The easiest, most exciting adventure in consciousness follows the lamplit guidance of the still, small voice in each of us. In the quiet of meditation, we listen to our souls and hear what is most needed in our lives and how best to obtain it. This wise, kindly voice never fails us and never falters.
There is no substitute for inner listening. But in our travels, these four pathways emerge to enhance our joy and draw us into the Oneness.
See which of these harmonic pathways resonates best with you: thought and word, self-knowledge, inner peace, or chanting and toning. All work together, as individual notes or as a chord, to transport us into the beauty and music of higher consciousness--the light and sound of Universal Mind, or God.
1. The power of thought and word. When our ideal is peace, healing or prosperity, and we say or do something out of alignment with this, we sense, feel or know it. The discord itself keeps us on track and guides us back into oneness with ourselves, others and Spirit. The great psychic-healer Edgar Cayce, who said that "Thoughts are crimes or miracles," lovingly advised everyone to create an ideal by which to live. This is best done in meditation, so that the soul voice may show us what is needed most. For you, is it peace, joy, self-discipline, will, oneness or something else altogether?
If a single word floats up when you ask this question, create with this word an affirmative phrase or sentence, then go back into the silence to see if it is good and right for you. When it is, post your ideal somewhere and, during meditation, use it as a mantra to draw your busy mind back into the silence. This will build your ideal into your life. When the words of your ideal no longer have a "shine," or "go dead" for you, you have incorporated this quality and it's time to return to meditation for a fresh ideal.
Every time you think or speak your ideal, you are physically attuning your body-mind to it, so be sure it's a spiritual intention that will uplift you! Ideals are blueprints with which we build our lives, whether we know it or not! If you aren't convinced that your thoughts, words and emotions influence the physical world around you, you might find these stories very interesting.
Last November I attended an historic conference in Virginia Beach that featured the physicists and U.S. military personnel at the center of America's research on remote viewing, termed "anomalous perception" or "anomalous perturbation" (psychic receiving or influencing) by these methodical thinkers. One of the presenters was the famous remote viewer and artist Ingo Swann, who reminded us that thoughts, as vibrations, are heard and felt by all sentient beings, including house plants!
At a party in New York City, Swann met Cleve Baxter, who later authored the classic book, The Secret Life of Plants, and visited Baxter's home to participate in experiments. Baxter had hooked up lie detector electrodes to the leaves of ordinary house plants, and every time Swann struck a match, the readout jumped sharply in reaction. After awhile, the reactions stopped and Swann asked why. "The plant knows you're bluffing!" Baxter told him. And so it did, as illustrated time and again in Baxter's landmark book.
In other experiments, Baxter and Swann took skin scrapings and drops of blood from a man and put them in a vial hooked up to the same electrodes. The readouts consistently jumped when the man was poked with a pin, even when he was five blocks away! (See the second edition of my e-zine, OneWorld, for a series of eye-opening articles and interviews from this amazing conference.)
That we are all one body, one mind is indisputable. Yet we so easily forget and doubt how our thoughts and words affect everyone-and everything-else, including our own bodies and minds.
2. The power of self-knowledge. My still, small voice has said for the past 16 years that releasing darkness enables us to attract and hold more light, and recently, DNA experiments carried out by a Russian scientist proved definitively that this is true. It's intuitively verifiable as well, and a phenomenon that we can physically feel as it takes place.
Here's how to bypass your ego, which I call a "hero in its own mind," and awaken to what you need to know about yourself. Every time you find yourself angry, frustrated or in conflict with someone else, "Stand back and watch yourself go by," as Cayce so vividly advised. "Know Thyself," emblazoned on the temples of Greek mystery schools, is the key to conscious evolution. If we do not undertake this journey, we are not really conscious at all.
I was taught this by my meditative writings, and as I traced my discordant words and actions back to their source-fear of inadequacy and a crippling lack of self-love-I was able to see and correct the destructive patterns of behavior that drove me to addictive decisions and ways of life. I could actually feel my burdens growing lighter, as my pain, sorrow and yearning gave way to increased amounts of light in my body-mind.
What fascinated me most was the correlation of this "en-lightenment" to sound: with each stride forward, I could hear my singing voice becoming ever more resonant and beautiful! I can still hear the difference in my voice, in shifting from one state of consciousness to another, and especially in singing with other spiritual seekers, wherein everyone's voice grows more harmonious, resonant and beautiful. I concluded that the high frequencies of love bring us into our blossoming literally and in response to our deepest desires.
3. The power of inner peace. Silent meditation, by building up the divine currents of energy within us, is the single most effective way to heal and transform the body-mind. These currents, containing the light and sound of God, tune up our bodies through the chakra system, or "wheels of energy," as Cayce called them. He said, and virtually all medical intuitives have seen, that these seven energy centers connect the spiritual dimensions with our endocrine glands, located at major nerve centers The chakras, powered-up like frequency transformers with multi-level circuits, step our energy up or down.
You can feel this happen during meditation, and the longer you meditate, the more sensitive you become to these subtle energies, which carry us into the Oneness. I experience this oneness not only as a sense of love for and connection with others, but also as oneness with my highest mental clarity, creativity and intuition. After 16 years of regular practice, I emerge from every meditation, brief or lengthy, feeling more centered, grounded and in attunement with my true self. Going within kindles the divine spark in us so that we may know and speak the truth of who we are-and, in this, reach out to others in love, compassion and service.
