Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 30

The Nothing, The Everything & the Miracle Between

Georgi Y. Johnson

As we open the windows of perception, either through the release of consciousness from mental programs, the non-attachments to contractions in our feeling awareness, or through the allowance of pure sensory perception, a fundamental duality at the core of nondual experience emerges. This is the duality of the everything and nothing.  

Nothing (Consciousness)

“There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices.”
Jean Klein

When the perceptive window of consciousness flies open, no longer barred by beliefs, thought patterns and identities, the seeker asks: “Who am I?” No thought, no image, no belief seems to define him. He experiences himself as the consciousness at the source of all thoughts. The light of knowing through which thought itself takes form. And he becomes conscious of that consciousness. Time – beginnings, middles and endings – seems to collapse, together with the definitive story of self.

A great nothing emerges in the world of identity. Wisdom, the highest expression possible from the level of mind, says: “I am nothing.” No-one. Nada.

Everything (Awareness)

Yet, as consciousness becomes depersonalized, the mental nets over what is acceptable in the dimension of feeling unlocks a new freedom in the dimension of feeling awareness. Still, with a driving impulse into the world of form, the seekers than drops to sensing who she is, sampling how it feels to be alive, here. The question that emerges now is “What am I?” As sentient awareness is flowing in its purity around and through all energetic contractions, and as the eyes and ears of the heart open, the experience that comes forward is “I am everything.”

“When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
Rumi

Feeling occurs in real time, without the constrictions of mind. As such, to feel an energy in an awareness is to feel as that energy. Every form through which awareness spreads enters the felt sense of awareness. It can be an experience of the one soul observing directly through us. Where we suffer, it suffers too. Where we are in joy, the greater dimensions of Being are also in celebration.

There is a rising absolutism as the mind realizes that everything that emerges in awareness is part of the whole, at the same time that it claims that nothing can be existentially real, that is not arising in awareness.

Often at this stage, a belief system is constructed that takes experience as the defining factor in the proof of awareness as absolute. The hierarchy of authority gets confused. Experience is restored as a defining factor of reality, now in an absolute sense. As by now, the seeker has returned to the mind, experience is then objectified in a subject-object duality, in various forms – as body-mind, as the “other” through which we must seek liberation, or as the “other” that is essentially made of consciousness.

Paradox

Yet earlier, the mind experienced itself as Nothing, and a paradox prevails. “So who or what am I then?” All of this? None of this? Both? Neither?

Fear arises within the impulse to grasp a position and defend it. With fear, there is aggression, ego, and the birth of a whole new form of identity which is often deeply wounded in the area of authority.

Emptiness

“Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am
both, and neither, and beyond both.”
Nisargadatta Maharaj

For some, this is confusing. Yet it is precisely where the everything and nothing become one, in the perception through emptiness, that the deepest living liberation occurs.

All form is a configuration of time and space. Through the window of consciousness, time is liberated as temporal, passing, non-definitive. Through the window of awareness, space is liberated into the boundless infinity of being. Yet, the tendency to spiral between the duality of time and space will continue in a perceptive zig-zag movement between head and heart until the courage is allowed (or karma demands) the movement into the realization of the body.

The body is the form which contains both time and space in unity. As such, perception through emptiness involves the realization of the source of both time (consciousness) and space (awareness), in any given configuration of time and space. The body is the container of heart and mind. In the body, heart and mind are one. Just as in each and every transient form, time and space are one.

How do we contact the body?

The only way that we even know we have a body at all is through direct sensory perception. Even with our five rudimentary senses, it is through the touch of the air on the skin, the sound of the wind in the trees, the sight of the face of our loved one, the smell of our mother’s kitchen, and the taste of our favourite food that we compose our reality.

“Wisdom tells me I am nothing, love tells me I am everything. Between the two, my life flows.”
Nisargadatta Maharaj

Yet we are conditioned to view our sense perceptions as dead-ends on the inside. As such, there is a lot of fear about taking in too much of the ‘outer’ world, as if we would get blocked by it, filled up or dominated. Yet when we truly allow the physical sensing of the world around us, truly allowing that which is able to sense anything at all that is transient and impermanent by nature, then it becomes clear that our sense perceptions are open channels. Through our senses we take in the world, and through our senses the world manifests outwardly through us.

Sense Perception in slow motion: the everything and nothing.

In every moment of sense perception, the everything and the nothing are one. Why?

If we are to truly allow the use of any sense organ, we actually have to totally let it go. Often this requires relaxation, as in relaxation, we are able to open. We need to release our restriction on the channel, and let it receive. To do this, we have to allow it to work in and of itself. We need to become nothing.

