Learn a language using visualization

Certainly vizualisation shouldn't be the only method you use to practise and learn a foreign language but it can be a very effective way, especially when you're somewhere native speakers of the language are rare.

I'm currently enjoying an older out of print book called "Breakthrough Greek" to develop my understanding of modern Greek a bit further.  The beauty of their approach is using short dialogues with explanations on the facing page. I first read the dialogue through without reference to the vocabulary or explanations and see what my brain can work out based on what it already knows or can guess.  Then I read the vocab and explanations and reread the dialogue and practise saying it out load.  I've already learnt the alphabet but if I was learning that too I would write the passage out.  I then visualize having the conversation with another person. I mentally substitute some of the words with others I know. If the dialog covers stuff that's very new to me I leave it for a day or so then come back to it - this gives my brain time to have rewired. When I do meet a helpful native speaker I try some of it out.

Pineal Gland meditation part 2: surfing the brain

This is about my third week of meditating on the pineal gland using the techniques outlined in Jill Ammon-Wexler's ebook on the pineal gland. What I've learnt so far is not to try too hard or get hung up on the results. If my mind wants to wander then I let it muse a bit, valuable insights come from this, then I gently steer my focus back to resting my minds eye at that point between the brow. Sometimes the indigo colours I get at the start of mediation elude me and when that happens I surrender all expectations and either send love from my heart chakra to my third eye or do a breath through my nose and sending it towards the third eye, down into my abdomen and then breathing out through the mouth to really let go.

Once I'm "in" and my focus locks on then so far there seems to be a couple of distinct stages.  The first stage is experiencing the colours and lights on the screen behind the eyes.  This is heightened by wearing a light proof mask and using a darkened room.  I got a mask off ebay that has built in therapeutic magnets for the acupressure points and this seems to help greatly.  What I experienced last night during this phase was a world of light and an awareness of my body as light.  I experimented with how different thoughts and feelings and attitudes affected this light. I can't quite find the words to describe it yet.  The second phase I've experienced when I do a long mediation, about 40 minutes in the screen show stops and there is a sense that there is only consciousness and there is a sense of being everywhere and nowhere. Struggling to express it - it seems to be a loss of the sense of locality.

I'm still sometimes using Brainwave Tuner app on my android tablet, which I updated last week from the lite to the full version. The best one for me has been the sleeep induction which use to take me to the edge of sleep but I don't let myself go to sleep.  From my reading about brainwaves this would seem to be the best way to get into the delta waves of lucid dreaming or insights.

What if we wake up tomorrow all sharing the one mind?

What if...?
If we woke up tomorrow and we were all of one mind what would it mean?
If we could heal anyone by simply loving ourself and them as part of ourself?
If we could pull any idea we were interested in from the unified field of consciousness?
If we didn't need to protect ourself from ourself?
If we could travel anywhere in space and time with simply the thought?
If we didn't need even half of what we now need, let alone desire...?

If positive thinking is about visualizing an outcome and then giving thanks for it as if it already exists in our lives then maybe this is something worth pondering.

Experiencing Pineal Gland Activation Week 1 results

I've been been using the diet and exercises in Power Up Your Brain - Perlmutter, David, Villoldo, Alberto for some weeks and then read  Pineal Gland and Third Eye: How to Develop "Conscious Self" Psychic Abilities  by Jill Ammon-Wexler which gave me actual techniques to use to activate the pineal gland. I also availed myself of some brainwave music using the Android application "Brain Tuner Lite".

What I've been doing on almost a daily basis for about the last ten day is 

• lying down
• listening to the "self-hypnosis" setting on the "Brain tuner lite" program
• starting out with a few minutes of alternate nose breathing (to balance both sides of the brain apparantly)
• then when my arms start to ache from that I just put my arms down at my sides or do the hand position (mudra) the Jill Ammon-Wexler recommends.  Relaxed I close my eyes and breathe in through my nose, focusing my breath up to the third eye and then releasing the breath out through my mouth.  I do this for a little bit until I'm suitably focused on the third eye and deeply relaxed.
• then my own innovation is to send loving thoughts to my third eye and just rest my awareness there seeing what I see on the screen behind my closed eyes.

