Videos hosted by Michael Erlewine

Let me warn you right off that what follows is a little "heady," maybe a lot, so please ground yourself and hang on. I have been writing these last days about the three eclipses in a row that we are now in the middle of, and the opportunity for inner change that times like these can bring. Yet words can only take us so far. We all know that.

Beyond words is the life experience that words can but refer to, point at, and we each will have to go deeper into life to have that experience for ourselves. We can stand as long as we want with our toe in the swimming pool, but sooner or later (and it will happen) we each have to take the plunge.

Eclipse times (and also times of intense solar activity like flares, etc.) are moments when change can be more obvious for us to see and feel the urge of, if we will just time-out a bit and let the mind rest long enough to pick up on it. The highest Tibetan lamas tell us that inner alignment is there at eclipses.

In a very real way we each are like the old "camera obscura," surrounded by darkness and watching the world projected on our own inner movie screen through a tiny pinhole of light, the view or vantage point of the Self. And the lens of the Self we peer through is nothing more than the sum total of our attachments, our likes and dislikes. That is how we identify who we are: as me, myself, and I. This is the most common vantage point.

I mention this here because at times of change like these, we can, of course, actually change, and the greatest (or most common) change is one of attitude or view. It is much easier to change our attitude or approach to life than it is to rearrange everything outside ourselves in the world to our viewpoint. And there are little and big changes of view that are possible.

Someday we each will learn to remove those self-attachments, one-by-one, and just expand into the full light of our natural awareness. This is what all the wise persons tell us and they even tell us how to do it. And here is the point:

When we do become more aware, it won't be from the vantage point of our "self," and I have found that this point is very hard to grasp, but understanding it (or beginning to) is crucial to inner vision.

We have all endlessly heard admonitions from our parents and teachers to "not be selfish," and the like. This is not simply some moral imperative we are expected to follow, but a true clue as to what will eventually take place. The state of "not being selfish" is a clue that we will then no longer be looking from the vantage point of the self, and we need to understand this. It will help.

Instead, like the spider on a web, we will crawl across life, handhold by handhold, moving from our self-perspective to a more enlightened view. And this changing view and new vantage point is profound. It has been called the transmigration of consciousness, and is well worth understanding.

Transmigration is not so much a transfer of consciousness from one body to the next (as many books suggest), although that is what we study when we invoke terms like reincarnation, metempsychosis, or rebirth. Yet this, like so many things, can be misleading.

True transmigration is a transfer of view or vantage point and it can be done right in the here and now, in this life, as well as in any series of successive lives to come. As the Tibetans continue to point out, the life we now live is also just another of the bardo states. There are only bardo states until we wake up and become enlightened.

The entire point of all spiritual knowledge, meditation, and mind-training instruction is to point out how we can go about letting go of where we are now bound by our attachments to a patchwork self (this view that we imagine that we stand behind and have drawn around ourselves unknowingly), and instead migrate or expand to a view as wide as awareness itself. And it is this awareness that we can take with us when we die.

At that point, we cease to identify with the self as exclusively who (or what) we are and gradually learn to migrate to another vantage point, one of awareness of our own awareness. This is what transmigration is about and it can take place as much in this as any next life. Sooner or later we just have to learn to do it.

And eclipse times can make this process more obvious and easier to grasp. At times of change we stand teetering on the brink of changing our view and vantage point, changing it from assuming that life is as we see it from the point of the Self, to letting that go and transmigrating to a view that is as wide as awareness itself.

Any interest in this?