Yet simultaneously, in that precise moment of being nothing (not even the one that listens, not even the receiver), the sense opens and everything is allowed to be. That is, in the purity of nothing, we become everything. In every moment of sense perception, the nothing and everything are one.

We are not listening to ‘the sound’. We are not the listener who is ‘listening’. We are the listening itself, in a manner that is so utterly free that there is no fear of getting caught there. We are, as Jesus said, in the world but not of it. Everything and nothing. One in every second of the miracle of experience, by virtue of that one which is prior to all experience, prior to awareness and prior to consciousness.

The paradox of the everything and nothing is perpetually collapsing in the miracle of the living ‘somebody’.

 

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 Nothing, The Everything & the Miracle in between

 

As we open the windows of perception, either through the release of consciousness from mental programs, the non-attachments to contractions in our feeling awareness, or through the allowance of pure sensory perception, a fundamental duality at the core of nondual experience emerges. This is the duality of the everything and nothing.  

Nothing (Consciousness)

When the perceptive window of consciousness flies open, no longer barred by beliefs, thought patterns and identities, the seeker asks: “Who am I?” No thought, no image, no belief seems to define him. He experiences himself as the consciousness at the source of all thoughts. The light of knowing through which thought itself takes form. And he becomes conscious of that consciousness. Time – beginnings, middles and endings – seems to collapse, together with the definitive story of self.

A great nothing emerges in the world of identity. Wisdom, the highest expression possible from the level of mind, says: “I am nothing.” No-one. Nada.

Everything (Awareness)

Yet, as consciousness becomes depersonalized, the mental nets over what is acceptable in the dimension of feeling unlocks a new freedom in the dimension of feeling awareness. Still, with a driving impulse into the world of form, the seekers than drops to sensing who she is, sampling how it feels to be alive, here. The question that emerges now is “What am I?” As sentient awareness is flowing in its purity around and through all energetic contractions, and as the eyes and ears of the heart open, the experience that comes forward is “I am everything.”

“When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
Rumi

Feeling occurs in real time, without the constrictions of mind. As such, to feel an energy in an awareness is to feel as that energy. Every form through which awareness spreads enters the felt sense of awareness. It can be an experience of the one soul observing directly through us. Where we suffer, it suffers too. Where we are in joy, the greater dimensions of Being are also in celebration.

There is a rising absolutism as the mind realizes that everything that emerges in awareness is part of the whole, at the same time that it claims that nothing can be existentially real, that is not arising in awareness.

Often at this stage, a belief system is constructed that takes experience as the defining factor in the proof of awareness as absolute. The hierarchy of authority gets confused. Experience is restored as a defining factor of reality, now in an absolute sense. As by now, the seeker has returned to the mind, experience is then objectified in a subject-object duality, in various forms – as body-mind, as the “other” through which we must seek liberation, or as the “other” that is essentially made of consciousness.

Paradox

Yet earlier, the mind experienced itself as Nothing, and a paradox prevails. “So who or what am I then?” All of this? None of this? Both? Neither?

Fear arises within the impulse to grasp a position and defend it. With fear, there is aggression, ego, and the birth of a whole new form of identity which is often deeply wounded in the area of authority.

Emptiness

“Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am
both, and neither, and beyond both.”
Nisargadatta Maharaj

For some, this is confusing. Yet it is precisely where the everything and nothing become one, in the perception through emptiness, that the deepest living liberation occurs.

All form is a configuration of time and space. Through the window of consciousness, time is liberated as temporal, passing, non-definitive. Through the window of awareness, space is liberated into the boundless infinity of being. Yet, the tendency to spiral between the duality of time and space will continue in a perceptive zig-zag movement between head and heart until the courage is allowed (or karma demands) the movement into the realization of the body.

The body is the form which contains both time and space in unity. As such, perception through emptiness involves the realization of the source of both time (consciousness) and space (awareness), in any given configuration of time and space. The body is the container of heart and mind. In the body, heart and mind are one. Just as in each and every transient form, time and space are one.

How do we contact the body?

The only way that we even know we have a body at all is through direct sensory perception. Even with our five rudimentary senses, it is through the touch of the air on the skin, the sound of the wind in the trees, the sight of the face of our loved one, the smell of our mother’s kitchen, and the taste of our favourite food that we compose our reality.

Yet we are conditioned to view our sense perceptions as dead-ends on the inside. As such, there is a lot of fear about taking in too much of the ‘outer’ world, as if we would get blocked by it, filled up or dominated. Yet when we truly allow the physical sensing of the world around us, truly allowing that which is able to sense anything at all that is transient and impermanent by nature, then it becomes clear that our sense perceptions are open channels. Through our senses we take in the world, and through our senses the world manifests outwardly through us.

