

Field of Love

How to Experience the Field

Martin Birrittella

Published by Martin Birrittella at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Martin Birrittella

ISBN 978-0-9899764-5-9 (ebook)

Also By Martin Birrittella

Field of Love:  
Power, Love & Fortune on the Road to Enlightenment

Field of Love:  
Self-Inquiry and the FREE Process™ Workbook

Please visit:

www.MartinBirrittella.com

www.FieldofLoveBook.com

To Sasha and Danielle

the sound and movement of love

Part 1

The Field

Field of Love

In the spring of 2012 I had just finished speaking at a Soul-­Radiance Retreat that my wife Sarah McLean was running at Unity Church headquarters in Kansas City. I normally tell a number of stories from my book Field of Love: Power Love and Fortune on the Road to Enlightenment during these retreats. As usual, some of the participants asked me about out-of-body, near-death or Kundalini experiences. The more unusual the story, the more details they want.

One person asked, "What would you suggest is the quickest, easiest way to experience the Field?" meaning the Field of Love as I like to call it.

I responded, "The number one ingredient to connect with the Field is a deep desire to do it."

Another said, "I know that! Just tell me the best way to do it."

I smiled, chuckled a little and did what I do best. I told another story that I hoped would put into perspective from my own experience what it took for me to connect to the Field in a deep and meaningful way.

When writing this book I decided the best way to communicate connecting to the Field was to describe in detail exactly how I did it, or should I say how it happened or unfolded for me without trying to censor myself in any way. I know that your experience probably will not be anything remotely like mine, but there will be some hidden gems in the way I did it and in my recommendations on how to do it. The one thing that is apparent in my autobiography was my level of enthusiasm, intensity and openness to where my heart led me.

Over many years I put a lot of time and energy into experiencing the Field. I heartily recommend that the reader does the same, but if the effort you put in isn't reaping real benefits, either don't do it or change what you're doing. I'm talking concrete, measurable, experiential benefits. Everyone has their own unique path when connecting with Source, so I know your path will be perfect for you in every way down to the smallest detail.

I learned a few important lessons when connecting with Source and the Field. First, the Field is accessible, present, and alive in every moment. It is both within and without. There is nothing closer to you. There are many names for the Field. I will refer to it as Field or Source throughout the book. The number one thing that keeps us from experiencing the Field is the tremendous activity within our brain, body, and mind on a chemical, electrical and subtle level. Surprisingly, this activity to a large extent is out of our control because of the instantaneous reflexive nature of the brain, emotions, feelings, and body. Scientific study has shown that our unconscious mind knows what we are going to do before our conscious mind is aware of it. A study entitled "Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain" by Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze and John-Dylan Haynes was published on-line in Nature Neuroscience April 2008. The synopsis was:

There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 seconds before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.

This study is interesting because it is clear that the unconscious is affecting awareness a couple of seconds earlier than previously thought. This reflexive, reactionary nature of our mind and body, propounded by acclaimed quantum physicist David Bohm and his theories on thought, bring me to the second lesson to keep in mind when pursuing Source: Everything going on around us, both inside and out, is spontaneous and out of our control. I call this activity and manifestation of everything and all movement including your own thoughts Quantum Interconnected Will or QW for short. On a micro-quantum level, atoms and subatomic particles are moving incredibly fast. We are 99.999% empty space. In many ways our bodies are images projected on the world screen of consciousness. Quantum physics has shown how difficult it is to measure certain things because as soon as we try to measure them we alter the outcome. This happens because we are literally part of what we are trying to measure. In essence we are inextricably interconnected with all objects in one giant Field whether we like it or not. In fact, everything that is transpiring in front of your eyes has been affected by and is interconnected with every object, action and thought that has previously taken place in space and time. In the same way that every divisible part of a holographic image down to the smallest part contains the entire image, so is every manifestation or movement in front of you interwoven with every action everywhere that has come before it. This is what the intuitive human mind (and religions in particular) call God's will.

Even though our cognitive mind thinks we are in control and that we are the doers, our intuitive heart has a strong sense that some other force is operating and is in control. This is the aforementioned Quantum Interconnected Will. This QW is different from Cognitive Will or CW. We use CW in our conscious minds from moment to moment to make decisions. CW appears to be completely free and independent. For example, if I say, "Concentrate and squeeze your right hand and then relax, concentrate and squeeze your left hand," CW will send signals to your hand from your brain and should not be confused with QW, which is overseeing the whole action.

QW is so fast that it transcends the ability of our minds to perceive it. Over millions of years, our brain has not evolved enough to notice this rapid, interconnected movement. Fortunately, our conscious awareness can. Our brain evolved to ensure our survival and it's given us a strong sense of ego to protect us. Most importantly this awareness of "I" gives us a distinct sense of separation from all objects around us. Unfortunately, this inherent sense of separation is our primary cause of suffering. The Buddha said all life is suffering. He could have added that all life is suffering because we see everything as separate from us. The good news is that by continuously focusing our attention we have the ability to experience the QW—the movement of the Field—which transcends the sense of separation, and whose nature is love.

We have developed such a strong sense of individuality or "I" that we are convinced we are the doer and that we have free will. As far as free will is concerned, for argument's sake I will say, "Yes we have some free will, but it is extremely small." One thing for sure is we absolutely do not know when it is functioning. When we think we are exercising free will, my experience is that the outcome of that action will probably take place in the future and not in the moment. The apparent new action we take — if it was not already predetermined from past action (which almost everything is) — takes time to interconnect with everyone and everything on the subtlest level. Like a seed it needs to geminate in the quantum Field of possibility along with all the other thoughts and actions being germinated along with it. It is important to understand that even thought operates on this level and creates a reaction only in conjunction and perfect harmony with all other thoughts and objects. This is why our CW has such a minute effect on what is going to happen next. What is going to happen next was probably determined quite a while ago.

I believe the action and reaction of our CW is so small that it is almost not worth saying it exists. This statement may prompt many readers to put this book down right now. They might think, How can I manifest and co-create my own reality if I do not have free will? You can act, dream, and pursue your goals to the fullest. My autobiography is a testament of what pursuing my heart's desire looked like for me. When I acted, I always had the strong sense that I was not the doer at all. I was a player on the field of life and I played hard, not knowing what the outcome might be. To give some relief to the fans of the Law of Attraction or LOA, I like to say that the universe gives you everything you want. It doesn't have a choice. You will get what you want. It's just going to take a little longer than you previously thought. My dad's favorite expression was one word: relax.

This brings me to the third and maybe most helpful lesson: Since life is all movement or QW, and we have little or no free will and are not the doers, it is extremely important that we are loving and kind to ourselves at all times no matter what we have done or what someone else has done to us or anyone else. I can't emphasize enough being kind to oneself. It is what Rumi referred to when he wrote, "Beyond the ideas of right or wrong doing there is a Field. I will meet you there." I recommend that people meet themselves personally in that loving Field every moment of their lives without any self-judgment.

People ask, "How can I better myself if I don't critique myself and my actions?" My answer is QW. That critiquing thought moving through your mind, which is part of QW, cannot be stopped but only recognized in your awareness. Take it easy on yourself, and you will watch yourself act in integrity to your own critiquing recommendations. You will do what feels right in the moment to do. Just recognize what your mind does with judgmental thoughts and eventually you will notice that the critiquing thoughts will begin to diminish. Gradually, all thought will dissolve as your awareness of the Field intensifies. This happens naturally because pure awareness is delightful to feel and experience.

The fourth lesson and what Part 2 of this book is about is that we have the ability to move our attention to the awareness of Source, to the Field, whenever we want to do so. That is the most exciting realization because moment to moment you and everyone else have the opportunity to do this. All we have to do is be open to moving our attention, our awareness, the moment we recognize we are on autopilot, identifying as the body, or experiencing ourselves as separate. A big part in learning how to experience the Field is doing exercises to move our attention. Even in the midst of a strong emotion such as anger, sadness, or love moving through us, we have the ability to simply be aware of the thought or feeling and move our attention. Even if we move our attention very little at first, it grows easier over time. This happens for one very simple reason: it feels good. It becomes a learned behavior and it starts to feel uncomfortable if we don't move it. It's that simple.

I had an intense desire to achieve my goals. You will realize this when reading some of my stories. I can report now that these experiences happened on their own. Even when I was making millions of dollars my free will had little or nothing to do with my success. My determination or exercised concentration may have been present in the moment, appearing as CW, but it was QW operating and manifesting reality.

In my autobiography I chronicled over 40 years of my efforts from the time I was a very small child up to middle age regarding how I connected with the Field. That book provides a much clearer picture of what happened for me. Throughout my life in the midst of intense desire and practice, a lot of crazy, unusual, and sometimes shocking things manifested. My desire here is to tell the reader right up front that you can do it no matter what has happened in your life. You can touch the Divine, and that experience is much more gratifying and intoxicating than anything else. No matter what is going on in your life and no matter how difficult or easy your life is, you can do it – because it doesn't depend on how you look, how much money you have, or your social status.

I like to use the NIKE ad line: "Just do it." Phil Knight, the founder and CEO of Nike, picked me up in his car one day many years ago, smiled at me with a look that said You can do it; you can do anything. It was funny. A few hours later he said to me, "You're only in this for the money; Sheri (my wife at the time) is a real shoe dog." In that instant I thought BS! Then almost immediately I thought, Shit! He's right! I just want to sell this company and go meditate. I could just do it. I kept my mouth shut and just listened for the rest of that meeting.

My desire is to give the reader inspiration to connect to Source, to their divinity, and thereby experience the Field all around and within them. I can tell you it doesn't matter what intensity you initially bring to it. Just start. Even if it's just a little bit, just start. I suggest practicing five minutes a day if that's all you can do. Gradually, over time, you will get exactly what your heart desires on all levels. I have no doubt about that. You don't have to try to manifest anything. Just go for the Source and the heart will make everything else happen. It did for me. Again, there is only one thing I really insist on, and that's be kind to yourself at all times. You are love itself no matter what thoughts are going through your head. Even if you just did something you might think is stupid or bad or even very bad, it doesn't matter. Be kind to you. It's only your thought, the brain, emotions, and body that are telling you that you are something other than perfect, divine and love itself. You are the Field of Love.

On July 5th, 2000 I had my back operated on for an exploded herniated disc. Even though I had experienced totally transforming and transcending states of consciousness in the past, what transpired the few days after that operation was life-altering. What it did more than anything else was show me how much the unconscious mind affects our ability to experience the unified Field of Love without interruption.

A good part of this book explains why the brain and the unconscious mind have so much control over our ability to experience the Field of Love. Amazingly and unknowingly, it's our fear of love and transcendence that works against us when we try to connect with the Field. This book will also show what you can do to overcome this innate tendency. Simply understanding what's going on with our body and brain goes a long way in accomplishing this. Also, the more we identify as our body the more we disconnect our awareness of ourselves as the Field, and the more we identify as the thinker and our thoughts, the more we disconnect our awareness of ourselves as the Field.

Many near death experiences—NDEs, or out-of-body experiences—are induced by a major shock or event like a car accident or an operation. This happens because our awareness and consciousness are temporarily and forcefully disconnected from our body. Of course this would be the case, because our heart (and to a large extent our brain functioning) has stopped during an NDE, and for the first time in our lives we are conscious and free of our bodies.

We don't need to have an NDE to experience the Field. In part two of this book it's my intention to inspire the reader to do the practices that connect us to the Field of Love. Many of the writers of best-selling books beautifully describe their NDE but have difficulty in re-accessing the Field. You can read about these experiences all you want and they may inspire you, but I'm interested in experiencing the Field right here, right now. No one signs up for a car accident or having their heart stop in the operating room. Do the practices to transcend your body and connect with the Field. In the next chapter I share my experience from that July week in 2000 to put a little light on what happens when the unconscious mind is made conscious. Two short back-to-back chapters titled "I Can't Feel My Balls" and "Field of Love" are excerpted from my autobiography.

Experiencing the Field of Love

  1. The Field is accessible, present, and alive in every moment. You are the Field of Love.
  2. Everything you experience, including your thoughts and feelings, is movement taking place beyond your control.
  3. Be kind to yourself at all times no matter what you have done or what someone else has done to you or anyone else.
  4. The primary way to access the Field is by simply moving your attention and awareness.

I Can't Feel My Balls

After being in Boston for twenty-three years, my last eight months went out with a bang, so to speak. In the middle of January, 2000 I took a trip down to Austin to be with Janine. I always had great fun with Janine and this time was no different. One evening, she and I and a couple of her friends, Nancy and Rob, all went out together. We had a couple of drinks and were having a good time, and we decided to go back to Rob's place. Rob was a Pilates instructor and had a big studio with a lot of equipment in his home. It looked more like an S & M den with a lot of leather and unusual contraptions. Janine and Nancy suggested I lie down on his massage table and let Rob walk on my back. There were bars hanging from the ceiling that Rob would use to help with his balance. I thought, This guy must know what he's doing. He's a professional. I didn't want to disappoint Janine or Nancy as they had encouraged me and wanted me to have this experience. I lay on the table, stomach down. Rob was a pretty big guy, about 6 feet and 225 pounds, so I was apprehensive as I positioned myself. Rob began to walk on my back slowly.

Unfortunately, he decided to get up on the balls of his feet and walked along my spine to try to crack my back. A number of drinks will do that to a Pilates instructor. There was an incredible amount of pressure and pain. I let out some huge gasps from my lungs as my back was cracked. He stopped and I was listless for about five minutes, trying to recover. I was okay and we continued to enjoy the evening. The next day, I flew back to Boston.

I woke up the next day at four o'clock in the morning with a sharp pain in my right calf. It felt like somebody had stabbed me with a steak knife. I jumped out of bed thinking I had an intense charley horse. I stretched my leg and it took me about 30 seconds to realize that I didn't have a charley horse. The pain was in one little spot. I walked around the apartment for five minutes and it gradually subsided. I was able to lie back down and go to sleep. In the morning, there was absolutely no pain. I thought, What was that?

Over the next week the pain started to reemerge and somehow spread and expanded from a single point the size of a quarter all the way up my leg and into my lower back. My back was totally wrenched and when I stood up, I couldn't stand up straight. A week later I went to a chiropractor—this was rare for me—and he worked on me a number of times to straighten me out, all to no avail. I was spending time meditating and going for walks around the nearby pond, but I was having difficulty even doing those things. Janine recommended that I read a book by Dr. Sacco entitled Healing Back Pain. The book said I should get in touch with any hidden unexpressed anger. He described anger as a major cause of back pain. I read the book a few times and thought my lower back pain must be due to unexpressed feelings that really needed to get out. I called and yelled at Janine, not for anything legitimate, but just because I wanted to yell at someone, anyone, and even manufacture unresolved anger if it would just stop this terrible pain. It didn't. Sorry Janine. I spoke with one of Sheri's old boyfriends, Mean Gene the Pasta Machine, who suggested I go get some epidural steroid shots directly into my lower disks since they were probably bulging and inflamed. These shots would hopefully shrink and dry out the tissue around where the disc was most likely hitting a nerve.

I went to Beth Israel Hospital's Pain Clinic to get the epidural shots and they helped, but only a little. Three months later, I was in such pain that I met with a neurosurgeon and, after looking at my MRI, he said I had a significantly ruptured disc and I should have my lower back fused. I asked him what else I could have done and he said that I could have a discectomy, in which case he would go in and snip off the section of the disc that was touching my nerve and causing the pain. My brother, Mark, had undergone a similar procedure a year earlier with great success, so I decided to go that route.

I found another surgeon who did his surgery out of New England Baptist Hospital and was very well known. He had put a six-inch metal bar in Larry Bird's back, so I thought he must be good. I asked him a week before the surgery after he had looked at the MRI what he thought the end result would be. He said, "There is always a risk of nerve damage, but one thing I can tell you for sure is that you will come out of the surgery without any pain."

The surgery took place at 6:30 a.m. on July 5th. It had been six months since the pain began. Going to the hospital that morning I was hoping that the surgeon wasn't partying too much the day before, the 4th of July, down on Cape Cod at his summer house. The surgery was supposed to take about an hour, after which I would spend some time in the recovery room, and then be able to walk out of the hospital later that afternoon. I was administered anesthesia, went unconscious, and woke up in what seemed to be fifteen seconds. I was lying in the recovery room, and I opened my eyes to see Danielle, my 18 year old daughter standing there. She was going to drive me back to the apartment.

The recovery room nurse asked me to wiggle my toes. My left leg was perfectly fine, but I couldn't wiggle my right toes or even move my right foot. I thought, Holy shit! I can't move my right foot. It was then that I slid my hand onto my right thigh and realized I could barely feel it. I slowly slid my hand up to my scrotum and penis and was shocked. They were totally numb, as if I had been shot with Novocain. I started to yell, "I can't feel my balls!"

Danielle tried very hard to calm me down. "It's okay, Dad. It's okay." I regained a little composure and my surgeon came over to see me. I calmed down some more and asked him when the feeling would come back. He matter-of-factly said he had no idea and that it could take three to six months.

You have to be kidding me.

He went on to tell me that my disc was so ruptured that he'd had to go in from the disc above to get to it and remove the significant portion that was bulging.

The doctor also said he was going to admit me to the hospital to make sure I could urinate on my own before I went home. I was sent upstairs to a room and Tricia came to see me. Danielle had called her because she didn't know how else to help me. Tricia was incredibly sweet and calmed me down. She helped me get in and out of the bed in the hospital room. When I did try to stand up, I was stunned at how little sensation I had in my right leg. I was having a lot of difficulty walking too. I stayed in the hospital one more day because I had to learn to use the walker.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't urinate so they had to catheterize me. I had to be able to go to the bathroom before they would discharge me. In the middle of the first night, the sixty year old patient in the bed next to me, who just had his hip replaced that same day, was so pumped up on drugs that he ripped out his I.V.s, got out of the bed naked, and tried to take the metal railings above my bed apart. I buzzed the nurses and they came and heavily sedated him. I thought, Shit! How can this guy even move? He must be in so much pain. Then I remembered I couldn't feel anything in my right leg.

Accept what is-

embrace what isn't.
Field of Love

I was back in my apartment within another day and I was in shock. What karma put me in such a condition? I couldn't stop wondering why this was happening, but my only answer was, "No idea." I had heard Katie say often, "People get cancer so they can come to know." I was living in a similar situation and I wanted to know. This had to be happening for my benefit. I sat there alone for a few days, mystified.

The first three days were mentally hellish. The doctor prescribed pain pills, but I didn't need any because I couldn't feel anything. He was right about that. I got enough strength and courage to go out of the building and take a walk down the street with my walker. I did a pretty good job until I tried to get back in the front door of my apartment building. The door was extremely heavy and pulled outward. I was trying to navigate myself and my walker around this door and I couldn't do it. A homeless man who was walking down the street with a plastic lawn bag completely filled with empty cans and bottles saw me struggling. He walked over and, without saying anything, held the door open so I could get into the lobby. He was dirty and unshaven, but he looked at me with compassion and kindness. I said, "Thank you so much." That was the most consciously and intently I had ever said thank you in my life. He just nodded slowly without speaking, then walked on.

I went into the elevator and pushed my floor button. The doors closed and I burst into tears. An uncontrollable flow of emotion and tears poured out of me. I had never experienced anything quite like this before. It felt good to let it out. Returning to my apartment, still crying, it took some time, but I finally relaxed and calmed down. I wondered, What was that? I was amazed at the total outpouring, but I couldn't understand what was at the root of it. I was dumbfounded.

The next day, I went out the sliding glass doors of my living room onto the deck of my apartment. It was a sunny and beautiful July day. I just stood there with my walker, overlooking the Charles River. There were five floors in my building. A couple on a balcony three floors up called down to me. I had never seen them or talked to them before. They yelled, "Are you okay? Do you want us to go out and get anything for you?"

I yelled up that I was all right and thanked them for asking, then turned around and made my way back inside. I shut the sliding glass door and once again burst into tears as I had done in the elevator the day before. The eruption was powerful and lasted for at least ten minutes before I regained my composure. I sat down and recognized that I seriously needed to figure out what these emotional explosions were all about.

The next few days, I spent more time meditating than I had in months. I was determined to get in touch with what was happening inside of me. Could my internal knowing reveal the cause of my powerful releases? I sat there, my mind very still, meditating. An image appeared of myself as a very small child, about two years old, standing in my crib.

It was dusk, probably about 7 p.m. before sunset in the summer. I was holding onto the railing of the crib, wanting to be picked up and not wanting to go to sleep. The door to the room was closed. Suddenly, it opened and in walked my mother. She had a very stern look on her face. "Marty, put your head down and go to sleep." Tears welled up in my eyes. I really wanted my mom to pick me up. I couldn't get the words out of my mouth because I couldn't talk or express myself at that age. She left the room and closed the door without looking back. I was left all by myself. Something was wrong with me. I wasn't lovable. I didn't deserve to be picked up. If I wanted or needed anything, I would have to do it myself and no one would help me. I was on my own for good, plain and simple. The bottom line was that I really couldn't rely on anyone. I had to take care of myself from that moment on.

In My Crib

The image of myself was so clear and vivid as I came out of meditation: At that very young age I must have decided that I did not deserve help. As a small child I must have believed this so deeply that I had no idea it was even buried inside of me. The pain and paralysis from my back surgery, combined with the love and kindness of a homeless person and that of total strangers in my apartment building had pierced that encapsulated belief. It was a feeling I'd been storing for forty-five years. When the unconscious thought was finally shattered by complete strangers, my inner hold had no choice but to let it out. Oh my God, I thought. My whole life I've held this belief that I'm not deserving of love.

I wondered, Without the thought "I am not lovable," who am I? I realized that without that thought I would be open to receiving whatever love and help came to me. I would be open to everything. It was a shocking revelation. I didn't realize the real impact of it until I got up and went into the hallway with my walker to get some exercise an hour or so later. I walked down the long hallway and a man about my age came off the elevator and started to walk toward me. As he did, there was a sudden explosive opening in my heart. The feeling of love was so intense and tactile that, if I hadn't had the walker to hold me up, I would've fallen to the ground. Somehow as he approached, I was injected with the most amazing love drug imaginable, directly into the center of my chest. I was drowning in love. It was consuming me. The being vibrated in ecstasy the closer he came to me. The man appeared to be the embodiment of limitless love, a divine being. It was impossible to look at his face. Love was walking toward me in the form of a complete stranger.

I lost all sense of separateness. I no longer recognized my own body or saw the body of the stranger. I had no recollection of the stranger passing me because all form dissolved in that Field of Love and light. I leaned against the wall for a good minute or so. I made it back to my apartment and slumped onto the couch. The sensation was so expansive that I continued to have no feeling in my body. I slowly returned to normal consciousness and the thought arose, Before, I was concerned that I would not feel my right leg. Now I'm not concerned that I can't feel my entire body. I sat there basking in the love for hours.

The next few days, I continued to have a very similar experience, though not quite as intense. Whenever I saw anyone moving toward me, my heart opened with total abandon. The love was so big that sometimes, before I left my apartment, I hoped I wouldn't run into anyone because I didn't know how much more I could take. I didn't want to embarrass myself and fall to the ground while using the walker and then put anyone in an awkward situation of trying to pick me up. In retrospect, I should have let it happen. But then again, I wouldn't let the love totally devour me.

I got brave one day and decided to walk along the sidewalk of Moody Street in the sunny, fresh air. I was able to adapt to people walking toward me, but if I made eye contact with someone and they appeared to have a look of Can I help you? my whole being would flood with love. A couple of times, I purposely turned and crossed the street so I would not fall down from the overwhelming intensity of the expansion. As the next weeks went by, my mind adjusted to the sensation and I could function more normally. My mind and thinking processes started to overcome the love that engulfed me.

