Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 22

All About Joy – I AM HERE Zoom Meditation 29/12/16

The next online meeting is on 29/12/16

Find the time in your area!

All About Joy

An opportunity to meet up online in community and to meditate together. Togetherness within the intention to come to peace is a powerful support in opening the channel to the inner, unchanging source so that through us, it can be expressed into the world. 

A short talk is followed by a guided meditation of 30 minutes, after which there will be some time for questions.

If you have a question you want to be answered during the meeting, please feel free to send it up front to Georgi at info@iamhere.life.

Zoom is a user-friendly platform. After you register, you will be given a link which will download a small app to your computer. You have the option to be seen through your camera, or you can turn the camera off. We advice participants to mute their microphones during the session, except when sharing after the meditation.

The event is free, but a quick and easy prior registration is needed to enter the Zoom Room.

Register here

Find the time in your area!

 

Previous I AM HERE ZOOMS
 October 2016

 September 2016

March 2016

I AM HERE ZOOM takes place once a month at varying times so that everyone around the world gets a chance to take part. Sign up to the I AM HERE Newsletter for notification of the next online event, on contact us at info@iamhere.life

I AM HERE – Georgi Y. Johnson & Renate McNay Conscious TV Interview & Transcript

 

Georgi Y Johnson – I Am Here
Interview by Renate McNay.

Renate: Hello and welcome to Conscious TV. My name is Renate McNay and my guest today is Georgi Y Johnson.

Hello Georgi, nice to have you here. Georgi is a spiritual teacher and she offers non-dual therapy with her partner Bart around the globe and we will find out later what that means about what non-dual therapy is. Georgi wrote a wonderful book and the book is called, ‘I Am Here: Opening the Windows of Life and Beauty.’ And I have to say this is one of my most  favourite books. It gives such a clear window into Consciousness and what it means to be a human being. I’ve just heard the follow up of this book is in the pipeline and it’s going to be called, ‘Stillness of the Wind’. A very interesting title, stillness of the wind….(laughs). Beautiful….and the book will be about the dance of duality…the dance of duality.

Okay…so… Georgi was born in the UK and she presently lives in Israel with Bart and their ten children and we are going to hear Georgi’s process which led her to write this book and we start chronologically with your first awakening experience or your first memory which was even further back than your first awakening experience, when you were two years old.

Georgi: Yeah…so before…when we open the windows of feeling, feeling memory, we have our memory, which happened, this happened, story memory. We also have an experiential memory, a feeling memory. And so, there’s plenty of feeling memories of the first atmospheres before conception and in the womb, those places that we call home, which feel like the reality here. But then there’s conscious memory and I must have been around two years old, just learning to talk. My mother had put me in the bed, I imagine to take a little rest. I was told to go to sleep now for a while and gone downstairs, and I lay there and I looked at my little legs. It was a big full-length bed and I looked at these little legs and I noticed that they’d grown longer than they were before and it was a kind of mystery that these legs would grow longer too. ….and looking at these legs and then I needed to sleep and so I closed my eyes.

It was the late sixties, so I imagined the word guitar was very much in the vocabulary. My father was a record producer, so it was alive with the culture in a way….the house. I started thinking about guitars and saying the word guitar in my mind. It must have been that I’d just learned the word.

Renate: Yes.

Georgi: …..and had been appreciated for knowing the word. So I started thinking the word guitar and started saying guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar….chanting it and then I kind of woke up again and it was this ..….has nothing to do with the object. It was just these syllables in space of guitar, guitar, guitar in my thought…no connection. It’s kind of tricky when your learning to talk because this baby to have this disconnection happen…

Renate: It didn’t have a connection to what?

Georgi: To the object, to the guitar was to signify guitar, guitar, guitar.

Renate: Oh right, yes, yes.

Georgi: …it’s just sounds. So I tried it with my own name….and so I began Georgi, Georgi, Georgi, Georgi, again there’s no connection and then it was, ‘So who am I?’  This was the question…’So who am I?’

Renate: You realized that you were not the name.

Georgi: Not Georgi and not a guitar. (Laughs)

Renate: Yeah…

Georgi: Not this thought, not this label and so this question, who am I? What then? What am I then?..there was a…this kind of sense of consciousness and then a leap of consciousness becoming conscious of consciousness, overwhelming….conscious of conscious of consciousness. This kind of…this kind of expanding existence and I was lying on the bed looking towards the window where the sunlight was coming through and there was this leap to the point of not being able to contain this pure consciousness of who I am and I kind of retracted from it where’s my mummy? I kind of retracted from it….where’s mummy? I could hear her downstairs in the kitchen, hear the pots and pans being washed up and I began thinking mummy, it’s not mummy. These sounds have no connection but the feeling was of incredible wholeness to it. It was almost like I was climbing the ladder back again. It was like reconnecting to a source, which was so clear where I’d arrived from.

Renate: But that was….. You didn’t know….did you know exactly what happened? Or is it just something you felt?

Georgi: Something that I very much experienced and what’s amazing is that this memory is like a deep notch in my mind,. In my mind I never forget, never forgot this memory.

Renate: But you didn’t have the word consciousness at two years.

Georgi: No…no…no..no

Renate: So what was it? How could you define the experience at that age?

Georgi: Yeah. So Georgi was gone. There was no Georgi. Georgi was just Georgi. It was just Georgi, Georgi, Georgi. So it was this seeing, the seeing of the curtain and of the light of the little body on the bed but I wasn’t this little body either and then it was the seeing of the seeing, it was then the seeing of the seeing, of the seeing but without leaving the body…kind of like a…expanding in a kind of light of perception. But you know we give words to it because we don’t have words.

Renate: Sure.

Georgi: I didn’t have words then for sure…it was a very, very vital home, which was more home than the home I was physically in and it’s not that the home I was physically in was a bad home, it was just much more familiar but also in this kind of conscious of conscious of conscious, not containable either. After that I went to sleep, which is also home, gone!

Renate: So, you didn’t run down to mummy and told her what you experienced? (They both laugh).

Georgi: No, well mummy wasn’t mummy..…no and I wasn’t afraid. I really wasn’t afraid. Maybe I was more afraid when I was put down to bed to sleep and began thinking about guitars, then after this…..

Renate: And did something change after this experience for you and the way you related?

Georgi: It’s so early, it’s such an early one, that in a way a link that normally would be cemented between thought and language and words and identity and the world was broken very early on, so I never really trusted it. I never really believed a word was what it said it was. I never really believed I was Georgi. Never really believed in this calling of identity. So, in a way it was a tremendous gift, like you’re here human but remember, remember who you really are. I don’t mean who you really are in a personal private perspective at all…It’s a benevolent breakage between word and what it’s supposed to mean and since then it became like a natural escape door in a way, so when I was suffering I could come to this place of pure consciousness, in the Now and step bigger than it, not step out of it but contain it much more easily, be free of it within it.

Renate: So what did you have to do to step back into that?

Georgi: Go…into the felt sense of the body and really allow it. Really allow the….as real as we can be, the Real Reality and that’s not the reality which stops here. It’s kind of… we can’t find a reality but we can allow reality to come to life in a way. So it’s moving into the now. It’s connected with the body, the miracle of the body and letting it be and then consciousness is free in a way.

Renate: So you mean with letting it be, whatever feelings are coming up, whatever emotions coming up it’s free to be. Is this what you mean?

Georgi: Yes, you know when you’re able to let something be, there’s two. There’s you that is able to allow and there’s that which is experienced…

Renate: Yes.

Georgi: So the moment that you can allow something to be, that which can allow comes much more to life.

Renate: Yes, I understand that.

Georgi: Yeah, there’s a space that opens up.

Renate: So, it’s so interesting after doing so many interviews over the last years, we only started, recently actually…that probably has to do with my own, our own process…realizing the importance in the awakening of the body…..

Georgi: Yes.

Renate: ….awakening happening through the body…yah…there’s so much out there, so much talk about the….but it’s the awakening of the mind, yah,.…it’s the body, somehow doesn’t play any role and that is more and more coming to the foreground as if it is….as if it would be an evolutionary move into the body. That is how it appears for me.

Georgi: Yes. You know there is an evolution happening also in terms of our basic attitudes towards life, towards creation, towards this world of duality and many people, myself included, no different, so we, in a way are motivated in a spiritual search by an aversion to the physical, to all of this suffering, to this….we have a body but it’s not going to last. It’s dying, it’s aging. You can’t trust it, we have a certain amount of time but we don’t know how long…

Renate: It fails, yeah.

