Bypassing the Reticular Activating System

"No one will mind if we are moaning and bucking with the intense energy flow. And all we have to do is ask the question... "

The very simple "What Am I Feeling" exercise releases inhibitions of the Reticular Activating System (the RAS), a complex of nerves connected to the brain stem. The nerves serve as a filtering system of input from the environment. If the stimuli fit the personality idea of what should be admitted you will experience them. We only take in a small portion of what we encounter, organizing it according to what we have been trained to accept. The “Guardian of the Threshold” or the habitual blockage that our personalities exhibit as insecurities, prejudices, addictions, or energy vampirism, for example, guards the gateway of the RAS. Energy running through ends up at the blockages and keeps them there.

The world will appear different to different people because of this system. For example, one person riding in a car may see a passing pedestrian as friendly and buoyant. The other may see him as mocking and condescending. The actual colors and sounds of the physical world are noticed in different arrangements. There is such an array to choose from that more and more diverse pictures of reality actually exclude each other, and some people become increasingly invisible to each other. Some people block out certain people from their consciousness who would threaten their structure of reality. If the RAS is programmed to see all as sacred, sacredness will design your world. All you see will be embodiments of the sacred. If you see the world as an answer to your questions, "coincidences" and synchronistic events will tell you all you need to know.

Usually, as we feel ourselves trapped in emotions, we are cutting down the whole flow. This is how physicality works. We are taking the overwhelming whole and breaking it into parts to explore and understand and create with. This limits our energy, however, and restricts us to certain identities.

However, if we are simply lying down and need no hard identities, and can handle experiencing more input, we can let ourselves be overwhelmed by the whole. We can let the Guardian take a coffee break. No one will mind if we are moaning and bucking with the intense energy flow. And all we have to do is ask the question and let the answer move through us as energy. Rather than seriously trying to answer the question "What Am I Feeling" in logical words, we only want to feel it. But we want to feel all of it. We want to feel all that was being filtered out before. We want to feel all that the Guardian directed away from our consciousness to protect our sense of superiority or inferiority, for example. We are really no longer identified with our actual bodies, which are involved in emotions. Or with our mental bodies which also direct what is allowed into the brains' consciousness. We feel the still silence as incredible inflow of vibrations rising up the spine to the brain. Nothing is blocked; we are everything. We allow all the vibrations, invite them, pull them up to the vacuum created by that feeling. We don’t judge them or compartmentalize them. This opens the pathway for the Kundalini to rise at the correct time. This also lets us see more clearly into the Akashic records. It helps us understand the emotions as part of a complete bundle of vibrations that are very powerful and joyful. We experience ourselves as the One sending the vibrations, choosing which ones to accept at the time, and the one receiving them.

We are as Shiva dividing into his female counterpart Shakti, but knowing they are one vibration. A vibration, however, exists as the interplay between the magnetic force of attraction into form, and the radiant electric force of dispersal. The contracting/expanding type of pulsation of life needs a duality to create physicality. We can experience Shakti/Shiva as one by releasing the division between what our Expanded Selves send and what we receive into our bodies. The two ends of the spine resonate together as one. We infuse our bodies with divinity by letting them hold more than a limited personal identity guarded by patterns in the RAS. We become multisensory, highly aware of slight stimuli even on levels above the physical. Normally, only what we have programmed into the RAS tells us we must be in the presence of something to perceive it. As we release this idea through this easy and direct exercise, we can perceive at distance through our sensitivities.

By Tantro Bensko