The first few times I tried this nothing special happened and then about the third time I saw swirly colours of indigo, almost an electric blue - really quite pretty.  I am ware I must not get fixated on such effects but at the moment I'm using it as feedback that I'm doing the right thing.  After the first time this happened I got nothing over the next couple of days.  The two reasons I put down for that is that I was trying to hard and the other was it was the middle of my work week (lack of time and too much work stuff on the mind).  At the end of the week I had more time and determined I was going to give it my best shot and go really deeply into it even it took some time to really relax and clear myself of expectations.  This time I got the colours again. I tried twice more that day and got the same results - the later times without the brainwave music and mudra.  I think the brain is starting to learn the pathways and its getting easier each time. Today it was quite easy to achieve and even with my eyes opening and not trying to meditate I can still focus on my third eye point and get a sense of what I feel during meditation. The colours during meditation are now more sustained - not just the occassional flashes.

What I don't know is what to expect if I keep going with this - so I'll have to do some research on the web and just keep experimenting.

The cloud computing brain

As usual, I have been reading a number of books in tandem:

• Power Up Your Brain by David Perlmutter and Alberto Villoldo
• The Source field investigations by David Wilcock
• The Fourth Awakening by Rod Pennington and Jeffery A Martin

I started reading The Source Field Investigations back in December and I'm still picking at it. To be honest I haven't found it an easy read but it does contain some ideas worthy of further exploration. The structure of the book is essentially a compilation of little known science, quite a bit of it by russian scientists. It has a chapter on the pineal gland.  Frankly I don't see the author's comparison of the shape of the pineal gland with a pine cone.  I certainly would have been more interested in knowing what the Egyptian hieroglyphs beneath the Vatican's giant pinecone statue said.  It did however get me thinking about that gland as a possible of gateway for communicating with the source field, a hypothetical field of "something", possibly energy, possibly vibration, possibly a universal consciousness that surrounds and emeshes everything in the known universe.

"The Fouth Awakening" is a novel in which the hero is a Timothy Leary style multimillionaire who believes in the power of positive thinking and who tries to get his ideas across to a female sometimes journalist who has regrets about giving up her high flying career for a marriage (that resulted in divorce) and children who are now leading lives of their own.  The fourth awakening is the concept that we are about to take an evolutionary leap as a species, from symbolic communication to non-symbolic communication.  Further information on the ideas contained in the book can be found in a non-fiction book written by one of the authors, Jeffery A Martin, called the God formula. In the novel they are trying to speed up the supposed evolutionary event by stimulating certain portions of the brain.

I greatly enjoyed reading "Power up your brain" which was well written with clear general reader level explanations of how the brain works. The intent of the book is an integration of David Perlmutter's work in the field of neuroscience with Alberto Villoldo's shamanic healing methods. The book outlines a number of practical exercises and a nutritional regime aimed at stimulating brain healing and connection with a greater reality.

One of the exercises in  "Power up your brain"  is the "Invocation to Create Sacred Space"

Alberto has used this invocation, with variations, in a number of his works.  In form this is a fairly standard ritual used to define a circular area, to create sacred space, by honouring six directions: east, west, north, south, above and below. I like to also honour my heart center as the seventh direction.  I am not providing the detail of the ritual here, surfice to say Alberto starts his ritual in the South, honouring the great serpent, then proceeds to the West to the Mother Jaguar, North to the ancient ones and ancestors who have gone before us and then to the East, the great eagle that sours above the high mountain peaks. The next stage of the ritual asks for healing of the mother earth and honours the Great spirit above.