Georgi: It’s full of loss, all the time…loss, pain, nothing is stable. We try to make it stable, it breaks in our hands, there’s love but we can’t hold it, we can’t keep it. So, many spiritual motors of development come from this rejection of creation and by creation I mean the physical world that we are seeing here now. Very quickly we move to this let go. You’re not your feeling body, you’re not your feelings, you’re not your pain, you’re not your emotions….prrff! But what we are really moving with then, is the energy of rejection, which is a big duality. ‘It’s not me. I’m enlightened! This is not me I’m awakened now’, so I’m not my body,’ and that energy becomes the dominant thing so we are launching into another spiral of illusion, in a way. It’s based on fear. Nothing needs to get left out if we are not afraid. Nothing! Not one aspect, not one particle of our experience needs to be rejected. It’s not even ours (arms extended), but it’s not even personal.

Renate: Yeah, but it’s the failure. It is as you say there’s suffering but I am not suffering, there’s pain but I don’t have pain and it’s allowed to be there because it’s shared.

Georgi: Yeah, it’s tricky…because when we…you drop all form, everything that you can perceive, everything that you can think, everything you can feel, even a sense of being, you move beyond it or you just let it go completely. What emerges of itself is a natural care. We care. Life cares. It really deeply cares and so we care about the suffering. We care so deeply about the pain, which is here, that we would be reincarnated by choice again and give up our enlightenment to be back here to be of service. It’s unstoppable this care at the core of creation and the problem is that we have these minds that want to avoid suffering and in this kind of either or thinking of the way we are programmed as little children, we have this belief that if we don’t suffer it, it’s not there. Or if I don’t….if I pretend I’m never going to die it’s not going to happen. If I don’t let this cruelty into my feeling of cruelty, if I don’t acknowledge this feeling it won’t exist.

And this is, in a way, the Achilles Heel of the healer. It’s the trap of the healer because every doctor knows that you cannot heal any ailment unless you are prepared to go there, to look at it, to go into it, to receive it. The same way every doctor knows that, you’re not really healing anything, you are creating the conditions in which healing can happen through the natural wisdom of life. Life is the healer. We make the conditions by removing the obstacles for life to do what it, of itself does with this supreme intelligence. So, sometimes it’s really important we find, me and Bart, in our lives and in our teaching, to really allow suffering. It doesn’t matter if it’s yours or not, it doesn’t matter if it’s on your bill or on the other’s bill. To really, really, really allow it completely to allow it to transform through you or to allow it to be is enough. This is where….in a way the depth of Karma is created when we….we reject the pain, the things we don’t want to feel and there’s such an agenda there and agenda is back again into the light, ‘I’m enlightened that means I’m free of suffering, free of fear, free of jealousy, free of anger’. It’s not true! Not with me, not at all. I’m free within it. Anger is free here, suffering is free here, jealousy is free here. It’s free to move, it’s free to tell its story. Fear is free and often….I’m afraid, often utterly and totally terrified but it’s just terror moving through me. I don’t even know any more if it’s mine or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a problem because the freedoms also here. Does that make sense?

Renate: Completely. Our normal reaction is to runaway.

Georgi: Yeah.

Renate:  Yeah and we don’t want to feel it. It’s too awful this feeling.

Georgi: …..to run away or to freeze or just to try and hold things as they are…which is totally fine but then it’s important to relax in the running away and to stay present to the running away and to relax in the freezing. If you relax in the freezing it can be quite beautiful.

Renate: Yah…I experienced several times in the midst of the worst suffering is the…is beauty.

Georgi: Yes.

Renate: Yeah, if it’s allowed to be..yeah… it just moves into beauty.

Georgi: Yes because it has….if it’s allowed to be, it has such depth of truth in it.

Renate: So, let’s move a little bit back to your story. (Laughs) So you had continuously awakenings of similar kinds through your childhood and at one point you were puzzled how this awakened consciousness couldn’t stay. In the interims you would disappear…so retrospect do you know where you went? Do you know what happens when we lose awareness?

Georgi:  No and neither…..I remember one when I was walking to school in the morning and suddenly I was there. I am here. Totally conscious with this strangeness, there was this strangeness like when you revisit yourself in your life.

Renate:  You recognize…It recognizes itself.

Georgi: …then I’m walking, vowing to myself, ‘I’m going to stay here. I’m going to stay here…grrrrr….(Renate and Georgi laughing).

I was saying to Bart last night that it’s a little bit like we are all drugged. There’s this opiate but like a dolphin you pop above water and ‘ahh this is truth!’ And then whumph! into the drugged state again…you come up again, ’Remind me of this, remind me of this, keep me there,’ then down again…so that’s the question; What’s with this ocean of non-awareness, non-heightened consciousness, what’s in that ocean?

So….if we take the body as a landscape in a way, the ocean is here, the horizon of the ocean (hands horizontal to the shoulders). Here is the air and the sun (hands pointing above the head), some seagulls and a lot of thoughts and here’s the horizon and the ocean is feeling, feeling energy and the feeling isn’t a thought. How do we know feelings not a thought? Because if you feel a feeling, immediately you’re out of time, you’re in the now. You can’t feel your anger or your love for tomorrow or for yesterday or as part of a story. You can as a mental activity and kind of rip up a bit of love and put it in but fundamentally if we agree to feel how it is, how it feels to be here, we are immediately in the now. So we move beyond time, just like that, power of the now, just by feeling a feeling, even a sense perception in the feeling body but also in feeling a feeling emotion and we are in real time we are in the now. We are in the now and it’s not stable, but here in the level of feeling and that is what we call awareness as opposed to consciousness, there is…..

Renate: You could not feel to….

Georgi: … still space, there’s bounded space so we have a feeling, for the first feeling could be you know, ‘This is where I am and this is where I end’. Or the grief can be here but I don’t want to feel the grief now so I’ll go to the joy which I can get in the crack between the grief and next days dinner…laughs….so we move into a dimension of space and it’s really, maybe important to realize that there are two kinds of experiences going on when people talk about awakening and enlightenment. One is the freedom from the mind, freedom from time, the freedom from the story and then there’s another kind of description where people talk about the sense of infinity and boundlessness. Those ones talk very much about love, these ones talk very much about peace, peacefulness from being free from the mind, the peace of mind…..which very much comes as a backdrop to conscious freedom of consciousness. The second one’s experience. This opening of the heart unconditionally, nothing confines them anymore. Their free of some kind of energetic restrictions in what they are allowed to feel and how they are allowed to feel. Their being becomes one with the kind of one being.

Renate: You talk about this, your own process. You had this… your first awakening was from the head and then you say your heart was still held prisoner and then later the heart was opened to unconditional love and yet the body was still held prisoner. So what were the different stages? I think we covered your awakening from the head. So how did you awaken your heart?

Georgi: So…

Renate: We make now a big jump. (Both laughing). We jump over here…..

Georgi: A few decades later. (Laughs).

You know, conscious awakening was great for me. It got me into Oxford. The conceptual mind was open. I could theorize an incredible amount of freedom in a way to a  kind of universal mind and all of this but, like we said, if the heart was…

Renate: You studied Literature?

Georgi: English Literature…

Renate: English literature.

Georgi: The theory…the theory of literature…so how do we approach it from a Marxist perspective or from a feminist perspective….went deeply into Jungian perspective at that stage. But the…as children we get shaped in how to be here which is different from the identity, it’s how we are allowed to be. So are we allowed, is our love allowed to be unconditional? Are we allowed to feel our emotions? Or do we get rejected? So, for a child when they are rejected for crying too much or being too angry or being natural in a way, there is a kind of deepening of separation, and a kind of separate self on the energy level of feeling, of what they are allowed to feel. It’s a contraction, a contraction of form, are created. It’s not even personal. Whole family’s carry contractions. Whole nations carry…whole cultures carry contractions of form. That we will not be afraid of or we will not talk about, death…sexuality is huge. Nothing…there were two dirty words for me when I was a child, one was sex and the other was god. Not because my mother wasn’t spiritual but I felt so ashamed to say these words. So, here there was no freedom and the best response for me was, to fix that with the mind and so I moved very much like other interviewees who were talking, in a way to…to fix that with the mind and so I moved very much to fixing  the outside, saving the world from this conscious, awakening perspective. So I went deeply into journalism and exposing all kinds of horrors that were going to happen to the world and what I was really, I was right but…(laughs with Renate).

Renate: Just to mention that Georgi worked for the BBC.

Georgi: A little bit at the beginning..yeah..and later as an independent investigative journalist about the threat of global terrorism but before there was any….before September…

(laughing with Renate)…

Renate: You were already ahead…(laughs)

Georgi: …..or it wouldn’t have been a secret would it?  (laughs)

But what I was really…. what was really driving me was the threat of the collapse of my own separate self, the fear of this ego needed to die and at a certain stage it became so obsessive that the identity broke down under the pressure of this thinking, thinking conscious…conscious and I went into a period of a lot of panic attacks and anxiety. Which of course, at the time is living hell. It’s really living hell with three little children, to be suffering really from panic and the…..professional authorities of course come in with medications which I’m so grateful I didn’t take and all kind of diagnosis which I’m so grateful I didn’t believe.

