We Are All in This Together
1 – Awakening Together, Our Shared Oneness
Our experience of being humans together has become increasingly polarized and destructive as the corporate media strategically inflames the sparks of division and hatred, while fostering an “us against them” mentality. While we are responsible for our interpretations and reactions to things, it’s human nature to try and avoid this responsibility by making excuses and seeking scapegoats to blame for our troubles.
The polarization and divisions catalyzed by those in power prevent us from recognizing the simple truth that we’re all in this together, and encourages a dangerous collective irresponsibility. More than ever before, our problems are global and interlinked environmentally, economically, politically, socially and militarily. Real solutions require an all-inclusive frame of reference that includes and transcends the distinctions that define our differences and foster our divisions. We must resolve our differences and work out our solutions together. Spinning through space, his orbiting sphere we call Earth is home for all of us. None of us can leave just because we don’t like our neighbors.
For ages humans have lived through a misapprehension of reality, believing ourselves to be separate from each other, from the earth, and from All-That-Is. This mind-made misperception of reality, of separate and competing entities, is a destructive, falacious premise. Most of us manage to get through life suppressing and enduring the underlying angst and frustration our mis-attunement to Reality creates, never realizing that this is the source of most of our personal and collective problems.
Humans are just one species of consciousness living in an interdependent web of life with 50 to 100 million other species. Nothing actually exists as a separate “thing,” in isolation from everything else.
We tend to regard everything we can name, including ourselves, as a separate “thing;” as if we, and all “things,” were not inextricably embedded within the enveloping and infusing resonant field of energy and information, which includes everything and everyone else. This results from the fallacious premise at the base of our believed, conditioned representation of self-and-other, self-and-world as discrete, rather than interdependent, co-arising entities. We have tended to own the one and project out the other; failing to notice that both sides of our split-off interpretation, along with their accompanying feelings and emotions are co-arising as complementary, dynamic energies and thought patterns within a larger, singular system of our awareness of being.
Through recognition of this we can begin to notice that each time we create a self-other split in our mind, we are failing to notice the living awareness, which is always the singular wholeness of our actual now moment and, in which both our construct of self and our construct of “other” exist. The self we have been experiencing and have been living through is a composite of images, thoughts, feelings and sensations distinguished from our current “other” or “world.” It only exists within our mind’s abstracted representation of reality. The other we have been experiencing is equally a set of images, thoughts, feelings and sensations within our awareness of now; it has not yet been teased apart and, inquired into so that we discover whether such a “self-other” representation exits in reality or just in our mind. And if “it” cannot be found, what’s actually here where we imagined “it” was?
Again, We are all in this together. We were all raised to see through our conditioned frame of reification and separation; we each gradually adapted to the field of energies and beings around us, developing relational patterns we came to adopt as we began to live through our personality.
This has been the consensus reality of our human species of consciousness for a long time. It is what we have all been born into and it has been determining how we have all been living within this mind-made, mis-representational field. Fortunately or unfortunately, this cannot go on forever.
Changes within the consciousness of our species and/or changes, within the field of energies within which we live and move and have our being, are causing fluctuations in the resonances of energy we are experiencing. These fluctuations have begun to exceed our individual and collective representation of reality. Both our internal structures and our shared social, political and structures we’ve created have begun fluctuating beyond these structures’ capacity to contain them. Scratch the surface and just about everybody on this planet at this time knows things are changing dramatically on many levels and they don’t really know how things are going to turn out.
Whereas formerly it seemed we could to some extent swim where we wanted in this river of life, at this moment, both as individual beings and as a singular species of consciousness, we’ve entered the rapids and She is sweeping us all into a vortex which is, it seems to me, destined to transform us from imagining we’re separate to recognizing our shared Unity and our common destiny.
Consider this: one of the fruits of our millennial misunderstanding is expressed as the United States of America spending over 50% of its wealth on military and defense – more than the total of the 12 next most wasteful nations on this planet. This is because we have been living within a representation we’ve created and believed where we seem to be separate from and threatened by each other. And so rather than collaborate, the biggest bully gets to control, dominate and exploit the rest of us, here. And spend half our wealth doing it.