I never thought I would say that I was glad Ron had walked on my back and my disc had exploded, but that was exactly where I was. Even though I ended up with permanent nerve damage in my back that keeps my right foot perpetually numb, it's an experience I wouldn't exchange to get the feeling back in my foot.

Katie had said many times that everything that happens is perfect, no matter what it is or what it looks like. That was true. My mind and body would do whatever was necessary in order for me to come to know my innermost core, my center, the heart. The experience now was that reality was love itself. Ramana always said, "The self lives in the heart." That love is everywhere at all times. It's a Field of Love that we just don't perceive because our minds create so much separation in order to support the illusion of an individual "I."

I moved to Sedona two months after my operation and slowly adjusted to my new environment. A path out of my back yard leads directly into the wilderness. The undulating nature of the trails in the wilderness was perfect for me to get out, walk slowly, and heal the damaged nerves in my back. I no longer needed a walker and began to use a walking stick, just as Ramana had done. The feeling in my foot never came back completely, and I was happy with that result.

Happiness: Our Heart's Desire

Everyone has the greatest love for himself or herself because happiness is our inherent nature. My goal is to help you have a concrete experience of the Field of Love. If you have had a glimpse of it, then let's intensify and deepen what you already know is real. I want to lead you to a place where you're experiencing yourself as the Field. Anything less than that just doesn't cut it for me. For example, I don't want you to be in a Starbucks and be "completely present in the moment" enjoying your favorite coffee, tea, etc. I want you to experience non-separation so complete that you are the coffee or tea and the people around you. You have the ability to merge and fuse with everything in every moment. Most of the practices I suggest for accessing the Field are from my direct experience, and I have shared many of them in my autobiography. I'm completely confident if you bring your willingness, love and attention, you too can touch that infinite loving space within and without. All you have to do is have the desire and do it.

The single biggest block to experiencing "enlightenment" and continuous happiness is simply our mind's unending ability to delineate, categorize and separate all objects within its perception. The mind does this automatically and effortlessly through the five senses. This separation happens in a micro second and for the most part it cannot be stopped.

Einstein said it simply and clearly:

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us.

From my experience, we can overcome this delusion to attain true freedom and enlightenment. The key to having a direct experience of this "enlightened state" is to still the mind in order to make the awareness arise and then extend the experience without causing the sense of separation to arise. Stilling the mind is what yogis, saints, and sages of various traditions have been prescribing for eons. Chanting, mantra repetition, breathing, meditation and prayer are all useful methods that have worked successfully through the centuries to help aspirants dive into the depths of their soul, quiet their mind and experience oneness with the universe. All that's well and good and I know that you have heard or read it before, but I'm going to recommend and discuss a couple of techniques that can catapult you into the Field if you just give it some effort.

The single most important step in breaking down this separation is to have the desire to overcome this sensory delusion. Einstein called it an "optical delusion," and he was right from the standpoint that 80% of all sensory input that enters our brain does so through the eyes. It takes a little effort to prompt the mind to bring it back to its Source, where it can experience oneness, interconnectedness, and non-separation with the Field of Love. The main difficulty is that 150 billion intrinsically connected neurons are firing in our brains continuously to keep us alive and functioning.

So what effort is required to move our awareness away from our everyday life, the norm, the comfortable, the predictable? Actually, it's as easy as moving your attention from your right hand to your left hand. It's that easy. Try that right now: hold your attention in your right hand. Feel it? Now, move it to your left. Feel the difference as your awareness moved from one hand to the other? It's that simple. You might think there has to be more to it than that, but there isn't, although the intensity might vary. For instance, instead of just sensing your right hand, make a fist and squeeze it hard with your attention in there. The intensity is greater, but a little time and attention is all it took. You can also lengthen the time to intensify it even more. The tricky part is that our body and brain have been trained to find pleasure with the least amount of effort in the shortest amount of time. This naturally disconnects us from the Field.

To make this work, you have to invest your attention (as I just showed you) and some of your time and add a little intensity to it. Time is the most valuable thing that you have, and there's no way that I can prove to you that giving up a little of your time is worth it. It doesn't matter what I say or what stories I tell you. If you want to experience the Field, you have to experience moving your attention even if it's for just 5 minutes a day to start. From then on, your own intuition, feeling and experience will lead you to moving your attention for six or ten or more minutes... or even to an uninterrupted breathing or awareness exercise that never ends. Yes! I said it: an exercise that never ends.

I like what the Buddha had to say: "Don't believe anything I say unless it's your own experience." I say it's insane to do anything that doesn't give you the experience you want. If it doesn't work for you, don't do it just because others are doing it or because I'm telling you that you should. In other words, if it feels good, do it. If it continues to feel good, do it some more. Keep doing it for extended periods of time to the point where it no longer feels comfortable. You can stop then if you want to take a break for a day, a month, a year, or five years. It doesn't matter. It will come to you to do it to the level that works for you. Just push yourself ever so slightly. Five minutes can turn into an endless process. You never know.

Millions upon millions of people do some form of Hatha Yoga for 30, 60 or 90 minutes a day. They do it to experience the benefits and because it feels good. Shortly I'm going to share the different ways that I have used my attention to access the Field of Love. I have spent so much time focusing my mind and my whole being, banging on the door to the Field of Love, that it exhausted me at times. I was like a little kid, kicking at the door trying to get in because I had already experienced what was on the other side. Eventually that effort landed me at the base of the door, realizing that not only was I already in the Field but I was the Field.

I truly honor even the slightest effort that people make to access the Field. It's a wonder and very moving for me to watch because I see myself in all of it. The effort I made was perfect for me, and I'm confident that your life and efforts will unfold perfectly for you no matter how it looks.

Let me be clear about one thing: One person's life is not higher or lower than any other, no matter what it looks like. Life unfolds perfectly, it doesn't have a choice it's just how the universe works. You will get exactly what you need: perfection all the time.

People ask me if I continuously fall to the ground in an ecstatic state or trance. No, I don't. I do dance most nights, but not well according to my wife Sarah. At times I feel ecstatic, invigorated to the point of tears and overwhelmed by the Field and its presence. Do I feel hesitation sometimes if the feeling overwhelms me? Yes, slightly and that's what I call the fear of love. That's when the mind/ego desperately jumps into action to create any sense of separation it can conjure up to save itself. The only effort is to continuously let go and surrender to it totally. There is not much else for me to do, and besides, it's so much fun. Because I put forth the effort over time, this journey became more pleasurable, more fulfilling and more ecstatic. A statement in the Indian scriptures says that when you put your time and attention on contacting and connecting with the Field or Source or God—whatever term you want to use—you end up getting both bhukti and mukti, both pleasure and spiritual freedom.

Your essence, your awareness, is pure undifferentiated love. That awareness doesn't spontaneously come up with the thought I'm good now or I'm bad now. Over time our body and mind have worked in concert to come up with that thought. The body and mind, including your thoughts, are not you! That may come as a surprise to some, but sages, mystics and many scientists today are saying that we are something beyond what we think we are. The mind is so tricky, so fast, we can instantly create separation with everyone and everything around us even if we just had a moment of oneness a second before. It's actually laughable how quickly we separate from one another and the objects around us. I encourage laughter and humor when doing these practices because we are trying to get to something we already are. The beautiful antics our minds and bodies manifest are really worth enjoying and laughing about. It's my goal that this book will help you experience the Field in your everyday life and that your "aha" moment can extend endlessly.

Why don't we perceive ourselves and others as pure, expanded, limitless awareness if that's our true nature? Because it's more comfortable to feel limited and separate and safe. Millions of years of evolution have insured that. My natural reaction is to not jump into a pool of water if I don't know beforehand how cold it is. If your mind and senses really can't tell whether it's 40 degrees or 80 degrees and you're not allowed to test it, most of us would decide to sit down and just enjoy the view. Our mind wants to know before we commit. I'm not going to risk freezing my butt off. Besides, if it's cold I might get sick or even worse I might freeze to death. Of course this protecting but limiting thought feels familiar, smart, and sane. We have been working on and creating it since we were infants.

If we go a little deeper we will find that we have learned so well to limit ourselves, that we actually get real pleasure from doing so. Neuroscientists are showing the pleasure we receive from going with the familiar and sticking with what's comfortable is what we do best. We have trained the body and brain to release the feel-good hormones when we complete certain actions even when we know repeated release could hurt or damage us in the long run.

If we investigate and get honest with ourselves we may find that we get something for limiting ourselves sometimes. The simple self-inquiry I describe later is helpful in unearthing the subconscious, hidden, repressed thoughts and core beliefs that can keep us limited, separate and identified as just our body.

Before you get too excited about this prospect, sit back and relax a little because your life is going to happen whether you like it or not. You might be thinking, Wait a minute. I'm the doer. I'm the creator of my reality. I'm the co-creator of my life, this beautiful existence, and I have 100 books on my shelf from well-known writers who say just that. My response is, "Okay." The last thing I want to do is take away or change your beliefs. After all it's your reality and it's your experience and you very well may be right. There's no way that I can know. All I can report is my experience that I was clearly not the creator of my reality. It took some time but eventually the thought I'm not the doer actually gave me freedom.

The events that unfold in your life can be seen from an entirely different perspective in which everything is pure movement and that movement is perfection itself. Just like the experience people report when they enter the Field of Love through an NDE or other experience. There is no Doing in that state; it's all about just Being. In others words when you're in the Field, the internal mental experience of joy and excitement from hitting the lottery may be equal to hearing that you're going to die from cancer. It would certainly not be the norm but it's very possible. The Alanis Morissette lyric "hit the lottery and died the next day" became true for my neighbor two doors from me, although it didn't quite happen the next day. It took a little bit more time but she did die not long afterward. What was happier? The moment she read the winning numbers on the ticket or the moment she learned she was going to die? What was Steve Jobs' happier moment? The day Apple went public, the day it became the most valued company on earth, or the moment he learned he was going to die? Anything is possible and can manifest in the Field. Absolutely anything.

Intuitively, we all know we have infinite creative ability that can manifest anything. This power operates within, around and through us without stopping – whether we like it or not. Do what your heart tells you is the right thing for you in that moment. Listen to your intuition, and remember not to judge yourself. The right action for anything changes in time and space so what might seem right today might feel totally wrong tomorrow. The beauty of pure conscious awareness is that it doesn't judge ever, and since you are that pure awareness, you don't have to sign up as jury, judge and executioner of your own life. It's much kinder to get a seat in the Field of awareness. It doesn't cost a thing and the show that's playing is your show. How sweet is that? You might think, If I don't judge and regulate myself I'm going to get into some trouble or I won't accomplish what I need to do. Your intuition will move you to where you need to go and to what you need to do. Isn't that what's happened so far in your life? Even if you got into some trouble, probably it taught you something that you needed to learn. Just be easy on yourself and become the awareness that's watching your life, watching your mind, and listening to your heart while you act.

The mind/ego is an incredibly intelligent mechanism, and its primary function is to sustain its survival. If it gets any sense that its existence is at stake it will take any measures necessary to prevent its demise. For this very reason our perception becomes limited and focused on the people and things directly around us. Remember Einstein's statement; it's imperative that we keep guard of our personal fortress otherwise known as the mind/ego. Egos are very much like a happy guard dogs. If an intruder shows up at the door to take something away, watch out. The mind and the ego can be the biggest, baddest dogs you have ever seen. What's worse, they've been trained from the first breath to defend themselves at all costs.

Reality is a concept.
The Field

Many have experienced the Field of Love during a near death experience or NDE. It can also happen with an out-of-body experience as it did for me. A significantly high percentage of the population has reported having one of these types of experiences. In Australia, for example, as many as 18% reported having such experiences.

In 1982, Gallup Polling released Adventures in Immortality a book about NDEs and out-of-body experiences based on two Gallup polls specifically addressing near-death and belief in the afterlife. George Gallup Jr. wrote, "Our surveys have also shown that nearly one-third of all Americans—or about 47 million people—have had what they call a religious or mystical experience. Of this group, about 15 million reported an otherworldly feeling of union with a divine being ... visions of unusual lights, and out-of-body experiences."

Undoubtedly, a large number of people have connected in different degrees with what I call the Field of Love. Numerous books describe NDE experiences in detail. Many of them are astounding and inspirational. A recent book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife by Eben Alexander, has become very popular. Eben reported in an interview with Lilou Mace that his deepest sense of God came on hearing the sound AUM. He stated that AUM was actually the sound of God. The eastern mystics could not have been any more succinct.

The Field has been described as a sea or firmament of light and love. The love is so overwhelming that no judgment arises in regard to the people who are met in the Field. No one comes back from the near-death experience and says, "I saw Johnny and he wasn't looking so good." There's an uncanny sense of connectivity with everyone in the Field, connectivity that's so powerful that having any perception of separateness or judgment dissolves. This contrasts significantly with the normal, protected, and separate experience in our everyday life. It's pretty difficult not to instinctively react to the people and things that are in our physical waking state and in close proximity to us. The waking brain instantly judges the people around us or the ones appearing in our minds. Our brains are very good at, "That person should ______ ." You fill in the blank. This thought is neurologically hard to stop in almost everyone's mind. People don't report having thoughts like this when having an NDE or out-of-body experience. Communication during these events is non-verbal. It is thoughts/feelings emanating from our core without any effort or judgment. The overwhelming communication is love and nothing else. During my first experience there wasn't anyone there but a violet light in a sea of love: total contentment, total satiation and complete peace.

Can we have an experience of the Field without an NDE or out-of-body experience? Yes. Many people report experiences of oneness and non-separation without doing anything consciously to make it happen. They were not having an NDE or out-of-body experience and out of nowhere they achieved transcendence. This is not unusual. Unfortunately, these experiences typically only last for a short period of time, no matter how vivid, powerful and real. The memory of these events, on the other hand, in almost every case lasts a lifetime. We all have the ability to touch that divine part of ourselves, but how can we hold the awareness for an extended period of time? That's the real trick and the purpose of this book.

Mystical moments can happen spontaneously, without effort, and that experience can be powerful, even overwhelming, and in some cases life-changing. The timing of these events can also be unusual and sometimes they occur for no apparent reason. The mind, perceiving itself as a distinct and separate entity, suddenly dissolves and merges into oneness with all objects around it. It temporarily enters a state of non-linear or non-duality awareness where everything including its self-identified awareness appears to vibrate in a unified Field of oneness. In many cases the individual does not know where he or she begins or ends. Many report a sense of universal, unconditional love unlike anything they have ever felt before. A great example of what this can look like is the experience described by Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neurobiologist who suffered a severe stroke on the left side of her brain but was able to stay totally cognizant through much of the ordeal, which lasted a number of hours.

In her own words from her TED talk: "I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body [sic]. I can't define where I begin and where I end because the atoms and molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall and all that I can detect is this energy and I'm asking myself, 'What is going on with me? What is going on?'... In that moment... my brain chatter went totally silent... I was shocked to find myself inside a silent mind. Then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me... I felt entranced and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there."

You can see and hear her whole powerful, moving description by going to www.TED.com/jillbolteTaylor. It's well worth the 20 minutes. The questions I like to pose after watching Jill are: If we are pure awareness, what would it feel like if both hemispheres shut down? What would that feel like? Would we still be aware? Would we still be here?

This experience of interconnected oneness is the true nature of all beings. It's called by many different names: the Soul, the Self, the heart, or many others depending on culture and terminology. The description is similar no matter what term is used. Some traditions conclude that the center of this awareness resides inside the middle of our being. Many scientists believe the universe is a giant hologram of reflected non-separate connectedness. It arises from a single point of awareness, the center of which happens to be everywhere. That's tricky, but it very well may be the case.

David Bohm the noted physicist wrote, "The universe may be nothing more than a giant hologram created by the mind." I would add the nature of this hologram is love itself.

If you cut a hologram in half, each half contains the entire image. If you cut out a small piece, a tiny microscopic dot for instance, that piece will still contain the whole holographic image. This may be why individuals experiencing the Field feel so indescribably at peace with no desire to leave. Why leave when in the midst of that fusion of love we intuit that we are everything? I can tell you it feels like you're everything. There is no thing to leave for. This is why I say the Field is a hologram of love reflecting everything back upon itself.

I believe making the slightest effort to move your attention for the purpose of accessing and fully experiencing what is around us every second of our lives is well worth it. Understanding the quantum nature of the physical universe and how it intersects and interacts with the Field can be very helpful when trying to access it.

In the next sections I'm going to tell you about the quantum field and the brain for one simple reason: it will significantly help you to access the Field with the practices I suggest. There are numerous fantastic brain books out there that do a much better job of describing how the brain works. I will give you the bare bones and my unique take on some important facts.

No thought,

no pain.
The Quantum Field

The quantum nature of reality has unlimited organizing and creative abilities to manifest anything. The universe is going to give you everything you ever want; it doesn't have a choice. Einstein said it this way: "Everything is energy and that's all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics."

The two factors we must take into consideration are time and space. In others words, manifestation can take years or it can happen instantly. That is the flexibility and power of Source. You might have had that experience of manifesting something. For example, you might have had the thought that you needed a certain object and like magic it appeared out of nowhere. Or maybe the phone rings and your next-door neighbor says, "John gave me (an object) yesterday but I have no need for it. Do you want it before I throw it away?" Some people call that synchronicity. I call it reality embracing itself.

My personal desire is to have an uninterrupted experience of the Field of Love, and guess what? I'm having a continual experience of the Field. It's just that the 150 billion neurons in my brain and 40 million neurons in my heart along with a basket load of memories are distracting me sometimes. The funny thing is that even though the mind distracts us, our awareness is always watching. This means we can allow the mind to do its thing and we can still transcend and enter the Field. All it takes is our awareness along with our attention.

Illusion is the art form of the quantum field. Light has the ability to act as both a wave and a particle, and even Einstein didn't understand that when he came up with his equation that energy equals mass times the speed of light, squared: E=MC2. Quantum physicists have found that mass is so small, so infinitesimal, that everything we see as solid matter, including our bodies, is 99% space. Everything about us is pure, undifferentiated energy vibrating at speeds incomprehensible to the human mind. Hearing peoples' descriptions of the Field in NDEs or OBEs substantiates and supports the physics of the underlying nature of reality. It's our bodies and minds working in unison that create the illusion that we are real, individualistic, and most importantly solid and separate from everything around us.

Scientists say that these small particles which make up 100% our body act in strange ways. Since they are both particle and wave they seem to appear and disappear at random. Metaphorically for example, if your car was a quantum particle it could be at its destination the moment the engine started as if space and time did not exist. Leaving its destination to return home it finds itself backing out of the garage on its way to the destination, never having been there. That's the nature of the quantum reality. For these particles, time and space are irrelevant.

Quantum physics tells us that these particles don't exist unless we observe them. This translates into our simple awareness, and observation creates the reality we are experiencing. These particles create what you see, from your friends and spouse to your children and everything around you. If that's not a good reason to spend five minutes a day paying attention, I don't what is. It also backs up my statement that the universe gives you everything you want; it doesn't have a choice. Just connect to Source and watch every desire stored in your heart, mind or soul come to you. It's that simple. People coming out of the Field of Love never say they came back for the Mercedes they always wanted. They might say that they came back for the love of a person. Many report that they had a hard time coming back for their closest intimates or children. That tells you something about the ecstasy of the Field. It totally satiates every sense. There is nothing left to desire.

The quantum field is vibrating and moving so amazingly fast that time and space are difficult for our minds to comprehend. You can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. Your body is traveling at 792,000 kilometers per hour through space and the atoms in your body, being 99% space are vibrating probably a million times faster than that. In reality, we are not very much different than the images we see on our TV screens or iPads or cell phones. There is so much momentum moving us from one moment to the next, to think that we have a lot to do with what's going to happen or what we are going to manifest is comical. The mind, brain and quantum physics say, "Hey, I can create my own reality. Anything is possible." I say, "Absolutely. And where did that thought arise from, and what brought that thought into your mind?" Thinking you're the doer and that you're having original thoughts is an illusion.

Quantum potentiality would have us believe that we create what we think. I would agree, but who is the thinker and where are those thoughts coming from? If we could create what we want, you would try to envision and replicate your most joyous experience or what you think would give you the greatest happiness. This is the modus operandi of a human being. The brain is always looking for pleasure. The problem is, just because we think it doesn't mean it's going to manifest right now. Remember, space and time are an illusion. The more that you hold up and support the illusion of the "I" as the doer, the harder it is for Source to give you what you want. Eventually you will get it, but it may be 5, 10, or 20 years from now when you have long given up on the desire. When you finally get what you want you no longer have the sense that you created the manifestation. You just receive it and recognize, "Oh yeah, I remember wanting this a long time ago." This is why I say go for immersion in the Field, in Source. Connect with it now in the present moment with all the objects around you. If you do have a desire it will just show up; it doesn't have a choice. Source doesn't care about time and space. Be kind to yourself and relax because if you want things they will show up eventually.

Many people who have accessed the Field through an accident, a near-death or out-of-body experience report that it's almost impossible to re-create the experience through the power of their mind no matter how hard they try. Why is that so? Do we really have the ability to create our future reality with just our thoughts? If we do, what reality or event should we go for? If we knew that the ultimate experience was inside and around us at every moment, would it not be smarter to just recognize and connect with it right here, right now?

The brain and mind operating through our senses obstruct and separate us no matter how much we concentrate on being in the now. Would it not make more sense to put effort into removing the obstructions created by our brains in order to experience the Field? This is what the sages and mystics through the millennia have shown is the easiest and most direct way to access the Field and have the ultimate experience of freedom and enlightenment.

One of the most difficult things for scientists to comprehend or even study and measure today is what the mystics would call the subtle, energetic and causal mental bodies. Millions of people believe in the energetic body, auras, angels, and a soul that transmigrates and is reborn, but physicists looking at hard empirical information still do not understand and can't measure how this works. They are getting closer with theories but it may take another 50 years before we can really get a much better understanding of how particle wave quantum theory intersects with the subtle realm that just about everyone believes in and what many people have had a direct experience of. Since we are limited scientifically in exploring this, let's look at the brain and how it generates the experiences we have on a day-to-day basis and see if that can help us in some way to connect with the Field.

What we do know from brain scan studies is that when an individual is experiencing some type of unusual state or experience, it can be reflected in the physical brain and seen on scans. This is important because if the subtle world can affect the brain, then our ability to direct the brain can help facilitate our ability to connect to the subtle Field all around us. Understanding the functioning brain is immensely helpful when we use it to access the pure awareness that we are.

The mind runs a racket

in search of itself.
The Brain

Roughly 50,000 neuroscientists are working on brain research of some kind or another. This research is helping people with diseases of all kinds, whether physical or mental. We know a lot more today about how and why the brain works than we did even 10 years ago. This research has opened doorways in the areas of meditation and how the brain functions when the mind is in an altered state of consciousness. The Dali Lama is so intrigued and fascinated by what science is telling us about the brain and its functioning that he has Tibetan Buddhist monks participating in a number of brain studies. He's completely supportive and enthusiastic about all of this research and how it pertains to meditation.

One thing that we know for sure is that we have a strong tendency to do the same things over and over day after day out of habit. Neuroscientists tell us that we create neural pathways within our brain matter because of repetitive thinking and physical responses to basic needs. We have heard people say, "I'm in a rut." If you combine this tendency of being in a rut with the quantum understanding that we—or should I say "something"—generates and manifests our reality, we experience very similar situations over and over again. We have probably heard people say they have to do something again and again until they get it, that it's a lesson they have to learn. Even when they recognize they're repeating an action or experience, for whatever reason they still cannot stop. That is the power of the repetitive neuron-firing brain chemistry. The neurons fire over and over again connecting the same pathways.

