Awakening according to AI

      I recently heard Rick Archer - of Batgap (Buddha at the Gas Pump https://batgap.com/) - describe his website's unique Bots. Unlike most, which scan 'horizontally' ie broadly, all data on the web, his site's Bots scan 'vertically' ie deeply into only selected respected / trusted data. He has 3 different Bots, each loaded with appropriate resources:
    "Compassion Bot" - https://www.awakin.ai/compassion/thread?t=about 
    "Interfaith Bot" - https://www.awakin.ai/interfaith/thread?t=about  and 
    "Batgap Bot" - https://www.awakin.ai/batgap/ask

    So I posed the question, "What are definitions of Awakening?" not to a wise human being, but to Batgap's "Compassion Bot" which quickly provided a surprisingly decent, fairly nuanced, nonsense-free answer - mercifully the opposite of the old database admonition, "garbage in, garbage out!" :

"Awakening is a profound and transformative shift in one's sense of identity and perception. Here are a few perspectives that capture its essence:

• Identity Shift: Awakening involves moving from a self-oriented perspective, where a personal "self" is at the center, to an expansive identity that includes everything. It's a movement to a broader worldview that influences how you view, experience, and relate to the world and others.

• Awake Awareness: It is the transition from a thought-focused consciousness to an awareness-based knowing, allowing a deeper connection to the present moment. This state of being is often associated with feelings of being in flow, selfless service, or deep love, where you 'forget yourself.'

• Direct Knowing of True Nature: Awakening is also described as a direct recognition of a deeper, true nature, often experienced as a profound absence of self. This state is characterized by a unity experience where all is perceived as interconnected oneness.

• Timeless Ground of Being: Awake awareness is seen as the formless, boundless, and timeless essence that serves as the foundation of our being. This awareness brings clarity, presence, and freedom of choice.

In essence, awakening is not about changing beliefs or external circumstances but rather about shifting how we organize our minds and identities. It's about embodying an awareness-based way of knowing that deeply connects us to our true self and the world.

Follow-up questions you might consider:

• How can I start my journey towards awakening?
• Are there specific practices that can facilitate awakening?
• What role does service to others play in the process of awakening?
• How do different spiritual traditions view awakening?
• Can an awakening experience be sustained over time, and how?

As actionable next steps:

• Reflect on moments when you've experienced feelings of connectedness or presence.
• Explore meditation or mindfulness practices to cultivate awareness.
• Engage in acts of service to deepen your connection with others.
• Seek conversations or literature on various spiritual paths to broaden understanding."

Stone Jizo Statue - SangkalaArt - www.etsy.com

 

Greatness of Heart

    Too many of us deal with the many serious challenges in life by avoidance, procrastination & distraction. So we drown ourselves in excessive : eating, drinking, shopping, sex, gambling, work, drugs, traveling, cars, houses, cottages, etc.
    This escapism brought about our high & rising: suicide rates; drug-overdose-related death rates; mass shootings in the US; annual murder rates in the US - always greater than the number of soldiers killed at the height of the Viet Nam and Gulf wars; consumption of mood-altering prescription drugs; burnout rates; etc. Add to that, a climate crisis that most completely ignore or "don't believe in." We clearly can't go on like this.

    Perennial philosophy calls for a much wiser approach - which actually works. Bravely face & wisely deal with our past & present traumas, shed our armor, denial & reactivity, and open our hearts.

    Heart Opening is “… a deep awakening to being love, rather than needing love.
    Every tradition has ways of opening our heart and expanding our capacity to love, whether through ritual, worship, devotion, or chants. Some people feel their hearts open through relationships with gurus, and Christian saints describe overwhelming love for Jesus. Our hearts can also open by falling in love, sometimes irrationally or without any hope of reciprocation. The heart also breaks open with grief.
    The heart can be a powerful portal into realizing our true nature, as a heart opening can lead to dramatic shifts in our energy and worldview. It is an intensely physical & emotional experience as all armoring around our heart breaks down. It opens the contractions around our heart that we formed in our early years.”
    Bonnie L. Greenwell. “When Spirit Leaps. Navigating the Process of Spiritual Awakening.” Non-Duality Press, 2018.