Renate: Were you afraid of something, or was it just…just panic, just fear?

Georgi: I was…because the form, the focus of my attention was on the threat of non-conventional terrorism and exposing it. The work of an investigative journalist is very much imagining what could happen, so it’s very fear based but I would empathically imagine, I would experience how it would be and this in the end had it’s incredible toll on the nervous system. I was trying to save children from that horror, so it was quite an obsessive spin, driven from this incredible difficulty to come to peace, beneath the level of the head.

Renate: Did you understand at that time what had happened that this is connected?

Georgi: No, I was saving the world. I was on a campaign to bring the truth and to save lives…especially living in Israel. The threat that Jews could be gassed by terrorists and thousands could die and that they weren’t being told of the threat and being sent to gas mask stations to get equipped and all of this, and a lot of this felt for me an incredible outrage. So it was also the sense of justice and a history behind it. But I was running like hell away from myself. I was at the same time a mother of three children. The greatest miracle of life giving birth to three little…..it was terrifying so I tried to fix the world. I was terrified of myself.

Renate: And so what stopped you? What turned it around?

Georgi: I think I cracked!(Laughs).

Renate: What turned around?

Georgi: What turned around was I became dysfunctional. I couldn’t function anymore and luckily we took a sabbatical in that time in England and there was an NHS counsellor who was amazing, just listened, she just listened, no judgment and then it stepped into a kind of apocalyptic depression and I felt like I was looking at the ruins of my own ego structure. There was no way I could pick up the stories again. I had many connections through the internet and they were kind of nagging for me to continue with the..the campaign. It was before September 11th, the threat was coming but I was finished. It was like seeing myself as a destroyed city and not…hardly able to move through the day and……. little by little life picked it up.  I kind of surrendered to the depression but then magical things like…I was in a bookshop, just walking, because walking was the only thing that gave a moments mercy from the suffering while the children were at school. I went into a bookshop, and walked immediately to a shelf and there was the face of the Dalai Lama looking back…’The Way to Happiness’, and there was this moment of instant recognition. I didn’t know, even remember, it wasn’t in the spirituality at all but I took the book, like a lifeline and his writings about compassion as an antidote to fear and the practice of replacing yourself in the other. I would try anything at that moment and it really worked and so there were many little synchronicities that helped show the way forward, step by step. I began just massaging people’s feet, not my own because that didn’t somehow help me feel better but the feet of the children, the feet of my husband and then moved into the smells, the aromatherapy. This helped so much, the smell. Now it makes sense to me because smell bypasses the control function and it’s a sensory perception that directly awakens something from far beyond normal thinking mind and so that was a process of erasure.

Renate: And Georgi, all this time of suffering, did you ever remember the experience you had as a child?

Georgi: Yes but I was so nervous, so anxious it wasn’t possible to have the nervous system activated like that. In a way I was always in an awakened aroused state. It was a total imbalance. There was nowhere to sink down into. There was no way into the body. It was a kind of spiritual psychosis in that sense.

Renate: You could not sense into it?

Georgi: But then….one time I lay down in total panic, my stomach totally in contractions and utterly, in a way just surrendered to the horror of it and I hadn’t quite fallen asleep and I had this vision. I wasn’t in meditation or anything at that stage and it was…..but I was on the hills near our house in Mount Carmel in Israel and there came from a distance a nun and a man….no, a nun and a woman and I was laughing because the nun…there was a man dressed as a nun and I was laughing at he, who I knew so well, was dressed as a nun and they began to walk across this golden field towards me and as they walked there was two spheres of white, white, white, white lights. So intense, expanding out of them and as they moved towards me, it was like…like I was going to dissolve. I was going to disappear inside the blessing of this white light of…inside of the dream, vision, my son Adidya, my first born was next to me, young, and he looked at me and I looked at him and he, we both turned towards a rock and held the rock and that brought me back from the….it was as if I almost died, it was almost as if they came to take me and this choice to stay was in moving towards me the rock with my children…and then because I was kind of in a psychotic state I began collecting rocks and moving rocks around our garden as it really made me feel better and created a picture..,,laughing.

Renate: Trying to ground you.

Georgi: Very much trying to ground myself, yes. I would cling to the rock, cling to the rock.

Renate: And that was, I assume the third stage when you said yet was the body was prisoner, still held. How did you open?

Georgi: Well, first there was the stage of liberating the feelings which was very much through studying with my partner, he was my teacher then..the spiritual psychology education. This is an education which is really moving without…when we say let’s get free of mind, that’s a thought. So this is a beautiful exercise is given by his teacher, Bob Moore, who was in Denmark through feeling perception, felt sense on the chakras on certain energy points to allow the energy to move by itself without a story.

Renate: Yah, so…so you went to Holland to find…

Georgi: He was in Israel.

Renate: Oh, he was in Israel?

Georgi: He was teaching it in Israel.

Renate: Oh yes, yeah..okay.

Georgi: Little by little..but of itself without even the story, the stories would come later but the energy itself would kind of present itself. The blockages and this spaciousness began to open up into a kind of …first all a permission to just feel what you feel, just feel it and not just feel it and okay, been there, done that, but really collapse into it to be curious about it, even if it is an unpleasant feeling. It’s a switch where experience becomes yummy, even if it’s negative or positive. And it’s like we said, the moment you move towards experience like that, towards feeling like that, you’re already not the experience, there’s a greater spaciousness opening up. So there was this Sartori stage when the heart could just burst open. This unconditional love and it went on for a few months and I was more functional than ever. This now wasn’t a psychosis. It was years after the anxiety but it…this incredible release of holding, holding the heart, always holding, always afraid, always with conditions. It all felt like dominoes, it fell and it fell and it fell for a few months. More expansion, more expansion and I’d reach a border and go through it …and such a stillness and such a love, such an opening to energies and felt presences around as well, this otherworldly in a way. Then the last…I was hanging out the washing outside, because at the same time I was still a functioning mother and all that and I noticed it was like hitting a brick wall. I was really hitting a wall with this. There was one place where this unconditional love wasn’t going to go and then I realized it was toward myself. I would love Bin Laden. I would love George Bush, (Georgi and Renate laughing as she speaks). I would love…but this, (holding her hands to her heart), this was a kind of…still a resistance and that’s the bridge to where the block was, being in a physical body at all in a way…yeah…

Renate: How did you overcome that?

Georgi: So, we jump forward another ten years..(they both laugh). So this left me extremely happy. This Sartori or enlightenment and these words have hooks so this experience of liberated awareness, boundless awareness, left me in a very, very good space with a lot of freedom. But it’s like being in a place then of almost happy, almost, almost free. It wasn’t quite….totally relaxed and peaceful and okay yet. It was okay up here (arms raised to head) and it was okay in meditation but in terms of living it wasn’t quite there yet and at a certain stage I was in the middle…I was giving a meditation in where we live and I came up against ‘this not quite there yet,’ feeling and there was such a spiritual tiredness in it. Such a ……almost boredom of being in this place where there are layers. It’s almost like states of subtle despair, states of subtle boredom or subtle resistance like….like smog.

Renate: I call that the itch of the ego….(They both laugh).

Georgi: Maybe it’s the breath of the ego…the smell of it. (Laughing).

Renate: I know what you mean…(Laughing).