If we want to access the Field of pure awareness we need to recognize and get in touch with our tendencies. Fortunately, we know in precise biological and chemical detail what the brain does and how it functions. We can use this to our advantage and direct it. Can you imagine directing your brain to have one whole hemisphere shut down? You may be getting a glimpse of why yogis manipulate their breathing significantly in order to alter their state of awareness. Alternate nostril breathing, holding your breath, oxygen, the brain—it's all connected. Again, the number one rule when dealing with and recognizing the old painful tendencies is to be kind to yourself.

We have the ability to undo these tendencies if we just use a little intention to move our attention. You might think, Hey wait a minute in the last chapter he said I was not the doer and now he wants me to direct my attention. Yes, that's what I'm saying. You act as the doer, using your cognitive will or CW until you have perception that you're not the doer. Then the doing goes on whether or not you perceive yourself as the doer. Believe me this is how it works. I raised tens of millions of dollars having this understanding. If you think you're going to sit there and not move you might be right or you might get up and create the most magnificent thing anyone has ever seen.

The brain's habits and tendencies and neural pathways operate in all areas of the brain from the neocortex and frontal lobe on the top part that make us very human and from where we direct our CW to the reptilian part at the base of our brain that makes us very simple creatures. Many functions in the lowest part of the brains are automatic. Breathing and heartbeat, for example, are controlled by the medulla oblongata, which is a part of the primordial reptilian brain. It controls autonomic functions and connects the higher levels of the brain to the spinal cord. It's also responsible for regulating several basic functions of the autonomic nervous system, including respiration, the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, and the reflex centers of vomiting, coughing, sneezing, and swallowing.

This primal system doesn't have a choice. It just works on its own. The core imprints from this part of our brain are so basic that they react automatically. The body memorizes these repeated actions and follows through without a thought or direction from the conscious mind. It's connected to the cerebellum, which controls our primary motor functions. Watching dozens of lizards run back and forth through the high desert terrain every day on my walks puts this into perfect clarity. It's truly poetry in motion. Those little guys don't have a thought—they just move—and our human bodies do the same thing. They become automatically trained to do certain functions without any thought at all. Did you ever drive home and have no memory of the trip? This is the same automatic functioning of the lowest part of our brain. It has memorized the action and does it spontaneously without any direction. The cerebellum above the brain stem is the lowest part of the brain cortex. It has almost 75% of the neurons in the brain. These neurons are tiny and simplistic compared to the ones in our higher brain cortex, and their specialty is performing repetitive functions over and over again. That's why habits are so hard to break.

These neural pathways, both simple and complicated, become indelible imprints with which we become familiar and even intimate. In fact, the automatic reactions we perform are stored in our subconscious or unconscious. They become an innate and core part of who we think we are. Knowledge of this functioning of our brains is critical when trying to do practices that will help in accessing the Field. Why? For example, when you're meditating you might think, I have to call so and so or I forgot to answer that email. Your body wants to get up and react. That is memorized behavior and it's incredibly powerful. If you recognize it, it helps change the habit. The study I cited in the opening chapter really shows the unconscious mind and its directed action is incredibly more powerful than we know. To access the Field we have to learn to overcome this unconscious reactive process of the brain and mind.

No wonder it's difficult to transcend the thought that I am this body. The biggest block to accessing the Field is the thought I am this body. That is why the first thought when entering the Field in a NDE is Wow, I'm out of my body. Many people report that on the way back from the Field at the end of the NDE they don't want to go back into that body. It's odd that people think of it as "that body" after an NDE as opposed to "my body." We are very clear in coming out of the Field who and what we are. We are not the body and we have a new connection with universal love that we never really knew before.

The experience of the Field can be overwhelming. It can linger for days, weeks or even months. Eventually, our powerful and dominant lower brain takes over and we react to all external objects as we have been programmed to do. We slowly disconnect unconsciously from the experience of interconnectedness and oneness in the Field. The brain and body are back in control with the I am the body, this is me thought. The lower part of our brain uses its ability to disconnect and separate so it can ensure its life and existence.

Contemplate for a second the number of unconscious memories we must have from the time we were born. It doesn't matter whether they were life threatening, scary or violent or whether they involve our parents, friends, or whomever. They are hidden and can be very difficult to remember. They are not only stored in our brains unconsciously but our bodies have memorized them so innately and cellularly that we don't recognize it. Someone pisses you off, or you see someone do something stupid, and you react without hesitation. If you want to generate compassion for yourself, family, friends or complete strangers just think of how hard it is to stop a reaction that begins with one simple event or perception: He is______. She is______. They are______. This perception instantly generates a thought that triggers an enormous power within our brains and bodies to act, judge and separate. We begin establishing these neural pathways with the conscious and subconscious minds while our brains are developing in the womb.

The middle area of the brain is called the limbic brain. The limbic system is a complex set of brain structures that lays on both sides of the thalamus, right under the direct center of our brains. It's a set of primitive brain components located on top of the cerebellum and buried under the neocortex or "new part" of the brain. These parts of the brain are involved in many of our emotions and motivations, particularly those that are related to survival. These emotions include anger, fear, and emotions related to sexual behavior. Not surprisingly, the limbic system is also involved in feelings of pleasure that are related to our survival, such as those experienced from eating and sex. The limbic system also includes the hippocampus and amygdala and it supports emotions, behavior, motivation and some long-term memory.

The hippocampus is involved in various processes of cognition and memory. It flash records an event and holds the experience so it can retrieve the memory. Neuroscientists tell us that our primary short-term memory is stored temporarily in the hippocampus. They say we can remember on average only six or seven things in short-term memory. That is why memorizing a phone number greater that seven digits is difficult. The short-term memory is then transferred to other parts of our brain and becomes a long-term memory. The hippocampus looks like two long thin Bluetooth earpieces. When your head is violently jerked this long thin piece will move and vibrate, and therefore not function or record the memory of that instant. This is why when people get into a car accident they may suffer short-term memory loss. This is ingenious. The brain is functioning in a way that's extremely kind to itself and the rest of the system. It has a built-in circuit breaker that limits painful memories. One time I was getting an epidural steroid injection through a large needle. As I sat on the examination table looking at the needle I started to feel faint and the doctor had me get in the fetal position so I wouldn't fall off the table. I asked the nurse why I felt faint and she told me it's a reflex action that cuts off the blood flow in the carotid artery to the brain so you will lose consciousness before you feel pain. That's a good example of the body and brain taking charge and reacting unconsciously without thought.

The amygdala is another integral part of the limbic system. It's also involved in many cognitive processes, including memory. The amygdala encodes and stores certain types of memories, especially those involved with instantaneous emotional perception and attention. Because of this the amygdala is something of a star in discussions of brain anatomy. It has been most commonly linked to fear and the area of the brain responsible for our "fight or flight" response. You feel fear in your gut because your amygdala made an instant determination and told your pituitary gland to release a hormone. Information comes in from the world and passes through the amygdala where the decision is made whether to send the information to the other limbic parts or up to the thinking cortex area of the brain. If it triggers enough of an emotional charge, the amygdala will override the cortex, and send the data straight to the limbic system, causing the release of hormones in the endocrine system and bang! You're off and running or you're yelling at the driver who just cut you off.

During a powerful event, the amygdala goes into action without much regard for the consequences since this area of the brain is not involved in judging, thinking, or evaluating. This reactive incident has come to be known as an "amygdala hijacking." I can remember yelling at my 18 month old son as he unwittingly ran off the sidewalk into traffic. I would have liked to see the inside both of our brains at that instant, because I hijacked both mine and his amygdala and definitely left an indelible imprint on the cellular level of his brain and body. That is what the system is designed to do, but it has consequences. The hormones released can have a dramatic effect and last for a while. The individual can feel little control or even out of control. Sometimes additional hormones are released that affect us for days. What's astounding is that even a seemingly insignificant event can set us off for no apparent reason and have dramatic consequences. Our conscious mind and thinking brain don't know why we are reacting like this, but our lower brains along with stored unconscious memory do. Some people seem to have a close connection with that part of our brain. We say they know how to push our buttons.

What's interesting is that many times it's their unconscious brain, not their conscious mind, which has decided to push our buttons. To take it one step further, from a quantum point of view it's your unconscious brain projected and manifested as their unconscious brain pushing your buttons unknowingly. Your conscious mind is so fired up it doesn't recognize what it's doing to itself. Simply, it's you doing it to you. My personal experience is that this action, reaction and projection is going on with every person and object in every moment. That's why my number one rule is Be kind to you. It's also why every exercise I suggest is meant to break down the illusion of separation we create with the objects around us. When we undo this separation we experience a fusion of love with ourselves and every object. This is the natural experience of the Field of Love.

EEG brain readings have concluded the amygdala is so sensitive to accessing things that it becomes very active when judging facial expression of unknown individuals and determining whether or not they are trustworthy.

The area of the brain that I find the most intriguing lies directly above the amygdala, thalamus and hippocampus and is called the insula. Almost every practice I recommend to access the Field involves the insula. Why? Because in the insula is where the sense of "I" begins to appear. The insula reads the physiological state of the body and then produces feelings to instruct the other parts of the brain to react. The subjective sense of hunger that causes us to eat and keep the body in a state of balance is an example of this. The insula is the director, relaying information to other brain structures both in the higher and lower brain that are involved in decision making. The insula functions somewhat like a bridge or junction box between our emotions in the limbic brain and the thinking, calculating brain of the neocortex, which is directly above and surrounding the insula.

The insula is present in all mammals although it's larger and its connections are much more complex in higher primates and humans. The insula aids our self-awareness of body states, such as the ability to time one's own heartbeat. It appears to be where our subjective sense of the body and any negative emotional experiences related to the body arise. It's also involved to some extent in controlling the heartbeat and blood pressure. Think of yogis controlling their heartbeat and blood pressure and you can understand why this area of the brain is so pivotal in the higher brain's connection and identification with the body, and the yogis' desire to disconnect the higher brain or mind from the body altogether. In brain scans it lights up under a wide range of emotions including love, happiness, sadness, anger, fear and even when we perceive ourselves connecting with the divine. It's also connected with emotional processing, empathy, and orgasms. It's a busy area of the brain, especially when it comes to the sense of "I."

The insula actually reacts under brain imaging when it's exposed to strong visual images of pain. It will even do this when the pain is not associated with itself. Imaginary pain and pleasure can be generated by the insula just by the person conjuring up the image in his mind. This is particularly important in meditation techniques and visualizations. Does this mean if you just imagine the Field that you can create the Field and be in it? My experience tells me that yes, you can. Besides, you are the Field so you don't have to go very far. That is what quantum physics has shown is possible. The insula also will react when an individual listens to music, hears laughter or crying and shows empathy or compassion, listens to jokes, sees disgust on a face, or is ignored in social settings. Besides controlling heart rate it also has a role in swallowing and speech articulation along with certain motor, hand, and eye movements. It also has a role in regulating our immune systems along with the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system's automatic responses and directions.

Most critically it has been seen to be essential in playing a role in our ability to identify our bodily self-awareness and sense of separateness. It's the area of the brain that would light up with a thought I am (fill in the blank), and it doesn't matter whether the thought is I am good, I am bad, I am compassionate, or I am loving. It's no wonder a brain imaging study at the university of Wisconsin using Tibetan Buddhist monks and a study at Massachusetts General Hospital using "regular" people showed that a certain section of their insula developed more folds and got larger and thicker after meditating on compassion for others. Directed thought from the frontal lobe in the upper part of the brain using your CW to generate a feeling would logically light up and create this alteration in the insula in addition to making the left frontal lobe light up with directed cognitive thought. In other words, the bigger and more folds in the insula the more defined the sense of "I" and the perception of separation becomes between you and the object of your perception. This would be true even if you're trying to generate compassion and love for a person or you're trying to cultivate hatred for others with concentrated thought combined with feeling. I don't think the insula cares when it's receiving information from the frontal lobe and combining it with the limbic brain. On the other hand, when you generate compassion for another person as in Buddhist meditation there is a natural melding or fusion with the object or person, and the result can be unity and love. Again, subject and object meet and become one. When you see the insula creating more folds, you're probably seeing the feeling and cognitive parts of the brain fusing. What's important is the fusing and merging with the object of your perception and transcending the "I" altogether. I think Rumi would agree because the Field is beyond ideas of right or wrong and good or bad. It's love and pure awareness, plain and simple. It does not matter what the subject or object is.

What would happen if the insula was damaged in some way? What effect would that have on the individual? Brain scans have shown that the insula is activated when craving food or drugs. The insula lights up when an individual perceives him or herself as the one enjoying pleasure and satisfaction. You can understand how the insula is acting as a fulcrum point, identifying as the body – as an "I" with emotions that can generate images with help from other parts of the brain. It must play a major role in creativity, but it also has the sense that "I am the one who created this" or "I am the doer." It certainly can help create and get things done. It can also define and find limitation within us when we try to access the Field because it's convinced it's the body.

Brain imaging studies have shown that the insula is activated in drug abusers. This happens when cravings are triggered for a variety of drugs, including alcohol, nicotine, cocaine and opiates. In one controversial study, brain scans of a few smokers who suffered damage to the insula from an accident or stroke amazingly had their addiction to nicotine practically eliminated. Individuals in the study reported quitting smoking less than one day after the brain injury. Some reported it was remarkably easy. This happens because the insula stores the pleasurable interceptive effects of drug use completely separate from a chemical dependency. In other words the touch, taste and smell of a cigarette, to which the insula reacts, appear to be much more addictive than the nicotine itself. If the need for something—i.e. food, sex or drugs—can be completely changed by damage to the insula, it proves the power of the way a repetitive practice can change our neural pathways for the better. All we have to do is focus our attention over and over again. The repetitive sense of "I need this, I want this" is powerful, causing the addiction, pain and need for something outside of ourselves because of habit and the identifying memory of the senses during the act. This can be even more powerful than a pure chemical addiction.

To take this even further, studies reveal that the insula fires in brain scans when drug paraphernalia is merely placed in front of drug users, which shows the desire is totally subjective with subjective urges. This was true for subjects who had no residual drugs in their systems over the prior days. Clearly the role of memory for the pleasurable effects of past use and the expectation of the future created the need in the individual. In people with damage to the insula either by stroke or accident, it may show that the brain and body have simply forgotten or that the urge to use is not registering in the insula.

What does it all mean as it pertains to the Field and accessing the Field? For one thing it shows that our brains have the potential and ability to generate both pleasurable and painful responses to a desire or need, and that the experience is completely internal. The frontal lobe in the neocortex recalls a pleasurable experience, comes up with the thought of it and projects the desire to the insula where it communicates with the limbic brain to release the appropriate hormones, which are then dispersed throughout the brain and body. You've probably heard the expression "sex happens between your ears." Sex can be experienced energetically throughout your body but a large part of the function is happening in the mind and brain – in the insula in particular. It is the same for food. Just the thought of going to my favorite pizza place gets the juices flowing, and the pizza is 120 miles away in Phoenix. What's important here is that no external object is necessary to create this effect.

One of the most effective ways of accessing the Field, as described in Patanjali's 2,000 year old yoga sutra, is to have the mind merge with the object of its perception. In other words, direct yourself as the subject, as the meditator, to merge with the object of your meditation. If you read these sutras you will see that he does not recommend any specific object but suggests that it be good and not an object that has negative connotations associated with it. What we now know to some extent that Patanjali didn't know, is that is what's going on in the brain during meditation. He wasn't concerned about the brain. He was focused on what quieted the mind and then dissolved the objects of perception along the mind into its Source. He experienced that this merger and dissolution created bliss – and if done enough – created a continual perception of the Field of Love.

Pain can also be generated exclusively by our minds. The gyrations and cycles we put ourselves through simply by focusing on a thought or memory creates anxiety and hormonal release. Eventually it runs its course and we gradually end up with a little peace. Again, this episode is created completely within our minds and brain with a thought that fires a bunch of neurons that trigger a feeling... and off we go. For some people watching a scary movie not only creates fear and releases hormones, but the whole cycle of release and rebalance is pleasurable. This is what happens in bondage and S & M activities.

This brings us finally to the largest part of our brain: the neocortex, which sits on top of the midbrain. This is where simple and complex thought is generated: e.g., I'm a woman named Mary or E=MC2. The insula can come up with an "I," but the neocortex is needed for I'm a woman named Mary. The neocortex is a part of the brain of all mammals. It's made up of six layers and is connected to all other areas of the brain. It's involved in higher functions such as sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought and language. It has a sensory center for feeling the body, and a motor center for moving the body. The parietal lobe determines time and space, and the visual center is in the rear of the brain. The frontal lobe is directly above our eyes and is much larger in humans than in other mammals. It gives us the ability to have sophisticated thought, be creative, and do wondrous things using our CW.

At birth a newborn baby has no idea of who he or she is. The amount of neurons firing in their brains is much less than that of even a small child. Their daily life consists mainly of sleeping and eating. Their attention span lasts for only a few seconds. By six weeks the simplest part of the brain, the cerebellum, is able to memorize. Through repeated attempts it recognizes that it gets attention by crying or moving in a noticeable way, like arching its back. At approximately three months, the baby's sense of self begins to emerge. More neurons in the brain are firing, connecting and starting to communicate with one another, enough that the baby will start to play with his fingers and toes by making them touch each other. This feeling and connection creates pleasure and joy for the child. At this moment the entire brain is firing, although in a somewhat limited way. It's firing and communicating from the frontal lobe neocortex through the insula and limbic area down to the cerebellum. Magically or magnificently there are enough neural connections and communication that the baby comprehends the parts of the body it's touching are actually itself. It's at this point that we can say that the ego or sense of "I" or the self has been born, but in a most unusual way that's not similar to adults.'

The major defining characteristic of this new baby's "I" is that it thinks it's everything around it. The baby sees and the brain processes that everything, all objects including the mother are part of itself. There is no sense of separation. It's almost as if the insula is directly wired to the optic nerve and seeing everything as itself. I guess we could say at this point that the baby is enlightened or experiencing what it feels like to have no sense of separation arise. Is that enlightenment? From my experience it's pretty damn close, and what it feels like to be the Field – with one small exception. The problem for the baby, if it is a problem, is that it has no reference point, short or long-term memory, or idea what enlightenment is. Its consciousness and awareness is limited, and it doesn't have the ability to fuse and merge with the objects of its perception in order to produce joy. What enlightenment is for the baby may not be a problem. Adults are the ones always wanting to know what enlightenment is, but for a baby it's clearly enjoying itself.

The baby's arena of non-separation may be similar to the experience people have when they are out of their bodies or having an NDE. In that space, in that Field, there is no separation from everything else. The individual feels inextricably interconnected with everything around itself just like the baby. The baby in this state is "one," but this experience will not last for long. Studies have shown that at approximately six months the individual begins to understand that it's separate and independent. The baby becomes a person from its own perspective. Someone who's on his or her own. The sense of separation begins for a lifetime.

Why does consciousness or awareness decide to create a sense of separation for itself in the first place? For one thing we know it does this simply for survival. Esoterically, maybe there is great pleasure, joy and adventure in finding its way back to its Source into the awareness of the Field. Or maybe it's just a play of consciousness that God or Source enjoys so much. Like a game, it purposely creates separation only to undo it and merge with itself. Looking at galaxies with black holes at their center may be more than a metaphor when it comes to describing what consciousness is up to. Let's go for a spin, then collapse back into ourselves.

Later in the practice section I talk a little about Kundalini. Yogi and sages believe that the Kundalini, once it's awakened, rises from its sleeping contracted spot at the base of the spine to the top or the head or crown chakra. It's finding its way home to Source. They also say that consciousness in the form of the divine feminine manifests the entire physical and subtle universe, and when it's done creating it rests as the sleeping dormant Kundalini at the base of the spine waiting to be awakened for the trip back home. This could be true, but I will let you be the judge of that.

Using our knowledge of brain science it's interesting to contemplate at what point the individual soul comes into being... or does it? Is it just that the neocortex of a human being has enough neurons firing, interconnected, and communicating with one another that along with the insula it can come up with the perception, the story that it's a separate "I" or individual? Many scientists would conclude that's the case.

Do our pets, our dog, our cat have a soul? Can they or can they not perceive themselves as a separate individuals? How do animals perceive themselves? In reality are they just a series of chemical reactions and neurons firing in their limited brains to make them move and act the way they do? Are they pure instinctual movement utilizing the limbic emotion-feeling midbrain along with the cerebellum, which has memorized movements unconsciously as instinct to just move, react and respond purely by what's happening in front of them without cognitive thought? A fish has all of the same brain components as we, only much more primitive. It moves, it swims, it eats, and it avoids danger. Are we as human beings simply movement too? Are our cognitive, thinking minds/brains coming up with the thought that tells us, "I think therefore I am" as Descartes said? Are we something much more than just some extremely sophisticated cognizing, emotional, feeling brain/body mind in action? Is it because we have enough neurons firing to create cognitive thought that we think we are individuals and therefore we have a soul? These are the very thoughts that the Buddha, without the brain science, was meditating on under the Bodhi tree around 500 BC. His conclusion... are you ready?

Buddha, The "I," and The Brain

The Buddha taught that there is no reason to think that there is a soul that comes from another world or realm that will transmigrate to another realm after death. He taught that what we call the soul or the self are mainly terms that do not refer to an independent self. To the Buddha everything was an illusion created within the mind. The Buddha recommended that the seeker not waste time but rather simply focus on finding peace and happiness in this moment by recognizing that everything is not real. It's all an illusion which the mind experiences as suffering. He went on to say that we should forget about the thought of a soul that goes from this world to the next to be reborn. The Buddha just wanted the suffering to stop. From his own reports, he had enough suffering himself.

If the Buddha had brain science on his side he probably would have made these very arguments and asked the following questions: Is there just enough critical mass of neurons within the brain that it comes up with the idea that it's a separate individual, self, soul, ego or "I"? Is this all just an illusion generated by what we call the mind, with the help of the brain? This primary basic Buddhist philosophy was very sophisticated and difficult to comprehend for the masses. Simply put, there is no soul, no heaven, no "I." Here is the Buddhist philosophy from the Dhammapada, the preeminent Buddhist text, with quotes directly attributed to the Buddha himself: "All conditioned or unconditioned things are soulless or selfless." (Dhammapada #279)

The Buddha expounded his Anatta doctrine that there was no-soul, no-self. They arise from the misconception "I Am." The individual must try to see things objectively as they are, without putting any mental projections on them. Tell that to your five senses and the 150 billion neurons in your brain. For most people it's, "Uh, I don't think so. I hope not. I don't want to lose myself or think I really don't exist. I'm a mentally generated illusion? I might not be coming back? Are you kidding me?"

The Buddha also spoke about his past lives, which seems to contradict his Anatta doctrine. All he was saying is that the whole thing is an illusion, even the perception of past lives. Don't be fooled by that and don't spend any time worrying about it. This is why many modern scientists and quantum physicists really love the Buddha. Time and space exist only when there is consciousness perceiving it; otherwise it doesn't exist. That is pure quantum physics. The Buddha got it right a long time ago. Reality is an illusion. Buddha was expounding the highest truth of reality, and it coincides what we know from brain science.

