Tag: creativity

Meditation–Deep Dive

The following Deep Dive Meditation is designed to provide an understanding of the three levels of reality and how it feels to work in each realm. Repeat as needed until you understand the difference between the Material, Spiritual, and Divine realms and the power of the creative wish. Either record the meditation so you can do it with eyes closed, or imagine that your eyes are closed as you read the meditation. Here is the meditation:

Imagine yourself in the Material world as you are, sitting comfortably in your own dwelling or a quiet place you have selected. Start with your eyes open, then close them and visualize what you just saw, yourself sitting where you are.

Visualize yourself getting up and walking around this location where you are, as you sit with your eyes closed. Pick up some things in your imagination, and feel how firm and real they feel. Think, “These things are physical and real.” Wonder at how they came to exist. Visualize returning to where you are sitting.

You wish to know how physical things came to be, and feel a slight jerk. The place where you are sitting begins to move down like an elevator to another level under the physical world. Here with your mind’s eye you see crafts people designing and building all the things in the room where you were sitting. Architects drew the plans for the room. Carpenters constructed the walls, floors, and ceilings. Artists planned the floor coverings, and weavers wove them on looms. Designers sent plans to shops to build the furnishings. Painters and photographers created the room decorations. Movers on elevators took all these things from below and installed them in the room above where you were meditating. See all this in your mind’s eye.

You decide to explore this Spirit realm of mental forms where ideas are turned into real things. Here you see many beautiful works of art, functional objects, and amazing tools and machines, all with people creating them. You wonder where they get the ideas for these amazing things. You notice each of the makers has a well next to them. They often lower a bucket into their well and bring it up brimming with bright ideas, which they apply to what they are creating.

You pick one of the work stations and ask the worker if she will lower you down her well to see what is there. She agrees. You sit with your feet in her bucket and grip its rope tightly as she lowers you down her well. It is dark in the tunnel of the well, but there is bright light at the bottom which grows brighter as you are lowered. You emerge into formless light and are surrounded by it, immersing you in indescribable joy.

The light is too bright for your eyes, so you keep them closed and feel ideas bumping against you. You reach into the light with one hand. Ideas are elusive and hard to grasp. You find you must concentrate. Still your mind and focus without thought on your outstretched hand. Pause and focus for a while on your hand. Stay focused until your attention rests gently on your hand.

Finally, with a quiet mind, you manage to grasp one of the ideas with your free hand. Imagine closing you hand gently on the idea. You shout, “Bring me up!” to the owner of the well and she hauls you up the dark tunnel to the workshop of visualized forms. You both gaze at the bright idea you brought back, and she helps you craft it into a Real thing.

You thank her for your help, and she wishes you well on your return trip. You walk to the elevator that brought you to this level, and sit again in meditation. Now you wish to return to the Real world of Material form, and the elevator lifts you back to the room where you started. You realize you just made a trip from the Material world of everyday physical form down to the Spirit realm of imagination where mental ideas take form and are transformed into Real things. From there, you plumbed the well of the formless Divine realm where ideas are born, and you brought one back with you. Open your eyes and look at what you created from the bright idea you captured. What did you bring back?

Formlessness

There are three realms of existence, domains that affect the world. Let’s walk through them. Look around and tap things. That’s the Material world, the Physical Form realm. Form means having characteristics that can be described. Look in a mirror–that is your Physical Form Body. Hold up some fingers. Most people around you would agree on how many fingers you are holding up. Obvious, right? Almost everyone can perceive the Material realm.

Now close your eyes and imagine your face and body. Notice that your mental image of yourself has shapes and other characteristics. That is also Form, Mental Form. Imagine a letter. That visualized symbol has a characteristic Form that you can see in the “mind’s eye” and can be described. Imagine hearing a word. That is an auditory Mental Form. Imagine walking. That is a visualized action, a series of Mental Forms. This is the second realm of existence, the Mental Form realm, or Spirit Realm, the non-physical things you can see, feel, and hear with your inner perceptions.

This Mental Form realm also exists, because much of what you can visualize, with effort you can make Real, you can manifest your vision in the Physical Form world. Even if you can’t bring an idea into Physical reality, there are engineers, artists, animators, or scientists who can. Almost everything humans have created first existed as ideas or plans in someone’s mind.

But where do these ideas come from? Many, like the benzene ring, spring into people’s minds in a vision, fully formed. Artists, like my mother, describe this source of ideas as a well that never runs dry. There is a source of potential that contains everything that could exist, awaiting our mental and physical effort to visualize it and bring it into existence. Potential has not yet taken Form, it is Formless.

Many things that exist in the world have no Form: space, time, love, hate, fear, joy, beauty, consciousness. Every one of these “things” influence the world, therefore exist, even though they are invisible and have no shape, color, size, or other describable characteristics. They have no Form. Yet we experience them. We know they exist. This is the Formless realm of existence.

All three realms of being have power in the world, thus they all exist. People have experienced inhabitants of each realm. We all perceive the creatures of the Material world. Some people experience ghosts, angels, and other spirits as Mental Forms, the Spirit world. Fewer people experience invisible forces and beings without form, the Divine dimension. Atheist scientists who perceive the beauty of the invisible laws of nature, relationships among forces, and mathematics are touching Divinity, the Formless reality underlying all-that-is.

People have differing capacity to perceive and master the three realms, depending on their Spiritual maturity. Everyone has at least some access to physical perception, what we call the Material world. Those of us who are limited to the five senses, or fear what lies beyond them, or have limited imagination, often deny that the other realms exist. They dismiss the Spirit realm as mere fantasy, and say they only believe what they can see and touch. It is possible to be a master of the Material world and have no perception of worlds beyond. Such people can become leaders and “stars,” wealthy and admired by many. But without access to creativity, they must rely on helpers or subordinates who perceive possibilities beyond the mundane. Some masters of the Material world may be Spiritual cripples. This is sad.

Leaving the mundane world of the five senses behind, many people are able to visualize things that other people cannot perceive. In the arts and sports, we say these people are “creative,” they can manifest what they imagine into forms that others can perceive, clay into sculpture, emotion into music, words into story, movement into performance. In the sciences, we call those who have access to the Spirit realm of Mental Form “gifted.” They can perceive relationships among matter, energy, time, space, and forces to create technology that generations ago would have been called “magic.” In the religions, there are people with access to the Spirit realm of thought and deep perception who can see and hear beings and realms without Physical Form. We call them teachers, gurus, psychics, meditators, shamans, and prophets. We say they have the third eye or sixth sense. These are our masters of the Spiritual world. Many of these people, especially those with large egos, regard being a master of the Spirit world as the ultimate attainment. But this is merely a step along the Path to ultimate experience.

Delving deeper than the visualized characteristics of religious images, of gods and demons, beyond even the limits of human imagination, lies the realm of ecstatic religious experience. The realm that can only be experienced, because it is beyond the power of words to describe. The Tao. The one. The unitive experience. Emptiness. The Ultimate. The Divine. The Formless.

This Formless realm can be accessed by anyone, but few make the effort to perceive the reality that is the foundation of our experience. It can be found with stillness meditation into the Heart of Reality. It can be reached through devotional prayer. It can be given as the gift of solace from adversity. It can be the karmic effect from selfless service. It can be found after years of diligent practice, or the blinding flash of insight in an instant. There are as many different ways as there are people, and many ways yet to be discovered. We call masters of the Formless Divine realm Mystics, and they are hidden everywhere. How would you find one, or better yet become one?