Nurturing Our Troubled World

     “A beautiful prophecy they tell in the Andes and in the Amazon is called the prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor. They say that this is the time when the Eagle People – people like you & I, who perceive life primarily through the mind – at this time in history will reach a kind of zenith. They’ll use the mind, and tools to even extend the capacity of the mind. That’s probably a prophecy about computers & artificial intelligence. And we will be materially rich beyond any previous generation’s imagination. But we will be spiritually impoverished to our peril and our very survival will be at risk. While the Condor People – which refers to indigenous people, who live primarily through the wisdom of the heart, the five senses, and inhabit the spirit world as their primary home – they will have reached a kind of zenith & sophistication in their skills & their way of life, but they will be materially impoverished to their peril and encounter with the Eagle world, and their survivability will also be at risk. And they say that at this time in history – the beginning of the third millennium (this is the 1st century of the 3rd millennium) the Eagle People and the Condor People will begin to fly together in the same sky, and the world will come back into balance.
     But the change after hundreds of years of domination of the Eagle People over the Condor People, from the 4th pachakuti, the pachakuti of dominance & darkness, (between ~1492 to 2000), changing to the 5th pachakuti, the pachakuti of balance & light (a pachakuti is a 500-year period of time). This change from the 4th to the 5th pachakuti will take, they say, 25-50 years, and during that time, Pachamama (their name for Mother Earth) will humble all her creatures with huge climactic events – earthquakes, temperatures rising, fires, floods, tsunamis – to humble all her creatures so they remember their rightful role in relationship with her, going into the pachakuti of balance & light. So this time of climactic turmoil and huge crisis with our climate has been predicted for thousands of years by the indigenous people as a way that the Mother is humbling us, in some cases destroying us, but humbling us so that we will find a rightful role of integrity with her as we go into the 500 years of balance & light, where the Eagle and the Condor fly together – the prophecy about the Pachamama Alliance. They say that this is a huge transitional period, this roughly 25 to 50 years, where we are receiving massive feedback from the Mother. They say the pandemic is part of this feedback, an announcement from the Mother. So everything comes from the earth, everything – the computer, the pen I’m writing with, everything we know, including the pandemic. That virus impacts only one species, of the millions of species on the planet, only one species gets sick from it, and that’s us. Why is that?
     They say that the pandemic is an announcement, it’s not a punishment. It’s an ally, it’s halting us, interrupting our way of life so we have to stop and think, re-source, re-check, re-generate who we are for the next 500 years.
     I call it morning sickness for our pregnant species, that’s pregnant for its own rebirth. When a woman is pregnant but doesn’t know she’s pregnant, and she’s vomiting in the morning, and feeling tired by 2 o’clock, and wanting weird things, and feeling very out of sorts, she actually considers herself sick.
     But if she finds out she’s pregnant, then she’s no longer sick – she’s having a baby. She’s still throwing up, but delighted that she’s going to have a baby. And I say that the pandemic is our morning sickness for a pregnancy that we’re entering into as a species, to re-birth ourselves, co-labour, both men and women collaborate into our next evolutionary leap, into what it means to be a human being. All pregnancies do not produce a baby. There are miscarriages, there are stillbirths, all kinds of things. This is a metaphor. The indigenous people say how we hold this interruption – the pandemic, the climate crisis – is not happening to us, it’s happening for us as feedback, so that we will make the changes necessary to survive. And if we don’t we’ll go extinct. These changes are harsh, but gentler than they could be, but are forcing a transformation."
     Lynne Twist (1hr 35min) interview: https://batgap.com/lynne-twist/

The Butterfly Story - A Metaphor for Humanity in Crisis
by Elisabet Sahtouris, Evolution Biologist & Futurist
http://www.sahtouris.com/#5_3