What many people do not understand is that the Buddha, when he first started teaching, was expounding his philosophy primarily to Jain ascetics like himself. These individuals had gone through years of rigorous discipline and practice to achieve enlightenment. Many Buddhist practices and beliefs come from Jainism because of the Buddha's intense engagement with it and its prominent teachers of the time. If you want to understand the Buddha better, read about the Jain teachers he had and Jainism in India at that time. The only significant difference between Jainism and Buddhism was the Buddha's Anatta doctrine, in which he said there was no soul. These Jain ascetics, as well as Hindus at the time, believed in a soul or Atman or Self that was separate and needed to merge with pure consciousness. They – like the Buddha – were suffering and struggling and wanted peace, and the Buddha was able to speak to them and give it to them straight. It must have been a little shocking to these ascetics when these words came out of the Buddha's mouth. There is no "I." There is no soul. There is no heaven or hell. A small group of struggling ascetics who heard the Buddha were at a point in their lives when they were ready to listen and receive his teaching. They ended up forming the initial group of followers around the Buddha. The Buddha was really saying, "Intently watch the mind and the body. Pure awareness will arise when you do this." The "I" and the soul get swallowed up in that awareness. This total awareness is Nirvana itself. That was the Buddha's teaching. There is a famous story in which the Buddha addresses Vacchagotta, a wandering ascetic, and answers all his questions with a silence. These are just two of the questions.

It there an Atman? No answer.

Is there no Atman? No answer.

When the Buddha's followers asked him why he wouldn't answer any of these questions about the soul, the Buddha explained to his disciples that if he gave any answer the ascetic mind would attach and be confused. The Buddha was truly taking his disciples beyond the mind and perceptions of all objects including the idea of a soul. He was teaching pure awareness. The Buddha once said that only through delusion do men perceive the soul to be a separate transmigrating entity.

Even today, the earliest Buddhist thought is difficult for the mind to perceive and accept because the mind and the brain naturally love objects. As we can see, even a wandering ascetic whose total focus was on transcendence had a hard time getting it. The brain does not like to negate itself. The mind, the "I," likes itself as an object, as a soul. We know the brain enjoys interacting with objects on mental, feeling and primal levels. We see this on brain scan studies. If you show the brain an attractive or repulsive object under imaging, it lights up.

The brain/mind and body derive pleasure from objects. It also doesn't matter if the object is physical or conjured up in the mind. In fact, it's hard to experience pleasure without an object being involved. The brain's natural reactive desire for objects is what facilitated their incorporation into spiritual practice. The pleasure received from worshipping gods and goddesses eventually helped facilitate the downfall of the earliest Buddhist thought and caused it to morph into a more object-based practice. The net result of this early, highly cognitive, frontal-lobe Buddhist thought, as I like to call it, was that it disappeared from much of India. The Buddha was really saying "take a look at the mind. Investigate the mind. Be mindful of the body, feelings, mind, and mental objects in the mind." It is what current day Buddhist mindfulness practices are all about. For the Buddha the mind and its activities were the object of meditation. For modern man who has time for such contemplation, this is possible.

Contemporary mindfulness practice is valuable because it makes the meditator focus attention on a place other than where it naturally wants to go. If a beautiful object passes in front of one's eye, everything in the brain wants to focus on that object. The Buddha and mindfulness are saying, "Wait, that object is not real, this body is not real, even this thought is an illusion." Move your attention. Focusing on the breath, then the breath in the body, and finally releasing tension from the body using the breath supports the awareness that you're not the body or the mind. Experiments have shown that focusing the mind this way increases the size and folds in the insula. This makes sense because the insula integrates the brain's process of sensing, feeling the body and cognizing thought simultaneously. This strengthening of awareness is the doorway to the heart center, the place where thought actually germinates and arises. (This is not the heart chakra – which will be explained in the next chapter).

At the Buddha's time of 500 BC and the years thereafter, his practices were difficult for the majority of the masses to grasp fully. Their lower brains naturally wanted to feel and practice what resonated with their basic brain functioning. The educated kings of the time, on the other hand, could understand the Buddha's subtle, more sophisticated teaching. It was because of the kings' support that Buddhism became the state religion and flourished along with monasteries for renunciates for years. As time passed the political structure changed, kingdoms fell, and the masses (following the natural instinct of the brain), reverted back to the object-based worship of the traditional Hindu gods and goddesses.

Over a period lasting hundreds of years, Buddhism left much of India and spread to the north and became Tibetan Buddhism, which is the religion of the Dali Lama, the Karmapa and others. The idea of Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism flourished and resonated because it included the idea of a subject and object, with gods, deities, Bodhisattvas and souls that transmigrate from birth to birth. How many different Tara goddesses, red, green, etc., are there to meditate on? Tibetan Buddhism has tremendous support throughout the world even today. If you go to Nepal or Tibet you see the nuances, the colors, the sounds, the objects, and ceremonies all interconnected with Tibetan Buddhism as its heart. The oldest surviving branch of pure Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, traveled to Sri Lanka and certain parts of the Far East. Depending on the region, from China and Japan down to Indonesia it manifested and morphed into a religion in which the Buddha might be worshiped as an object and deity. In some places Quan Yin (a female form of a Bodhisattva or enlightened being) is revered. This is where you find the massive statues of Buddha or Quan Yin today. Would the Buddha have approved? Probably not. Again, the brain is naturally more comfortable when all three of its regions—neocortex, limbic and cerebellum—are able to interact around a thought that gives rise to feelings and is directed at an object that's either worshiped or meditated upon.

Today less than 3% of the Indian population is Buddhist. If you want to have some fun with objects, become a Hindu or Tibetan Buddhist. I like to joke that I'm a Hindu and my wife, Sarah, is a Buddhist so we are really good for one another. She is the primary object of my worship and I'm a thought in her mind that she works to transcend. Why shouldn't I worship her? She is the one in front of me, myself projected. How could I not be completely in love with that? Sarah and I were interviewed for a Chinese documentary on meditation and the interviewer asked how I meditated and I said one of my practices was to worship Sarah as Quan Yin. This elicited a smile and wonder from the journalist. She was surprised someone would say his wife was Quan Yin. If you read how I proposed to Sarah in my autobiography, you will understand my intent and focus.

This story is a good metaphor when discussing the difference between subject/object meditation and working on transcending the mind with mindfulness. Today it's much easier for people to comprehend and do mindfulness Buddhist practices. A lot of current brain research is conducted when people are doing mindfulness breathing exercises or contemplating compassion for others as in the Massachusetts General Hospital study. Not surprisingly, because of the Internet and its impact on the spread of knowledge, there are more and more people today in India who are moving toward Buddhism and mindfulness practices than ever before.

Like Patanjali, I'm a big believer in using the objects of our perception to access the Field. We might as well, since they are in our waking state 24/7. Any object that you're strongly attracted to you can use. Patanjali's exact words are: "anything that is good." There is no point in using something that's bad because that will probably disturb your mind right from the beginning. Meditate and become one with your heart's deepest desire in whatever form it takes. For men this is probably going to be associated with the female in some way. Tibetan Buddhist Taras or the Hindu Shivalingam are not accidents but the most desirous forms arising in the male mind thousands of years ago. Concentrating on an object such as an Indian or Buddhist goddess Tara has its advantages also, because the conscious mind already knows that the image is not real in waking reality. On the other hand, if the mind can concentrate on any object, that one-pointed focus will lead to meditation and eventually Samadhi. I use this subject-object relationship in almost every way I recommend accessing the Field.

It is possible to have both a non-dual practice and subject-object worship at the same time. The 20th century sage Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, the author of the famous book I'm That, an Advaita (non-dualism) master, when asked why he did certain ritualistic activities like chanting, pujas, etc. (because those things appeared dualistic and contrary to his teaching), answered that he did it simply because it felt good. He was just moved naturally to do it out of habit and he watched himself do it. He was awareness ("I am," as he would say), just doing. Clearly there was something in his brain, in his cerebellum, limbic area and neocortex that just felt good to do it. Probably it was his insula that memorized the sense satisfaction and feelings of the actions that he did when he was younger, and now he merely watched himself chanting or waving incense on a daily basis. He sold and smoked cigarettes for years. I say this here so that we can learn something when we try utilizing the different methods and techniques I suggest in accessing the Field: do not get caught up by being rigid about one method or technique. They all work, and can work well in conjunction with one another. It's important to keep that in mind. Being honest, kind, and sweet to ourselves by allowing ourselves to do what feels good is of utmost importance. Let others completely embrace what feels good for them.

Inquiring into the "I" thought and its origination is one of the ways I suggest to access the Field of Love. It's the purest, simplest method but not the easiest way to access the Field. Most of us are not ready for this process of inquiring into the "I" thought, like "Who am I" or "From where does this thought arise?" or "Without this thought, who am I?" It's too dry and cognitive for most. I have added in Part II an inquiry technique that also engages the feeling limbic part of our brain in addition to the cognitive neocortex to make it easier for people to connect to inquiry practice.

Live the Heart

not the mind.
The Heart

It is important to speak about the heart for a moment because it too has an actual feeling nature that helps when accessing the Field. The heart has neurons just like the brain. The amount is much smaller: only 40,000 compared to 150 billion for the brain. The heart manufactures some of its own hormones just as does the brain. What has gotten a lot of attention in the last few years is the heart's ability to generate a powerful electromagnetic field. Studies show this electromagnetic field to be 5,000 times more powerful than the electric field generated by the brain. This field is so strong it's proven to have a measurable effect on people in close proximity to one another. People's electromagnetic heart fields have been shown to overlap. It's why we have the inclination to touch or hold someone when that person is in distress, pain or love. It's also why so many different healing modalities are effective and why human touch is so valued. Taking it one step further, research has shown that one person's electromagnetic heart field can have an effect on someone else's brain waves.

When you have a thought that generates a strong emotion, hormones will be released from your endocrine glands, pituitary, etc. on direction from your limbic brain, the amygdala, hippocampus, etc. This then creates an electromagnetic wave signal from your heart that sends messages that can affect somebody else's brain waves, and vice versa. In other words, the heart's electromagnetic field can actually act as a transmitter back and forth between individuals or among a group of people. This is part of what's called group coherence. What's important to note is that these measurements are scientifically proven, and are the first step in being able to quantify the activity on the subtle, energetic or casual level that saints, sages and some people with psychic ability have reported. To scientifically measure activity on these super subtle and probably quantum levels is going to be difficult, because (according to quantum physics) the conscious observation of the activity will alter it.

You can imagine the exponential effect of being in a Sunday Baptist service or in a chant with 1,000 people all generating the same thought with feeling centered in the heart. It doesn't matter who the God or deity is. It's pure electromagnetic physics at that point. I have experienced both of these things, especially when playing the Indian drum the murdunga, or a pair of tablas with a large group of people. I can attest to its power. The same thing is happening at a rock concert – and it has nothing to do with whether or not some of the participants are on drugs. This practice is one easy and instant way to get closer with the unified Field of Love which is surrounding us at all times. You can see this connection worldwide in every type of spiritual activity when a group of people are gathered together for a united purpose. It also explains why when we are all in the same room or space we sometimes have the distinct ability to tune in to one another's thoughts. The transmitter in this case is not only from mind to mind but from heart to mind and mind to heart.

As much attention as the heart has been given, it has never been shown that the consciousness of the donor has gone with it when the actual physical heart is transplanted into another person. Many transplant recipients have reported unusual feelings that seem to be connected in some way with the heart donor. That subtlety is immeasurable. Most people having an NDE where their physical heart has stopped beating do not have the heart's electromagnetic field operating. This however does not affect awareness, and shows that the real core of our being is beyond the physical heart. This center is key in accessing the Field because on a physical level (and also on a holographic quantum level) it must be in the center of our chest. This is why the heart center is of preeminent importance in Buddhism and to great sages like Ramana Maharishi. From a holographic level the center must be everywhere, both within and without at the same time.

In the next section I'll talk about ways to access the Field of Love. Many practices have the ability either to give you a glimpse of the Field or to take you all the way into an uninterrupted experience of the Field. They have for me. What practice or practices you choose depends on your inclination, your personality, what feels good, and what intuitively resonates with your being.

Part 2

Experience the Field

Accessing The Field

The number one ingredient needed to access the Field is intention or desire to do so. Even a limited amount of attention will start to bear fruit. You can be successful if you just do it. In this section I will give you the ways to access the Field that have worked for me. I still do many of them today. Certain techniques became habitual because I practiced them for such a long time. I watch myself do them because it feels good. They become second nature. If you were in my house at 4 a.m. you might think my activities are somewhat unusual. I don't judge myself. I have become a lover of what moves the heart to embrace itself.

In this section I put the practices in an order that might seem to be the easiest to the hardest. This could very well not be the case for you, and certain methods will resonate more for some than others. There is no judgment here; just do what feels good to you. You can't do it wrong.

Love blooms in the fragrant field

of not knowing.
Just Be The Field

This may seem simple – and it is. It just takes moving your attention to the recognition that not only is the Field present in every state of consciousness—waking, dreaming, and deep sleep—but that you are the Field. No matter what's going on, no matter what thoughts and feelings are moving through you, you are the Field. The Field transcends your own actions and the actions of others. Be the Field no matter what. Allow your mind and heart to perceive and judge these actions by yourself or others as good or bad because that's what the mind and brain do. It's all just movement in the Field.

One of the reasons that I included a few personal stories as part of this book is so the reader can see that it's all just a story. In the Field, it doesn't matter whether the story is beautiful, ugly, crazy or transcendent. When my autobiography was edited a number of stories were removed that the editors thought were "over the top" and did not serve any purpose. When they did that I laughed and said okay. A story is a story is a story. It's in, it's out. Besides being entertaining, our stories may separate us from who we really are or who we think we are. Then again, our stories can connect us to the magnificent part of ourselves that witnesses the whole beautiful play of consciousness as we recognize that we are not the doer. A caption under an image of a person in meditation reads, It's all fun and games until someone loses an I. Personally, I think that's when the real fun begins.

Our minds, the ego, the "I," just love to get involved and take credit for what's manifesting in our lives. I did this. I did that. They did this and that. I'm using the Law of Attraction to do this or that. I took this company public. I had this meditation experience. Our destinies and the force that drives our lives are so powerful and strong that they are beyond the mind's comprehension. Therefore the easiest way to access the Field is to actually be it. Be everyone, everything and the movement in the play. The moment your attention moves away from this understanding just be aware and move it back. That's all. This will become humorous at some point, because the Field loves itself. It doesn't have a choice. It wants itself because it's in love with itself. The Field of awareness will pull your attention to it because your attention is the Field's love projected. It sees itself and just wants to embrace itself over and over in every form it sees. The Field's nature is spontaneous and joyful no matter what actions are occurring in and around it, and this will become your experience also. The Field enjoys your company so much that if you start to wander from its awareness it will grab you any way it can, and I mean any way. Uninterruptedly holding one's attention in the midst of activity was the Buddha's practice and leads to Nirvana.

The Bhagavad Gita, the most revered Hindu scripture, is a discourse between Arjuna and Krishna, who is God or Guru however you like to see or refer to Krishna. The two of them are in a chariot on a battlefield. Arjuna is the charioteer. Krishna is standing next to Arjuna and advising him on how to approach the battle, especially the one going on in his mind.

Arjuna is freaking out because he is fighting his cousins and has no desire to fight them, much less kill them.

Krishna is telling Arjuna that what he sees is all an illusion, a play of consciousness. He says not to worry even if he kills them or they kill him, and begins to give Arjuna advice on how to overcome the illusion by describing different forms of yoga and practices to undo the illusion.

Arjuna keeps saying he doesn't get it.

Finally Krishna puts him in a transcendent altered state of consciousness, like an extreme NDE.

Arjuna is stunned and amazed. He finally gets it and he wants to know how to hold that awareness.

Of course, Krishna tells him the ways.

The essence of the story is to not get caught up in what's transpiring on the battlefield of your everyday life. Like Arjuna, it's your destiny. What's going to happen is going to happen, and is the manifestation of Quantum Interconnected Will.

Just remember to move your attention to simply being the Field of Love. Be love in motion manifesting as all the objects both within and without. You are the object of your perception. Your brain will rewire and create new neural pathways to support this experience. Do your job, live your life, and bring your attention to the reality and existence of the Field as often as you can. Forty years ago Ram Dass wrote Be Here Now and it had a major impact on a generation, expanding the awareness of millions of people. The title of one of his latest books is Be Love Now. It encourages us to recognizes that awareness is love itself. Be that love, be that awareness, and see everyone and everything around you as love itself. Simply train your mind and brain to fall in love with every single object around it. Consciously direct your attention to do this over and over. You are that love and you are the Field. Buddha would say to focus intently on that pure awareness... and I say that awareness is love.

Hatha Yoga

There are approximately 25 million people in the United States who do some form of hatha yoga every day. That is very exciting, because hatha yoga has the ability to significantly alter one's consciousness. It certainly facilitates stress relief and provides a sense of well-being for almost all practitioners. Hatha yoga is a system of yoga described by a Hindu 15th Century sage named Yogi Swatmarama in the text Hatha Yoga Pradipika. "Hatha" is a Sanskrit term that refers to a kind of yoga or abstract meditation that forces the mind to withdraw from external objects. It's related very much to Raja Yoga, which was expounded by Patanjali around 300 BC. The main focus is to get the mind to merge itself (the subject) with the object of its meditation. This culminates in varying degrees of absorption, or what's called Samadhi. The highest form of Samadhi is what the Buddhists refer to as Nirvana, although Buddhists would probably disagree with that terminology. To make the process of Raja yoga even easier, the meditator hopes to raise or awaken the Kundalini, which is lying dormant, "sleeping" in one's body and consciousness. We will talk more about this later.

Hatha yoga is a yogic path, including disciplines, postures, purification procedures, gestures, breathing and meditation. The hatha yoga normally practiced in the West consists of mostly asanas or physical postures. It's also recognized as a stress-reducing practice. Brain chemistry and dopamine hormone release from the breathing and physical movement has proven to be extremely beneficial. On that basis alone, it brings one closer to accessing the Field. Hatha yoga is offered at almost all the retreats that I participate in even though I do not normally do it myself anymore.

Hatha yoga uses asanas to get the body ready for meditation, and it's great for that. I did hatha yoga for only two months when I was 19 years old. It was a gateway practice into meditation for me. It was so effective that it knocked me completely out of my body into the most wondrous out-of-body experience. I would not be where I am today if not for hatha yoga, and I truly honor and respect its benefits. If you are doing hatha yoga I recommend that you spend three minutes after each session doing some type of breathing exercise, or pranayama. You can learn different types of breathing exercises from your yoga teacher or find some online or in a book. After you do this breathing exercise for three minutes, I suggest you meditate by watching your breath for at least five minutes. Of course, you can meditate longer if you like. Those eight minutes will heighten your awareness of the Field. If it feels right, if it feels good, extend your meditation time.

Meditation

Statistics show that over 1 million people begin meditating every year in the United States. They start meditating for a number of reasons, but most often because they want to reduce stress in their life and have a more peaceful and happy existence. People ask me all the time whether I meditate and if so, how I meditate. I literally do every practice that I describe here to some extent or other. Just watching the breath is the easiest practice to do if you're just starting out.

For new meditators I love the practice that my wife Sarah McLean teaches. It's called the Simple, Easy, Every Day Meditation™ Method, SEED Meditation® for short. It's a basic practice that includes a few different elements, including heart-based breathing and a mantra meditation that's very simple. If you only do hatha yoga right now and you want to begin a meditation practice, I recommend this method. You will learn how to meditate in a very easy, comfortable way that will have you meditating 10 to 30 minutes a day. This method was designed to work easily for everyone. Sarah and the McLean Meditation Institute® have taught thousands of people to meditate, including housewives, grandmothers, Olympic athletes, FBI agents, and children. By doing these practices you will be able to glimpse, access and experience the Field more and more. Most importantly, the benefit of this type of meditation is that you will see it reflected in your everyday life. Life will move more easily. You will have much less stress, you will feel more interconnected with your family and friends, and you will probably have the desire to deepen your practice even more.

This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter, close your eyes and follow your breath to the still place that leads to the invisible path that leads you home.

— Teresa of Avila

Kundalini Yoga

One of the primary goals of both hatha yoga and meditation is to try to awaken one's Kundalini. This powerful force lies dormant in each of us and has the ability to take you into higher states of awareness and consciousness. Once awakened, it can expand consciousness all by itself, thereby eliminating much of the persistent, hard work that hatha yoga and meditation demand for individuals dedicated to transforming the depth and intensity of their awareness.

In the early seventies I was living and going to school in Gainesville, Florida. I had been getting meditation lessons in the mail from Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship for about four months. My roommates, old friends from high school, Tom and David, had been doing these lessons for over a year so they were well ahead of me in their meditation practice. I was a meditation novice so to speak. I had never heard of Kundalini until one Friday afternoon in early winter. I got the biggest surprise of my life, and my ignorance truly benefited me because I didn't have a clue what was about to take place. I put this here so the reader will not only get a taste of the power of Kundalini and the benefit of having it awakened, but also to share one of the pivotal events of my life that completely altered my perception of reality. After this story I will share more about Kundalini and my experience with it. The following is an edited excerpt from Field of Love: Power Love & Fortune on the Road to Enlightenment:

Guru Om

It was a sunny day on University Avenue. My insatiable appetite for more information about Yoga and its workings led me into the metaphysical bookstore across from the University of Florida. I was browsing the spiritual books, looking for something that would satisfy me when I picked up a book simply titled Guru. The word was printed in bold white letters on its dark blue front cover. On the back was a photo of the author, Swami Muktananda. The book was about Muktananda's experience with Nityananda, his guru, and it piqued my interest. I took it home and began reading it that afternoon.

I was completely captivated by the power and wonder of Muktananda's experiences, which sounded very detailed, personal and intense, differing from Yogananda's otherworldly and fantastic experiences in Autobiography of a Yogi. Muktananda described an energy he called Shakti or Kundalini that moved through his body. I felt excitement in my body as I devoured each page. I read the book until late into the evening and continued reading in the morning right after breakfast.

Muktananda described how his body moved spontaneously into yoga poses on its own and how he travelled to other worlds. I thought, Wow, this is crazy! The energy is moving his body all by itself! Is that real? Muktananda described his practice of meditation, which entailed touching his entire body one part at a time, moving up and down, touching his eyes, mouth, arms, legs, and toes, while repeating the mantra Guru Om with intense one-pointed devotion. He willed his mind into complete and utter identification with Nityananda.

I was stunned that Muktananda revealed the mantra he used. I thought all mantras were supposed to be secret. I was getting weekly meditation lessons by mail from Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship and doing simple energizing exercises for three months. I was dying to get a mantra and here Muktananda was revealing one. I stopped reading for a moment and quickly touched my fingers to different parts of my body, mimicking Muktananda's technique as I silently repeated Guru Om. I wanted to see what it felt like to say a mantra and compare it to my energizing exercises. It did not have the same effect as tensing my own body parts, but I was excited nonetheless. I was so intrigued and enthralled by Muktananda's stories that I stopped my pseudo-meditation experiment and moved on to the next chapter of the book. I finished the book about 11 a.m.

I got off my bed and sat in front of the small altar next to it. I gazed at the pictures of Jesus and Yogananda and closed my eyes, silently asking them and God to take me into the highest state of consciousness. I wanted Muktananda's experience. For twenty minutes, I sat very still, trying to keep my mind quiet, but inside I felt agitated and jumpy. Nothing happened, so I stood up and walked around the room for a few minutes, shaking my arms, trying to get some of the charge out of my body. It was hopeless, so I went for a walk to see if that would help dissipate the energy.

After a brisk two miles in the unusually cold winter day, I was back at the house in front of my altar, trying again to meditate. This time, I asked Yogananda, Jesus, and God to let me merge with the ocean of bliss. My whole body was vibrating with excitement. It started to shake slightly I was so charged up. I needed to calm down. I was about to erupt.

