The positive thinking movement tells us that we have the power to create and change our reality. Choosing to be positive is within our individual power to do. By changing how we react to people events and life in general, changing the language we use to speak and thing about ourselves and others and simply choosing to be happy anyway can bring profound changes into our individual lives. There's a catch though. Its relative power is often limited or derailed by our subconscious insecurities, aversions and desires/attachements.
clearing our subconscious of its dross AND practicing a positive outlook takes us further. Techniques like relaxation, breathing techniques, yogic chakra releases, visualisation, acts of faith and forgiveness can all help with the letting go.
But the above will still only fix you. How do we fix the wider problems of the world. The violence, sickness, greed and misery that simply shouldn't have to be. We feel helpless in our individual capacity to bring about change. Prayers or focused intent can be directed at our external environment but again the affect is limited. The fact is you are one individual against the global consensus reality waiting for a tipping point number of people to believe the same as you before the global healing you wish for can spread like a benevolent virus embracing the world. So what to do?
We need to go beyond the individual. All of the above is worthwhile but something more is required for a truly global fix.
Gnostic traditions, those traditions based on direct experience, state that we live in an illusion that is largely of our own collective making. What we experience is governed by the limits of our biological capabilities and our programmed responses. We see and feel what we expect to see and feel. We see a world where we are separate from other individuals, other beings and the very earth beneath our feet. Conceptually at least we know this isn't true. Quantum science is no longer new. It's been telling us for some time now that the structure of the universe is not what we perceive. Take just one atom of one cell of your being. It's mostly just a lot of space with a few particles moving within it around a central core but the exact location of any particle can only be given in terms of probability. Everything else is space. We perceive a hard touchable surface to our skin. It keeps rain, leaves blown on the gusts of wind and anything else from passing into our body, viruses aside. But the surface is mostly space.
Space is the one boundless thing that truly exists in our dimension in our universe. Is it any wonder then that Tibetan's spend time staring at clear blue skies our finding their own inner skies inside. Space is a metaphor for all that is infinite, beyond naming or controlling.
Using the metaphor of space we can using our imagination to connect with our idea of it. You can enhance this practice with visualization, sound and breathing. Imagine the space that exists in the deep cavities of your body: your mind, your throat, your heart and abdomen. Imagine and rest in that space. Just sit with it without judging it. Explore within it. Explore the mind that is looking at it. Feeling the boundless nothing. And yet as we deepen the practice we do indeed find something there: a lightness, stillness, a vast silence. Going outside of ourselves we can imagine a connection to the space around us, space that is the glue that connects us with everything. We realise there is no difference between the inner and the outer space. We realise that each individual thing is within that space. As we connect with the space more and more we realise that the things are creations existing within the space. Our focus has shifted from the individual ego to the whole, to what Larry Dossey calls the 'One Mind'.
Connection with one-mindedness has profound consequences for how we see ourselves and act within the world. We come to see the individual bits of the relative world as temporary constructions. That is not to devalue those constructions but it does mean we start to see them as less concrete. We realise the relative is as it is. It in itself doesn't need fixing. What needs fixing is our connection with the one-mind. And it is from this perspective that everything resolves itself. For there is only one being. The only thing that is need to 'fix the world' is to reawaken to the one-mind and realise that there is only boundness light, love and joy and that what your individual ego in the relative world sought to fix was only its own creation.
