We’d like to share a technique and prayer for practicing third eye meditation as our Part 2 to our recent blog. To review, the third eye is our sixth of seven chakras or energy centers in our body where we can tap into higher consciousness. It is located at the point between our eyebrows.

Before we get into techniques, let’s talk about just how universal our third eye is. Everyone has a third eye (also called spiritual eye). People of every spiritual path and religion, and those without a spiritual practice, can see the spiritual eye. It is a subtle reality that exists in each of us, integral to our energetic makeup.

To see the spiritual eye, we must concentrate on the point between our eyebrows, gazing slightly upward as if we’re looking toward a distant mountaintop. Usually after our thoughts are calm and we are deeply focused, it is possible to see the spiritual eye. Seen clearly, it is an area of blue surrounded by a golden circle of light with a five-pointed white star in the center. Sometimes we may instead see a faint dot in violet light with a dim circle around it. This is the spiritual eye, but seen less clearly. Others may not see a single point of light. Still others may not see the spiritual eye for a long time. No matter what you see, or don’t see, focusing on the spiritual eye and drawing your energy there can greatly lift your awareness.

Meditation on the spiritual eye invokes a universal higher consciousness. It brings calmness and clarity to our inner world, qualities which will reflect in our daily lives. For example, when we are inwardly calm and filled with peace, love and joy, we will become outwardly less reactive and peaceful, thus bringing the positive qualities we feel within into our outer world. This helps raise the consciousness around us an even helps to cultivate world peace.

We’d like to share the following third eye meditation technique from Awaken to Superconsciousness by Swami Kriyananda, a lifelong meditator and disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda, the great yoga master who wrote Autobiography of a Yogi and brought yoga to America in 1920:

“Concentrate at the point between the eyebrows. Visualize there a tunnel of golden light. Mentally enter the tunnel, and feel yourself surrounded by a glorious sense of happiness and freedom. As you move through the tunnel, feel yourself bathed by the light until all worldly thoughts disappear.

After soaring through the tunnel as long as you feel to so do, visualize before you a curtain of deep violet-blue light. Pass through that curtain into another tunnel of deep, violet-blue light. Feel the light surrounding you. Slowly, the tunnel walls disappear in blue light. Expand your consciousness into that light—into infinite freedom and bliss. Now there is no tunnel. There is only the all-encompassing blueness and bliss on infinity.

At last, visualize before you a silvery-white, five-pointed star of light. Mentally spread out your arms and legs, assuming your body the shape of that star. Give yourself to it in body, mind and soul as you surrender every thought, every feeling to absolute, Self-existing Bliss.

Bliss cascades gently over you, like a waterfall of mist, filling your heart with ineffable peace.”

We’ll leave you with this beautiful prayer-demand that we find to be a powerful invocation to visualize the third eye. It was written by Paramhansa Yogananda in his book of mystical prayer-poems, Whispers from Eternity. The prayer is aptly titled, “Demand for the Opening of the Spiritual Eye, to Find God In Everything.”

“My eyes are enthralled, O Father, with the beauty of earthly flowers, with life’s passing scenes, and with the sailing, silent clouds. Everywhere, all I see hints at Thy hidden presence. Open that eye in me which sees only Thee. With that gaze may I behold Thee above, beneath, all around, within, and outside me. Teach me in all things to see only Thee. Open in me that eye which beholds everywhere Thy hidden but ever subtly reigning wonder.”

Paramhansa Yogananda recommends to mentally repeat this prayer with deep concentration until the “prayer-thought becomes fixed in your superconscious by the conviction born of deep faith.” We invite you to find further inspiration in Whispers from Eternity here.