I jumped to my feet and hurried into the kitchen. I pulled a half-gallon of milk out of the fridge and got out a loaf of bread and a jar of Skippy peanut butter. I ate four or five peanut butter sandwiches and drank the entire half-gallon of milk. That relaxed me, and my energy started to dissipate.

With sunlight pouring through the windows, I moved to the living room sofa to digest what I had scarfed down. Feeling much better, I looked at the photo of Muktananda on the back of the book. Ten minutes into my relaxation, strangely, my bare feet started warming. There was a large crack under the front door just a few feet away. I thought, How can my feet get warm with that cold air coming in? Rapidly, my feet went from warm to hot. I bent over to feel them to determine whether it was my imagination, and sure enough they were significantly hotter than my bare legs and calves. This is weird! What's going on?

The heat spread upward as my calves began to warm. I slid my hands down my legs to feel the heat in my calves. When I touched my feet, I found they had mysteriously gone dead cold. Lifeless. I could not feel them. Okay, this is really strange. Within five minutes, the heat had spread over my knees and up thighs. As before, with my feet, I started losing feeling in my calves, knees and thighs. Within minutes they too went dead. I started to hear Muktananda's mantra, Guru Om, repeating itself inside my head. I made no attempt to do this. At first I didn't think much of it until I realized I was hearing the word Guru when I inhaled and Om when I exhaled. My breathing became rhythmic as it coordinated with Guru Om. It appeared the mantra was somehow breathing me. The rhythm and depth was intoxicating. I just listened and made no effort to stop or alter it. It was a delight.

Forty-five minutes later, I was completely numb from my waist down. I touched my legs, which felt paralyzed and immobile. The intoxication of the breathing and Guru Om kept me very calm and still. Suddenly and without warning, the space between my anus and penis began contracting. I felt an upward pull and tightening from my rectal area when I breathed in. A relaxation and release happened as I exhaled. This pulling and relaxing was coordinated with the breath and mantra. Something had taken over my body and was playing me like an instrument. It was in control but I didn't mind. It felt so good.

Within a few minutes, I could feel something moving upward with each contraction and inhalation of the word Guru. When I exhaled Om, the relaxation caused this sensation and tingling of energy to descend into my rectal area. With this up and down movement I realized every breath was coming in through my left nostril and out through my right. I was amazed as I put my finger to my nose to feel the in and out. It was so distinct: in left and out right. Can this really be happening? I've never felt anything like that! The energy appeared to lift higher and higher inside my body with every breath and repetition of the mantra. The intoxication was mesmerizing. The breath acted like some exotic gaseous drug that caused me to feel lighter, freer, and totally stoned. Total sensation and feeling left my arms and hands as a good hour had passed.

The up and down energy stayed at my stomach for a while before moving upward past my solar plexus. The sensation of the energy within me was noticeably familiar. An exotic sexual interchange with my body was taking place, strikingly similar to a penis moving in and out of a vagina. There was a tactile, visceral, internal thrill to every inward and upward movement, as there is in copulation. Some sort of otherworldly intercourse was taking place spontaneously inside of me. I was penetrated as both lover and loved, male and female. The energy broke higher and approached my chest and heart. Guru Om gripped and breathed me. I lost all feeling from my neck down. I was the witness, ecstatic, reveling in surrender to the motion.

With one final breath the energy burst into my chest cavity. My heart exploded with love. It infused and drowned my entire being in love that I had never known. My breathing stopped as waves and waves of ecstasy engulfed me. The awareness of myself, space, and the living room was gone and I was saturated in love. I was love. I thought, This is what love is! Oh my God, this is what love really is! Tears streamed from the corners of my eyes.

I sat still for a good ten minutes as the love bathed me. The intensity subsided, leaving a warm, tingling radiation throughout my body. "This is what yoga must be all about; this is what the ultimate state must feel like! Thank you, God! " As I settled down and the love subsided, I was surprised to hear the mantra Guru Om pop back into my mind. As before, it mixed with my breath and the energy began moving upward again from the base of my spine. This time it passed my heart and moved higher with every repetition. My body had no feeling, as if my nerves had been severed. I thought my meditation experience was over, but I heard in my mind, That's not it. That's not the end. There is more. I became less and less body conscious. The opening of the heart left nothing but pure joy and ecstasy. I was fearless. Above the heart, the energy's previously sexual nature became more subtle and sublime, as when the identity of lover and beloved merge in the afterglow of union and there is nothing left but love. It was apparent the energy wanted to move higher. There was a determined, focused feeling to the force that had overtaken me. The energy reached my throat and with my eyes wide open there was instantaneous and complete dissolution of any sense of separateness with everything around me. The objects in the room, although I could clearly see them, were not separate from me in any way, shape, or form. I became the room and everything in it. Wow, this is like LSD. This sublime recognition saturated my consciousness. I only perceived oneness and pure presence. Separation was an illusion. My breathing slowed and temporarily stopped as I dissolved in oneness.

Almost two hours had passed. My breathing returned to the sound of Guru Om. I felt tremendous pressure on the roof of my mouth. The energy seemed like it was trying to puncture my palate. My awareness and vision became forcefully riveted to the point between my eyebrows. The concentration was so intense, it felt as if someone was pressing a stick into my third-eye where my eyesight was intensely focused. This one-pointedness gripped me and held me like a vise. I could not move my awareness and eyeballs away from focusing at this point even if I wanted to. My breathing continued and the energy moved up and down, all the way from the base of my spine to the roof of my mouth and directly up to the third-eye point. Up and down, up and down, again and again, relentlessly. The sound of Guru Om intensified. It was a force so powerful, saying, "You're mine" and thrilling my entire being. My eyes, still opened, rolled up inside their sockets, and above my head was a radiant, indescribable field of violet light, a color and luminosity I had never seen. It was a similar to the blue field of light I had experienced a year before when I was knocked out of my body on the basement floor of my Albany, NY apartment. It radiated unconditional love. I could not look away. I was transfixed and bathed by this light.

Every ensuing upward breath intensified the fusion of love emitted by the light. The field of light suddenly filled the entire space around me, and with one more upward breath the energy shot like a flash of lightning from the base of my spine into the top of my head. A million volts of light and love exploded inside my head and shot throughout my entire body. This electricity of pure light was transferred into every pore and cell of my being, billions of cells simultaneously experiencing an orgasm of their own, engulfing me, overwhelming me. The ecstasy was earth-shattering; it devoured my being. The thought arose: This is it. It's all over. Oh my God, I am leaving my body! With the thought of death, uncontrollable fear rushed into my heart and flooded me. Every ounce of awareness and power of my separate self that I had left, screamed No! and with all the willpower and force I could muster, I threw myself off the couch and onto the floor.

My head pounded with intense pain. As I lay there on my back, stunned and in shock, I checked my head to see if I had cut it on the coffee table. If this is yoga, I want nothing to do with it. It will kill me.

An hour later I felt more normal and was able to get up and walk around. I still had a splitting headache that would not go away. I was scared and freaked out, and also in awe and overwhelmed by the experience. I wanted to see if I was really okay, so I decided to leave the house and go for a drive to see how my senses would function or whether they had been blown out or short-circuited in some way.

I drove around town and saw that there was a movie playing, Cinderella Liberty, starring Marcia Mason and James Caan. I went inside the theater and bought a ticket. The film served to divert my attention from what I thought had almost killed me. I came home and went to sleep. The next day I realized I had survived the most amazing two and a half hours of ecstasy and had stood at the door of my own death.

When a man attains ecstatic love of God, all the pores of the skin, even the roots of the hair, become like so many sexual organs, and in every pore the aspirant enjoys the happiness of communion with the Ātman.

– Ramakrishna

I was 20 when this event took place and as you can imagine it completely changed my perception of reality. Within months I dropped out of college. I knew without any doubt that there was a force operating in the world that was beyond my ability to direct and control events in my life. It instantly seemed both silly and absurd to think that I was the doer of anything that was manifesting or transpiring in and around me. My understanding and my decision to surrender to this power was proven right as I was able to start and take two companies public, raising millions of dollars and retiring at age 40, never having graduated from college. Like the Kundalini experience that took over internally, I just listened and watched and everything externally unfolded perfectly. Such is the wonder of Kundalini.

If you can awaken your Kundalini it makes the process of purification and attaining higher states of consciousness and merger with the Field much easier. This is why it's so valued. The primary reason, if not the only reason, to do hatha yoga and raja yoga is to awaken the Kundalini. On a subtle level this Kundalini is within and without and alive on all levels of creation. My initial experience is not the norm, although I have spoken with people who had similar experiences and I've read stories somewhat like mine. There is a lot more interest today in Kundalini yoga than there was even 10 years ago, the natural outcome of millions of people doing hatha yoga. People want a deeper, more fulfilling experience of yoga on levels of awareness and consciousness beyond the physical. There are many schools and centers teaching Kundalini yoga today. In almost all centers there is a distinct path of method and exercises that people do to rouse the Kundalini.

Two great teachers who are no longer with us described Kundalini Yoga in books. Yogi Bhajan wrote, "Kundalini Yoga consists of active and passive asana-based kriyas, pranayama, and meditation which target the whole body system (nervous system, glands, mental faculties, chakras) to develop awareness, consciousness and spiritual strength." Swami Sivananda wrote, "Kundalini Yoga, at its highest form, is practiced for the purpose of attaining bliss, opening the heart center, developing power, serving others, attaining self-realization and ultimately merging into God consciousness."

It's not easy to awaken the Kundalini; in fact it's quite difficult. It takes a lot of love, dedication, faith, attention and one-pointedness to perform these exercises, which can be quite strenuous. Thousands of people have done these exercises for years and still have not gotten the Kundalini to awaken. If it happened easily, people would be going down to their local yoga center and asking to have their Kundalini awakened. That is not happening – but these centers will teach the exercises that will help awaken it.

A word of caution: there have been stories of people who have had their Kundalini aroused and had difficulty dealing with it. Gopi Krishna has written a couple of books about his own experience and difficulty with Kundalini. His experience has given Kundalini something of a bad rap, but I believe it's way overdone. Kundalini is the dynamic feminine force of consciousness. It's intelligent. Its purpose is not to hurt you but to transform you and take you to higher levels of awareness.

Another good example of the subtle power of Kundalini is the experience of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the great philosopher and writer. He went through a powerful Kundalini experience in his late 20s. He referred to it as "the process." He claimed the process continued throughout his life on subtler and subtler levels, but initially it was quite intense and very confusing. In the end it turned out to be life altering and transcending for him although he rarely talked about it during any of his discourses, speeches or interaction with the students around him. I speculate the reason for this is that he recognized how difficult it is to awaken the Kundalini, especially without a teacher, and he didn't want to encourage people to try to make it happen. You don't need your Kundalini awakened to have a powerful experience of the Field, and he knew that.

Kundalini is mysterious and powerful. The safest and surest way to awaken the Kundalini so you wind up getting your best results is to find a teacher who not only can arouse the Kundalini but can take it all the way to its final union and resting place in the heart. Very few teachers can both arouse the Kundalini and lead it all the way to the crown chakra where you can experience total ecstatic fusion, and then to the heart or universal core quantum center of your being, which is its final resting place. In a true classical experience like mine, as the Kundalini rises it opens up each chakra and absorbs or swallows the chakra completely before moving higher. This absorption of the chakras as the Kundalini rises is also called laya yoga.

There are subtle energy channels on either side of the spine called the ida and pingala, along with the sushumna, which is inside the spine. The Kundalini becomes active in these three channels and moves up the spine to the top of your head. It appears that the vagus nerve, which wraps around either side of the spine, correspond to the ida and pingala This nerve runs directly into the brain. The Kundalini, working in conjunction with the actual physical vagus nerve, absorbs and retracts its electrical signals. This is why sometimes people report losing sensation in their arms, legs or entire body. This can happen even the very first time someone meditates. In a total Kundalini experience, all conscious connection through the nerves to all parts of the body is completely absorbed. This is what happens when a yogi goes into a super conscious transcendental state. All the energy and awareness in the body is completely withdrawn into the upper part of the brain.

When I lived with Swami Muktanada in 1975 and also in India I saw hundreds of people having significant Kundalini experiences. People would share their experiences on a daily basis during the evening programs and also during weekend intensive programs. Many of the stories were quite phenomenal. Dozens upon dozens of articles have been written describing these experiences.

In these events people reported a wide range of experiences, from visions to seeing colored lights. In a room of 1,000 people it looked like a freeform, wild, out of control hatha yoga class. Participants made animal noises, from birds calling to lions roaring. This movement happened spontaneously by the power of Kundalini and it was thrilling and awe-inspiring to witness. At times the Kundalini spread from one person to the next, causing the person to perform the identical and unusual yoga asana. People were not copying one another; the energy alone made it happen. This did not happen a lot, but I watched it happen on a number of occasions.

For certain people these movements and ecstatic states would not stop after the meditation session was over. Sometimes I helped carry people out of the room and put chocolate into their mouths to bring them back into body consciousness. There is nothing like a chunk of sugary chocolate in your mouth to bring you to your senses and connect you to your body. Universally the participants would report they felt totally safe. The Kundalini appeared completely intuitive and in control and no fear arose as to what might happen next. The Kundalini also knew exactly what the participant needed in that moment. Sometimes it was a physical movement or kriya to unblock the energy flowing through the body. People reported seeing lights or visions. Many individuals spontaneously went into rapid breathing pranayama called bhastrika. Often someone's breath stopped for an extended period of time, an action called kumbhaka. The photo of Muktananda's guru Nityananda and his large belly, which hung in the front of the room, was a reminder of this unending kumbhaka. Others reported feeling tingling in certain parts of their bodies. For some their hands or their legs would lose sensation. Some said they heated up and others reported their limbs went cold. These are all signs the Kundalini is awake and operating inside you. It's important to note that the Kundalini functions on so many levels that it can become active in any one of the chakras at any time. It doesn't have to start at the base of your spine to be awakened; it could be awakened instantly in your third eye or in your heart center. For months, I often experienced a spontaneous physical pulling of my head back so that I felt the back of my head was nailed to my shoulders. It seemed the energy was trying to undo a blockage so Kundalini could enter my third eye or crown chakra. Over five years I experienced almost every type of breathing and movement possible.

This is why I recommend finding an experienced teacher who is familiar with all these manifestations of the Kundalini. Trying arduously to awaken your Kundalini can be a long and frustrating experience. In 1994 I built a house with a large temple and a bigger than life-size statue of Nityananda. He had died in 1961 and I had never met him. Day after day I tried to manipulate and control the Kundalini inside my body by doing certain breathing exercises initiated by me alone. Completing a thousand conscious upward breaths every day from the base of my spine to the top of my head gave me a big headache at times. I thought, I know how to do this. I can make this happen. I can put myself into Samadhi (super conscious state). I got very high, but I was not in that transcendent state that I had experienced effortlessly earlier with no doing on my part. That happened by identifying with Nityananda and repeating the mantra Guru Om. I was mimicking what I thought should happen. This is what I see people try to do by practicing Kundalini breathing, mudras and asanas in Kundalini yoga. You will benefit and you may be successful, but it probably will be difficult.

During this time in Boston, I was doing my own meditation programs or satsangs. In the midst of meditation I would get up and go around and physically touch participants the same way I saw Muktananda touch people thousands of times. With the large statue of Bhagwan Nityananda in the front of the room I felt I was not the one who was doing the touching. Participants would report having powerful experiences and seeing visions or lights, but my experience was completely normal and not eventful. I did it because I wanted to be helpful to others and provide a safe place for people to deepen their internal experience. I also thought my action would probably help intensify my own experience. In reality it did intensify my experience, but not the way I had imagined. You can read in my autobiography why I stopped having these meditations in the temple of my home. The one thing I realized from touching people was that someone could have an awakening and a powerful experience and it really had nothing to do with me. Although it appeared that energy was moving through me and coming from a Source beyond me, I was just a conduit. Even though the awakening Source appears to be coming from outside the individual, the real Source is the center of your own being. This is important to remember in every practice. You're the Source, you're the Field. Let's call it a quantum timeless space where everyone and everything exists without end, including your own self.

A perfect example of Kundalini, timeless space, and connecting with Source was Joyce Green, a Brooklyn housewife with three children who in 1972 was trying to lose weight by doing breathing exercises. She intensified her breathing so much that she claimed Jesus Christ appeared to her, and then Nityananda, instructing her on what mantra to use. Her experience was so transcendent and transformative that even the noted writer and teacher Ram Dass ended up spending over a year with her and following her instructions. Considering how extremely devoted he was to his guru Neem Karoli Baba, whom he had made famous in the book Be Here Now but who had died, this was quite amazing. It didn't turn out so well for him, and he wrote an article entitled "Egg on My Beard" to describe what had transpired with Joyce, who was also known as Joya. Years later she changed her name to Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati and had an ashram with hundreds of followers in Florida. The point is that you can awaken the Kundalini if you have enough desire to make it happen. It's centered inside you and can manifest as a teacher coming from a timeless space. As I say, the universe gives you everything you want. It doesn't have a choice. If it's your inclination to pursue Kundalini awakening you can certainly make it happen and the universe will give you exactly what you need.

This leads me now to explain how I think one can and should access the Field using Kundalini. You can pick any saint or sage (alive or dead) for whom you have tremendous love, affection and respect. You can pick Christ or Buddha if they are the ones you feel the strongest connection with. You will know intuitively whom to pick. Pick one in whom you have complete faith and trust. When you intensely concentrate, meditate, and identify with these individuals and their forms, your brain, mind and heart will awaken the Kundalini within you. Their timeless forms are really inside of you; there is no separation with them in spite of what your mind might tell you. Simply put, you become what you meditate on and identify with. Remember, that's how quantum physics works. You just have to approach it with tremendous faith and love for the individual on whom you're meditating. You also need to have great love for yourself. You're as much a spark of the divine as they are. They are not higher than you are. The biggest mistake you can make is to see yourself as less than these great beings. The reality is you're not separate from them. The separation of subject from object is an illusion created by the brain and mind. Dissolving and not holding this sense of separation in your mind is the greatest gift you can give yourself. What makes it so hard to practice this way is that our unconscious mind and lower brain have been trained to see ourselves as smaller than and separate from almost everyone around us. Be kind to yourself as you begin to meditate and identify with the object of your meditation.

People ask me: "Do you really think Jesus or the Buddha can awaken my Kundalini?" I like to tell them about the Italian priest, Padre Pio, who died in 1968 and whom many people see as a saint. Understand Padre Pio, his intensity, devotion and what he did for his practice and you will see how effective this can be. He so completely identified with Christ while he was a young priest that he started to experience stigmata, the wounds of Christ, in his hands and feet on a regular basis. He totally merged his mind and consciousness into identification with what he perceived was Christ and with the wounds from his crucifixion. In an amazing survey, the Italian people were asked who they prayed to in the time of need, and Padre Pio came in first – ahead of Christ and the Virgin Mary. It's easy for Italians to pray to Padre Pio because he's one of them. He is the guy next door. Their unconscious mind accepts his connection with God or Source because they saw him do it and he is one of them. What helps even more is that they have photographs of Padre Pio. Their unconscious mind says, This guy has a connection with God, a connection that I can relate to. They are not trying to do what he did and develop stigmata. They just want someone they believe in to act as a go-between with the higher Source when they are in a time of need. You can see his picture in a lot of coffee and gelato shops in Italy today.

The brain has millions of so called mirror neurons that can completely perceive, identify and copy actions it sees outside itself. This is what makes it easier when you're looking at an image or photograph of a real person when meditating and identifying with them. For many, a real person is more effective than a drawing or painting. The surest way to awaken Kundalini with the individual of your choice is to implant their form into your own body using a mantra. From brain science we can see how this would work by making our cerebellums perceive, memorize and implant the image and characteristics of another into itself. The 18th century Hindu saint Chidananda Avadhuta, who wrote a book titled Jnana-Sindhu (Ocean of Knowledge), recommended doing this. This is my paraphrased translation, which originally was written in the Tamil language:

You should concentrate on the form of the Guru and see him or her in all parts of your body. Have your mind become quiet and as still as possible. Honor and worship the Guru over and over again in your own mind with great love and without any hesitation or reservation. While meditating on the form of the Guru perceive that he or she is all around you, above, below and beside. Imagine your body completely immersed into his body and his body in you. Identify with his body. Eliminate all separation from your mind. Recognize and worship yourself as pure love. Sit down and relax into the most comfortable posture. Become quiet, still and peaceful. Raise your hand to the top of your head and begin to touch the parts of your body one after another, imagining that they are the form of the Guru. As you touch everything—your eyes, your ears, your nose, your chin, your neck—repeat the mantra Guru Om, Guru Om, over and over again. You should touch every part of your body from your head to your toes, arms, hand, belly, thighs, and legs while repeating the mantra Guru Om with great faith, love and intensity. Completely understand and feel that you truly are planting the mantra into every pore of your body and that body is the Guru's body and your body is the Guru's. When you finally make it to the tip of your toenails repeating Guru Om you can then start to go back up the body and implant the mantra into your calves, your knees, and every other part again to the top of your head. Recognize that you are the Guru and the Guru is you. Think I am Jesus or whomever your Guru happens to be. There is no separation between you. Continue to repeat the mantra Guru Om with every breath. Do this practice every day alone in your meditation spot. As you walk around in your everyday life, hold the awareness and the understanding that you and the Guru are one. That you in fact are the Guru. That you, the Guru, and Field of Love are one. Let this awareness and feeling overwhelm you and your being in every way possible. This will certainly arouse the Kundalini, the Divine feminine consciousness, inside of you. This force, this power, this love will of its own accord start to manifest both internally and externally in all areas of your life. This will be a doorway into the Field, without a doubt.

For those who are inclined and have a stronger connection with the divine feminine you can also use the mantra Ma Om over and over again in the same way. Touch your head Ma Om then your eyes Ma Om never stop repeating Ma Om as you implant her and the mantra throughout your entire body and being. If you ever wondered what kind of intensity 19th century Indian saint Ramakrishna Paramahamsa brought to his practice, this is what it looked like. A statue of the Hindu goddess Kali in the Dakshineswar temple of Kolkata came to life for Ramakrishna. On a quantum level you could see how this could manifest for him. It just takes a lot of one-pointed devotion and a total commitment of the mind to actually manifest and then merge with the object of its attention. If you're fortunate to be able to spend time with a great being, do not waste time on any other practice. The divinity of that individual lies within you as you, so identify with them and become them. That will be your highest joy. That will be your entrance into the unlimited Field of Love.

When your Kundalini is awakened it can be very subtle or dramatic. The range of experience can be far and wide. Just continue to practice with great faith and the Kundalini will give you the experiences and the guidance you need to continue on your road to an amazing connection with Source.

I am my thoughts.

Okay, tell me another story.
Jnana

Jnana or the path of knowledge is the constant movement of your attention to the reality of love, oneness and most importantly non-separation. You're using your neocortex and the frontal lobe of your thinking brain to re-center itself over and over again until the brain rewires itself and lays in new neural pathways that completely support your attention as pure knowledge and awareness in the Field. One who practices Jnana is called a Jnani.

Jnana in the highest sense is pure knowledge and awareness of the one reality in which subjects and objects have ceased to exist. The mind is not trying to comprehend, experience, or understand a state that is different and apart from itself, the subject. The moment you even sense a thought you bring your attention back to pure awareness. When in the state of Jnana there can be no object that is separate from the knower or subject. There really is no doer. Everything just appears as movement. The nature of that unity is love. The Jnani sees nothing separate from himself or herself. There is no ignorance or delusion in the world. A Jnani sees everything as perfection and embraces it all as himself or herself. There is no judgment, there is no high or low or good or bad. To the Jnani everything is equal. Everything is one in the Field. The Jnani drops all concepts even of Jnana. Jnana is dense burning knowledge that no cup can hold. No thought or concept can survive this pure awareness.