Georgi: There was such a tiredness with it and then I could feel beneath it. I’d really had enough, really had enough of this. I want to get….I could feel lifetimes behind me of going through the same cycle and I had such a passion come forward. I want to get this now! I don’t care if I die in it! I don’t care if the worse nightmares happen! I don’t care what happens, this is it! I totally give myself now to go all the way. There was a choice and there was a choice really from the bases. It’s enough now. Now I get it. There isn’t a tomorrow. I’m not waiting any more even if I burn in it, even if I suffer and of course the conditions begin to come forward in the meditation and okay even if that… even if that….so that was a choice and then things began to move very, very fast. So, already there was this open question of the difference between awakening of the mind, this consciousness and the opening of the heart, between head and heart is the constant spiral and it seemed clear to me that the heart wasn’t a resting point either and nor was the head and so something…there was a duality here I wasn’t using duality and non-duality as terms then I didn’t even know about it. But there was clearly a spiral. It’s got a peace between head and heart and then…intuition really, really came to look down on the third level to look towards the body and of the body, and also there was guidance there as well. And I began to kind of playfully….because always in the healing education I’d done, we’d do all the chakras and of course I knew that it was important that there were chakras…was like the root chakra…yeah, yeah, yeah you know, that’s the baboons (Georgi and Renate laughing and agreeing). Don’t do a root chakra here! No need for that and….somehow the invitation came to move more deeply into the body and what I did was move very deeply into the…just the feeling sense, the sense perception of the coccyx of the tailbone. How was it to like….how was it to look at the world from there? So we’ve got consciousness, this whumph!. We’ve got awareness, this, this boundless space. So, what’s it look like from the perspective of matter, from the body, from the bone, really from the base bone of the spine. What does it look like? Let this consciousness completely sink into the….of course it brings also the atmospheres, so I was pondering that. Still I had to go to work at the university, so I packed up the kids to school and I was driving to the university. They’d just built this great big tunnel through the …Carmel, Mount Carmel tunnel. It was still fresh, a fresh tunnel underground and so I drove innocently inside this tunnel, all the time in my tailbone, eyes and ears, in a way sensing through the tailbone and something flipped inside the tunnel where, all separation physical, with the physical began to dissolve. It was…I went in the tunnel in one form and I came out in another form…it’s really weird. In a sense, every….everything….in a car it’s very easy to move into altered states in a way. One thing, the mind is occupied with the driving, so that’s taken care of, the automatic pilot is busy but also you’ve got sense perceptions happening all the time there’s the rumble of the car. There’s the music playing, there’s the wind, there’s lights changing all the time. It’s very hard to grab hold of anything and it’s not even…you don’t push it away either. So the sense of the engine of the car coming and going, passing physical sensations and feelings would come forward, but they come and they go..they come and they go and thoughts would come but thoughts were much less at that stage because they weren’t that relevant because feelings are more what cause thoughts. Thoughts would come forward like a field, so it’s like it’s bounded in space. I’m not bounded in space, the one that can feel the feeling, the sense perceptions, so, the body like now…we don’t really know we’re alive except through our sense perceptions. So, we feel our body on the chair. You see me. I see you. We don’t see ourselves. We see each other and it’s changing all the time. We feel the air on the face but it’s not stable. These are the only way that we even know we are here. So…

Renate: Through our senses…

Georgi: Through our senses and the senses….if you really allow the senses to be here, they’re changing all the time. They’re channels, channels into the physical. They are the windows of the five senses and there’s more senses which are the windows of the physical and what’s being channelled through the physical into consciousness and from consciousness through the physical, it’s content is changing all the time and it really doesn’t matter. Because the one which is moving, the one which is really here, which is here wherever we go, that never moves isn’t that which is  bound in time or bound in space. So this one gets stronger and stronger and stronger and expands in a way, into a kind of unity.

And I arrived at work and it begins the technology transfer. The discussion and everything is fluid but I’m absolutely going through the motions but everything is fluid and she’s talking and I’m looking at myself talking in a way. I don’t mean any personality, it’s like empty, this emptiness.

Renate: So Georgi was gone?

Georgi: Georgi was gone and Georgi arrived at the same time.

It’s also…this was the here from the, I am here. This is a kind of arrival point at the other end of the tunnel, like arriving into a here, which is not local to sitting on this chair. It’s a here which is here, also when Georgi was two years old and closed her eyes and thought how, I’m supposed to go to sleep, the darkness inside. It’s the same here tonight when I close my eyes, this timeless unconfined here. That’s the entry point. It’s beyond space and beyond time and we’re programmed to not trust it. To not….even, it’s beyond…it’s prior to consciousness. It doesn’t need to see anything or to be conscious at all in order to be here. It’s not separate.

Renate: Is it existence, existing itself? Or experience, experiencing itself? There’s no gap, no somebody who experiences it?

Georgi: There’s a somebody but a somebody is a kind of channel to the source of experience, the source of consciousness, the source of existence.

Renate: Do you call it the Absolute or is it prior to the Absolute?

Georgi: You know absolute is a tricky word because absolute suggests it can be seen, it suggests a form, an absolute form and it’s really not a form. You know, it’s also not possible in any way to hold it. Just as you can’t…you can be conscious of the effects of consciousness, you can even be conscious of consciousness but the real source of it, it doesn’t see itself. The moment it sees itself it’s made a loop and the real source of it is. …it doesn’t need to be conscious, that’s a condition. It doesn’t need to perceive. It’s not dependent on perception. It’s not dependent on form to be formless. It’s the other way around. Form depends on the formless in order to be in form. It’s the source.

I’ll give an example: We all want to be loved. We all talk about love. We all know what love is but when you really go into the feeling of love. How do we know what love is? How do we feel love?

Renate: Are you asking me? (Laughs).

Georgi: Yes.

Renate: It’s just…I guess it’s just a knowingness. It’s…I just cannot say in the moment. It’s…

Georgi: Yes.

Renate: It’s just…an interesting question…(she laughs softly).

Georgi: I asked the wrong person because you…that knowingness is really, has got absolute quality to it, for many, me included, love would be described as a warmth, an opening, a pleasant sensation, a nostalgia, an expectation.

Renate: But not if you are inside the love…..if you are inside the love you cannot name it.

Georgi: Yes…exactly. So, all of those feelings, like this feeling of heart opening, of expansion, the feeling of warmth, the feeling of pleasure, the feeling of happiness to which we associate with love. These are the effects of love. This is what happens when what you could call the Absolute is moving through this dimension and this great unknown, imperceivable absolute is moving through this form. So this effect is opening, opening of the form but the effect is not the cause, the cause is something we can dive into and be at peace in. If that same pure life is moving through the head, it’s much more likely to be experienced as peace because the effect is a quietening of the mind, an expansion, a resting, a release of stress but it’s the same one moving, that one is us. It’s the source of who we are and it’s not bound in time. It’s the same one that was there as a little girl. Nothing moved, nothing happened, nothing changed. It’s the same one that was there when we were most in illusion, most lost, most ignorant. Same one. Nothing moved. It will be the same one without anything happening at the moment we die. It doesn’t go anywhere also when we die, it doesn’t, but here can be trusted.

What I didn’t expect was is that it is at the core of matter…but then when you begin to look at the science of it, and this is where my day job helped. I interview a lot of scientists in my day job. You get down to the individual cells and all the intelligence of life, which is from the stem cells through to the cells expressing itself in form, in harmony, in duality, left hand, the right hand, in this remarkable beauty. But you go deeper down, you go down into the fundamental particles that make up the cells and look into the fundamental particle and it’s 99.99999999999% empty. All of that is imperceivable. That bit that can be perceived which is our whole life, our whole experience, all the love, all the longings, all the yearnings, all the fear, all the dramas, that’s .0000001%. That means that the only restriction on our pure freedom, on our pure infinite spaciousness, on our indestructible strength and creativity to be here, is our minds!

In saying that it’s the other way round, all this stuff is 99% and we are the 1% that’s God, that’s the source of ourselves, a little tiny bit,  it’s misprogramming. Matter dissolves when you get to the core into pure energy, and that pure energy I would gamble is consciousness, it’s perceptions, where we are perceiving…and in perceiving creating we’re co-creating.

Renate: So can we say freedom is in our body or through our body?

Georgi: There is no freedom, which excludes anything, certainly not the body. And the body is…who are we trying to kid that freedom wouldn’t be through the miracle of the physical for as long as we are here. That the opportunity is not here in this miraculously strange thing which we’re in, this fluid living life, everything is here and that’s where there is a kind of time restriction because this is our chance while we’re physical, while we’re manifesting physically, there’s an opportunity to do something, to let something move through us and it’s really okay, it’s really okay. A bit like working, in a way for IBM being born here. You know you work for IBM and at the end of the day you give back your equipment and your free of IBM and IBM goes on. It’s not really our problem but we are here and we’re here because it’s absolutely right for us to be here, right here in whatever position we are. The most damaging thing we can do to ourselves is to believe we’re not free in being here. And with every judgment that we make on ourselves, that it’s not okay to be as we are, we are taking away that freedom which is always here regardless of what form we’re taking and it’s very deeply programmed and this, this goes back to the deeper layers of liberation in a way. It’s in the Bible, the throwing out of Eden that happened because we’re guilty,….this condemnation.

Renate: We are a sinner.

Georgi: We are condemned. It’s not just religion that does this. It’s also the healers. It’s also us New Age people. We’re trying to fix it. So in trying to make the world a better place, what are we saying, what are we feeding?..…feeding a message that the world is not okay as it is. We don’t accept it.

In a way, collectively we are perpetually condemning ourselves. We put our….humanity puts itself in a state of condemnation and then begins this whole game of being okay. Is it okay for me to be here? Am I acceptable? Did I do good? It’s very childish in a way, but the…inside the opium field of the collective awareness we need those leaps of freedom into conscious awakening, in order to release the condemnation. Maybe that’s what they mean when they talk about redemption… (laughs)…and but it’s not historic and it’s not future, it’s inside us.

