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A Place to Share Non-Dual Wisdom & Spiritual Insight
The shared illusion that we are nothing but physical forms driven by thoughts, opinions and emotions, keeps us confused about the nature of reality and our natural role within it. This illusion locks each of us into conditioned thought and behavior until it is shattered by the explosive recognition called awakening or Self-realization.
It would be challenging to consider an awakened state anything more than living in the moment, a condition everyone is prone to on occasion, and very few enjoy on a consistent basis, even when they have seen the Truth of the conscious awareness that we are. But most of the time we cannot see the light for the clouds. Read more...
Perhaps it is time to write a few words about Christmas, and whatever meaning arises from this date for someone who is fairly enmeshed in the non-dual perspective. Could we be unconsciously celebrating our True Nature at Christmas? As I was raised a Catholic, Christmas had a sacred and magical feeling for me as a young child. I remember staring at the reflections in the globes on the Christmas tree and feeling entranced by the reflections of light.
I saw the movie “The Theory of Everything”, about the life of Stephan Hawking, last night. Unlike most Hollywood productions it is full of kindness and inspiration, demonstrating the miracle of love and courage in overcoming grief and limitation. Adapted from a book written by Stephen’s wife, Jane, it tells the journey from the moment they met at a college mixer, until they parted and moved in different directions many years later. Along the way their strength and devotion is evident, along with a remarkable ability to keep moving forward and defy the threat of death (he was told when first diagnosed at about age 21 that he had only 2 years to live, and is now going strong at age 72).
Have you ever taken a step away from your mind long enough to notice the relationship between stress and the thoughts you carry in your head? Can you imagine the release if you only could stop all thoughts for a few minutes? Of course we do this every night for a few hours. We realize that if we were to stop sleeping these same thoughts that maneuver us through the day would force us into mental bankruptcy and we would lose our minds. So we try to get our sleep.
As we face the prospect of another war in the middle east, acknowledging the bombings that have already happened there for weeks, and now are recognized officially as they will be continuing indefinitely, where do you feel resistance? Is it resistance to the engagement of U.S. people and funds in another war, resistance to killing, or resistance to a terrorist group who brutally eliminate the lives of others?
Unbeknown to him, I watched through the hospital nursery glass as my son-in-law gave his newborn son his first bath. Gently and with awe he touched the tender new skin and lifted the tiny child with the palm of his hand. It nearly brought me to tears.
How essential is touch to a newborn infant who as yet has no thoughts or impressions of life? It cannot yet see but it can feel. How essential are the first words it hears, the tastes and smells and sights it later meets as it first opens its senses to the world? Imagine this state of having no idea of what to expect, no mental impressions, only awareness and senses.
This is how we all begin. Perhaps in the womb we received our first intimations of what human embodiment would be. And then we are brought into the light of delivery and the hands of human experience, available to absorb whatever is given.
We are open and receptive, caught in wonder and longing.
I sat in bleachers once at a rocket launch in Florida, behind a young woman with a little toddler in her stroller. This child had beautiful dark eyes with long lashes and a face ringed by dark curls. Her mother was intent on the rocket launch but the little girl was focused on the mother and spent the whole time searching her mothers face and trying to catch her eyes. Her whole body was intent on connection.
We do not remember being this way as young children -- memories before the age of reason seem to be scarce and vague. The impact of our experiences are held at a deep emotional level, as if our inner child is entangled in the emotional body, stored along with early impressions about the nature of human beingness. Our early sensate knowledge and understanding of connection likely color our relationships at an unconscious level the rest of our lives. When a child knows safety and love it moves comfortably into the world. When exposed to violence and rage at early ages, it is burdened by psychic scars that are too deep to remember.
What has this to do with spiritual realization? With awakening? Everything.
The longing in us for God or Truth or understanding is the inherent longing of consciousness to remember its source, to restore its connection to that pristine awareness with which we entered and exited the womb. We were once free of all the impressions we have acquired over the years from the actions of parents, teachers, classmates, relatives and strangers. Each encounter or lack thereof left marks like little post-ums all over our psyche, and at a certain point we made a decision through these filters about how to be and what to be in the world. We may have felt accepted and safe or we may have felt unseen and irrelevant. We may fit in somewhere or always believe we do not belong. We may have waves of anger, fear or depression, feeling needy or lonely, all arising seemingly out of nowhere. There will be moments of feeling lost and out of control, overwhelmed by some circumstance of life. We did not come in with fear and foreboding, despair and a need to be in control. We came in open and available.
A challenging part of spiritual process are those moments when we see our conditioning, relive uncomfortable memories, and begin to see the primal need to be vulnerable again, to open the heart. It is our vulnerability that makes us available to spirit -- to realization -- to a connection with our roots that will eventually overwhelm our patterns and conditioned responses to life events, freeing us from ourselves. This longing for Truth or awakening is consciousness longing for itself in its most expansive and unbounded form, knowing its connection to every bit of creation, knowing itself as love of creation, remembering itself as availability to wonder. Human life is full of challenge and unavoidable sorrows, but the pure awareness with which we entered has a sweet openness to all experience without the contractions the body learned along the way. It knows at the core it is okay. It remembers that it is eternal.
To reconnect with this is to be awake. To live as this is liberation. To gently touch the infant consciousness, whether within ourselves or in the children around us, is a way to make the human journey more easeful, to offer a sense of security in this world of form we all pass through. It can help the individual and the world awaken.
I'm facilitating a study group around Adyashanti's latest book Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic. This book is a wonderful invitation for those of us who have drifted afar from Christian teachings to rethink the story of Jesus, reflecting on his life as a metaphor for spiritual awakening. Great myths are metaphors for deep truths, and have a way of grabbing the unconscious and paving the way for transformation of the psyche. When they are penetrated and taken in they bring new hope and a bit of understanding of the mystery of human experience. They impact how we think and act.
This book about Jesus is ground-breaking, because Adyashanti brings to it his deep realization and the depth of his years of Zen practice, blending this with a transformative recognition of love that he encountered when exploring the deeper meaning of Christ. In a world that sorely needs hope and fresh ways of understanding the true radiant source of human life this book offers a way to penetrate the experience of the early Christians, before the church fathers created a business and behavioral philosophy around it. He says churches have ignored the sacred and the true potential for understanding how all of us are the sons and daughters of God, and instead limit that potential for the divine to the man Jesus, and tend to preach politics, morality and guilt, rather than transformation. It appears they ignore the model Jesus gave us of living a radiant life that reflects our own divinity, and is anchored in truth.
