Going Within (19 page)

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Authors: Shirley Maclaine

BOOK: Going Within
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When you begin to trust the spirituality of sex you are basically allowing yourself to surrender to the feminine aspect of yourself. That isn’t easy when we live in a yang-operated world. And
surrender
is the key word of description. It’s allowing oneself to surrender to the Goddess intuition, the Goddess creativity, the Goddess and hidden Divine flame of trust within. It doesn’t matter whether you’re male or female, the Goddess energy is longing to be expressed.
It is the energy of tolerance, of allowing, of nurturing and unconditional love. When the feminine Goddess in each of us is recognized, the spiritualization of the physical plane will be accomplished.

But for too long we’ve been fearful of trusting it. In fact, we’ve been prejudiced against it out of fear. “Can I afford to trust that I won’t be lost or overwhelmed?” “Can I afford to
evolve
rather than survive?”

These are the sexual questions of the New Age of spirituality. The masculine, manifesting energy can be seen. The feminine, creative energy is hidden. To trust the feminine is to trust the unseen: unseen truths, unseen dimensions, unseen reality, unseen entities. In fact, unseen God.

To surrender one’s manifesting identity to the balance of an identity not yet seen and tried is the task before each of us.

We are experts in the attitudes of physical survival, but we are new to the attitudes of spiritual evolution.

Perhaps after the deluge and the destruction of the known world (whether Atlantis and Lemuria existed or not) we, out of profound fear, allowed ourselves to adopt the modality of survival at the expense of spiritually trusting the process of evolution. An evolved soul is automatically a surviving soul, but our mistrust and fear prevent us from recognizing the wisdom in that.

Thus, our very survival now depends on recognizing the need to balance ourselves physically, mentally,
and spiritually. And spiritual balance is the most necessary of all. Perhaps the point of life itself is to amalgamate the seen and the unseen in our physical reality—to balance the masculine and the feminine in ourselves and nourish
both
in our partners as well. Then we will have spiritualized the material and materialized the spiritual. And we will be expressing ourselves in our relationships with an equal appreciation for what we truly are—androgynous, a perfect balance.

12

All Time at Once

We are each a temporary embodiment of memory.

 

F
or me, the subject of time has always been volatile and pressurized. That’s because I never seem to have enough of it. I remember feeling that time was almost an enemy as early as my teens. I think overachievers like me usually feel that way. I used time as a motivating force (the lack of it propelled me to do more), but that approach never made me happy. It made me anxious and productive.

I began to feel that there must be a way to relate to time so that I could be both happy and productive. I never really subscribed to the theory that I’d rather be a neurotic artist than a happy bum. When I found myself involved in spiritual and metaphysical investigation, I realized that my concepts of time were beginning to shift. By that I don’t mean that I started showing up late for appointments because I was spaced out with bliss. I mean that, for some reason, if I relaxed and surrendered and trusted that
there would be enough time
, it usually turned out that way. Time seemed almost to bend and become elongated. With trust that it would work out, it usually did. Meditation had a great deal to do with it.

When I meditated I found that time took on a new meaning. I had read that Einstein said that linear time is an invention of mankind, designed to help us feel focused in space. Had I invented my concept of time in order to focus on success?

When I meditated I felt connected with the universal oneness and time, as I measured it, became irrelevant. I felt completely relaxed in the present. As a result, it helped me feel I was a part of everything and everywhere at once. I found I became even more productive because I was being nourished by this universal oneness instead of stressed out by anxiety relating to what I might not accomplish in the future. This esoteric, “mystical” concept has now become the core of New Age scientific thinking, the subject of experimentation, and the highest form of speculative thought.

However, the soul knows no measurements. Words such as
otherwhen
and
otherwhere
come to mind when describing the unlimited parameters of the soul’s experience.

Dipping in and out of experiences that come up during meditation, one feels as though the past and the future are as real as the present. As of course they are. There are clear emotional memories from times
and places that are in the “past” and “future”—yet you feel it as all happening in the present.

When that occurs, you become profoundly aware that all time is, in fact, happening at once.

In other words, our experience of linear time is really an experience of focus that enables us to concentrate on that which interests and intrigues us for the limited moment. Actually, with a simple shift of focus, we could experience another time and another adventure by expanding our awareness of the moment.

From this perspective, linear reincarnation (that is, lives lived one after another, after another) is not a truth, but rather an experience of focus toward which we choose to direct our conscious attention. So, the present lifetime we are leading is simply a desired focus of our creation, which exists simultaneously with other created adventures that are occurring, but on which we are focusing “now.”

To use a body analogy, I know I have a complete body with a head, torso, arms, and legs. If, however, I decide to concentrate and focus my attention on only my right hand I will lose the awareness that the rest of my body exists in direct ratio to the intensity of my focus on my hand. That does not mean, though, that the rest of my body doesn’t exist. It means that I am not focused on the awareness of the rest of my body simultaneously. The right hand would be analogous to this present lifetime. This lifetime exists because of focus, but that doesn’t mean that the totality of my soul’s experience isn’t occurring simultaneously.

Or, looking at it another way, if Einstein, Alain Aspect, and other physicists are correct in thinking that all time is occurring simultaneously, then so is the soul’s totality of experience.

