never-ending expression of Divinity through the ages—in you, as you.

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Combining experience and wisdom

The idea here, then, is to live into the Soul from the place of your Mind, which is your doorway. This means to experience every moment as a collaboration of the Mind and the Soul.

Most people think of life as something that is happening to them. They do not see life as something that is happening through them. They experience moments as things that are encountering, rather than things they are co-creating. And they experience Reality as something that is being produced by Life Itself, rather than something that is being produced within their own Being. They have not embraced the idea of Beingism.

These misunderstandings of the very nature of things is what creates life for so many people as journeys of difficulty, fear, and unhappiness. Yet the Master Teacher would tell us that life was never meant to be, and in fact need not be, difficult, fearful, or unhappy. And the Master would also tell us that moving from Scenario A to Scenario B can be accomplished without a single thing in your exterior environment or circumstance changing in any way.

The secret is to move from the mind to the soul in one’s consideration of every moment; to see it from the soul’s perspective; to add to the mind’s experience the soul’s wisdom, awareness, and total knowing. So let’s focus in on how to get to the soul, in order that we might integrate what the soul knows with what the Mind has experienced regarding any particular moment—and, of course, all of life.

That is the difference, you see. What the mind holds is experience. What the soul holds is knowledge. The mind bases its understanding on the present moment on a very limited storehouse of data, called Prior Experience. The soul, on the other hand, holds the knowledge of All Experience. Put simply, the mind is time limited, the soul is timeless. The mind is temporal, the soul is spiritual. The mind’s experience is finite, the soul’s knowledge is infinite. Limited experience produces assumptions, unlimited knowledge produces wisdom.

Yes? You see? If you base your decisions and responses and choices on finite resources, your actions will emerge from your experience, which produces assumptions. This will not always be bad, by the way. Sometimes your assumptions are very astute and quite correct. In fact, much of the time they are. So your mind serves you well. Its job is to guarantee your physical and emotional survival, and it does that well.

If you base your decisions and responses and choices on infinite resources, you actions will emerge from your knowledge, which produces wisdom. The creates an entirely different expression of life

Put the mind and the soul together and you have a powerful combination.

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How to find your way to the soul

The only way to get to the soul is through the mind. The mind is the doorway to the soul and the only way to get to the soul. The big burning question is, how do we use the mind to get to the soul on a consistent and regular basis?

Perhaps the bigger question is, why bother? If we want or need something that cannot be supplied by the body or the mind, why not just go directly to God?

Most people try to do just that. We try to sidestep the soul and go directly to The Boss Upstairs. So we use the mind to go around the soul. One way we do this is by praying. We pray, “Dear God, please help me. Please help me get this,” or “Help me get out of that.”

You can get to God that way, but it’s the long way around Robin Hood’s barn. Using the soul can get us there much faster. This is because when we use the soul to get to God, we don’t have to go anywhere. And that is because the soul is our direct connection to God.

It is more than that. That is understating it—or misstating it, actually. The soul is God. It is the part of God that resides in us. So when we connect with the soul, we connect with God at the same time.

I’ve been asked by many people, what are the steps to connecting with the soul? I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’ve come up with these…

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Step one on the path to the soul

The mind must agree to step out of itself.

Without the mind’s agreement, we will not be able to access the soul. The mind will attempt to block everything. Once the mind agrees, then we can move on and start to connect to the soul.

We need to establish that this is no small thing for the mind to agree to. It is not an easy thing for the mind to do because the mind’s job is to ensure your survival. See? That is the mind’s function. What you are asking your mind to do is to let you die. The mind hears your request as a request to let you die.

The mind’s job is to ensure your survival by placing before you in every moment all the past data, all the history, all the stories, all the experiences of yourself and others that have come to you by a variety of means to ensure your survival. When you say to the mind, I need you to step outside of yourself the mind goes, Are you kidding me? You want me to step aside here? You want me to get out of your way? That’s suicide. You cannot get along without me! You understand that?”