In the fall of 1975 when I was living with Muktananda in Oakland, one afternoon he gave me a bright yellow wide brim felt hat. On this hat was written Thou art That. Since the words were written around the entire circumference of the hat it was difficult to immediately see what it said. I looked at Muktananda and thought Why are you giving me this crazy hat that says this is a hat? It wasn't until a few moments later that I realized it said Thou art That.

Thou art That translates in Sanskrit to Tat Tvam Asi. It can also mean "That art thou," "That thou art," "You are that," or "That you are." There are a number of other statements, or "Grand pronouncements" as they are called, that are designed to help the individual understand that the subject and object are just an illusion. Another one is Neti Neti which means not this not this. You see everything around you and think not this not this. It would have been great if my mind could have totally received and understood the gift of that hat in the moment but it wasn't meant to be. I was living in the ashram and like many others, saw myself as a limited, separate being with years of practice ahead of me.

So'ham Japa

So'ham in Sanskrit translates to "I am He" or "I am That." It really means identifying oneself with the universe and all objects in it. Unlike other mantras you can use So'ham as a continuous, uninterrupted mantra along with your breath no matter what activity you're performing. By doing this, you end up controlling your breathing pattern, which quiets the brain. This instantly helps, enhances and facilitates concentration and settling of the mind. The word japa (italics) means mantra repetition.

For people who practice present-moment awareness there's nothing like using the So'ham mantra to center your being in the moment. Your breath is inextricably connected with your body, and your body is always in the present moment. In essence, with every breath you're dissolving the object into the subject and the subject into the object. This is the meaning of the words "I am that." The breath just keeps you connected to the mantra. This is how it's done. Even though So'ham is written "h-a-m," you pronounce "ham" as "hum."

Soooooo........ is the sound of inhalation and is remembered in the mind as you inhale.

Hummm........ is the sound of exhalation and is remembered in the mind as you exhale.

If you feel inclined to practice this, start with 5 to 10 minutes and see whether you can watch and listen to the sound of the mantra mixing with your breath. Just get used to the sound as if you're listening to a song that you like. It's easy to do; just play with it. When a thought arises just let it be and don't try to stop it; just recognize, and hear the sound of your breath and So'ham happening in spite of your thought process. The sound is just the awareness of your breath coming in and out. Eventually you will experience that So'ham is happening all by itself. Is it possible to be aware of your breath and the sound it makes and be thinking at the same time? Yes it is! What will happen is the sound and the feel of the breath will become intoxicating. Your thoughts will subside and sometimes stop for an extended period of time. It can be heavenly.

If you're lucky, you might get to the point where you cannot stop So'ham from being there all the time. That is what it's like for the Jnani. He or she just becomes pure awareness witnessing the breath. Do it in every activity. If you notice that you have lost awareness of your breath, simply recognize it and bring it back.

The ultimate goal is to have everything merge into one. Breath, So'ham, and all the objects within view or arising in the mind become one. Recently, I sat in India with a yogi who kept his right arm raised above his head for 38 years nonstop. I could easily see that there really was no effort for this yogi in holding up his arm after so many years of practice. I'm sure it was incredibly difficult in the beginning but it became second nature for him. He was laughing and joking quite a bit. So it can be with So'ham; you eventually get to the point where it's going on all the time effortlessly. It will always be there. You even get to the point where there is not a thought or conceptualization of I am that. There is no thought, no thinking any way. There is just the continuous, unending awareness. Not even awareness of the breath going in and out. You might start witnessing the pure non-separation of all objects around you. You just become pure awareness. The mind can become so still from this that all thought will stop. You will begin to have the experience of the Jnani, recognizing everything as you. This greatly heightens the experience of living in the Field full time. That is the Field of Love. Do So'ham and train your mind and brain with the breath to fall in love with every object around it. Consciously direct and redirect your attention.

Here again slightly edited from my autobiography is my first experience with So'ham. As with my initial experience with Kundalini I got a little more than I bargained for. My naiveté along with my intense, one-pointed desire worked for me. The chapter title in the autobiography is So'ham.

Be kind to you.
So'ham

After a month went by, I was ready to find out more about Muktananda. I saw he was responsible for my Kundalini experience and he scared me. I knew he was alive, living in India far away from me, so I did feel safe enough to order a few other books he had written. They came in a couple of weeks, but I was in no hurry. I wanted to delve into them very carefully. I got a copy of the little red, four-inch square, twenty page book called So'ham Japa: A Meditation Technique for Everyone. It was very simple and easy to read.

The So'ham mantra translates into "I am he." The "I" in this statement is the individual self, and the "he" is a universal self, or as we know it in the West, spirit, or God. This mantra could be done effortlessly and easily by silently repeating it with the natural inhalation and exhalation of the breath through the nose. The word or sound "So" was to be thought on the inhalation and "ham" (pronounced "hum") was to be thought on the exhalation. He called it the natural mantra and said it could take one into the enlightened state of the Sahaja Samadhi. He described Sahaja Samadhi as the state of enlightened awareness in which one is awake, conscious, and can easily go about all of one's daily activities of eating, working, sleeping, and so on while simultaneously in a state of expanded awareness of connection.

I was excited because it did not sound like it would kill me, unlike the experience I had while repeating the mantra Guru Om. This technique was to simply inhale and be aware of So, and exhale and be aware of Ham. In the final paragraph of the book, Muktananda writes that one can do this mantra while walking, talking, eating, and seeing: in essence, every moment one is awake. Because of my prior experience, I took what Muktananda was describing very seriously and believed everything he said.

I decided to practice So'ham because, on a deep level, even though I was scared, I wanted to experience what Muktananda described as the waking state of bliss, Sahaja Samadhi. As an experiment, I made the commitment on one Saturday afternoon to repeat the mantra consciously on every breath for six hours. There was no particular reason for six hours, but I figured that in that amount of time I would most likely take a walk, eat, and end up talking to Tom or David. I wanted to try to repeat the mantra during all of those activities and see what would happen. At mid-afternoon I began my practice.

It was relatively easy at first; I was sitting on my bed feeling my breath go in and out. Breathing in, I listened to the sound So, which I imagined in my mind. Breathing out, I listened to the sound Ham. While I was listening, it seemed that the noise of my breath moving in and out was making the sound So'ham by itself. Maybe I never really listened carefully to the sound of the air as it went in and out of my nostrils. I was so focused on what I was hearing, it took over and I began to hear So'ham on every inhalation and exhalation without any effort. For the first hour or so, other thoughts would arise like, This is cool. I wonder what this is going to be like once I do it for a while. A thought would interrupt the mantra for a moment and when I realized it, I would just bring my mind back to hearing So'ham.

Everything was going pretty well even after a couple of hours. My mind was still without thoughts. My breath was steady, even, and rhythmic. I felt slightly high with my even and soft breath. When I looked at the clock, I heard the thought, Only a few more hours to go. I went back to the mantra and the breath, So'ham. I made no effort in any way to hear the internal mantra; it was going on naturally and easily by itself, just as Muktananda had described it in the book. There was no stress or strain.

As I moved around a little while still sitting on the bed, I became slightly more intoxicated by the repetition, especially at the peak of the inhalation, and at that still point before the exhalation. Even though there was only a second or two pause before the outward breath, it felt like some juicy energy was being squeezed out of the pregnant pause. I noticed the same sensation on the outward exhalation and the still point before the next inhalation. I felt completely soothed and relaxed. As I concentrated on witnessing these sensations, the intoxication I felt during the pregnant pauses spread completely throughout the entire cycle of breathing. I was beginning to feel really, really high.

I saw everything in my room, including my little altar, but as my gaze passed over each object, there was absolutely no thought: my mind was settled on the sound of So'ham. I didn't have any desire for anything; I was simply experiencing the profound delight of being. I then had the distinct sense that the objects in my room were actually not separate from me at all. It was a perception similar to the one I had sensed during my Guru Om experience after the energy had passed through my throat and I saw and knew everything as myself. Even though the translation that Muktananda used for So'ham was "I am he," my experience was more, "I am it" or "It is all me." Whenever I inhaled, I was figuratively gathering the objects I perceived into myself, and when I exhaled they were coming back out of me into form. It was a sweet loop of creation. I was both the perceiver and what I perceived. The concept of subject and object was completely disappearing during the pauses between the breaths. Subject (I) and object (that) became one and the same. My mind slowly dissolved. There was no separateness. That was my reality. Pleasure, enjoyment, and even ecstasy melded into that union of non-separate awareness.

By this point about four hours had passed and it was easy to stay in that state. I was moved to get up and walk into the kitchen. My experience did not change at all. I heard So'ham on each and every breath. It continued by itself even when I began to speak with Tom. I was acutely aware of every breath and was captivated by the experience of being completely present in each and every moment, in a most subtle way. I opened the fridge, looked inside, and continued to talk to Tom. Words came out of my mouth very easily and normally, but I noticed the awareness of the breath forcefully reasserting itself the moment I stopped talking or Tom began speaking. The awareness of the breath was dominant unless I had to use it to form words. As I heard him speak, I had the same experience I had when looking at objects in my room. He appeared to be part of my own self speaking to me. There was no him and no me, even though the language we used in our conversation supported the idea of separation.

I went back into my room and again sat on my bed, enjoying the flow. At about 10 p.m. I lay down. I wondered how I will sleep? I had the identical experience while lying down that I'd had while sitting up. The breaths flowed in and out normally and I was aware of every one of them. The vague remnant of the sound of the mantra accompanied every breath. The actual sound of the breath was so much like the mantra that I lost the distinction between the two. My mind was so still, I witnessed the sound without any thought. There was a current of energy flowing through my body that was not only delightful, but mildly invigorating. Because of this, the desire for sleep never came. I lay there the whole night without sleeping at all. A few times my breath became very slow and would stop for what seemed to be thirty seconds to a minute. It was dark in the room, but being in a state with no thought, there was just a sense that I had become pure presence or awareness. The flow of energy was completely nurturing. There was no thought, no dreams, not even deep sleep during that first night. Only my new awareness existed.

I got out of bed the next morning and went about my normal daily routine. I didn't sleep at all last night, passed through my mind. When any recognizable thought came to me, the awareness of my breath was totally dominant. It was as if someone had turned up the volume of the sound of my breath from two to ten, and I could not avoid the awareness of it. In the past, when I paid attention to my breath, I could observe it for only a short period of time, maybe a minute, before other thoughts arose. I had found it difficult to stop the mind. In contrast, the awareness of my breath was now completely effortless and unending. The ingoing and outgoing breath was paying attention to me, forcing me to be aware of it, to witness it. I realized by noontime that this experience was not going to go away anytime soon. It was so enjoyable anyway that I had no desire for it to end. The process continued day and night for the next few weeks without any need for sleep whatsoever. With no break in the interruption of this awareness and with little rest, I went to my classes and did my work at both the laboratory and at the farm.

One day I was working in the lab for one of my PhD professors who directed me to run an experiment to determine how much nitrogen was contained in this new strain of watermelon leaves growing at the farm. I took a sample of the leaves and placed them in a closed beaker. I then heated the beaker with a Bunsen burner to release the nitrogen into a vapor that traveled through a spiral-shaped tube. The gas would also pass through a very sensitive meter that gave a read-out of the total amount of nitrogen released once the leaves had been consumed. It usually took about two or three minutes for each small portion to fully cook. On this particular day while performing my analysis, as I sat on my stool in a cross-legged position (which I did frequently because it was comfortable), I had my first abnormal experience of the So'ham mantra.

As had been the case over the past few weeks, I was completely conscious of every single breath I took. Sometimes I would hear So'ham attached to the breathing, but for the most part, the natural sound of the ingoing and outgoing breath was prevalent. Sitting on the stool, I ignited the burner and started to heat the small patch of leaves inside the beaker. As soon as I lit the flame, my breathing came to a complete standstill. My eyes rolled up inside my head even though my eyelids were still halfway open. I saw the familiar field of blue-violet light. I was riveted to the radiance and the sensation that transmitted from the light. It was intoxicating. Without any effort on my part, and after only a few minutes, my eyes reopened just in time to turn off the burner and take an accurate reading on the meter. Each time I would go onto the next batch of leaves, the sensation was more intense than it had been during the previous batch. The cycle continued for two or three hours while I performed the experiments. Somehow, throughout this process, the moment I needed to open my eyes and disengage the burner, I would. Coming out of this state time and time again, I wondered, Who is the one who knows when to open the eyes at the right moment? There was clearly some intelligence operating through me without any willingness or prompting on my part. When my workday ended, I simply got up and left as I normally did and continued to be acutely aware of my breaths.

My recognition of the continuous breathing went on for almost a month, and once in a while, I would experience a thought pass through me: I am in some permanent altered state of consciousness. Is this what it's like to be enlightened? Sometimes the thought arose, I am he, I am a realized being. A week later my experience of So'ham came to a sudden and unexpected end in the most unusual way.

The mind runs a scam

and calls it knowledge.
Jnana and  
The First-Person Exercise™

Going to the heart of Jnana and holding your attention can be facilitated with another exercise. I call it the first-person exercise. This is very simple. Whenever a thought arises about anything just put the entire thought, both the subject and the object, in the first person (I). Conceptually, most people understand that everything is a projection of themselves. That is the basis for the first-person exercise. The exercise just presses and forces the mind to continuously hold the understanding of oneness and non-separation. Ken and Penny Keyes, the authors of Handbook to Higher Consciousness and Handbook to Higher Consciousness: The Workbook, started to do this type of exercise of seeing everything as yourself in the early '70s. In their own words " Here are the directions for making a significant instant expansion in your consciousness: Expand your love, your consciousness, and your loving compassion by experiencing everything that everyone does or says as though you had done or said it." Here is how I suggest doing their exercise.

A thought arises: The apple is beautiful. Immediately you switch the thought in your mind to the first-person thought, I am beautiful. You think Okay, I like that. I get that. The next thought, That guy is a jerk becomes I am a jerk. Okay. And I want Ann to leave me alone becomes I want me to leave me alone. And I need John to love me becomes I need me to love me. It's first person because there is no one, no thing, that is not you. Reality from a quantum holographic standpoint is a projection of yourself.

John is mean to Anne and he shouldn't be becomes I am mean to me and I shouldn't be. First person, first person, first person. Get it? There is no sense holding on to or identifying with the new first-person thought because there's no use for hanging on to and attaching to any thought. Remember, we are trying to quiet the mind and lose all thought, all sense of separation. When a thought is done, it's done.

If my new first person thought is, I am a jerk, I can take a look inside and find Yeah, I am a jerk sometimes. That's not so difficult to do. I could also find that I am a jerk to myself in the moment I perceive him or her as a jerk. That is another interesting way to look at it completely from a first-person mindset. When you have a negative thought about someone else it's important to see or understand that whatever you do to someone else in your mind you do to yourself in your mind. Inevitably this thought or judgment creates the sense of duality and separation, not only with the person you're judging but within your own mind in regards to yourself. The other person, the object, is an illusion. In reality you will come to see that you also are an illusion. This is the reason you're doing this exercise anyway: to get rid of any sense of separation.

Once you put the thought in the first person it doesn't mean you have to walk around all day thinking I am beautiful or I am a jerk—after all that would be just identifying and attaching to another thought, thereby supporting duality and the sense of separation. You just need a quick recognition that I am beautiful or I am a jerk in the moment that you perceive him, her, or it to be beautiful or a jerk, and then drop it. These first-person statements are only momentary perceptions that you recognize and let go of until the next thought, belief or judgment arises. The more you do this, the quieter your mind will become. In fact, gradually you will get tired of hearing the first person statement about any person or object, and your mind will become still as the sense of separation with yourself and all objects dissolves.

It's important to note that these first-person statements are not reversals or turnarounds of other methods. In a reversal, for example, I am dumb could become I am smart or I am not willing becomes I am willing. Those techniques can be helpful, but many times they have the tendency to support duality and separation and the subject/object existence. We are just interested in reducing all thought to a singular point of oneness and pure awareness where the sense of subject and object dissolves. Finally we even drop the thought and concept of oneness, unity and even the Field of Love.

Jnanis are relentless and ruthless, in a manner of speaking, with the thoughts that arise within. They take no prisoners, meaning they refuse to support duality. They are not interested in that. They are willing to investigate every thought. They practice seeing everyone and everything in complete unity. That's the first-person exercise. They recognize it's all me all the time. You might think, Wow, that's a big leap. Is that really true? All I can say is, experiment and see how it feels to you to recognize everything as yourself. Then do it over and over again. This will collapse your thought process so that you become still and just stay as the "I," the subject, because to see it any other way will start to feel uncomfortable, even painful. Eventually, even the "I" will dissolve. The other benefit is that your recognition of the objects outside of you as you will create a fusion of love with those objects. Simple awareness will create a current of love within. Jesus said "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and I add "because they are you." Seeing reality from a quantum holographic viewpoint backs up this truth.

To take it one step further, recognize your body and mind as objects of your thought. You are the subject but even your mind and body are objects. There is only awareness. Here is an example of a thought. My body is fat. I love that one. Personally the thought was embedded in my brain and memorized. I heard it first from others as a child, then from my parents and brothers, and then repeated it to myself in my mind, both consciously and unconsciously. Mirror mirror on the wall... you understand. I did it so much so that I was resigned to the fact it would never leave me because even if I wasn't fat, my brain and unconscious mind was committed to another belief.

What's great about the first-person exercise is that you don't have to get your brain or your mind to change its beliefs. You just allow them to do what they do. Pure awareness recognizes the separation the mind creates with the objects around itself. My body is fat becomes My "I" is fat. Or I could say My mind is fat in the moment I have the thought My body is fat. Awareness does not judge. It recognizes the brain and mind are just doing their thing. Awareness just watches. It doesn't even try to stop it. The brain, and in particular the insula with its "I" thoughts, wants to take ownership of everything it's processing. The mind is tricky. It acts like a willing participant in the process but in reality it doesn't like being pure awareness. The mind doesn't like being an object or being quiet and dissolving. I can't blame it, because ownership is what keeps it doing its job of protecting itself.

One of the best things about this exercise is that it never lies. Whatever is in front to you is your projection all the time. It does not discriminate. It's not as if you can decide This is my projection now or This is not my projection now. It's you all the time. That is the great power of this exercise. That is pure jnana and all you have to do is recognize what the mind does. It's that simple.

At the same time Ken and Penny Keyes, the authors of Handbook to Higher Consciousness and Handbook to Higher Consciousness: The Workbook were doing these exercise in Berkeley, CA, I was a few miles away living with Muktanada. I just wish there had been an instruction card with exercises like the first person exercise that came with the Thou art That hat Muktananda gave me at the time, but that was not to be.

The present moment is an illusion

of a past that never happened.
Jnana and Present-Moment Awareness

The biggest illusion is the sense of "I." Objects appearing in the Field are the second grand illusion. The third illusion is a sense of time, the now and the present moment.

Much attention is paid these days to the practice of present-moment awareness and the power of now. People say to me "I'm right here right now. I'm in the present moment totally engaged with all of my senses and focused on exactly what I'm doing."

I ask, "How does that feel?"

They respond, "It feels pretty good."

Well for me, pretty good is not good enough. The present moment is an illusion of a past that wasn't real. Let's not support the illusion that the present moment is real; let's push a little further and go beyond this natural perception of the brain and mind.

Practicing present-moment awareness might be more peaceful than going into the future or the past, but I'm interested in much more than that. Thinking of the future may give you fear, and thinking of the past in many cases causes suffering from painful memories, so staying in the present can be very helpful. But objects that we see in the present moment are not real. They were not real a second ago, they're not real in this moment, they are all an illusion – including your body, and even your thoughts – so stop wasting your time trying to stay present with them. Mindfulness and loving kindness practices work don't get me wrong. My point is that if you really analyze, look very deeply, and get totally intimate with the objects in front of you, an amazing thing will start to happen. Love. Yes that's right, love. Not ordinary love but love so complete that both the lover and the loved get lost. Something else happens, too—if concentration on an object becomes completely one-pointed, time stops. During that fusion there is no time and there is no now. There is no present moment.

This fusion can take place instantaneously in your heart for no reason when you see someone or something that moves you. At that moment you're merging and fusing with the object of your perception. The feeling is so strong that no thought arises: it's just love. From heart and brain science we could probably see this on an electromagnetic level as your energies intermingle with one another. Some people report it's like a chemical reaction, that they knew instantly or that the feeling overtook them, that they lost themselves in that love.

Patanjali's yoga sutras are all about merging subject with object. This merger can take place in different energy centers in your body from your heart to your throat to your head. The net result is a fusion of love. He would call it Samadhi. These Samadhis happen to different degrees, but what's important to understand is that it takes place when any object completely merges with you as the subject and your center of perception or awareness. The love you have for your girlfriend or boyfriend is just a tiny taste of what real merger feels like. This continuous, unending feeling of love is what people describe when they are in the Field during an NDE, and it's why they don't want it to end.

From a physics standpoint all mass has the inherent tendency to gather and form through the simple size, weight or mass of its own being. It will pull other matter toward itself through the force of gravity and congeal into a larger mass. This is how stars are formed. If a gaseous cloud in space is massive enough and the gas pressure is insufficient to support it, the cloud will collapse in upon itself and form a star. Literally, the mass is so big it congeals and forms a ball we call a star. That process is similar to what happens when you as the perceiver merge with the object of your perception.

When the mass of the gaseous cloud is big enough, its gravitational pull becomes so strong that the outer surface of the mass (soon to become star) is pulled toward its core or center. In this process hydrogen atoms on the surface are crunched together under the intense pressure, and fusion takes place. Countless hydrogen atoms merge and turn into helium atoms. This is fusion, and the result—in addition to new helium atoms—is trillions upon trillions of photons hurling through space in the form of light. Look up at the sun and the stars. All you're seeing is the fusion of the simplest atoms of hydrogen merging with one another and creating light. That's what's going on out there all the time in the physical universe: merger, fusion, light, and love. The universe is really one big light and love machine and this is what most of the physical universe is doing. If you want to know what Source or God is up to, just look up either day or night. If you asked those who've experienced NDE or out-of-body experiences to describe what the light feels like during their experience, the majority would say love. Others would say it's indescribable and beyond what we call love. Light and love are most often given as the descriptions when people come out of that altered state. St. Francis of Assisi was enlightened by looking up at the stars at night. He wasn't just present with them, he merged and became one with them.

Think of yourself as a star for one moment. You're seeing objects around you. If you were large enough and had a big enough gravitational field, objects would move toward you. If you merged and fused with the object, the outcome would be light and love. This happens on a deep mental and quantum level during meditation and is what the yoga sutras are all about. When the fusion of subject with object is strong enough, the result is Samadhi. The sensation of that Samadhi is pure undifferentiated love and energy. You may also have this experience of fusion in the presence of a great being as the density of their presence removes and stops the activity in your mind.

On a daily basis, our brains keep people and objects at a safe distance as a natural protective mechanism. If we could break down our natural tendency to protect ourselves and instead allow ourselves to receive everything outside of ourselves, the experience would be love. That is why it's much more difficult to receive than to give. There is so much love coming at us, in receiving, if we just let it happen. Amazingly, what stops us is the fear of love. A Jnani has overcome this fear of complete intimacy and just recognizes and receives all objects as his or her own self. Fusion and love are the result. That is why I said if you look very deeply, getting totally intimate with the objects in front of you, an amazing thing starts to happen: love. A mother falls in love with her child at first sight. There is no effort in it. The brain is wired that way. Rewire your brain to fall in love with everything, every person, every object in front of you. If you asked, "What's the first object to merge and fuse with?" I would suggest the one in front of you, or more so the one that continuously arises in your mind and that you most strongly desire.