The impact of realizing such a concept has had a tremendous effect on me. If all time is occurring at once, then problems of this “time” are not so serious except insofar as they are the result of what went “before.” The understanding of the laws of karma becomes clear. You can actually trace the origins of a painful experience in time and see the perfection of the law of cause and effect at work.

You are suddenly aware that karma is not punitive; instead you are only experiencing the full circle of that which you originally expressed. Your expressed energy ultimately comes back in boomerang fashion and you are the recipient of whatever you put out regardless of “when” it occurred. Since all time and all energy occur simultaneously, we choose what we desire to experience and focus upon. Hence, free will.

Therefore, when it is said that we choose and create our own reality, what is meant is that we are selecting, from the vast swirls of possible energy patterns, those harmonics which create emotional impulses that best put us in touch with the learning experiences that teach us what we need to resolve.

Each time I am troubled or upset by something, I “go within” and ask my Higher Self to guide me to the origins of what I’m feeling. If I am disciplined
and commit myself to the internal surrender, I can trace the difficulty back to cause and effect from lifetimes of thousands of years ago. When I experience the tracing and the search, it feels as though it’s happening now. Therefore, I am the result today, in this lifetime, of many experiences and much karma that has accumulated over many lifetimes. I am a product of all my lives and experiences, just as I am a product as an adult today of all my experiences as a child.

When I remember what happened to me as a child I am recalling the emotion of it now. The impact can be just as strong, though it is filtered through an adult perception. During hypnotic regression the human being experiences events of the past in the same emotional center as when the event occurred. The subject is not controlled by conscious perceptions of an adult view of now. Instead, hypnosis allows him to experience the past in himself, which, even though it is childish, is still occurring
now.

Thus it is possible to expand our limited, linear point of view of time and hence to begin to see that reality has much wider possibilities.

We in the Western cultures have very different structures and techniques of thinking about and experiencing ourselves from those who live in Eastern cultures. We are taught to think and perceive in linear terms, which requires; a strongly logical and rational point of view. This is the province of the left hemisphere of the brain. Left-brained thinkers logically
put one thought in front of the other in much the same way as we walk, going from cause to effect on a clear but narrow line of thought. Left-brained thinking is the basis of scientific reductionist thinking, which characterizes our technological brilliance but tends to ignore all things that do not lie directly within its path or frame of reference.

Oriental systems of thought tend to be less linear, less straight-line, having more latitude, and accepting the exploration of tangents and byways. Their dunking is less exact, more diffused and abstract, and therefore more capable of holding many contradictory concepts simultaneously. As a result, an Oriental thinker or scientist can see a broader connectedness to events that would be a confusing and paradoxical puzzle for a left-brained Westerner. The Westerner’s rational, objective approach proceeds according to rules of classic logic and is very reliable in terms of linear reality. But Western thinkers have difficulty creating new perceptions or broader constructs relating to the nature of reality itself.

More recently, though—that is, within the past couple of decades—there has been a surge of scientific thinking and experimentation in the West about concepts that can only be described as verging on the mystical. The quantum theory alone has created fascinating areas for speculation on the nature of the universe, which in turn is leading to questions about how the stuff of the universe gets informed—how does a group of undifferentiated cells in the human
body, for instance, each carrying the DNA code capable of creating a whole body, decide which of them will differentiate to become a head, or an arm, or whatever? Who, or what, informs the cells of their different roles when each holds the potential to play all parts?

Neither East nor West has the answer, but the West has come up with some brilliant hypotheses that lead one straight down the path of “What is consciousness?” Biochemist Rupert Sheldrake’s radical theory—the “M-field” described earlier—is based on the proven ability of like species to apparently “learn” patterns of behavior and growth from one another, even though widely separated. The M-field works across both time and space.

This and much other thinking based on proven experimentation support the holistic concept of space and time.

Eastern systems of thought seem not to require proof, embracing perceptions that have more flexibility with new levels of intuitive cognition. This is right-brain thinking. Right-hemisphere thinking allows intuitional and subjective approaches that can create new thought forms and compositions. It also allows a kind of internal surrender to the spiritual reality within.

That surrender occurs during meditation, which many Orientals use as a common practice.

Many people, during meditation, see themselves as having lived before, sometimes experiencing dramatic
events from past lifetimes that explain a profound fear in this lifetime.

The Eastern systems of thought take reincarnation as a matter of course. They feel that the soul, the Higher Self, remembers all its lifetimes, even though our conscious minds may not recognize them.

During meditation one begins to feel the subtle universal energy vibration that the Indians call
prona
, the Chinese call
chi
, the Egyptians call
ka
, Wilhelm Reich called ozone energy, Mesmer called animal magnetism, and Reichenbach called Odic force. This is the energy of the God source within. When we come into alignment with it we automatically feel ourselves begin to become more balanced.

Now with the influx of Eastern processes of thought entering the Western stream of awareness, we in the West are beginning to allow ourselves more lateral recognition of what we term
reality.
It isn’t necessary to be so fixed in linear limitations of logic and empirical provability. The processes of memory, imagination, and intuitive fantasy are being regarded not so much in the realm of the “unreal” but more as a potential of expanded reality. In other words, the physical dimensions of reality as we perceive them may not be, and in fact almost certainly are not, the only real dimensions there are.

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