     “A caterpillar can eat up to three hundred times its own weight in a day, devastating many plants in the process, continuing to eat until it’s so bloated that it hangs itself up and goes to sleep, its skin hardening into a chrysalis. Then, within the chrysalis, within the body of the dormant caterpillar, a new and very different kind of creature, the butterfly, starts to form. This confused biologists for a long time. How could a different genome plan exist within the caterpillar to form a different creature? They knew that metamorphosis occurs in a number of insect species, but it was not known until quite recently that nature did a lot of mixing and matching of very different genome/protein configurations in early evolutionary times. Cells with the butterfly genome were held as disc-like aggregates of stem cells that biologists call 'imaginal cells', hidden away inside the caterpillar’ all its life, remaining undeveloped until the crisis of overeating, fatigue and breakdown allows them to develop, gradually replacing the caterpillar with a butterfly! 
     Such metamorphosis makes a good metaphor for the great changes globalisation, in the sense of world transformation, is bringing about, as Norie Huddle first used it in her beautiful book Butterfly. Our bloated old system is rapidly becoming defunct while the vision of a new and very different society, long held by many 'imaginal cell' humans who dreamt of a better world, is now emerging like a butterfly, representing our solutions to the crises of predation, overconsumption and breakdown in a new way of living lightly on Earth, and of seeing our human society not in the metaphors and models of mechanism as well-oiled social machinery, but in those of evolving, self-organizing and intelligent living organism.
     If you want a butterfly world, don't step on the caterpillar, but join forces with other imaginal cells to build a better future for all!”

 

Scarcity in our Time of Abundance

     Someone who earned well over $250k a year, once told me that he envied panhandlers for doing nothing and earning more than he did. He must have been thoroughly intoxicated by the paradigm of scarcity to say something so ridiculous.

     “Buckminster ('Bucky') Fuller in 1976, told an audience of 2,000 people: ‘Now I’m going to say the most important thing I’ve ever said or ever will say. Humanity has just crossed a threshold. And that threshold changes everything. And we’ve crossed it. And it’s recent.’ He meant in the last 50 or a 100 years – he dealt in these large swaths of time. ‘And that threshold is that humanity is doing so much more, with so much less. And that is the direction of our science, our innovation, of all of our technology – to do so much more, with so much less, that we now clearly live in a world where there is enough for everyone, everywhere to have a healthy & productive life. We live in a world of absolute, profound sufficiency and everyone, everywhere can have a healthy & productive life.
     And that was not always true. Before this threshold, we lived in a world of scarcity, where it was either you make it at my expense, because I make it at your expense, because there was not enough for both of us. But on this side of the line, you and I can both make it at no one’s expense, because there’s enough for everyone, everywhere to have a healthy, productive life. We don’t have to compete like mad any longer. We have everything we need. And he said, we won’t realize that for around 50 years, because human institutions inside of which we live, are all rooted in the you or me paradigm, rather than the you and me paradigm – a paradigm of scarcity, rather than a paradigm of enough. And so he said that governance is rooted in a you or me understanding of the world; the economy is clearly designed & rooted in a you or me understanding of the world; education is rooted in a you or me understanding of the world; even, he said, religion is rooted in a you or me understanding of the world. So he said these institutions will need to become so dysfunctional, that they start falling apart and they won’t be able to fix them. And then we’ll have to recreate our human institutions from a new paradigm – a paradigm of profound sufficiency. And it will take about 50 years for all of this to fall apart. He said this in 1976 and here we are in 2021, and things are totally falling apart, and we can’t really fix them because they’re rooted in a set of assumptions that are now so clearly inaccurate. That’s the big lesson I learned from Bucky, and then I began to be a spokesperson for the distinction of sufficiency, which is not an amount of anything, it’s an experience, it’s a way of being where you are in the experience that you are enough, there is enough, and from enough, we build and grow and expand (rather than from scarcity or lack, but from enough). It’s just a completely different way of living. … Bucky said, ‘We can make the world work for everyone, with no one and nothing left out.’

