LIVING DELIBERATELY
The Discovery and Development of Avatar® by Harry Palmer
Editorial Assistance - Kayt Kennedy
All our love to all the people who contributed to the creation of this book.
Published by Star’s Edge International® at Smashwords
© 1994, 2000, 2010 Harry Palmer.
ISNB 978-1-891575-62-4
Avatar®, ReSurfacing®, Thoughtstorm®, Star’s Edge International®, Creativism™ and Living Deliberately™ are the registered trademarks of Star’s Edge, Inc.
Publisher’s Note and Disclaimer:
Living Deliberately is the first section of a larger body of original work collectively referred to as the Avatar Materials. The characters and events described in the text of Living Deliberately are intended to entertain and teach rather than present an exact factual history of real people or events.
Avatar is a nine-day self-evolvement course based on principles of consciousness defined and described by Harry Palmer.
Since its introduction in 1987, Avatar has experienced an explosive global growth. Today (2/2010), there are over 12,000 certified instructors (Masters) of Avatar and more than 100,000 Avatar graduates scattered in 71 countries around the globe.
The Avatar Materials are currently available in the following languages:
Chinese • Croatian • Danish • Dutch • English • Farsi • French • German • Hebrew • Hungarian • Icelandic • Indonesian • Italian • Japanese • Korean • Nepali • Portuguese • Russian • Spanish • Slovenian • Swedish
For my Companions
Table of Contents
Author’s Preface - Extraordinary Moments
Part I
Chapter IV - I Am Still Floating
Chapter V - Notes From The Tank
Chapter VII - The First Avatars
Part II
Chapter VIII - The History of Belief Systems
Chapter IX - Orders of Belief Systems
Chapter X - Recovering Your Mental Blueprint
Chapter XI - A Private Talk On Honesty
Chapter XII - Viewpoint and The Nature of Being
Chapter XIII - The Great Divide
Chapter XIV - Creativism & Reality
Chapter XV - Designing Your Own Reality
Chapter XVI - Relative Truth and Existence
Part III
Chapter XVIII - The New Civilization
Avatar: Practical and Mystical
* * * *
Author’s Preface - Extraordinary Moments
Have you ever thought about the subject of consciousness? Where would the universe be without consciousness? If you began eliminating things from the universe—suns, planets, spaces, energies—the last thing you would eliminate would be consciousness!
Could you even eliminate consciousness? Who, or what, would know if you did?
Have you ever been curious, or maybe even concerned, about the momentary experience of some unexpected or unusual mental ability or extra-normal state of consciousness? Maybe you were more than curious; maybe you sought to experience the mysterious state a second time.
Our religious faiths, and more recently our sciences, abound with references to extraordinary consciousness phenomena: enlightenment, turning point experience, holographic consciousness, quantum transformation, cosmic awareness, bliss, nirvana, samadhi, grace, universal harmony, spontaneous healing, alpha rhythms, heavenly rapture, OBE (out-of-body experience), ESP (extrasensory perception), levitation, the glory of redemption, the peace of salvation, satori, godhead, Christ consciousness—and this is only a small sampling.
The growing list confirms that more and more people are encountering phenomena that do not fit with their normal waking moments. Is something going on with consciousness? Is it experiencing its own evolution? A cosmic awakening?
Extraordinary consciousness phenomena occur spontaneously and do not always fit simple cause-and-effect explanations. People are unsure how to describe nonphysical events. Most of the terminology tends to be esoteric or vaguely fluid in meaning. Comparisons and categorizations are closer to art or analogy than to science. And just when an understanding seems imminent, the event, like a rapidly forgotten dream, fades into a haze of doubt. For a moment there was something unusual...wasn’t there? Word descriptions are a pale substitute for the real thing.
Instructions or practices that attempt to re-create the phenomena usually condense to some sort of backward be-do-have ritual that says, “Have faith, do this over and over, and maybe something might happen that you could describe as....” Unfortunately the universe does not work backward and the only result, from such rituals, are self-degradation, hypocrisy and pretense.
So people learn to live with the uncertain memory of a few moments, hours, or days of an extraordinary experience for which the cause is unknown: a euphoric moment of love, an omnipotent moment of invulnerability, an omniscient moment of crystal clarity, a moment of grace, a moment of premonition, a moment so real that the rest of life seems dreamlike. How can one recover these moments? What combination of thought and event will create them? This is a quest into the quintessential realm of consciousness. The prize is beyond any amount of fame, wealth, or power.
Extraordinary moments! Awe-full moments! Experiences that cast even life and death in minor perspective! They leave unexplained magic moments and hint of a thread which, were we able to pull it, might utterly unravel and redefine what we are and what we are becoming.
For some, the demands and desires of life erode such moments into forgetfulness, and they escape back into the safety of plain vanilla reality: paychecks and bills. Probably by now, they will have laid this book aside and continued with the struggle they call their lives.
But you still read. For you, a nine-to-five life, while maybe necessary, is not an answer. You’re on some sort of quest. Are there some fascinating memories hovering near the edge of your imagination? Would you like to have one more look?
* * * *
PART I: The Quest
Winter, 1962. I was walking back from the library one evening when a 1940 green Dodge stopped beside me. It was pulling a silver Airstream house trailer of about the same vintage. It had a spooky feel, as though it had just driven out of a lost episode of the Twilight Zone. I imagined Rod Serling standing up the street somewhere about to do a voice-over:
“For your consideration, Harry Palmer, discouraged engineering student. Like so many of his generation, his mind struggles to understand the path his life is following. In a few moments, his worries will be interrupted as he keeps his appointment with fate...in the Twilight Zone.” (music)
A fogged window rolled down, a gloved hand reached out and presented me with a hand-written invitation. It read:
The Last World Tour of Swami Ananda!
Experience a last audience with Swami Ananda before
he joins the Rapture of the Universe!
By invitation only $5.00.
Was it coincidence that I was the only person on the street, or that I just happened to have with me my entire life savings of five crumpled one-dollar bills?