Sense Perception in slow motion: the everything and nothing.

In every moment of sense perception, the everything and the nothing are one. Why?

If we are to truly allow the use of any sense organ, we actually have to totally let it go. Often this requires relaxation, as in relaxation, we are able to open. We need to release our restriction on the channel, and let it receive. To do this, we have to allow it to work in and of itself. We need to become nothing.

Yet simultaneously, in that precise moment of being nothing (not even the one that listens, not even the receiver), the sense opens and everything is allowed to be. That is, in the purity of nothing, we become everything. In every moment of sense perception, the nothing and everything are one.

We are not listening to ‘the sound’. We are not the listener who is ‘listening’. We are the listening itself, in a manner that is so utterly free that there is no fear of getting caught there. We are, as Jesus said, in the world but not of it. Everything and nothing. One in every second of the miracle of experience, by virtue of that one which is prior to all experience, prior to awareness and prior to consciousness.

The paradox of the everything and nothing collapsed in the miracle of the living somebody.

 

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

 

Nonduality and Masturbation

“There is no need to struggle to be free; the absence of struggle is in itself freedom.”

~Chogyam Trungpa

For millennia, sexual desire has been the dark shadow in the halls of spirituality and mysticism. No sooner than its talked about, it becomes polluted in the energy of shame and disgust. A moment after its awakened as part of our wholeness and an inescapable current in the flow of living energy, it gets cordoned off in domains of “tantra”, “suspicious and potentially offensive content”, provocative and opportunistic. Spiritual teachers dance around the subject, weary of the kvetch response in their students.

The tentacles of sexual energy reach deeply into the energetic contractions of fear (including the great collective horrors of the emptiness: betrayal, abandonment, unworthiness and the inner, all-powerful psychopath – that one we call ‘evil’).

Even the word ‘sexuality’ cordons off the energy and puts it at a safely contained distance – safely buried together with that dirty secret that our whole life and personhood – all that we are in the world of form – was the result of some shadowed act or accident by our parents. In general, spiritual teachers prefer to talk of “desire”. It’s less scary, less limited and above all, less taboo.

Freedom from #desire means this: the compulsion to satisfy is absent.~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

— Non-Duality America (@NonDualityUSA) May 21, 2016

Trust in sexual purity is critical towards our teachers and towards ourselves. Yet the very expression ‘sexual purity’ suggests judgement, condemnation, shame and a shadowy world of secrets we must forcibly face off with our wondrous, non-dual face. Yet what is sexual purity, but the courage to be inwardly honest about the ebb and flow of desire as it moves through us? How could purity meet sexuality unless it is free of the contamination of fear-based judgement? Sexual purity involves honesty about desire, allowance of its unconditional expansion, and also honesty when the sea inevitable retracts and we feel passion-less, burnt-out, uninspired and empty. Precisely that wasteland is the fertile birth place of the next wave of passion. All we need to do it allow it into our felt sense.

Sexuality, sensuality, desire and passion and fundamental streams through the life-force. Irrespective of sexual activity or degrees to which we manifest our passion into the world, they are streams within an endless power source that through us – a power source called life. When we repress our sexuality (and as with anger, acting out can sometimes be a means of repression), we disconnect from our purity and from the wonder of the living energies that are moving through us, whether or not we choose to acknowledge them.

“Expose yourself to your deepest fear, and after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.”

~Jim Morrison

 

Desire is Here

The sexual call: “Is there any Body out there?”

Moving with the sexual metaphor, let’s say there is a strong horniness in the physical body. Perhaps the first reflex is to masturbate. It doesn’t really satisfy the sexual longing, but it takes the edge off. In many cases, this is a sexual patterning which is aimed at containing, repressing and getting rid of sexual energy. It can be a form of control that stops life getting in the way of the agenda of ego.

Often, masturbation recruits images of forbidden sexual expression from the imagination, bypasses the heart and also short-cuts the wider sensitivity of the body. The very choice of images are often forbidden content, born of the life force caught in the split from our own sexuality. Masturbating in this way can superficially give sexuality a non-threatening form, a form that remains under control, but it also sustains structures of our own inner oppression.

This agenda of control binds our sexuality, sensuality, and ultimately our hearts to the agendas of fear, which is a reactive energy that when given authority, affirms the illusion of a separate self. As such, routine masturbation can separate, isolate and in a way, reject the deeper, living desire that is seeking to awaken through the body and mind.

