BREAKTHROUGH CONSCIOUSNESS

Exploring Who We Are and Why We are Here

by Sharon Janis

BREAKTHROUGH CONSCIOUSNESS brings a combination of spiritual, psychological, metaphysical, philosophical, and scientific teachings that can help readers expand and open their minds into new possibilities and worldviews.

Chapter 3

Energetic Vibration

"The conscious "world" is in fact energy radiantly manifest
at relative rates of regarded speed."

-- R. Buckminster Fuller

When people talk about "getting more energy," they are usually referring to increasing their physical energy. Or we might say we feel mentally energetic or emotionally charged as when we fall in love or are interested and enthusiastic about something in our lives. Beyond these experiences, however, is another view of this entire universe as being completely made up of nothing but energy.

Even scientific knowledge lends credence to the view that our entire physical reality is composed of "solidified" vibrations of one energy. Our eyes translate particular patterns of energy as visual information; our ears transcribe other energies into sound. Through complex mechanics of body and brain, external energies are translated into the subjective experiences of sight and sound, together with an intricate blanket of personal interpretation, memory, and meaningfulness.

Because universal energy exists independent of our experience of it, the same energy waves can sometimes be received by more than one of our sensory receptors. Some individuals can actually hear colors and see sounds, as the inner mechanics of two of their different senses pick up and translate the same energies differently. Remember that it is our sensory translation devices that we experience, not the pure energy as it exists independent of ourselves. For example, very loud music not only overloads the ears, but also becomes kinesthetically perceivable as the room, car, or even the whole house starts vibrating and shaking with the sound.

Experiments have shown that if vibrations of sound are applied to a piece of metal covered with a thin layer of sand, various artistic patterns are formed in the sand, based on the specific vibratory wavelengths of the sound.

These sand sound designs offer an analology for the kind of magic our senses and brain work, all day, every day. We read particular portions or patterns of the undifferentiated field of all-pervasive energy, and create subjective experiences from it -- subjective experiences that have no more to do with the original energy pattern than this pattern of sand has to do with the sound waves of the vowel "A" that inspired its particular patterns. Like these sand designs, our experiences in life are not exact or obvious translations of the energy coming in. Like these sound patterns in the sand, our minds create visible images from invisible waves. You may rub your head now.

The medium, therefore, becomes an integral part of the message. Our senses, brain, memories, emotions, and thoughts are the medium, the template of sand. The energy field all around us intersects and interacts with our template to create new and unique patterns of experience, no two of which are exactly alike for anyone in the world. Each of us is walking around in our little, subjective bubbles of creative experience -- the experience that we ourselves, on some unimaginable level, create. It's as though each of us is going through life with a virtual reality machine on our head, able to interact with the world only through whatever images are accessible to our particular software and system.

During an interactive computer game, we may choose an image such as a computerized body to represent ourselves in the virtual realm. Now, in the physical reality, we are the person and consciousness who is animating the character on the screen, yet the others in the virtual reality game can only see the image that represents us in the game, along with whatever actions and words we express through that image. Likewise, our ideas about the other players in the virtual room are based on their temporary images, which are only vague reflections of who they really are.

This is analogous to how we experience the world. We are not our body, yet we express through the body. In addition, we can only see the other characters through their limited visible projections. Except if this was a true analogy to the deeper spiritual realms of life, all the characters in every game would ultimately be animated by a single player. But don't worry about that right now.

If the doors of perception were cleansed,
the world would appear to man as it is - Infinite.

- Blake

Most people in today's world are directing their energies toward materialistic directions. We put all we have into finding the best job, developing financial security, finding a better relationship, acquiring and breaking habits, and sticking words and labels on everything. If we were able to turn off all these outer spigots through which our energies are pouring out, and instead direct them inward toward the reservoir of pure life force, not only would we have much more power available to achieve our daily goals, but we would also find that our goals might change drastically to accommodate the greater knowledge and understanding that is now available to our awareness. It's like seeing a crying child whose only intense desire in the world is to get that package of candy they see at the grocery checkout counter. As adults, the child's behavior looks, well, childish. We know that getting a candy bar is not as important as all that. One day, we will likely look back at our current desires with the same knowing eye, as our evolution continues.

We laud that Shankara (Supreme Divinity)
by whose mere opening and shutting of the eyelids
there is the appearance and dissolution of the world.

- Spanda Karikas

Through the opening and shutting of the "eyes of Consciousness," the opening and shutting of various flows of energy are echoed throughout this manifestation. Cycles upon cycles: the waves roll in and move out, the breath comes in and goes out, our states of consciousness move within us and disperse just as the clouds roll across the sky and then dissolve into the ether.

Individually, as we close our eyes to go to sleep, we also close our minds and let go of our conscious awareness. Then, upon awakening again, we reopen the eyes of our personal awareness and, in a sense, recreate the world. While asleep, we close our physical eyes and open the inner vision, as countless worlds dance across our personal screen of consciousness. Even the very neurons that support, activate and guide our awareness are like big on/off switches. These cycles of opening and closing, motion and stillness, consciousness and unconsciousness, are reflected throughout universal life.

From the tiniest molecular level to our highest consciousness, we see these same cycles of opening and shutting, appearance and dissolution. Some philosophers have postulated that the entire universe blinks off to complete blackness, a black hole if you will, every so many billions of years. According to others, the universe is blinking on and off constantly, at a speed so rapid as to be imperceptible to our sensory and mental mechanisms.

The tangible world is movement, say the Masters, not a collection of moving objects, but movement itself. There are no objects "in movement", it is the movement which constitutes the objects which appear to us: they are nothing but movement. This movement is a continued and infinitely rapid succession of flashes of energy . . . All objects perceptible to our senses, all phenomena of whatever kind and whatever aspect they may assume, are constituted by a rapid succession of instantaneous events.

-- The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

Perhaps this entire universe is created and dissolved billions of times a second. Maybe infinite potential universes are, in this way, co-existing along with our human time scale and its so-called physical universe. After all, what we call a "second," is valid only in reference to our human perception of time. One day for a human being might be an entire lifetime for some insects. A trillionth of one second in the universal realm of time might be equal to many centuries of a human being's time frame. Even within the experience of one person, time is a very subjective experience. There are times when five seconds seem terribly long, perhaps filled with thoughts, ideas and worries. And there are other times when complete days seem to pass so quickly, almost unconsciously.

Our forefathers decided that the aspect of time that is captured by our clockwork machines is the definitive, unquestionable, undisputedly accurate measurement of all time, and the entire set of world views we have since built on this structure are all inherently limited because of it. For example, it is possible for a person in a state of meditation to slow their mind so deeply that subjective time itself becomes malleable, but very few have explored and explained how this "time distortion" takes place.

So many eyes are opening and closing throughout our lives that we don't usually notice our countless facets of attention and awareness blinking on and off. It is similar to the effect of watching movie film move through a projector at twenty-four frames per second, while perceiving an illusion of steady, constant movement on the screen. At just twenty-four shutters each second, we do not see the black spaces between the images of a movie. Just imagine then how difficult it would be for us to perceive the constant creation and dissolution of entire universes that may be going on -- hundreds, millions, perhaps even billions of times every second.

Then you have all the dimensions that exist beyond time, as the eternal form of being. In the timeless realm of pure existence, this flashing on and off, the opening and closing of the eyes of consciousness in all places and within all history, is all occurring simultaneously. This close relationship of all the universal energies is what give the possibility that a person can live in the higher realms and the most mundane realms all at the same time, flashing back and forth between the various experiential worlds so quickly as to be virtually imperceptible.

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Breakthrough Consciousness

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