Renate: Georgie, I’m afraid we have to stop. (laughs). We just covered a fraction of your story……but maybe we have another chance. Anyway it was beautiful talking to you.

Georgi: It was beautiful talking to you too.

Renate: And so this was Georgi Y Johnson and I show her book again, ‘I Am Here: Opening the Windows of Life and Beauty,’ and thank you for watching Conscious TV and I will see you again soon. Bye bye.

 

To watch the original video interview click here. This programme has been transcribed on a voluntary basis. If you would like to offer to transcribe a video on the same basis, then please contact: info@conscious.tv

All text copyright © Conscious TV Ltd.

Because of What You Are ~ Frank Cavano

Because of what you are, you

cannot sin but merely err.

Because of what you are,

there is no guilt, you are free.

Because of what you are, I

do not tremble when you

accuse. I see the pain behind

your pricking. I let you be.

 

Because of what you are, I

see myself (as what you are).

The view I have of you must be

true as well of me for one

receives the gifts he gives.

And thus we give to others as

He has given us and, in that

giving, become His Child again.

 

Healing Depression – Well-being Beyond a Pill

A few months ago, a friend asked me for some advice about his father, who was suffering from depression. After finding out that his father spent most of his time indoors, watching television, I told my friend about ecotherapy, which investigates the therapeutic effects of contact with nature. As I informed my friend, there is a great deal of research showing that regular contact with nature — such as a daily walk in the park or countryside — can have a very beneficial effect on well-being.

The research suggests that this can be just as effective against depression as medication or other forms of psychotherapy. So I asked my friend to encourage his father to get out of his house and go for a walk in his local park every day — or better still, go for walks in the countryside.

A couple of weeks later, my friend got back into contact to say that he had told his father’s doctor about my advice. The doctor had gotten angry and told my friend, “Your father has an illness! Would you tell a cancer patient to go for a walk in the countryside? Would that help their condition? Depression is an illness that has to be treated medically.”

It seems to me that this attitude to depression — or to any psychological condition — is simplistic, misleading and possibly even dangerous. This is not to say that brain chemistry isn’t involved in depression. But it’s certainly not the only factor.

They proclaim that depression is just the result of brain chemistry, or just the result of faulty thinking styles. Of course, it’s much more likely, and much more sensible, to argue that all of the above are factors in depression, operating in different combinations and proportions in different people.

All main fields in psychology interpret depression in different ways, and recommend different kinds of treatment or therapy, based on those interpretations. For example, while in psychobiology depression might be seen as a problem with brain’s serotonin reuptake system, in behaviourist terms, it might be seen as a habitual emotional response to negative events, perhaps learned from our parents.

A humanistic psychologist might interpret it as the result of the frustration of basic human needs, and a blocking of the urge for development, or self-actualisation. A positive psychologist (or a cognitive therapist) might see it as the result of faulty thinking styles, a “script” of negative thoughts manifesting themselves as negative emotions.

A social psychologist might see depression in environmental terms, as a reaction to an unfair society, to inequality and oppression.

An ecopsychologist would see it as the result of lack of contact with our natural environment, while a transpersonal psychologist might see it as the result of a false identification with our superficial ego-selves, and the result of a sense of separateness from reality.

As in so many areas, the problem here is that some adherents to these fields fall prey to what I call “justism.” They proclaim that depression is just the result of brain chemistry, or just the result of faulty thinking styles. Of course, it’s much more likely, and much more sensible, to argue that all of the above are factors in depression, operating in different combinations and proportions in different people.

If a person lives in a deprived urban environment, is unemployed and in an abusive relationship with a partner, how helpful is it to prescribe them medication to increase their brain’s reuptake of serotonin? How helpful are such drugs for a person who is naturally highly creative and intelligent but intensely frustrated because they are stuck in a dreary low paid job with long hours and don’t have enough money to free themselves from their predicament? How helpful are drugs for a person whose main issue is that they have low self-esteem, and habitually think that they don’t deserve to be happy, and expect things to go wrong for them?

It could be argued that medication is actually unhelpful in these circumstances, because it makes people less likely to deal with the real causes of their depression. Even if (and that if is in itself very controversial) such drugs might bring short-term benefits, their long term effect may be counterproductive.

Of course, there are other conditions where these problems apply. For example, a condition such as ADHD may be viewed as a psychiatric problem which can be “treated” with drugs. But this ignores the social and environmental factors which may generate restlessness, impulsivity and an inability to concentrate in children. These characteristics may be the effect of a lack of “concentrative training” provided by parents, who allow their children to spend too much time passively staring at screens, or they may perhaps be due to an intrinsic nature of restless spontaneity and creativity, which makes it difficult for some children to sit still and focus. Perhaps, for some children, it simply may not be “natural” to spend several hours a day in a classroom, staring at books, screens and pieces of paper. (This is similar to the “hunter vs. farmer hypothesis” of ADHD, that the condition may be an adaptive ability left over from the early human hunter-gatherer phase.) So again, to treat alleged ADHD as a medical problem may mean ignoring its underlying causes.

But what about the research suggesting that depression is associated with disturbances in the brain’s serotonin system, or that ADHD is associated with impairment in the brain’s neurotransmitter system (dopamine and norepinephrine in particular)?

Perhaps it makes more sense to reverse the conventional causal direction, and suggest that it may be a state of depression itself which generates changes in neurological functioning.

These associations are by no means proven. Research has found that the best known “selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors’” do not alleviate the symptoms of depression for 60-70% patients. Some neuroscientists question whether serotonin is associated with depression at all. But even if there is some truth in these associations, perhaps it makes more sense to reverse the conventional causal direction, and suggest that it may be a state of depression itself which generates changes in neurological functioning. In other words, the psychological state of “feeling low” may produce changes in the brain’s serotonin system. In the same way, perhaps the characteristics associated with ADHD themselves affect the brain’s neurotransmitter system. Or perhaps — more likely — psychological and neurological states interact in a more nuanced way.

To take medication to reduce the levels of those hormones would not fix the problem — in fact, it may make it worse.

This “reverse view” of depression entails the philosophical assumption that the “mind” is not entirely a product of the brain, and may in some sense be independent of it, and so be able to affect the brain. This view would explain why depression is associated with so many different factors. After all, a whole range of different issues (e.g. a lack of contact with nature, frustrated creativity, negative thought patterns) could generate similar neurological patterns of activity. And this also emphasises the importance of dealing with depression in a holistic way, treating a range of factors rather than “just” one.

To someone schooled in the biopsychological model of the mind, this may seem absurd. But perhaps it is even more absurd to try to cure depression by “fixing” the brain, when neurological activity does not itself cause depression.

If you’re walking through a jungle and a lion stepped out in front of you, it would produce all kinds of biological and neurological changes associated with the state of fear, such as a cascade of hormones like norepinephrine and epinephrine. To take medication to reduce the levels of those hormones would not fix the problem — in fact, it may make it worse, because you might be less likely to make the necessary changes to your situation e.g. to try to escape or pacify the lion. The real cause of your fear would still be there, just as the real causes of depression will still there, with or without medication.

Steve Taylor is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, and the author of several best-selling books on psychology and spirituality. For the last four years he has been included (this year at no. 62) in Mind, Body, Spirit magazine’s list of the ‘100 most spiritually influential living people.’ His books include Waking From Sleep, The Fall, Out of the Darkness, Back to Sanity, and his latest book The Calm Center. His books have been published in 19 languages, while his articles and essays have been published in over 40 academic journals, magazines and newspapers, including Philosophy Now, Tikkun, The Daily Express, The Journal of Humanistic Psychology and others.

Love is who you are, allow its company

We were first given to. I was given my life, you were given yours. We were each given the ability to love as a fundamental ability of that life. I was given freedom of choice and so many gifts. These same gifts have been given to you.  Having received, it is now our responsibility to give. Until we learn to give we are unlikely to receive, especially spiritually.

As a person learns to be compassionate, they make space to receive kindness. In the same way as you forgive it becomes easier for others to forgive you. Allowing your true feelings to flow opens the door to receiving. As you love others you give love an opportunity to liberate. As you love your own soul, your own being, your own presence love becomes part of you.  Now is the time to give, to give to yourself and of yourself. Do not wait for an opportunity to arrive, the occasion is always present. The time to love is here and now. Your spirit, your very essence is healed as you do so. It is not selfish to re-unite with your soul. A wounded soul needs your love to restore it.

There is no scarcity of love, it is free, it is plentiful and to be found anywhere and everywhere. It is within, nearby and afar. It is here now, this very instant. It is throughout and beyond. We are never alone. My problem is that during my temporary stay here on planet earth I have clouded my ability to see love’s clarity. I have been neglecting love who is my companion. It is not within the spirit of love to hide and be unavailable to anyone, for why would that be so? Love has no requirement to be veiled for that is not its essence. Love does not hide. It can only be me who has made myself remote from love. Each of us is alike, it is the same for you, the same for all.