If we imagine the possibility of our human species of consciousness recognizing the actual fact that we are all in this together, all of that wealth could be invested into ensuring opportunity and well-being for all of us. I am seeing a rather different world where each individual among us is encouraged to discover and develop their unique strengths, gifts and talents and then, is supported to discover the best ways to express them for the benefit of all of us. In this envisioned world, we thrive together as a species of consciousness. But as Einstein is credited with saying, we can’t get there using the kind of thinking that has gotten us into this conundrum.
The kind of thinking that has gotten us to be oppositional and preemptively aggressive is binary, reifying and based upon an assumption of separation. For the most part, we have come to regard ourselves and others as things which we label, judge and describe within our mind-made story about “us,” “them” and “the world.”
In both developmental psychology and my personal observations of how my own children developed, it is understood that our distinct persona configures by the time we are 3 or 4 years old. Because of the environment which conditioned us, our mind is grounded in a premise of separation and the reification of both self and other. Everything that develops after that is built upon our premised foundation of assumed separation. All the edifices of physics, philosophy, psychology, international and interpersonal relations are built on this mistaken foundation of separation and reification. For generations, we have been living within all these complex, abstract ideas about who we and others are and what the world is, without recognizing they all have been derived from the understanding of our 4-year old minds’ adaptation to the distortions of the world into which we were born.
What I am describing here constitutes what’s called our human karmic vision of samsara in the East and it is probably what “seeing through a glass, darkly,” and “a house built on sand,” in the Christian Bible originally meant. Our ideas of this polarized duality are internally experienced and expressed in language and images. These distinctions, descriptions, interpretations and stories constitute the world in which we live. As a species of consciousness, this mind-world we have been living within is what philosophy refers to as a representational field of conceptual notions. We introject these labels and descriptions onto ourselves and “us” and project them onto others, “them,” and the world.
These are the stories of our lives we tell ourselves and each other and, we have taken this mind-world to be reality. Because our mis-representational field is based in our fallacious notions of separation and reification, that is, because we have taken the experience of our living moment and conceptually made separate “things” out of ourselves, others and our world; this shared mind of samsara ultimately CANNOT truly provide satisfaction and well being for any of us, much less all of us. Perhaps we can distract and benumb ourselves, even for a lifetime, but the underlying and inherent dissatisfaction of trying to live a fundamentally flawed understanding of reality can only be resolved by restructuring our minds and attuning our organisms to the natural clarity and resonant frequencies of the actual, underlying reality of our being.
In recent decades human beings in unprecedented numbers have begun awakening to our natural state of shared oneness in which we recognize both our own and every other’s unique individuality and we simultaneously recognize our mutual unity. In 2000, when Lynn Marie Lumiere and I published our book, The Awakening West – Evidence of a Spreading Enlightenment, we were excited to have discovered about twenty western individuals who seemed to have awakened and we were delighted to have had the opportunity to converse with fifteen of them. The evidence of a spreading enlightenment has gotten a lot stronger. Today, a cursory examination of websites such as Buddha at the Gas Pump, http://www.batgap.com, shows that we’d need well over a dozen such volumes to cover those among us who’ve awakened and are teaching. Add to that the unknown numbers of individuals who have attended these peoples’ talks, retreats and webinars are now awakening or have awakened. We are all living in an epoch of shared awakening; whether we have been aware of the fact, or not.
I am one of us. I am one among an exponentially growing portion of our human species of consciousness; we seem to be awakening together. As we awaken together, it is as if we learning a new language. It is apparent, inevitable and understandable that most of us will be mispronouncing the language for a while yet, as we are still outgrowing our conditioned mind/world, as the shared ground of our natural state more clearly reveals itself, within, between and among us.