Some theorize that the physical world in its entirety is a mental projection arising from ourselves. I agree. What most people do not see is that most of the physical manifestation of the entire universe is matter collapsing in upon itself in the form of stars with the outcome being pure light. Therefore most of what we are projecting on a physical level is light and love, and we just don't see it. Stars are absent from the daytime sky but the Sun is our greatest projection and manifestation. The Jnani sees this. On a deep mental and intuitive level you have the ability to fuse with all the objects around you. This is the experience that people report feeling when they are in the Field, especially in NDE and out-of-body experiences. By continuously bringing your attention to the awareness inside of you and to what's around you, you can experience this fusion during every state of consciousness, even in the waking state.

"See every object as your beloved deity. When holding a book, handling clothes, or opening a door, mentally bow to the beloved divinity who stands before you."

— Ammachi

The world is Samadhi in motion.
Samadhi

The merger of the subject with an object as described by Patanjali is called Samadhi. If you have thoughts during the experience it's called Savikalpa Samadhi, and if you have no thoughts it's called Nirvikalpa Samadhi. Sahaj is the final state of Samadhi. It takes place in all states of consciousness, including the waking state. When all identification as an "I" is lost, even in the waking state, but there appears to be an individual functioning, walking, talking, etc., this is called Sahaj. The Nirvana of the Buddha as he walked and talked was Sahaj. Almost all NDE are a form of Savikalpa Samadhi because people report having thoughts during the experience. If you come back and describe what your experience was, what you saw and who you saw, you obviously had thoughts. The experience of love people report during an NDE is completely otherworldly. Usually, communication with others is without any words in some type of telepathy. There is no need to communicate when you're experiencing that kind of love and unity. The last words of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computers, before he left his body were: "Wow wow wow." That says it all.

Nirvikalpa—Samadhi without thought—is indescribable bliss. Every cell of your body fuses instantly with everything, everywhere. That sounds like hyperbole but if you ever experience it you will understand. In Nirvikalpa Samadhi, what happens in the brain may be similar to the electrical activity of a grand mal brain seizure when a massive amount of neurons are all firing simultaneously. Unfortunately, unlike Samadhi these seizures are usually catastrophic and overwhelming events for individuals. Normally our brain neurons are firing on and off in random sequences. Imagine a Christmas tree with thousands of lights twinkling randomly. In a grand mal seizure, everything fires at once with the outcome being an electrical overload of the entire system, which the brain and body cannot handle. During Nirvikalpa Samadhi, which can last from seconds up to many days, it's likely that the brain neurons are firing at an elevated rate. It certainly was my experience.

To give you a glimpse in someone else's words of what this could be like, I like to quote the great Russian author Dostoevsky. He had seizures in real life and wrote about them. He also used a character in his book The Idiot to describe a seizure. Here are Dostoevsky's narrator's words:

He remembered that he always had one minute just before the epileptic fit when suddenly in the midst of sadness, spiritual darkness and oppression, there seemed at moments a flash of light in his brain, and with extraordinary impetus all his vital forces suddenly began working at their highest tension. The sense of life, the consciousness of self, were multiplied ten times at these moments which passed like a flash of lightning. His mind and heart were flooded with extraordinary light.

What's interesting to note in his description is that both his mind and heart, not just his head, were flooded by light.

Here are Dostoevsky's own words describing his own seizures in real life:

I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life—such joy that no one else could have any notion of. I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world and this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life perhaps.

Reading this helps us understand the depth of a Samadhi experience and why thousands and thousands of individuals around the world are trying in whatever way possible to experience it. This is what the Buddha was spending so much time trying to achieve before he gave up, so to speak, only to be enlightened under the Bodhi tree. Sahaj has been described as Nirvikalpa Samadhi in the waking state.

The good news is that these experiences are possible. When objects outside are correctly perceived as being inside, you fuse with them and experience extreme love. The trick is to open yourself to receiving and at the same time drop any thoughts that create separation with yourself and the object. This is how a Jnani moves through the world, seeing everything as him or herself and merging or fusing with all things.

I thought.....

now drop that.
Self-Inquiry

Self-inquiry addresses self-limiting thought and identification of objects as being separate from oneself. In Sanskrit this constant attention and awareness of the self is called vichara or self-inquiry. It's the most direct way of discovering the unreality of the mind and the inherent initial "I" or ego thought. Self-inquiry shows how thoughts and identifications can be brought under control by separating the subject "I" from the objects of thought. The "I" inherently identifies with objects because it's always in a relationship with what it perceives. Our senses and thought create instant duality. If you focus your attention on the subjective feeling "I" or "I am" with great intensity, the thoughts of "I am this or that" or "they are this or that" will begin to cease. This takes constant conscious attention to the "I" and recognition of thoughts arising within the mind. It's directing the brain to instantly focus on thoughts and follow them to their source. When your attention becomes so laser-focused on the "I" as Source, with the exclusion of all other thoughts, any objects of your perception will begin to dissolve in that Source. All thoughts and objects will dissolve into the "I" and then even the "I" itself will dissolve, being recognized as an illusion itself. What's left is pure awareness.

This sounds simple but as a practice it's not. The mind and brain are so attached and programmed to identify with external objects that to hold the primary "I" thought and inquire at all times is difficult to do. Ramana Maharishi, the great Indian sage who died in 1950, recommended that most seekers should do other forms of practice unless they feel very inclined to do self-inquiry. This is probably what happened to the Buddha, recognizing that the "I," the "soul," and all objects were not real. Remember the Buddha's teaching. "All conditioned or unconditioned things are soulless or selfless." (Dhammapada #279)

The Buddha expounded his Anatta doctrine that there was No-soul, No-self. Soul and Self arise from the misconception "I am." The individual must try to see things objectively as they are and without any mental projections. The outcome for the Buddha was Nirvana. It was very pleasurable for me in 1993 sitting with three Tibetan Buddhist monks very early in the morning meditating in front of the sofa that Ramana Maharishi sat on for many years in Tiruvanamalai, India. It was a metaphoric fusion of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Vedanta.

Ramana Maharishi

Much insight can be gained from understanding the life and experiences of Ramana Maharishi. Carl Jung said of him, "What we find in the life and teachings of Sri Ramana is the purest of India. He is the whitest spot in a white space." Ken Wilbur, noted writer and lecturer, called Ramana "The greatest sage of the 20th century."

At the age of 16 Ramana had an NDE experience that totally transformed his life. We could say he had an unqualified, unbroken experience of the Field. What was unusual was that the experience never stopped for him. From then until his death at age 70, Ramana was not only immersed in the perception of the Field, he was the Field and he radiated as the Field. Thousands upon thousands of people who went to see him would attest to this. His impact was so broad and wide that even today almost every teacher of self-inquiry worldwide comes from a connection to him. The self-inquiry practice he would advise people to do was simply to ask oneself the question "Who am I?" This practice has become the Sine qua non of self-inquiry.

Ramana left home after he had a transcendent experience and went to live in a very holy site in southern India called Tiruvanamalai. He was inexplicably attracted to the sacred mountain Arunachala, which overlooks Tiruvanamlai and is worshipped by millions as the embodiment of Shiva, the self, or pure awareness. Ramana was in such an altered state of consciousness when he first arrived in Tiruvanamalai that he found himself continuously going into the state of Nirvikalpa Samadhi. He located a very small underground stone enclosure about 5' x 5' within but below the massive Shiva temple located at the foot of the mountain. He stayed in that enclosure for a number of weeks without moving. He was in a super conscious state, not eating, drinking or sleeping. The state would look like suspended animation but was Nirvikalpa Samadhi. He was in an ecstatic state where no subject or object existed, including his body, and because of that insects were eating through his legs. Some worshipers at the temple found him and pulled him out of there and put food in his mouth to try to make him eat. For a short while he wandered naked, completely oblivious to his body. People recognized his extraordinary state and put clothes on him so that the British police would not arrest him. Eventually he went up the side of the mountain and lived in a cave. For nearly 9 years he was almost completely silent. At the age of 19 one of the individuals who stayed close to him compiled answers to the questions people asked. The fourteen questions were put together in the form of a book which became in English Who Am I? This book became the basis for his first teachings on the process of self-inquiry.

Understanding anything

hurts.
Who Am I?

One of the key factors that distinguishes the inquiry in the form "who am I" from every other spiritual practice or meditation technique is that almost every other spiritual practice necessitates the existence of a subject who meditates on an object. From his own experience Ramana would say these subject/object types of meditation would not dissolve the "I" because the moment you came out of meditation or one of those deep states of Samadhi the mind would immediately rise up in the form of the ego or "I." Obviously, he was talking about his own deep direct experience with states in meditation and Nirvikapla Samadhi in which all identification is lost. He would say that a yogi could go into a transcendent state of Samadhi barely even breathing for 21 days, but the moment he came out of it the mind would begin to think. He referred to the ultimate reality as the heart or the self. This is not the physical heart nor the heart chakra. He would frequently use the Sanskrit term hridayam to talk about this center point of the Self. It can be translated as the heart but a more literal term would be center. It sounds very much like a hologram because the center is everywhere in the holographic image. Ramana was clear that there is not a particular location or center for the self or heart, but merely that this point was the Source from which all appearances manifest. From a quantum standpoint this would make sense because you cannot really pinpoint any center. The center appears to come into being only when it's observed. It's everywhere and not subject to time. It's from this heart or center point that all of reality appears. The manifestation of physical reality would not come into being until the "I" thought arose, and then everything else would be created. Ramana said that meditation practices of subject and object would quiet the mind and they might even produce blissful experiences and Samadhi. However, the endpoint, which is all he was interested in, would only culminate when the "I" thought was isolated and deprived of its identity.

In regards to Kundalini he would say it is active on all levels of consciousness. The energy of Kundalini goes from the base of the spine to the crown chakra where one experiences transcendental bliss, but then it curves and bends down to the center of one's being or heart, from which all reality arises and manifests. This self-inquiry using "who am I" to find the Source and eliminate the "I" is not the same as the So'ham mantra. So'ham translated is "I am that, subject and object" so Ramana's vichara or self-inquiry was clearly different.

As may be expected, this is difficult for many seekers to comprehend. Dissolve the "I" using "who am I" as an inquiry. Ramana sat peacefully in the same location, same room, same sofa with people around him day and night, 24/7. Whenever somebody would ask him a question he would say to the questioner, "From where did that thought arise?"

The questioner's answer almost always would be, "From me."

Ramana would then respond, "Who is that me or I? Inquire into that I and find its Source."

He was relentless in teaching this way in order to force the individual to do the practice. People had endless questions about meditation techniques, practices, rebirth, karma, souls, Samadhi, etc. He rarely answered these questions but would immediately ask the questioner: "From where did that thought arise?" to put them into the inquiry practice.

"Therefore seek the root of 'I,' question yourself: who am I?; find out its source."

-Talks with Sri Ramana Maharhi #197

The ultimate reality, the heart and the Field of Love is apparent and real on all levels of consciousness whether sleeping, dreaming or waking. I imagine Ramana would say, "What is the sense of going after something that was not the ultimate truth during all states of awareness?" He would say that the heart or self was the underlying reality which supported the appearance of all states of awareness. He insisted that it was possible to be aware during deep sleep. Sometimes he would tell certain individuals to try to find who is there in their deep sleep state.

Ramana would refer to the self or this pure awareness as Turiya. Turiya is also described as the fourth state, which is beyond waking, dreaming, and sleeping. It's the name for the state in which you, the individual, are functioning as pure awareness with no "I" or ego remaining. From science we know from brain scans that when an individual is in deep sleep the brain neurons are still firing on and off. During this stage the rapid eye movements stop and our brain waves become slower, with occasional bursts of rapid waves called sleep spindles. These are neurons firing on and off but not long enough to communicate with one another. Then delta waves begin to appear which are extremely slow brain waves interspersed with smaller, faster waves (again, neurons firing on and off). Ramana would say that in Turiya, awareness is there watching but there is absolutely no thought.

As with the other practices that I have written about in accessing the Field of Love, self-inquiry is a very powerful practice. It can be done at any time and any place just by using the inquiry "who am I?" or by thinking "From where did that thought arise?" and tracing it to its Source. When we find that Source, we recognize the Field of Love that is around and within us 100% of the time.

Analyzing self-inquiry in regard to the brain and what might be going on when you trace the "I" to its Source is fascinating. Alpha-theta neuro feedback has you focus on a feedback tone as well as breathing. The brain is literally watching itself go from a fast wave to a slower and slower wave until it reaches theta state which correlates with deep relaxation and non-REM sleep. Ramana said you can be totally cognizant in deep sleep with no thought. This corresponds to the delta state, which is below theta. Inquiring or searching for the "I" and its Source appears to naturally take us deeper and deeper, as does slow wave training because the brain and the mind become very still.

Two other benefits that this research has uncovered are that first as you drop down into a deeper state your glands can be stimulated to release Beta-endorphin and dopamine. In addition to lowering the brain frequency to relax the listener, people going into this very relaxed deep state reported recalling repressed memories of childhood events. They experienced themselves almost reliving these events as they watched from this deep relaxed state of the witness. Self-inquiry is a great way to find and connect with Source. The next way I encourage people to access the Field is using our innate simple feeling abilities as a catalyst to loosen our repressed memories when we inquire.

Without thought

who am I?
The FREE Process™

The FREE Process™ is a technique I use to access The Field.  The practice combines the 19th century sage Ramana Maharshi's most essential question, "Who am I?" with the simple precursor "Without this thought," along with three deep feeling questions to release the unconscious mind's attachment to a thought. The FREE Process helps us examine each of our thoughts and beliefs by meeting them with the question, "Without this thought, who am I?"

Unlike other forms of inquiry the FREE Process does not support duality in any way. It solely focuses on the "I" thought, where it is arising from, and who you are without any thought at all. There are no turnarounds or reversals using the FREE Process because subject and object still remain when you put any thought into a second or third person turnaround. Second or third person statements can be very helpful because they can connect you in a deep way to the object of your thought like many methods of meditation, but in the end they support duality and the sense of separation. I wholeheartedly encourage people to write down and do inquiry practices like those in Ken and Penny Keyes' book, Handbook to Higher Consciousness the Workbook or Byron Katie's The Work® if they feel so inclined because I have seen first-hand how effective they are in helping people. Keyes' work was particularly helpful in getting people to recognize the "payoffs" and price they pay for having different demands and beliefs. The FREE Process is more basic and simply facilitates the merging of all thought in the heart of the inquirer. It is best suited for those who have done significant meditation or spiritual practice. Ramana Maharshi clearly stated this in his writing titled Spiritual Instruction when referring to self-inquiry. He wrote, "This is suitable only for the ripe souls. The rest should follow different methods according to the state of their minds."

The single biggest block to expanded awareness is the thought "I am the body." The Buddha taught that, from the highest spiritual standpoint, the concept of "I" is an illusion. As I stated earlier, he said that there is no reason to think that there is a soul that comes from another world or realm and will transmigrate to another realm after death. To the Buddha everything was an illusion created within the mind. The Buddha recommended that the seeker not waste time and just focus on finding peace and happiness in this moment by recognizing that everything is not real.  It is all an illusion, and the mind experiences suffering because it thinks its body and the objects around it are real. Because of the teachings of Ramana and the Buddha the first thoughts I prompt people to inquire about are their bodies, mind, heart and soul. These are the biggest illusion our brains and minds are convinced are real. The next thoughts to inquire about are the people closest to you: mother, father, etc., who are also powerful illusions that most of us are dearly and emotionally attached to. In my book Field of Love: Self-Inquiry and the FREE ProcessTM Workbook, the body, mind, and soul are the first thoughts I have people inquire about.

The FREE Process incorporates the science of quantum physics and brain science to facilitate the self-inquiry practice. Holonomic brain theory of David Bohm and Karl Pribram supports that everything is arising from the same singular point that happens to be located everywhere simultaneously.  Due to the nature of quantum theory it is impossible to scientifically prove what is transpiring in the brain when thought arises. This inquiry process calls on the inquisitive nature of the mind as a tool to untangle its hold on our identification as separate individual egos with a physical body, because everyone reports "I am," "I feel," etc. In other words the "I" is real and no one doubts or questions that.

As I noted earlier from the findings of brain science, we can deduce that the sense of "I" only exists when a mammal's frontal lobe has enough neurons for it to generate the "I" thought. Does a field mouse have the since of "I"? Does a cat, a dog, a newborn infant? At what point does the sense of "I" arise? We do know that anyone reading this has the sense of "I" arising within.  There are almost 150,000,000,000 neurons constantly firing on and off in our brain to create the appearance of separation between ourselves and all of the objects around us. People who have have had an NDE or out-of-body experience will tell you there is an experience of non-separation during the experience, but as soon as it wears off the brain does its job of separating and making sure we don't walk off a cliff or walk into on-coming traffic.

Many hidden beliefs can be stored in the mind and body. Deeply unconscious thoughts can be sparked by unusual events. In my case, a back surgery I had at forty-eight acted as the trigger to unearth the unconscious belief ­that I was not lovable. For my entire adult life, I did not have a clue that I was holding onto this thought. The experience showed me how difficult it can be to uproot unconscious impressions that often have a stronger hold on us than conscious impressions. I wanted to find a simple, direct way to unearth and work through my most fundamental unconscious beliefs, and so I started pushing myself to question my thoughts from a deep feeling perspective to see what would arise.

The idea that I was not lovable had been stored in me for decades and there was a part of me that did not want to let it go. I discovered that the thought protected me with a false belief that if I completely took care of myself, I wouldn't have to rely on anyone. In fact, I had a tendency to flat-out refuse receiving help. My brain and senses automatically created this separation both to keep me safe in the world and to motivate me into action so I could be the one in charge.

We have numerous unconscious, subconscious, and repressed memories that appear to be stored in the brain, maybe even in our cells or our subtle bodies. These thoughts, beliefs and memories are like the files on a computer. The Hindu yogis called these stored impressions samskaras and explain that they come from events in this life and from past lives. According to them these impressions are stored in the subtle body, the chakras or energy centers and the central subtle nerve within the spine called the sushumna.  These memories, impressions and samskaras keep us from connecting and accessing The Field all around us. Brain scientists conclude that memories are neurologically imprinted in us, and the body and psyche have memorized many of them so incredibly well that we don't consciously recognize them.

These impressions are so embedded that trying to think our way out of an unconscious belief using the conscious mind doesn't work.  Exactly how these are recorded by neurons scientists don't know other than seeing what areas of the brain are active when prompted to think or move. This is why people may do things like primal therapy, for example, in order to loosen up, discover and release these stored feelings and beliefs. Scientific evidence shows the subconscious mind reacts faster and is larger than the conscious mind, and accounts for over 90% of the brain's activity every day. In the beginning of the book, I cited a paper published in Nature Neuroscience by Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze and John-Dylan Haynes, entitled "Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain." It's synopsis was: "There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 seconds before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness."

The well known philosopher, teacher and author Dr. David Hawkins wrote in his book Power Versus Force: An Anatomy of Consciousness, the Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior: "We think we live by forces we control, but in fact we are governed by power from unrevealed sources, power over which we have no control."

This research and statement are amazing facts when you consider that we believe our conscious mind is making decisions moment to moment before we act, when in fact the majority of the process is coming from our unconscious. It also supports my belief that what is happening is all movement, and that we fool ourselves by thinking that we are the doer.  You could also see why it would start to be uncomfortable to believe that we know everything – especially about ourselves, our minds, and our emotions. This also backs up the noted quantum physicist, David Bohm's theory which he writes about in his book Thought as a System. He speaks eloquently about the interconnected instantaneous reflexive nature of thought, the brain, mind, feeling, emotions and the body. The key word here is reflexive. We all know what happens when a doctor taps us on the knee. It moves. It does not have a choice. Is the same thing happening with our thoughts and feelings? I say yes.

The FREE Process is designed to connect and stimulate arising thoughts with any unconscious thoughts and beliefs that could be underlying them. We do this by engaging the thought with deep-feeling, probing questions to unlock its connection to other thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in the unconscious mind. This process can release a whole range of feelings from sadness, euphoria, anger, love, and anxiety, in addition to other thoughts.  To follow the computer analogy, it is not enough to look at the titles (thoughts) stored in the computer and try to delete them.  Some inquiry methods would simply say release them when you recognize them on the screen of your mind. My experience is that we must click on the thought file, open it up, and let it play in the mind and heart, feeling it with full expression. You have to totally feel the thoughts arising in the mind and see how they affect you, so that the unconscious beliefs connected with them or supporting them at the root are also revealed. Then a whole series of connected thoughts and feelings that are supporting this belief can be recognized, loosened, and inquired into, thus allowing them to also be released and dissolved.

Here is an example:

For many years I held strong beliefs about my mother. Here were some of my thoughts:

I hate my mother. My mom is a Nazi. My mother doesn't support me.

I considered the effect I experience for having these thoughts by asking myself these questions. I questioned each thought separately:

How do I feel when I have this thought?

How do I treat my mom in my mind when I have this thought?

If I do not suppress or censor myself in any way, what do I want or need from my mom?

I sat quietly with the answers to these questions. I got in touch with the payoffs that I got for attaching to these thoughts. I felt the sadness and disconnection from my mother that I was suppressing and was a result of these thoughts. I felt a lot of heartache and released the tears as they came up.

Then I inquired:

Without the thought,"I hate my mom," who am I?

Without the thought, "My mom is a Nazi," who am I?

Without the thought, "My mother doesn't support me," who am I?

When I asked myself these questions, my mind got very quiet.

I was so committed to the beliefs about my mom that not having those feelings was strange. From a very still, honest point inside my heart, I heard and felt another answer arise:

Without the thought "I hate my mom" I would be free, I would free of a big belief about my mom.  In fact, without that thought I can feel myself merging with her in love. I can actually feel myself dissolve in that love right here, right now.

I recognized I had grown attached to the thought and beliefs about her over time and it permeated the way I treated her in my mind, my actions, and in her presence. In that moment, I realized that all the negative thoughts about my mother existed to keep me separate from her, and safe from the possibility that she, who I loved so dearly, could hurt me. Even more so it kept me from experiencing my own self love and the Field of Love all around me because being separate felt so safe, so smart and wise to me.

This example of The FREE Process illustrates how effective it is in releasing both the conscious and unconscious mind. When the root of a belief can clearly be identified and viewed with full awareness, it dissolves on its own and merges with the heart or Source lying within us.  The goal of the process is to still the mind, dissolve thought, and merge the object of the thought into the heart, along with the "I," the Self. This creates a natural fusion of love and a door to experience the Field.

I purposely used the example of thoughts about my mother because it is easy for the reader to grasp and understand how it works. What I really encourage is for people to do the FREE Process on your body, mind, and soul as objects of your perception and awareness. This is subtle, but when you do this all thought begins to dissolve and the result is a total merger with the Field of Love.

We can also inquire into thoughts that don't appear connected directly to our personal self, such as:

Peaches are delicious or Judy is sweet. In fact, we can inquire into any thought and there is a payoff for every thought whether positive or negative.

Processing a seemingly benign or even positive thought can seem unnecessary and almost ridiculous. The reality is that these thoughts are upheld by deep unconscious beliefs that support our whole identification system.  Our brains have predetermined what peaches are, what delicious means, who Judy is and what it is to be sweet.  We are so convinced of our beliefs, and what we perceive as absolute truths, that these beliefs permeate ALL of our thoughts from the mundane to the insane. This activity of the unconscious mind is what keeps us separate from the field of pure awareness because our normal awareness has so much confidence in "knowing" and "separating" everything.