The mind has been trained. It has been, in fact, instructed never to let go, never to step aside, and never to get out of the way. However, the mind is our friend. It will do what it is instructed by its owner/operator, ultimately. It will obey. The mind is obedient to itself.

So we use the mind to instruct the mind to allow us to be out of our mind. The last thing the mind will say to you is, “Are you out of your mind?” You will say no, not yet, but I need to be. You don’t have to say this with words. You can signal the mind with your actions. (I’ll describe what this looks like later.) Your mind will say, “Okay, fair enough.” Then it will step out of the way.

It does not do that very often in our lives, unless it does. Unless we instruct it to. This is a process of training like training your hair, training your dog, or training anything that needs to be trained. The training of the mind is done with very few words. It’s just about closing your eyes and focusing. You’ll see what I’m talking about in just a bit.

It’s not about getting the mind out of the way in the classic sense. You can’t get your mind out of the way. That would be like trying to not think of a pink elephant. It’s impossible to get your mind out of the way. Simply by telling your mind to do that, it is there. So the process is…be there with it. Don’t abandon the mind, or try to shut the mind down. Be there with it.

While it is not possible to get your mind out of the way, it is possible for your mind to focus away from certain things. This is something that you can do consciously. You simply let the mind step out of itself. I mean, you let it step out of your story, out of your data, out of your history, and out of your experience. You let it go to a place where none of those things exist.

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Step two on the path to the soul

In step two—after you have gotten the mind, allowed the mind, to stop its remove its focus from your story, your data, your history, and your experience—is to re-focus the mind on what you—Big You—now choose to be.

That is, to focus on a state of being. Once you get free of your story and your data, once you get to the space of no-thought, you then choose a state of being It could be virtually any state of being. This is where the souls resides. The soul resides in the state of Pure Being. This place is broken down into many parts. The soul is being love. It is being compassion. It is being forgiveness. It is being wisdom.

Actually, what it is being is divine. It is divinity, residing in you. It is you who have broken it down into many parts—so that you could experience it, one part at a time!

Now the mind, of course, will struggle with you as soon as it creates a state of being; decides upon, or focuses upon a state of being. It will bring all that other stuff back in.

For instance, just as an example, let us say that you got to the place where you are feeling “connected”; you’re really feeling at one with the moment, the silence, with life itself. You’ve left your history behind. You’re feeling what I would call “happy.”

Immediately, because it is trained to do so, the mind will bring you all of your past story, history, data, and current experience around the feeling of happiness. “You cannot be happy! My God, your boss is calling you into his office tomorrow. Your father-in-law is coming over for dinner! Your car broke down and you lost your best ring! How in hell can you be happy?”

And that’s a very good question. Your mind will create a hell for you, then have the nerve to ask you how in hell you can be happy! Now you can fake being happy. You can try to be happy. But the mind will come right back in and begin to tell you all that it thinks it knows on the subject of happiness.

Or let’s saying you’re being “compassionate.” That’s the State of Being you move into. The mind will say, “You can’t be compassionate, for heaven sake! Don’t you remember how people treated you when you needed compassion? Are you seriously imagining that you can find this now in yourself? Don’t be a hypocrite!” If you listen to yourself, you’ll hear all the reasons why you cannot rest in the state of being you want to focus on.

Unless the state of being you choose, that you say you want, you want very, very much. Then the mind will not tell you that you cannot be that. That’s the secret. That’s the formula. You must cultivating a huge “desire to be” something—whatever that state of being is.

I want to give you a vivid example of what I’m talking about now.

When we really want a beingness badly enough, we can actually get the mind to turn itself off to most of its past data. It’s a matter of desire. The example that I use with an audience is sexual desire. When we are with another person who is totally turning us on, or who we want to turn on, who we want to desire us, to want us, to choose us, and in fact to have us; when we are with a partner or person who we want to want us, we can focus the mind on becoming sensual, sexy, attractive, magnetic, and irresistible. We do it all the time. Sometimes we call this “getting in the mood.”

