expansive heart, we till the ground for the new myth inspiring social reform.
Toward that end, the techniques of pranayama can be taught in schools to help foster
expansiveness of the heart. And whereas separation of church and state is threatened by
school prayers that call upon a separatist ideal of God, it will not be challenged by the
nonsectarian and purely psychophysical methods of self-expansion through pranayama, the
science behind the prayers of every religion, any more than by biology, mathematics, or
physical education. The pranayama practice described in Technique 13 helps children learn
from a young age how to fight against patterns that shut down the natural expansiveness of the
heart so they might introduce social reforms capable of accelerating scientific progress and
ensuring world peace. Perhaps the war heroes of future myths will be those who conquered the
narrow sense of self.
TECHNIQUE 13
Magnetizing the Expansive Heart
The human emotive heart naturally yields an expansive feeling if sufficient awareness is
directed toward it. The best way to experience this phenomenon is by magnetizing the
heart—directing nervous energy toward the spine’s dorsal plexus behind the heart—rather than
glorifying the self by pretending to love humanity. Awareness then shifts to intuitive
understandings decreasingly bound by sensory ambitions associated with the lower plexuses.
As a result, the societal sense of self becomes defined less by reactive impulses and more by
transpersonal values. Whereas prayer uses an image of God to move one’s attention up the
spine to the heart, this technique produces the same effect more powerfully by engaging the
breath. Most children, through imitating their parents, can successfully begin employing this
technique at age three, provided they practice it daily before eating.
Sit in a chair of comfortable height in a quiet room, with your spine straight, shoulders back and
shoulder blades drawn slightly together, palms together at the chest as if in prayer, eyes closed
and focused slightly upward, mouth closed, and chin pressed gently against your chest. This
position, because it directs nervous energy away from the senses and toward the spine, will turn
your attention more inward.
Next, tense your abdomen and exhale fully through your mouth, then close your mouth again
and slowly inhale through your nostrils with a slight sobbing sound, caused by the partial closing
of your epiglottis. While inhaling, allow your abdomen and lower back to expand; as you bring
the breath up to your dorsal plexus, let your rib cage expand as well. Placing your attention on
your hands, extend your fingers outward like antennae and let your expanding chest push them
forward. Keeping chin to chest and fingers stretched outward, focus on the sensation of
expansiveness in your heart. Hold your breath for 6 seconds, allowing your abdomen to sink in
below your rib cage. Then exhale slowly with your epiglottis still slightly closed, making a soft
aspiration sound, and finally reverse the motion of inhalation by allowing your chest to deflate,
gently tightening your abdomen and squeezing out the remaining air. The exhalation should be
of the same duration as the inhalation, thus sending considerable nervous energy to the dorsal
plexus and magnetizing the heart.
Begin by practicing this technique 12 times per sitting, with 1 or 2 sittings a day. As time passes,
advance to 4 sittings a day and then gradually, over several months, to 18, 24, and finally 36
rounds of practice per sitting. With progress, your inhalations and exhalations will get longer,
and as they do be sure they remain of equal duration. Start with 6-second inhalations and
exhalations, building very gradually to inhalations and exhalations lasting 12 or more seconds. If
pain occurs in the lungs or chest, discontinue practice for several days.
After working with this psychophysiological technique for about six months, you may find your
attention gravitating toward your expansive heart at other times during the day. To make this a
conscious practice, pull energy toward your heart any time you are standing in a crowded room,
walking across a busy intersection, or performing other select tasks. That is, instead of artificially
self-divinizing by pretending to act out of an expansive feeling, which can lead right back to a
narrowing of the self and bouts of affectation, simply change your center of awareness and
allow the expansive feeling of the heart to be intuited naturally. To aid your shift in attention,
concentrate on receiving through the antennae at your chest the infinite expanse of the
substance of self seated in the hearts of all things.
A big issue I had with spiritual pursuits was finding the line between making efforts and faking it.
I understood the practice of intuitive technology as a form of mimicry; by sitting in the meditation
pose with eyes upturned and breathe still, I was effectively mimicking paradigms of asceticism in
the hope of similarly expanding my sense of self. Assuming a virtue I did not have, hoping that
over the time the virtue would be my own, also made sense. What’s the real difference, I asked,
between acting loving and being loving?
