Imaginal Journeys in the Underworld

  This morning’s meditation took me both in a familiar and an unexpected direction. As I sat, I felt more strongly than ever how the simple factness of my Being is important, essential even. This is a lesson I need to learn over and over as a Point Three fixation on the Enneagram. Even in my lofty state (haha), I still get swept up in the belief that my value comes from what I do, not who I am. It’s deeply ingrained in me. These experiences during meditation serve to correct that misconception and also point to a key difference between life in the physical world and life in the nonmanifest realms.  In the physical world, each person is said to have value as a person but we mainly just give lip service to that notion. When it comes down to it, we really don’t value a human life that much. It’s sad but true. We’re so materialistic that the lives of wealthy people are generally worth more than those of almost anyone else. There are exceptions but not many. Further, in the physica...

  I was kind of dumb. For the past many months when I meditate, I’ve been pretending that I have no outside help, no teacher, no one to tell me what I’m experiencing or how to interpret it. It’s not a bad idea in principle but in practice it subtly reinforced my ego structure and I inadvertently was doing a quintessential American thing: Attempting to be a rugged individualist. You know the American myth of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps and soldiering on? That’s basically what my meditations became.  I couldn’t figure out why my heart was feeling increasingly pinched. Finally, when I realized that I was blocking out the expansive field of my soul’s experience and allowed that awareness to permeate my meditation, things got a lot better. My heart no longer feels quite as pinched and my meditations are different. It is important not to do anything while meditating and forcing myself to narrow my focus was a kind of doing. One thing that got blocked out as a result of my...