Self-Evident Truths And Awakening
I find some thoughts to be self-evident; almost tautological in their simplicity and obvious truth. I am wondering whether the rest of us would experience these ideas similarly. I’d like to mention a few before I elaborate.
For example, it seems patently obvious that the One that is All-That-Is is all of Itself – including our human species of consciousness as well as everything that we experience and regard as other than this human species of consciousness on this planet near this star. Simple and obvious, huh?
We, each one of us, as well the whole set of us human beings, are in, of, and by this One that is All-That-Is. To me that is indisputable. We could say that our human species of consciousness is one of the innumerable ways that this One is experiencing and expressing Itself at this particular location of Itself at this particular moment of Its ongoing revelation of Itself to Itself. All of these statements appear self-evident to me. Are they to you?
I’ll proceed from these ideas whether you take them as self-evident or reasonable premises.
Given our inherent immersion in this One and our evident emergence from the quantum/zero-point field as well as our innate embedded-ness in this One’s multi-dimensional interconnectedness, I believe we humans, as a species of consciousness, can begin to understand our human situation on this planet differently than we have been regarding it.
As this particular species of consciousness we have, pretty much all of us, been living through a mind-made filter that both shapes and limits our experience and expression of ourselves and our relationships with each other in ways that are fundamentally out of harmony with the multi-ordinal, mutually sustaining, self-organizing and self-evolving nature of this One in and of whom we live and move and have our being. This is made evident by the fact that we are, pretty much all of us, at each other’s throat and willing to spend the greatest portion of our global wealth to destroy each other and disrupt and destroy each others’ cultures over a rather small set of mind-made ideological constructs and pre-emptive perceptions of threat which have often been fostered by a seemingly endless stream of false-flag events in our history.
To date, very few of us realize what we actually are individually or as a whole species. We’ve never been taught about and rarely even looked for our actual being. This is largely because we’ve been so caught up in our personal version of our species-wide illusion of separation, reification and polarized dualities that we’ve never actually considered the possibility that there may be something else going on here beneath the surface of our alienation and our adversities. This misguided misunderstanding is the root of both our failure as a species of consciousness to thrive together as well as our inability, to date, to co-create a world of growing, mutual benefit and mutual support.
Anyone who’s ever lived in a functioning community knows that the only way the community thrives is for everybody to do their part in making it work for all of us. It is exactly the same for any species of consciousness living on a planet, together – like us; this is the only way by which we shift into what is called a “shared memory complex.” My dear, co-existent human beings, isn’t it obvious that we are all in this world together. It only makes sense for us to realize we have been living an insane dream, to wake-up and begin to discover what it means to live in support of each other’s well-being.
Here’s a relevant parable I have heard. A spiritually dedicated practitioner earned a boon; she asked to be shown the difference between Heaven and Hell. In a mind’s-eye instant, she was shown a room with a large, round dining table with a large steaming pot of what looked to be a delicious soup. All available seats around the table were filled with, apparently, rather hungry people. But these all had unusual right arms. Their right fore-arms had the shape of three-foot long handles and at the end was a soup spoon. Each one was able to dip their spoon into the pot in the middle of the table and get some of that delicious smelling food. But they couldn’t get the spoon to their mouths. People were trying to throw the food and catch it in their mouths. No one was really eating and all the food was spattering on everyone around the table; tempers were flaring. In the peaceful silence of her mind as she contemplated this scene, she heard, “That’s Hell.”
Then, instantly she was transported to a similar but very different scene. Same table, same steaming tureen of soup, same gathering of people with their silly, long soup-spoon arms; but here, they’d each dip their spoon in that appealing soup and feed one another. Meanwhile, they shared a warm and wonderful conversation. Everyone was happy and well-fed. “Heaven.”
But, just knowing we are all in this together and wanting to collaborate is not enough to free us; ask most of us who lived the heart of the ‘60s. Recognizing we have been asleep in a dream of separation and disconnectedness is not the same as waking-up. We need to both attune our organisms (read “nervous systems”), to the underlying, but seriously overlooked, reality of our being and, simultaneously, deconstruct the habitual, conditioned neuro-somatic, neuro-relational and neuro-mental patterns that constitute our mind-world/dream-body of duality, separation and reification.
These two processes are mutually supportive and both are required. Fully attuning to the inclusive, spacious presence of our natural state requires the deconstruction of the conditioned self-other, self-world identifications in which we have been living. It is equally true that the dissolution of our reifying, polarizing mind-states goes smoother, faster and, it cannot be completed without the active presence of our silent awareness pervading the process.
First and most essentially, we to notice our natural state and then, get more and more familiar with it in the midst of our life. For most of us, we gradually come to live from and as our innate, clear, open presence and we come to see this self-same ground of being in everyone and everything.