That question turned out to be the wrong one. The better question was, What lasting benefit to
self-expansion did I reap with the energy devoted to looking within and magnetizing the spine
instead of merely acting expansive? If the question was between acting expansive and nothing,
then assuming the virtues I didn’t have was probably better than not assuming them or looking
within. But compared with the technology of intuition, and especially the technique I devised to
specifically focus on the heart’s naturally expansive capacity, mere mimicry of
large-heartedness could not compete. It took took much effort for relatively too few lasting
results and always bordered on a decidedly unpleasant affectation too common in cults of
personality.
A humanity uplifted through intellectual generativity and expansion of the heart becomes fertile
ground for the bottom-up dissemination of the theory of self’s new myth sparking social reform
by invigorating a shift in the societal sense of self and ideal of God. Many gods of Dark Age
myths are dying because the narrowness out of which they were created and later interpreted
has caused suffering and unhappiness. Collectively, the ideal of God projected by any
organized religion in competition with that of other faiths has caused divisiveness and
stratification among societies, undermining world peace. James Baldwin, sensing this
predicament, wrote, “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us
larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”24 To
achieve peace and happiness, however, seekers need not get rid of God but rather, through
worshipping by wondering, arrive every day at a new ideal of their mythic God image.
Redefining God through the new myth of an individuated sense of self invites us to embrace
more unifying interpretations of older God images. For example, the Hebrew myth that says God
created Adam in his own image and from the dust of the ground can be newly interpreted as
follows. If humans are created in the image of God, then humans would be creators, too—but
humans have no power to create something from nothing, only the ability to move gross and
fine substances around. If God does not have the power to create something from nothing
either, but only to move the primordial dust around to bring stars and worlds into being, then
who needs a creator God to shape stars, worlds, and life from stellar gasses, especially in
today’s scientific age when the laws of nature already sufficiently account for such a feat?
Interpreting the part of the old myth that says God created Adam from the dust of the ground,
one might say that if humans are made of dust and in God’s image then perhaps God is the
cosmos and everything has been made in the image of God, from the animals to the atoms, all
with varying degrees of likeness and all procreating in their own image.
According to this new profile of divinity, God is everything, manifesting a fragment of infinitude in
gross atoms and stars, plants and insects whose awareness of self is barely awakened, crude
finite animal forms that subconsciously strive for infinity, and refined human forms capable of
consciously looking within for the expansive self of the cosmos. Turning outward to look at
another human being or even a rock, we subsequently realize we are seeing a part of God.
Seeing more of God, as in a large boulder or grand vista, can inspire awe. The euphoria many
astronauts feel upon viewing the entire planet from outer space may simply result from a felt
sense of having seen an enormous piece of God.
Whereas to humans the earth appears large, it is but a speck of dust in comparison to the
infinitude of the cosmos. The individuated sense of self likewise seems colossal when we feel
like rock stars though it is but a small part of humanity. Human faculties register only minuscule
portions of infinitude because of the narrow band of space-time accessible to the senses. It is
this predicament that drove ascetics, who wanted to see all of God all at once, to turn inward for
direct knowledge of the infinite self of God.
Children and adults who directly intuit increasingly more self-awareness by nurturing their
expansive faculties will have a natural defense against the narrowing influences of
anti-intellectualism, materialism, and divisive myths. They will be the pioneers of major social
reform, introducing, among other improvements, environmentally friendly technologies that
decentralize the generation of electrical power, promoting loyalty to humanity instead of nations,
strengthening the United Nations or some similar multinational entity to fight any necessary
wars, and removing sectarianism from spirituality. Change cannot happen overnight, but a
noticeable shift in the societal sense of self could conceivably be accomplished within each
generation.
CHAPTER FOUR
Testing Today’s Choices
Can We Know God?
We make our world significant
by the courage of our questions and by the
depth of our answers.
—Carl Sagan
For thousands of years the question of whether humans can know God—that is, gain infinite
self-knowledge—has preoccupied spiritual seekers and followers of organized religion alike.
Belief in an eternal heaven assumes that humans attain such immortal knowledge after death,
but despite the comfort derived from viewing death as a door to eternity, it may not be possible
for a finite being to realize infinitude. The theory of self, which proposes the possibility of an
infinite intuitive self-knowledge, may provide insight into this age-old question.