     Brother David Steindl-Rast (gratefulness.org) when asked ‘What’s the difference between gratitude and gratefulness?’ replied, ‘Gratitude has two great branches, one is gratefulness, and the other is thanksgiving. Gratefulness is the experience of life when the whole of life is so full, it is almost overflowing, but not quite. The bowl of life is so full, that it’s bowed at the top but not yet dribbling over the edges. And that’s the experience of the great fullness of life. And when you’re in the great fullness of life, if you’re one with God, one with the Universe, and there is no other. It’s all One. That is so fulfilling that the bowl of life starts to overflow, and that puts you over on the other branch of gratitude, called thanksgiving. And when you’re in the branch of gratitude called thanksgiving, the bowl of life is like a fountain, it’s overflowing. And so all you want to do is give, and serve, and you’re so grateful to discover there’s another so you can give and serve and contribute and share and that’s so fulfilling, it puts you in the gratefulness of life again. … back & forth … And you can live in these two branches of gratitude, and it’s so powerful & fulfilling to live in these two branches, like Brother David does. All of us can.
     But sometimes, when the bowl of life gets full, almost overflowing, we think, ‘Oh, I’ve got to get a bigger bowl!’ rather than realize this is enough.
     And out of enough, natural bounty, or natural abundance flows. Abundance is different from sufficiency. This is sufficiency, and this is natural abundance, which flows from sufficiency, never from lack, and not even from more. Real sufficiency flows from the profound recognition of enough. There’s a beautiful principle of sufficiency I kind of made up: When you let go of trying to get more of what you don’t really need, it frees up oceans of energy you’ve tied up in the chase, to turn and pay attention to what you already have. When you pay attention to what you already have, when you nourish what you already have, when you make a difference with what you already have, when you share what you already have, it expands. This is another way of saying, ‘What you appreciate, appreciates.’
     What you long for in the world, and what you love, where you feel hurt in the world, and what you care deeply about, where you feel the world is longing for your participation and where you’re drawn from your heart to do something about – you put those two things together, and you’ll find your path of service. Albert Schweitzer said, ‘One thing I know; the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought & found how to serve.’ So just get involved in whatever makes your heart sing, touches your heart, and keep engaging in things until you find this is it, this is mine, this is why I was born, this is why I’m here, this is what I stand for, this is my dharma, this is my karma, this is my service, this is who I am."
     Lynne Twist (1hr 35min) interview: https://batgap.com/lynne-twist/

 

 

Awakening A Little Each Day

      We all do our best to get by. Whether we realize it or not, we prioritize trustworthiness in ourselves, other people, animals, and even things such as cars & appliances. At the same time, we know that everything & everyone, including ourselves, changes constantly. We see this change whenever we look in the mirror. We see ourselves age, AND YET, somehow, the one who is aware of this feels somehow timeless.

      "We are luminous beings. We are perceivers. We are an awareness.
We are not objects. We have no solidity. We are boundless.
The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us.
      We or rather our reasons, forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in a lifetime.
     We are perceivers.
     The world that we perceive though is an illusion. It was created by a description that was told to us since the moment we were born." Don Juan

     “As I’ve discovered, awakening doesn’t belong to one teaching or tradition, and in any case, once you wake up, you actually awaken out of traditional frameworks. After all, if you’re awakening to your true nature, the one you’ve always already been deep down inside, how could one tradition or approach have a monopoly on it? This precious spiritual nature has always belonged to you, and, like one version of the proverbial prodigal son, you’re merely discovering the diamond that’s been hidden in your pocket all along.
     In fact, more and more people appear to be awakening to their inherent spiritual nature, whether or not they’ve been practicing meditation or some other prescribed technique. Perhaps it’s just our technological times, when experiences are shared so much more globally through cell phones, e-mails, websites, and blogs, but awakening seems to have shed the garments of religion and revealed itself for what it is – a universal human experience available to everyone right here and now. Despite what you may have been led to believe, enlightenment is your birthright, your natural state – you merely need to reclaim and learn to embody it.”
     Stephan Bodian. “Wake Up Now. A Guide to the Journey of Spiritual Awakening.” McGraw-Hill, 2008. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

 

      Please play Buffy Sainte-Marie's beautiful song today - September 30, 2021 - our first National Day for Truth & Reconciliation. We have SO MUCH to learn from our wise First Nations sisters and brothers. Thank you CBC Radio for playing this beautiful music!

Never Forget Our True Nature

     “Many people have intimations of their true nature in childhood – the sense of a benevolent presence guiding their life, a radiance that shines forth from all things, or a current of love that unites us all. …
     But we lose touch with this luminosity as we age … we forget who we really are and succumb to the way others see us..."
      Stephan Bodian. “Wake Up Now. A Guide to the Journey of Spiritual Awakening.” McGraw-Hill, 2008.

     By adulthood we've more or less forgotten who we truly are, and have passively absorbed the current cultural fad of being frozen in the armor of materialism, meaninglessness & cynicism. Not surprisingly, something in all of us "continues to weep over the barrenness of modern life."

The Way It Is
William Stafford

"There's a thread you follow.
It goes among things that change.
But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread."

