Anchoring Yourself in Cosmic Consciousness

Embodying your cosmic self is a practice that can stabilize your awareness in cosmic consciousness. To understand how it works, you have to know that it is not merely an imaginative exercise. Imagination is certainly involved, but the embodiment of a higher sense of self has to be a full-bodied, deeply felt experience.

You are having an embodied experience of being human right now, and if you turn your attention toward it, you will see that the experience of being human is not just an idea; it's a felt experience. Part of the experience of being human is all of the physical sensations of your body. We know our body from the inside out, and we are intimately familiar with how it feels. In addition to bodily sensations, your sense of self is contained in the reactive patterns of our emotions. We all recognize the way certain feelings tend to arise in us in different circumstances. Finally, our sense of self includes the cognitive matrix of all the things we know and the ways that we think about them. At the very least our sense of being human includes physical, emotional and intellectual elements.

The practice of embodying your cosmic self is aimed at anchoring ourselves in the experience of cosmic consciousness, and this must happen on at least the levels of our physical, emotional and intellectual experience. We need to feel our cosmic self in our bodies, our emotions, and our mind. This practice should not be confused with pretending. We are not just pretending to be a cosmic self, we are experiencing what our cosmic self actually feels like. A simple metaphor will help explain the difference.

When I was in India I saw huge elephants tied to small posts with a rope that couldn’t possibly hold them. The reason the elephants didn’t break free was because they had been trained to believe they couldn’t. When the elephants were small they were tied to the same post with the same rope, but at that time they weren’t strong enough to break free and they came to believe they couldn’t. Now, years later, they were certainly big enough to break the rope, but they still believed they couldn’t and didn’t try.

We are like the big elephant that thinks it is too weak to break the rope that binds it. We are cosmic beings who think we are only human. When we embody our cosmic self, we are embodying our true self. It is only pretending if we still believe we are less than that. If we engage with this practice long enough, eventually something will happen that will show us who we really are and what we are truly capable of.

Imagine the big elephant that thinks it is small and only pretending to be big. Suddenly it kicks its foot and the post it is tied to splinters into pieces. Suddenly it realizes that it is not a small elephant; it is huge and powerful. That is what happens in the practice of embodying your cosmic self. Eventually you will do something, or something will happen that will reveal the truly cosmic nature of who you are.