Another way of regarding what is emerging among us is to consider each of us is a fragment of the singular holographic plate, which is all of us. As more and more of us come into the resonances of being which are aligned with our natural state, the hologram of all of us here, together, becomes clearer for each of us. Thus, we move toward fluency in our co-created language of shared oneness. I imagine that as the strength of these frequencies become strong enough among us, as enough of us have resolved a sufficient amount of our personal/shared mis-representation, we will all snap into a higher order of organization and understanding and we will together be restored to our natural and, mutually supportive, synergy.
2 - Awakening Together -- the Light and the Shadow
To catalyze our collective shift, enough of us have to be attentive to experientially recognizing our innate awakened presence in the immediacy of our life and, we need to have sufficiently deconstructed our conditioned, dualistic self-other, self-world identifications. Together these constitute the two components of embodied awakening required for each of us; they are mutually reinforcing and inescapably intertwined. And, they are distinct components of embodied awakening.
Discovering and experientially recognizing the living, primordially pure and spontaneously present actuality of our being, even if only the briefest glimpse, is often spoken of as the beginning of our awakening. Becoming accustomed to re-recognizing our open and inclusive awareness in the midst of our lives constitutes our pathless “path.” Coming to spontaneously live from this awareness 24-7 might be a good description of fully awakened consciousness or enlightenment. When we all share in the acknowledgement of this innate reality, I’d call that the ascension of our particular, human species of consciousness into a co-creative shared memory complex.
For our lives to bear this fruit, we each must repeatedly choose to give our attention to the recognition of the openness in the core of our being again and again for short, uncontrived moments as often as we think of it during our walk through each day.
We are repeatedly remembering to choose to stop giving attention to our mind stream for a moment and deliberately notice the actual experiencing of being present. As we do so, there are at least two significant neurological processes which prove essential for us to fully embody our awakening. Our ability to deliberately, to consciously shape our own neural patterns is famously encapsulated in the sentence by Canadian psychologist, Donald O. Hebb, “…neurons that fire together, wire together. [ Donald Hebb in his 1949 book The Organization of Behavior, NY, Wiley & Sons ] So, firstly, the neural circuitry of focused attention, one set of neurons, is firing with as well as connecting to a different set of neurons, which subtend our actual experience of being present and awake for the duration of the moment.
When we do this, it is as if we are communicating among several levels of our being. In effect, we are saying, “I am appreciating this moment of conscious awareness; it is important to me. Thank you; give me more!” to the interconnected, multidimensional singularity of our nervous system, our whole organism, the universe and, God/Goddess/All-That-Is. Secondly, as we accumulate more and more short moments of re-recognition, we are literally retuning our nervous system (read: our neuro-psychology, our neuro-physiology and the neural substrate of our interpersonal field) to the resonances of our actual and shared being. Since this is our natural state, it is harmonious with and reinforced by the resonances of the natural state of the Universe itself! This practice is the most skillful and rapid way of transforming our adaptive, samsaric consciousness into our natural state.
So, this half of the awakening experience, which I have been describing, initially involves recognizing this awareness enveloping and pervading the field of our moment-to-moment experience; it is still, silent, open and cognizant of both itself and its contents. As we develop the habit of stopping the thinking and re-recognizing the immediacy of our awareness of being in the actual now moment, we learn to rest as the living awareness. Increasingly, by our own choice, we come to rest as the presence of the moment through which the river of life’s sensations, emotions, thoughts and images is flowing; we learn to rest as this living awareness suffused with whatever happens to be present.
Little by little (at least in my case) we come to increasingly rely on this open intelligence at the core of our being. It becomes the ground from which we live and resolve challenges. We come to spend more and more time resting as presence and, thus, we find ourselves spontaneously responding from this openness to life as it presents itself. For most of us, coming to rest for longer and longer moments takes a while of dedicated practice. The sustaining motivation comes both from our increasing contentment, deepening peace and well-being as well as our heartfelt impulse to both free ourselves and to help others - to truly be of benefit to all of us. Our life is getting better and better.
That is, life does keep getting better and better, if we are dealing with what comes up within us as we are awakening. Specifically, “dealing,” means deconstructing our various habitual dualistic and reified constructions of self-other, self-world which are brought into the foreground of consciousness by the people, events and circumstances of our lives.