The mind may bring us past data about how to be seductive, how to be sexual, how to be sensual, and how to be magnetic. It will not usually bring us data that stands in our way. Unless we have a serious hang-up about sex, or some previous serious damage or injury (which is another matter altogether—and I’m not making light of that), you mind  will not say, “You cannot be that.”

Generally speaking, the greater our level of desire to attain a state of beingness, the lower will be your mind’s resistance to it. That is actually axiomatic. The mind’s loves to assist us in having whatever we want, assuming it does not endanger our survival.

Therefore, train the mind to choose a very high level of being, one that is very desirable. One to which the mind will have little if any objection. The mind wants what you want, if it can find no objection. You can find plenty of objection to being, say, happy. But you’ll find a lot fewer objections to being sexual. I just use this as an example, to illustrate how the mind works.

So if what you want is a deep, deep sense of connection with your soul, and through that with The Divine, your mind will step out of the way. That is what I meant earlier when I said step out of its own way. It will provide you with that focus and that doorway. It will say, “Over here. The door is over here.”

That is why every great spiritual teacher, the great monks, the great spiritualists of past and present, have said the same thing. Desire is the key. Pure, honest, deep, unending desire is the key. That is why it works with people in sexual situations and in certain other situations in life itself. The higher the desire, the lower the mind’s resistance. It is axiomatic.

We need to cultivate a hunger for connection. From that hunger and from that deep desire we invite the mind to focus on the soul. Focus first away from your story, your data, by using some mechanisms I am going to share with you. Then, once you’ve stepped away from your history and your experience, focus through to a state of being. This is the pathway clear to the soul, for the essence of the soul is beingness.

I want to say in relative terms, the higher the state of being or the higher the state of beingness upon which you focus, the closer we are to the essence of that beingness. It is the soul itself.

By the way, you should know that we often do all of this subconsciously, spontaneously. We often find ourselves being compassionate or being courageous and expressing those qualities of being, by going to the soul so fast that we don’t even know we did it.

I will use two examples. In spontaneous moments in our lives the mind is totally out of the way. This all happens lightning fast. This is not a half hour process. This need not be a five-minute process. This need not even be a five-second process. This could be a nanosecond process.

It is the guy who jumps in front of the car and pushes the kid out of the way. It is just a nanosecond process. The mind can get out of the way very quickly when the state of being called for is very high. The state of beingness called for when a man sees the child in the intersection while the child does not see the car coming…the man does not think about it. He moves immediately into being courageous, or courage. The mind goes, “Fine,” and the body responds. The man pushes the child out of the way, and with luck he gets out of the way himself. If not, he dies. That is how it happens. That is the process. It is a lightning fast process.

If we choose a high, high state of being, the mind can and will get out of the way—that is, out of our story, your history, etc.—very quickly. So if you want to get in touch with your soul, the state of being that I suggest—and I know this sounds almost blasphemous…it is tough to get people to go there—I suggest holiness.

This is hard for me to even talk about, because it touches so deep. I suggest that people call forth the state of their own holiness. This is not a state that many of us are used to attaining “on command.” It can be, however. It can be attained on command. The Christed ones, the Buddha, Mohammad, and the other great masters, both ancient and contemporary, have done precisely and exactly that. It is all that they did.

I once had an interviewer ask me, “How might somebody do that, Neale? How might they tap into that?” I told him, “By calling it forth. Simply say, “I am holy. I am what holiness is. I am that. Using God’s great command, I am that I am. I am that.”

It is about focusing on the feeling. It is about getting—after one makes the declaration—getting away from words. Focus on the feeling of what it would feel like to be holy; to be a holy person. When I focus on that, my language changes. I swear, my language changes. My demeanor changes. The way I move, the way I walk, and the way I am—my “amness” changes and steps into beingness. It is the beingness that I have literally called forth.

It is what I call stepping into being.

I tell you the mind will get out of the way the higher the calling is.

The same thing is true of compassion.