* * * *
Earlier the same year, I had won a scholarship to Clarkson College of Technology, one of the top engineering colleges in the U.S.—slide rule heaven. Lucky? I don’t think so. The scholarship was disaster masquerading as a prize. I would have been better advised to curl up on a tour bus with an encyclopedia. My interest was so broad that details confused me. I was an expert in the entirely superficial, but it was free so I went.
I attended lectures by some of the top mathematical theorists and physicists in the world, but I found only clarified reflections of my own confusions. There didn’t seem to be any foundation to what I was taught. I felt as though I had come in on the middle of the show. What a mess. Too late for first principles and too early for conclusions. This, so this, so this, so this...so what?
I felt like a bright ape on the bridge of a starship. I learned the punch key combinations for the hatches, but never mind that the starship existed, that someone had a reason for building it, or that it was going somewhere! Immaterial questions. Apparently, no one knew the answers. The patronizing smiles of professors said it was a sign of my immaturity that I even bothered to ask.
So on this night I walked out of the library, beatnik-engineer-poet, folded my Dr. Strange Marvel comic book and headed for the dorm.
* * * *
The mysterious green Dodge bounced through the potholes and turned in to Cubbly Park, a small strip of grass and picnic tables along the Raquette River. It stopped in a circle of light under one of the new mercury vapor streetlights and waited. I tried to ignore it. I was on my way to the warmth of the dorm and told myself I couldn’t care less about anybody’s last world tour. I just wanted...WHAT? I turned around and walked back toward the Dodge. I can’t believe I’m doing this!
“Namasté.” A woman’s voice—strong Indian accent—greeted me with a word I almost remembered. She appeared from behind the trailer and with a deep bow identified herself. “I am a disciple of Swami Ananda.”
She had a red dot on her forehead and wore a bright orange shawl. At first she looked like a young girl and then like an older woman. I had trouble focusing on her features. Is she old or young? I can’t tell.
“You may see Swami immediately,” she said and held out her hand for my money. I surprised myself by giving it to her. She folded the dollars and placed them in a small beaded purse. There goes the Dilly burger #2 with strawberry shake.
“What is your name, young seeker?” she asked.
“Harry.” How old are you anyway?
“I must tell you, Mr. Harry, Swami has not spoken aloud for 20 years, but he knows your every thought and will communicate through me what it is that you most need to learn.” As if to demonstrate the strange arrangement, for a moment she seemed to turn transparent and disappear. I rubbed my unbelieving eyes.
A telepathic holy man! An invisible woman whose age changed every time I looked at her! What have I gotten myself into this time?
The disciple opened the door and indicated that I should sit on a red cushion at one end of the trailer’s single room. The trailer rocked under my weight as I stepped in. Candle wax and incense. As my eyes adjusted to the flickering candle light I saw a beatific old man sitting on a folding chair. Does he always ride back here? His eyes were closed, and he seemed to be asleep—or maybe dead! I remembered a rumor from school about a mummified corpse in the upstairs closet of the Odd Fellows’ hall.
Without my noticing, the woman stepped into the trailer behind me. Floating like some ghost, she settled beside me and bowed to the old man. He didn’t move a hair. Oh, God, I thought, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Freak Show! A dead holy man being pulled around in a travel trailer, and I paid to see him.
The woman announced loudly, “Swami Ananda, I wish to introduce you to one who seeks the great answers.” He didn’t move.
For several minutes no one spoke, no one moved. I stared with morbid curiosity at the old man. Are you dead or alive? Finally the woman nodded her head in acknowledgment as if something had been spoken. I heard nothing, but I suddenly noticed a sheet of writing paper on the floor in front of me that I hadn’t seen before. The woman handed me a pencil and said, “Swami is honored to meet you at last, Mr. Harry. He wishes for you to draw him a circle.”
The statement surprised me. ...honored at last? Has he been expecting me?
Suddenly my arm was covered with goose bumps. It was probably from the cold, I told myself. Anyway, I drew the circle.
The woman approved. “Thank you, Mr. Harry.”
Then she placed the paper on a tray and held it before the swami. He moved! He is alive! Without opening his eyes or uttering a word, he picked up the pencil and drew a smaller circle inside my circle and a larger circle outside my circle. Three concentric circles.
For a moment the woman seemed to faint, then revived enough to fold the paper and present it solemnly on upturned palms.
“Thank you,” I said. Who are you? Why do you appear to be every age at once?
The trailer rocked again as I climbed out. I began to wonder if someone was playing a joke on me. A fraternity prank? That was it, I was sure. I walked away, crossed the street, and perched on the back of a bench. It was cold and started to snow. I wished for a collar button on my corduroy Joey Dee sports jacket. No drunken laughter. No one around.
After a bit, the Dodge pulled out of Cubbly Park and came back my way. The windows were too fogged to see who drove. The old Dodges used a small fan on the dash to defrost the windshield, and this one wasn’t working. Whoever was at the wheel was driving by feel.
As the car drew even with my bench. It slowed, and words I had never heard nor will ever forget formed a thought in my head. I am as old as you imagine me to be. May you grow into the universe, Mr. Harry.
The Dodge disappeared into the night. I sat for a long time and watched the snow begin to fall. It seemed to be erasing my world.
I left college. I left engineering. I left town. Three concentric ripples from my encounter with the swami? I went home and took up residence in the basement. My mother worried, and my father called me a bum. I slept all day and read all night. Occasionally I attended classes at a local college to study philosophy and English literature.
