So meditation has different outcomes. I can buy that. But your answer opens up a lot more questions. You talked about using meditation to contact the transcendent spiritual root of our identity. You also mentioned using meditation to obtain information. So are you referring to transcendent information? Supernatural information? Information about future events? Secret information? Does meditation involve ferreting out people’s secrets? Ferreting out our own secrets? And where do the Akashic Records jit?
THE GUIDES RESPOND:
When people start out on their spiritual journey most think in somewhat grandiose terms. However, the secret to spiritual exploration—we use the word “secret” not because there is any great secret to spirituality, but because human beings so much enjoy thinking there are secrets to be uncovered—the secret is that the best place, in fact the only place, where you can start your spiritual exploration is where you are right now, in your present state of mind, living your current life.
So the information we are referring to isn’t on a grand scale. It is information pertinent to your current life situation. Accordingly, rather than trying to peer into the past or future, and instead of speculating about hidden levels of the cosmos, and certainly instead of trying to delve into the Akashic Records, we suggest you bring it all back home and focus on the who, where, what and how of your current life and its circumstances.
YOU MEAN MEDITATION REVEALS SECRET INFORMATION Photo Gallery
We admit this is a somewhat humdrum reply to your question. It lacks the romance, the grandiose cosmic vision, that many religions offer, with their tales of travels into the heavens, their visions of angels, and their promise of meeting the Divine. In our defence we suggest that these are somewhat nebulous. Even if such things ever do happen, they will be far in your future. Effectively, they will occur at another time, in another world. Our point is that you are not currently living in any distant possible world, you are living in this world, here and now. Your pains and pleasures, confusions and illuminations, blindnesses and insights, problems and solutions, exist right where you are now, around you and within you. So the information we recommend you seek consists of information regarding your present life situation.
Information comes in many forms. We first draw your attention to psychological information. This involves extending your understanding of your own personal psychological make-up and those of your family, friends and colleagues with whom you live, work and play. This kind of information is crucial to working through the grating of personalities that is an inevitable aspect of human life. Often people grate with each other not because one or the other is a so-called bad person, but because their respective personalities contain incompatible elements. Understanding in depth the different aspects of other people’s personalities, knowing which parts of your own personality to turn off when you interact with them, and learning how to do so, lies at the heart of psychological knowledge.
Another significant form of psychological information that contributes to your spiritual development consists of knowledge of your own habitual behaviours, how they arose, how they function within your overall psyche, how their impact may be diminished, and how to eventually eliminate those habitual behaviours that limit your growth.
Why does eliminating habitual behaviours help your spiritual progress? Because habitual behaviours lead you to respond to new information in old ingrained ways. If you possess psychological gloop—and everyone does—then whatever information you come across ends up getting processed into that same gloop. In order to progress you need to face up to ongoing behavioural issues, identify underlying problems, and initiate action plans to change how you do things. As the saying goes, you can’t keep doing the same old things and expect to get new results. To rise out of your inner gloop you need to do, feel and think in new ways. New information provides what you require to begin to achieve this. Yet here we strike a conundrum.
Let’s say you want to transform your old gloop-filled self into a more knowing, more loving, wiser self. Or maybe you’re not that ambitious. Maybe you just want to do one thing in your life better than you have been. The situation is that your gloop-filled self has a string of habitual ways of feeling, thinking and doing. So even if you get new information that identifies the problem and provides guidance on how to work through it, your ingrained gloopy behaviours will process that information in their habitual ways, offering doubts, saying it won’t work, and in the end turning the new information into the old familiar gloopy stuff. This is a chicken-egg scenario. You need new information to change, but you need to change in order to access and process that new information. The conundrum is you need to change in order to change.
What happens if you never absorb new information? Nothing much. Yet a solution exists that can dissolve the conundrum and lift you out of your gloop-filled self-limiting habitual behaviour. The solution is meditation. Meditation involves shutting down your gloop-filled self s thinking. That self engages in a continuous inner monologue. When you speak unthinkingly it is inevitably the gloop-filled self talking, expressing its habitual ways of feeling and thinking. Shutting down the constant flow of your gloop-filled inner monologue enables you to process whatever new information you receive in an equitable manner, free of the old self s agenda—which is to keep doing what it has always done.
