Major Transitions

     After we achieve enough of the goals we assumed would make us permanently happy, but they didn't; after deeply experiencing constant change, sickness, aging & death of loved ones; and deeply experiencing various forms of trauma from the all-you-can-bear buffet of suffering; so after having our fill of needless suffering, more & more of us are waking up from the collective dreamlike illusion of humanity. Inevitably we all awaken to our authentic Self, our True Nature.

    One of those who's awakened and is sharing her experience is Lisa Cairns. Here's her overview of awakening from dualism - the almost universal illusion of being a separate adversarial entity, and returning home to nonduality (Oneness, Self, True Nature, Divinity Love, Silence, Stillness, Universal Consciousness, God, Source, etc):

    “Nonduality, you could say, is an energetic movement from being separated, from being a limitation, to being unlimited. Most people in this society believe that they are a separate entity that is walking through a separate world. And what that means is that they believe that they are the thoughts about themselves and the feelings they feel about themselves, rather than the actual experience. And the actual experience is nondual. 
    What we’re speaking about here isn’t theoretical. It’s actually something that can be experienced and is experienced when you’re not veiled by the illusion of thoughts.

    But most people walk around believing that they are their story. So their story might be that they’re 21 years old, they’re from Berlin, they have a nice car, they grew up in a family with 5 children, their name is Enid, they dislike bumblebees, love going to the beach, and they love music. So they believe all these things about themselves. And most people are trying to inflate that story. They’re trying to grow their sense of self and create a bigger sense of self. 
    In psychology they talk about getting a 'healthy ego.' It's actually a really good thing to have a healthy ego. But most people in our society are just trying to grow what they believe themselves to be, and make it better & better & better. That’s (a 'noisy ego) certainly not a healthy ego. And they believe they are their feelings and they’ve got no separation from it. So if they feel angry, they see that as reality. So if they feel angry with someone, they don’t notice that they’re feeling angry with someone, what they think is that the other person has done something to make them angry. So they don’t have any separation from it. 
    So this is how most people walk around in our society that they are their body-mind mechanism and they’re the story that they tell themselves and then throughout the day, they’re mostly lost in what they’re thinking about. So they’re thinking about themselves or others, and most of what they’re thinking about is actually problems and how to solve problems, because that is actually the mechanism of the mind, but it just gets overworked like over-flexing a muscle, so it just becomes too big and it’s kind of finding problems everywhere. So most people believe they are their story. 

    But if you can sort of fall out of that story, some people name it in a way which I find very poetic and beautiful. It’s like ‘fall through the gaps, the silence in between your thoughts.’ There can be a whole new reality that’s discovered, where you discover that you’re not that person that you think yourself to be, but you’re actually this vast, unnamable, unlimited consciousness – not personal consciousness, but a big consciousness, as well as this being, this alive presence, this consciousness and this presence. And this consciousness and presence isn’t limited to anything. It’s not limited by a name that you give anything, or a thought, or an idea, or a feeling you have about anything."
    Lisa Cairns “Most people don’t see this one thing and REMAIN STUCK for years!!!!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rrEtrU8OQk

    Here is a partial transcript (the first 20 minutes) from one of her many valuable guiding videos, addressing the question, “What happens when (after awakening) the 'old you' has died, but the 'new you' has not (yet) arrived?”:

    “That’s such a bizarre concept: 'What happens when the old you dies?' So who is this old you that died? This is something that people often feel, that the old you has died. But who is that? Who is this you that’s died? You may think, ‘well me, this person I thought I was, and this person has died and then this new person hasn’t taken place. The story might go, ‘I got into spirituality, and then through getting into spirituality, this character changed and it changed in ways which aren’t recognizable and I don’t really know who I am anymore.’