What happens if we don’t act out, but stay with the living experience of desire? This involves not especially focussing on it, but also not pushing it away. What does horniness feel like? Where is it hot? Where is it cold? Where is it pleasurable and where is it uncomfortable? Where does it rise up and where does it fall to earth? What is the fire behind it?

Is there and body out there?

Falling into the fire, and experiencing its burning, sometimes a solitary voice can be heard. The voice is softly asking, in purity: “Is there any body out there?”

The still small voice is the searching of life into the physical – firstly into the cells of our own body, but equally through and into the atoms and particles around us – the physical body of the planet. Allowing the energy to move in search of the greater physical body of the planet loosens the contractions around sexuality. The furniture where we are sitting begins to resonate, the body itself begins to readjust to a new kind of vitality. Sometimes, the mind becomes very busy with wants, needs and distractions.

The art is to not do anything: to let the desire move as it chooses without intervention and without lasting identification. The sanctification of form occurs when we can surrender it into life, without the compulsion to immediately release this power, or to project it on another. The art is to be free enough of grasping, in order to observe the transformation that is happening through our sentient awareness.

Of itself, whether we make love in purity to our partner, or whether we do nothing, sexual energy transforms into the finest forms of spiritual energy. It liberates us of entanglement; it has the power to easily expand our consciousness; and it refines our sentient awareness. As this passion moves through the cells, it brings the cells to life, an experience which is blissful, and which is unconditional to any sexual act. At the finest frontiers of this bliss, there is a freedom in releasing it through the experience that bliss moves through us, at the same time that we are not that bliss. We are that which is a continuum of indestructible openness through which all bliss reverberates.

Sexual energy is not to be possessed by our mental illusion of a separate self or our perception that our  ‘person’ is a tangible ‘thing’. It is no more ‘ours’ than life itself is ‘ours’ alone. Sexual energy, together with the full life force, move through us. When we manipulate it, we meddle with the global field and interfere with what it needs to do according to its own innate intelligence (which is so much greater than the intelligence the threatened structures of ego imagine themselves to have).

When sexual energy is on the move, it blesses all it touches. It reaches others beyond the mental constructs of time and space. Complications only arise where we feel compelled to interfere with it. Direct action, driven by the agenda of fear or threat is a form of interference with this natural intelligence. Like a blessing, sexual energy should not be forced on another. Attempts to do this will always create a whiplash of dread. Such attempts can only arise out of identification, which when coupled with the living energies moving through the male-female divide, opens a great rift of despair.

Stillness is the default position – through which the active and receptive, and the male and female aspects within us, can find the precise balance and attunement needed in any moment.

In the words of Nisargadatta, freedom from desire is not about rejecting desire. Freedom from desire, is about freedom itself, which is inseparable from desire as an expression of the purity of life.

 

To live in the known is bondage. To live in the unknown is liberation.

~Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

Masturbation

Of course, if we want to masturbate, there is utterly no reason why not. Yet the invitation is towards the experience of wholeness. It is towards a real, living, felt-sense, out-of-mind inquiry into the living sensuality of our experience.

It is an opportunity to ride and observe the ebb and flow of pure vitality as it moves through us: where it rises and releases in freedom to the heavens, where it meets pressure (reflected through thoughts, imagination, sadness); where it is allowed to heal us, and where we are still reluctant to let it touch home. Our sexuality is at the source of all creation. It’s not separate. The more we realize the nature of our own passion and desire, the less we are afraid of the sexuality or passion of the so-called ‘other’.

Through the non-judgemental realization of how sexuality moves through our form, we can begin to liberate that form. Each such liberation is a sanctification and purification. These are not holy words. They are the building blocks of our being here (for now), physically alive, in creative and destructive unity, in the heart-beat, blood-lust, glorious rhythm of it all.

 

 

Perfect Peace. Omnipresent and Inviolable

“Peace asks nothing and is in conflict with nothing. Peace is always here, in every breath I take and with every step I make.”

The nondual descriptor of peace is fundamental to all nondual therapy. In the contracted spiral between surrender and war, (according to all-or-nothing thinking), many contractions are embedded.

Choices between war and surrender are bound up with other contractions in duality. For example, the agenda not to be guilty, can be a top player in maintaining the greater contraction of conflict. Similarly, the inability to allow anger, or the refusal to feel fear is intimately linked up with a lack of freedom within the war and surrender dynamic.

The agenda to avoid condemnation or to seek redemption is similarly embedded in choices involving binary conflict.

As such, peace is a tremendous healing agent, as well as a signal from source when a conflict is resolved, even before the realization comes to waking consciousness.

Peace is often confused and interchanged with other nondual  positions, such as stillness, silence or love, yet although it will often be the backdrop of such positions, it is not the same.