Accordingly, sitting in meditation, with the mind of your ingrained gloopy self quiet, enables you to process new information however you receive it, whether via books, workshops, seminars or through obtaining expert guidance. Free of the ingrained self’s habitual blaming, justifying, excusing and denying, you can evaluate the new information, relate it to your own life situation, use it to illuminate the dark corners of your gloopy self, decide how to change your life and, in the long run, transform yourself.
Sitting like this, inwardly quiet, has another significant outcome. It opens you up to other levels of information. This is because when you sit in silence you may start to hear voices that are not your own. We are not talking about schizophrenia, a psychotic state in which people hear voices—such as those of God, the Devil, or various deceased personalities—who tell them what to do. We certainly do not mean you will hear voices in this sense. Rather, we are using the word voices as a metaphor.
When inner silence is sustained over a period of time, a condition is generated in which you may begin to discern very quiet streams of thought. We call such a stream a voice, but it is not heard in a conventional aural sense. So when we say a voice is heard by the ear of the mind you must be aware that neither ear, voice nor hearing are literally involved. For example, this communication is reaching our scribe via a subtle stream of thought that he is aware does not come from him. To say this communication involves him hearing a quiet voice coming from somewhere else is a metaphorical and not a literal description.
Our scribe’s ability is not special. Anyone can do it. It just takes a desire to do so, and a period spent in training learning to quieten the gloopy self s mind sufficiently to hear quiet and subtle voices that come from out there. At this point we wish to share a secret. This secret is the biggest secret in your life. The secret we wish to reveal is that the biggest secret in your life is … you.
This statement may seem mere froth, to be just another piece of New Age faux wisdom. We sympathise with such a response. Nonetheless, we are not being facetious. We ask you to consider this statement in a quiet state, without your gloopy responses kicking in. Assuming you are in such a state as you read this, we repeat: The biggest secret in your life is you. The most important source of information is you. The most significant contributor to your growth and transformation is you.
In our answer to the previous question we drew a distinction between your current human you and your transcendent spiritual you. That spiritual you is your primary source for the information you need to grow. It knows more than you do because your spiritual you has lived many, many lives. In contrast, you in the form of your current human you only know this life. Accordingly, the voice of your spiritual you is the first subtle voice you need to hear. It can offer you sound insights and useful advice, given it has lived through similar (or even the same) situations as those you are going through now, and given it has an overview of all that is involved.
This voice can legitimately be called a secret because, in the midst of the conditions of ordinary life, it remains hidden. It may also be characterised as the pirates’ mythical buried treasure, as the princess locked in the tower, as the alchemist’s red sulphur, as the Philosopher’s Stone, or as the Pearl of Great Price people spend their lives trying to obtain. The good news is that your spiritual you is not mythical. Nor do you have to sail to distant lands to find it. However, you do have to fight a dragon before you can access it. In the context of this discussion, the dragon consists of your gloop-filled self and its constant stream of self-limiting thoughts.
While we are in the realm of myths and legends, a Greek myth relates how a soul drinks from the river of Lethe just before it leaves the underworld and returns to the human world to be incarnated in its next body. Drinking the river Lethe’s waters induces a state of forgetfulness, so when the soul is born in its new body it is unable to remember its previous lives, or indeed that before it was born it existed for an extended period in a non-embodied, spiritual state.
In the previous book in this series we stated that forgetfulness is necessary for reincarnation to function effectively, because each spirit needs to live unencumbered by memories of all its prior incarnations, especially the mistakes it made. Now we can add that what sustains the state of forgetfulness throughout your life is that you are constantly drinking from the stream of thoughts emanating from your gloop-filled self. This stream promotes forgetfulness because it keeps you involved in the minutiae of your current life. This involvement isn’t at all a bad thing, given it lies at the heart of being human. You have to get involved in order to live a human existence and so be in a position to extract what being human offers. Yet there are other possibilities besides being forgetful for your entire life.
When you engage in sustained periods of silent meditation, one outcome is that you stop constantly drinking from your gloopy self’s stream of thoughts. Inwardly free, you start to hear the quiet voice of your spiritual you. As contact is maintained, that quiet voice, at first heard intermittently, gradually becomes a stream of subtle thoughts. And as you drink from this alternative stream of thoughts you start to remember things, things that you at the level of your spiritual you know well, but that for you as a human you have long been hidden and secret. Meditation makes remembering possible. Remembering is the process of you as your current human you becoming aware of what you as a spiritual you already know. Remembering is the process of digging up the secret treasure of self-knowledge regarding who, what, where and how you are.