    So let’s break down, first of all, what people think themselves to be. Most people think themselves to be a name, a body, past events and future events, what they’ve done, their choices, their decisions in this life, their behaviors, their wants & not wants, their relationships ie being a mother, father, daughter, sister, grandparent. And they believe that all of that is who they are. So that’s maybe something that we can describe, in time, about the supposed character, but it’s not who you are, not nearly who you are. 
    So most humans believe, that that person I’ve just described, is looking through the eyes now, and experiencing other people. But how can that person be looking through the eyes now, when everything you say about yourself is an imagination? So if I knocked you in the head, or if you fell off your bike and got memory loss, and you forgot all these things, would you still be you? If you took drugs and forgot who you were when you were on drugs, would you still be you? And I feel that most people would unanimously say yes, I would still be me. But yet they believe that who they are is a story looking through their eyes. That’s not true. You could see it a little bit like a movie projector projecting a film, of a woman on a spiritual search. And then it’s like the actual projector believing that the film images it’s projecting is the (woman) experiencer on the film or is the projector of the film is watching is the experiencer. 
    So right now, you’re dreaming a character. You’re dreaming a life, and you believe that is the experiencer. And this is where suffering arises from – the mis-identification that who you are is a story in time, rather than a radical presence which is experiencing now, which is prior to the story in time.

    And what you might notice about the story about you, the story of you, of this character in time, is that it’s a lot of who you think yourself to be is about what you want or don’t want. It’s about wants and seeking. So you’ve got two different forms of wants: natural wants and seeking wants. And the seeking wants are what make identity. And the seeking wants are wants where there is attachment to them. And attachment is the belief that these wants will free me in time. ('promissory materialism')
    So it could be, ‘If I get enough money, I will be able to be free. I will relax.’ So, we’re always waiting for that moment of relaxation. But the relaxation is your nature. It is what’s watching the dream. It’s that which is prior to the character. But the character is looking for that relaxation in its story of itself, which it can never complete. 
    And what actually makes the illusory you is this attachment (desire, clinging) to the wants. It’s a really funky phenomenon that happens, where the consciousness, the wants, and the ‘I am’ all get squished together, so it feels like somebody is inside the body. 
    And that happens through seeking – through the belief that your freedom, that what you’re looking for, that your home, that deep rest, that peace comes from a future event, or is taken away from you in a future or past event. And that forms this illusory ‘you.’ It sort of makes consciousness and the feeling of ‘I am,’ which are impersonal and prior to the illusory story of you, feel like they belong to the illusory story of you. And then this illusion manifests, and if feels like there is illusory you that owns consciousness and owns beingness and is walking around separate in this world.

    And so when that story begins to be challenged, and waking up begins, all your desires and seeking patterns begin to change. So everything about you begins to change. What you held as important, becomes less important. What you spent your time doing to try and achieve something, you maybe have less interest in. You maybe have less interest in socializing and presenting to everyone a particular story about yourself. 
    And so everything in which you thought was you, and navigated your life by, begins to dissolve. And this can often be like and called ‘walking through the dessert.’ You no longer have these seeking desires anymore, and yet there’s nothing which replaces that, and you’re still not feeling the bliss and the freedom. So there’s this discontent and nothing in the life seems to make you feel contented. Whatever you look for doesn’t feel like it’s it. So it’s described like Jesus walking through the dessert for 40 days. It’s described as a dessert where everything’s dry, and you don’t have a direction, because in the past your direction was seeking and yet you don’t fully hear what could be called God’s will or natural intuition, your natural wants or desires. 
    So isn’t this like deeper movement happening? So what to do when that happens is that you have to keep presenting yourself to this subject. Your mind might begin to blame this subject, or think it’s done something wrong. And then a good thing to do is to evoke bhakti – evoke the loving, compassionate side of nonduality, and know that this is part of the process, the apparent process, and happens to many, and that it will, like everything, pass. And there won’t be a new you that arises or arrives. It’ll be that the seeking you will dissolve more and more, and the character will become more authentically itself, and then you could call that being more authentically yourself, like God’s will appearing. God is speaking through you, rather than you as a separate person doing something. So there’s this flow that takes over. And ironically, that flow feels naturally, organically yourself. It doesn’t feel like some alien has taken over your body and moving you as if you were a marionette. It feels like yourself acting because you are God (unitive mystical experience). So it feels like the most intimate sense of you moving everything, not some bizarre foreign entity, but it’s without the second. It’s without that separation. It’s spontaneous. It’s natural. There’s not that second which is controlling or owning or trying to get something for itself.”
    Lisa Cairns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMX5X3HFIzY

 

Lisa Cairns “What happens when the 'old you' has died, but the 'new you' has not arrived?”