As we learn to deal with our “stuff”, by resting in the peaceful and inclusive awareness of being while we are perceiving/conceiving our reified selves in relation to reified others; we start recognizing that both these elements of our experience, are constructions made by and held within our mind and, together, they constitute our personal mis-representational field which is appearing in awareness at the moment. This recognition offers us the opportunity to renegotiate a particular piece of our unique adaptation to the disconnected, samsaric mind of polarized dualities we became immersed in when we arrived here. Whether we have the strength, and will and capacities required to “deal” in a particular moment or not, these experiences eventually need to be metabolized by our being to enable us to redeem our shadow and live from our fullness.
These moments are an experiential and often, uncomfortable, process of reclaiming our disowned and projected personal and collective shadow This can be either internally processing the evil we see in our negative shadow which has been projected onto “them,” or, it can involve reclaiming our positive shadow, as when we have projected all goodness onto a lover, teacher, guru or our image of Deity.
In my process, “dealing,” or reclaiming my shadow, begins in earnest as I acknowledge that both the felt-sense of the one that I am experiencing “here” as me, and the felt-sense of the one that I am experiencing “there” as the other, them or the world, etc.—the felt-sense of both is occurring here, within the singularity of my awareness just now. I have come to realize that when I am seeing duality which is not grounded in the inclusive felt-sense of the singularity of awareness, I am mis-perceiving; and, if I truly want to awaken in this moment, I would do well to reconsider this way of regarding and responding to what I am perceiving as my life.
When I have had the presence of mind and, whatever other energy or capacity is required in the moment, to choose to do this, I attend to the felt-sense both of the apparent “self” and the apparent “other” currently appearing within the space of awareness. I drop, to the best of my current ability, the labels, descriptions and story and feel the resonances of each and the tensions between the two. Without thoughts or images superimposed on the living experience, these sensations can be described as a dynamic pattern of energies within the awareness of now or, more poetically, as clouds of energies within the sky of awareness. I rest as this open space, this sky; these clouds of energies inevitably morph and resolve or dissipate. In my experience, as this happens, there is usually been some kind of revelation.
What gets revealed has been unpredictable. Sometimes, an imprinted moment from childhood has been revealed; as when I reacted to my interpretation of my life and I formed a polarized and oppositional sense of self and other. One of the many crystalizing moments, which together coalesced into my sense of a reified, separate identity. As I have experienced these moments so far, they always seems to have involved the darkness of my shadow introjected in as a flawed or deficient “me” or projected out as a bad or evil “them.”
Sometimes, what has been revealed is one of what I have come to call the ninety-nine namable names of God, which was somehow lost during that earlier event. It may be a quality of peace, or an uncharacteristic sense of clarity, or unconditional love, or inclusiveness, or empowered presence, etc. Sometimes what is revealed is an exquisite, indescribable, un-nameable quality of being. Each time, however, some kind of wholeness is restored to my view and my experience of the “other” is transformed.
Suffice it to say, facing and feeling our shadow material can become challenging and it may at times be wise to seek support from a spiritually &/or psychologically experienced friend or clinician who has some understanding of spiritual emergence and the challenges of awakening in this world. It is much better to be seen and accepted as we are learning this new language, than to be judged, shamed and made to feel that we must be going crazy.
3 – How Complex Systems Create New Structures
(At first encounter the following description may seem complicated and abstract, but this model is very helpful for contextualizing and understanding what is emerging in our human consciousness as well as providing a way of using language which helps us to regard the world as a diverse, interconnected living being which animates and includes us rather than a collection of “things” including whatever we have believed ourselves to be.)
What is a “complex system?” Our individual specimens and collective human species of consciousness can be described as a complex systems nested within the enveloping, complex system of the eco-/biosphere; which is created on this fecund planet we call “Earth” through Her dynamic interactions with the Sun, the solar system and the enveloping, infusing Universe – each and all, also, complex systems.