The story of Jesus parallels the journey to enlightenment -- the simplicity and the gifts of the magi at his birth (we all have both), his disillusionment with organized religion, His initiation symbolized with baptism, the release of his siddhis or powers and the need for healing, the struggle with his inner demons in the desert and in the garden of Gethsemane, the surrender to his fate, forgiveness, and transcendence. Implied in his life is also the theme of an engaged spirit.
Today, as in the time of Jesus, spiritual awakening must go beyond transcendence and calls for an engaged spirituality. Those who fully awaken are reborn into a service or destiny with the world, not one defined by the ego but rather a movement from the depths that longs to be followed. Adyashanti blends the wisdom of awakening with service through his teachings and his transmission, and this book in some way catches that energy and gift so that it can be an experience for the reader and not just an intellectual study.
He urges us to clarify our "aspiration" and to reflect on our two "orders of being", the human and the divine, the form and the formless. Just as Jesus expressed his humanness and his divinity it may be possible, even essential, for more and more humans to discover this possibility, go through the shedding of our old identities, and surrender into our destinies,
I've always felt the tragedy of the death of Jesus, not because he was god but because he was human. All humans that are subjected to the betrayal and horrific suppression that he was dealt are equally caught in tragedy. Every violent death is as horrid as the death of Jesus. As we learn of people, innocent or guilty, who are slaughtered by those who are ignorant of the sacredness of life we can feel the suffering that the family and friends of Jesus must have known, and find some hope in the archetypal resurrection of this timeless story. Jesus lived the whole of life, the beauty and the trauma, just as most of us must. Can his life as myth or metaphor give us hope, and new direction for awakening out of the blind collective adherence to the mind's divisive point of view about who is valuable and who is not? This is never the perspective of an awakened heart.
If Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and all the rest of us alike began to see the truth of who we are, just as Jesus did, who would be left to cause such harm as crucifixion? Or murder families? Or drop bombs?
The challenge is that all of us must crucify our blind adherence to separation, collective belief systems and conditioned reflexes before we can be awake as a species. It may never happen, certainly not in our lifetimes. But if we as individuals can play our small part in the whole perhaps in time the collective field will transform just as the inspiration of Jesus must have intended. Ignorance may always exist but so does the potential for transformation and resurrection.
The yellow and gold roses outside my window have a way of bursting into life, falling into ruins a few days later, and then rebirthing and recycling themselves again and again. Some days their bush is a mix of baby buds and depleted blooms. It is a nice metaphor for life, which is always in a mix of birth and decay, growth and faded beauty, glory and collapse, softness and thorns. The difference between humans and roses is that the roses never complain!
How do we find that place in our self that, like the rose bush, sweetly accepts whatever arises in our place and time? It is nature's way to be in continual flux, and however we may resist this we are part of nature. We will always have new life arising with loss. We are part of constant change because that is the only way fresh possibilities and growth can enter life. Like the roses, the cells of our bodies are in continual modes of living and dying, even though we cannot feel it but only notice the changes months and years later.
What if the rose bush complained and wept over each fallen rose, or agonized about the coming of winter? What a noisy and less joyful world it would be! But we humans have that privilege. We can think ahead and worry and fret that things might get worse, loss might happen, we might make a mistake or take a bad detour when we make choice. Unlike the rose bush, which is unlikely to ever count its losses over time (how many roses have I seen and lost?) we can feel emotional pain for every dream or opportunity we missed or lost along the way. We can miss enjoying our present beauty and the wonder of the new potential always in our grasp.
People who read my books "The Awakening Guide" or "The Kundalini Guide" sometimes write me asking help to awaken their energy with the idea it will change their life into something more magical, more powerful or more successful. They have not yet seen that the culmination of such awakening is more like becoming the rose bush or the tree -- more at peace, more present with the essence of our true nature, engaged as the pure beingness of life itself.
It is the dropping away of resistance to what is, along with the openness to change that leads to creativity and beauty, compassion and appreciation for what exists. Whether spiritual awakening will help anyone become more of anything other than his or her true nature is impossible to predict. More likely they will become less of their conflicts, regrets, and neurosis. With awakening it becomes possible to stand where you are free of the past and the future, be aware of what is true, and move with clarity, spontaneity and acceptance into each unfolding in life. We not only "stop and smell the roses" but we recognize our oneness with them. You really do not need a spiritual awakening to do this, you simply need to let go for a moment and be your true Self. But awakening energy and consciousness will help to prune away the old faded debris of the psyche and shift with more stability into the natural state.
At a conference this weekend to learn how to connect with all the people out there who may benefit from knowing about my 30 years of doing spiritual work both personally and professionally.I am at a generating stage of life, eager to pass this on. The web is the new way for finding those you are resonant with and who can support you even when lost in the chaos of transformation, the confusion of emotion, the drama of awakened energy, and the sense your life is crumbling about you. Do you go to the net? to twitter? to amazon? to blogs? I don't know yet but I expect to explore these outer dimensions of consciousness caught in the media and search for those who might like to hear what I have to say. There is a way through and out of your pain, confusion and sense of being all alone . There is a way to shift fear into curiosity, discomfort into ecstasy, fogginess into clarity. There is a way to transform out of you and into the real you that has been hiding all along in the shadows of your personality waiting to be noticed and brought to the surface.
Spiritual awakening is not an improvement of your present condition. It is peace and presence reclaiming you from the confusion of your present condition and encouraging your to see the world in an entirely new way, a way that is not corroded and conflicted by past experiences, disappointments and pains. These must be dropped with compassion, accepted as the difficulties of living in a human condition, and recognized as irrelevant to the free expression of who you really are. Freedom means only that we become free of our old selves, and thus free to live!
