Part 1: The Foundation
In order to expand one's Consciousness without in any way betraying a Christian outlook on life, do so guided by Jesus Christ.
Indiscriminate love is one of, if not the, highest goals of consciousness expansion - to learn to love indiscriminately one's self. This is how the Bible teaches God loves, and how Jesus, the Son of God, loves. Therefore, ask Jesus Christ to share indiscriminate love with you.
It may happen instantaneously, that moment - you may feel your love expand to embrace every aspect of existence when you make the request. It may happen as a gradual awakening to the Will of God.
Regardless of one's definition of "God," I consider indiscriminate love to be a state of consciousness that is one with the will of God - I consider the will of God to be omniscient understanding motivated by indiscriminate love.
Part 2: The Work
If you made the request for an awakening to indiscriminate love, & succeeded that instant in achieving an unconditionally loving attitude, reflect on available choices and decide what to do next.
If you did not succeed in learning to love indiscriminately, in feeling filled with boundless, all embracing love, ask yourself why. What barriers, psychological, material, spiritual, or otherwise, exist between yourself and indiscriminate love?
Regardless of what barriers exist, learn to act as if you love indiscriminately, and to treat others as Jesus Christ would treat them. A good actor, in pretending to be a given character, eventually learns to think like the character by doing so. This may be easier for the Christian, because Jesus Christ is willing to help you.
Theoretically, the closer you come to Jesus, the closer you come to behaving and thinking like the Christ.
Part 3: Meditation
Visualize Jesus Christ inside your heart. Invite the presence, insights, and love of Jesus Christ into yourself. Try to think only about these things, and to feel them expanding from within you.
Visualize all the things you have ever done wrong, and all the things that have ever been done wrong to you, and release all self-blame and blame of others, dissolving these things in the all-forgiving love of Jesus Christ.
Visualize all the things that have ever made you angry, and release that anger by the all-forgiving love of Jesus Christ. Feel the love becoming too intense for anger to persist in its presence.
Visualize the things that you love and the things that you do not love, and realize that Jesus Christ loves them all, and that he is willing and powerful enough to teach you to love in the same way.
Visualize the things it is most difficult for you to love, beginning with something easy and gradually moving on to more difficult objects, until Jesus Christ succeeds in teaching you to love them all. Animate and inanimate objects alike, learn to love.
Part 4: Perfecting One's Ability to Act Based on the Indiscriminate Love of Jesus Christ
There may be one lesson that God will never share with any of His children: the lesson of Omniscience. God's children may never have all the answers to every problem.
The more clear headed, focused, and objective one's perspective, and the less it is tainted by ignorance, the better.
I think that information is distorted by one's natural emotional disposition, by repetition's tendency to condition belief, by the misleading or out-right deceitful and lying presentation of the information, and by the incompleteness of any source.
To attempt to overcome emotional interpretation of information, learn techniques of emotional control - meditating on a target emotion, or on apathy, to achieve it. Create a fictional robot, and write down how the apathetic robot might take the information, were it in your place. Study what the various philosophers and spiritual teachers have said about coming closer to "the truth," both the good ones and the bad ones. And study the controls placed on information by the various branches of science/empiricism.
Understand in what ways your personality type is predisposed to receive information.
To attempt to overcome the incomplete and deceitful presentation of information, use multiple sources. Research the track records of your sources. Diversify as much as possible the kinds of sources you use. Intentionally read what people have to say that have opinions hostile to your own.
To learn to be focused, pick a still posture and stick to it, for half an hour to an hour a day, until you learn to shut down your internal dialog. When you can go an entire day without a single thought running away with you, you can move on to other kinds of meditation.
Discipline, too. When desire distracts you from helping others, ask Jesus Christ for the love and the strength to resist desire. When pain causes you to avoid helping others, ask Jesus Christ for the love and the strength to persevere anyhow, & for salvation from suffering.
Part 5: Become Powerful Through Christ
You can pray to Christ for guidance in everything that you do, & this is a good prayer, but in my opinion one of the main things Christ guides people to do, if they are truly listening, is to think for themselves.
If the Body and the Mind and the Heart are a vessel for Christ, they should be strengthened and purified every way possible.
To strengthen the body, study diet, eat right, take vitamins, drink right, and exercise. To strengthen the body's instincts, take classes on the various branches of the martial arts.
To strengthen the mind's creative faculty, study as diverse a variety of art forms as you can get your hands on. The further from the norm an object veers, the more likely it is to cause an unobjective sense of disgust or aversion - defeat this tendency! Read comic books and every kind of fiction and every kind of poetry, and every kind of mythology, soak in every kind of painting and sketch, listen to every kind of music.
Learn to enjoy diversity itself.
And make art.
To strengthen the mind's creativity through meditation, try visualizing colors when you hear music - whatever association pops into your head when you attempt the visualization. See if you can visualize the sound waves - think back to computer screen saver programs, and the different patterns that went along with the music.
Try to learn to visualize you favorite cartoon characters on the tv screen when the tv is turned off. See if you can make them interact with each other, and put words in their mouths.
Invent your own meditations.
To strengthen the mind's decision making faculty, study history, psychology, sociology, and any subject related to the decisions you must make. To improve your behavior toward the environment, study the environment. To improve your behavior toward children, study child psychology. To improve your ability to repair lightbulbs, research lightbulb repair.
In order to expand one's Consciousness without in any way betraying a Christian outlook on life, do so guided by Jesus Christ.
Indiscriminate love is one of, if not the, highest goals of consciousness expansion - to learn to love indiscriminately one's self. This is how the Bible teaches God loves, and how Jesus, the Son of God, loves. Therefore, ask Jesus Christ to share indiscriminate love with you.
It may happen instantaneously, that moment - you may feel your love expand to embrace every aspect of existence when you make the request. It may happen as a gradual awakening to the Will of God.
Regardless of one's definition of "God," I consider indiscriminate love to be a state of consciousness that is one with the will of God - I consider the will of God to be omniscient understanding motivated by indiscriminate love.
Part 2: The Work
If you made the request for an awakening to indiscriminate love, & succeeded that instant in achieving an unconditionally loving attitude, reflect on available choices and decide what to do next.
If you did not succeed in learning to love indiscriminately, in feeling filled with boundless, all embracing love, ask yourself why. What barriers, psychological, material, spiritual, or otherwise, exist between yourself and indiscriminate love?
Regardless of what barriers exist, learn to act as if you love indiscriminately, and to treat others as Jesus Christ would treat them. A good actor, in pretending to be a given character, eventually learns to think like the character by doing so. This may be easier for the Christian, because Jesus Christ is willing to help you.
Theoretically, the closer you come to Jesus, the closer you come to behaving and thinking like the Christ.
Part 3: Meditation
Visualize Jesus Christ inside your heart. Invite the presence, insights, and love of Jesus Christ into yourself. Try to think only about these things, and to feel them expanding from within you.
Visualize all the things you have ever done wrong, and all the things that have ever been done wrong to you, and release all self-blame and blame of others, dissolving these things in the all-forgiving love of Jesus Christ.
Visualize all the things that have ever made you angry, and release that anger by the all-forgiving love of Jesus Christ. Feel the love becoming too intense for anger to persist in its presence.
Visualize the things that you love and the things that you do not love, and realize that Jesus Christ loves them all, and that he is willing and powerful enough to teach you to love in the same way.
Visualize the things it is most difficult for you to love, beginning with something easy and gradually moving on to more difficult objects, until Jesus Christ succeeds in teaching you to love them all. Animate and inanimate objects alike, learn to love.
Part 4: Perfecting One's Ability to Act Based on the Indiscriminate Love of Jesus Christ
There may be one lesson that God will never share with any of His children: the lesson of Omniscience. God's children may never have all the answers to every problem.
The more clear headed, focused, and objective one's perspective, and the less it is tainted by ignorance, the better.
I think that information is distorted by one's natural emotional disposition, by repetition's tendency to condition belief, by the misleading or out-right deceitful and lying presentation of the information, and by the incompleteness of any source.
To attempt to overcome emotional interpretation of information, learn techniques of emotional control - meditating on a target emotion, or on apathy, to achieve it. Create a fictional robot, and write down how the apathetic robot might take the information, were it in your place. Study what the various philosophers and spiritual teachers have said about coming closer to "the truth," both the good ones and the bad ones. And study the controls placed on information by the various branches of science/empiricism.
Understand in what ways your personality type is predisposed to receive information.
To attempt to overcome the incomplete and deceitful presentation of information, use multiple sources. Research the track records of your sources. Diversify as much as possible the kinds of sources you use. Intentionally read what people have to say that have opinions hostile to your own.
To learn to be focused, pick a still posture and stick to it, for half an hour to an hour a day, until you learn to shut down your internal dialog. When you can go an entire day without a single thought running away with you, you can move on to other kinds of meditation.
Discipline, too. When desire distracts you from helping others, ask Jesus Christ for the love and the strength to resist desire. When pain causes you to avoid helping others, ask Jesus Christ for the love and the strength to persevere anyhow, & for salvation from suffering.
Part 5: Become Powerful Through Christ
You can pray to Christ for guidance in everything that you do, & this is a good prayer, but in my opinion one of the main things Christ guides people to do, if they are truly listening, is to think for themselves.
If the Body and the Mind and the Heart are a vessel for Christ, they should be strengthened and purified every way possible.
To strengthen the body, study diet, eat right, take vitamins, drink right, and exercise. To strengthen the body's instincts, take classes on the various branches of the martial arts.
To strengthen the mind's creative faculty, study as diverse a variety of art forms as you can get your hands on. The further from the norm an object veers, the more likely it is to cause an unobjective sense of disgust or aversion - defeat this tendency! Read comic books and every kind of fiction and every kind of poetry, and every kind of mythology, soak in every kind of painting and sketch, listen to every kind of music.
Learn to enjoy diversity itself.
And make art.
To strengthen the mind's creativity through meditation, try visualizing colors when you hear music - whatever association pops into your head when you attempt the visualization. See if you can visualize the sound waves - think back to computer screen saver programs, and the different patterns that went along with the music.
Try to learn to visualize you favorite cartoon characters on the tv screen when the tv is turned off. See if you can make them interact with each other, and put words in their mouths.
Invent your own meditations.
To strengthen the mind's decision making faculty, study history, psychology, sociology, and any subject related to the decisions you must make. To improve your behavior toward the environment, study the environment. To improve your behavior toward children, study child psychology. To improve your ability to repair lightbulbs, research lightbulb repair.