Complex systems are temporarily stable, self-organizing patterns/sub-systems which process light, energy and information. Complex systems contain many dynamically interacting sub-systems, each composed of nested sub-systems and sub-sub-systems, etc. living beings incorporate as bodies composed of organ systems, composed of organs, composed of cells, composed of molecules, composed of atoms, composed of sub-atomic patterns, composed of the zero-point field… Complex systems are naturally open to their environments and engaged in ongoing exchanges of energy and information therewith. As an example, we all live within and, none of us could long survive without our living environment.
The stability of the structures within any complex system, of their unique patterns of organization, is dynamically sustained by the interdependent relationships among positive and negative feedback loops within its subsystems. A positive feedback mechanism exists when a change within the system stimulates other events, which cause the first change to recur more frequently and/or more strongly. As an example, we can consider the growing tendency for rabbits to create increasingly more rabbits in an environment with an abundance of food and an absence of competitors or predators.
A negative feedback mechanism exists when a change within as system dampens the tendency of the fluctuations within positive feedback cycles to just keep getting larger. Let’s say a family of wolves move into our imagined rabbit haven, which would then flourish and grow by culling the bunnies. As there came to be fewer rabbits around, some of the wolves might move on to another territory, giving the rabbit population a renewed opportunity to bounce back. Within complex systems the various negative feedback cycles check the, potentially exponential, growth of the positive feedback cycles.
Stable patterns of complex systems’ and their sub-structures’ processing of light, energy and information are sustained both by the positive and negative feedback dynamics just mentioned as well as by the continuity of a relatively stable environment provided by the particular system’s enveloping and infusing super-system; in which it is nested and which provides its “raw materials.”
It has been recognized that periodically, complex systems evolve new patterns of organization through a process which has been well mapped and for which its discoverer earned a Nobel Prize in 1987. The understanding is called Dissipative Structures and it was discovered and revealed by Illya Prigogine.
Basically, a system can initiate self-organization at a higher level of integration when a set of positive feedback loops begins to run away, fluctuations unchecked, within their patterns of processes; such an unchecked positive feedback loop occurs because of a change in inputs from the system’s environmental system or because of a change within the system itself. As the patterns of process within the existing sub-structures of the system continue to fluctuate more and more wildly, they approach the limits of the system’s old structures’ to contain the oscillations and remain stable. This moment in the process is called the “instability threshold.”
As the system crosses its instability threshold, many of the previously stable patterns of processes break down as the, formerly stable, old structures dissipate. The flows of energies and information within the system can appear chaotic at this point. Think of the transitional chrysalis process when the creature is no longer a caterpillar and not yet a butterfly.
At some point after crossing the instability threshold, the energies and information circulating within the complex system begin to coalesce around sub-systems and sub-sub-systems, etc., which had existed previously within the complex system but which were held in check by the formerly stable overall organization of the system. These potential seeds of new organizations of the system, act as attractors for the energies and information and they offer themselves, so to speak, as available niches within the ecosystem of the whole system. Eventually the system settles down and self-organizes into a new patterning of processes, which contains the formerly overwhelming energies/information within its new organization of processes. That is, the system spontaneously integrates what had been exceeding its structures’ capacity to contain into new structures, which are a more complex, more integrative, higher-order version of itself. Again, caterpillar becomes butterfly; a group of musically talented young people learns to play effectively as an ensemble.
The following five concrete examples of this process will bring it more into our day-to-day lives and elucidate why this understanding of Dissipative Structures is poignantly meaningful as we awaken together.
One: Within the womb of a woman an egg receives a sperm and a runaway process ensues which changes the nature of the woman’s experience, her mate’s, their relationship and which, in 9 months, changes said relationship from a dyad to a family.
Two: At a particular point in the maturation of each human being a few drops of an endocrine secretion precipitates the dramatic changes of puberty. A person’s physical appearance, social relations and self-concept dissipates and reforms; the being self-organizes itself anew, for better or worse, into a teenager.