Now is the time to give, to give to yourself and of yourself. Do not wait for an opportunity to arrive, the occasion is always present.

Love cannot help but give of itself for that is its nature. Frequently we do not recognise this and we become blinded by our inability to see. On another occasion we may be blinded by love, by its beauty, by its brilliance. Where you or I do not see peace today, we may find peace tomorrow. The same is true of all the aspects of love. As I forgive I am forgiven. You and I as individuals may find it difficult to reduce the conflict on our planet, but we are responsible for peace within our own hearts.

Although love is not hidden, in order to see it and be in its presence, we are required to seek it out by opening the eyes of our souls and then, finding it, stay within that place. Love will assist, that is its nature. It is not for me just to sit back and let love do the work for me, it is my job and yours, to initiate this reunion by achieving our home coming back to kindness, compassion, peace and joy so that we again find our true selves.

Our egotistical self is not our real being. As I pick love as my powerful and comforting partner I may always ask for its assistance. Love will not and cannot reject me for its pattern is to give and forgive. Our efforts will always be rewarded. It is a case of “give and be given to” rather than saying give to me first and then I will give. I am, and so are you, to make this move of reconciliation and be loving. Thus we may re-unite with a mighty giving and forgiving presence.

If you do not find peace in your own home, your own kitchen, your own inner self, what chance planet earth?  For the sake of all, the path to peace is yours to take.

The task of every human is to actively look for and seek the company of love in every situation.

Love and all its ingredients such as kindness, forgiveness and truth are free. We may access its compassion wherever we are, within and without, for it is ever present and ever a present awaiting to be opened. We only need to practise our willingness to achieve its companionship. The task of every human is to actively look for and seek the company of love in every situation. Love is to again immerse us as we devote ourselves to renewing our relationship. What better cause can there be in life than to love?  It is time to re-discover love, it is the reason for life and death. My soul is love and yearns my return, we have been separated too long. We all forget and we have left our souls in darkness. The moment is now to renew this spiritual association.

In the beginning we are love, what has happened since? How come I no longer recognize my beginning? Where have I hidden my truth? I have become so remote. I seem to have difficulty distinguishing my own spiritual self, my own reality. I associate with my ego in preference to my soul. I no longer recognise my true nature. I have deeply buried myself and hidden my real being, buried behind so many disguises. I have been so calculating with my cleverness that I no longer recognize who I am. I have lost contact with my soul. So have you.

How come I let others advise me about my feelings? How come I let the world I perceive, the material world, tower over me and my relationship with my soul? How is it that I have ignored my very core, my essence, my presence? How come I have shut myself down from love? How come we fail to demonstrate thankfulness, to forgive, to be caring, comforting and to show concern for others? How come we judge and fail to be truthful and gentle? Where is our hope, our humility? We have lost touch in these matters and love escapes us. The time is now to return to kindness, joy, light, mercy, peace, thankfulness, tolerance, truth, wisdom and all things loving; for you and for me. We are all related, we are related by love; we have forgotten.

Love is who you are, allow its company.

Now is my chance to again be with my soul. It is not within my power to change yesterday, nor am I able to surely predict tomorrow, but by living love in the “now”, in this instant, then I become more accepting and less judging. Love will love me for that. Similarly for you, by giving, you receive. By showing care, you will receive. Forgiving self, forgiving others and being forgiven is what your soul yearns. Love is who you are, allow its company. Love will remain with those who are prepared to forgive and be at peace. Now is the time to do this, it is never too late.

As I receive love I may pass it on to others, as I do so I may immediately be replenished. But not giving is being apart and I will not have made space for love within. As I again allow myself to love and be loving, I am thankful. I am not to ask to whom shall I give, I am just to give. It is not for me to judge whether I should give to the perceived rich or poor. The sun does not ask “For whom am I giving light?” the sun just gives light. The tree does not ask, “For whom am I giving shade?” it just gives shade. Similarly it is for me to give. Give freely so I may receive freely. Practise giving and be thankful. Give with joy in the heart. Give of the soul rather than the mind, give spiritually. Today is given to us for giving. I may find it easy to offer love to some and more difficult to others. I am to practise for all are equal; all are souls as I am, journeying on this planet. I am offered the consciousness of love as my companion, why would I reject it?

My giving is just to be giving, not with any attachment. Should I give with a condition, it becomes something other than a gift. To say “I will give you this, if you do or allow that”, that is a trade rather than a gift. Love is not a trading commodity. Similarly love cannot be: “I’ll love you if you do this” for that is manipulation and such exploitation is no longer loving. The gift of love is freedom, love itself is free. Love is. Just allow love, for this recognition brings peace and understanding. Today our world needs peace and acceptance and I hear many say “There’s nothing I can do.” But there is something you may do! You may assist by becoming peaceful and kind, within your soul and outwardly in your daily life. Re-unite with your soul. Imagine if we all did just that!

Does Consciousness Create the Universe?

“Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.”

– John Archibald Wheeler

The beginning of time, according to quantum physics, could have come not with the big bang, but the first moment where consciousness proclaimed “NOW”. In the now, is born the past, the future, and the whole story line of cause and effect. Is consciousness fundamental to creation, and can the frequency of this “Now” rhythm speed up or slow down? If the rhythm of my “Nows” is creating my universe, then who is creating yours?

 

“Let’s assume the whole universe is a quantum system… when you take out the observer participant, you have a problem of frozen time. The universe does not evolve, it doesn’t change, nothing happens,” said Alan Wallace, expert on Tibetan Buddhism at SAND 2015.

Quantum physics has long been stunned by the measurement problem. The experimental evidence that the intrusion of the observer is actually effecting the outcome of observed phenomena between wave and particle has become as mind-boggling of the Shroedinger cat which is both dead, alive, both or neither.

The participatory universe was proposed scientifically by the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler, colleague to Einstein and Bohr. Wheeler is best known for linking the term “black hole” to objects with gravitational collapse already predicted early in the 20th century, and for coining the terms “quantum foam”, “neutron moderator”, “wormhole” and “it from bit”, and for hypothesizing the “one-electron universe”.

“The universe and the observer exist as a pair. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of the universe that ignores consciousness.”

-Andrei Linde of Stanford University

In the final decades of his life, the question that intrigued Wheeler most was: “Are life and mind irrelevant to the structure of the universe, or are they central to it?” He suggested that the nature of reality was revealed by the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics. According to the quantum theory, before the observation is made, a subatomic particle exists in several states, called a superposition (or, as Wheeler called it, a ‘smoky dragon’). Once the particle is observed, it instantaneously collapses into a single position.

Wheeler suggested that reality is created by observers and that: “no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” He coined the term “Participatory Anthropic Principle” (PAP) from the Greek “anthropos”, or human. He went further to suggest that “we are participants in bringing into being not only the near and here, but the far away and long ago.”

This claim was considered rather outlandish until his “delayed-choice experiment,” which was tested in a laboratory in 1984. This experiment was a variation on the famous “double-slit experiment” in which the dual nature of light was exposed (depending on how the experiment was measured and observed, the light behaved like a particle (a photon) or like a wave).

In Wheeler’s version, the method of detection was changed AFTER a photon had passed the double slit. The experiment showed that the path of the photon was not fixed until the physicists made their measurements. The results of this experiment, as well as another conducted in 2007, proved what Wheeler had always suspected – observers’ consciousness is required to bring the universe into existence. This means that a pre-life Earth would have existed in an undetermined state, and a pre-life universe could only exist retroactively.

“Stronger than the anthropic principle is what I might call the participatory principle,” said Wheeler, “According to it, we could not even imagine a universe that did not somewhere and for some stretch of time contain observers because the very building materials of the universe are these acts of observer-participancy. You wouldn’t have the stuff out of which to build the universe otherwise. This participatory principle takes for its foundation the absolutely central point of the quantum: no elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed (or registered) phenomenon.”

Today, most people still believe there is an external world out there. “Why should a particle out there change its behavior depending on whether you watch it or not?” asks Robert Lanza, whose Biocentric view of the universe has having a significant impact on the fundamental belief systems of 21st century science. “The particles aren’t just “out there”. Space and time are tools of our mind, they’re tools of animal understanding.”

