It is said that the spiritual Master, Muktananda, kept the door to his library locked. Students were told that before they could gain access to the books on spirituality, they needed to gain experience first. Intellectual enlightenment will fill your head with knowledge, but without practice and experience, its help is only limited. I hope this book will be a complement to your meditation practice and encourage you to deepen it. Much of the theory in this book is combined with what you can expect as your own experience deepens. It may also explain why you are having the experiences that you do.
The best I can hope for is that this book will be read alongside your meditation practice and provide a useful reference from time to time as your awareness of Self grows. You will find differences between your experience and what is given here, but you will have a framework to better understand your own.
If this book has a purpose, it is to instill a reverence and awareness of your true essence, your Self. And yet, a book like this cannot adequately describe the Self. It cannot do anything more than point the way and assist you with knowledge and techniques to bring about this recognition of your true inner nature. It is a book about the evolution of consciousness, your consciousness, from awakening to the evolutionary cycle and the subsequent journey ‘home’.
Perhaps the most important thing I have learned is that an egocentric perspective of the evolutionary cycle is severely flawed. In reality, the ego does nothing, as consciousness is orchestrating the show. You may think you are the doer, but that is the trick of the ego! As you progress on the path, there is a gradual shift in your awareness from the egoic doer to the trans-egoic doer. More precisely, it is a shift in awareness to the realization that there has only ever been the trans-egoic Self that has ever done anything. Through meditation, you gradually return to the experience of who you really are, and your egocentric data gets replaced with a trans-egocentric awareness.
The evidence that you have of the evolution in your consciousness is your ever-increasing Self-awareness or wakefulness and the ever-increasing amplitude of your power along with the resultant palpability of your presence. All you need to do is to remain a witness to it as much as possible.
Your regular practice of meditation ultimately pays off in increased wakefulness and bliss. Invest in wakefulness as your most important life path. Accept where your feet are, accept that everything is exactly as it is, and don’t buy into the illusion that it should be other than it is. You couldn’t be more on schedule if you tried. If you negate yourself and believe you are not good enough, remember, you have all self-worth simply by virtue of your existence.
The book begins with a look at the evolution of humanity to the present day, remembering that this is the background through which we, as individuals, began our own journey in a search for the Self. This moves on to a psychological perspective on why we are the way we are, including paradigms that acknowledge the soul or Self. Some techniques for self-analysis are included under the heading of psycho-analytical meditation.
We then look at the subtle energy system within, including an in-depth analysis of the Kundalini and the chakras and the effect of the spiritual transformation which follows arousal of the Kundalini.
Three chapters follow on the mechanics of consciousness, meditation pointers, and understanding dreams. These are based on many years of personal mentoring with a spiritual Master, Master Charles Cannon, founder of Synchronicity Foundation for Modern Spirituality. The chapter on dreams also includes the understanding of B.S. Goel, who also became Self-realised.
I refer to the seven creative energies of the universe, the Seven Rays, so that you will gain an appreciation of the importance of these in psycho-spiritual understanding. This includes the awakenings and expansions of consciousness which play an important role in your evolution as you move from a purely human level of awareness to ever more subtle levels of Self-awareness. This journey involves constructing a bridge, often referred to as the rainbow bridge, between the personality and the Self, so that eventually the two are fused as you become a Self-realised being.
An entire chapter is devoted to the personal experiences of two individuals on their journey to Self-realization, B.S. Goel and Muktananda.
Finally, as an extra, there is a short supplementary course which gives practical exercises to help cement much of the information given in the theory.
Extract from book introduction