Thursday 3 April 2008

The shift of consciousness......

I have been thinking over the past few days about what might happen when the consciousness shifts. Shifts in states of consciousness are like ascending the rungs of a ladder. At each level it is possible to see everything below it and a little above. An event or insight shifts the consciousness another rung up the ladder of consciousness so that the little that was seen above is now expanded while what could be seen from the lower rungs of the ladder is not lost.

I have long considered myself to be a right brained person. In the 1960s the notion of right and left brain was a popular concept. The left side of the brain was deemed to have different qualities and characteristics to the right. The left had to do with sequential learning and the right with wholistic learning. So someone who is left brained might identify all the parts of something and then put them together to produce a whole. The right brained person on the other hand tends to see the whole picture and then work backwards to identify each piece. When I look back at my spiritual journey which started when I was 11, I definitely believed that I saw the bigger picture. This bigger picture for me was a conviction that there is something bigger than me. This was my starting point or end point whichever way you want to look at it. From this conviction I worked backwards to identify how can I make this conviction an experience.

This morning I had an insight that a shift of consciousness is simply a shift of attention from the left to the right brain. Applying the theory from the paragraph above, this could be a shift from seeing things in a piecemeal fashion to seeing the entire picture. Such a shift would be profound enough to result in someone taking themselves away from the world in order to deepen this state through meditation and contemplation. But what if this is not necessary. What about if the shift in consciousness so that the consciousness now rests in the right brain is enough for the consciousness to deepen and expand of its own will and nature. That removing the physical form to put effort into expanding this state is a waste of time because the consciousness is now where it needs to be to experience the qualities of bliss, peace, harmony, connection. There is no effort needed because this is a natural state.

If I am predominantly right brained and have been since a child this might account for the strong sense of a Presence that I have felt since a child. Not all the time because there have been periods where I have felt very much alone and this Presence has seemed far away. But as I get older I feel the consciousness in my right brain deepening and expanding without any effort on my part. It is what is giving me the intuitions and insights that I receive on a regular basis. I don't know if this explanation is correct but it feels right to me. It gives me a reason for why I can experience periods of intense rapture and an incredible closeness to something without feeling the need to take myself half-way up a mountain to meditate. I have grown up with this state of unity and connection; it is a natural way of being for me. I don't need to force it. Perhaps this is why I find meditation so difficult, it is because I am forcing an already natural state.

I'm not making any assumptions about what I have written. And what I have written doesn't take away from the deep gratitude I feel and express to the universe at the beginning of each day and at the end of each evening for this blessed state........

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