Three: As a result of a complex set of interconnected, interdependent factors, the climate of the planet goes into wilder and wilder fluctuations, exhibiting hotter hots, colder colds, wetter wets, and dryer drys, etc. Briefly, the poles get hotter, ice melts and the changing water temperatures change the oceans’ currents; the gulf stream stops, north east North America and west Europe go into an ice age. Chaos ensues replete with enormous challenges and overwhelming suffering; social, political, economic structures are dissipated; and millions of people are displaced; the populations receiving the influx are destabilized and must themselves come to a new integration of the developing situation. This has happened more than once in the past. And the Pentagon, in , made plans for just such a scenario, just in case. [FN]
Four: It is worth noting that a similar disruption and re-organization of stably established, complex systems of families, communities and cultures ensues when a country or region gets invaded for the sake of profit, control and “regime change.”
Lastly: For the last several millennia the consciousness of our species has been patterned through the filter built from
our premise of separation and consequent dualistic reification. Because we have been living within the mind-made constructs of the polarized duality of our mis-representational field, we have acted as though we were actually disconnected from the Earth, disconnected from each other, disconnected from our own being and disconnected from All-That-Is. This mistaken notion within our consciousness has been long-lived and we have all pretty much taken it for granted. Nevertheless, it has never been true.
For whatever reasons, at this time, the complex system of our human species of consciousness appears to be rapidly approaching an instability threshold. Fluctuations within and among the various subsystems in our personal consciousness and collective consciousness of our world are increasing and they are becoming wilder than our old structures of consciousness and social organization can contain. Today, no one need look very far to see the old structures beginning to break down and dissipate.
As far as I can see there are at least two morphic seeds around which our consciousness is coalescing as possible forms of integration into a global society; one of which I prefer.
The first is inextricably embedded in a polarized, dualistic mind-set. It involves the fostering opposition and conflict among divisive and fundamentalist ideologies and elevating psychopathic and sociopathic people into positions of power and influence within hierarchical structures industry, media, governments, etc. where they can dominate, control and exploit those below them in the pecking order. To envision the end result of this, picture the social, political and relational style exhibited on Darth Vader’s Death Star. It is a kind of globally unified society of the controllers and the controlled.
I’d say that much of our corporate media is both giving us evidence of and programming us for the emergence of this meme as dominant. Recently (2011), it has been shown that the same 147 corporations which have been shown to control most of the corporations on the planet. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” [https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world/].
It appears worth noticing that the bulk of the media is controlled by 6 international corporations with interests in fostering the first “seed.” As a result this awakening has been largely ignored therein and the vast majority of us have no idea that there is an awakening spreading among us. From news like this, it seems “they” have things locked up.
On the other hand, as mentioned above, I am bearing witness to the seed of a global awakening to our shared oneness and its spreading contagion among us. We are now consciously becoming an intricately interconnected web of awakening consciousness exchanging energies and information about our experience, the process and the skillful methods we have found useful. Because this has gotten very scant press, we have no idea how many people may be involved in this spreading awakening.
Nevertheless, at this point, globally, there may well be millions of us complex, human systems (by my, admittedly fallible, intuitive sense), who are, usually gradually, jettisoning our conditioned, adaptive identification within our collective samsaric world and, again gradually, getting used to resting as and living flexibly and spontaneously from the silent presence of our natural state. This involves the dissipation/deconstruction of our dualistic mis-representational field of reified self-other, self-world and, as mentioned above, re-patterning our neuro-physiology, our neuro-psychology and our neuro-relational field into the harmonious resonances of the natural state of our beings, together. This is occurring within the complex system of the context of our living world. We are awakening both within and as a holographic, fractal wholeness of this One, which is All-That-Is.
4 – Dealing with the emerging potentials
Firstly, we each need to discern whether our natural inclination is predominantly service-to-self or service-to-all. If you recognize that you tend toward service-to-self and you are content with that momentum in your life, I doubt whether I can be of very much help to you. I am sure that you will find your own mentors along your way. If you find yourself drawn toward service-to-all, both opening into your natural state and deconstructing your conditioned patterns and processes are essential and they become increasingly simultaneous. If you are pulled toward service-to-all, I, and many others who have found ourselves moving along this path toward recognizing and coming to live as our natural state, are interested in assisting, collaborating and co-creating. Most simply: I am one of us. If you sense that I may be of service during some part of your path, feel free to contact me.
