This is the first step in aligning ourselves with our spiritual power. It is the only step that we must take on our own in that it is the step of inviting and calling upon the Holy Spirit, Voice for God or Universal Mind. Although the Voice for God is always present and available, God will not speak to us out of an exquisite sense of respect until we have so invited Him/Her to enter our awareness. The Voice for God is a very unique experience for each person.
Our personal relationship with God, although in essence similar, may take different forms in our minds, which make it an entirely loving one for us. For this reason, we may adopt some religious symbols or rituals to represent our communication with God. Or, we may have found that over the years the character, the essence of God, speaks to us in a way beyond and outside of any structured previous educational or religious experience. Or, we may find a blend of the two. For us to truly feel ready to get beyond plaguing thoughts of fears, anticipations, worries, and concerns, our first step here is to recognize and appreciate how God is always with us, always walking by our side.
How do we know when God is speaking to us? Actually, if you reflect back on the most awesome and intense experiences of our lives, we can recall the feeling, the essence, and the tenor of our communication with God.
Can you remember your first true awareness of God's voice? It may have been a moment of remarkable clarity in an instantaneous discovery that God was always there for you and was waiting for your invitation. Many of us learned what this experience was like when we turned to God only during a time of special importance, such as an emergency. When we invited His/Her presence into our lives, God signaled us in an unmistakable way that He/She was, is, and always will be by our side. In that unmistakable moment we became able to sense our opening to God's light.
We now recall, as in a recollection of distant past echoes, that the moment above was by far not the first moment God had been with us, for God never left us. It is the first moment when we were willing enough to be open and the first moment that we discovered one of many channels of awareness of His/Her exquisite and respectful availability to us.
What internal cues signal the Voice for God to you? The Voice for God may be a very quiet sense of knowing or it may come to you as an unmistakable whisper. In one instant, it seems a multitude of thoughts come with great clarity. God may come to us visually, or in the form of clear physical events showing us love's path. God may come to us through the words of another and we just know they are the words meant for us to hear. The form that the Voice for God takes for us depends completely upon how we are ready to receive it. Of course, we need not ask only in times of distress or great celebration. As soon as we are ready, no matter how great or small the guidance needed, God is our ready companion. It is that simple.
In virtually every circumstance leading us to feelings of discomfort, we have placed our attention upon ego fears. All fears can be reduced to one core illusion, the illusion that we are alone and not worthy of God (because of our guilt over this or that). We can take infinite comfort in always remembering what we have always known. God is around us, within us, and a part of us at all times. At any given moment we decide if we are available to the Voice for God, the Holy Spirit. This is a bit like God's radio station always broadcasting. Yet we must tune in to be able to listen.
We may know what we have just read rings true. Yet, we have many ways of entangling our minds. We think that we (and our particular set of problems) are the exception. We have seen the intervention of God in our lives throughout the years in a multitude of examples. In many cases we thought that we had come to the ultimate end of our proverbial rope. There were times when we may have felt extreme loss, we had felt abused or misused, we could not see our way clear due to of lack of resources, we felt personality flaws and felt alienated from others. We may have seen whole lifestyles change or be destroyed right in front of our faces. And yet, throughout all of this, and throughout everything that is happening in our lives today, God is still with us, and has helped see us through what we thought was the ultimate catastrophe, the ultimate loss, the ultimate proof that we could be unworthy of love. As we look back on many of these circumstances, we find that eventually, each of t hese seemingly painful maladies turned into a blessing, and each of these existed strictly for our own benefit. Each challenge we survive help us to see the blocks to love that we constructed are unnecessary.
With each lesson that we learn through God and through communication with the Voice for God, we realize that survival is a state of mind and answers to our fears and to our prayers are always at hand. By deciding to remember in faith that God is always with us, communication with God can happen anytime we want, not just when we judge that our need for God deserves response. God does not put constraints upon His/Her availability to us. We have bound ourselves with thought habits of guilt and shame. Who are we to deserve to speak with God? We are His/Her children. We know our children can do nothing to cancel out our love for them. There is nothing we can do to be judged as undeserving of the love of Father/Mother God.
