Meditation Talk Transcription
Welcome to Release Into Now, Week Four. This week, we’ll focus on Heart and Third Eye opening.
Heart Opening
When working with meditation the practice of heart opening commonly arises. This can be a challenging concept to understand as this practice is intangible and subjective. You can’t exactly compare results with friends as you make internal progress. Another barrier is that definitions of these pursuits are often ethereal and esoteric.
I define heart opening as the pursuit of identifying, deepening and expanding what a person recognizes as the physical sensation of love and compassion in their body. The root of this feeling is almost always located in the chest where the biological heart resides. It doesn’t matter whether you refer to it as an energy center, chakra, emotion, or whatever. The label isn’t important. Finding the feeling is what matters.
Imagine a person that you love deeply, an impossibly cute baby animal, a touching moment in your life, anything you know will make your heart swell with warmth. Direct your attention to the warm feeling in your chest. This is heart energy. Plain and simple. Now that you’ve identified that feeling in your body, try and make it expand until you feel that warmth in your entire body. Once your body feels full with this feeling, see if you can move that feeling out of your chest and into the world, like you’re a Sun shining rays of your own compassion upon all things.
That was a concise description of the heart opening process. Naturally, as you practice this technique you’ll achieve greater results. The experience and awareness of your heart resonance will become deeper, more complex, and clearer over time. The opening and acceptance of the love sensation within yourself is a lifelong process. Don’t rush. Don’t beat yourself up if this takes you a bit of time. There’s no imaginary finish line to get to. Little by little, as days, months, years, and decades go by, you’ll gain better command and sense of that feeling and the unfolding of your heart language will continue to grow.
Another benefit to tapping into and opening your heart is that you’ll develop a greater comfort and openness with accepting love for yourself and expressing it outwardly towards others. As a deepening of your heart resonance awakens you’ll notice your anxiety, armoring, and worry of vulnerability begin to fade.
Third Eye Opening
Third Eye opening. Awakening of cosmic vision. Seeing from the Astral Eye. There are countless ways this has been described over the course of human history and I would wager that many have experienced this without the benefit of such context.
The Third Eye is commonly said to be located in the forehead, a few inches above our biological eyes. The Third Eye term represents the vision that awakens during meditation. The closest thing I would compare this cosmic vision to is dreaming while you’re awake. It’s as if your mind has a stage on which dreams are unfolding and you can interact with and guide the story.
Some would call this an expansion of consciousness, an increase of internal awareness, tapping into other dimensions of reality, or other frequencies of thought. As this type of vision continues to awaken, the richer our awareness of these frequencies become.
I would say the reason this phenomenon is depicted as a single eye on the forehead is because this is a universally common location people note as the birth of this sensation. During meditation, practitioners find the Third Eye to be an entry point to other dimensions of consciousness. This point often comes into awareness as a pinhole of light in the mind’s eye and expands over the course of years into an open channel of cosmic consciousness.
The mechanics of opening the Third Eye are similar to the process we followed for heart opening. However, in the case we’re dealing with our intuitive visionary mind.
My Early Third Eye Experience
After several years of steady meditation, I started to notice a muted silver point of light awakening in my forehead during my practice. As I continued to nurture and expand this sensation, the muted silver light began to come alive with a feeling of electricity. Shortly after that, the sensation grew into a spinning pinwheel of white light.
Throughout the next year, I continued to keep my attention directed towards the deepening and unraveling of that sensation. It continued to increase in intensity until I began to have a sense of that feeling in my Third Eye space even when I wasn’t meditating.
Astral What?
After years of devoting time and attention to expanding my Third Eye consciousness, it was if I broke through a membrane that separated what I understood to be my conscious awareness and another simultaneously occurring astral light dimension. Now, in my meditations or daily life, I can see a vision of a completely different world that I observe through the third eye space, just as clearly as I observe our layer of human consciousness.
Fortunately, at my core, I’m a scientific materialist just as much as I am an experimental explorer of my own consciousness. I want to be clear that I don’t ‘believe’ in the cosmic light world any more than I trust my own human subjective perception of our objective universe. They’re both simply forms of information to me on which I base my estimations of reality. I don’t find it important if this cosmic light world I’m tapping into is an empirically testable dimension that exists in a different layer of the multiverse. It could be that. Or it could be a symbolic connection with our internal self which exists only in our minds. A cosmic reality that’s buried so deeply within our brains that it arises to consciousness in the form of visions, sensations, symbols and abstract perceptual experiences. Regardless whether we’re seeing into another dimension of complex light consciousness or if we’re just watching a projection of our own mind – I’m interested in how this experience can be useful.