To start right now, we decide to stop thinking for a moment and notice what is here in the absence of thought. If you choose to stop a moment and attend, you will notice a silent (read: “absence of thought”), alert, presence. This may not seem like much; in fact, if you are attentive, it seems like nothing whatsoever – and yet, there is an awareness of the present moment. Nothing, and yet cognizant of whatever happens to be appearing as this particular moment. Interesting, huh? In Tibet, this is referred to as the empty cognizance of our natural state.
If you’ve recognized this much, you’ve had a glimpse of recognition. Congratulations! This is the first step on the path of awakening to our true nature and out of our unique, individual set of conditioned identities. Although this truly is the key to freedom, if it doesn’t seem like much of any significance to you at this point, you are not alone. Many of us fail to recognize the significance of the silent presence of awareness during our first, brief glimpses. If your initial short moments are anything like mine, you’ve just begun to sense the aroma of the natural state; you are nowhere near enjoying the feast with all your beloved brothers and sisters, yet.
What typically happens, once we’ve hit the pause button on our thinking and begun attending to what is naturally, already and always here, is we immediately notice some quality or characteristic of what we’ve touched and we lose contact with the immediacy of the actual experience; because we’re so attentive to our intelligence’s capacities of discernment, labeling and description. Ether that or we get distracted from our presence by any current focus that presses in upon us.
In other words, one or another of our habitual neuro-logical complexes moves into the foreground of our consciousness and the deeper qualities of our being are no longer being noticed. The full depth and richness of our consciously aware being cannot be revealed in a short glimpse any more than a trailer can communicate the full-on experiential ride of a really good movie. In order to more fully appreciate the remarkable qualities of our innate awareness of being, we have to cultivate the ability to rest back into and as the spacious, inclusive, living awareness of our every now moment; this usually takes a while. If we’re getting pulled out of our natural state after a second or two, we can say we’ve recognized it, but we cannot yet say we really know it.
Within the practice communities among us, which have over centuries produced embodied and realized human beings, at a certain point in a practitioner’s development, a simple practice is given. However, the masters of these lineages have said that now is the time for this to be more widely disseminated. The injunction is, “Brief moments of thought-free re-recognition, repeated many times, become continuous and obvious in all experiences and situations.” This is how we can shift our default neurological complexes out of our conditioned identifications in separation; restoring our neural substrate to resting in and as the silent expanse of our presence and, usually gradually, coming to live from that.
As a species of consciousness, humanity as a whole has been living within a mind/world-dream/body in which “reality” is conceived and perceived as a collection of separate three-dimensional “things” including our conceptions of ourselves and “others.” Generally, within our shared, abstract representation of ourselves and our world, we regard ourselves as the body and/or the representations in our mind of who and what we think we are.
The problem with this situation lies in the fact that the fundamental assumption upon which our shared mind-world/dream-body rests is false. This mind-made world is called our “dream” body because we are having a lived experience and perception of separation and reification. Nothing is ever actually separate from anything or everything and, nothing is actually a “thing,” ever!
For example, we all know what the word, “tree” refers to. As the word is mentioned we each have an image in our mind and perhaps a description as well. However, may I ask you, what is a tree with out the soil? Without water? Without the sunshine? Without air? Without the forest it came from? Etc. Etc.
We have all been raised to adapt to this shared but mistaken, 3-d mind-world/dream-body that was going on before we arrived on the scene. Through a series of personally impactful moments the innate intelligence of our being constructed, and we gradually identified with an adopted set of relatively stable identities in relation to those around us, and our environment; this usually happens around three years of age.
Within our own mind we became a particular separate one, within a three dimensional world in which everything and everyone is a separate “thing;” when, in reality, nothing is a “thing.” Any “thing” we care to name is multi-dimensionally entangled with every other “thing” in the cosmos and “it” is both made of and embedded within the ground energy of the zero point field and the living awareness in which all of these “things” are appearing, existing and passing.
What we call “things” are better named “holons.” Holon, a term coined by Arthur Koestler, mean something which is simultaneously a whole and a part of a larger whole.
What I am calling our mistaken mind-world/dream-body emerges in consciousness from a complex set of habitual neurological programs which underlie the conditioned cycles of our moods, the ways we sense and perceive our bodies, ourselves in this world and ourselves among others as well as all the labels, descriptions and the stories we tell ourselves about what is happening. Extracting our consciousness from experiencing and perceiving through the filter of our deluded, mind-made field of representation is actually simple, if not easy:
The deconstruction of our conditioned identities-in-context can be facilitated by any number of skillful practices and technologies. More on that in other posts…