Our step along the path to increasing comfort and attunement with the Voice for God, through the Holy Spirit requires the use of daily preparation and many personalized methods that we will construct for ourselves to rediscover and reinforce what we know in our hearts is already there. God is with us, God will never leave us, and all that happens for our benefit.
By sensitizing our minds to listening and tuning in to the Voice for God, the presence of God will become increasingly available to us, and easier to feel within the deepest recesses of our hearts. We consciously put faith first, faith in our willingness to set aside our ego fears and replace them with a mind filled with gratitude. This step is not unlike all the other steps in which we train our minds, in that it reverses steps that our ego thought processes have habitually conditioned our minds to follow.
In our first major leap, we allow ourselves to see a dilemma, a foreboding challenge, and decide to change our habit of how we choose to respond. Now, instead of seeing the problem, coloring it with fear, anticipating the fight with potential catastrophe, we choose another way. We ask God to help us recall a short list of gratitudes from times which were similar and in which we discovered tremendous blessings from those challenges. In preparing us to hear the Voice for God, we set the groundwork with gratitude. We soon feel our minds opening, our tension decreasing. We sense the light of God. This will be the first step in our wakeful meditation.
WAKING MEDITATION
Step 1, The Altar
Throughout the ages people have built altars as a way of personalizing their relationship with God. When people go to their altar, they focus their mind upon the task of gratitude for all that God has previously given them. They also use this special place to find a ritual means of prayer. In this prayer, their concerns and worries are left at the altar for God to contemplate.
Coming to the altar is analogous to going to a website, tuning into a radio station, or going to your community house of worship. The specific spot, the specific makeup, the specific surroundings and rituals involved are not nearly as essential as the state of mind we place ourselves in as we have approached our willingness to join with God's love rather than the ego's fear.
Perhaps when we think about an altar, we think about a place beyond doubt, beyond attack, beyond the errors and trappings, which people use to judge each other. We think about a place where what we wear or what we say is of secondary importance to what we receive through the reassurance of a special and direct line by which we can tap into God. We think of the practical metaphors of taking off your shoes before walking into a Buddhist temple, or placing a kepah on your head when walking into a synagogue, or lighting a candle in a church. Each one of these small rituals helps to place us in a particular state of mind in which we are open, ready and certain of the presence of God. We can build an altar physically almost anywhere. This can be in a formal religious institution, or it can be in a corner of a room in our own home. Ultimately, wherever we place the altar, we have used this symbol to clear a spot for God to speak with us in our own minds and hearts.
Here are some possible methods for the construction of our altar. For the physical representation of the place where you communicate with God, you may choose a particular corner of a room in your home, or at your office, or in your car; anywhere you normally frequent and visit.
In this special place, there should be some objects, which are representations for you of the concepts of gratitude and eternity. Light, for example, in the form of candles, represents eternal truth. There may be objects that you have found in nature, which seem to have spoken to you in a very unique way. Or, there may be heirlooms carried down from one generation to another, things that show the continuity of your family, of your life, of the universe. How you construct your altar is extremely personal to you. Allow at least one small symbol that you would normally include on your altar to be mobile enough to be carried around with you and represent the link to that altar and to the Voice for God.
When you approach your altar, approach with thoughts only of gratitude. Like in the Buddhist temple, leave the dirt from your shoes outside. What you want to do here is relax and rest in the arms of God. Before all else, devote yourself to your daily basic deep breathing meditation as described in the last chapter. As you feel both the arms of God surrounding you at this altar, and the reassurance of God's care in examples of the past, you are coming closer to a frame of mind in which you are opening yourself to the language of God which is the language of love everlasting.