     “The life I chose when I promised my six-year-old self never to forget being a child, never to grow frightened and dishonest like the grownups I saw, nodding politely to each other without affection, and decided to put my true self in a time capsule for later use.” Aurora Levins Morales

      “Love is subversive, undermining the propaganda of narrow self-interest. Love emphasizes connection, responsibility and the joy we take in each other. Therefore love (as opposed to unthinking devotion) is a danger to the status quo and we have been taught to find it embarrassing.” Aurora Levins Morales 

     “Love … is seeing the unity under the imaginary diversity.” Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

     “By religious attitude I am not referring to following a path toward redemption or salvation or even necessarily to being a member of a religious institution. A religious attitude relates to the cultivation of soul – an openness to wonder, awe, fear, and reverence with respect to the ‘other,’ those numinous forces that exist outside our conscious control. These powers have been called at various times fate, destiny, the hand of God, or, to use Robert’s term, slender threads.” Jerry M. Ruhl

     “I have learned to trust the slender threads for the big decisions in my life while using my ego to take care of the small details.
     Humankind has struggled with the dilemma of how to balance fate versus free will since time began. There have been many rules of thumb for how to achieve such a balance. My personal approach is that the big events in my life follow a slender thread while the details are my business. Nobody but me will balance my checkbook or shave me or keep my house tidy. Those are the appropriate tasks for the ego. The little decisions belong to us, while the great things are like the weather sweeping us along. Yet most modern people spend a majority of their waking hours worrying about larger issues that the ego cannot really control. The small and limited ego is not the proper human faculty for such issues. The ego does not belong in the driver’s seat. In fact, the ego often gets in the way of being attentive to the slender threads. We must learn to humble and quiet our egos so that we may follow the slender threads.
     … I feel that the ego is properly used as the organ of awareness, not the organ of decision. … The ego is useful for collecting information about ticket fares and accommodation and things to see and do when you arrive. But the ego does not determine the experience you will have on your trip. People get so preoccupied with trying to control things that are not in the ego’s province that they neglect what is the ego’s business – heightened awareness. The ego should be collecting data and watching. The ego serves as the eyes and ears of God. It gathers the facts, but it does not make the ultimate decisions. The decisions come from the Self, Dr. Jung’s term for a center of intelligence that is not limited to the ego but contains all of the faculties – conscious and unconscious – of the personality. Obviously, this is but a new attempt to describe the old concept of a personal relationship with God.” Robert A. Johnson
     Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

     “We are made to trust our destination. We are not lost.” Aurora Levins Morales 

 

 

Ego - Destruction and Repair

     "... the ego is a contraction. Love is expansion, a feeling of spaciousness.” Jean Klein

     I invite you to notice what emotions arise in you, as you read the following. When our ego feels threatened - and it doesn't take very much at all - we react as if our life were at risk! AND we externalize - project BLAME outside of ourselves - in this case, the authors of these quotes and or myself. One mark of spiritual maturation is, instead of projecting, examining what OUR contribution is to our frequent emotional 'tempests in a teapot.' We'll never be able to fully control our external environment, however, our internal environment is FAR more cooperative!

     “I define awakening as ‘an experience of clarity, revelation, and joy in which we become aware of a deeper (or higher) level of reality, perceive a sense of harmony and meaning, and transcend our normal sense of separateness from the world.’
     Awakening experiences occur when we temporarily transcend our normal state of being – or, more strictly speaking, our normal self-system. The structure of our normal self-system – with its strong sense of ego, firm boundaries, and automatic perception – dissolves away, like a tent swept away in a wind. This can happen in times of inner relaxation and stillness, when our normal thought-chatter fades away and there’s a higher level of energy inside us, infusing our perceptions and enabling us to perceive the world more vividly. This is why awakening experiences are often generated by contact with nature, meditation, watching or listening to arts performances, and other sedate, mind-quieting activities.
     Alternatively, our normal self-system may be temporarily swept away as a result of intense stress and psychological turmoil. In fact, my research shows that intense psychological turmoil – perhaps caused by loss, failure, divorce, or bereavement – is the most common trigger of awakening experiences (with contact with nature, meditation, and watching or listening to arts performances following closely behind). Turmoil and stress can be like an earthquake, breaking down the structure of the normal self and allowing a more expansive and intense state of being to unfold.”
     Steve Taylor. “The Leap. The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening.” New World Library, 2017.