I was in a hospital about ten or twelve years ago visiting my father. There was a guy in the next room. This man was calling out and moaning. He was obviously in pain. The nurse was not coming fast enough. He was in distress. He was moaning, “Oh God, oh, my God, I can’t take it.” My dad was nowhere near that. He was just laying there feeling perfectly fine.

I said hey, I have got to go over there. I have got to go see what’s going on next door. He said no. He said son, leave it alone, leave it to the nurses. I said no, I’ve got to go. I can’t let that guy just lie there.

Instantly when I went in there, compassion was called forth. Now listen very carefully to what I just said. I didn’t say, “Compassion was called for.” I said, “Compassion was called forth.” This “calling forth” is a process in which the mind, analyzing a situation, opens an immediate pathway to the soul. The soul pours forth its Essence—the true Essence of its Being—and that Essence expresses through you, as you. This manifests without effort because it is, in fact, who you really are.

We have all been in situations similar to that, whatever the circumstance, where compassion is called forth. Or patience is called forth. Or forgiveness, or kindness, or understanding, or immense generosity, or just plain love…is called forth. This particular version of our Essence just bubbles up. It just comes up in us. We do not think about it. We do not decide, I think I will be compassionate here. The highest callings happen automatically. It is merely a question of whether we will respond to them.

I went in and talked to the guy. I rubbed his forehead. I held his hand. He was an older man about 80 or 85. He was having a terrible time. His meds had run out. His pain had come back. I do not know what was going on with him, but I just talked to him quietly. He did not even care who I was. He did not even care. I could have been a doctor. I could have been a nurse who hadn’t put his scrubs on yet. I could have been a psychiatrist who’d been called down from the seventh floor. He had no idea who I was and he did not care. Someone was a witness to his life. That made it all a little easier. Someone was bearing witness…

I didn’t tell that story to make myself look good. I told it to illustrate something. As I said, we’ve all had moments like this. We’ve all experienced “showing up” in life in a very big way, in a very wonderful way. We may not even have seen it as that, but it was that, I can tell you, in the life of another.

This is what I mean when I talk about beingism as a tool for an individual. This is what I mean when I speak of beingism as an engine for an entire society. Imagine what a world we would have if we all simply decided to be “compassion.” Or to be “forgiveness.” Or—dare I suggest it?—to be “holy.”

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Step three on the path to the soul

The final step is to simply expand consciousness and awareness.

Expand the ear. I want to say we open the ear. Let those who have ears to hear, listen. We open the ear of consciousness. We become aware of the presence of God in the person of our own soul.

Now if you ask me, How do you do that?, I would say I don’t know how to tell you to do that, but you will know how to do it. It is just a question of… once you are in that state of being holy, you will just intuitively know how to open the ear of consciousness and hear God.

You will simply watch your consciousness expand, like ink on a blotter. (You may have to be in your sixties or seventies to know what either ink or blotters are!) You are not making the ink spread. It is just happening. It is not something you do. It is an allowing. It is the same with your consciousness. You simply allow your consciousness to expand.

It is like on those TV commercials, you know? The one where they put down the kitchen tissue—I think they called it the quicker picker upper. You watch it pick up the water that was spilled on the table. It’s like that. It is just an allowing. It is an absorbing and allowing. You feel your consciousness expand into the silence, into the oneness, and into the experience of your soul.

Beingness produces consciousness. Consciousness produces awareness. Awareness produces perspective. Perspective produces perception. Perception produces belief. Belief produces behavior. Behavior produces experience, and one’s whole life changes walking the pathway of the soul.

Then we pay attention to what we are aware of. That I can explain. That is easy to explain. Pay attention to what you are aware of. It is like…have you ever been in a church, in a cemetery, in a movie theatre, or any place where you are aware of a lot of things, but you’re not paying attention to anything in particular until somebody says, “Listen! Did you hear that?” You heard it before—that is, your ear received the sound—but before you were not paying attention.