It occurred to me, while practising this ritual that

• the Sepent of the South equated with our reptilian brain, our automated habital responses, the beat of our heart, our breath, all the things that we rely on the cerebellum to do.
• the Mother Jaguar represents our animal brain (the limbic system) that powers our emotions, our desires and at its most basic: feeding fighting, fleeing and sex.  This is the part of us that can feel stressed and drives us to protect ourselves and pursue pleasure.
• the Ancient Ones of the North equate with our Neo Cortex, our ability to reason, reflect and to express ourselves in words and symbols.
• The Eagle of the East equates with an ability to sour above mountains we have only started to dream of.  

My intuitive guess is that the layer of brain that will empower the eagle aspect of ourselves is one that we are yet to evolve or yet to activate.  Could the pineal gland, once active in us, be like a plug connection into a universal "cloud computing" level of consciousness that exists only in the spiritual realm?

Zucchini, carrot, shallot and sorghum fritters

To make these I put one each of a zucchini (small), carrot and shallot (all three chopped up) into a blender with enough water for the blender to blend easily.  Then pour into a mixing bowl.  Add seasoning (I use a veggie stock).  Add a heaped tablespoon of chia seed (adds omega 3), add a heaped tablespoon of psyllium seed (improves texture and adds fibre) and then add enough sorghum flour to thicken the mixture.  Let the mixture rest for a minute as this gives time for the chia and psyllium to swell. Use a scoop or large spoon to take good sized dollops of the mixture and add to a fry pan that has been preheated and seasoned with coconut oil or rice bran oil (the latter cooks a little hotter so make sure it doesn't burn). When browned on one side flip over and do the other side, don't need a lot of cooking, just enough to hold them together.  Serve warm with fresh salad pickings from the garden ... eg some sliced cucumber, sliced tomato and fresh purslane ( a highly nutritious and tasty weed).

Making the switch from individual to universal consciousness

Having waded through about six months of beginner's and intemediate Benei Baruch classes on the Kabbalah (I think I actually got more out of their youtube videos though) as well as augmenting with my own reading I've decided what I've got from it is as follows:

• everything we do is for self benefit! (even giving to charity makes you feel better about your self)
• up until recently most of us have been caught up in the illusion that we are alone in the shells of our skins, egos, unique and trying to control everything in our perceived environment (to our own advantage)
• recently a lot of us have been starting to wake up (whether through kabbalah, brain science, the human potential movement, the fourth awakening or plant teachers...) to the fact that consciousness is not in our brains nor is it confined within our mortal bodies. 

My consciousness is a part of great cosmic sea of consciousness, diamond net of Indra, source field... whatever name you wish to call it (some might call this "God" but I'd rather not as I think that unnecessarily complicates things and attaches too many thousands of years of misguided dogma). This sea of consciousness contains everything and in some way which is beyond my understanding is in any part of it (holographically perhaps) everything. This everything is energy vibrating but doing so at different frequencies, the very fast as spirit and the slower as matter.  There are no boundaries within it ... just areas of slower vibration or faster vibration (a bit like a weather system).

Now the really neat bit is that I don't have to give up doing everything for self benefit (you can't any way as its just plain human nature) - I just have to realise that my "self" is everything and do "everything" for self. This is the true meaning of "love everyone as your self" (including your friends and enemies, beings of stone, beings of plant, beings of four, six and eight legs etc) for everyone is you.  This is the origin of Mayan saying "you are another me".

So shed your artifically constructed boundaries: give way to the yourself in the queue of the supermarket as you have as much right to get out quickly as you do... if you catch my drift.

They say that all this is something that you can't explain ... you can only understand when you experience it for your self.  So experiment: use visualisation, affirmations, act as if this model of consciousness is real (whatever works for you) and see what you think about it.

At the moment I practise daily visualising love and acceptance for my body contained self and then I extend that visualisation out in onion layers to include family, then neighbourhood, then work and so on until I visualise the whole planet and everything on it and then out to the galaxy and the universe.  All the time ayaing "I love you, I accept you as you are", all the time knowing that I mean just one extended entity. Its also easy to extend this across time and space (to everything past, present and future in all dimensions and all universes).