* * * *
Summer, 1965. I worked as a fry cook at the Dog ‘n Burger for most of the summer. I saved enough to buy a 1953 flathead Mercury. It was a robin’s-egg blue V-8 with a white top. The dealer threw in a pair of moon hubcaps that went on the back wheels. Black rims up front. It was cool. I was cool—too cool in shoulder-length hair to flip burgers. I rolled a pack of Luckies in the sleeve of my white tee-shirt and hit the road: Greenwich Village, Haight Ashbury, Berkeley. I had no idea where I was going. Going was enough. Me and the blue Mercury drifted over the next rise, around the next bend. I carried the swami’s circles with me, waiting for them to tell me something. When I needed money I painted motel rooms. Some nights I stopped at coffeehouses and read the poems I had written. Beatnik rhymes and bongo drums. Occasionally someone would pass a hat and I’d make a few bucks, but mostly I painted. Motel rooms always needed painting.
I met friends on the road who were also “going”— Smokey, Rebel and Steve. We went from college to college, eating in student cafeterias on borrowed ID’s and, when we were lucky, slept in vacant dorm rooms. We visited communes, bagged food for co-ops, and generally hung out in the swelling underground culture that characterized the time.
Steve carried a knife in his boot, and it made him limp. Cool limp. He had an empty canister of teargas from some protest and claimed to be a recruiter for Students for a Democratic Society. Mostly he listened to rock-and-roll while teaching himself to play an electric bass. There is...a house...in N’Orleans, they call the ri-i-sin’ sun. He played that song in his sleep.
Rebel looked like the Zig Zag man on the cigarette rolling papers, so that’s what I called him. He was on a mission to get everyone stoned. He could roll a joint with one hand—at least the first one. He turned us on to smoking grass, and we discussed things like how elves turn into tree stumps if you look too closely. We laughed together, had munchie attacks, and forgot what we were talking about. We forgot a lot. Forgetting felt good. What were we just talking about?
Smokey. Oh, Smokey! A liberated chick. She booed Maxwell housewife commercials and made love to protest the war. Where did you end up, girl?
Me? In my mind I was the hippy version of Roy Rogers. I guess my friends felt the identity, because they called me Cowboy. Long-haired space-cowboy! I wonder if Roy ever wore a ponytail?
I was studying Western psychology and Eastern philosophy and finishing college without attending. Professors who called roll learned to skip my name. I wasn’t there. I was a test-bright book-ape who wore an ominous black arm band and showed up only for their exams. I was tolerated, because it was the radical ‘60’s, and college deans were politically careful. Columbia University was closed by student riots. Cornell had its buildings occupied by shot-gun-toting radicals. Like the song said, “...the time is ripe for revolution.” It was a dangerous time to be intolerant.
So my education was casual and mobile. The paper with the swami’s circles outlasted the transmission on the Mercury. I drove the car like Robert Mitchum in the movie Thunder Road. One day I popped the clutch to make the tires squeal. It ended up as another rusting ghost in a Pennsylvania junkyard. Scrap metal. I took $25 for it and thumbed a ride west.
Smokey wanted me to meet her in Chicago to protest the convention, at least that was what was on the agenda. I would have made it if it hadn’t been for the Zig Zag man. He came back from a Timothy Leary lecture preaching the gospel of acid. He had a dozen purple Ozlies. Sandoz. Four-ways. They called them that, because one tablet would turn four ordinary brains into electric mush. Twelve thousand mics of pure LSD-25! Fifty mics would give you a religious experience, a hundred would make you believe you were God.
I ultimately received a Masters of Science in Education in '71 with majors in English, history, philosophy and educational psychology. A long way from engineering! After graduation we sat in the quad drinking strawberry Ripple and listening to the sounds of colors, watching envious freshmen with flashlight eyes whose questions left after-images in the air. Vibrations everywhere. Lucy in the sky with diamonds!
I really hope none of this offends you, but I’d be betraying dead friends if I didn’t tell it like it was. For me, this is the way those days were. Assassinations, nuclear threat, and war in Vietnam. It didn’t always look like we were going to make it. Tear-gas and insanity. Nightly body counts on the news. “Today, 500 Viet Cong were killed and 103 American soldiers lost their lives.” A million bullets found warm flesh in the battle between the true believers. Morality was bleeding to death, enough blood to float a supertanker, and in the middle of it all, a man walked on the moon. Live TV, scripture from the moon, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
The world and I drifted into and out of things that left deep marks on our collective soul. And the three circles? They accompanied me through the perilous worlds of grad school, cults, and shaman psychedelics. They came to mind when the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song reminded me: “Naa-thing is revealed!” They were there when I swayed with a new bride to “We’re Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, we hope that you’ll enjoy the show.” And they were there a few years later when we wiped tears and said good-by.
Then, like most things, they were lost. As if the truth could ever be lost. Maybe they were left behind as a place marker in one of the books I was reading at the time: Atlas Shrugged, Stranger In A STRANGE Land, Journey To The east, Siddartha, The Harrad experiment, electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Dune, The I-Ching. I don’t know.
Then it was over! Just like that. End of line. Last train to the coast. It was time to get straight.
I cut my long hair and bought a used Robert Hall suit. I moved to the other side of the desk and gave lectures on American literary figures. I shed the ‘60’s like an empty exoskeleton of a cicada clinging to the bark of an oak tree. Bell-bottoms, love beads, and dope, Morrison, Joplin, and Hendrix, left behind.
The ‘60’s were a decade out of sequence, a serendipitous spiritual experience, wandering possibilities looking for a home. At least, that’s how I remember them.
And somewhere among the possibilities, the circles within circles, the seeds of the Avatar materials began growing in my consciousness.
One day in the early ‘70’s in Los Angeles, I had an extraordinary experience that I would not understand or re-experience until more than a decade later.
I walked out of my apartment and noticed that my normal perspective had been replaced with a much broader one—a total perspective! My thoughts and the things I looked at were in the same place!
I was walking through a physical landscape that was the same as my mind. Separate from both. What had been inside my mind was now outside! Or maybe the outside was inside? Concentric circles! Something major had dissolved, something that kept the objective and the subjective apart. The world and the mind were suddenly synonymous. A perfect, coincidental alignment of mental thought and physical reality. So simple, so pure! The mind had become the universe, or perhaps it was the other way around. I closed my eyes and I could still see! My physical vision and my mental vision were in perfect alignment.