The theory of self offers a method to test for infinite self-knowledge just as physicists test for
finite material knowledge. In physics, the cosmos consists of four forces: gravity,
electromagnetism, weak nuclear interactions, and strong ones. These forces of nature are
present in the workings of increasingly finer aspects of matter, from planets and stars to
electrons, atoms, and subatomic particles. The power to technologically utilize them comes with
understanding of them, implying that a person harnessing such a power possesses material
knowledge of the corresponding cosmic forces. Likewise, a person with infinite self-knowledge
should have some manner of infinite power.
A standard for testing infinite power is therefore necessary to determine whether humans can
know an infinite God or even his infinite gifts. To arrive at such a standard, it is essential to
understand that according to the theory of self, the cosmos consists of four substances: the
infinite substance of self and, from it, the increasingly gross manifestations known as causal
ideas, prana, and atoms. As nervous energy and awareness ascend from the coccygeal plexus
at the base of the spine to the cerebral plexus in the skull, a person intuits finer and finer
substances. The more a person’s awareness transcends the interpretive function of the mind,
the greater that person’s power to intuit the infinite substance of self.
Infinite power, then, requires ever-increasing freedom from the sluggish, scattered, and
sense-bound mind intuited as an attribute of an individuated self. Whereas the mind fragments
the substance of self into its hierarchy of cosmic substances, liberation from the mind eventually
reveals the substance of self’s essential indivisibility. Mind is but a causal idea, an elementary
aspect of all substances other than the eternal self. As such, to the mind the eternal self’s
division is real, while the power arising through freedom from the mind promotes triumph over
physical limitations, based on the awareness that every part of the cosmos reflects the
substance of self. To better understand the indivisibility of the one self, it is helpful to
contemplate modern physics’ comparisons between the cosmos and a hologram, where every
part reflects the whole in accordance with its intuitive capacity.
Having infinite power would make it possible, for example, for an infinite self to overcome space
and time. Based on the theory of self, the earth’s space-time dimensions are functions of the
substance of self in its manifestation as first the causal idea of space-time-causation, then a
corresponding sea of prana from which emerge atoms in motion, and when atoms revert to
prana their space-time values give way to the wider parameters of a prana-based existence; by
contrast, the division of causal ideas results in prana and atoms. Because ideational, pranic,
and atomic existences all participate in the panorama of cosmic nature, the overcoming of
space and time would awaken an awareness of the laws of nature as they extend beyond the
boundaries of atomic matter. If the causal idea of mind also were to be overcome, the cosmos
would consist merely of the indivisible infinite substance of self playing with finite ideas. Fully
identifying with this infinite substance of self would ultimately endow a person with whatever
power might come from intuitively reducing all of the cosmos to a unified substance.
More specifically, the theory of self indicates that a person’s infinite knowledge becomes evident
through the power to dematerialize and rematerialize the body at will. The feat of
dematerializing as a means for demonstrating the acquisition of infinite knowledge may sound
preposterously impossible but nevertheless makes sense in this context since the body is
considered an atomic manifestation of the individuated self; an infinite self prior to individuation
would not be conditioned by the presence of a body. And the power to dematerialize arises from
intuition. A person who intuits prana and causal ideas, said the ancient yogis, would be able to
convert the atoms of the body to prana and prana to causal ideas.
Because the ancients asserted that the power to dematerialize and rematerialize was within the
scope of human capability, one might wonder what sort of world they thought they inhabited. We
now know it was probably composed of waves of light and energy vibrating at different rates, the
world modern physicists describe; but this still does not explain how they thought human beings
were capable of such a feat. Actually, the theory of self and the theory of relativity meet in the
enigma of light, which has properties in both domains. In the former, bodily atoms are
considered congealed light finally realized to be light through the breathless state, and the way
to the infinite is to unite one’s awareness with the substance of self and thus see the cosmos as
infinite light without divisions of space and time. In the realm of relativity physics, the velocity of
light, c, can never be reached by a material object because at velocities approaching c, mass
and energy increase to infinity, time slows down and ultimately stops, and space collapses. It is
as if the cosmos, at least as the ancients saw it, is saying, “You cannot overcome space and
time and become infinite light through attempts to materially reach the speed of light. But if you
mimic moving at the speed of light by accelerating the mind’s vibratory rate through inward
concentration and stilling the breath, my secrets will be revealed and I will make you light.”