Now you are. Your ears have not gotten any better than they were three seconds before. The same sound is hitting your eardrums. Only now you’re paying attention to what you are aware of. My God, is it a wolf? Is it a lion? Something cracked. I heard it. Somebody…some thing…is walking in those woods! I heard a twig snap! Your friend says, “Yeah, that’s what I was trying to tell you. Let’s get out of here!”

So in this business of connecting with your soul you pay attention to what you are aware of. You were always aware, but now you’re paying attention. But it’s not what your mind is aware of, because now you are in the beingness of holiness. You pay attention to what holiness is aware of. Does that make sense?

Believe you me, holiness, sanctity, is aware of things that you could never even imagine until somebody said “Listen. Let those who have ears to hear, listen.” Then you will be aware of what you have always known. You’ll begin to feel the wisdom of your soul. That wisdom will become recognizable. That is, you will re-cognize it. You will know it again to be, in fact, the voice and the wisdom of God.

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Some mechanisms you can use

So I’ve said a lot here. And it all boils down to: The way to get to your soul is not to stop thinking, but rather, to start thinking of what your soul is knowing at any particular moment.

The first thing I have to do, as I said, is get my mind to agree. But how to do that? We have to get our mind to get out of its story, to set away from its data. We need a mechanism…some hints on how to pull the mind out of its own history and experience and bring it to Right Now.

There’s no right way or wrong way to do this. I don’t have the perfect way here. I can only tell you what works for me. So, with that caveat…

I get my mind out of my “story” by pausing as I am moving through any moment or event, taking a deep breath, exhaling it forcefully through my mouth, breathing in again, then closing my eyes and releasing that second breath very slowly, this time gently through my nose, over a period of ten seconds.

During that time I focus my inner attention on the space just above my eyes in the middle of my forehead. Usually this calms me down so much that I want to stay in that place for a longer time. And so, if I can, I do. I take a third deep breath, keep my eyes closed, release that third breath even more slowly than the second, and peer with my Mind’s eye deeply into the darkness where I envision my Third Eye.

Now I “look” deeply, deeply, and even more deeply into that velvet jet black darkness…until I make my “connection…”

Usually at that point this is nothing but darkness. If you are seeing images— “thinking thoughts” of something and seeing that in your mind—work to fade those thoughts out, like a “fade to black” on the movie screen. Turn your mind to blankness.
Focusing your inner eye, peer deeply into this darkness. Be looking for nothing in particular, but simply peering deeply, allowing yourself to search for nothing and need nothing. 

In my own experience what happens next can often be the appearance of what appears to be a small, flickering blue “flame” or a burst of blue light piercing the darkness. Some people have called this The Blue Pearl.

I find that if I begin thinking about this cognitively—that is, defining it, describing it to myself, trying to give it shape and form or make it “do” something or “mean” something—it disappears immediately. The only way that I can “make it come back” is to pay it no mind.

I mean that literally. I have to work hard to turn my mind off and just be with the moment and the experience, without judging it, defining it, or trying to make something happen or figure it out or understand it from my logic center. Once you take your mind off the dancing blue flame, all the while keeping your focus on it, without expectation or thought of any kind, the flickering light may reappear. The trick is to keep your mind (that is, your thought process) off it, all the while keeping your focus (that is, your undivided attention) on it.

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Thought off, Attention on

Can you imagine this dichotomy? This means paying attention to what you are not paying attention to. It is very much like day dreaming. It is like when you’re sitting in broad daylight, in the middle of some place of great activity, and you are paying attention to nothing at all—and to everything all at once. You are expecting nothing and requiring nothing and noticing nothing in particular, but you’re so focused on the “nothing” and the “everything” that someone finally has to snap you out of it (perhaps by literally snapping their fingers), saying, “”Hey! Are you day dreaming????”

Usually, one day dreams with one’s eyes open. What I’m describing here is “day dreaming with your eyes closed.”  That’s as close as I can come in explaining the experience.

Now the dancing blue flame has reappeared. Simply experience it and do not try to define it, measure it, or explain it to yourself in any way. Just…fall into it. The flame may appear to come toward you. It may become larger in your inner field of vision. This is not the flame moving toward you at all, but you moving toward it, you are moving into it, and inside of it. And then you become the experience of It. 

