Manifestation Basics: Just Change The Channel

Part Seven

One of the statements Neville made often was, “God is your imagination.” In The Creative Power of Imagination he phrased it another way: God is the “I” at the center of all your experience (I may be paraphrasing somewhat, hence the lack of quotes — but as I remember it, this is the exact terminology he used).

Neville made statements like these so often, in fact, that it’s easy for us to become blind to their actual meaning. They become lines we gloss over — take for granted even. But they’re the foundational principle of all manifestation and thus worth revisiting and clarifying often. If we don’t understand this zeroth principle deep down in the core of our being, conscious manifestation will always be an uphill battle.

The first thing I think we need to distinguish is the difference between the aforementioned statements.

The “I” at the center of all experience is unaltered, uncolored awareness. Consciousness in its purest form. In my experience, this is one of the most difficult ideas to grasp — even when we think we’ve finally got a grip on it. Unadulterated consciousness is not the same thing as “mind.” Anything you can be aware of, cannot (by definition) be it. It is the blank canvas on which all experience is painted. The silence in which all sounds arise.

The easiest way to conceptualize this is by analyzing your experience in deep sleep. Most people would say deep sleep is the state of no awareness. But can you really be certain that you aren’t still conscious in deep sleep, when you aren’t dreaming?

Yes, you’re not conscious of any thing — you don’t have a memory of sleeping deeply, because there’s no experience to remember — but that isn’t necessarily the same thing as being truly non conscious. In Tibetan spiritual traditions, masters strive toward the sleep of clear light, or the remaining aware that we are aware, despite not being aware of any actual thing, through all stages of sleep. This is somewhat of a departure from the route we’re on today, so I’ll leave our talk of pure awareness here for the moment — you should study your own experiences of what I’m saying deeply though.

With that out of the way, we can get to imagination.

Imagination is God in “active” form. It is his first emanation out of the infinite unmanifest state, so to speak. Before things find their existence physically, they find their existence in the subtle form of feelings, then thoughts. As we’ve discussed in the past, our feelings and our thoughts are our “primary” manifestations.

Okay, cool. Definitions out of the way, why does this matter?

Well, it matters because some of us lack clarity on “where” the power of manifestation lies in our experience. We identify as our limited mind/body complex and buy into the idea that our minds have the power to project their contents outward onto the world. This is a logical place to end up at given the necessary concessions made by most people writing about manifestations (it’s cumbersome to try and communicate without appealing to people’s casual identifications) but ultimately it’s wrong.

Again, as we’ve discussed in the past, your mind/body complex doesn’t have any power to manifest anything. It is in and of itself a manifestation. This is why so many people struggle to hold their desired state when faced with so called “reality.” It’s also why people have the intuition that changing our feelings or beliefs is very difficult.

I have bad news for you. Changing your feelings or beliefs is not just difficult — it’s impossible. Well, it’s impossible so long as you identify as little “i” (your mind body complex).

Here’s what I mean: Trying to change your feelings or beliefs while identified as your body/mind is the same as saying “I am wearing a red shirt. I want to be wearing a blue shirt, while continuing to wear my red shirt.” Made sense? I hope not, because it’s nonsensical. It’s a paradox.

When you identify as “little i” what you’re identified with is your thoughts and feelings. You cannot continue to identify them as yourself, and simultaneously be able to change them. How could you? If you were to replace something with which you’re identified, wouldn’t you disappear? How would that even be possible?

We struggle because of this primary misidentification. You are not your body/mind — not “little i” — you are pure awareness (big “I”), the space in which little i arises.

I understand this may be a little mind bending, so let’s use a metaphor. Think of awareness as a movie screen. Everything that arises on the screen (the movie) depends on the screen for its existence. The images we see can change or even disappear, but the screen remains unaffected. This example is a common one in vedantic traditions, and I first heard it from Ramana Maharshi.

The reason it’s hard for you to change you feelings/beliefs is because you’re identified as an image on the screen, when what you actually are is the screen itself. You take yourself to be the unhappy person who desires different experiences, and is trying to employ manifestation in an attempt to change the world in which you live. But the images on the screen don’t have the power to change themselves.

That brings us to the title of this post and our exercise for today.

When trying to hold a new state of knowing/feeling, start by meditating on everything we’ve covered here today, recognizing yourself as the awareness that underlies you body, your mind, and everything in your world — then try to “change the channel.” Instead of identifying as the star of the movie on the screen right now, and trying to alter what happens in your world, try and just put on a different movie. One where the star might look a lot like you, and might experience similar things to you, but ultimately one where the feelings and experiences faced by the star are different — and more in line with what “little i” desires.

This kind of practice can be helpful in clarifying to you what it is touted actually doing when you try to change your state of knowing.

And it won’t actually change your regular practice of visualization or SATS. It’ll just help you see things from a more productive vantage point. Instead of feeling as person X trying to manifest experience Y, you’ll focus your attempts at “knowing” person Y who naturally encounters experience Y.

As always, good luck.