Gratitude is the reliving of miracles that have been put before us to help resolve what we thought were omens of fear and uncontrolled pain of many forms. Let us embrace the belief that whatever challenge is being shown to you now is like any other lesson that you have been shown. We had fallen into holes, yet we have been shown our way out. The lessons have helped us to be stronger and face future challenges with a more intimate awareness of God's loving intercession. So, as our first step in walking through this challenge with God's assistance, write down similar circumstances that have been resolved through your cooperative listening to the Voice for God which in turn helped you deepen your understanding of God. Although you may have felt so uptight, and even preoccupied concerning your current fears before you approached your altar, take the time to set your pain aside and do this simple exercise. Recall gratitude first and this will clear the way for clear communication with the Voice for God.
Step 2, The Image
To personalize our discussion with God, we may find it extremely helpful to construct an image of God's holiness. We refer to that communication with God in this book as the Voice for God, or the Holy Spirit. It is our direct link to God. The more real that link is in our mind, through image and affect, the easier it is to tune in. Symbols have been used throughout eternity in the form of relics representing God and Gods, in artistic and visual representations which describe God's personality as found in religious scriptures. But no communication can be as direct as that which is completely tailor- made by ourselves. Until an article of clothing is tried on, we simply don't know if it fits. Here, we can construct our own evolving image of the Holy Spirit, making it in a heartfelt way, much more real for us.
In a quiet place, sketch your image of the Holy Spirit with your non-dominant hand. Allow it to unfold anyway that it wishes to, without censoring the drawing whatsoever. It may end up being in the form of a person, or an animal, or it might be an image which you have never seen before. Allow the image to show itself in texture, in realism, in character, as you might see the Holy Spirit before you. Make sure that you draw eyes which you can look into as you communicate deeply and sincerely. Eyes lead us directly to the seat of the soul. Over the course of several days, refine this drawing in whatever way seems to flow easily for you. Allow that flow to proceed without judgment. Use colored pencils or chalk, crayons or textured means of filling in colors for this image, or leave the colors as simply black and white. As the image becomes more solid, see God speak to you through that image. Now place that image in your mind. Allow it to animate itself. After each working refi nement of your evolving image of the Holy Spirit, place it back upon your altar.
Step 3, Prayer
It is now time to look at prayer. We prepare to focus our intentions to listen to God's guidance by resonating our energies with our Universal mind through prayer. Prayers we pick as meaningful to us can be from formal religious training, our family traditions, inspirations from our lifeÕs travels, or those inspired through our openness to our personal communication with the Voice for God, the Holy Spirit. There is certainly a wealth of prayer both written and as yet unwritten, for words are secondary to God. All life experiences can be used as inspiration for prayer.
There are three very simple rules to any prayer. First, we acknowledge that God is love and only love. Second, we acknowledge that although we are a part of God we are not the totality, therefore whatever circumstance has caused us discomfort; we ask only that God show us the wisdom of the unfolding of events so we can better understand God. We expect no specific outcome; we wish to be shown only the will of God. Third, we approach prayer with gratitude for all that God has shown us and for our willingness to include ourselves among all souls in God's universal mind. The more we can glorify ourselves by our willingness to be a part of the whole, the more we are able to make use of God's total inspiration.
Once we have brought our prayers to God's altar, we leave knowing through faith, that the answers will unfold. We commit ourselves to true vision in seeing the solution to the concerns that we have brought before God. We seek within for the strength to carry out these solutions.
SHORT WAKING MEDITATION
As you go through the day, you may choose to take a small item from your altar with you, such as a picture of your drawing of the Holy Spirit, or an artifact such as a small pebble that is meaningful to you. When you are feeling tension or discomfort, you can simply reach into your pocket and feel this small object, close your eyes briefly, breathe deeply, and allowing the sensations of joining with the Voice for God to enter your mind's space. As you touch this object, imagine a key simultaneously unlocking the top of your mind, allowing a universal light to illumine brilliantly your image of the Holy Spirit. Allow that image to communicate with you in whatever way seems to be comfortable. For some people, the message of comfort and love comes in the form of words, for others it is an understanding and compassionate expression extended towards us, for others just seeing the image allows a flood of thought which we know to be Truth.