Waking up can be sudden or it can be gradual. It happens when positions beliefs, attachments and pains are dropped, because it is underneath all the debris of our mind that our clear awareness shines, free of all burdens, seeing into every moment of our life. No one can force you to drop these burdens. It is up to you and a secret moment called fate. It may happen spontaneously or it may happen because you suddenly see with a flash that none of these moments of problems are true -- they are all thoughts of memories in the past now floating in the mind that have the power to keep you from living the full expression of who you are. How much weight are you carrying? How many arguments are you having each day with yourself? Is that what you want for your life, or would you rather meet each day as a fresh adventure, a curious possibility that might offer something new, something you had never considered before? What thoughts would you need to toss into the waste bin of history to live today fearlessly and openly?
There are many portals into an awakened life. I hope you will explore The Awakening Guide (on amazon) as I have tried from experience and heart to show these doors to any who wish to enter. I am eager to see who will enter, what they will discover and what gifts they will bring to the table of our shared human experience. I can't say where my life has come from nor where it is going, only that these discoveries are what have poured through me along the way. I hope you will let me know your response. I hope it will lead you to love and peace.
I got in a heated discussion once with another psychologist over who was the better analyst -- Carl Jung or Sigmund Freud. In the middle of a sentence my mind suddenly stopped. It was a futile discussion leading nowhere based on two disparate points of view, imbued with our unique conditioning and personality styles. There was no point to be made. I laughed and ended the conversation. I've thought of this encounter occasionally, while looking at opposing points of view and wondering how it can be that each person can be so convinced of the truth of what they believe even when it is the opposite of someone else's belief, who is also very convinced. What then is true? Is it relative to personal experience? Is it only a projection? Are all opinions true or are none of them true? Like everyone else I sit with a set of beliefs about life, death, experience, what is good and bad, right and wrong. But perhaps this is all it is -- beliefs. Perhaps my beliefs have little to do with what is true. They are the accumulated data I have collected through my experiences, reading and what others have said that I agreed with. Isn't this true for everyone? My teacher, Adyashanti, sometimes says that nothing we think is true. None of it is Truth. Truth cannot be known by the mind. This does not mean that if we label a color black it would not always be called black, or if someone gave you the name Mary or Bill you won't always answer to that name, or that you do not own the house (with the bank) that you have purchased. These are relative truths, called by the names we give them because we have agreed upon them. They are truths spun out of language and agreements within our illusionary identities. Even then they are not very reliable -- the color black has a different word in other languages, someone else may lay claim to property we think we own, we may change our name to Willow or Buddy just on our personal will. In school we are trained that certain facts are true and must be remembered to pass exams and go on in our learning. We tend to think that because we agree on relative truths and so-called facts (most of which have changed over the last 200 years) that there is such a thing as fundamental and philosophical truth. But theoretical and philosophical beliefs make very unreliable truths because most of our beliefs depend on where we grew up, who taught us, what we like to hear because it makes us feel like we know what we are doing or where we are going, or because the people we prefer to hang out with are complicit in the same beliefs. In the non-dual world there are only a few "Truths", the primarily One being that everything is One, or part of a whole, and the nature of this wholeness is consciousness (or that consciousness is the portal to realizing it but what is behind this has no name). It is understood that believing this alone has great limitation and the only way to really "know" what is "True" is to directly experience it. When this is reported it is usually because of a deep meditation experience, or a surprising and spontaneous awakening, when the mind seems to stop and awareness is shifted into a direct knowing called Oneness or Self-realization. This knowing does not feel like other truths -- it feels essential, or primal, and it collapses a person's interest in the spiritual search, upsets their conventional mindset and sometimes uproots their life. All of the truths produced by thought might fall into 4 categories -- agreed-upon Truths that are learned such as labels for things (i.e. names, grammatical rules, tools used in a specific way); working truths that are predictable like doing math, driving a car, or using a recipe; philosophical truths that are learned but unproven (i.e. beliefs in the afterlife, beliefs about how people ought to behave, points of view about politics or the environment); personal truths about ourselves and others (often not true at all.) Perhaps all of these so-called truths are only the product of neurons firing randomly in the mind, linking together all we have heard and been forced to learn throughout our life. How is it possible to know the real essence of what is true about life and who we are if we are dependent on these four channels? Spiritual practices, as opposed to spiritual beliefs, are aimed at breaking through all these patterns of belief and discovering something prior to thought, prior to belief, prior even to the housing of spirit in our bodies. Although they may not be successful, and in fact often are not, when a person is fortunate to break through the limitations of thinking and falls into the unknowing world of consciousness before there was a name, before a teaching, before philosophy or a personal belief about who they are, there is an opportunity to discover a Truth that brings peace and ends argument with life as it is. After this it is difficult to hold hard to any belief (although easy enough to use the working tools of mind) because the world of not-knowing offers the adventure of discovery, of seeing experience from many diverse perspectives, of moving in harmony with the moment instead of being propelled by the past. Drives fall away but the impulse to expression does not. Anyone who honestly seeks Truth might do well to forego collecting all the horizontal data provided by life, and begin to plunge deeply down into the inner core of their own personal experience, letting all the extraneous accumulations fall away. The mind most likely will resist -- all of us have worked hard to become what we think we are, to choose patterns that we believe support us, to have friends that are in line with what we believe -- but why then do so many of us still feel emptiness, longing and a vague sense that we are missing a fundamental understanding of existence? Perhaps there is one Truth that can put all the other partial truths into a new perspective, and free a person to live in peace. But it cannot be learned, it can only be known.
It's supposed to reach 108 degrees today -- here in Oregon --I'm not in Las Vegas!It will be the hottest day on record here, and with this and the flooding issues as rivers rise in some parts of the country, and the drought in other parts, it is simply astonishing that anyone dares to deny the fact of global warming. It is an example of how the human mind is capable of denying what is right in its face -- one's own direct experience, and clinging to a thought that is not only false, but self-destructive. Why are we often so afraid to question our thoughts and beliefs, to challenge assumptions, to look objectively at the world around us?
It is easy to blame greed and self-serving goals for many of the stumblings in our political structures. But there is a broad base of people who vote for these people despite some of their statements that appear on the face of it anti-humanity, destructive to the very life of the planet. I have found that many spiritual people are pro-life in the sense they support whatever would improve and nurture the health of the planet, the cooperation of cultures, the alignment with a universal respect for nature and for one another. They may support a person's individual choice, but at a universal level they believe in supporting the lives that exist here and now. For many spiritual seekers a huge barrier to feeling free is all the agitation that arises in them when they observe what is happening in our political structures and to our planet and the people on it. How can one be free when turning on the evening news brings international horrors and national insanity, obvious inequalities, and a continual impulse to support killing in order to achieve national goals, and a political emphasis valuing personal arsenals for "self" protection over innocent lives?
