1. THE BLUE SUNFLOWER
I magine for a moment that you are a gardener who grows many flowers, and among the flowers you grow, your specialty is to grow sunflowers. You’ve been growing sunflowers for many years and have the process down to a verifiable and repeatable methodology to produce the greatest and healthiest sunflowers in the shortest possible time.
One day, you plant two sunflowers side by side at the same time, in the manner you normally would. However, one morning you awaken to find one of the sunflowers to be completely blue in hue. You pluck this strange sunflower from the ground, clear out the roots, and dispose of it completely while leaving the other yellow and healthy sunflower intact. You plant another sunflower in place of the recently discarded one, using a seed from your “known-good” collection of reliable and optimally bred seeds, only to find that this newly planted sunflower also turns blue after it grows. Baffled by this repeat occurrence, you discard the blue sunflower once again, then plant a new sunflower 137 feet away from the original one; however, the sunflower once again turns blue. Determined to find a solution to prevent this odd phenomenon, you plant a new sunflower in a pot using the highest quality and purest soil imported from another region. Further, you place the potted sunflower in an air-filtered, miniature greenhouse while using a separate source of nutrients and water than you use for the rest of your plants. Yet, the sunflower still turns blue.
Stunned and confused, you intend to remove all the flowers from your garden and begin to do so. Though, once you arrive at the original healthy sunflower, you notice that it has also turned a bright blue. Before you can pluck it from the ground, it changes to a bright and vibrant red before your eyes. Bewildered, the flower then changes to neon green, again before your eyes. You take a step back and look around to notice that all of the remaining sunflowers in your garden are changing in color to match the color of this sunflower only seconds after this single sunflower changes its own color. You begin shouting various colors at the sunflower, black, white, chartreuse, and scarlet, to not only find that the sunflower changes to the color you suggest to it, but the other sunflowers respond as well to your overt color suggestions.
Even for the most seasoned botanists and horticulturists, a situation involving a plant’s ability to not only change its own color, but influence the hue of other nearby sunflowers, even the ones that do not share the same soil, nutrients, or air, would be mind-boggling. Further, for you to verbally suggest colors to the sunflowers to change their hue would leave you equally astounded. We would be shocked to discover this occurrence in plant life, or quite frankly, anywhere in nature with anything involving life on this planet. Yet, this is precisely how we as humans containing consciousness operate in every moment of every day within ourselves and in relation to other humans and forms of consciousness. By the very nature of life, we are both the gardener and the blue sunflower.
INSPIRING MATTER
As humans, we are products of the environment and grow from within it. On a material level, whether plant life, part of the animal kingdom, mycology, or human life, we are all made of matter on planet earth, which consists of the same subatomic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons.
Close your eyes and imagine taking a bite of your favorite food or dessert. As you do this, imagine that the food or dessert of your choosing is perfectly prepared, perfect in consistency, and is the best version of that particular edible you’ve ever consumed. Imagine how it feels in your mouth as you chew with every single bite. Imagine how it tastes and how the texture of it feels against your tongue and cheeks. Is it sweet? Bitter? Salty? Soft? Cold? Warm? Spongy? Imagine the sensation experienced as you swallow it, allowing it to effortlessly slide down your throat as it makes its way to rest in your stomach so comfortably, leaving you with a great feeling of satisfaction and contentment. After much enjoyment, bite after bite, you finish your delicacy after consuming the perfect amount of it and rest comfortably in a cushy chair. As you sit in this chair, you feel an overwhelming sensation of gratification and fulfillment in your body, with the remnant taste of the food still detectable as your tongue glides around your mouth and through the spaces between your teeth. Leverage each of your five senses inside this visualization by asking yourself your own set of questions, relating to each sense individually, to impress the most realistic experience inside your own mind.
Throughout the visualization, how did your physical body outside of the visualization respond? Are there any effects you can continue to notice, even subtly, after coming out of this visualization exercise? Perhaps your mouth began producing an abundance of saliva. Maybe you became so immersed in the visualization that you felt a similar level of satisfaction in your physical body, akin to how the visualized version of yourself rested comfortably on the chair post-consumption with the imaginary food inside your belly. You might feel hungrier now and craving for the food than you did prior to the visualization, or even, you may feel content, satisfied, and full as if you had actually consumed it. The intensity of what you felt as you visualized consuming your favorite food or dessert is relative to your degree of submersion inside of the visualization you created inside your mind.
Let’s visualize one more scenario together by placing ourselves in a situation that would elicit a fear response inside of us. Continue only as it is physically safe for you to do so without putting yourself in harm’s way. For some, this may involve imagining yourself standing on a stage in the center of a large football area in front of 45,000 people and speaking to them all. The silence of the crowd is deafening, as you see countless camera flashes from audience members snapping pictures of you standing there, producing no words, as they hotly anticipate what you might say. In an act of unintentional procrastination, you shift your gaze upwards only to see a close-up of your face on several very large screens inside this arena, as well as on the giant screen carried by a blimp overhead, as the encircling cameras follow your every move from every angle imaginable. For those that don’t fear public speaking, you may imagine something else, such as having to trek through a pit infested with countless 18-foot, poisonous king cobra snakes while barefoot. Regardless of the visualization you choose, imagine it with as much detail as you can do so safely. Imagine how the air smells. How does the air feel as it enters your nose or mouth? Is the air warm or cool? Are your palms sweating? Is your throat dry and scratchy? Is it dark or bright outside? If bright, does it cause you to squint due to the light source’s intensity? What sounds do you hear, if any at all? Is your heart racing? Can you feel it pound through your chest and clothes? Are your extremities trembling? Are you short of breath? Ask yourself these questions, and any others of your choosing, to paint the picture of yourself inside this reality with as much detail as possible.
Through these visualizations, you were able to elicit various feelings inside of your own physical body, using your own imagination, through your conscious ability to manufacture the necessary scenes and stimuli, which all originate from the awareness of your choice to participate in such an exercise. As you imagined these acts deeply, your physical body responded in various ways as if you were engaged in the actual situation in the physical world at that very moment. As in, when you imagined the dessert, you felt satisfaction and pleasure inside your body, but when you imagined the fearful scenario, you felt your heart rate increase or, at a minimum, a general state of unease and anxiety. Was the satisfactory feeling that you felt after consuming the imaginary dessert part of your imagination, or did your physical body actually feel good? Surely, the excess saliva that might have been generated in your mouth wasn’t only within the bounds of your imagination, as this effect breached into your physical reality. Similarly, did you imagine your heart race and your breath shorten only in terms of your imagination, or did your heart actually begin to race? Regarding the dessert and the feeling of satisfaction inside your physical body outside your imagination, this was caused by a chemical release of serotonin. For the fear situation, your imaginary act engaged your amygdala inside your brain, which alerted your nervous system, ultimately releasing a chemical cocktail of stress hormones, such as cortisol and adrenaline, causing the physical symptoms you experienced.
In short, by using your awareness to guide your conscious activity through various scenarios, you successfully altered the matter within your body. Your physical matter, consisting of the various subatomic particles, was effectively influenced through the thoughts and experiences inside of your own head, despite neither of these scenarios actually being experienced in your present physical world. These reactions can all be measured via brain-scanning equipment and blood sampling; thereby, they are not solely experienced within the imaginary visualizations but in the physical world within your physical body. In essence, you turned your sunflower blue by altering the matter there within through active awareness and recruitment of your consciousness alone. Though,...