The conscious mind taking unconscious beliefs as fact, on the other hand, uses it's cognitive ability to formulate judgments about what people and things should or shouldn't be doing. It also judges what we personally should or shouldn't be doing. This brain activity can be troublesome when trying to access the unifying nature of the Field. We are working with a loaded deck of beliefs so ingrained that they are almost impossible to overcome.

In summary, the FREE Process begins by identifying any thought or belief, and asking three primary feeling questions. The reason we ask these feeling questions is so that we can momentarily still the mind and overcome the conscious, thinking upper part of the brain and start to recognize the payoffs we get for holding on to these thoughts.  This thinking part is so sure it knows everything. By prompting the thinking brain to feel by asking it questions about feeling it naturally lets go and allows the other part of the brain do that job because even it knows it doesn't know how to feel. In essence we are undermining our cognitive thinking process with these questions. These questions act like disruptive explosive charges to momentarily still the upper, thinking brain and get our awareness to just feel so that the thinking brain does not have any support.  The reason we do inquiry and the FREE Process is because in reality we are not our brain, mind, thoughts or feelings. We are pure awareness which is utilizing them and creating a sense of "I" and individuality.

When we plant the mind with the these feeling questions, we effectively loosen and stir up the bedrock of our unconscious so that it will not only reveal even deeper thoughts and beliefs hidden below, but also lead us to the experience of who we are without thought, feeling and everything else attached to it. In the moment we inquire, our cognitive structure is temporarily untethered to past beliefs. The cognitive mind frantically searches for an answer. It searches for itself.  It searches for its Source.  It literally tries to find itself so that it can reestablish its identity and very existence.  While it searches, a new perspective that isn't tethered to what we think we know as absolute "truth" arises as pure awareness which is our true nature. This could last for a millisecond or go on for a lifetime.  This is the same gap that's talked about in meditation, where pure awareness continually resides. This feeling of the gap can be so expanding and transcending that it often alters our perception and experience of reality. We begin to see the benefit not only of letting go of the beliefs and concepts we've clung to, but of ultimately dropping all thoughts, beliefs or concepts. In other words, we could ask the question, "Without any thought, who am I?" or "Letting go of all thought, who am I?" If you inquire into every single thought, eventually everything appears as movement. Pure awareness and an experience of the Field is all that remains.

The FREE ProcessTM Short Form

  1. As a thought arises, identify it.
  2. Feel the feelings and consider the payoffs you get for having the thought.
  3. Reveal, express, and release the feelings you experience. Write them, speak them, or express them any way you like.
  4. Inquire, "Without this thought, who am I?"

Free Process

To help you identify some payoffs you might receive from holding onto a thought, here are some that Ken Keyes Jr. and Penny Keyes share in their workbook.

  * I can avoid looking at "what is" in my life.
  * I'll prove it's unfair or untrue.
  * I get to be right and make the other person wrong.
  * I get to feel superior.
  * I get attention, sympathy, agreement, approval, and/or comfort.
  * I avoid taking responsibility for what I do, say, or feel
  * I don't have to really experience what I'm feeling.
  * I get to avoid confronting the addictions that would come up if I weren't wanting this addiction.
  * It feels safe and familiar to hold onto the old pattern and scary to let go.
  * I get to play the martyr.
  * I get the play the victim role.
  * It's feels safe to keep a distance from other people (or a specific person).
  * I get to enjoy the fantasy. ("Even if I don't get what I want, I still get to fantasize about it food, sex, looking different, etc.").
  * I get to share and feel close to other people who have the same addictions.
  * I feel a sense of intensity. ("I'll feel really alive when I'm angry.")
  * I'll get control over myself.

Payoffs Reprinted from Handbook to Higher Consciousness The Workbook. by Ken Keyes, Jr, and Penny Keyes. Copyright 1989 by Love Line Books ISBN:

ISBN: 0-915972-16

Surrender

Surrender is the alpha and omega of spiritual practice. It appears simple, but can be difficult to do because the "I" just loves to be the doer, the manifest-or, the co-creator of reality. With surrender you have to drop everything. You have to just surrender to all that is and leave everything, even your thoughts, in God's hands. That is the problem for most of us. We want a reference point to operate from and that point for the mind begins with the "I" thought. Ramana would say that inquiry and surrender are in essence the same thing. It's easier to understand that now from the point of view that one has to drop and surrender everything including the "I" thought. That is why I put surrender as the last technique for accessing the Field.

Many of the world's religions advocate surrendering to God as a means of transcending the individual ego or self and becoming one with God. Christianity and Islam are associated with dualistic devotional practices: love of Christ, love of God, love of Allah. In Arabic, the word "Islam" means submission or surrender. In Christianity, surrendering to God is a way of putting your life into more capable hands. Jesus asked many of his disciples to surrender and follow him. There is not a better symbol of surrender than Jesus hanging from the cross. That was the ultimate surrender to a higher God, Source or Field.

To completely surrender all responsibility for your life to God you must have no will or desire of your own. You must be completely free of the idea that there is an individual person (yourself) who is capable of acting independently of God. In reality this is the case whether you perceive it or not, whether you believe it or not, or whether you experience it or not. In other words, you think you're the one who is surrendering but you're in essence part of the Field just unfolding perfectly with no thought as the doer of anything. You are in fact surrendering in motion, but your brain and your mind separates you from that perception. Remember the Buddha's Anatta doctrine that there is No-soul, No-self. They arise from the misconception "I am." Intuitively our individual human consciousness knows that we are part of something much bigger. Do we get that we actually are the Field? Probably not. The powerful underlying universal truth that we are one with everyone and everything is the reason billions and billions of people use surrender to connect with God or Source in the context of their particular religious beliefs. Is it also why people who participate in a 12 step program feel so much lighter and freer when they acknowledge that some form of higher power is in control?

Surrendering aims to eliminate the "I" by separating it from the objects and actions that it perceives and identifies with. In essence there is only awareness. There is no individual "I" who acts or desires.

To do this practice, try to withdraw the mind from its environment, from its objects of perception whenever you become aware that you think you're the doer. In my case, for example, at one point I had the thoughts: I am the painter; This is my painting, or even more basic: I am making my morning coffee or I am taking the dogs for a walk. This surrender practice obviously takes a lot more than five or ten minutes of attention. It takes constant awareness of the mind's activity, what it's attaching to and identifying with. The instant one realizes that self-attention has been lost, bring it back to pure awareness until it begins to disappear in its Source. Find the Source and you find and realize you are the Field. As I said in the beginning of this section, just be the Field.

This constant awareness prevents the mind from identifying with objects and enhances its connection as pure awareness with the Field. The Field all around us has density, a tactile realness that's unquestionable. Its purest sensation is overwhelming love. Ask those who have had an NDE or out-of-body experience. That density is the weight of love itself. This love will meet any attempt of awareness to connect to it. It does this simply out of love for itself. It doesn't ask; it just does. This is the nature of grace, which is synonymous with love. Grace has no motive. It just reacts. The mind thinks it can attract grace somehow by doing something, but grace is love showing up for itself. It doesn't have a choice.

Surrendering weakens the "I" thought and self-identification and destroys the tendency of the mind to perpetuate and reinforce its existence. The "I" thought will gradually sink more and more into its natural center in the core of our being and then be inextricably projected outward as Field, manifesting everywhere as everything. This process of surrender can be very difficult in today's age where everyone is interested in the Law of Attraction and what we can manifest and co-create for ourselves. Like pure love, which asks for nothing, there cannot be any motive in this process. When you surrender like this you're really putting all of your chips on the table and betting that the connection with the Field will give you everything you ever wanted. That is a big bet, but a bet I can report has worked extremely well for me. After I retired, for over 20 years, people would ask me "Don't you want more?" "Don't you want to start another company?" "Don't you want to make more money?" "Don't you want this or that?" "Don't you want to travel here or there?"

My answer was always, "No I just want to connect completely with Source." What I found was that the desires that were still residing inside of me from the past, whatever those desires were, would just come to me without any effort on my part. Some of them just walked in the door and sat down right in front of me. Surrender will take you into the Field, but for the active Western mind that's so identified as the doer, other methods might be more palpable at first. Only you know in your heart what's right for you.

Sex and Transcendence

Sex and celibacy and their relationship to the Field of Love were a big theme throughout my autobiography, Field of Love: Power, Love & Fortune on the Road to Enlightenment. I would be remiss not to discuss what I have found in regard to sex, after sharing so many intimate encounters. Sex can be extremely helpful in experiencing the Field. My experiences in how sex affects one's state of consciousness were diverse. It's important to understand that sexual union is a metaphor, a physical representation of what it looks like and feels like to merge subject and object. In other words, many of the practices I suggested within these chapters to access and experience the Field can be enhanced by practicing sexual union as I describe below. On a deep but simple level it's mimicking exactly what Patanjali was teaching about meditation. First, a little background from my personal history in exploring this area...

Is transcendent sex necessary to access the Field? No. Can it be helpful at times in accessing it? Yes. For many years this internal sexual/celibacy dialogue consumed me because from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to Muktananda, Satcitananda, Satya Sai Baba, Osho, Poondaji, Amrit Desai and on down I don't think there has been one famous male guru or teacher of any significance who has not had magazine articles or even whole books written about his sexual indiscretions. The list is too long to write here.

I had to ask, "Why is that? Why are all these great male teachers portraying celibacy and doing something else behind closed doors?" It didn't matter whether they were Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, Zen, Advaitan, etc. For me the answers are easy. First, I believe their primary motivation was to help others and they didn't want to risk losing that, and because it feels wonderful to connect with people in that way. Secondly, they get power and money in the form of donations from perpetuating the image of the celibate. This works especially well in the eyes of men who hold celibates in rare esteem, and to some extent, in the eyes of women, so they continue it. Were their secret lives worth creating confusion about their teachings? Maybe, and most importantly for my readers here, Did their self-proclaimed celibacy help them access the Field at some point? I say yes. Did it keep them in continual awareness of the Field to be celibate? Probably not.

The great irony in this whole discussion is that after 40 years of experimentation I have found that sex and spirituality and its most delightful manifestations and experience can be achieved very easily with little or no effort. What makes this even more ironic is the women with whom I have spoken directly in regards to their sexual interaction with the so-called "enlightened one" is exactly what I'm wholeheartedly recommending here. I laugh and wonder why these teachers couldn't give these simple instructions to their followers.

Sex is an expression of the fusion that naturally takes place in the Field. The duality represented in nature by the male and female forms is present on every level of creation. It seems logical that because of this we should be able to harness this magnetic attraction between the genders to expand and deepen our experience of melding two into one. The chemical interaction in the brain and throughout the body during sex on its most rudimentary level is the reaction of positive and negative poles. To recognize and utilize this energy of polar opposites is key when incorporating sex into our everyday lives and spiritual practice.

The first thing to grasp when participating in sacred sex is that you're generating both male and female, positive and negatives poles in each body. Seeing that you're both male and female is the key to transforming and transmuting the energies in each other's body. There must be constant awareness of giving and allowing oneself to receive equally. In other words, this interaction becomes like beautiful music or dance, with each partner taking turns leading and performing for the other. The balance of this giving and receiving can be learned and cultivated over time, but it's easy to learn. The best attitude to have is one of joyous playfulness and acceptance along with the willingness to change roles with the focus on either receiving or giving. All this being said, this is the method that I have found produces the best results for utilizing sex to access the Field.

To begin, both partners need to go into the activity desiring a new transcendent pleasure different from ordinary sex. This experience both deepens and enhances the other practices and techniques that I describe for experiencing the Field. In order to be successful both individuals need to be willing to avoid orgasm to experience what's possible. Men's immediate reaction is: "I don't know if I can do this." That's okay and is natural, believe me. Just have an attitude of willingness and be kind to yourself because this is a process that takes time. The male orgasm is especially detrimental because there's nothing like an orgasm to support the idea "I am the body." This body awareness creates a powerful sense of separation from everything around you, your partner, and the experience of the Field. The thrill and momentary ecstasy of apparent union is met almost immediately with a powerful disconnect. We regain our bearings quickly, even within a few seconds with the help of the hormone oxytocin, which is released in both the male's and female's brain during sex to promote pair bonding.

I recommend picking a time when it's convenient and when some other event is not scheduled immediately afterward. After all, you never know how long it could go on or how delightful it could be if it's not going to end within a certain time period after achieving an orgasm by either party or both. It's also very helpful to approach this loving embrace with a true sense of love and tenderness toward each other. Having an open heart and a goal of unity, transcendence and merging with the Field should be the goal.

Start sweetly by touching each other gently while lying next to one another. Express your desire for unity and transcendence as you get each other to relax completely and let go and receive the love you will give one another. Recognize the divinity of each other and especially of yourself in the same way I describe in some of the meditation techniques that I wrote about earlier. You are both truly a god and goddess in your own rights, and there is nothing higher or more spiritual on any level than the two of you.

Tell each other how beautiful you are while the man gently touches the female body from head to toe in the sweetest, softest way possible. It's much more important for the woman to be touched in this way to ignite the natural feminine polarized energy in her body. This should go on for a good 10 minutes before approaching her vagina or "yoni" as it's referred to in Indian Sanskrit. If she is wet and your penis is erect you may enter her in the slowest, gentlest way possible. The man lying on his side with her flat on her back is the easiest most relaxed way to do this. Hold the awareness that you, the man, are embracing and entering the primordial living divine feminine. In addition, keep the awareness of your own divinity and inherent God-like qualities as you proceed. There is no need to rush. The woman should be very relaxed, and lying with her legs in the most comfortable position for her.

Tell each other "I love you" as she helps you enter her. If you become too excited just stop for a moment and relax, thinking sweetly from your heart of her beauty and divinity. Even if it takes 5 minutes just relax until you feel comfortable enough to try again. When you are finally all the way inside her just relax without any movement and the magnetic energies of each other's organs will balance themselves.

Embrace each other, looking into each other's eyes, recognizing you are embracing your own self. Your own masculine or feminine is there before you with no sense of separation. Feel the magnetism of your organs as they send energy throughout the entire body of the other. The more you sense this energy flow between each other, the more any sense of individuality is lost. You have become a fused point of love floating in a Field of energy. The intuitive and visceral sense of the polarity of both male and feminine energy within the body is what breaks down any sense of duality. This understanding is a balm of love that will begin to engulf and expand your awareness. Feel this unity awareness as energy that's exchanged between your eyes, skin and hands with each other as the energy moves back and forth. A good half hour will have passed by this point as your feel yourself expand more and more. This expansion envelops both of you in a unified Field of Love in which you actually are the Field.

If you feel at any point that climax is imminent, the man can slide himself out and relax for a few moments before entering again. It's very natural in beginning this technique that you may accidentally orgasm. If this happens just relax with a loving, playful attitude toward yourself and your partner. There are many more times that you will successfully be able to achieve the complete and utter union with your lover. The sky is the limit with this practice, and only you and your partner's love, kindness and sweetness for each other will limit where this can take you.

No matter what happens be very kind to yourself. In reality there is no one here but you and the Field of Love. This is key: The man will find that after a half-hour or so he will be able to move freely inside his partner with no tendency toward orgasm. It will feel as if some magic force has completely switched the energy. You will find that even though you can move easily it is even more intoxicating not to move but just feel the unity and love instead. This is clearly nature's gift to humanity to effortlessly connect to one's divinity through sex, and is practiced in many traditions. Again, what's amazing is the simplicity of this energy exchange with little or no movement. A glimpse into the Field of Love is assured if you do this one easy exercise. It's all you have to do. Could total spiritual sexual connection be as simple as joining together for 30 minutes with no movement? Yes. Consciousness and Source have made this gift easy and accessible if we open ourselves to receive it.

Over time you and your partner will experience divine unity not only during the moments of embrace, which will become so dreamlike and transcendent that normal orgasm will be a thing of the past. The experience will spill over into your everyday lives as it enhances the other practices that connect you to the Field. The energy will radiate throughout your bodies, minds, and heart and you will experience your own divinity as pure, unending, blissful consciousness. This experience can go on for days and even weeks. Your heart and core will expand as you become one with everyone and everything around you.

Dance with the Heart

let the mind take a seat.
Conclusion

Desire and Effort

It takes the smallest amount of attention to get the ball moving with any of these practices. I'm talking 3 minutes of breathing and 5 minutes of meditation after Hatha Yoga for example. The same is true for every other practice. Try them and see what works. On the other end of the spectrum you have Ramakrishna saying people should approach spiritual practice with the same intensity that a person whose hair is on fire is seeking a lake to jump into. Personally I have fluctuated between these two extremes and have found that I never did it wrong. Ever.

Bhakti

One practice that I did not speak specifically about was Bhakti or the yoga of devotion. Love and attention starts and ends with love of your own self. This underlying awareness that attention is love should and easily can be present in each of these practices. Muktananda would say in his public programs, "Honor yourself, worship yourself. God dwells within you as you." I agree and nothing could be closer to the truth. I certainly do this every day and it has benefited me in many ways. This is the highest form of bhakti and it also reminds me to be sweet, kind and understanding to myself all the time. Is it ever possible to make a mistake? That is a good question to do inquiry on. See what you find. Not only are we moving at our own pace, but the universe, Source or God are moving us at the perfect pace. Always keep that in mind. The reason to do any of the exercises that I describe is because they feel good and the benefit carries over to your everyday life. Only you know what appeals to you. Again, you probably will end up attracted to a few different practices, so feel completely free to do any or all of them.

The Teacher

People ask me about spiritual teachers and what do I think about this one or that one. Hundreds of great teachers are available for many of the practices that I describe. Just use your intuition and choose. I have found that the best teachers make themselves totally accessible. They are not trying to protect themselves in any way. They love doing what they are doing and you can feel it. People ask me: "Should I go to India and live with this one or that one?" or "Do you think this man or woman is enlightened?" As the Buddha would say, rely on your own direct experience and don't believe anything I or anyone else says.

Dattatreya, one of the most revered ancient Hindu saints, said he had 24 teachers including the five elements. Every object in the world was his Guru. The teacher arises from that infinite center point within and without you. Who is the teacher? The one directly in front of you. The great thing is that the teacher is always there. Just make an effort to uncover the truth of this and you will bring you home to yourself. Simply train your mind and brain to fall in love with every single object around it. Consciously direct your attention to do that over and over. Good luck. You can do it!

Martin Birrittella is an entrepreneur, inventor, artist, writer, and was the co-founder, chairman and CEO of two multi-million dollar companies he took public in 1988 and 1993, Ryka Inc. and Aerial Assault Inc. He retired from all business activities at age 41 to pursue his first love, meditation. He is a captivating storyteller and presenter. Having lived in India he also managed an ashram in Boston for four years in the late 70's. He has practiced meditation and self-inquiry for over 40 years.  His theories and published works are on the cutting-edge of conscious thought philosophy.  He attended Cornell University school of engineering, is a holder of multiple patents, and is a recognized self-taught and happily retired primitive naive artist.  He is author of the books Field of Love: Power, Love and Fortune on the Road to Enlightenment and Field of Love: Self-Inquiry and the FREE Process™ Workbook. He is a gifted facilitator who loves to work with others and share his approach to the practice of self-inquiry. He lives in Sedona, Arizona. 
Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all those who have helped to make this book a reality: to my wife Sarah, the living goddess Saraswati for her presence and love which inspires and intoxicates me, and to my daughter Danielle, Mahashakti, the great creative force of love, power and encouragement, for her tireless work on the manuscript, and her continuous holding my feet to the fire (and Sarah for endlessly turning up the heat).

To my son Sasha, for being the music and love in my heart and never allowing me to leave the present moment.

To my mother Helen, the goddess Kali for turning me into a warrior by her intensity and devotion, and to my father Michael, for being the embodiment of peace and understanding and a bhakti of the highest order.

I want to thank my brothers:  Michael for his generosity; Mark for manifesting pure genius and tenacity; Mitchell for being one who would give his life without a thought for himself; Matthew for fearless searching of truth in every form and at all costs; Myles for literally being the face and expression of God in all conditions, and Meredith who made me millions and even more so gave me the priceless gift of time.

To Sheri, for being a divine mother in every way.

I want to thank Mike for his one-pointed love and devotion to living and giving his life to the truth, and to David for his pure joy, enthusiasm and inspiration. To Sheena for truly being an angel of love and kindness, and to Janine for loving me more than anyone. To Tricia whose love, beauty, integrity, and truth were a precious gift, and to my Godmother Evelyn who taught me at the earliest age you can break the rules and still be loved.

I want to thank Ashok for his wisdom, clarity, honesty, and most of all for being a lover of unity and oneness of the highest order. To Victoria for seeing me like no one else, and Peter for his kindness, equanimity, and teaching me how to see light. To Dennis for supporting me both mentally and even more so physically like no one else could and to Zeffi for proving living Goddesses really do exist. To Ray and Mary for their generosity and support.

I want to thank JD for his uncompromising dedication to expanding hearts and minds, including my own and to Regina for her sincere open heart and willingness to share it with the entire world. To Rachel and Joe for sharing love and enthusiasm under all circumstances, and to Nels for endlessly entertaining me when I least expect it. To Mary for absorbing herself in the power of a novena.

I want to thank Kirby for believing in me before anyone else and to Bob S. for teaching me to open my heart and not to suppress my feelings under any circumstances and most importantly to stop at Sally's. To Lorwen for never suppressing her feelings and to Uma for being the curator of love, truth, and the provider of the faces of Gods. I want to thank Elizabeth for her loving kindness and Melissa for all of her hard work in manifesting Turiyatita. To Corrine for embracing love, giving so much of herself and showing others how to live a dream, and Satya for being the selfless Jnani of Annamalai.

I want to thank my agent Bill Gladstone for his great faith in my creative expressions, and my editor Harvey for teaching me how to write a simple sentence. To Jeanna for being the messenger of endless possibilities and to Cindy the voice of reason under all conditions. To Carol for being the first person to listen. I want to thank Harvey Stanbrough, Jim Bisakowski, Dane Low, Kio Griffith and Nancy my editors and designers of my Field of Love books. I also want to thank Nirmala for his kind support and advice.

I want thank Mahamandaleshwar Swami Nityananda for his unshakable strength, humility, devotion, and surrender and to Janaki for being the uncompromising lover of truth in the eye of every storm. To Eddie for his love, kindness, and ability to push me beyond what I thought was possible, and to Richard for helping me put the finishing touch on this manuscript by his burning desire for truth.

Finally, I want to thank Amma for being a living example of fearlessness, love, and sainthood, and Baba for blowing my head off, having the Goddess Kundalini take over my being and teaching me to love myself above all else. I want to thank Katie for killing me sweetly with my own truth. And lastly, thank you to Bhagawan Nityananda for showing me how to live and speak, and to Ramana for being the heart of all.

Other Books by Martin Birrittella

Contents

Part 1

The Field

Field of Love

I Can't Feel My Balls

Field of Love

Happiness: Our Heart's Desire

The Field

The Quantum Field

The Brain

Buddha, The "I," and The Brain

The Heart

Part 2

Experience the Field

Accessing The Field

Just Be The Field

Hatha Yoga

Meditation

Kundalini Yoga

Guru Om

Jnana

So'ham Japa

So'ham

[Jnana and  
The First-Person Exercise™](Experience_ebook_draft_131125-36.html#toc_marker-2-1-10)

Jnana and Present-Moment Awareness

Samadhi

Self-Inquiry

Ramana Maharishi

Who Am I?

The FREE Process™

Surrender

Sex and Transcendence

Conclusion

Acknowledgements