Although we are spirits living in human forms, our society is not spirit-driven, it is mind-driven. As soon as forms and thought emerged in the vastness of space, division emerged. The opposites came into being. Light and dark, day and night, inner and outer, space and form, sound and stillness, peace and violence, right and wrong -- everything has its opposite in thought. A great yogi, The Mother, who was the spiritual partner of Sri Aurobindo, once said of the experiences that arise in yoga (something like) "You can be sure that if there is a great darkness, there is a great light hidden beneath." This insight can offer us hope and direction in our human struggles with politics, weather, one another, and even within ourselves. Is there a light hidden beneath the denials of global warming, the migrating children upsetting our patterns and beliefs in immigration, the rapid accumulation of guns designed only to kill humans or many of the other issues that seem insane to someone who has awakened not only to spirit but to life? Take time to look for this light and see where it is functioning in the world. There may be kindness among your neighbors, charity, personal moments of great connection and even joy. Deep inside of you there will be light. But thoughts can keep you ever distracted from it.
Perhaps some political practices and beliefs have to become so obviously dysfunctional and unworkable that they collapse under the weight of their own confusion. There was a time when child labor was common, and women were not allowed to vote. Our "united" states once suffered with a civil war. Perhaps political issues must become intense before they provoke a need for greater clarity and compassion, and old structures are recognized to be past any usefulness. Where will new possibilities emerge? Is it possible for thoughts to shift on a great enough scale that we can heal the divisions while still recognizing the inevitability of opposites, which are not likely to go away? Is an intuition and understanding greater than thought available within us?
I know on a personal level that division within me dissolves when all I want is to know what is true, free of any conditioned beliefs about how I want it to be. I know truth is found in silence, presence, and a willingness to be open and flexible and to consider another's needs as equal to my own. I know it is helpful to trust that within each human is the spacious open availability to love and beauty and truth, even though it is often immensely clouded by beliefs and positions that are self-destructive. Sometimes a mental illness, a desperate childhood, or a huge traumatic life event overwhelms the capacity to be free or see clearly who we are. But for those who have choice and who love life we will be soothed by taking a backward step into our own silence, opening our heart, trusting the core of human life is the spirit of universal life, and being willing to hold the dissonance that arises within the human condition we all share. Today we may all be sharing heat arising, and we need to find creative responses to it. Will the answers come from the divided mind or the loving heart that cares for all humanity?
I just returned from a few days in Sacramento where I presented two programs about kundalini and awakening experiences based on my new books, ("The Kundalini Guide" and "The Awakening Guide") at the invitation of some close friends. Their gracious treatment and care for me has prompted some reflection on the deep value of friendship. All of us thrive in the warmth of a few intimate friends, and no matter how awake or how spiritual we are, this quality of friendship enhances our lives. We humans need to share and reflect upon our experiences, consider new ideas, express feelings, care and be taken care of, and take time to play. Sometimes family members are our closest friends, but more often your closest friends become family. In my many years of spiritual searching there have been times when I have been too introverted or preoccupied to fully appreciate friendship. But as I am aging it is more and more clear how crucial these connections are to mental, physical and spiritual well-being. I've noticed that older adults with meaningful friendships have vitality, enthusiasm, creativity and a sense of adventure that is lacking in those who are more isolated. Invitations, options, connections and affection make it more fun to be alive and give a reason to awaken and meet each new day.
The people I met through my good friends this week are all exploring life and contributing to others in many ways, such as teaching yoga, hospice work, healing practices, alternative medicine, centering prayer or meditation groups, facilitating radio programs, channeling, counseling, painting and in many other expressions of their passion and engagement in life. They are enthusiastic friends interested in giving to one another and being nourished in return. Many are in a spiritual awakening process.
Non-duality can seem like a dry teaching at times, stripping one of identifications and old patterns of thinking, or making a person feel disengaged from the ordinary preoccupations of the world and socially detached. Waking up to Oneness can make being alone restful and peaceful, but also somewhat empty. Many people who write to me have expressed the feeling they can no longer relate to old friends because their interests have changed and they no longer like listening to "stories" or problems. But underneath the surface of the non-dual realization is the recognition we are one consciousness playing these many roles in life, reflecting many facets of potential and each in our own unique dance. Compassion and love are stirring. So it is the case that even if we are illusions, we are still a reflection of the infinite and can enjoy the many other dancers around us. I've often thought how the source of life must love diversity as it seems one of the most consistent patterns on the planet. No two of us are exactly alike and we evolve consciously as we meet ourselves in this multiplicity of divine expression.
So we can enjoy friendships with those quite different from us, and find new depths in ourselves through those quite similar. We learn and grow through friendships. A good friend is someone who listens, shares their truth, laughs with us, explores possibilities with us, feeds us whatever we may need at the moment, and whose projections upon us make us feel wanted in their lives.
We do not awaken in a void. Although I am a person who spent many hours meditating in a darkened room it is through my connections with others that the barriers of separation often fell for me -- sometimes a chance encounter, at other times through classes, retreats, music, therapy and in a myriad of ways. The gifts of friendship and the openness to what another spirit had to offer opened the possibility of seeing Truth, or feeling the bliss of unitive moments through chanting, movement, or shared silence. Friendship encourages expression and contribution to the world around us.
If you wish a vital and spiritually full life find a friend or a few who are open to exploring life, Truth and potential with you, and treasure them.
Many of us spend a good part of our lives trying to "transform" ourselves, improve ourselves, or discover new ways to be present in the world. This is what keeps psychotherapists, body therapists, hypnotherapists, self-help writers, spiritual teachers and even academic institutions in business. There is a deep internal drive to learn and grow, create and improve, and find new ways to enjoy life. One of the great tragedies of war and poverty is the limitation it puts on the children and adults in societies that are burdened by them. There is not much time or vision for healing and expanding into a better life. Perhaps they offer through suffering another kind of transformation, one honed by suffering. Whether we are transforming through effort or through suffering, what is often overlooked as we search to transform our self is the deep potential of the inward passage, and the exploring of the nature of our awareness. Beneath all the introspection and searching in the average life is the subtle noticing of what we are. This noticing -- let's call it our present witness-- is the aspect of us that sees, senses, and feels what is happening before there is any labeling or judgment of it. We are spirits witnessing a life -- witnessing movement, opportunity, choice, beauty, tragedy, sensations, experiences, our selves and others. This present witness is an awareness that is so open and receptive that it is shocking to experience in its full power of presence. Like a flash it is all that exists in a moment of crisis or awe, great concentration or passion, and sometimes in a transcendent meditation. Purely there, available, awareness is never in need of transformation. It is the foundation of who we are, the pure consciousness, and if we turn deeply into it we will discover our source and the universal connection with all.
Spiritual awakening happens in those moments when awareness returns home to itself, triggering a flash of insight, connectedness, expansivemess, and sometimes radiant joy. It is a moment beyond thought when there is only being. Such moments are only truncated if the mind interferes or the personality tries to step up and claim them. Language may point to the moment but generally limits it. In the way a great feast cannot be tasted in words, so awakening cannot be translated. It is said not to be an "experience" because what happens is awareness awakens to itself, and awareness has always been present, only hidden behind the tendencies and interpretations of thought and language.
When awakeness happens it opens a person to the possibility of true transformation. How this will unfold is part of the mystery and always unknown and unpredictable. It is beyond any goal or fantasy of the mind. Those who live awakened lives have surrendered to the surprises of each moment. They may experience great shifts of energy, lifestyle changes, the uprushing of old stories that turn to ashes before their eyes, the releasing of much of who they thought they were and new capacities they never asked for. In time there will be peace and a sense that everything is okay just as it is, even if there could be improvements.
This is a passage into the heart and a softening mind, a willingness to live with the opposites of relative form without attachments to them, an opportunity for clarity, relaxation, and trust. If you are on this improbable journey you may have challenges but you probably know you are very blessed.
Often people who are in the process of awakening are concerned about the phenomena that accompanies it. They are afraid they will be distracted or derailed by the uprising of energy, flashes of feeling outside of time, emotions that arise and even the bliss. Once there has been a taste of pure seeing, without all the commotion and interpretation of the restless mind, the sensation of being alive is so open and so radiantly present that a desire arises to maintain this place of simply being. But inevitably the time of distraction will follow. It may be the distractions of life -- a need to focus on work or raising children or health or lifestyle issues, a challenging issue or relationship to resolve, or a psychological or emotional reaction that is unexpected and unacceptable to the "new" me. It may be the internal distraction of physical and energetic change. When energy arises it can be blissful or uncomfortable, enlivening or depleting, welcome or disruptive. This is the energy of consciousness, that deep internal life force that arises and moves to release and open whatever is unneeded, stressful, or stuck in the body/mind system. It's true that it can be a great disruption and distraction in a life, but if it can be met with curiosity rather than fear, a letting go into it rather than contracting against it, and an appreciation that it is just part of the awakening of the whole of you then the process is much more smooth.
This energy, known as kundalini in yoga systems, seems to bring the body to a higher energy frequency, and it demands paying attention to how you eat, how you live, and how you move in the world. It makes you pay attention to yourself, and the physical and emotional needs of your life. It is important to notice the reaction of your energy field when you eat or drink what is unhealthy for your body, overwork or overstress yourself, are not completely honest in your relationships, or get caught in toxic environments. Your subtle energy body is trying to align with the Truth you have glimpsed, and support the embodiment of peaceful presence, but it seems as if everything that is not in alignment must be deconstructed before this can happen. It some ways it is like being emptied out of yourself.
It may be that some people with deep awakenings do not go through this kundalini process, but those I have asked have always acknowledged it was part of their experience. By meeting it willingly, without drama or resistance, and appreciating the mystery of this "goddess" helping to awaken you fully, you will grow and unfold in remarkable new ways, and learn to live fully with what is.
Kundalini activated for me following a Radiance Breathwork session many years ago, and as it cleared and opened my body it deepened my receptivity to meditation, opened the mind and heart, and eventually moved from being felt as rolling energy up my back that jerked involuntarily through the nights, to rivilets of bliss throughout the body, to a quiet internal hum. It redirected my life and the focus of my work, leading me into territory I had not know existed. It has been a great gift.
If you are in this process you might learn more at www.kundaliniguide.com or my new book "The Kundalini Guide".
There is a certain violence in nature. There is an underlying indifference to life that is paradoxically a movement that keeps life changing and evolving. It is the nature of all physical form to rise and fall, shift and die. We see this in large movements like earthquakes and floods and fires caused by lightning and in smaller circumstances such as lifeforms that feed on other lifeforms or battle one another for the right to procreate. Our planet and species were created through eruption and wild intense forces of nature. As humans the roots of this indifference and fierceness to survive also lies in our shadow,underlies many of our darker patterns and is evident in the decline of our bodies as we age. As pure awareness it is seen that all of these movements toward upheaval and destruction are just part of who we are. When consciousness awakens itself and the stillness of our true nature is known we can see with equanimity the naturalness and inclusiveness of the world as it is. This part of what we are has limitless acceptance of what is. As Adyashanti often says, "It has no argument with reality." But this does not mean we then turn our back on the human condition and have no response to it. We are source playing humans at the moment and when this source is awakened in us it moves through an open heart and generates compassion and love, creativity and responsiveness. In knowing we are all of this world we may be moved to respond in ways the limited mind would not. When our identification with personal suffering in our past, and our emotional resistance and rage and grief is over, we are more free to bring something authentic, healing and useful into the world. We don't need to be indifferent and are free to move spontaneously. From a non-dual perspective we can rationalize we are not our body/mind , and think "Why do anything?" But if you look closely you can sense this must be a mental rationalization, because the fully awakened being is not personal, and is moved by a recognition of being one with others. Instead there is a movement that is impersonal, but inclined toward the healing of suffering, the feeding of the human, the nurturing of the planet, bringing harmony into the whole. Many call this movement love, but it is not the love that is looking for something in return. It is simply the complement to the destructive and painful forces. It moves through us and not from us.
Genuine acceptance of the fact that destruction and death are an aspect of living and being in form, frees one to bring more harmony and love into the mix rather than rage and resistance. I can't speak for other life forms, but while we exist as humans we have a capacity for the wisdom to end our psychological self-destruction and the pain in our species that perpetuates it. It is our dream we are living and as we become more harmonious and awake as a species the dream can evolve more harmoniously.
I am back home in Ashland Oregon now, and although it's cold and damp it still warms my heart to be in this picturesque town with its charming theaters, parks and people. The pace is more nourishing here, with much to be involved in, yet a quieter pace of traffic and only a few thousand people, most of whom are happy just to be here. It is the best of small-town living. I've created a Spring schedule for the non-dual center here, and here are the events scheduled:
Meditations at 9 a.m. Saturday mornings;
Satsang on Sundays at 7 p.m on March 27, April 3 and 17, May 1, 15 and 29;
A workshop on "The Kundalini Process" on Sat. May 14 from 9 to 5;
A Meditation Intensive "Sudden and Gradual Awakening" from 9:30 to 4:30 Sat. April 30;
A Non-Dual Wisdom Discussion group at 7 p.m. for 9 weeks beginning April 14;
A Transpersonal Exploration group on Weds. for 7 weeks beginning April 13.
Contact me at kundinfo@mindspring.com if you need information or want to register.
On World Events:
What has been on my mind most often these past few weeks are world events. Every day I want to know just what is unfolding in Japan, Libya, Bahrain and all the other unsettled and chaotic places on our planet. I see that what I am includes all of these, even though I as a body/mind have the luxury of living free from harm in this particular or apparent moment in time.
One of the biggest challenges of seeking freedom or liberation is the recognition that so many people and places are suffering. It makes it seem one should not allow oneself to be free of suffering since we are all in this together. Guilt can arise in those who are not in pain along with everyone else. But freedom from suffering already exists in each of us and until we remove the patterns that block this freedom we are not capable of bringing any lasting freedom into the world. All of us as humans have our times to suffer --with losses, grief, illness--or because we are holding on to anger, self-rejection, jealousy or fear (psychological suffering). Isn't most of the horror caused by humans in the world the result of someone who suffers from a rage, or greed, or fear of "others" or desire for revenge? Isn't the need for power just a reaction to all these internal limitations we resent and reject? Some folks are simply obsessed with a greed for power. What fear and rejection of humanity must lie beneath this obsession? It is easy to see how a repressed people would want to gain control over their lives and would battle authority for it, would hunger to overcome the pressure of someone else's power drive. It is harder to see how someone could want so much power over others unless they felt a great lack and fear deep within themselves. Despite all of the horrors we witness on the world stage do we dare to remember our own internal freedom, our natural compassion and love, and the true nature that is empty of all conditions while paradoxically holding all conditions? If we who have the breathing space to wake up and to live as freedom do not invite it into our lives how will it ever penetrate the collective, or infuse the planet with wisdom and love? We cannot force freedom or love or wisdom but we can let go of ourselves deeply enough to remember that these qualities are reflected naturally from the light of what we truly are. We seldom see them in the world because most humans are so identified with the surface of their lives, and fearful of the inner shadows in their psyches, that they do not sit still long enough to penetrate the delusions of mind and heart that trap us. When someone begins a spiritual path it is usually for the purpose of ending suffering within themselves, at least on the surface of things. But perhaps it is really a drive imposed by the universal source or wisdom in order to release just one facet of the suffering in the world, to breathe into the universe a fraction more of freedom. If the repression of Truth and Love ends in you or me, something painful ends and something new and unexpected can emerge. If we are then moved in a way to help others who suffer we then can do so from freedom rather than pain,trusting the capacity for freedom in others, and we can see the obvious fact that anyone who truly lets go, lets go of suffering. Even in pain and loss there is a possibility to discover an endless and eternal freedom of spirit.
Some people believe the reason for suffering is to force someone to go deeper and to wake up. But why wait until you are suffering or struggling with great losses to go deeper? Why not move when there are less outer distractions, before loss, before chaos -- why not move inward to see through delusion and get released to be a force for freedom now? Then whatever happens on our vast and erupting planet can be embraced as part of the whole, with compassion and spontaneous wisdom, with love amidst the pain? All of it belongs to all of us but few are those who can bring harmony into the whole. And this harmony will never come from mind, whose nature is division, but must come from the awakened heart.
I am sitting in a beautiful sunny spot overlooking the ocean in Newport Beach. I feel very blessed to have this opportunity to escape the cold and return to California, and realize I am still a California girl at heart -- although many too many years along to carry this image. This coast in California has swelled with people over the years since I first lived in California as a girl. Houses climb up every hill, hanging off cliffs, braced with stone walls and metal pilings. What is it that so draws us to the ocean? All ages drift along the beach and sit in the benches in the beach-front parks. There are kids dragging beach toys, toddlers digging holes in the sand, mothers with blankets and baskets, young lovers just strolling, old folks with tiny dogs, surfers silhouetted in the distance waiting for a perfect wave, muscular young people playing volleyball, old men playing chess -- everyone likes to hang out at the beach.
Perhaps our senses draw us to the sand and sea, the warmth on the skin, the smell of the salt air, the unbounded horizon, the taste of salt and sunscreen, the soothing sounds of the steady surf and the calls of seabirds. It is one place we take the time to simply be where we are, soaking it in through all the senses. In some ways it is home, representing the primal life that keeps the planet functioning -- without oceans could there be life on earth? It is a place that draws us to reflect on ourselves, our lives, our destinies.
Every age has a different approach to the beach. I remember the fun of digging in damp sand and building sandcastles with my dad when I was a young girl in San Diego.
A little older and it was more thrilling to run in and out of the waves and see how deep I could trust myself to go. As a teenager I once swam out way too far and had to grab a rope attached to a buoy to pull myself back on the beach. It was the most frightened I have ever been in the water.
In high school the draw of the beach was for romantic nighttime beach parties, volley ball, flirting around a camp fire, getting nauseous on the rides at the boardwalk, and laying in the hot sun to get a tan.
