You are surrounded by a sea of disembodied spirits who are sharing ideas and concepts with you 24/7. Most of you are remaining sane in the face of this onslaught of unsought advice by ignoring it or pretending that it does not exist. Having done this myself for many, many years, I can say it is one of the workable schemes for being an Earth person and getting on through life without scaring friends and family by changing personality several times a day. Over millions of years, we have trained ourselves to work with a few concepts of who we are and to ignore the storm of random concepts, images, sounds, etc. that would have us shift our attention into being someone or something else.
You operate very much like this Mexican bus driver. You manage your life by ignoring distracting thoughts and images. You try to get on with what you are doing and ignore the distractions that surround you.
This focus on getting through life the best way you can creates an interesting barrier to increasing your awareness. If your life is at all like this Mexican bus driver’s, you probably desire to escape the confusion and reach out to a different existence through drugs or spiritual exercises.
Unfortunately, almost any increase in your spiritual awareness will be accompanied by an unexpected influx of unwanted and unexpected ideas. You will become aware of thoughts that you have never encountered before. Some of these thoughts will be coming from other people around you, as though you are picking up what they are thinking.
It will be a complete shock when you finally realize that this is exactly what is happening. These people are looking at you and giving you their unfiltered opinions and intentions and it will be very upsetting. This can happen when you first try drugs like marijuana and will add to your paranoia when it occurs.
When you increase your awareness through meditation and spiritual exercises, your increase in awareness occurs more gradually and the presence of thoughts and images from other living beings is easier to accept and incorporate into your daily experiences. There are thousands of people researching spiritual activities and some have adopted the attitude so aptly expressed by this author.
Sometimes I ask students to imagine each thought as a visitor knocking at the door of their house. The thoughts don’t live there; you can greet them, acknowledge them, and let them go.
—Sharon Salzberg
Wisdom is the understanding and accepting of data and using it to make your life easier and more satisfying. When you finally realize that most of the thoughts you are experiencing are not your own, you can turn your attention to the idea that this is information you can possibly collect and channel for your own purposes.
You are continually exposed to ideas from immortal beings who have accumulated knowledge on innumerable subjects from countless civilizations. Why not reach out and request help on topics you are writing about or are working with? Whether you are writing or creating art or designing computers, there are thousands of spirits who have done the same tasks before in civilizations here on Earth or on other planets in other galaxies.
You can begin to explore this resource by meditating and thinking about how others might have done the task you have set for yourself. The ideas may come slowly at first, but as you persevere, you will start to notice more and more variations on the theme will appear until you have more than enough ideas to begin working with them to get the result you need.
In writing “original” work, the ideas continue to jell until you finally have enough to launch an article or story. Once you begin to commit words to a document, you will find that the ideas just continue to flow and your biggest problem will be typing fast enough to capture everything before it evaporates.
While writing, I am aware of the flow of information that occurs on the topic I am writing about. I will get ideas for a paragraph and will also see ideas for upcoming paragraphs. Occasionally, I will get an idea to add to a previous paragraph and will go back and insert it where needed.
I have found that doing this process on something I am building is slightly different. I will play with concepts until I get a clear three-dimensional image of what I want to construct. If it is not too detailed, I will skip the drawing phase and start constructing elements of what I wish to build. As I create the parts, I will see the concepts change to fit the materials I have on hand and the construction is altered accordingly.
The point I want to make is that I am fully aware of the contributions being made by other spirits and we work as a team to incorporate them into the finished work. The final product is a joint effort and the satisfaction is shared by all.
You can test this for yourself, if you wish, by attempting to create something that does not exist here on Earth yet. Consider a product or service that might be very useful if it existed but is not available now in any form whatsoever. Try to conceive how it might be designed or constructed and see what concepts come to mind. You will notice that most of the ideas are things you have never thought about or even considered.
My favorite project of this type is the design and construction of personal anti-gravity systems for personal and sport use. From the many variations I see when I explore these themes, I get the feeling that advanced civilizations have worked out solutions for some of these challenges and they are not variations on any existing technologies. I also feel that I will eventually pull in someone who has successfully built such a system and we can proceed with the project from that point. Until then, it is merely a continuing research project for the purpose of collecting useful data.