     Thomas Merton’s famous, powerful "heart opening" while walking down the street in Louisville, Kentucky:
    "At the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realized what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
    Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depth of their hearts where neither sin nor knowledge could reach, the core of reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the Divine. If only they could see themselves as they really are, if only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more need for war; for hatred, for greed, for cruelty. I suppose the big problem would be that we would all just fall down and worship each other."

    "Sharing the heart is a simple practice that can be used at any time and in every situation. It enlarges our view and helps us remember our interconnection.
    The essence of this practice is that when we encounter pain in our life we breathe into our heart with the recognition that others also feel this.
    It’s a way of acknowledging when we are closing down, and of training to open up. When we encounter any pleasure or tenderness in our life, we cherish that and rejoice. Then we make the wish that others could also experience this delight or this relief.
    In a nutshell, when life is pleasant, think of others. When life is a burden, think of others.
    If this is the only training we ever remember to do, it will benefit us tremendously and everyone else as well. It’s a way of bringing whatever we encounter onto the path of awakening compassion.” Pema Chödrön

    “There’s a story of a great saint in Northern India to whom people would pray, have a picture of him, and if they had problems with finances, the law, their children or whatever, they would pray to him and things would just work out for them – their prayers were answered. Then someone asked the Saint, well how is this happening? You’ve never met these people in person, are you doing something? Do you hear their prayers and you change things for them?
    He said, ‘No. It’s the department of the almighty, and he takes care of it.’ And then there was a desire for further explanation. And the explanation was that when someone (like this saint) is in tune with thaat cosmic intelligence, and people put their attention on that person (eg this saint) in a way, s/he (eg this saint) becomes a representative of that cosmic intelligence. Whereas without a representative, it’s too abstract for most people, so they can’t really relate to it, direct their attention to it, or pray to it.
    Whether it’s a contemporary teacher, or one of the great luminaries of history, just by evoking their aid, even though they might be 2,000 years deceased, we are kind of triggering the almighty cosmic intelligence to come to our assistance. You (Lucy Grace) may be serving such a function for some people.” Rick Archer

    “Absolutely. Again there’s nothing about me that’s special and doing anything, it’s a place for them to project all their own innate intelligence, wisdom, grace until they’re ready to internalize & claim it themselves.” Lucy Grace

    “They need some kind of concrete point of focus for those who are oriented that way. It’s too abstract for them to find it within themselves, or within the cosmos.” Rick Archer

    “Something in us opens to the archetypal energy of the (universal consciousness, Divine, etc), and whether it’s through Christ, or some punter down at the pub, whether it’s through me on the computer screen, it’s a conduit. It’s not that I’m doing a conduit for it. And then it’s all about this is yours, there is nothing outside of you that you need for this.” Lucy Grace, 2^nd Batgap interview : https://batgap.com/lucy-grace-2/ BOTH THIS & HER 1st interview https://batgap.com/lucy-grace/ are SUPERB IF YOU'RE READY

    "Here’s a question we don’t often ask ourselves: 'Do I have what it takes to be a saint?'

    Most of us would say we don’t. Lama Rod Owens, however, has a different take:
    'Because we love and venerate the saints, because we pray to them for blessings, developing deep devotion to their embodiment of the Divine, because we tend to elevate them to a place of godhood, it is easy to believe that they didn’t start out just like us: ordinary, struggling, & basically human. I believe that we all can and must become New Saints.
    We live in a time that can feel so grim that it seems like the world is ending. We are not experiencing the end of the world, but we are experiencing the end of some provocative & desperately enduring lies we have told ourselves. With the end of lies comes the awakening of truth.'" https://www.soundstrue.com/products/the-new-saints-1?utm_source=Z-Customer+Service&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=R230711-TNS-Pre-Publication+%2801H4P5VV33FMVHZHT6CXSVP32P%29&triplesource=klaviyo&utm_klaviyo_id=JsSQsZ&_kx=oubFt43NAjNBb0_NppHaGCF951bovtuCAx1o4i41Tys%3D.JMDgaq

 

“I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?
Look at your eyes. They are small,
but they see enormous things.”

 Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi

 

 

Photograph by P. Michael Lovas

Chopped Liver or Human Being?