 

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

– Max Planck

 

SHUT UP STUPID! Murder in the Wilderness of Mind

Angel sits on the edge of her chair, in a heavenly unity with her father, mother and older brother. She has just eaten her scrambled eggs and is full of life and a joy at being together at the table with her family. Her Dad is explaining something to her brother. Angel tries to join in the conversation. They keep ignoring her, but she keeps trying. At a certain moment, Angel’s Dad rolls his eyes to the ceiling and grasps his car-keys, ready to leave. “Shut up, stupid!” hisses her brother. Her mother throws her a scornful glance. Angel’s throat clenches up, and she blushes deeply. She turns her eyes down, and experiences a tremendous jealousy and rage. It feels like her insides are falling through her ass into the pit of the hell. At four years old, Angel has received the first blow to the Beginners’ Mind. She doesn’t belong here, she is the ‘Stupid little girl’.

Out of the spirit of pure unity, the innocence of belonging and the joyful naturalness of engagement, Angel has found herself to be a refugee in an ‘adult’ world, unworthy even of an education in how to belong. As a girl, and a younger child, she has been shown that belonging is a survivor’s game without any training. Being ‘clever’ and knowing stuff, are the keys to acceptance, and anything else is simply not enough. At least, this is the belief that is forming.

Beginner’s Mind and the Stupid Wound

Such is the deformation of our current culture, that many of us are formed by traumas such as these. Don’t be fooled. Even (and perhaps especially) the most intelligent, informed adults are often driven by an early need to evade this banishment in the form of being a worth-less, stupid child. If it’s not in our family homes, its bred deeply into our education systems, that rest on a premise that the child’s head is stupid until filled with facts, sums and correct spellings; that judges the child on the basis of this stuff that it is supposed to shelter and regurgitate.

Education is in this era postulated as a means through which objects (of knowledge and information) are housed in the brain, to be reproduced correctly at the appropriate time. The power of inquiry, the openness of experience, the evolution of the neural ability to hold two opposing truths at once, or the conceptual (philosophical) mind that can transcend paradox – while naturally present in children – is left unseen and unaffirmed within the vulgarity of our educational ethos.

Over all this, the threat of being ‘crazy’ is dished out with school dinners as a fate almost worse than death, that can lead not only to exclusion, but also incarceration and torture. Whatever you do, don’t be crazy for long. If you become this mysterious thing called ‘insane’, you’ll cross the stark line of the consensual sane, and you’ll go down, until you won’t even know who you are anymore. It all starts with the carnal error of being ‘stupid’.

Fight, Fight, Freeze

The agony of rejection lights up the brain like a survival threat, mobilizing the central nervous system to take the action needed in order to stay alive.  For Angel, this meant, that at all costs, she had to be clever. Driven by the open wound of not belonging, both as the younger child, and the girl, she began assimilating knowledge and stretching the mind to extreme degrees of thought. Her mental programming became more and more sophisticated to the extent that she learned how to smoke screen others with pure intelligence and knowledge whenever she felt excluded. Although she got a top degree from a top university, the mental charge was sourced in the deep, unfulfilled need to belong, and at a certain stage this became so intense that she moved into psychosis.

For other children, the same command “don’t be stupid” can have the effect of stupifying the brain. Neurons freeze in fear, and the whole mental game is cast aside in place of a kind of privileged rigidity of mind, based on a kind of arbitrary status in the world (“I’m a Christian white-skinned Dutch citizen, so I’m right because I say so.”). Just as Angel used thinking to escape pain, this alternative reaction uses lack of thinking to repress the pain of rejection. Still, the underlying condemnation is:”Shut up, Stupid” – a condemnation that can simmer in pain below the surface of conscious mind for decades.

Beginner’s Mind

It’s not wonder that the concept of Beginner’s Mind can feel horrific at first to many practitioners. The empty head, the brain without thought, the movement out of judgement, can be experienced as a dangerous risk. Thought itself has been conceived and formed as a buttress against precisely this undefended, transparent innocence. When the mind is pure, reality un-violated and consciousness un-controlled, then what demons of jealousy, pain and horror could come loose?

Because of this, the movement into Beginner’s Mind often takes some training and preparation. There needs to be a reversal of the belief that mind dictates reality, to a wisdom that reality, and mind, is actually formed by deeper wounding or responsiveness at the sentient and somatic levels of body, emotion and feeling. When we have developed a calmness and trust which allows the experience of pain to work out through the system, as well as flashes of emotion are traditionally forbidden, such as hate and jealousy, then Beginner’s Mind can open be degrees in a sacred return to the innocence of perception which is our birth-right.

Beginner’s Mind is not stupidity. To call it stupid would be like saying that a perfectly polished mirror is dull, as it has no mud on it. Beginner’s Mind reflects sensory input, even from the most subtle dimensions with precision, precisely due to the lack of interference of history. Nor is Beginner’s Mind unsafe. When sentient pain of separation, rejection, betrayal and loss, can be acknowledge or reflected, then the wider picture can also be perceived, without limitation or without buying into either-or equations. The “I” vanishes as illusion, as Beginner’s Mind purely reflects the ‘other’ from a consciousness that has no judgement. The togetherness already in this, is tremendously healing. Even a conflict is a seen conflict, and every threat is seen, all the way to its origin, including the natural response of the system to the danger.

Educational Trauma

This post began in describing how our educational ethos can be traumatic to our children. Perhaps it is apt to close by pointing out that our educational ethos is itself the result of collective trauma. Terrified of life, bewildered by the control we seem to have through our thinking, bereft of certainty and with nothing but arbitrary truth to clutch hold of, we are behaving like psychotics in our insistence that knowledge, mental content and thought take the prime position at the throne of collective reality.Believing that we can “think” our way out of trouble, while closing down our emotional receptivity and sense-perception to the nature of the trouble itself, we lock ourselves in a bedlam of dualistic thought, blinded to our own demons and delusional about the part played by “others” in bringing us down. Indeed, in the desperate seizure to “know who we are”, we forgot who we are, launching ourselves into an asylum of absurdity and surreal destiny.

Each mind that surrenders to the truth and innocence of its own perception prior to thought; each mind that prostates itself before the miracle of feeling sensation, inside and outside of the individual; each mind that reflects what is here, now, rather than what has been or what will be, is a mind of service to the sanity of the whole. The responsibility is with each and every one of us.

5 Ways to Freedom with Fear & Anxiety

Here are 5 guidelines to generate compassion in these times, and in this, avoiding falling into the hell zone of pure dread.

1. Compassion for Compassion

Compassion is about what is here, now. If you experience fear, disgust, rage or a sense of despair, then the first and most clear object of your compassion must be these feelings. Relaxing the body, you can even give these feeling a voice like the growl of a dog or the cry of an animal in pain. Let your own, free awareness be the source of compassion. Let the feelings move through your awareness, without trying to grasp them, fix them, or repress them.

2. Compassion Moves 

Compassion is a movement of energy through the source of all you are and the rest of all you are. Let the compassion flow, into the steering wheel of your car as you drive, through your feet into the ground as you walk, towards the trees and the living nature that is everywhere around, unnoticed by the human field, even in the densest urban precincts. Let the care move through your hands as you touch an animal or even touch the edge of your chair. Fear and anger shrinks you into a body, compassion returns you to the whole physical environment.

3. Disinvesting Negativity

There’s a good chance that if there is someone that embodies a major threat to you, that there are many others that remind you of him. Ugliness is everywhere and in our pain, we can begin to create a whole perceptive landscape filled with ugly behaviors, people, architecture and other evidences of the ugliness of the whole. In no time, we begin to look and behave pretty ugly ourselves. Next time you catch yourself in the grip of these fields of negativity, try noticing the beauty. Even the most horrible person has an innocence in their little finger. Even the most powerful tyrant is breathing in and out, like a helpless baby. There is always a detail to keep the window of compassion open. Compassion is your birth-right, don’t let it be hijacked by horror.

4. True Nature

The greatest threat by all parties of humankind right now is towards the planet itself. In the rift between humanity and the whole, we find the greatest dread and the most horrific structure of arrogance and power. A good way to step out of the insanity of human is to honor nature both inside and outside of ourselves – the water, the earth element, the air element and the fire (heat). Nature is alive all around and through us, yet we are programmed to ignore it.

If you find yourself caught in our woeful human entanglements, try just three mindful breaths. Breath in all that is human right now, and breath out nature. Breath in what is here, in you, as human, and slowly breath out all that is nature – the trees, rivers, clouds, sky, mountains, animals, fish and distant galaxies.

5. Be 4 Real

Last and perhaps most importantly, remember that compassion is always out of the and-and. It’s about togetherness, being ‘with’ whatever is anyway already here. Compassion is not a means to escape, a means to defeat or a means to confront. It’s as important to our physical and psycho-spiritual well-being as oxygen and regardless of any conflict we’re engaged in, it can be in the picture as well. It doesn’t take sides, but rather, it’s a paradigm shift which is possible inwardly, behind every fight.

“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein

Nondual Therapy, Experiential Pathways, Nondual Dimensions

“If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin.” 

C.G. Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected Writings

Nondual therapy is the natural child of spiritual psychology and nonduality.

Somewhere between the nondual realization or awakening and the regular person’s life, there is a dramatic healing impact, leading to more freedom of mind and feeling, deeper emotional intelligence, and a greater sense of well-being.

“If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?” George Carlin

Out of the nondual awakening, a healing process begins, which can be both a revolution and/or an evolution. This work is intended to support that process, through all the layers of liberation from limitations of mind, soul and body.

Duality is fundamental to our physical universe. Just as we have two arms and two eyes, we have a left side and a right side, a front and a behind. Our planet is existing between North and South poles, and even the smallest particles of matter operate through polarity.

These natural polarities naturally come to balance and harmony within form, but on top of this natural duality, human beings have the freedom to create artificial polarities. These artificial polarities – such as the separation between the individual self and the world – scar the free flow of energy throughout the whole system through creating energetic contractions, conflict, discord and energetic entities of suffering.

“One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.”
Alan Wilson Watts

The release of disharmony between polarities and the return to naturalness depends on non-intervention – not grasping and not pushing away. Yet disentanglement is hardly possible from the perspective of the entangled knot. The freedom needed for the restoration of harmony always depends on the time and space to rest in a third position, beyond the local duality.

Instinctively, we know this. It’s that moment when we turn to a loved one and rest our duality battle in her non-judgemental arms. Or it’s that time when we reach out to a higher power to help us, to be lifted out of the narrowing spiral of a suffering form.

Nondual therapy brings the experiential pathways to move more easily and safely into dimensions beyond duality, revealing a new breadth of freedom in form as the limitations of old patterns are by degrees released and transformed.

We make out of the quarrel with others,

rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves,

poetry.

William Butler Yeats

To find out about online sessions in Nondual Therapy and Awakening, click here.

Consciousness Beyond Life, The Science of the Near-Death Experience

‘To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal’ .  William James

Dr. Pim van Lommel, a renowned cardiologist, is the first medical practitioner to have undertaken a full, systematic study of near-death experiences (NDEs). As a cardiologist, he was struck by the number of his patients who claimed to have near-death experiences as a result of their heart attacks. As a scientist, this was difficult for him to accept: Wouldn’t it be scientifically irresponsible of him to ignore the evidence of these stories? Faced with this dilemma, van Lommel decided to design a research study to investigate the phenomenon under the controlled environment of a cluster of hospitals with a medically trained staff. For more than twenty years van Lommel systematically studied such near-death experiences in a wide variety of hospital patients who survived a cardiac arrest. In 2001, he and his fellow researchers published his study on near-death experiences in the renowned medical journal The Lancet. The article caused an international sensation as it was the first scientifically rigorous study of this phenomenon. 

Van Lommel writes that according to our current medical concepts it’s not possible to experience consciousness during a cardiac arrest, when circulation and breathing have ceased. But during the period of unconsciousness due to a life-threatening crisis like cardiac arrest patients may report the paradoxical occurrence of enhanced consciousness experienced in a dimension without our conventional concept of time and space, with cognitive functions, with emotions, with self-identity, with memories from early childhood and sometimes with (extra-sensory) perception out and above their lifeless body. In four prospective studies with a total of 562 survivors of cardiac arrest between 11% and 18% of the patients reported a near-death experience, and in these studies it could not be shown that physiological, psychological, pharmacological or demographic factors could explain the cause and content of these experiences.

Since the publication of these prospective studies on NDE in survivors of cardiac arrest, with strikingly similar results and conclusions, the phenomenon of the NDE can no longer be scientifically ignored. It is an authentic experience which cannot be simply reduced to imagination, fear of death, hallucination, psychosis, the use of drugs, or oxygen deficiency, and people appear to be permanently changed by an NDE during a cardiac arrest of only some minutes duration. According to these studies, the current materialistic view of the relationship between the brain and consciousness held by most physicians, philosophers and psychologists is too restricted for a proper understanding of this phenomenon. There are good reasons to assume that our consciousness does not always coincide with the functioning of our brain: enhanced consciousness can sometimes be experienced separate from the body. Van Lommel has come to the inevitable conclusion that most likely the brain must have a facilitating and not a producing function to experience consciousness. By making a scientific case for consciousness as a nonlocal and thus ubiquitous phenomenon he questions a purely materialist paradigm in science.

Near-death experience

Some people who have survived a life-threatening crisis report an extraordinary consciousness experience. A near-death experience (NDE) can be defined as the reported memory of a range of impressions during a special state of consciousness, including a number of special elements such as pleasant feelings, seeing a tunnel, a light or deceased relatives, or experiencing a life review, or an out-of-body experience with perception of one’s own cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

Many circumstances are described during which related special and enhanced states of consciousness are reported, Such states include cardiac arrest (clinical death), shock after loss of blood, coma due to traumatic brain injury or intra-cerebral haemorrhage, near-drowning (mostly children) or asphyxia, but also in serious diseases not immediately life-threatening, during isolation, depression or meditation, or without any obvious reason. So an NDE can be experienced in a range of circumstances from severe injury of the brain as in cardiac arrest to continuum when the brain seems to function normally. What distinguishes a NDE is that it is a transforming experience causing enhanced intuitive sensibility, profound changes in attitude to life, and the loss of fear of death.

An experience

This is the story of a woman who experienced a near-death experience during delivery.

“Suddenly I realise I am looking down on a woman who is lying on a bed with her legs in supports. I see the nurses and doctors panicking, I see a lot of blood on the bed and on the floor, I see large hands pressing down hard on the woman’s belly, and then I see the woman giving birth. The child is immediately taken to another room. I know our daughter is dead. The nurses look dejected. Everybody is waiting. My head is knocked back hard when the pillow is pulled away. Once again, I witness a great commotion. Swift as an arrow I fly through a dark tunnel. I am engulfed by an overwhelming feeling of peace and bliss. I hear wonderful music. I see beautiful colours and gorgeous flowers in all sorts of colours in a large meadow. At the far end is a beautiful, clear, warm light. This is where I must go. I see a figure in a light garment. This figure is waiting for me and extends her hand. I feel that I am warmly and lovingly expected. We proceed hand in hand to the beautiful and warm light. Then she lets go of my hand and turns around. I feel that I am pulled back. I notice a nurse slapping me hard on my cheeks and calling me”.

“Once returned from that beautiful world, that beautiful experience, my reception here in this world was cold, frosty and above all loveless. The nurse I tried to share my beautiful experience with dismissed it by saying I would soon receive some more medication so I could sleep soundly and then it would be all over. All over? I did not want that at all. On the contrary, I did not want it to be over. I wanted to go back. The gynaecologist told me I was still young, I could have plenty more children and I should just move on and focus on the future. I stopped telling my story. Just to find words for my experience was difficult enough, how could words express what I had experienced? But what else could I do? Where could I take my story? What was the matter with me? Had I gone mad?”

“During that time I lived like an automaton. Although I looked after my husband and our first daughter, and walked the dog, my mind was elsewhere. My mind was with my experience. How could I reconnect with it? Where could I hear such beautiful music, see such a beautiful colors, find such gorgeous flowers, see such a beautiful light, experience so much unconditional love? And, was I mad for thinking these things? What was the matter with me? And I kept silent. I spent years dedicated to a silent search.  When, eventually, I found a book in the library with a report of an NDE, I could hardly imagine that I had had such an experience. Surely it’s impossible? Even I had stopped believing myself. Only very, very gradually did I come to have the courage and the strength to believe myself, to trust my experience, so I could start accepting and integrating it in my life. It was not easy. I was finding it more and more difficult to accept the opinions of others, of colleagues. My inner conflict intensified, I felt at odds with what my feelings told me and with what I knew. Everything became increasingly difficult”.

“Only many years later I realize I am not mad but that my NDE has changed me. This is why my fear of death has completely disappeared. This is a marked difference compared to the years prior to my NDE, years in which I wrestled with death and with the fear of death. This is why I struggle with the concept of time. Nowadays I always lose track of time, whereas before I lived by the clock. This is why material things are not important to me. This is why the only thing that matters to me is unconditional love. And this is what I had and continue to have with my husband. And yet I recently read in a study that unconditional love is impossible between human beings. And they refuse to believe me! This is why I sometimes feel like an outsider. This is why I am always, especially during holidays, on the lookout for landscapes, for colors and flowers which I have seen but cannot find again. This is why I have a problem with quarrelling – I want to go back to those peaceful surroundings. I am also incapable of picking a row myself.”

“Having made the journey to my inner self to reach the point where I am now, I am glad I had my NDE. I accept it as a beautiful experience, which calms me, which allows me to be myself, with my experience. Life is good now, with my experience. By integrating my NDE this world has become a better place. Only since I started accepting and integrating my NDE have I come to take some pleasure in life again.”