What IS awareness or this present happening? Can any word or concept truly capture or explain ANY of this?
True awakening involves love, faith and surrender. Love is a natural by-product of aware presence, and we could say that awareness is another word for unconditional love
Awakening is a choice in this moment to stop the search, to stop the resistance, to let go, to relax, to allow everything to be just as it is, to surrender and turn ourselves over to what Robert Adams called “the power that knows the way” (what I would call awareness or the Now, and what some might call God), to be fully present and awake to the bare actuality of this moment (hearing, seeing, breathing, sensing), to come home to Here / Now, our True Self—the Heart of what is.
Awareness
Is awareness something detached, aloof, beyond it all? Should our identity shift from the sense of being a person to being awareness? And are we supposed to “be here now” all the time?
There is an immense freedom Here / Now, at the heart of the present moment, in the open space of unbound awareness. Freedom but not free will.
Nonduality or awakening isn’t theoretical. It’s not mystical. It isn’t something to figure out.
If we drop all the labels, ideas and beliefs about life and what’s going on here, if we let go of everything that can be doubted, what remains?
What happens when we do nothing at all? When we simply allow the emotion and the movement of the mind to be as it is?
Some people meditate for a purpose—for stress reduction, anger management, physical and mental health, enhanced athletic or artistic performance, or whatever the reason might be
The fundamental question that arises naturally can take many forms: What is Truth? What is real? What is this? Who am I?
When we speak of giving complete, nonjudgmental attention to the present moment, accepting what is and allowing it to be as it is, or when we say everything is perfect as it, this is sometimes misunderstood
Truth (nonduality, Ultimate Reality, supreme enlightenment) is utterly simple. It is right here. You are it. This is it. It is all there is. addictions, our compulsions, our quick temper, our various failures and disappointments)?
We assume that there is an objective, observer-independent world “out there” that we are born into, a world that we are looking out at and trying to manipulate
The obsession with personal success is a uniquely human problem that exists only in relation to the (imaginary) false self.
Let’s consider a very common human experience. We are seemingly faced with an apparent decision, a decision that SEEMS big and important
An illusion or a mirage cannot have any real power. It can only APPEAR to have power.
Not that long ago, people lived in a world where there was no social media, no internet, no computers, no YouTube, no printing presses, no airplanes, no trains, no cars, no highways, no telephones, no televisions, no radios, no streaming media.
Non-duality, Buddhism, Awakening—What's This All About in a Nutshell?
It is the dissolution of every answer to that question, the openness of not knowing.
The Paradox of the Wave Seeking the Ocean
Life happens automatically. Breathing happens, digestion happens, thinking happens, the entire ecosystem happens.
The Problem with Assigning Attributes to True Self/Awareness
Authentic spiritual awakening involves, in part, a recognition of Awareness (sometimes called “True Self”) as the unchanging space to which all phenomena come and go.
In a healthy world it would not be unusual for a person to undergo a long series of profound transformations over the course of a life time.
A mind identified as a wave is in denial of the ocean. It's that simple
Thoughts are like corn kernels, and you’re the popcorn maker. There is heat and they begin to pop, and you become aware of them
You’re not the seer. That is a STORY, an INTERPRETATION. The conscious contact is being claimed by the head.
Take a bowl. Put things in it; make soup. Does the bowl change? No, no more than the bowl of sky does when the birds and stars move through
Nowadays it's easy to see that we are this formless intelligence inside. Yet so many of us, in our innocence, still think that thought is thought, and that it's an object, and that it's going to be there for eternity, yacking away about nothing, bothering us.
Most of us believe that we are a 'person' with a unique body and mind. Possibly there is a 'soul' that survives death in some way.
We often talk about the mind causing us pain. We might hear that we are running stories that we are buying into
Satsang is your true and natural Being, the song of your heart singing, the light of your consciousness shining, the peace of your spirit resting.
It is true that ‘you’ cannot know the thought that ‘I’ am having. In other words all thoughts are limited.
The true Self does not need to identify with
itself in order to be itself.
Presence, You, I, is the witness and the substance of every experience. And as there is nothing other than experience, Presence is everything.
The Witness and the experience
‘I’ that am seeing these words am also the substance of these words.
An Introduction to Non Duality
The essential discovery of all the great spiritual traditions, including Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, Sufism, Kashmir Shaivism and Judaism, is that experience is not divided into a perceiving subject, an entity known as ‘I,’ and a perceived object, world or other
What is the experience of an object?
Take a tree for instance. When looking at a tree we
experience a visual perception. The perception is never only of a tree. The
apparent tree is always part of a larger perception that includes, the field,
the sky, others trees, etc
Self-remembering simply means to remember our true self of present Awareness.
Now what is it that can remember the Self?
You are not in Presence. You are Presence.
The one that doesn’t feel in ‘Presence,’ in ‘total peace’ or in a ‘state of knowing’ is simply a thought or a feeling. jm
Sooner or later we will all experience the tragic quality of life. Perhaps this quality of life is brought to us through illness, or the death of a loved one, or losing a job, or an unexpected accident, or having your heart broken.
There is an unavoidable tragic aspect to life. We will all experience the loss of loved ones, illness, and tragedies of various kinds and to varying degrees.