I was astonished at my own calmness. There was an amused relief, like when in the midst of worry one discovers there is no need for concern. The feeling grew until it engulfed everything. It seemed to me to be the quintessential experience of the meaning of the word “okay.” Everything was okay. Everything was okay! Had this ever happened to anyone before?
Who could I ask? Have you ever felt like I feel? How do I feel? Detached...but okay. Yes! Okay! I looked up and down the street half expecting the old green Dodge to appear. Nothing!
Later I met a friend, but I was reluctant to talk to her about the experience. I suspected she would frame it in psychological terms, and that would mean a discussion I preferred not to have right then. Besides, if you discover you’ve suddenly gone over the edge, there is no sense in broadcasting it! I just blended into the ranks of those who were pretending to be normal and guided my body to class. Eyes closed!
The body worked fine and went where I sent it, but on another level I had the peculiar sensation of being completely behind time and space, not moving at all. Watching, seeing, everything was okay.
* * * *
Summer, 1972. I was participating in a spiritual counseling practice (Scientology) that insisted I go back in time (75 million years, to be exact) and explore my past lifetime memories of a horrible event that was supposed to have destroyed galactic civilization and left worlds in ruin. Truth or science fiction? The fall of man? Who knows?
Anyway, I guess I was supposed to cry or emote or something so I could free myself of the terrible trauma that had scarred my consciousness. I was informed that one lady who had already gone through this counseling had struggled with the trauma for three days, but then had spontaneously cured herself of cancer and recovered perfect 20/20 vision. So I was excited and ready.
After a briefing on what my donations bought, I was given a thin pack of materials to read about the event. Interesting reading, but nothing much happened. Well, to be honest, nothing happened. I figured I must have had a huge emotional shut-off, subconsciously protecting myself from the horror. Repressed trauma! I knew that was the worst thing. So I started cranking up my imagination to create the most awesome fearful experience that a being or entity could possibly endure. Gravitational fields collapsing. Nuclear incineration. Betrayal. Torture. I shook. I broke out in a cold sweat. I wept. I moaned and writhed on the floor—at least part of me did. Another part of me, the detached part, observed with interest.
Right in the middle of what must have been the most grievous episode of suffering ever to afflict a being, the detached part of me began to wonder: What if you don’t create the memory of this event? I mean, it is your mind, right? What if you just stop creating this memory?
No problem. Seemed like good advice to me. I got up and dusted myself off.
Why was I creating the memory if all I wanted to do was get rid of it? I think about it so I can stop thinking about it. I wasn’t thinking about it in the first place! Who is in charge of my mind, me or my mind? Does my mind know something I don’t know?
When I volunteered my little insight, I was told very sternly by an Ethics Officer (spiritual practices in those days were very serious) that I was avoiding the incident and that I needed to go back and think about it some more so I could stop avoiding it. I meekly obliged and went back to my room. But my enthusiasm to suffer had suffered. The event taught me two important lessons: one, only a decision is required to change one’s mind; and two, I learned not to seek approval for my realizations.
In fairness to Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard and his galactic tragedy, it should be pointed out that early Greek philosophers believed that a period of intense contemplation or the witness of tragedy enacted upon a stage accomplished a beneficial purging of a person’s own emotional burdens. Homeopathy, as well, believes that like cures like. So perhaps having a good cry can have a therapeutic benefit. I believe Hubbard’s intent was not so much, as his followers believe, to be the literal historian of an event, but was to engage in some homeo-psyche-therapy.
* * * *
I left Los Angeles skeptical of all psychological paradigms that have us bearing the burden of our past around with us—presumably tucked into the wrinkles of the brain or stored electrochemically in some fusion of mind and brain. How much does the past really influence me? I kept asking myself the question: If that made me do this, what made me do that? The detached part of me, which I discovered I could contact by honestly feeling “everything is okay,” was amused by the idea that anything could make me do anything—can God create a stone that is so heavy that even He can’t lift it? Maybe, I thought, if He wants to.
So a piece of the Avatar materials slid into place: The past influences you as long as you let it. From the detached part that was watching, it was perfectly clear. The past and future do not exist unless I deliberately (or by some default setting) decide to create a memory or image of them in present time. The PAST is not the source of the present; the PRESENT is the source of the past and the source of the future!
It’s all here, right now! The present is the beginning of time.
Something rejuvenating happened to me when I stopped creating the past. The quest to explore life firsthand resurfaced. Within me there was a hunger for experiential first principles. The real quest! I didn’t want so much to know as I wanted to experience. It seemed as if I had been studying someone else’s descriptions of life, never mind that I was alive, that my own consciousness was the perfect laboratory in which to find the answer. With that recognition, I became my own friend and began to explore firsthand my own capacity to determine and experience.
The indoctrinations of how I should feel and how I should operate began to fall away. A true sense of personal responsibility awakened. After ten years of spiritual study, I realized that all of what I had learned was what someone else believed—my mind was full of what someone else had concluded or imagined. Thought dragons, keeping me from my own divine center.
I began to gather the courage to do my own imagining, my own believing. I retraced old steps and started over. I discarded any ideas that I had assumed for approval from others. I followed an intuitive feeling that told me that the more information I collected, the further I moved from experiencing. The more reasons why something was true, the less experientially real it became. It was liberating to realize that I didn’t know! No pretending. No proselytizing. No more act. I didn’t know! But I was alive!
I started feeling, deciding, doing. My philosophy and my experience of life began to converge.
* * * *
Seasons, 1982. I gave my books away, hundreds of them, and moved back to the land: 160 acres on the southern slope of Buck Mountain, New York. An old stone wall (no one could remember who built it) ran around the property. I raised my own food, learned carpentry and back-to-land skills, bartered, and read Organic Gardening and The Mother Earth News. I waded through three feet of snow to gather firewood. When the spring thaw finally came, the mud was so thick that it sucked your boots off. I helped a registered Jersey named Angel Starbeam Dreamer give birth to a calf at 4:00 in the morning and then with the sun rising behind them, I watched mother and her wobbly-legged daughter—Angel Star Dancer—go to the pond for a drink, What a picture!
