Find a comfortable and quiet place to sit. Close your eyes, let your shoulders drop, unclench your jaw, and let all of your muscles relax, releasing any tension you’ve been holding. Notice your breathing, as it is. If there are any thoughts that come to mind, watch them come and go, noticing you are not your thoughts, but rather the one who is observing them. Now float up out of your body, so you are hovering right above, looking down at your body sitting peacefully, and your surroundings. Float up slowly, until you are a few hundred feet above your body when you start to look like a small dot. Pause here for a moment, taking in all of your surroundings. Continue floating up slowly until you are amongst the clouds, looking down upon the cities and landscape. Your body no longer visible, has become part of the landscape. Continue floating slowly higher, watching landscapes becoming part of other landscapes and oceans. Float higher until you see the curvature of the Earth and the edge of the atmosphere meeting space. Looking down, notice the Earth as one entity, in all of its beauty, you have become one with this giant blue sphere.
Slowly start to descend, floating back down into the atmosphere, in amongst the clouds, slowly floating back down, noticing the oceans, the landscapes… continue floating down… you can start to make out the small dot of your body as you slowly descend towards it, closer and closer until you are right above your body. Now gently sink back into your body, your fingers back in the finger slots, and toes back in the toe slots. Breathing in with your lungs, feeling the Earth beneath your feet, keeping you firmly planted where you are. Slowly start to move your body, and open your eyes.
Discussion
“Something happens to you out there. You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.”—Edgar MitchellLooking down upon the Earth on his return from the moon in 1971. This is a profound awareness and deep insight that most astronauts have experienced, and has been named the Overview Effect. It is a higher state of consciousness where there is no separateness from others. It bypasses the Ego. It’s a pervasive sense of unity and connectedness with everyone and everything on Earth.
“The Overview Effect is a message from the universe to humanity. The message is that the Earth, when seen from orbit or the moon, is a whole system, where borders and boundaries disappear, and everything is interconnected. Our planet is a tiny spaceship in an enormous universe, which is itself a whole system, of which we are an important part.”—Frank White, founder of the Overview Institute.This awareness can also be experienced through meditations, visualizations, dreams, epiphanies, plant medicines, and other experiences. In fact, I actually did experience something very similar during an Ayahuasca ceremony… a strong connectedness with all beings on Earth and with the Earth itself. It was profound and something I’ll always carry with me.
I think this awareness is incredibly important, as it creates a feeling of unity, which I think is also a feeling of unconditional love, peace, and belonging. And when we have these feelings for all life on Earth, we free ourselves from the bondage of our own selfish limitations.
Join me in the next lesson where we’ll go over beliefs and the huge role they play in our lives.
