Reflection: We watch the migration of animals with a strange fascination - from delicate Monarch butterflies to giant Gray whales. Their travels echo the mysterious drawing within each of us, not to north or south, but to the moment when love and awareness meet. Here eternity springs forth. It is the moment recognized as the one we always yearned for on some deep, forgotten level, an ancient hunger only fully remembered when it is satisfied. Immersed in the most personal of personal loves, we are a point of awareness in an ocean of compassionate love; a butterfly on the back of a whale preparing to dive.
Exercise: So let's continue our exercises of awareness and compassion to keep us on course. In this exercise we will shift our focus away from the content of our thoughts and move it to creation of thoughts and to ourselves as the thought creator.
Intention: The intention of this exercise is to know yourself as a point of awareness capable of creating thoughts.
Meditation: Once again, as in the previous exercise (see There Is a Beauty Within You #9: Mom Became Like the Sweetness of the Chocolates ), become conscious of the location of yourself in the area of the frontal lobe, just behind the center of your high forehead.
Now think, "I am." You created that thought. Close your eyes for a moment as you imagine looking around inside your head. See the location where the thought occurs. Repeat the phrase, "I am" and watch the thought coming into being. See the letter "I" appear each time you think it and then shift your focus to the instant before the letter "I" appeared. What was there? It came out of somewhere. It appeared at a certain instant of time. See the emptiness from where the "I" emerged. Experience the emptiness and silence there the instant before the "I" appeared.
Now visualize the letters of the word "am" coming out from this silent point of awareness. See the letter "a" appear and then the letter "m." Continue to look at the thought you have created out of nothing - "I am."
This is you in the act of creation - a point of silent, creative, still awareness in the eternity of the present moment, creating thoughts out of nothing.
Inquiry: And what can you say about yourself as the thinker, the thought generator? We experienced awareness initiating the use of our brain to create thoughts. What attributes do you have as a thinker? Are you the thoughts? Or are you simply the awareness generating the thoughts?
Intention Renewal: Allow the intention of this exercise to continue, knowing yourself as a point of awareness capable of creating thoughts.
Service: When you interact with others this week practice meeting them on the level of awareness meeting awareness. You might imagine this meeting as a feeling or an energy moving between the two of you from one heart to the other. Allow the talk to go on above as usual, words moving back and forth. You stay at the heart level, awareness to awareness, silently offering compassion and love.
Background Reading: Talks with Ramana Mahrashi - On Realizing Abiding Peace and Happiness, Inner Directions Publishing, 2001, (www.InnerDirections.org ).