Activating Spiritual Consciousness: Closing the Gap

Description

Closing the Gap is a metaphor that represents the establishment of an alignment between your personal identity and your spiritual energy. The premise of this meditation is based on the understanding that your brain has been conditioned to react to programmed responses that are based on your life’s experiences, whereas your spirit is not constricted by this programming.

If you can begin to see the function of your brain as being a processor that’s been programmed into responding to reality based mainly on what you have been taught, then you’ll begin to see that everything that’s stored in your brain, based on your learned experiences, may in fact not be of service to you. Your programming may block your intuitive channels and act to inhibit your connection to your more spiritual knowledge.

It’s important to understand that your brain has evolved to react to incoming stimuli before you become consciously aware that you are reacting. Our primary reactions are the result of a bio–chemical reaction that takes place in the limbic system, sometimes referred to as the primitive brain.

Everything that your senses perceive is channeled through the limbic system where two things happen almost simultaneous. The amygdala senses danger and elicits a emotional response, while the hippocampus compares the incoming stimuli with similar experiences from your past.

It is really quite amazing that within a billionth of second your brain can process whatever it’s exposed to and attach an emotion to the experience. Everything that your senses perceive is influenced by the limbic system prior to your conscious thought.

If you watch the news, it’s hard to not agree that we live in dangerous times. Everyday something bad happens somewhere. Now, in reality most of us are not directly exposed to any immediate danger, but your primitive limbic system doesn’t know this. It reacts to what your senses perceive from the images and sounds that you hear on the news and then it releases a chemical response into your brain, increasing your stress.

Stress is a chemical response, so is joy, anger, fear and love. We use the word emotion to describe the bio–chemical response that takes place within our brain and body. Emotions add power to our conscious experience.

Our two strongest emotions are fear and love and every other emotion falls somewhere in between. For simplicity, lets say that fear-based responses originate in our primitive limbic system and love-based responses originate in our heart. Lets also say that fear is a very primitive human emotion, whereas love is a very advanced spiritual emotion that is non-yielding. It’s a feeling that can guide us, sort of like the game warmer and colder would guide us toward something that we’re looking for. The heart feels what is right, where the brain can over-think things and perpetuate problems or dangers that may not even be real.

During this mediation, Andrew suggests images that will help you to see and feel if there is gap within your ability to connect with and trust the guidance offered though your heart, through your spirit. If the gap is wide and your brain is too busy, you’ll over think the happenings of your life. Over-thinking can make you feel stressed and over reactive.

As the gap begins to close you’ll feel an opening in your heart, a feeling of strength that pacifies your limbic system’s fear-based responses, so that you can feel the presence of your spiritual knowledge rising into your consciousness.