     “The loss of self is the essence of trauma.” Gabor Maté MD   

 

     As a consequence of trauma, a relatively healthy sense of self is lost and replaced by an armored "false self" or "noisy ego". Healing trauma involves carefully letting go of the heavily-defended, armored false self, leaving behind a more authentic sense of self or "quiet ego." This requires gentle patience, perseverance and ideally, expert professional help. (Dr. Gabor Maté Interview - The Tim Ferriss Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9B5mYfBPlY)

     Another term for awakening may be a genuinely revelatory mystical experience - "the revelation that the socialized ego, historical persona or religious identity is not all we are.” (Jeff Kripal) Most of us are so completely identified with - completely lost within - our own stories, that it usually takes something radical to at least briefly "part the veil" so we can have a brief peak at the way things actually are. Awakening experiences, as mentioned in a previous blog (http://www.johnlovas.com/2021/03/fascinating-overlap.html) can also be induced by entheogens - the fastest, most radical pathway to awakening. I personally have never tried any entheogens or other psychoactive substances. The specific effect of these powerful drugs is highly dependent on "set & setting": safe, supportive healing environment, medical expertise & healing intention.

     “There’s nothing wrong with the ego. The ego has been demonized by a lot of different new age communities and spiritual teachings. Just the phrasing, the association of the ego is quite negative. But the ego is just the construct that allows you to navigate in this realm. The ego is the vessel builder that actually allows you to engage in any particular way.
      But what’s happened as we move through life is that we experience some sort of painful experience, that isn’t allowed to complete its full cycle and properly discharge, as it would if it wasn’t inhibited, it gets stored in the system, and then we develop what’s called a compensatory action or behavior. And that’s what we build our personalities, our identities on top of. We’re actually armoring up so that we don’t need to go back to that sensation that was inherently overwhelming, which felt like if we felt that thing, we would die. And so we develop all these coping mechanisms to avoid these things that we carry inside of us. And that becomes our personality, that becomes our identity. And that’s what I call your consciousness structure.
     And so we have to actually disassemble that structure. And as we disassemble that structure, all of those suppressed and repressed aspects of ourselves actually come up - they surface to be felt, and to be expressed, and to be discharged. And then we’re left in kind of a fluid place, where we can now craft a new consciousness structure, a new vessel that can carry, guide and direct consciousness in a different, liberated way. And when you’re coming back from the non-dual space, it’s like you can witness the construct building itself again, block by block, very very rapidly, as the mind, and the emotion, and the armoring, all comes back and solidifies again back into a cohesive whole – maybe with a few pieces altered, with some energy released. And it’s in this discombobulated state that the integration really happens, because you come back a new person. ‘OK, how do I exist in the world now, from this new vantage point, without all of the armoring, defense mechanisms, and the coping strategies, and the behaviors that I had carried up until this point? How do I actually craft a new identity?’ And that’s really where the work begins.
     As the ceremony comes to completion, the rest of the ceremony of life begins. And this is one of the main things that is important to communicate, which is tied to what we were describing before about the potential pitfalls of the ceremonial spaces, is that these realms – not just bufo or 5 MEO DMT, but with any psychedelic or plant medicine, they’re not meant to be separate from the rest of life. They’re actually meant to reveal us to ourselves, so that we can actually live in a more optimized, more holistic, more integrated, more whole state of being. They (plant medicines) are teachers that are teaching us how to be human. And they have existed on this planet far longer than we have. Mushrooms are actually our ancestors. (There’s an interesting documentary “Fantastic Fungi” on Netflix.) Mushrooms are revealing us to ourselves so we can live in an optimized state.
     It’s fascinating when you start observing this not only in yourself, but also in others. You come to see that every person’s identity is a construct, not just an idea, but as an actual reality. Every personality is actually just a construct. It’s just a combination of stories, which is one of the reasons why I respect the work that you do so much, about actually going into the mythos – the myths that actually generate and create and supplement the human experience. Because every single one of us is just a combination of stories. And these medicines really ask us to consider ‘Who am I, when I remove all of my stories? What is left?’”
     A Psychedelic Guide to Healing Trauma - Deus Fortier (The Impeccable Man) The Mythic Masculine (1hr 50min podcast) : https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-mythic-masculine/id1487709630?i=1000532409278

The Storyteller - Inuit whalebone carving from: Donald Kalsched "Trauma and the Soul" 2013

 

Ostriches, Chickens and Eagles

     “A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.
     All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.
     Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.
     The old eagle looked up in awe. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
     ‘That’s the eagle, the king of birds,’ said his neighbor. So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.” Anthony de Mello SJ