     “Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.”
     Bob Samples. “The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness.” Jalmar, 1976.

     Einstein was pointing out how our society is becoming increasingly materialistic & hyper-rational. As a result, for many, the only satisfaction in life is: "The one who dies with the most toys wins." Our current dominant worldview, whether we fully realize it or not, is that of "scientific materialism" or "physicalism," according to which, life & consciousness is purely accidental & our life has no meaning!

     This dangerously unbalanced, nihilistic worldview has been around before our own increasingly troubled civilization, leading to the collapse of the Greek & Roman civilizations. Iain McGilchrist, former professor of literature at Oxford University, psychiatrist & author, worries that our civilization is also speeding towards demise - watch the excellent (49min) video interview at the bottom of this blog.

 

      Below, a brief transcription from a recent conversation about why there are those who firmly believe that consciousness ends with physical death; while many firmly believe, based on far more than wishful thinking, that consciousness continues beyond death:

     Rick Archer (RA), host of batgap.com: “In my own experience, and I’m really not just making this up like I’m hanging onto beliefs, but I just feel it so viscerally & so intuitively, that life is such a continuum, and it far exceeds the life span of this body. And whether this body dies tomorrow or thirty years from now, it’s obviously not in my hands, but I really trust in the sort of divine wisdom of things, the divine orchestration, and I fully feel that I’ll continue. What was that song from “Titanic” – “my heart will carry on” or something like that. I’ve interviewed so many people, I’ve read so many books and so on about near-death experiences, and I just feel that life is a continuum that just goes on and on and on. I guess the reason it’s worth dwelling on this that, although we don’t want to make too much of a fuss about beliefs, it seems to me that if a person has the orientation that I’ve just described versus the orientation that this is me, and when this dies, that’s the end of me, it seems to me that that would make a big difference in how they’d view their life, and what they felt about death. It would be a very different orientation, don’t you think?
     Connie Zweig (CZ): “Yah! It is a different orientation. I have a psychologist stepson who’s a scientist, and there’s only the material world for him. That’s all there is. And I look at it as a level of consciousness. That is a stage of development. Where there is nothing beyond the material world – that is a stage. And many people go through that stage. Some people get stuck there. But rather than sort of devalue it, I look at it as a stage.
     RA: I wouldn’t necessarily say that he’s at a lower level of consciousness than somebody who believes that there’s life after death. It’s really hard to judge levels of consciousness.
     CZ: No, it’s not beliefs, it’s experience.
     RA: I see, right, he hasn’t experienced a lot of transcendence**.
     CZ: Right, or any.
     RA: I guess that’s why you and I feel the way we do. If you add it all up, we’ve spent years sitting in the transcendent, over the past fifty. I know I’ve calculated it’s been at least six or seven years for me sitting there with my eyes closed. And that definitely grounds you in something. that you can’t shake – that you wouldn’t want to shake.
     CZ: Yah! And people who haven’t had that experience have no idea what we’re talking about. They’ve no idea. It’s like, ‘Have you eaten curry?’ You’ve eaten curry or you haven’t eaten curry. You can’t imagine it if you haven’t eaten it.
     I believe that a lot of the craziness we’re seeing in the culture right now is about consciousness. In some ways it’s a regressed stage that’s happening now. It’s an earlier, more primitive stage of consciousness that Trump elicited. We don’t know what’s going to happen as a result of that. But it’s all out of the closet now."
     A very short part of an excellent (1hr 55min) interview: https://batgap.com/connie-zweig/

      **Transcendence refers to going beyond what we commonly admit to being able to think & clearly describe in words. The most deeply meaningful aspects of life - such as love & mystical experiences - which we can directly experience fit this category!

     Directly related to this, I highly recommend: Mark Gober. “An End to Upside Down Thinking: Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life.” Waterside Press, 2018.