Previous Pages
Everything Comes Back to Nothing
When the mind is free of all of its content, all of its conditioned thinking, it enters into the solitude of silence
It is impossible to know what words like liberation or enlightenment mean until you realize them for yourself.
Many contemporary scientists believe it is the underlying state of our physiological processes that determines the quality and stability of the feelings and emotions we experience.
Why is it that over 7 billion people seek to feel a sense of purpose and fulfilment in their life and yet only a very small percentage of these can achieve it
What explains the success of repeat entrepreneurs? A team of researchers from the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship (AGSE) have been investigating the proposition that nonlocal intuition accounts for the repeat entrepreneur’s extraordinary ability to locate future business opportunities
The process of transformation is always difficult. Just like the caterpillar turning into a butterfly you have to melt down into a mush and from there grow your wings.
Global coherence research encompasses a large variety of scientific data to gain new insights into the interconnectedness of human/animal health and behavior and the sun and earth’s magnetic activity
When I sit down to write I draw a blank. Its as if I have nothing to say, a bit like being brain dead
Sleep can be addictive.
Sleep can be used to sedate the autonomic nervous system so that you are always in a numb state.Nonduality means “not two” or “non-separation.” It is the sense that all things are interconnected and not separate, while at the same time all things retain their individuality.
When you think of empathy, you probably think of putting yourself in someone else's shoes, imagining what their life is like.
People may discover that they are writing out of the need to be seen by others. There are ways to fix this and begin to write for different reasons
Grief happens in response to the loss of something in your life. It is nature’s way of healing.
As you mature you become more aware of your energetic system and more conscious of how interactions affect it.
Compared to the emptiness of co dependence, having a communion with an inner child can feel like it is filling oneself up, but ultimately this practice keeps one at arms length from any deep seated trauma
If you are from a new consciousness than you may find yourself being subtly shamed by New Age consciousness
We can confuse our internal world with our external world - having a flashback and then projecting this onto our surroundings
Enlightenment and personal material
There is a common misconception that you shouldn’t focus on personal work when you want Enlightenment.
It is possible to be free from addiction
Many people are spending their lives in 12 step recovery
I hear time and time again that the way to heal from the past is through forgiveness
Childhood Experiences Shape the Brain
The quality of our initial relationships with our caregivers - how safe they are and how well our needs were met - actually plays a major part in sculpting a child’s growing brain
Shame is a painful experience.
Shame is when you want the ground to swallow you up, you can’t look at people in the eye, you feel frozen, you have self-talk going round and round, or you feel humiliated.
Materialism afflicts both the rich and the poor. It is about the attitude towards the purchases not the amount of purchasing done.
Research into the neuroscience of singing has shown that when we sing our neurotransmitters connect up in new and different ways
We are divided in our hearts by our illusion of separation and our fear of one another.
The New Year is approaching again.
How many of us were full of determination and hope this time last year with resolutions for the future, only to find our impetus faltering as January commenced and our resolutions all but forgotten by February?
Let us compare the Process of Transformation with that of the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly.
Our evolution requires that we turn inwards and connect deeply with ourselves and out of this find a new connection with others.
Truth
Truth (nonduality, Ultimate Reality, supreme enlightenment) is utterly simple. It is right here. You are it. This is it. It is all there is. It is this seeing-hearing-breathing-sensi ng-awaring-thinking-being, just as it is—one vast energy, uncontained, authorless, ownerless, seamless, boundless, timeless, placeless, without beginning or end, with no inside or outside. This vastness is showing up as trees and birds and cars and airplanes and clouds and cluster bombs and dogs and cats and zebras and rocks and planets and galaxies and also as the absolute emptiness of deep sleep. It is everything and everything is nothing other than it, and yet it is no-thing in particular that can be separated out and grasped as an object. It is never not here, and it is always already fully realized.
So-called awakening or enlightenment is not about going somewhere new and exotic, crossing some imaginary finish-line, or attaining something that isn’t fully present Here / Now. It is simply recognizing that the problem that seems to be binding us is imaginary, like worrying about what will happen to us if we fall off the edge of the flat earth. And above all, seeing through the root problem, the one at the center of the story who seems to be bound or free, the mirage-like separate self who seems to be unenlightened and seeking liberation. This self seems very real until we look closely and discover that it cannot actually be found, that it is nothing more than ever-changing thoughts, mental images, sensations, feelings, memories and stories creating a kind of mirage that we have learned to think of as “me,” the one who is supposedly inside my body, presumably authoring my thoughts, making my decisions, and steering “me” through life.
Because of the way consciousness gets hypnotized by thoughts and by the mental tendency to divide and reify and grasp, we think that this self is real, that something is missing, that we are apart from the enlightenment that we seek, that this is not it, that we must find something we don’t have, that we must figure all this out and have some experience we’re not presently having and become different from how we are. We must get somewhere. This whole virtual reality created by thought and imagination and sensation has been compared to dreaming while in the waking state. And part of the dream-story is that we are a separate somebody who is trapped in a dream, trying to wake up, or perhaps somebody who is sometimes awake and then sometimes lost in the dream-world again, somebody who is trying to be permanently awake. But this search to wake up from the dream is itself part of the dream.