     When women and children are rescued from an abusive home, and can choose between a safe shelter or returning "home", most choose the hell they know rather than face a freedom they've never experienced. It's so easy to rigidly imprison ourselves in nihilism, hoping that this tiny self-created prison (the hell we know) will protect us against possible disappointments (unknown freedom). Dark humor: 'No sense being pessimistic, it wouldn't work anyway!' Even false optimism has been shown to work better than pessimism. But by far the most effective, balanced & intelligent approach is "leaning in" with curiosity, into ALL aspects of our life, especially those we fear ***, to learn as deeply as possible about ALL that life has to offer.
      *** “Jung said that it is exactly where you feel most frightened and most in pain that your greatest opportunity lies for personal growth.”
     Robert A. Johnson. “Inner Work. Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth.” HarperOne, 1986. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

     "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." Marie Curie

     “I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with those we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.” Gus Speth

     "Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry asleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence. You know, all mystics – Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion – are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare."
     Anthony de Mello. “Awareness. The Perils and Opportunities of Reality.” Doubleday, 1992.

     “Ultimately, however, your path is unique to you, and it begins in the darkness of not knowing and the simple yearning of your own heart. As Nisargadatta Maharaj said, ‘You must find your own way. Unless you find it yourself, it will not be your own way and will take you nowhere.’ You need to be willing to sit in this darkness, recognizing that the truth is hidden here, without immediately leaping to claim easy answers or proven practices. ‘To live in the know is bondage,’ adds Nisargadatta. ‘To live in the unknown is liberation.”
     Stephan Bodian. “Wake Up Now. A Guide to the Journey of Spiritual Awakening.” McGraw-Hill, 2008.

“As we travel through life, we are all seekers
after something larger than ourselves…”
Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer PhD

Alysha Brilla "Immigrant"

 

Remembering Who We Really Are

     “Many people have intimations of their true nature in childhood – the sense of a benevolent presence guiding their life, a radiance that shines forth from all things, or a current of love that unites us all. …
     But we lose touch with this luminosity as we age … we forget who we really are and succumb to the way others see us until one day, perhaps, we have intimations of our immortality, our timeless spiritual nature, become seekers, and embark on the return journey home.

      Ultimately, your every desire – the desire for material things, relationships, career success, sexual gratification – is really the desire for the peace you experience for brief moments when you attain the object of your desire. Of course, such conditional peace is fleeting, and you move restlessly on to new objects and new desires in the hope of recapturing it. Until you know who you really are, know the freedom from desire that’s the true aim of every desire, you can never recognize the peace that can never be disturbed or lost.

      Our always already awakened true nature is our birthright, our inherent condition, our natural state, which we merely need to recognize, without effort or striving, in a moment out of time. … (this) echoed the teachings of the early Zen masters who were so revered (though not so often followed in practice) in the Buddhist tradition.

     As I’ve discovered, awakening doesn’t belong to one teaching or tradition, and in any case, once you wake up, you actually awaken out of traditional frameworks. After all, if you’re awakening to your true nature, the one you’ve always already been deep down inside, how could one tradition or approach have a monopoly on it? This precious spiritual nature has always belonged to you, and, like one version of the proverbial prodigal son, you’re merely discovering the diamond that’s been hidden in your pocket all along.
     In fact, more and more people appear to be awakening to their inherent spiritual nature, whether or not they’ve been practicing meditation or some other prescribed technique. Perhaps it’s just our technological times, when experiences are shared so much more globally through cell phones, e-mails, websites, and blogs, but awakening seems to have shed the garments of religion and revealed itself for what it is – a universal human experience available to everyone right here and now. Despite what you may have been led to believe, enlightenment is your birthright, your natural state – you merely need to reclaim and learn to embody it.

     Awakening is a fundamental recognition of the inherent insubstantiality or emptiness of the person you take yourself to be and a radical shift in your identity from being the suffering separate self to being the eternal witness, the limitless space or ground in which all experiences arise. In other words, you awaken from the dream of suffering and separation to the radiance and joy of your true nature. More than being merely one spiritual experience among many, this awakening (often called enlightenment) is the essential realization at the heart of the Eastern spiritual traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, and it can also be found as a more subterranean current in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – though mystics have been excommunicated, ostracized, or burned at the stake for making such pronouncements.”

     Stephan Bodian. “Wake Up Now. A Guide to the Journey of Spiritual Awakening.” McGraw-Hill, 2008. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED