Candle Meditation (Beginners)

Part 1:

Place a lit candle either on the floor, about 3 to 6 feet in front of you - where your gaze falls naturally downward, or on a table in front of you that places the flame of the candle at about eye level. Being as empty as possible, simply gaze at the flame. Silently focus on the flame. Your inner chatterer will probably comment, compare, and judge. Let it do its thing and the chatter will eventually slow and possibly even stop. Just watch the flame's soothing dance.

Part 2:

After gazing steadily at the flame with eyes open, close your eyes and visualize the flame. Use the flame as an inner sacrificial altar. Send your lower nature characteristics to the flame and see them dissolve, burn away, or turn to ashes. Serve up all the things that take your peace away. Your impatience, cold heartedness, anger, pain, self-loathing, and so on. Sacrifice them all. In your minds eye, see yourself becoming purer and purer, glowing more and more as the flame grows brighter with each offering. See the purified loving light fill you and radiate out in all directions, sending divine holy healing energy everywhere. Shine brightly, eternally, and live happily ever after.

Candle Meditation (Advanced)

Concentrate on the flame at the tip of a candle. Mentally analyze what you witness. See the white, blue, red, orange, yellow areas of the flame. Observe the way the light changes as it radiates from the candle. Observe the never-ending movement. Feel the warmth. Acknowledge this naked exhibition of atomic energy at play, unencumbered by solidity. Close your eyes and visualize the flame within your heart, stimulating the pulse of life itself. Witness the flame throbbing with every heartbeat and see light fill every organ, every bone, and every cell in your body. Witness the flame light up your third eye and beam energy out infinitely to infinity.

In your minds eye, see the flame within every person on earth. See the flame within every creature that lives in the oceans, on the land, or in the skies. See the flame within every tree, every plant, everything that has life.

Visualize the flame within every molecule and within every atom that composes all the so-called inanimate objects, and see the animation of the flickering energy that keeps all things in lively movement.

See the Earth itself filled with radiant flame. Recognize the Sun as the flame of life and see it's energy animating every atom of all the heavenly bodies in the solar system.

See the entire galaxy and all the millions of billions of galaxies alive with the same energy as the flame of the candle and know that this energy is within everything, everywhere and you are at one with it, luminescent, limitless, and eternal. You are now and have always been and will forever be pure conscious energy. Witness this enlightening illumination and live happily ever after.

3) Let the light come to you. Be available to be filled. The more you continue practicing this meditation, the more layers of the veil of illusion will peel away and Reality will reveal itself to you. As you perceive the Truth, your understanding of the delusional concept that you are apart from the rest of the universe will lose its grip on you, and the knowledge that you are a part of all and everything will become undeniably apparent. Your chattering mind will eventually dissolve in the unspeakable transcendent light of love that is now and forever within and without you.

4) Once you stop being locked into viewing reality from just one perspective, you will start to be free from habitual reactivity. 3rd eye experiences put you in that position. You will recognize that nothing more than a show has been playing out before you in what you considered "real life". And, just like when you are at the theater, you may be interested to some degree with seeing how the plot turns out, but knowing that it is all just a story, you won't take it any more seriously than a show. The constant anxiety and fear that is attached to a singular ego centered view of life will end and be replaced with the bliss of effortlessly merging and identifying with all of creation.

Once a chick has pecked its way out of its shell, it knows that there is a lot more to life than was within its dark confines. Mother Nature, Grace, then gives the chick strong wings that let it fly to the heavens. The 3rd eye meditation technique has the potential to be the beak you use to break out of your shell, as well as the wings to transport you to the infinite, eternal, universal divine reality that is your birthright.