The family grew. Pigs. Chickens. Peacocks. Ducks. Geese. And two German shepherds. The farm taught me that there was a difference between being alive, really alive, and just living—a difference between feeling and thinking.
Now the young disciples came to me. They were sure I knew, because I said I didn’t know. They didn’t know either, but what I accepted matter-of-factly, they resisted. “Tell us what to believe, Harry.” Have any words more dangerous ever been spoken?
But as long as they helped with the chores, they were welcome. When they thought too much, I instructed them how to create stillness: “Close your eyes. Let go. Look for something in your mind that is not a thought. Concentrate on the space between thoughts.” Eventually, for the ones who were willing to practice, their mental skies cleared.
The lessons were simple: don’t internalize; become absorbed in what you are doing. Chop wood, carry water. It was country Zen. Zen celebrated the fact that you didn’t know. The mind was disengaged, which, of course, left the experience of life. Chop more wood. Carry more water. Don’t let the heart wander. Do you know how boring Zen can get?
I switched my mind back on and began exploring it. Maybe it could find something useful to do since the pond was filling nicely with water, and I had enough firewood piled and drying to see me through the next ice age.
I started counseling people with problems and learned to observe and listen closely. Mental patterns began to appear. Little by little I developed a technique. It was like the string that the Purina Company sewed along the top of its feed bags. Pull just right and the string unraveled, but pull wrong and it knotted so badly you had to cut the bag open.
When the technique worked, it unraveled and opened to a profound concept: I create my experiences according to what I believe. What a peculiar notion! Until now it seemed everyone had just assumed that people created their beliefs according to what they had experienced.What if it was the other way around?
Here’s how it might work. Imagine a universal plasma of total possibility formed and filtered by your beliefs, each belief acting like a tuned filter in a radio receiver, passing only a certain frequency of circumstance and event. And like a radio tuner the belief tends to filter out anything above or below its frequency window. What you believe sets you up to focus on the elements that move from all possibility into the foreground of your experience.
For example, if you believe that walking in the park at night is dangerous, you tend to interpret your perceptions according to that belief. Rustling leaves become the footsteps of a mugger. Shadows conceal unimaginable dangers. Your heart speeds up, and you experience the park as a dangerous place. Your expectation of harm may even be strong enough to motivate someone who is suggestible into harming you.
Have you ever heard someone say, “I don’t know why I did it?” What if they did it because your belief created circumstances that caused their actions? Is it possible? Have you ever acted spontaneously in accord with someone else’s expectations? Try offering your hand to someone to shake.
Once the filtering belief is installed in your consciousness, your experience gives you evidence to support what you believe. A self-fulfilling prophesy. This explains how two people with conflicting beliefs both experience evidence that supports the rightness of their own beliefs and the wrongness of the other’s beliefs.
* * * *
When the technique appeared not to work, it knotted up like the string at the top of the feed bag. How about chance events and acts of God? What about victims? What if what I experienced had no relationship to what I believed?
Was it possible that I created an experience by believing in it and then forgetting that I had believed it? Yes, I supposed. Did I always know what I believed? Maybe not. I knew what I said I believed, but was it what I really believed? Was what I really believed the motivation for what I said I believed?
Before I went too far, I knew I had to figure out exactly what I believed and what effect it had on my own experience. How does one believe? Where does it start? What are the mechanics of belief? How long do beliefs last? Does it matter what I believe or when I believed it? Were my experiences shaped by what I believed about beliefs and/or how I believed them?
I played with an interesting bit of logic about personal responsibility: I experience what I believe, unless I believe I won’t, in which case I don’t. Which means I did!
One day my wife Avra came home and found I had replaced the cherry table in her dining room with a 1500-pound sensory deprivation tank.
“Where’s the...What’s that, a coffin?” The tone of her voice caused the German shepherds to fold back their ears.
“Sensory deprivation tank!” I said proudly. I showed her the hatch and began to explain. I had read about sensory deprivation tanks and thought, What a great tool for exploring beliefs!
The tank was a hardened polystyrene foam chamber about eight feet long and four feet square. It contained a solution of water with 800 pounds of Epsom salts dissolved in it. The water is so saturated with salt that your body floats effortlessly. You lose any sense of gravity. The temperature is brought up to the same temperature as your skin, around 94 degrees, so there is no sense of hot or cold. It is neutral. The tank is so dark that you can’t tell if your eyes are open or closed. The tank is also soundproof.
When you are in the tank, you float weightlessly; there is no sense of feel, no sense of sound, no perception. You are just there, consciousness, deprived of external stimuli or present time sensation.
“You’re going to get in there?” she asked.
“Yeah.” I smiled cheerfully.
“And close the door?” She and both German shepherds peered through the hatch at the swirling water that was trying to dissolve a small mountain of Epsom salt.
“Yeah. As soon as it’s ready.”
“For how long?” She asked looking wistfully at her dismantled dining room table in the corner.
“Dunno yet.” Then I thought to add, “Probably not too long.”
She shook her head the same way she had when I brought home the first milk cow. “O-o-kay, Harry. I hope you don’t drown.” Not in her dining room.
* * * *
For the next eight weeks, I spent most of my time in the tank. The only evidence of my existence was the dried Epsom salt trails leading to the refrigerator and the bathroom. Happy trails.
One of the first things that becomes evident during sensory deprivation is that the mind is more than willing to compensate for any lack of sensory input. Sensory input actually keeps the mind somewhat in focus and under control, like wet-sheet wrapping someone who is severely disturbed.
When the body’s sensory input is deprived, the mind compensates and becomes a three-ring circus with steam calliopes, high school marching bands and auctioning contests. It is a chaotic experience that somehow you must rise through to reach the stillness beyond mind.
* * * *
I float somewhere in the middle of the confusion, quite sure that whatever I am doing is wrong.
Here’s what it’s like:
How do I tell if I’m awake or dreaming? What’s real and what’s imagination? Should I meditate on something or just let it happen? What am I supposed to do? Maybe I should read some books on tanking first. No, I can’t do that because I am already in the tank. Or am I in the tank? Where am I? Who am I? Am I inside or outside the body? What body? Let’s find a place to start. Start what? Who’s us? I don’t feel anything.
Calm down, I tell myself. But who said that to me? Are there two of me? How many selves do I have? One sounds like my dad. What’s going on? Why am I talking to myself? Why did I ask that? Who did I ask it of? I’m still talking to myself. Don’t I know what I know without asking or saying it to myself? There, I just asked myself that.
This is incredible! It’s like my own private Thoughtstorming session! But I’m the only one here. Who did I say that to?
Thoughtstorm is a registered trademark of Star’s Edge, Inc. It refers to a procedure used to create synergetic thinking in a group.
Instant insanity! Man goes insane in tank. Am I still in the tank? I forgot. Yes, I’m floating in a tank. But where?
I’m not floating in a tank. I’m floating in a mind. Why did I say that to myself? Why didn’t I just know that?
Why did I ask that? What’s going on here? How could I not know? I give up.
Okay, anybody gets to say anything he wants.
Anything?
No resistance.
Until we come up with an answer that everyone agrees on.
What’s the question?
Who am we?
Days later, the subtle perceptions that exist beyond the thinking mind began to turn on. It was like a room with a rock-and-roll band playing full throttle, and in a corner was a portable radio playing classical music with the volume set very low. You had no idea the classical music even existed until the band took a break. That’s what happened. The Mental Rhythm Band grew exhausted and took a break!
I began to wake up as who I am. Not know, but experience. What a surprise! It was that old detached higher self part of me that watches interestedly without judging. “How you been?” I asked myself. As always the answer was, “Okay.” After integrating this new viewpoint, I began exploring the subtle background images that surround the thinking mind: resisted experiences, conceptions, births, traumas, deaths. The entire record of the existence of who I thought I was floated like a bubble in a sea of inexpressible awareness. At another level of being I am the sea of inexpressible awareness.
I watched the illusion of substance and separation unfold. Lifetimes after lifetimes. Lives within lives. Parallel lives sharing lessons. And the inexpressible awareness, the-always-present, watched silently from its spacelessness.
Creations floated like bubbles, each containing and defining a separate measure of awareness—seminal selves! Bubbles collapsed and merged into one another until they disappeared or until they reached that remarkable threshold quantity of consciousness that blurted forth, “I am.” The birth cry of consciousness.
Here was where the lessons of Avatar unfolded, watching consciousness define itself from the void, rising and ebbing in that no-space sea of inexpressible awareness.
From this viewpoint a thoughtform can be perceived or apperceived (meaning perceived without the use of sensory organs). It is something!
This was another revolutionary idea. Do you know how long people have been studying consciousness with the assumption that it was made of nothing rather than that it was made from nothing? Something from nothing—primal creation.
* * * *
There are several levels of conscious activity—different concentrations of definitions (mind stuff) and undefined awareness. For example, I can create a mental image of a tree—that is one level of conscious activity. I can create doing something with that mental image—that decision is another level of conscious activity. I can then carry out my decision to modify the image of the tree and monitor or correct what I decided to do. That is still another level of conscious activity.
As the point of view changes, the character of what is apperceived changes. Time serves as a good example of this. From one level of consciousness the subject of time appears thus: I am in the present moment; there is a past, and there is a future.
Moving to another level, and a different point of view, there is only the present moment, and in this present moment I create an idea called past, an idea called present time and an idea called future. Rather than being an instant in time between a past and a future, now becomes timeless NOW containing these ideas about time. From this level the past doesn’t exist or influence me unless I choose, or feel the need, to create it.
Move up another level,to a transcendent point of view, and the concept of time disappears all together. All that is, was, or ever will be blends into a singular, motionless trace within infinite awareness. Time becomes a tool, the sequence in which things are contemplated. From here, undefined awareness can contemplate the whole linear space-time fabric of existence simply as a creation: dimensionless possibilities waiting for the touch of awareness to unfold.
* * * *
I had a realization: Truth is relative to the point of view from which it is perceived. What I look as and where I look from determine my perception of truth.
I experienced deep compassion as I understood that everyone, from their viewpoint, is seeing truth. I think this is a key understanding for creating a harmonious civilization.
Instead of asking if something is true or not, you could ask: From what point of view or from what definition of consciousness is the statement true? From what point of view or from what definition of consciousness is the statement false?
Relativity is near ultimate truth! Had Albert Einstein had a tank, he might have understood this sooner.
Chapter Four - I Am Still Floating
Still floating, I asked my bubble-selves:
Are stones and ideas different concentrations and different frequencies of the same stuff? What stuff? What are the choices? Knowing and not-knowing. Consciousness? Inexpressible awareness shaped by definition into fields of familiarity. Is reality really familiarity? Is the process of examining really one of creating?
Take the definition away from stuff and what do you have? Universal plasma? Definitionless stuff. Stuff without edges. Nondimensional, timeless awareness without object or content. The world and consciousness are made from the same awareness that underlies both!
Assumptions prepare the stage. And the total of all the assumptions...what about the rock? Is it just a very solid assumption? Is it possible that “rock” and “idea of rock” are merely describing different concentrations of assumption? Strata of rock. Densities. Precipitation of assumption. The universe precipitating under the deliberate intention of an aware will.
And what about the mind? Consciousness? Packets of awareness separated by self-definition.
The mind permits us to focus on the physical universe. At one stratum (in one bubble) all the assumptions equal the mind, but in the next stratum up (the next bubble out), all the minds are assumptions. Assumptions that think.
Concentric circles! Namasté, Swami. I begin to understand.