Awakening begins we recognize the natural state. The universal aspect of our awakening, both individually and together, involves overlapping phases, which Lynn Marie Lumiere has labeled recognizing, resting and relying. (FN, Undivided Love – A Guide to Awakened Relating, 2019, New Harbinger, Oakland, California). We each need to recognize our awareness of being and, the way it always both contains and pervades the river of experience, which continuously, unpredictably and endlessly flows through our living, cognizant openness. Awareness and experience are inseparable and mutually pervasive and yet, they are distinct. Experience changes constantly; awareness is constant.
Awareness is the ever-present knowing of whatever is occurring in our now moment; in itself it is an inclusive openness or a kind of space in which our life takes place. Although we cannot, not be aware; we can certainly ignore the presence of being aware while engaged with the contents of our awareness. Awareness, in itself, is always right here, just now. It is empty, clear, open, still, silent. Awareness is not a locatable “thing;” it is nothing in itself, and yet, it is cognizant. Awareness is both aware of itself and aware of everything appearing within it. This empty, knowing space is the essence of our being. In fact, IMO, the words “awareness,” “being,” “presence,” “now,” all refer to the same indescribability.
Experience, on the other hand, continuously appears as the changing content of awareness moment-by-moment. I like Rupert Spira’s division of experience into the three categories of perceptions of the world through the five senses, sensations and feelings in the body, and thoughts and images in the mind. These three categories, individually or combined, comprise everything we, as human beings, experience. As mentioned, the flow of experience is unpredictable, endless and continuous. We can neither control nor stop it; but we can respond to it from a living experience of its still, peaceful and subsuming context. This is what happens in the moments we are consciously aware and awake.
It is useful to realize that we have never had an experience separate from awareness; nor does awareness ever occur without the experience of the moment. In my understanding, this inseparability is what is meant by the sentences in the Heart Sutra, which says, “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.”
Once we have recognized of the primordially pure awareness of now replete with its spontaneously present contents, we return to this simple recognition as often as possible, as often as we remember to do so. This re-recognition of our natural state is the discipline of our meditation practice and it is our moment-to-moment practice in the midst of our daily lives; whenever we happen to remember to stop thinking for a moment and notice the immediacy of the awareness of now. This is how we retune our organism/nervous system to our natural state and learn to rest in the nature of being more and more deeply for longer and longer periods.
Sooner or later, we notice, as we are recognizing and resting, that what usually keeps pulling us out of our moments of resting in awareness, is our conditioned mind and all our reactions to the self-other and self-world that we’ve fabricated into our current field of mis-representation. Again, the other half of awakening entails unraveling our unique, individual path of adaptations to this world as we came to interpret it, after we arrived here. We unravel polarized, dualistic constructs, which constitute our current samsaric, mind-world/dream-body. We each have a unique set of wounds, traumas and relational imprints, which created the experiential and conceptual foundation for who we have become, for who and what we take ourselves to be. These constitute the representation, which we regard as the relational world of self and “others” in which we find ourselves today.
Renegotiating this material seems to involve re-experiencing both the emotions and the interpretations in which they are based, which caused us to split the living reality of the singularity of awareness/experience into separate reified constructs of “self” and “other.” Typically, these formative emotions/interpretations do not involve the sadness, apprehension and irritability of an adult’s socialized emotional repertoire. Rather these involve the raw emotions of an infant. An infant’s feelings are unmasked and tend more toward the intensities of profound despair, abject terror and homicidal rage. These were the emotional aspect of our reactions to the events, which imprinted us with the lessons of separation and duality. Most of this intensity has been repressed from our conscious mind and projected out onto our current version of the “wrong” or “evil” “other.” At least some of the time, reclaiming our shadow requires our willingness to feel the raw emotions/sensations, which accompany our interpretations and underlie our adaptive personality.