The question has been asked, what about other people? Can you access their buried secrets? Yes, certainly. You can gain insights into other people’s psychological make-up and infer what past events, even those that happened in prior lives, have led to them manifesting their current habitual behaviours, their current levels of health, and their current personality. Gaining insights into another’s future is much more complex.
Some insights into others’ buried secrets can be obtained via meditation. However, this is a complicated topic that defies simple explanation. It is the case that some people choose to incarnate with the intention of using their so-called psychic abilities to help others. We are specifically referring to mediums who ferret out buried personal and family secrets as part of their work to help the non-embodied convey information to the embodied, whether to resolve issues caused by grating personalities or to dissolve grief. But you do not need to be a medium to ferret out others’ secrets. Anyone who lives intimately with another for years is in a position to access their deepest secrets, entirely due to proximity allowing you to get to know them well.
However, you only ever dig up another’s buried secrets when you really wish to do so. The fact is that most people don’t feel comfortable digging into anyone else’s deepest secrets, given they have no desire to delve into their own.
We must also emphasise the role observation plays in obtaining insights into what drives others. Using data obtained via straightforward observation, it is quite possible to infer much about another person and their deepest motivations. However, in order to infer coherently you need to use an appropriate psychological framework to process your observations. One such framework developed for the modern outlook is offered by the Michael Teachings. Others have been developed historically within Buddhism, Jainism, Sufism, Taoism, Kabbalah, and other spiritual traditions. People also develop their own frameworks in the context of their experiences. They are all valid in their own ways, but of course none is full and complete because the mind of the embodied human you simply cannot encompass everything that is involved. Nonetheless, by using an appropriate psychological framework to process observations, a great deal more can be ferreted out and understood than is normal among human beings.
To conclude, we address the question of how the so-called Akashic Records relate to meditation. In the previous book we observed that this name is not quite an apt description. It is more valid to say that each planet develops a cultural stream. The Earth’s cultural stream includes all the experiences and information that human beings have generated throughout the period they have existed on this planet. What has been called the Akaskic Records, with its suggestion of a library containing cosmic information, is better envisioned as a human-generated cultural stream that surrounds the Earth. Of course, there isn’t just one stream. Each species has generated its own stream. So at the level of what, for want of a better term, is called the astral plane, multiple interlaced streams are associated with this planet. Each species’ stream can be accessed by human beings. Incidentally, this is how shamans transform themselves into an eagle, snake or a jaguar. They don’t enter a particular animal, rather they drink from the species’ cultural stream. And because spiritual identities are associated with each and every species, in doing so they initiate communication with those spiritual identities.
We observe that you also generate your own personal cultural stream, which is a distillation of all your experiences, skills, knowledge and wisdom. Your personal cultural stream could be thought of as your personal Akashic Record, in which your secret multi-incarnational history is recorded. Of course, it is only hidden from your human you. Your spiritual you knows everything that is in it.
The existence of all these streams means that a vast amount of information is available to any enquiring mind. We emphasise the word enquiring because one of the few rules governing the acquisition of knowledge is that no one gains access to any personal or collective cultural stream without first asking. It is not that permission needs to be granted—although we note that sometimes an individual is held back from accessing information for their own good, given that the adage a little knowledge is a dangerous thing contains more than a germ of truth. But this is rare. What applies much more commonly is that people don’t gain access to information that would certainly be useful to them because they don’t seek it out in the first place. So it is not that individuals are denied access, it is that they deny themselves access. A simple request, sustained and repeated until a response is obtained, can open up much new knowledge.
Here, then, is another aspect of meditation: it involves asking for information and remaining quiet until a subtle voice presents what is sought. Most commonly, the voice you hear, the stream from which you sip, emanates from your spiritual you. After sustained practice, and in the context of what is required to fulfil your life plan, you may begin to hear other subtle voices and subsequently access alternative streams of information. The only restraints on your ability to access those streams of information are the restraints you place on yourself. No one else, no other being, is holding you back. As is written, knock and it will be opened to you. Ask and you will be answered. But no answers arrive without the questions first being asked.
What questions are best? Those that illuminate areas in your life that you wish to address. Start from who you are, where you are, doing what you are. All wisdom flows from this.