Assumptions nestle inside assumptions like cups inside cups. Little bubbles inside larger bubbles. Atoms in molecules. Molecules in compounds, and so on...definitions in a unified field of inexpressible stuff... which is aware.
As long as no one asks me to explain anything, I know it all. I am tiptoeing out of the theater where the universe is playing.
Little lifetime theaters within theaters. Playing thought excerpts from the life and times of me. No need to dress for the theater. I write the script. I am the star. I am the villain. I am the stage.
At some level I secretly play the audience as well. Life is truly an extraordinary illusion!
Did I come created with a mind? What do I do? I desire. I resist. Is the mind just recordings and distortions of what I have desired and resisted? Assumptions that define, preserve, and recreate experience? Assumptions put on automatic. Default assumptions. Where do the assumptions begin?
Occasionally a drop of condensation fell from the ceiling of the tank and made a horrendously loud, slow-motion...ker-plunk!
Arbitrary decisions determine desires and resistances. They are the motives that direct life when I am not present and tolerant enough to make an arbitrary decision. Desires and resistances invite the creation of assumptions. This is good. This is bad. Assumptions become beliefs. Thoughts arise from beliefs. Beliefs are seed pods of thoughts. Beliefs ripen and, when disturbed, shed thoughts, defining them in bubbles of consciousness to drift within awareness until they dissolve.
...Ker-plunk!
I am a belief that believes! I am...A CREATION WITHIN THE CREATOR, A CREATOR WITHIN THE CREATION. I am a bridge between awareness and creation. The middle circle! The one the swami had me draw! I package awareness in definition and then wear it like a suit of clothes. Awareness in perfect conservation, settling back into its inexpressible self. Rhythm. Breath. Life. The mind thinks, the background decides! Move to the background, live deliberately.
Something fell out of nowhere. A spinning, glistening, crystalline drop of near-truth. It was simple; it was profound. Life is a dance of consciousness.
...Ker-plunk!
I Am! The birth cry of consciousness. Awareness defined. I Am. existing at the core of self. existing at the beginning of time and space. I Am Not. The death of consciousness. Awareness released from definition. I Am Not. existing beyond the edges of defined self. Life and death, a simple stirring, a fluctuating state, within the source of all.
Chapter Five - Notes From The Tank
During the period I was floating, I kept an old typewriter on the top of the tank and from time to time would lift myself up through the hatch of the tank and tap out some near-truth that I didn’t want to forget.
There is a difference between knowing intellectually and experiencing. The intellect is a product of consciousness and cannot know beyond the limits that consciousness assumes. To go beyond the limits of the intellect, one must experience firsthand without evaluation. Intellectual understanding is a finished jigsaw puzzle, picturing some experience in words.
Experience is being present, without definition, expectation or judgment, with one’s perceptions.
* * * *
The cycle of genesis is imagination, intention, creation, perception, experience...over and over. All of which is occurring against an aware, compassionate nospace background--the detached higher self, pure awareness!
* * * *
There are methods by which one can fluidly move from one definition of consciousness to another. One can change!
The level of idea you look AS determines the level of idea you look AT.
If you want, you can break anything down to increasingly finer parts while at the same time shrinking with your perception. Or you can expand yourself and start looking at increasingly larger things. Zero and infinity. The alpha and omega. The inner and outer circles.
* * * *
Awareness defines itself to create consciousness. Getting into and analyzing the content of consciousness is the process known as trying to figure it out. It always comes down to saying that that bubble means this when looked at from this bubble. Relativity.
Awareness waits in the background, totally compassionate, appreciatively watching.
* * * *
Attention makes a creation more solid and draws it into one’s life.
Judgments placed on a creation cause it to be either desired, resisted, or ignored.
Either resisting or desiring results in the attraction of the creation that is the subject of one’s attention.
Gravity and attention are probably different modalities of the same force.
The ability to relocate consciousness is the ultimate form of space travel.
* * * *
It is possible to return to the timeless, nondimensional source of a creation. Once there, it is possible to stop creating a creation by relaxing into an effortless state (discreate).
* * * *
The difference between awareness and consciousness is that consciousness has content, extension in time and space, and form. Consciousness is a less solid material universe. And similar to the growth and decay of the material universe--but by a different pattern--consciousness is subject to expansion and contraction according to its alignment with cosmic forces. The ancient Tao!
Between the normal waking consciousness and the inexpressible background of definitionless awareness are the confining rings of desired and resisted creations. With the proper tools, a being can learn to navigate these rings and arrive at the totally-knowing, compassionate background from which the
final and total content and form of consciousness is apperceived. This is enlightenment.
* * * *
All the ideas we have of ourselves are ULTIMATELY false. Any asserted or resisted definition--call it I, identity, self--it is not who we are! It’s a product of who we are! It’s the bubble we created to operate from within. It is the definition that we wear, and it determines our experience of other bubbles. Ego is the effort to protect the bubble.
A self is an idea that awareness is temporarily availing itself of for the purpose of experiencing certain other ideas. The self is a means of participating in a paradigm. It is possible to change self or even to go beyond self altogether.
* * * *
From the Vedas: “What is within us is also without. What is without us is also within. He who sees difference between what is within and what is without goes evermore from death to death.” From Avatar: “Move into the background, live deliberately.”
* * * *
PALMER’S SCALE
Inexpressible Source
Awareness (Light)
Definition (Arbitrary Decision)
Creation/Discreation Consciousness Existence (Now)
Space (Viewpoint)
Observation Attention Time (Duration)
Judging (Labeling)
Emotion (Response)
Thinking (Resistance)
Disregard (Ignore)
Identity Forgetfulness (Unknowns)
Random Circumstance Elements (Matter)
Decay (Collapse)
Alternate Realities
Inexpressible Source
Et cetera
* * * *
The size of the bubble is determined by the responsibility you assume, and this size determines whether something is within you or outside you. Definitions either integrate and expand, or become secretive and contract.