These experiences in and of themselves are healing because they help us to discern when we are open to hearing the Holy Spirit, rather than our own rather labored and demanding messages that tend to produce pressure upon the mind. In contrast, the message of the Holy Spirit tends to be so simple and truthful, we just know that we have been given the most peaceful solution. We are called to let forgiveness rest upon our minds, knowing that in every way we will be taken care of if we follow this simple advice. Very often, the direction we are given is the one that would directly sidestep conflict, or the desire to change or control another.
These shorter, intermittent meditations, give you the opportunity to recognize and anchor the changes in our thought habits that originate in the longer morning meditations. We can place ourselves right back at our altar and to our healing communication, and tune ourselves into the presence of the Holy Spirit, showing us the most peaceful solutions in our interpersonal relationships. As these moments increase during the course of each day through our own invitation, the mystery of being at one with the Godhead becomes paradoxically both simpler and yet more awesome.
GUIDED IMAGERY
As with every guided imagery meditation in this book, we begin each morning with our basic breathing meditation. During this time, as we go down deep into our senses, we call upon the vision of our right-mindedness. In this guided imagery meditative practice, we will solidify the image of the Holy Spirit in our minds by way of invitation to the presence of God beyond words. We enhance this image, clarify it, and let it evolve in our minds.
Through our deep breathing meditation, we become relaxed and open minded. Now is the time to come physically in front of the our altar. Look at the drawing of the Holy Spirit that rests upon this altar. Breathe in that drawing as if you were inhaling it. Let that drawing melt into your being. See the details of your drawing. Notice the parts of it, especially the eyes, in which the soul of that drawing can so easily welcome yours.
When you are ready, close your eyes and see the image within your mind. Again, notice all the details that you can of the drawing. Notice the feeling of comfort and peace that continue to surround you. See the images of color that seem to emanate and notice where those colors reverberate in your body. Let the color send a ray to that part of your body where you feel discomfort. Let the energy that comes from that image directly comfort and heal whatever fears and concerns seem to be seated within that particular part of your body. Feel the rays of light from the image you have drawn as they gaze upon the emotions, the fears and concerns seated in your body in a forgiving and confident way. Allow the facial expression and the eyes to smile upon the issue that seems to emerge as you are describing your feelings in this Holy Encounter.
When you're ready, open your eyes and take in more details of the image of your drawing of the Holy Spirit. If you'd like, bring the picture down to add some details that seem to be evolving and emerging, as you meditate on the Holy Spirit breathing into your body and healing the corresponding spiritual issue emerging within your mind with His/Her infinite wisdom.
JOURNAL ENTRIES
Each time during the course of the day that you find a need to step back into the short guided imagery meditation as described above, please make a note concerning your search for guidance away from conflict and towards a loving heart. Use your pocket journal to note the effect this short meditative process has upon your mind. These entries should require no more than a few sentences. In the evening, these short notes can be transferred to your larger spiritual journal.
As you journal about these particular incidents, allow yourself to fall into a dialogue with the Holy Spirit. Consciously 'hear' how to give your fears and your resistance over to the call for love (as you may now understand it) from the other person. Let the writing be spontaneous and as long or as short as is needed. At whatever point you first wish to stop writing, continue writing just a short while longer. This will signal the stepping into what might have been an area of some resistance. Don't go to the point where you are feeling strained, simply stretch your comfort zone, ever so slightly.
Affirmation to be said and thought as often as you are inspired:
'The Voice for God, the Holy Spirit, is my constant companion through times of challenge.'
WHEN IT IS TIME TO MOVE ON
When you feel that you have been able to do the following with some ease, then go onto the next chapter.
Continue with these daily practices as we move into the next step of our spiritual path.
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