As a young mother the beach was a place to let the kids run free, to see their excitement and enthusiasm for the sea and its creatures hidden in the crevices of the tide pools, and to have picnics with family and friends. As about-to-be grandparents my husband and I spent a month at Venice and Santa Monica Beaches in the college apartment of a friend's daughter walking with our pregnant daughter everyday until her daughter was born. It felt like a time-out from our ordinary life, a time for intimacy and restoration and new beginnings, in the midst of the craziness of all the characters who inhabit the Venice Beach Boardwalk.
Today the beach is a place to walk and enjoy sunsets, and recall old memories, and seek out ocean front cafes. There is no longer a pull to go into the water or a longing to lie half-naked on the sand. Just being in the ocean air and scenery is satisfying enough. Watching the children and seeing how universal and yet in some way impersonal all this pleasure is that arises in the sand and sea.
What can awakening be beyond simply being alive and present to what is? there are so many magical assumptions about the nature of spiritual awakening. As if our life is more enriched by magic, or yogic tricks like flying (bouncing), or manifesting something out of nothing, or sitting in caves completely closed off to the world. As if we need to be healed from who or what we are. I spent many years seeking "enlightenment" and now I cannot remember what it is I thought I would get. I am not saying they were wasted years because it is really clear to me I am not the same person I was when I started -- I am more simple, less troubled, and there is not an ounce of seeking left in me. It is enough to just be who I am and where I am. There is beauty to be found everywhere in this world if we only take time to look. There is disappointment and suffering as well -- who can deny it? Tragedy is in the news every day, particularly the tragedy of lost lives always convinces us something is seriously wrong, and life is dangerous.
It seems to me now that awakening is simply the realization that what is living here is never lost, even when the body/mind return to their original states of dust and ethers, still what is our presence/essence/awareness must also return to source, and that source is never destroyed, never limited. We can't understand this but we can sense it -- our consciousness knows itself, when all else is set aside for a few moments in time, and we see we are not bound by time and space. But awakening is not about always feeling unbounded, as far as I can tell. It invites a return into ordinary life, into the pleasures of the senses which can only be enjoyed in the body, into the pleasures of this world, this life, this beauty available here and now, which has made an appearance just for us. We are of this world in our bodies and senses and even our consciousness. Whether we think of it as concrete form or illusion there is no need to reject it, and in fact rejecting is only another barrier the mind sets up, another game of hide and seek, rejection or acceptance. If we can only take time to be with our life and environment, to enjoy it, to appreciate the miracle that it exists at all -- that we exist at all, then we can find wholeness in our spiritual life through our ordinary life.
Perhaps the part of us that intuitively knows this is what draws us to the ocean, or the
Hello to All, I am back home in Ashland after a month of moving around, and life is quiet and still here, cold and overcast, with snow sprinkled on the surrounding mountains like powdered sugar on chocolate cupcakes. If you live here, I have scheduled two satsangs, Dec 23 and 30 here at Shanti River Center at 6 p.m. and a video night on Dec. 27 at 7.
I awoke this a.m feeling very open and spacious, and realizing I had not felt that quality of freedom in being for a while. Awakening is like a falling away of everything that feels like resistance, leaving this open spacious presence-ing that has no goals or intentions or requirements. It just is. Awakening into the day can feel like this, awakening out of the day and into sleep can feel like this, and moments of release into pure openness can happen unexpectedly at almost any time in our lives.
Where does all this resistance about life arise from? Ask yourself, within yourself, what is it that is so unwilling to live life as it is?
In me it feels like a shadow, accompanied by thoughts of preference, and then an emotional catch in the chest (Self-pity? Sorrow? Regret? Irritation? ) And that which is most true in this energy field called “I” is simply watching, and is free to fall into the pattern it is inviting, or to expand awareness to a larger field which cannot be defined beyond that word presence or being-ness or okay-ness. Life is happening, life is flowing – it can feel as free and open as the vastness of ocean or as constricted as water wiggling down a tube. There is no division in the ocean – only the meeting of wind and rain and sun and wave and the life flowing within, warmth here, ice cold there, life in many forms below and above. Our deepest wisdom is undivided, willing to be all that is asked of us, moment to moment. But our minds and emotions pull us over and over into division and separation, wishing things to be better, more perfect, more comfortable or more exciting. Human beingness is division, articulation of desire and demand, waves of emotional energies woven into passing thoughts and dead memories and fantasies or fears of the future. When it goes our way we call it good and when it doesn’t we call it bad. But this stuff of humanness is only a phase of what we are, like a storm on the ocean is only an aspect of what is happening out there.
Awakening is not really the changing of any of this human-beingness. It is knowing ourselves to be something unspeakable, a limitless consciousness which appears to be in this temporary holding pattern of experiences, a wave that will rise and fall through various forms and possibilities, and return again and again to its source. We do not awaken, so much as something within awakens itself, remembers itself, and sees through the dance of energies it plays with and calls life. This doesn’t really stop the energies or dances; it only allows them to flow past without any clinging or resistance by the little “me”. When this happens it is freedom. It is not just freedom to avoid getting entangled in old patterns and emotions; it is the freedom to respond more naturally and usefully to what is arising moment to moment. It is not transcendence out of life but rather relaxing into life, knowing the transcendence is really a reflection of an underlying undivided Self that is the ground of all.
Nature is a good model for this. Look at the trees standing naked and tall with no attachment to the beauty of their leaves or appearances they enjoyed only a few weeks ago. Look at the animals burrowing in for the winter or the birds flying south without having tantrums about it. Look at the sky shifting color and content, light and dark, cold and hot continually. It seems that only the human mind and emotions get caught in resistance and clinging to having their own way, in greed and power and disappointment and argument.
Therapists would say these patterns are both genetic and conditioned. Either way they are not the natural way of the source – not the way nature lives its life, meeting what arises without resistance. Changing and flowing, adapting.
I wrote a chapter once for a book that offered guidance for the future – the turn of the century in the year 2000, called "Voices on the Threshold of Tomorrow". The only advice that came to mind for me was the need for flexibility. Sometimes I am asked questions about relationship as I have been married nearly 50 years. The answer that comes again is flexibility. As humans we are moving experiences, flowing from one scene to another in the play that is our life. We are flowing energies and we only need to learn how to swim.