According to modern yogis who interpret myths of the past to fit their sense of reality, the mystic
Jesus was explaining this practice when he said, “The eye is the light of the body. So, if your
eye is single, your whole body will be full of light” (Matthew 6:22). As for the ancient Indian
yogis, it is just as likely that they selected the superhuman power of dematerialization as proof
of infinite self-knowledge to prevent practitioners from succumbing to delusionary claims of
infinitude while bound to a finite body.
Whatever the actual reason for its origin, the dematerialization method of testing for infinite
self-knowledge undercuts the human tendency to presume possession of absolute truth. For
example, asserting that human souls go to an eternal abode after the body dies is tantamount to
claiming to receive infinite self-knowledge. Challenging preachers and imams who profess
eternal heaven to test their infinite knowledge of it through infinite power, perhaps by converting
their bodies into pranic light, would reveal they lack such knowledge. In pragmatic terms, if they
in fact had infinite knowledge of an eternal heaven awaiting them after death, that knowledge
would prevent mourning the death of a heaven-bound family member or friend, eliminate fear of
mortality, and propel renunciation of narrow self-interests in this ephemeral world—none of
which typically characterizes the lives of exclusionary religious authorities. From both
perspectives, it appears that sectarian heavens are just hypotheses, and divisive ones at that.
Religious authorities and sincere truth-seekers who instead acknowledge ignorance of the
infinite will naturally refrain from foisting these and other beliefs on others as if they are absolute
truths.
The theory of self further reveals that testing for self-knowledge through manifestations of power
requires certain conditions. First, the realization of knowledge can be tested only by those
striving for it. The outward display of intuited power proves nothing to individuals lacking the
self-knowledge it confirms. For example, a bushman may observe the capabilities of a cell
phone, but they will remain inexplicable and fail to prove the inventor’s knowledge of
electromagnetic radiation unless the bushman investigates electromagnetism. Similarly, if the
power of dematerialization were displayed before a crowd, the theory of self would remain
hypothetical for everyone present until they personally intuit knowledge of the infinite substance
of self.
A second condition required in testing for self-knowledge through the exercise of power is that
the determination must be made utilizing the same avenue taken to acquire the knowledge.
Pathways to material knowledge cannot be utilized to confirm intuitive self-knowledge because
awareness and the sense of self is not within their purview. In fact, intuitive self-knowledge
cannot be proved through material methods any more than material theories can be proved
through theology or intuition. For instance, the use of science to prove that a meditation
technique might induce a more expansive sense of self would not only subvert science and
distort spirituality, but be utterly ineffective. The intellect and senses cannot even confirm that an
expansive sense of self inspired the actions of seemingly saintly individuals like the late Mother
Teresa, since she could have been motivated by any number of factors.
Self-knowledge can be confirmed only through intuition. This means knowledge of the
expanding self cannot possibly be validated or refuted by way of sensory data, thoughts, beliefs,
feelings, or material sciences. Because the individuated self interprets such secondary
information by its own finite standards and through its own finite faculties, to know itself it must
look within.
The mind-boggling test for knowledge of the infinite self, while potentially disheartening, frees
the intuitive scientist from external contradictions by propelling the understanding that all
knowledge reduces in the spine and brain to self-knowledge; that the ability to acquire infinite
self-knowledge translates into the potential to realize infinite knowledge, or God; and that the
individuated sense of self is the only conduit to the indivisible self of God. In terms of the theory
of self, the self is one and, as individuated atom-based manifestations of it, we all naturally seek
to know the indivisible infinite self that may be called God. This quest endures despite
fragmented images of the self, such as those portrayed by the three major monotheistic faiths,
where Moses’s God might instead say, “I am that Self”; Jesus would say, “I and the Self are
one”; and Muhammad might say, “There is no self but the Self, and the individuated sense of
self is the final messenger of the Self.” Though the self, whether individuated or indivisible, can
never be proved by way of the senses or intellect, it is always known intuitively, at least to some
extent, and is therefore primed for looking within so it can come to know the larger self of God.
Applying these testing standards gleaned from the theory of self, truth seekers may scientifically
investigate the question “As selves, can we know a self larger than one limited by our
senses?”—in other words, “Can we know God?” For many people, such an inquiry clarifies their
life choices as they wonder: Am I willing to test my knowledge base? What tools do I need?
How might my efforts be worthy of this goal? What if I find I’m steeped in information but lack
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