A calm, peaceful sense of oneness is critical to our evolution; otherwise, we volley back and forth from one state of consciousness to another without ever really knowing what is real and what is not. I experience this shifting consciousness when I don't meditate every day. The slippage is all too apparent to me, and unfortunately, to others around me as well.
When I do return to meditation, I am amazed at the consistently gentle, loving voice of my heart, which does not complain when I skip my contemplative time, but waits patiently for me to return. Recently, while in deep meditation, I heard a quiet little voice say, "I am too hurried." Upon engaging in a pen-and-paper dialogue with my heart and mind, I learned that both want and need the restful peace of meditation.
This makes sense, doesn't it? It is in the Oneness that both are energized and made more vibrant and whole. In this blissful state, these three notes organize themselves into a chord made of the proper co-creative partnership: mind serving heart, heart serving soul, and soul serving what I call the Divine Harmonic.
4. The power of chanting and toning. To comprehend the potential of sound, we have only to read the Hebrew Bible, which tells us how the powerful vibration of trumpets and the drumbeat of marching feet toppled the walls of Jericho. In modern times, we have seen this same harmonic phenomenon in a California bridge undulating in resonance with the frequency of wind blowing all around it. The bridge eventually shattered. Equally unpleasant to many of us is the deep, rumbling bass of automobile speakers passing by and thumping our beating hearts into palpitations.
Such "entrainment" sensations can be reversed by a meditative thought, word or rhythmic sound, all of which will rapidly shift any frequency pattern. People have always used chanting and toning to evoke altered states of consciousness and heal with the power of sound.
I've recently read, but have not yet verified, that Egyptian hieroglyphics show adepts using the vibrations of their voices to heal their patients' energy fields. It makes sense intuitively that if we fully understood the capabilities of frequency and vibration, we would be able to heal anything.
The racial memory of these abilities, lost through the ages, has been restored to us by Cayce and others. Researchers reading of Cayce's glimpses into the distant past believe that the mastery of sound technology is how the Mayans, Aztecs and Egyptians moved 100-ton boulders hundreds of miles and up mountainsides to build megalithic temples and pyramids.
David Elkington's meticulously researched book, In the Name of the Gods, claims that Egypt's pyramids were not meant to be burial chambers, but were frequency modulators for spiritual ascension and for quickening the mummified dead. Like sacred cairns and stone circles, pyramidal structures amplify the resonance of chanting voices and may have been used to raise the frequencies of the crystalline human body into harmony with the crystalline healing frequencies of the Earth. We know today that this frequency, 7.8 hertz, is a fundamental brain wave frequency of meditation and spontaneous healing by hands-on practitioners.
Hindus, Buddhists and many Westerners harmonize the body-mind by chanting the familiar "Om" or singing the word "Hu," the Sufi and Eckankar seed sound for God. (Eckankar is the present-day Religion of the Light and Sound of God.) The vowel sounds in these words move energy through the abdominal, cardio-pulmonary and cranial cavities of the body when we focus on feeling this movement of loving, divine energy, rather than how we sound to others. The key to chanting and toning is being present to it.
Here's a powerful chant from ancient Egypt, resurrected in trance by Edgar Cayce and explained in a little book, Music as the Bridge, published by Cayce's Association of Research and Enlightenment (edgarcayce.org) in Virginia Beach. I've asked people, during my talks and workshops, to sing this chant and always hear beautiful harmonic overtones that carry the singers into deep meditative states. Cayce said this particular chant awakens our ability to draw ourselves into the divine and the divine into us. See if it works for you!
Surrounding yourself with a sacred circle of love, chant the word ar-ar-r-r--e-e-e--o-o-o--mmm. Fill your pelvis and navel with this rich, resonant "ar-ar-r-r" (as in ah-r) and with your whole body sound the "eeeeee" (as in eat) in your solar plexus, moving the breath upward and directing the "oooooo" (as in oh) to the heart and throat, then the uuuuuu (as in blue) to the base and center of the brain, and the "mmmmm" (as in room) to the forehead and frontal lobe of your brain. You will feel this last sound vibrating the very bones of your head.
If you sit with this chant for awhile, you'll feel the currents of spiritual love coursing through your body-mind, and a river of peace will carry you into the Oneness of perfect love. Share your peace and healing by visualizing your loved ones and Earth's people basking in joy.
Joy is the natural outcome of these pathways into the Oneness, for here we feel the perfection in all things and know ourselves to be one with the Divine. All pain, loss and sorrow fall away in this journey toward the Light and Sound of God. In the beautiful music of this illuminated Oneness, we soar on wings of freedom and joy, at home in our place of true belonging, forever.
©2004, Judith Pennington. All rights in all media reserved.
About The Author
Judith Pennington is a writer, workshop leader and author of a critically acclaimed book on the soul and consciousness: The Voice of the Soul: A Journey into Wisdom and the Physics of God. Visit her website, www.eaglelife.com, to read articles related to this one and to sign up for her free e-newsletter, The Still, Small Voice, and e-zine, OneWorld.