We can take the insights we receive from our Third Eye vision as another form of sense. It’s important to keep in mind, especially when dealing with the slippery sense of the mind, that our senses aren’t always correct. We use our sense organs to guide us through life, informing our brain what our body is experiencing. Sometimes we can think we see something, only to realize we have mistook it for something else. We constantly mishear speech and sounds in our environment. When tasting a complex meal you’d be hard pressed to define every spice in it. Alternatively, we do sometimes experience a crisp and accurate sense reading. Nonetheless, to me, our Third Eye sense, our cosmic vision, is equally flimsy in it’s factuality as our biological senses. In my experience, I feel that with discipline in refining and developing our cosmic sense, we can increase our intuition and sense of a consciousness that extends beyond ourselves. The Third Eye sense is not infallible, just like our other senses, but it can guide us towards truth. As long as we remain as non-dogmatic about that sense as we do our others.
One Pointed Mind
One of the most powerful tools we can develop through meditation is the One Pointed Mind. I also like to call it ‘The Eagle Gaze.’ This technique is the ability to focus your mind on one singular thought or sensation at a time, with a pure clarity, distinct focus and unwavering concentration. Like all disciplines, building the strength of the One Pointed Mind takes dedication, but as you practice, your ability grows exponentially over time. The increased focus that developing the One Pointed MInd provides gives us the ability to observe, allow and differentiate between the thoughts that are constantly arising in our mind.
A One Pointed MInd is immensely helpful during meditation and in life. It allows us to stay focused, reflect on our thoughts, and contemplate our reality in an extraordinarily deep way. If we have a question that’s stuck with us, the One Pointed Mind gives us a control of our mental stage. This allows us to keep that question in our sights and ponder it during our meditation for an extended period of time. We can relax, allow, and let the answer that’s hidden in that question reveal itself to us. Most of the answers to larger questions are wound tightly in our own thoughts. With a calm and focused mind, we must simply allow our thoughts to unravel in order to expose the shining pearl that’s been there all along.
A strong command of our mental focus is indispensable when doing deep internal work. For example, we can dedicate an entire meditation session to focusing on the heart-mind and heart opening. We can spend a full hour concentrating on opening our third eye and increasing our cosmic consciousness. You can, and should, apply the strength a One Pointed Mind to all of the previous and future lessons in this course. A focused mind increases the ability to advance every level of your meditation and internal work. It will help you identify and release emotional trauma you’ve been carrying, it will help you simply sit and watch your breath, or it can enable your witness mind to observe your thoughts with immense discernment. Every aspect of your meditation and daily life are greatly empowered by developing a strong One Pointed Mind.
Developing Your Focus
There are several simple ways to develop a One Pointed Mind. One way is the following: Before your meditation session, place a small object on your desk or bed. What’s important is that the object will be at eye height while you sit in your meditation posture. Sit at a comfortable distance from the object, I suggest 4-6 feet, so that you can easily see it while in your meditation position. While sitting and practicing meditative breathing, keep your eyes open and locked on the object.
Do nothing other than simply sit, breathe and keep your focus on that object. After a while, it’s common for your vision to get a bit hazy or for your depth perception to move in and out. It’s fine if this happens, just ride the motion and stay visually locked in to the object.
You can also do the same practice with your eyes closed. You’ll just need to imagine a simple object in your mind’s eye. When you sit down to meditate, close your eyes, picture a sphere, and hold that image in your mind. If your mind wanders, which is common at first, bring your mind back to the same sphere again. After some practice, when you can effortlessly hold that sphere in you mind’s eye, try manipulating it. See if you can make the sphere grow and shrink in size, get further away or closer, change color, or even morph into a different shape.
While seemingly simple and deceptively easy, these practices work like a gym for your mental focus and will develop the strength of your One Pointed Mind. With dedication, your focus will increase smoothly over time. So smoothly in fact, one day, you’ll likely be struck by the realization of your own ability to remain clear and focused.
Looking Into A Flame
In my early years of meditation I developed my One Pointed Mind by staring into a lit candle flame during my meditation sessions. I don’t necessarily recommend this for everyone. For some reason, my intuition drew me to this approach as an instinct. The dancing of the flame does make holding focus more challenging, but I enjoyed that, and it was useful to me. As a side note, if you do use this candle practice, please be mindful of the fact that you have a lit flame in your house.
After I dedicated a good deal of meditation sessions to cultivating the One Pointed Mind I began to notice an interesting phenomenon. With my gaze locked steadily on the candle, the flame would morph periodically. It would stretch, get larger, wider, taller, or all of the area around the flame would blur. I came to realize that was my mind becoming modular and releasing from the paradigms of a singular locked perceptual perspective. This was the moment when I began to be able to view my reality through multiple perspectives at once.
As you cultivate this mental skill, you will notice that it travels with you into your day. Your ability to listen to people, contemplate ideas, be self-aware, and navigate life will all increase exponentially. By raising your consciousness and seeing reality through multiple perspectives we become one step closer to truth.
In the upcoming guided meditation, we’ll focus on the heart and the third eye.