INNER LIGHT MINISTRIES JOURNAL
ALIGNING AND AWAKENING
VOLUME 18 NUMBER 4
by Jim Gordon, President of ILM
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(from the talk, Living Each Day From Soul - 9/20/05)
editation is a way to begin a process of re-alignment. For lifetimes, your body, your imagination, your emotions and your mind have been at each other’s throats. “I’m in charge.” “No. Wait a minute, you don’t have anything to say about this.” “Go away. Leave me alone. I’ll do this.” Each one of them has been fighting for position and power and authority in this physical creation; the war is going on inside of us all the time. As we get older, we begin to just settle into the battle that’s going on inside, and eventually there’s one that seems to win over the others. For some of us, it’s the emotional nature: we just follow after whatever the emotional nature moves us to do. For others it’s the mind — the mind has won. For others it’s the imagination — we’re caught up in all these images, all these imaginations inside of us, and we’re chasing after those. And for others, it’s the physical body and the cravings of the sensual nature that run us, that lead us into the world to fulfill themselves. And so, in meditation, one of the first things that takes place is an alignment of those elements that are the ‘physical nature’ — the physical, the imaginational, the emotional, the mental, and the unconscious … instead of fighting for supremacy, they start to come into alignment. And the way that happens is: in meditation we look above them; we simple look above them to our true self, to our true nature. By looking above them we don’t give them attention, we don’t give them power, we don’t allow them authority in that moment. And they’re going to struggle for awhile and say, “Wait, wait. I’m supposed to be in charge here! What are you looking up there for? I’m the one you’re supposed to look to!” But as you look up in the one-pointed focus of meditation and you begin to chant the Name of God, you are knocking at that “tenth door” of the spiritual eye center, inviting God in: “Please open the door. Please let me come into you.” And in that one pointed focus, all of our energy, all of our attention, all of our consciousness, and all of our loving is ever focusing up-up-up above the elements of this level of creation, above our body, our imagination, our emotions, our mind and our unconscious. And over a period of time
DECEMBER, 2007
— the amount of time is different for each one of us — as we meditate every day, holding our attention above all of those elements, they begin to automatically fall into alignment. We do not have to do anything else. We do not have to go anywhere, we do not have to say anything to anybody or fulfill anything in this world — it happens automatically. That’s the beauty of this action; that’s the beauty of the Sound and Light meditation. And when that inner door opens, and that Light and Sound of the Eternal fill you fully, everything that you have ever felt in the way of separation or loneliness or longing is answered, because that Light and Sound fill you to the fullest, fill you to overflowing — and nothing in this creation has authority over you from that moment on. You wake up in that moment, that truly “I am a child of God, and God dwells in me as I dwell in God.” You wake up into the knowing of that. But then what happens is that we come out of our meditation. We’re sitting in alignment, and we get up and start to walk away from our meditation — and for a moment we are still in the alignment, for a moment we are still at the seat of the soul, for a moment the soul has an element of action over all the others, and we feel fulfilled, and whole, and loved, and complete in that moment. And then … our focus, out attention, starts to move back down into the old habit patterns of this creation, and we begin to focus right back where we used to focus before. If it was the emotional nature that was running us, we go there. If it’s the mind … we go there. The Persian mystic Rumi said it so well: “Wake up, and don’t go back to sleep!” There’s a warning in that, and the warning is this — as long as you’re in a physical body, you can go back to sleep. As long as you’re in a physical body, you can be attracted back into the sensual nature, back into the imagination, back into the emotions, back into the mind, and they can have dominion over you … you can go back to sleep. That’s what happened to the soul so long ago when it first came down into this creation. It came down and fell asleep … and we are living the great dream. This worldly existence is the great dream; it isn’t really true. It’s a dream. And the Lord is ever calling out to us, “Wake up. Wake up. Time to come home. Wake up, and then stay awake.” (AWAKENING continues on page 3)