Unless we meet each day as it is and see what openness we can bring to it, what shifts might be called for, where we can accept and grow and release our contractions, we cannot be happy. The external world will not give us everything we want. But if we give up the one known as “the me” who is making demands, the internal world can be at peace. And if we are flexible and can move from the heart we will usually find what we need now.
Winter is a good time to move inward, to find stillness, and to recognize our natural alignment with nature. The ancient stories of the arising of new life in the midst of winter remind us that a deep truth of human experience is that out of the changes, the losses, the stillness and the darkness of winter something new is conceived and birthed, and that it comes from a mysterious source that is both divine and human, pure and open, bringing change and new potential into the human condition.
This reaffirms itself every year, over and over. Perhaps we can use this image to learn to trust life in all its elements and phases.
I used to think awakening meant a magic kind of beingness, a presence without any content, but with complete contentment in the world. I could see it was not the same as mystical experience, which comes in many styles and intensities, and can be a flooding of love, a sense of falling into another dimension, a feeling of complete unity with everything, a vision, great ecstasy and many other things. But mystical experiences, however powerful they impact us, move along and leave us with yet another experience, usually a more ordinary and sometimes a more depressing one, because the me is still there longing for more. Life is a series of experiences, ordinary and extraordinary, gentle or harsh, exciting, loving, painful, full, empty -- many qualities can arise from the varieties of experiences both common and mystical. Many people seek spiritual liberation in the hope it will mean the conclusion of or transcendence out of all these experiences. So I have known mystical experiences, and I have felt awakened, but today I cannot say that any of it has much impacted the nature of experiences that life continues to place at my doorstep. The only thing these spiritual openings have left me with is quietness deep inside, and a very thin veil of personal identification with my life. It is more and more clear from this vantage point that only now exists, this apparent "me" is one facet of a massive multi-faceted universe ( or only a fraction of a facet, but one that is somehow mysteriously also a reflection of the whole), and that consciousness in the form of humanness exposes itself to numerous unpredictable, uncontrollable and inexplicable experiences
I attempt to do non-dual teaching or mentoring or something that I cannot really explain by simply being available and sharing what arises in the presence of those who feel they are seeking truth. Non-duality cannot be clearly explained because it is a western concept for an ancient eastern perspective that only One exists and all else is illusion. This is not a rational concept nor was it ever intended to be. It is a mentally unsettling, emotionally disturbing and incomprehensible possibility given the huge expansive range of diverse species and experiences, world views and planetary objects -- all of which appear to exist as separate and valid forms and events. All of us live in a mental world that collects these phenomena and puts them into thoughts and words and struggles to cope with all they demand of us. Sometimes this struggle is called suffering.
I have to confess that if awakening is here -- awakening to the non-dual or the direct knowing of Oneness or Nothingness or Stillness , it has had little impact on the experiences this body/mind encounters in daily life. As a parent and grandmother, a wife of many years, a mother-in-law, a friend, and in many other roles this entity plays, there can be drama, compassion, sorrow, love, joy, feelings of being unseen, misunderstood -- all the range of encounters of any other long-lived life. There can be unexpected tasks put before me, and uncomfortable demands, and simple precious moments of meeting someone and being met. There can be a simple peace in just meeting someone where they are, and being connected. It is just life meeting itself in all these forms and there is no way to awaken out of it; you can only awaken into it and move through each moment the way it is.
There is someone I care for greatly who is part of my extended family who has built a great delusional system in her mind about who I am, feeling I am some powerful being who is spying on her, trying to harm her life. She believes God is telling her terrible things about me. None of her God's messages hold any truth, but the intensity of her thoughts impact many people I love. I cannot say why these delusions torture her and make her so angry and unhappy -- perhaps they are connected to an early trauma and a deep distrust of life, or a need to avoid intimacy or connection with others. Perhaps she is using substances that distort her perceptions. Although I have experienced there is really no personal "me", just my own set of delusions about who or what I am as a separate being, waves of her energy of fear and distrust pound whatever it is I am at times and I have to meet them the way others may have to meet physical pain, wondering moment to moment where to go with it, how to be with it, even though one knows that at the core they are not the character suffering. Life is handing me this. LIfe hands everyone various challenges -- some certainly much more painful than any I have faced. One needs only read the news to see this every day.
So how does one be awake no matter what is being handed to you. I guess you just recognize you cannot avoid being awake -- something is always right here right now in the midst of every experience that simply IS -- it is there, it is free, it is aware, it is open and it is loving.
It feels but is not attached to the feeling. Thoughts arise but it is not glued to the thoughts as if they were something significant because it can see the potential for delusion and self-deception in all thought. It seems that freedom is not about being free from this, or even being free in this, or being a person who is free. Freedom is not at all what the mind has taken it to be. It is so much more subtle. It is a pre-existing state that allows everything to happen just as it does and participates however it is meant to participate, but carries no residual, the way a wave fully participates in the ocean, rising and falling as the moon and the wind and the curve of the earth dictate, and leaves no trace. If one could live without the impact of the delusional mind that is how it would be.
When we think we are trapped we desire freedom. When we know we are all essentially free there is nothing to desire. When I desire for my suffering family member to be happy and content and free of her delusions, the personal "me" colludes with the compassionate heart to feel it would bring more love in the world if this dark energy would fade away. If I hold this desire I am holding a piece of the personal "me" who still believes all should be well, and even though I am free to hold this it is at the cost of my own freedom, for it is going to be as it will be and I must go in the flow of it.
All of this is simply to share that this life here has the same disheartening moments as any other life, and all of us share this whether awake, unawakened, on the journey or totally disinterested in the journey. We also share the same inherent freedom if we just acknowledge it. The freedom to be fully present with what is, the freedom of compassion and peace in the midst of our confusions and disappointments. The freedom to move from love. People often do not open to these freedoms because they are too afraid of change, of being really free of their conditioning and familiar patterns. We humans have trained ourselves to live in fear, and we are free to live that way, but this grip of fear and attachment to our thoughts will never take us where we really want to be, which is content and whole.
It is possible to live with a sense of wonder and love and stay in the moment with what is, even in the midst of sorrow and pain. This is what it means to end suffering.