Again, being seen and accepted and supported during these phases of this process is invaluable. This is especially so when our wounding occurred because of mis-attunement and not being seen. Relational wounds can heal in a relationally supportive context. They heal faster and easier when we’re being held within a mutually acknowledged field of shared oneness while renegotiating this sort of material. This greatly facilitates the release and resolution required for freedom.
And so, this is one of the most essential areas of our lives where learning to rely on our recognition is most crucial. This is because our experiential recognition reveals the domain of our being which was never touched or impacted by the stresses, wounding and traumas of our process of adapting to our conditioning. When we can relax into the sky-like awareness of our being, while these difficult feelings and thoughts about ourselves, others and the world are arising, we can fully experience them, see them clearly and allow them to pass through or morph in their own, organic way as they resolve. I can’t say that this experiential recognition of our natural state makes it easy, but it certainly does make it a lot easier.
5 - Integration, Activation and Collaboration
At a certain point our internal process has proceeded sufficiently that we feel compelled to engage actively in the world we find around us. For many of us, myself included, this precedes what could be considered “full enlightenment.” However, with this impulse, it might be wise to err on the side of caution because a righteous and evangelical expression of our understanding of “the absolute truth” is worse than useless because our suboptimal imbalance and disharmony may temporarily deter others from exploring further.
That said, because we recognize that the recognition and familiarization with our natural state is the solution for the problems we face individually and as a species of consciousness, our impulse to share this may be inevitable and it may be quite strong. How can we ensure that what we are offering is actually beneficial to our audience?
In my opinion, which is based in both my own experience and my observations, we must, to the best of our current ability, rely upon the open intelligence we discover at the core of our being when we drop all our conceptual interpretations of our current situation or circumstance. This means (to me) that, in spite of what my education and conditioning within samsara are telling me is true about what I am facing, I will be effective to the degree that I can recognize and relax into the openness of not-knowing what is ultimately best in this situation or with this person or group. As we learn to rest into the true openness of our being, as we learn to more deeply release our conditioned mind’s interpretations, we connect with and bring through our innate and all-inclusive intelligence. This spontaneous responsiveness of being is always appropriate and timely because the “being” that is responding through us naturally includes both self and other-self.
As we begin to establish ourselves in the inclusive openness of our natural state, we each discover our unique expression of the oneness we share. We may know of a variety of people out in public explicitly teaching or writing who appear as models of how we should express the truth of being. We may be aware of other beings, which are more behind the scenes, such as parents or gardeners or artists or managers or entrepreneurs or activists who seem to be living genuinely, fully from their being. And, one of these roles may, in fact, be ours. Or not. In truth, IMO, we each have both a unique path of awakening through the shadowy mine fields of our unique conditioned identity and thus, we have a unique path of expressing that awakening into the life we share. It helps to remain quiet and open and willing to help in whatever situation appears in awareness as we walk our walk through life.
Know this: we naturally and spontaneously express the degree of our clarity and understanding in exactly the same way our parents or caretakers expressed the degree of their clarity and understanding or mis-understanding while raising us. This is an inevitable law. When we are clear and present and open, our attitude is inclusive and our expression is mutually beneficial regardless of how our behavior might be described as a “role.”
Somewhere along this process of awakening and embodiment, we begin to increasingly recognize that every single moment is our opportunity to show up as the open, clear presence we actually are. Our choice to be inclusive, present and available by surrendering attention out of our mind’s current construction of what is so and noticing our open presence, becomes more constant. We increasingly recognize viscerally in each encounter with other-self that we are all in this together, now. We share this moment with this particular other-self and with all of us. What I, what we happen to bring to this moment is my/our contribution to our shared reality, just now.
At this stage, we are increasingly compelled to release out of our conditioned mind’s interpretations and recognize our shared oneness. As mentioned above, this may involve a renegotiation of the material, which precipitated our individual splitting of the singularity of our being into “self” and “other,” or “us” and “them.” But our 100% commitment compels us to face and feel and integrate our shadow because we realize nothing less will free us, all of us. And, for those of us who know we are on this path, freeing all of us is why we are here.