    

 

 

Self-compassion, Wisdom & Leaning In

     One of my recurrent themes is the importance of shifting from avoiding (in all sorts of ways) our difficulties, and instead leaning into them with kind curiosity - with an open mind-heart, thus unraveling the energetic knots & shedding our armor of conditioning. This is a profound act of self-compassion, allowing us to mature, become whole, flourish, 'be all that we can be.'
     Here's Amoda Maa's insightful perspective on this theme: 
 
     “The feminine that I’m speaking of is not about anything in opposition to anything. It’s not got to do with the battle of the sexes, or the return of a feminist approach, etc. I’m talking about the infusion of love into humanity. And the infusion of love is what’s been missing. 
     And what I mean by that, if we go a bit deeper, is the capacity to turn towards gentleness; the capacity to turn towards the tenderness of the inner heart, which is not what’s been happening. Whether we’re on the patriarchal or matriarchal side, in some ways we’re still operating at the level of some kind of hardness. So I’m talking about the capacity to turn towards tenderness in response to our experience, and therefore in response to each other, and therefore in response to the world, which requires a shift from mind to heart, through surrender, not through knowing. 
     And so we can apply that to ‘spiritual practice’ or we can apply that to the totality of our life’s experience. And I get the sense that this frequency is beginning to filter in. I call it ‘feminine’ because it’s about surrender, but it’s filtering in through everyone, whether we’re male or female, whether we’re long time on this planet or just born, there’s a different frequency that’s coming through. I don’t speak about the feminine much actually. 
     By tenderness, I’m not talking about passivity, woo woo, or anything like that, it’s not got anything to do with the goddess archetype, it’s got nothing to do with archetypes, stereotypes, roles or concepts. The tenderness I speak of, if it’s going to serve any purpose, is a tenderness towards our inner experience. If we examine that, we probably can see how we are not tender towards our inner experience. Which means that when we have an experience we don’t like, that makes us feel uncomfortable, that makes us feel vulnerable, that makes us feel scared, that makes us feel unloved, that makes us feel alone, or anything like that, then we attempt to reject it, suppress it, deny it, constrict it, change it, maneuver it, squeeze it, spit it out, and so on and so forth. And that is not tenderness. That’s aggression. That’s violence. We are violent towards our own experience. 
     If you can stop that violence, and choose tenderness towards your experience, then you can forget about spirituality, you can forget about spiritual practice, you can forget about spiritual teachings, and you will live fully awake and fully human. Because that’s what it is – nonviolence towards our inner experience. Because when we’re violent towards our inner experience, what follows that is then ‘I’m wrong,’ or ‘they’re wrong,’ or ‘it’s wrong,’ and then you have become a victim of reality, and as long as you’re a victim of reality, you are separate, and when you’re separate you’re living in the dream of separation, and all horrors, all suffering personal & otherwise, arise from that. 
     So this point about tenderness is key, and way more powerful than the world tenderness implies. (People who commit terrorist attacks) are at war with their own fear. Everything violent arises out of fear. And that fear may have a thread, a root in a sense of injustice, in a sense of being abused, a sense of not being complete, whole, and safe and one and all of that. So it has a certain intelligence in it, but when we’re violent towards that fear, then it ends up as a violence towards that which appears to be causing that fear, and so then we have the terror, and the war, and the violence in the world. 
     But if we can turn that tenderness towards ourselves – those of us who have the capacity to do that, a vast majority of the privileged Western world, not all, but certainly a proportion – we do have the capacity to turn that tenderness towards ourselves, towards our inner experience. And that’s very often overlooked. And if we take that as the only spiritual practice there is, I would say that there would be a vast transformation.
     One of the things we’re so frightened of is the experience of loss, whether that loss is the loss of a loved one, or the loss of our own life, or the loss of whatever it is we’ve gained – success, or wealth, or love, or recognition – and yet, our willingness to be tender towards that loss is a very profound opening to what can never be lost, which is beingness itself. It’s like meeting death in everything. Being tender towards loss is again not investing that loss with meaning. It doesn’t mean that you’re bad. It doesn’t mean that you’re unloved. It doesn’t mean that your life is broken. And it doesn’t mean that you’re a failure. We tend to invest loss with a meaning to do with ‘me.’ It’s all about ‘me.’ But to be tender towards that is to feel the absolute shattering of loss, and yet, for we don’t invest ourselves in that, or meaning in that, we discover there is nothing that can be lost.”

Amoda Maa - 2nd Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview