Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 24

The Dark Side of the Mirror Neuron – When All Hell Breaks Loose

Why do good people do bad things? How is that sometimes we’re swept away on a flood of negative emotion and later apologize, saying “I wasn’t myself”? How do despots persuade the people to murder on their behalf, to sacrifice even their lives for destructive causes? The answer can be partly be found in the dark side of the mirror neuron.

Mirror Neurons – coined ’empathy neurons’ have opened the flood gates to new understandings in neurobiology and neuropsychology. Italian neurophysiologists Rizzolatti, Di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, and Gallese at the University of Parma discovered this empathic resonance in the brain of monkeys, it opened the flood gates of research opportunity – in areas ranging from autism, Parkinsons, to whole new theories of mind. Here, at I AM HERE, we have raised the possibility that the mirror neuron system is a biological means through which self contemplation, healing, awakening and spiritual liberation can occur (see: To be conscious of consciousness: mirror neurons and human freedom.)

The brain is a neutral organ of perception in which there is no such thing as ‘good’ neurons and ‘bad’ neurons. It’s an interdependent system of connectivity, like your personal computer. Mirror neurons reflect the biological means through which we attune to the energetic resonance moving through us, either through our own cells or the environment, and often both. They allow us to blend with the love between species, with the peace of the universe and with the inviolable sense of belonging of all that is.

Yet there is another side. When we are in a room full of angry people, we resonate with the anger – and even with the layers of feeling or emotion moving through it. That is, we experience the vibration as our own. This plays out whether or not we consciously agree with the anger. Refusal to merge with the anger then will reflect itself in the resonance of fear – the flip side of the energy of threat.

Sitting in a room full of professional mediators in the midst of vicious divorce proceedings, I observed this in action. During the first five minutes there was good intention, procedure, etiquette and a clear intention to look objectively at the issues in hand in order to find solutions for the whole. One person in the room, the husband, was in full survival mode, energetically and physically broadcasting rage, contempt and cataclysmic horror. Within 15 minutes, I looked at the room of cool professionals in amazement at what had happened. Each one was screaming into the space in front of them with urgency and compulsion. No-one was listening to anyone. None of them even cared that they weren’t being heard. The overriding compulsion was to express – get rid of – this inner rage or horror immediately. They lost themselves in his field, despite the fact that none of them had a personal investment or risk in the outcome. As we say (and we know what we mean) – All hell breaks loose.

Mirror neurons fire when we just watch another person doing a task, as if we were doing the task ourselves. The border between the self and the ‘other’ literally breaks down. As Prof. Ramachandran points out in the video below, the only thing separating us from other human beings “is our own skin”. Yet there is an additional monitor on our merging with the environment, known as the frontal parietal cortex. This system, spanning left and right sides of the brain, is the inhibitor of mirror neurons through the signals it gives off through discernment – “This is not my body that is being tortured, it’s only on TV”. This inhibits a fully embodied experience of what we perceive is happening in a space removed from ourselves. It’s a system of a control

 

Meditation effects the parietal cortex, as do certain psychodelic drugs. Psychodelics decrease its activity, which can lead to the experiential intensity of a good or very bad trip. Meditation however, seems to introduce a greater degree of discernment through the development of the neural pathway of the and-and. Without losing the stillness of self, the emotions of the ‘other’ or even of the ‘other’ inside ourselves, can be experienced as a happening within the stillness. This allows mirror neurons to serve the purpose of liberation – through empathy towards another’s condition or attunement to the energetic atmospheres of the environment, without the loss of center that leads to identification, entanglement and reactivity. Through meditation, the inhibitory control centers of the brain develop through practice to a form of mastery, where inhibition of experience is no longer fear-driven. Every experience can run through the system, without compromising the deeper center of the system.

Between this and that, mirror neurons not only reflect the surface of what’s playing out around us and through us, but can also reflect more root causes. That is, with education and training, they can become the servants of compassion. As a function of our own emotional intelligence, mirror neurons can attune, for example, not to the rage itself, but to the despair beneath that. At this frontier between self and other, inside and outside, our ability to stay ‘free’ is a direct function of our own unfinished business with unresolved emotions, old depressions or trauma. In this we can become confused, and the confusion is always an invitation to deeper self healing. In this, the parietal cortex is not a control freak or means to repress resonance, but potentially an instrument of spiritual discernment and attunment – rather like the dial on a radio. In its mastery, it can scan, tune in and tune out to emotional vibration, without being enslaved in the reflex to grasp or reject.

The implications of this are tremendous. In the classic coupling of narcissist with care-taker for example, the unspoken rage of the narcissist can be experienced by the care-taker as inner despair or a contraction of guilt. With this, he could identify and entangle, separating himself from the resources around him. He might not be aware that also this despair and guilt is a shared field with the narcissist – which is entangling with the core drive behind his personality structure of ‘taking care’. The energy of guilt couples with accusation, as the hitherto caring individual begins accusing the world, humanity or God in an attempt to get free. At the stress frontier between freedom and entanglement, entanglement won. The good guy is even in a rage. This is what the poet Andrew Harvey meant when he said that we need to sometimes look into the dimensions of hell, but don’t look for too long, or we become it.

When a man stands on the podium under bright lights and broadcasts his despair in the form of rage towards the betrayal of the ‘other’, just about everyone is vulnerable. The most wounded will feel the rage awaken first-hand within themselves and could well turn to violence in order to express it (or get rid of it). When this suffering is intensified through the gender split and sexual humiliation, then the whole resonated with the rift between man and woman, and the bloody age-long power war between the sexes in the drive to determine who sets the flavor of unity.

The savior on the podium arrives, an open channel of rising rage. Mirror neurons fire without discernment between self and other. Reward chemicals flood the brain with the experience of strength and unity. The crowd experiences an addictive, temporary, collective liberation from fear, as they become the threat itself, with all its seeming power and glory.

Yet onlookers are also effected. Their mirror neurons are also firing. Perhaps free enough of the identification with anger, they don’t consciously board the ideology of rage. But instead, they experience the despair, the horror, and the nightmare of exclusion which is beneath the rage. They experience themselves as the target. With this, they could get locked in identification with form, moving into depression, a sense of hopelessness and an old, inner conviction that our world is doomed (condemnation/guilt).

In these times, the energy of despotism is rising again throughout our land. The rage of suffering is heard everywhere from the bloodied hills of ISIS through to the Brexit and the anti-splendour of the rise of such a phenomena as Donald Trump. Many have commented that history is moving in cycles and that we face another dark time of war and destruction. Seen in terms of epigenetic trauma – trauma inherited through the generations – this could well be true. The agony of both abuser and abused through two wars and a great depression has not yet been genetically liberated and brought to peace – partly due to intense victim-identification that introduces new faces of arrogant righteousness and polarization. We will address these collective epigenetic cycles in a future article.

“Staying free as awareness within the nightmare is the highest service we can offer.”

For now, the message of both the bright and dark side of mirror neurons is this: just because you experience feelings and emotions first-hand, even with a sense of full blown intimacy, don’t be fooled into believing that these privately belong to you. Your inner experience is inseparable from the environment and is composed of nervous phenomena that arise and pass through. All this passes through you, but it’s not who you are. Feelings and emotions are contractions in motion: they are phenomena in time and space. You are the source of time and space – which is by definition endless and infinite. Through not grasping and not pushing away, but rather resting in this source, the parietal system is able to evolve into its higher purpose, as an orchestrator and reflector of the and/and -formlessness and form, in which repression and denial is no longer a compulsion. Staying free as awareness within the nightmare is the highest service we can offer.  This is the more evolved movement of nondiscriminatory mind and compassion through which we can find freedom from the historic cycles of despotism and despair.

 

 

 

8 Good Things About Trump at the Top

In calling the bluff on Washington, Trump effectively said: ‘The King is Naked’. Can we begin to truly see that the despot that has been deciding the future of our planet is indeed naked? As global hope falls and Obama Care has the plugs pulled, the website of the Canadian immigration authorities has crashed and CNN is talking about the biggest political upheaval of the century. While David Attenborough has suggested shooting Donald Trump as a compassionate option, here are some advantages we could find in having a Trump at the top.

“Voldemort was nowhere near as bad.”
J.K. Rowling of Donald J.Trump.”

1. We Get a Wake-Up Call: If by now it wasn’t clear that the world is run by insane people for insane agendas, now we’re going to be getting a daily reminder. This is a chance to see clearly through the hypnotic trance of media control and social coercion in which we are being led by a head-less beast of greed and self-interest, driven by short-term commercial incentives.

2 Walking the Talk: This is for real. Not only humanity, but also the planet needs us to walk the talk. If we don’t embody respect, compassion and wisdom in our daily lives, daily life threatens to become a daily beast. Spirituality is not a fashion, it’s a global responsibility. This is our chance to put our notions in our feet and to walk the talk.



3. Braving Up: Under the umbrella of what appeared to be a safe democracy, we snoozed into feeling that somehow, in some way, we’re protected by an outside authority. Uncle Sam will take care of us. This actually stopped us from moving through the base-lines of the fears that block our freedom. It’s easy to ‘be against’ the rape of the rain forests and the ravaging of our plant for the last remaining drops of oil, while still driving a big petrol-guzzling car. The battle of care has now come closer to home.

4. The Chance to Rehearse Integrity: If Trump supporters and part of the US police force begin acting out the ethics shown in the campaign, there could well come a time when you witness a racial or sexual assault – if not against yourself, then towards another. What do you do? What’s the wisest, most effective way to respond? Now is the time to contemplate correct action.

5. We Get a Scapegoat: On the dark side of the spiritual line. We’ve now got an object to blame for everything that’s wrong and toxic in our environment. Yes, it’s a cheap one, and blaming others won’t get us far, but at least evil has a face. How holy we can feel ourselves to be, when there is a Trump at the top. Also, Trump stress is generating a new league of humor. Thanks to the Trump phenomena, we’re slowly learning to laugh again.


6. Corporate America has a Face: The ‘evil’ we previously felt was driving the logic of war and suffering in our world now has a human form. Greed, selfishness, narcissism, abuse, opportunism and general ugly sleeziness now has a face. Trump will expose how the wheel turns, clog by clog. His vanity will demand it and stupidity combined with temperament means we’re going to get a clear view into the workings of hell.

7. The World Still Turns: Countries that felt the sporadic intervention of the US in their affairs for reasons that have not been always humanitarian can begin again to feel their independence. Trump will be too busy with local power conflicts in his own country to mess with others. He is also too stupid to either dream up or implement a plan for the planet. A disenfranchised world watched their future decided by American voters. Now, perhaps, America will need the world to fan the flames of freedom through its own people.

8. The White-lash and Wisdom: It has been said that Trump is a reaction to Obama. That means that for sure we can expect a reaction to Trump. This is a mobilizer for change, at a deeper level beneath the conscious minds of Trump’s voters. Disenchantment is inevitable and right there, in that space where beliefs collapse, we have a chance to tap into and express the deeper wisdom around what’s needed for our shared, collective future. In this, the consistent realization will be that what’s needed is a change in education. Trump and his family seem to be victims of trauma. They are emanating the fear and threat of the divided self. Can we dis-invest from the trauma they privately embody and invest in the compassion that can transform all trauma into freedom for the sake of all our children?

 

The Pain of Rejection & A Hall of Mirrors

Science has shown that meditation offers the chance to form new neural pathways that rise beyond the addictive twin trap of acceptance V rejection, condemnation V redemption, or self V other. In this, the suffering of rejection is immensely relieved, not by numbing the pain, but by rising above the duality. 

The pain of rejection can be so overwhelming that we build a thousand walls and moats around ourselves to avoid feeling it. Rejection is an emergency, launching the whole system into survival mode. Often, short-term survival mode boils down to the basic raw instinct: kill or be killed. Reject first, to avoid rejection. It’s them or us; me or you.

Long-term, unconscious strategies against the threat of rejection involves anticipation, projection or obsession with the reactions of others; masking who we “really” are; imitation of projected successful people; and a lot of imagination and plotting. Such is the threat of the pain of rejection, that it’s directly linked to an organization of experience in terms of superiority and inferiority. Within this quest for the survival of the personal psyche, even equality can become an equality complex.

It’s all far removed from the clarity and beauty of relaxing into the living presence of all we are. The fear can be so great that it’s not anchored either in the present time or space. That is, we can spend hours in the comfort of our own beds in mental trepidation about the anticipated pain of rejection that might come tomorrow at the party, or alternatively, that happened previously – perhaps even a very long time ago.

Rejection is linked to trauma . Yet unlike a trauma, in which we break connection with an unwanted aspect of experience due to the pure pain of it, in rejection between people, WE ARE THE TRAUMA. The threat of rejection is a threat of expulsion – from the tribe on which we depend for survival. All the four collective fears of traditional psychology are linked to rejection.


The fear of death: in nature, when a herd excludes one animal, it will probably die alone.
The fear of illness: illness is in nature is an underlying motive to reject one member of the herd – to isolate him or her, for the sake of the whole.
The fear of insanity: collectively, we reject those considered ‘insane’, confining them out of sight, as if mental disorder were contagious.
The fear of sexuality: rejection games between genders and over the whole gender issue, coupled with vast fields of rejection and projection around sexuality, makes sexuality a forerunner in the horrific rejection game.


In this sense, the fear of rejection would appear to be a meta-fear – more powerful and over-riding even than the threat of death. The pain of rejection goes with physical sensations – we literally seize up and contract around the wounding, as an emergency containment measure. It has mental sensation – releasing stress hormones that over-activate the control centers and vastly inhibit the firing of mirror neurons – so-called ’empathy neurons’. Emotionally, if we let it, the pain of rejection can feel like a hemorrhage of despair – we are literally bleeding out from the center of the chest.

[image error]The fear of rejection leads us to reject ourselves in ways that increase suffering. We reject our authentic feelings, we repress our voice, we adjust attitudes to conform and rearrange our faces to fit the occasion. We dress to please the imagined ‘other’ and we constantly keep a private eye on how the show is going down. We lose our naturalness,authenticity, harmony, and most tragically of all, our sense of belonging in freedom. Intimacy becomes forbidden as we progressively wither through a hall of conflicting mirrors. Life becomes one great game of survival and isolation – but no-one ever fired a bullet.

Acceptance can antidote rejection, but also feeds the belief. Meditation helps transcend the notion that any external authority has the power to reject what is anyway already here.

According to a study conducted by the University of Michigan Medical School, that metaphorical stab in the heart registers in the brain in same way as an actual physical stabbing.

Subjects with a high resilience to the pain of rejection were found to be producing natural pain killers – chemical opioids – into the gaps between neurons in the amygdala, which dampens pain signals in the brain region associated with emotion, survival and instinct. Such opioids determine the amount of pain experienced, whether its cause is physical or emotional. Cognitive-based approaches found to reduce pain, such as hypnosis, acupuncture, distraction and even the placebo response, have been shown to work through this system.

[image error]

However, In March 2016, Science Daily reported that Mindfulness Meditation, unlike its holistic counterparts, reduces pain without the activation of pain-killing opioids. The researchers suggested that meditation, rather than recruiting opioids in the brain, reduces the pain experience through using different pathways of neurons.

Love me, Love me not: the Rejection Catch 22

The irony is that for as long as we invest in the external circumstance or authorities to give us the seal of acceptance, we create a shadow of potential authority. That same authority that accepts you today, can reject you tomorrow.  Our state of mind and heart is perpetually held hostage to the Mengele-like thumb of survival – thumbs up or thumbs down. While opioids might give a feeling of success, success makes failure a real possibility. We are caught in a spiral driven by a bottom-less pit of lack or non-safety at the core of ourselves.

For a while, we can compensate the pain of rejection with the production of opioids. Scientists are even pondering manufacturing a medication to stimulate them for sufferers of depression and anxiety disorder. Yet this risks keeping us dependent on circumstance – addicted even, to the rush of feeling appreciated. We need ever increasing quantities of the reward chemical from the one whose appreciation and acceptance of us boosts those opioids – literally to numb the pain. This can be a person we admire, or a source of reward in which we seem to receive public applause and appreciation. Yet the opioid source itself does not take away the pain, it simply kills its registration in the brain – temporarily. Physically seen, the knife is still in the chest!


[image error]

Can the right hand reject the left?

The beauty of mindfulness meditation is that it brings perspective to the tyranny of pain, it makes the pain relative to the rest of life, without taking the pain away through repression, suppression or denial. It introduces elements of space and time to any experience. It forms a neural pathway that literally transcends the stark duality of acceptance/rejection. Where thought, feeling and flesh is contracting, it brings space and timelessness to the dimension of experience, which can relax the contraction. When working with the in-breath and out-breath, it brings the rhythm of the miracle of being physically alive in the here and now. Pain loses its autocratic control over the system.

“Science has shown that meditation offers the chance to form new neural pathways that rise beyond the addictive twin trap of acceptance V rejection, condemnation V redemption, or self V other. In this, the suffering of rejection is immensely relieved, not by numbing the pain, but by rising above the duality.”

As with physical pain, so it is with the pain of rejection. The moment we allow ourselves to feel the feeling, to recognize the wounding, even without need for objectivity, we create space. That which can allow the feeling is always already free from the feeling itself, no matter how intense. A spaciousness emerges through allowance of our own sensitivity, which means we also become sensitive to beauty, to pleasure, to the blessings of the moment which are also here, together with the pain. In this, the tunnel vision of a traumatic state is potentially avoided, or at least reduced in its capacity to get a firm grip. The threat of being forever, existentially condemned which is embedded in the pain of rejection, is annulled.

Anything within us that could be rejected is not who we truly are, it’s simply an aspect of form. In this, the pain of rejection can even serve our process of liberation in signalling where we’re not yet free of identification and where we still cleave to imagined authorities.

Rejection is one of the deeper illusions connected to the belief in a separate self: the belief that we are ultimately severed from our physical origins; from others; and from the universe. We’re talking about a trance state that is tremendously hypnotic, collectively nurtured, and which is deeply ingrained in our intimate belief structures. Nevertheless, freedom is possible, of mind, heart and body.

“It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj

Everything that exists, exists as part of the whole. We can deny existence, but every phenomena still has its place in time and space intricately connected and interdependent with everything else in an ongoing play of action and reaction.

The pain of rejection hurts, but it will not kill us. Through allowing the pain of rejection we can cultivate new neural networks of resilience beyond the polarity of either-or, or “me” verses the “other”. By degrees, masks fall away and we become more firmly established in our own fluid authenticity and the truth of our own authority. In this, there is less fear and far more clarity in allowing the flow of life through us. This is the inner empowerment on which the future of all of us depends.

Neuroplasticity – Nonduality of the Living Brain

Historically, we believed that the brain stops growing after childhood. In this decade, science has established that this is not true. The brain is constantly evolving and open for transformation. Significant changes in brain mass, connectivity and performance can be encouraged for as long as we live.

Loosely used, neuroplasticity refers to this almost miraculous ability of the brain to reform itself. On the level of neural networks, this is about connectivity, association and identification. From the nondual perspective, it is about the power to transform our minds out of a predetermined, binary system, in order to access greater, non-discriminating aspects of our human potential. The key ingredient? Unconditioned conscious awareness. Living without a cause. Neuroplasticity is fundamentally about the healing power of presence.

The maxim is that: neurons that fire together, wire together.

This means that if it has been learned that spiders are a death threat, then neurons associating spiders with extreme fear will instantaneously go off together, even on standing on a ball of wool. The more this happens, the more concrete the association becomes.

Yet although the spider phobia becomes the road most traveled, it’s not the only road possible. New networks can form through the repeated creation of new associations through adding new aspects to the experience. The ‘road most traveled’ will stay for a while, but other possibilities are added which dramatically decreases stress – the biochemistry of immediate survival which is an inhibitor of transformation.

Many neural networks are subconscious. This is because we have been collectively programmed according to the logic of fear and survival. Because the programming is fear based, our first reflex is to withdraw our consciousness – even from our own reflexive fear responses. This is based on a core experiential belief around perception – that if you don’t look at it, it’s not there. It is rather like the instinct of covering our eyes to make an experience go away, or as we see in children, covering their own eyes to make the world go away.

Because such networks of repeated suffering are less conscious, they are also less available to be released. We can’t heal something if we don’t allow it to be there in the first place! In this, there is always an aspect of attending awareness from above or beyond the brain activity which is critical to change and transformation. Without being mindful of the experiential map of our minds, we encounter difficulty seeing new routes.

Imagine that for generations, your family has walked a particular path to the ocean. It’s imprinted in your genes. It’s been taught you by both your parents and grandparents. Even your local school has never challenged the assumption that this is the one and only possible path. One day, somebody takes you in a flying machine above the terrain. You see the well-known route to the ocean. It curls, climbs a steep slope, bends backward, and then twists back to descend a perilous cliff edge. Even though the ground is smooth and the way is clear from having been walked so often, it goes through a reserve of poisonous snakes. Indeed, some of your ancestors were bitten and never made it – which is given as a reason for continuing to walk the same, known path. From above, you see another way. It’s overgrown with brambles, but it’s smooth, direct and safe. All you need is to walk it for the first time and cut out the foliage. Each time you do this, it will get easier. Nobody needs to die. In fact, on this direct route, you get the view of the ocean before you every step of the way. Your family might think you’re crazy. But who would not forge out the new path having seen the terrain from above? Who would not show this easier way to the children? The old pathway is still there, to be used if needed, but other options have emerged.

Neuroplasticity involves releasing the exclusive rights of one pattern or pathway, and allowing others to form. Between one road and the next, there is a transcendental position required, that is not obligated to any path. This means that consciousness unhooks from predetermined reactions and rests elsewhere – whether it is through mindful breathing, visualizing a triangle, repeating a mantra or blessing, or simply opening the awareness of the contact with the feet on the ground. This resting in a third point unhooks the destined pathway by adding first one, and then a range of possibilities to the inner landscape. Teachings such as the Power of the Now of Eckhart Tolle, provide, for example, a position to encourage neuroplasticity by referencing the present moment – the ‘here’ and ‘now’. Through the wider freedom of a transcendental point of reference, new possibilities emerge, even at a somatic or unconscious level.

Among other things, neuroplasticity means that emotions such as happiness and compassion can be cultivated in much the same way that a person can learn through repetition to play golf and basketball or master a musical instrument, and that such practice changes the activity and physical aspects of specific brain areas.

Andrew Weil

Neuroplasticity takes place in the healing of memories. Here there is some confusion and the idea can provoke some anger, as there is a clinging to the established story – “What happened, happened! It can NEVER be undone.” While this is true, most painful memories involve the re-experiencing of a very limited collection of neural networks. Partly, this is the chonological memory – the order in which it happened, but more so it is the experiential memory.

Experiential memory is alive in the moment – it is here and now. Within this living quality, memory can expand and contract. It can expand to offer that same over-view of the terrain – including the experience of the other person or people. It can access or allow the experience beneath the experience. For example, beneath the rage, there could be pain. Beneath the pain, there could be loss. Beneath the loss, there could be love. Within the love, there could be a quality of beauty. Out of the beauty comes a desire to express.

Without changing any of the established events of the ‘happening’, memory increases its plasticity, with new neural networks forming that reveal new perspective, identification, association and possibility. Just one detail of a traumatic memory can be enough to break open a fixed network. Think of a traumatic event in your life. Ask yourself a random question that you never thought of before, such as: what shoes were you wearing? What was the feeling in your hands?

By domino effect, neurons that associate problems as being fixed, predetermined and unchangeable also become more relative. The very movement of transformation means the neuron that shouts “doomed!” in perpetual self-condemnation runs out of ammunition. With this, the experience of transformation itself becomes associated not with danger, but with well-being, freedom and strength.

Whereas pathways previously had the agenda of escaping pain, new networks follow the incentive of freedom to ever-increasing degrees – even beyond the boundaries of the private individual. This is supported by the whole body-mind that inherently yearns toward peace and well-being.

SLEEP ME HOME – Georgi Y. Johnson

SLEEP ME HOME

Some say it’s fallacy

to deny half the time

living here,

in shelter without walls

The obliterating, open

chamber of choice-less love

where you and I

are one.

Some say it’s far

from fact and fiction too,

the eclipse of self,

where angels fall

and demons rise, mocking

the holy dove so true

(but their sleep’s clocking –

If at all).

Sleep, she’s broken wholeness,

peace without a floor,

joy before the chore

and endless sprays

of silence sourcing

each nervous tentacle of life,

birthing multiverse

unreflecting;

the home behind the head;

softly, softly, softly

merging the living

and the dead.

Georgi Y. Johnson

I AM HERE: a Great Awakening to Inherent Nonduality

At present, over seven billion people are alive on the planet. With the emergence of the incredible power of global communication, across time and space and across borders of nationality, culture or religion, for many the very idea of countries with borders and separate identities begins to appear ‘last century’.

Within the collapse of both local and global consensus on the nature of ‘reality’ there is born a whip-lash of individualism. Each living perspective of human perception seeks to ‘make something’ of his or herself, or to ‘do something’ with their enhancing, perfecting, embellishing or inflating the importance of their own point of view on this experience we call ‘life’.

Yet, just as the pressure on individuality increases, so does the very lie of individuality, separate self, or separate identity begin to fail. It implodes through the sheer stress of having to be ‘somebody’ other than what it already is. It collapses in exhaustion or burn-out as it stumbles through the unending labyrinth of ‘getting somewhere’ (else). It psychosomatically explodes through the un-felt voltage of repressed and socially prohibited emotion.

Within the increasing impossibility of conformity with insane and inconsistent power structures, inorganic mental structures break down in what can seem to be local insanity or mental disorder but with what is – in purity – the potential revelation of a new dimension of mental clarity.

In this, we are witnessing a widespread, global phenomena of conscious awakening – in which consciousness arises as an all-powerful, neglected bride of the night and frees itself from the fetters of inherited identity. Consciousness is revealed to herself amid the ruins of social norms as a perennial, uncaged freedom beyond all norms. The realization gradually emerges that the prison of materialistic identity to which it had been charged is no longer a viable cage. She is free.

How does awakening feel?

With a shock, as if from outside of the habitual body and mind, wordlessly, evidently, unequivocally, there is the perception I Am Here. From beyond the thought of the moment or the emotion of the moment, from behind the state of the body or of the environment there is a tremendous opening to the irrefutable. I Am Here.

There can be a sense of strangeness, accompanied by a rapid loosening of the hold of all content and context on this fact of being here. We don’t know who we are, what where we are or where we are, but even beyond the greatest treatise of existence, there is this perennial back drop. I Am Here. I Am Here, irrespective of identity, substance and location. I Am Here, although time passes through me, space contracts and expands through me, location or point of view changes out of me. I Am Here, as a stillness whether there is a sense of speed or a sense of slow down. I Am Here, at the source of all happenings through my body, heart and mind, yet also here as freedom from all happening.

“Truth is not a reward for good behaviour, nor a prize for passing some tests. It cannot be brought about. It is the primary, the unborn, the ancient source of all that is. You are eligible because you are. You need not merit truth. It is your own….Stand still, be quiet.”
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That

The awakening of this perennial, unformed, unconditioned, location-less dimension of the living source can have the effect of a shock to the nervous system. A sense of strangeness in one’s own body-mind; the sense of the surreal in what were once familiar contexts, the apprehension of alienation from one’s own family or friends – others we believed we ‘knew’, can activate a fear response of freeze/fight/flight.

The ingrained reflex of the psyche is to ‘grab hold’ of something. This could be a therapist, spiritual teacher, an idea of a new found identity beyond identity. It could be a glorified image of the self. It could be power, status or influence. At core, it is a grasping at the experience of awakening, which can rapidly become confused with the adrenaline rush of sudden arousal or excitement.

It is very important not to confuse the liberation of consciousness from the structures of belief and psyche with the arousal of the nervous system. In time, with a practice of disentanglement where we become reabsorbed, a practice of letting go, letting be and being for real, the greater freedom of awakening becomes increasingly established without fireworks. We become – in a grounded and real way, by ever increasing degrees, free of the constraints of the collective bad programs of our times.

Divide and conquer

 If there was not an awakening ‘from’, there would be no awakening. When we are born, we inherit a character composed of genetic threads of the character of our ancestors. We enter a collective field where the chief vibration is still all about survival. Through our unenlightened education systems, endorsed and enforced by the social thought police of our cultures, we are presented a mental program based on fundamental duality. This duality is reflected in a mind that reflexively discriminates between good or bad, right or wrong, pleasure or pain, inferior or superior, self and other. At it’s core, Nondual Therapy aims to support the release from this fundamental binary program of mind and experience into the wider dimension of the ‘and-and’ as well as beyond that, into infinite possibility.

The current collective state of mind as amplified through the dominant culture of individuality and materialism is deeply narcissistic. The blind agenda is to keep the rapidly expanding global population in a state of conflict – with itself. As long as this conflict continues, the transcendental position beyond warring opposites is maintained by the anonymous  ‘higher power’. This higher power, in this generation is the materialist machine that entirely depends on human acquiescence to a system of division between self and other, based on the quantification of value according to the ability to consume. It’s a system which has an energy source of fear and threat – the instinctive base-line of personal survival. It infuses in a structural manner every detail of mental, emotional and physical form – all we could believe ourselves to be and all we could ever become.

We are part of an evolution out of this collective miasma. It’s an evolution that depends on our generation of an ability to be in this world but not of it. This entails are a repeated free choice for freedom: to come home to that dimension of perception that is unconstrained by time and space, that is free from the conditioning of thought and feeling. Part of this is a training of the nervous system to recognize this dimension that can contain fear but is itself beyond fear as home – as positive to the well-being of the whole, individually and collectively.

When we step out of the bubble of a narcissistic psychopath and refuse to bend to the psychology of fear, threat and consummation, there is a response. The threatening behaviour increases, the attempts to tempt back through the reward of ‘stuff’ escalates. The maxim of ‘Divide and Conquer’ goes into full swing. They will try and show that you are divided from yourself, divided from the whole (collective field), divided from your sanity, divided from other humans. Whether the division is between you and the evil ISIS, or you and the collective ‘norm’, the agenda will be to reject, delegitimize and annihilate this awakening, and its spread among other humans. It is as if true freedom were an allergen to the dimension of fear and threat in which we live.

Form is empty of a separate self, but it is full of everything in the cosmos. The same is true with feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.
Thich Nhat Hanh

The real battle lines, are the same battle lines they have always been. This rift is not between religions, it is not between communism and capitalism, it’s not between black and white. As long as these conflicts continue, the wider rule of fear, epitomized by George Orwell as the command “BE AFRAID”, is perpetuated. The real battle line is deep within ourselves, between our guilt-based loyalty to a toxic psychic program – the same program that enslaved our ancestors – and the loyalty to the existential core of presence, of life, of consciousness – that on which ultimately, the whole show, and every dimension depends.

This awakening and consolidation as the core of existential freedom is not beyond our reach. Across the planet, irrespective of education, culture, nationality or religion, people are awakening to who they truly are. They are awakening to the birth-right of unconditional freedom, the power before creation, the perennial beyond birth and death, the benevolent source of joy and well-being that is entirely free of fear. The responsibility of each and every individual is not to conform, but to go to the heart of that selfishness, the core of the “me”, the essence of that sense of separation from the whole, and to find that here, at the eye of the storm, there is a stillness that is beyond all threat. In this, we are one.

In this, we never were divided.

I AM HERE: are you Ready to Awaken?

At present, over seven billion people are alive on the planet. With the emergence of the incredible power of global communication, across time and space and across borders of nationality, culture or religion, for many the very idea of countries with borders and separate identities begins to appear ‘last century’.

Within the collapse of both local and global consensus on the nature of ‘reality’ there is born a whip-lash of individualism. Each living perspective of human perception seeks to ‘make something’ of his or herself, or to ‘do something’ with their enhancing, perfecting, embellishing or inflating the importance of their own point of view on this experience we call ‘life’.

Yet, just as the pressure on individuality increases, so does the very lie of individuality, separate self, or separate identity begin to fail. It implodes through the sheer stress of having to be ‘somebody’ other than what it already is. It collapses in exhaustion or burn-out as it stumbles through the unending labyrinth of ‘getting somewhere’ (else). It psychosomatically explodes through the un-felt voltage of repressed and socially prohibited emotion.

Within the increasing impossibility of conformity with insane and inconsistent power structures, inorganic mental structures break down in what can seem to be local insanity or mental disorder but with what is – in purity – the potential revelation of a new dimension of mental clarity.

In this, we are witnessing a widespread, global phenomena of conscious awakening – in which consciousness arises as an all-powerful, neglected bride of the night and frees itself from the fetters of inherited identity. Consciousness is revealed to herself amid the ruins of social norms as a perennial, uncaged freedom beyond all norms. The realization gradually emerges that the prison of materialistic identity to which it had been charged is no longer a viable cage. She is free.

How does awakening feel?
 

“A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.” John Steinbeck, East of Eden

With a shock, as if from outside of the habitual body and mind, wordlessly, evidently, unequivocally, there is the perception I Am Here. From beyond the thought of the moment or the emotion of the moment, from behind the state of the body or of the environment there is a tremendous opening to the irrefutable. I Am Here.

There can be a sense of strangeness, accompanied by a rapid loosening of the hold of all content and context on this fact of being here. We don’t know who we are, what where we are or where we are, but even beyond the greatest treatise of existence, there is this perennial back drop. I Am Here. I Am Here, irrespective of identity, substance and location. I Am Here, although time passes through me, space contracts and expands through me, location or point of view changes out of me. I Am Here, as a stillness whether there is a sense of speed or a sense of slow down. I Am Here, at the source of all happenings through my body, heart and mind, yet also here as freedom from all happening.

“Truth is not a reward for good behaviour, nor a prize for passing some tests. It cannot be brought about. It is the primary, the unborn, the ancient source of all that is. You are eligible because you are. You need not merit truth. It is your own….Stand still, be quiet.”
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That

The awakening of this perennial, unformed, unconditioned, location-less dimension of the living source can have the effect of a shock to the nervous system. A sense of strangeness in one’s own body-mind; the sense of the surreal in what were once familiar contexts, the apprehension of alienation from one’s own family or friends – others we believed we ‘knew’, can activate a fear response of freeze/fight/flight. The ingrained reflect of the psyche is to ‘grab hold’ of something. This could be a therapist, spiritual teacher, an idea of a new found identity beyond identity. It could be a glorified image of the self. It could be power, status or influence. At core, it is a grasping at the experience of awakening, which can rapidly become confused with the adrenaline rush of sudden arousal or excitement.

It is very important not to confuse the liberation of consciousness from the structures of belief and psyche with the arousal of the nervous system. In time, with a practice of disentanglement where we become reabsorbed, a practice of letting go, letting be and being for real, the greater freedom of awakening becomes increasingly established without fireworks. We become – in a grounded and real way, by ever increasing degrees, free of the constraints of the collective bad programs of our times.

Divide and conquer
 

“We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake.” Pema Chödrön

If there was not an awakening ‘from’, there would be no awakening. When we are born we inherit a character composed of genetic threads of the character of our ancestors. We enter a collective field where the chief vibration is still all about survival. Through our unenlightened education systems, endorsed and enforced by the social thought police of our cultures, we are presented a mental program based on fundamental duality. This duality is reflected in a mind that reflexively discriminates between good or bad, right or wrong, pleasure or pain, inferior or superior, self and other. At it’s core, Nondual Therapy aims to support the release from this fundamental binary program of mind and experience into the wider dimension of the ‘and-and’ as well as beyond that, into infinite possibility.

The current collective state of mind as amplified through the dominant culture of individuality and materialism is deeply narcissistic. The blind agenda is to keep the rapidly expanding global population in a state of conflict – with itself. As long as this conflict continues, the transcendental position beyond warring opposites is maintained by the anonymous  ‘higher power’. This higher power, in this generation is the materialist machine that entirely depends on human acquiescence to a system of division between self and other, based on the quantification of value according to the ability to consume. It’s a system which has an energy source of fear and threat – the instinctive base-line of personal survival. It infuses in a structural manner every detail of mental, emotional and physical form – all we could believe ourselves to be and all we could ever become.

We are part of an evolution out of this collective miasma. It’s an evolution that depends on our generation of an ability to be in this world but not of it. This entails are a repeated free choice for freedom: to come home to that dimension of perception that is unconstrained by time and space, that is free from the conditioning of thought and feeling. Part of this is a training of the nervous system to recognize this dimension that can contain fear but is itself beyond fear as home – as positive to the well-being of the whole, individually and collectively.

When we step out of the bubble of a narcissistic psychopath and refuse to bend to the psychology of fear, threat and consummation, there is a response. The threatening behaviour increases, the attempts to tempt back through the reward of ‘stuff’ escalates. The maxim of ‘Divide and Conquer’ goes into full swing. They will try and show that you are divided from yourself, divided from the whole (collective field), divided from your sanity, divided from other humans. Whether the division is between you and the evil ISIS, or you and the collective ‘norm’, the agenda will be to reject, delegitimize and annihilate this awakening, and its spread among other humans. It is as if true freedom were an allergen to the dimension of fear and threat in which we live.

Form is empty of a separate self, but it is full of everything in the cosmos. The same is true with feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.
Thich Nhat Hanh

The real battle lines, are the same battle lines they have always been. This rift is not between religions, it is not between communism and capitalism, it’s not between black and white. As long as these conflicts continue, the wider rule of fear, epitomized by George Orwell as the command “BE AFRAID”, is perpetuated. The real battle line is deep within ourselves, between our guilt-based loyalty to a toxic psychic program – the same program that enslaved our ancestors – and the loyalty to the existential core of presence, of life, of consciousness – that on which ultimately, the whole show, and every dimension depends.

This awakening and consolidation as the core of existential freedom is not beyond our reach. Across the planet, irrespective of education, culture, nationality or religion, people are awakening to who they truly are. They are awakening to the birth-right of unconditional freedom, the power before creation, the perennial beyond birth and death, the benevolent source of joy and well-being that is entirely free of fear. The responsibility of each and every individual is not to conform, but to go to the heart of that selfishness, the core of the “me”, the essence of that sense of separation from the whole, and to find that here, at the eye of the storm, there is a stillness that is beyond all threat. In this, we are one.

In this, we never were divided.

LET IT BE: the Subtle Matter of Feeling

Awareness is a magician in the role of healing, through physical, emotional and mental affliction. This is the case whether it’s our awareness or the awareness of a beloved.

When we have an unexplained pain in the thigh, our habitual response can be to ignore it. We ignore it and also the area around it. At a certain stage, the pain gets stronger, and then we can think about nothing else. The pain in our thigh is more important than the starvation of continents. We have to ‘get rid’ of the pain. In the shadow lands of health and disease, a creepy suspicion emerges that the pain is showing that we’re not ‘OK’. It’s our fault. It’s because we’re guilty, and the punishment is here. Some will try to hide it, ashamed of the pain. If others knew about the thigh pain, then…

If there was a pill to instantly remove the pain from our leg, many of us would take it. The problem is that this drug would need to desensitize the whole area, in order to stop the pain. When the whole area is desensitized, we would no longer feel it if a wasp landed there and stung us. The leg looses its protection of sensitivity.

We go to a doctor. The doctor brings his consciousness, together with a lot of learning, towards the pain and towards the leg, She inquires about the nature of the pain. She assesses the leg in the context of its history (traumatic encounters with misplaced tables) and its inter-relatedness to the whole system of the body – the muscular, the vascular, the biochemistry of the blood and cells (it’s a good doctor). She runs tests. Even before any treatment, the leg feels better.

According to neuroscientists, emotional pain registers in the brain in precisely the same manner as physical pain. For example, the pain of rejection lights up the same areas in the brain that signify physical pain. (Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Representations With Physical Pain, by Ethan F. Kross, Marc G. Berman, Walter Mischel, Edward E. Smith and Tor D. Wager; published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). That is, social dynamics that ignite early wounds of rejection and broken attachment from our parents, can register in the brain like a major physical battlefield.

Yet ignorance of emotional pain and the consensual repression of areas of suffering such a grief, anxiety and especially anger, are practically endemic in our society. And yes, we have pills to try and take the pain away, many of which to desensitize the parts of the whole sentient system, before we get to the fall-out of other side-effects. Much of this so-called medication creates such a blanket over the natural psychic order of suffering, living, human, that in the end it’s impossible to distinguish what’s beneath the plaster-cast of chemicals. Often the drive to ‘keep the system quiet’ is so strong that the symptoms of withdrawal from the drug are taken by medical professionals as proof of the underlying insanity. It’s a horrific epidemic of fear of pain breeding fear of fear of fear, with a touch of medical threat to keep the plate spinning.

This ignorance of feelings and emotions is to a large degree internalized. We reflexively prohibit the open-field, clear experience of emotional discomfort or fluid feelings such as grief or despair. We have a tendency to freeze them out of any right to exist – in ourselves and others. Our drug is distraction – thinking thoughts, getting ‘stuff’, ‘being someone’ to others, creating and recreating a self image in a dance between survival (avoiding pain) and embellishing whatever temporary sense of safety we can grasp.

We partly do this, because we believe that our personal feelings and emotions are immaterial – less significant even than that pain in the thigh. Centuries of conditioning through mechanistic science has hypnotized us into believing that what can’t be physically seen, doesn’t exist. This leaves at the layer of the bone, but cuts out the whole biochemistry of the body. This biochemistry is material. It moves between mind, heart and body, seeking resolution of dissonant phenomena through release or containment. If emotional energy cannot transform through a natural circulation of release, and this is repeated as a pattern, the system will bring it into the physical, to seek attention there.

This is doctor’s magic. Not the drugs, but the attention. Attention is consciousness, which by nature is impersonal. Conscious awareness around areas of pain brings a subtle relaxation which allows an unfolding of the layers of pain – the causal story that is alive within it. This is true physically, but also emotionally and mentally. The energy will move through the whole, seeking harmony. The pure presence of conscious awareness is an invitation into that harmony.

Consciousness is increasingly viewed by science as energy. On the quantum scale, the observer participant directly effects the outcome of the experiment, presenting the well known phenomena of matter appearing as a particle (when measured) or a wave (when unmeasured), or of particles being simultaneously ‘here’ and not ‘here’, depending on the observer participant. As Einstein famously said, ‘energy is all there is’, and the pure energy of unconditioned consciousness has a resonance with the conditions of suffering.

Does ice melt by our injecting water into it? That doesn’t work. Ice is made of water. Ice melts by dissolving bit by bit, from the inside out, into the water that surrounds it, out of which it’s formed.”

Many readers of I AM HERE have been introduced to the scientific research beyond epigenetics and the healing power of the work with inherited trauma – states of stress of emotional affliction passed on to us through an inherited chemical tag on our genes. The healing power of consciousness in this process work is directly resonating harmony with the stress factor that is reflected by the epigenetic tag. Bringing our conscious awareness to a background sense of doom, or dread of betrayal, can initiate a whole healing process that is able to literally lift the chemical tag. Remember, the dimensions we are working in are so tiny (yet the effects so all pervasive on the form), that living resonance is a key to unfolding the physical, emotional and mental stories that surround us. This resonance is allowed through the presence of unconditioned awareness.

Yet the magic deepens. What is actually happening is not that we are bringing awareness into the form of affliction. We are actually bringing the form home into boundless, unconditioned expanse of living awareness. Does ice melt by our injecting water into it? That doesn’t work. Ice is made of water. Ice melts by dissolving bit by bit, from the inside out, into the water that surrounds it.

Awareness costs nothing. We don’t need an authority to prescribe it. Its presence is enough to allow life to heal itself, through the most direct routes. All we have to do is allow it, without assumption, agenda or expectation. This is the deeper, healing meaning of ‘Let it Be’.

 

Her Magistery – Song for Maya Angelou

HER MAGISTERY

Song for Maya Angelou

Silent is the night, but not empty, it’s full

of that slow-paced, sentient waiting

for those dark and world-forming

voices of unrepentant liberty,

where queendoms rise

and stars betray they died

before they lit our eyes.

A sense of danger, rising from the North,

right through the helpless, abandoned tribe,

through the waist of a refugee child

it’s here, waiting to arrive, to arrive here

at this in-breath of our lunacy.

And so it is, the widow of eternity

aware through unfettered space

of each micro-managed, mute, flicker

of misery, she is that shapeless space

from where it comes in harmony,

unfolding helplessly in love,

singing her chains like the sea.

Freedom’s melody through song

as history sucks and throws its time

with a moon we took for tapestry

and a sun

that might never be lost or won.

Georgi Y. Johnson

Inside-Out: Individual Freedom within Unity, Holland, Feb 3-5, 2017

Inside-Out
Individual Freedom within Unity
With Bart ten Berge & Georgi Y. Johnson

ISSP, Biotoop, Haren, Netherlands,

Feb 3-4-5, 2017

A 3-Day gathering to become aware of the perpetual flow between the personal and the whole. Introducing techniques of titration (slowing time, expanding space), to relax the contraction between ‘inner’ self and the ‘outer’ world.

Through allowing our awareness to touch the energetic border we believe to exist between ourselves and others, together with the energy sources of contraction that upkeep it, a natural quickening of energy allows a greater flexibility and fluidity to form in real time in social and environmental contexts. This by itself, builds a greater trust in the spontaneous freedom of manifestation which is possible beyond all pre-held formulation.

To find out more and register: info@iamhere.life