Daily Excerpt: A Guide to Bliss (Tubali) - Your First Step into Expansion, part 2

 

Excerpt from A Guide to Bliss -

Your First Step into Expansion, part 2

We will focus our consciousness on one object and then carry out an expansion. We will break through limits and realize new possibilities/ways of experiencing and feeling. 

We shall begin with a very simple expansion, the expansion of a positive emotion. Of course, we are not used to expanding positive emotions as they seem to be more than enough on their own. The very suggestion indicates that there is something beyond a positive emotion’s borders that we ought to find. Why would we expect this? After all, if it were up to us, we would rather abide in positivity as much as possible before sorrowfully collapsing into some negative emotion, pain or even the daily existential tension that follows too many of us! Well, the thing is that, in actuality, positive emotions in their expanded states can lead us to truly sublime experiences, overflowing bliss, and an existence beyond sorrow, beyond the ability to suffer. Simple positive emotion is mostly derived from passing circumstances, depending on some experience, person, or temporary state, while its expansion unveils a new potential, a free and happy existence that is not circumstantial, meaning that it is not caused by anything. 

In this spirit, close your eyes for a moment and allow your mind to effortlessly summon the brief time or period in your life during which you experienced the most positive emotion you can think of. Perhaps this would be your wedding night or the miracle of your first child’s birth; perhaps it would be a moment in which you cracked open some far-reaching scientific mystery or powerfully experienced a state of infinite peace while meditating or abiding in nature. Simply close your eyes, let go for a moment and allow your mind to bring to the surface such a wondrous time. 

There is no need to forcefully search within your mind. Every memory of profound experience and positive emotion lies dormant within your cells at this very moment. The happy news is that memories of positive experiences, not only traumatic ones, are fully alive within your being. We tend to say, “This trauma haunts me as if it happened yesterday,” but we forget that emotional elevation is also accessible to us at this very moment by contacting a positive living memory. Our positive experiences, too, are accumulated within us as layers of living experience, not merely as nostalgia. 

The moment you have tapped into such a living memory, get in touch with it sensually, emotionally, and visually. Bring it up before your mind’s eye, and, by breathing and focusing, revive it within you. Feel its interior, and move toward its very heart, its very core. Then, try to vocalize it. What does it feel like? Do not analyze the experience and do not interpret it. Just feel it, intimately, and describe what it feels like. 

 For instance, a woman may bring up the memory of the birth of her first born, a moment in which she experienced peaks of emotion al and even spiritual elevation. In response to the question, “What does it feel like?" she might answer: “It’s like a total breakthrough of all limitations, like an opening without an end, like life erupting out of me, like a collaboration with the miracle of creation.” This is her first characterization of the emotion’s structure. 

After you have revived the emotions and the wholesome experience of this memory, it is time to reveal its emotional structure as a visual structure in the full sense of the word. How does one reveal a structure? Each one of us is endowed not only with external senses that enable the full perception and characterization of the visible world, but also with inner senses, the senses of consciousness. We use these senses, among other things, in the dream state. Whenever we dream, we are able to touch, taste, smell, hear, and see things and events that do not possess an objective existence. These very senses will be of use to us as we attempt to identify and characterize structures within our consciousness. 

 The most important thing in this process is to identify where exactly the structure—in this specific case, the emotional structure— appears within our body. Our body is our first anchor. Whatever we may experience, feel, and even know, will exceptionally awaken one central area in our body. Even when we are dealing with a highly spiritual and abstract state, there is still always one area in the body that reacts to this state the most and interacts with it the most. In this sense, it is the body and not the psyche, or the mind, which should be considered our center of experience. We may locate the structure anywhere in our body: at the tip of our head or in our sex organs; in our upper belly or at the center of our chest; in the palms of our hands or at the base of our spine. For example, the previously discussed woman who got in touch with her memory of labor might have traced her sense of “opening” to what is regarded as the heart, the intangible emotional center that seems to somehow surround the human chest. Having located its area in the body, we can now turn our inner senses to the task of identifying, now quite easily, the emotion’s form or shape. It is always surprising to realize that every emotion has some energic form that exists somewhere within our being. It may be a geometric shape—a rectangle, a circle, a triangle, a pyramid or an ellipse—but it is also possible that it will be a more elusive image, like something that reminds us of an opening flower, the calm waves of a sea, or a spreading fire. Then, we will identify the color of the emotion’s structure, the central feeling or sensation that accompanies the structure, and also, the fragrance that follows the structure—a fragrance that does not necessarily have to be as tangible as “the smell of a rose” but can be, likewise, a more general ambience, such as “the fragrance of love.” Finally, we will select a general name for the entire structure. A “general name” does not necessarily imply the most accurate title but rather the first name that comes up from within us as we focus on the wholesome structure we have just identified. Thus, the happy woman in labor might identify the structure as a pure white flower at the center of her chest, followed by a central feeling of whole ness and completeness and by the fragrance of utmost beauty. The general name, appearing from within in the face of this emotional structure, would be “new life.”

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