If you are lucky you will experience total immersion in this light before your mind starts telling you about it and talking to you about it, comparing it to Past Data. If you have even one instant of this mindless immersion, you will have experienced bliss.

This is the bliss of Total Knowing. It is what the soul experiences all the time. It is the total knowing of the Self as One with Everything. It is the soul identifying Itself with the Only Thing There Is.

You cannot “try” for this bliss. If you see the blue flame and begin to anticipate this bliss, the flame will disappear instantly. That’s been my experience. Anticipation and/or expectation ends the experience. That’s because the experience is happening in EverMoment, and anticipation or expectation places it into the future, where you are not. 

Hence, the flame seems to “go away.”

It has not gone away. You have gone away. You have left EverMoment.

This has the same effect on your inner eye that closing your outer eyes has on your experience of the physical world around you. You quite literally shut it out. You can’t see it anymore. It has not left. It is still there. But you can’t see it anymore. You’ve closed your eyes to it.

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Mindlessness is achievable by everyone

In my own experience this encounter with bliss comes but once every thousand moments of meditation. Of course, a “moment” is very fast, very quick. It is a nano-second. Still, the experience of bliss I have described does not come often, even when measured in nano-seconds. Having known it once is both a blessing and, in a sense, a curse, because I am forever wishing for it again. Nevertheless, there are times when I can retreat from the wishing, remove myself from the hope, desert my desires, release my expectations, and place myself totally in the moment, utterly without anticipation of anything in particular. This is the mental state I seek to achieve. It is not easy, but it is possible. And if I achieve it, I have achieved mindlessness.

When I first heard that term—“mindlessness”—it sounded so mysterious to me, so mystical. I thought that it might only be achieved by true spiritual masters. Not so. It is achievable by all of us, by everyone.

Mindlessness is not the emptying of the mind, but the focusing of the mind away from the mind. It is about being “out of our mind”—that is, away from your story, your prior data, for a while.  (More on this later.)

This gets me very close to that blessed place between the Realm of Knowing and the Realm of Experiencing in the Kingdom of God, the Realm of Pure Being. Some have called this place nirvana.

So…if you have managed to find a way to quiet your mind on a regular basis—through sitting meditation, what I call walking meditation, “doing meditation” (doing the dishes can be a wonderful meditation, as can reading, or writing, a book), or “stopping meditation” (all of which are described in detail in the book When Everything Changes, Change Everything)—you have undertaken what may be the single most important commitment of your entire life: a commitment to your soul, to be with your soul, to meet your soul, to hear and listen to and interact with your soul.

And…now that you have quieted your mind, you can move into the richness and the depth of your soul, using the three-step process I’ve described above. So there you have it, a process and the mechanisms to support it. I hope this has been a help to you.

_________

 

POINTS I HOPE YOU WILL REMEMBER…

* There are not many people who think in terms of the experience and expression of their soul.

* Life invites us to get in touch and stay in touch with our soul

* Living your life from the place of soul can tell you many things that living your life from the place of mind and body alone cannot.

* Once you are ready to truly devote your days and times to what your soul came here to do, you will find your life unimaginably enriched

* Life will not, it will never, make sense to your mind.

* The secret is to see life from the soul’s perspective; to add to the mind’s experience the soul’s wisdom, awareness, and total knowing

 

ACTION I HOPE YOU WILL TAKE…

* Develop a method by which you visit your soul every day. That is the only “action step” in this section. It is all you will ever need.

10 Nov 2015.
© Neale Donald Walsch.

Prepared for publication by Dr. Gil Dekel www.PoeticMind.co.uk . Book published with permission from Neale Donald Walsch www.cwg.org .

The Storm Before the Calm: Book 1 in the Conversations with Humanity Series – by Neale Donald Walsch. Paperback published 1 October 2011, Emnin Books, Oregon, USA; ISBN-13: 978-1401936921