If you assume a very small, infinitely small, level of being then everything appears to be outside you. That’s maximum separation from awareness. You have become a physical particle!
On the other hand, if you assume a level of being and openness that is expansive enough to contain the universe, then the universe is within you.
* * * *
In a rush of light, I pushed open the lid of the tank for the last time. My skin looked like prunes. The quest was successfully concluded. Last question. End of the line. The great answer! The brushstrokes upon the unknown were mine!
I rocked the tank as I stepped out. The condensation on the ceiling of the tank fell in a shower of droplets. Hundreds of ker-plunks! Each sent three ripples across the surface where I had been floating. Ripples that intermingled in a holographic reflection of the world. It was a message.
Yes, Swami, I am indebted. Before I join you, in your ageless form, I will mark a trail for others.
September, 1986. I drained and dismantled the sensory-deprivation tank. In many ways it was a useful tool, but I now realized it was unnecessary to spend any further time in the tank. I saw clearly that there were easier ways to achieve the long-sought, high ground of awareness from which any existence is a profound, deliberate experience. If someone had said to me, You’re out of your mind, I could have replied, That’s true.
I now saw the mind as a universal tool that could be adjusted, aligned, and changed. It was no longer a prison or a trap. I was, delightedly, awake and aware in the void!
How did I feel? As I decided to.
I could determine, as easily as I could shift attention from one sound to another or from one sight to another, the form and content of the consciousness I defined myself as. I could experience any state of existence I could imagine, any state I wished to create. So, naturally, I chose to be euphoric. And when I created it, the whole universe reflected my expectations back to me. I choreographed a symphony of spiritual ecstasy. I looked from my eyes, but I saw from a heart beyond the edges of space. What was happening and who I was were one and the same.
I retreated into the forests of Buck Mountain to explore this new existence and to enjoy a glorious fall. I had the prize so long sought, the elusive extraordinary moment of consciousness deliberately created. I was in whatever place and time I created. In full view was the ever-changing expression of the universal consciousness. I saw the end of the path that every spiritual practice, in its purest moment of conception, has attempted to bring to humankind. I saw the possibilities and the pitfalls, the halls of mirrors that words can become. I saw how righteous folly could turn even the noblest path into the wheel ruts worn by “civilized” armies.
I knew the simplest of truths: I am because I say I am. I knew the truth is not what I create or anyone else creates, but the truth is that we created it. I understood that the consciousness in all living things is individualized only by what they create, not by the fact that they create. Beneath the definition, beneath the illusion of difference, I felt a universal self, and though it still slumbered, it was unified and whole. Beyond the dream theaters of consciousness, beyond the creations of time, space, form, and event, I experienced a total compassion and unconditional love for life. I could stay or return. The choice of the bodhisattva!
I was not in the world nor of the world, but within what was possible a small bubble floated. It contained the universe.
I watched the mountain ash leaves dance brightly and blow orange and yellow in the wind. Galaxies floated in the universe. A shimmering veil of creation. An ancient orchestration of belief. There was unity, and within that unity there was a watching and a spiraling of orange and yellow leaves. There was no separation between the watching and the spiraling.
And I smiled a lot. He, who lived in the bubble, smiled a lot.
Chapter Seven - The First Avatars
November, 1986. There were nine people in the first test group. They included my wife and her staff at the Creative Learning Center. Most of them had delivered and received many hours of a regressive type psychotherapy (Dianetics)--reliving traumas, releasing pain, resurfacing emotion, etc.
The majority of their clients were appreciative and had experienced a lessening of life’s tensions. So they were understandably skeptical about my new Avatar processes.
“Where did you get that name, Harry?”
“It’s been around,” I replied.
“Aren’t you afraid it’s going to offend people?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. Only the intolerant ones, I thought.
We had coffee together, and I briefed them about my work. I discovered that they were already thinking somewhat in terms of “belief precedes experience.” There was some resistance to my briefing, but also they were aware that something transforming had happened to me. It was noticeable in their reactions. My presence had a euphoric effect on them that I was not intentionally attempting to create. There was a relaxing of fixed opinions that gradually turned into genuine curiosity.
“Okay, Harry, if your process makes me feel as good as you look, I’m ready.”
My wife volunteered to go first. We went upstairs to her office, and I explained that before we started the processes, I wanted her to do some preliminary exercises. I asked her to put imaginary labels on things.
“Label that,” I said, pointing to a doorknob.
“Doorknob,” she played along.
“Label that.”
“Telephone.”
“Label that.”
“Wall.”
I noticed that for the most part she was allowing the items I pointed out to suggest their own labels. The typewriter was labeled “typewriter.” The desk was labeled “desk.”
I kept going. In a few minutes she realized that she was recognizing things rather than labeling them.
“Is there a difference?” she wanted to know.
“What do you think?” I answered in my finest counselor identity.
“Yes, there is. Labeling seems more—I don’t know.”
“Source?”
“Yes, that’s it. Source!”
Now she labeled the telephone “potato,” the bookcase “item 67” and a vase of flowers “creation number 5.” She remarked that the objects were now more objects than they were words. The room brightened up.
When she was comfortable with that step, I continued with another preliminary exercise, asking her to feel the separation between herself and the things she was labeling.
“Label that.”
“Chair.”
“Good, can you feel the separation between you and the chair?”
“I’m me and it’s it.”
I observed her settle in and begin to enjoy the game.
“Label that.”
“Book.”
“Good, can you feel the separation between you and the book?”
“Uh-huh!”
And then I expanded the procedure, still on that first step. “Do you have any ideas about yourself that you don’t like?”
“Well, I suppose, sort of.” She squirmed, preparing for the invasion of privacy that usually followed such questions.
“Don’t tell me about it,” I said. “Just pick one out and think about it.”
She thought for a moment, then said, “Okay, I’ve got one.”
“Label it from source.”
“Okay.”
“Good, can you feel the separation between you and the idea?”
She muttered a surprised, “Hmmm. I’m me and it’s it! That’s true, isn’t it?”
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