“The partner of war is surrender. Peace has no opposite. In peace, war and surrender are one.”

(Stillness of the Wind, Georgi Y. Johnson)

As a core nondual aspect, peace is apparent as an effect whenever a contraction is released. It is also present at milestone moments in creation, such as birth and death.

It can be felt and accessed in its powerful, living presence, regardless of winning or losing, departure or arrival, atrocity or serenity. It is present in its soft austerity in our laughter and our tears, through all our panic and fears, unconditionally aware even behind the rage at life, or aggression towards the other.

The very nature of peace is that it can never be taken away. The very idea of extracting peace from creation is an absurdity, as all of this, all the great show of duality and temporal form entirely depends on the peace out of which it arises and to which it returns.

No conflict, no contraction and no reflection could occur without the source of peace that is inherent to consciousness itself. We could not identify, ignore and neither could we reject, without peace as the lion’s share of our fundamental, living nature.

The attempt to deny peace resembles the attempt to disown our own mother. We can try it, but we can’t do it, as we are made of her; without her, we could not be anything at all. So prevalent and so resourceful is peace, that we tend to take it for granted. Our focus is so captivated by conflict, that we ignore the peace which is always here, in time, forgetting that it is here altogether. Then, in our negotiations of form, we try to gamble with her, or turn her into a reward, brutally deferring that which is omnipresent and omnipotent for ‘later’.

So defiantly silly is this deferment of peace, that it begins to be identified with death. As such, our fear of death drives us to also fear peace. The very scent of peace as we look into that originating cavern of our own inevitable demise causes us to equate it with the anti-life, or destruction. So we try to live a life without peace, and we suffer in our endeavours and die in a sudden realization of all we have missed in the living here and now.

Peace is not loving, although it is the source of love. It is not joyful, although joy can flash through us in the relief of the fulfillment of peace. It’s only subtle agenda is towards harmony, reunion and truth. It offers a perpetual and unbounded sacred safety, that is inviolable by the entangled forest of our hearts and minds above the surface.

The more we learn to rest in peace, the more we are able to come to life, accepting whatever presents itself in our inner or outer worlds without conditions. As such, peace is a master force in the opening of perception.

Every healing, each conscious awakening, each release of contraction is utterly dependent on peace. The degree to which we are immersed in this inner source of peace is in direct equation to the ability of our form (including our subtle forms) to allow itself to be made relative; to allow this higher power of peace to let it be transient.

When there is peace, we don’t need to grasp and we don’t need to push away. We gain a tremendous clarity of consciousness and insight into the challenges we temporarily carry.

There is a sense of fulfillment and natural completion. There is a kind of perfection that moves beyond all judgement and discrimination.

It is as it is.

So be it.

The Nondual Power of Purity

As a nondual position, purity cannot be grasped, defined, kept, won or lost.

Imagine a purity which is always here, at the source of all you are. It has always been here, and it can never be taken away. Each and every manifestation of yourself utterly depends on this purity. You breath it  with the oxygen and you breath it out with every out-breath.

It is pure because it is in simplicity, all that it is, and it is as it is.

The partner of shame is disgust.

Purity has no opposite.

In purity, disgust and shame are one.

Stillness of the Wind

 

This purity is not separate from you, nor is it separable from you. It is an inextricable part of all that you are, all that you have been and all you ever will be. It is the light within your sight; the silence within your thought and the stillness within every movement.

Through your sexuality, this purity is the channel to new physical life, the purity of touch and the purity of a new born child. As such, your sexuality flows through purity and in purity each conception occurs.

Within every feeling, every thought, every moment and every situation, purity is the backdrop. This purity has not changed since you took your first breath in this world, and it will be an inextricable part of the last exhalation. Out of purity, you emerged, in purity you are held, and to purity you will return. Through every happening of emotion and feeling, the purity never left.

All that you have done, all that has been tasted and experienced, all that has been said about you or done to you, all that has been repressed or forgotten and all that has been allowed, none of this is separable from the purity that is always here as the fundamental backdrop to all experience, as an inextricable part of consciousness itself.

This purity is indivisible. No amount of shame suffered in your name, or disgust endured towards the ‘other’ can divide this purity from itself. It is not yours to claim or to keep, yet you will never ever lose it. It is as pure as a sun burning and shining its light though an infinite universe.

It is the purity in the gaze of a new born child. It is as pure as the hand of an old man on his death bed. It is the purity of animals and of trees, the purity of the infinite sky and the purity of the night. It can be noted in the moment between each thought, or in the space between, before and behind every feeling. We couldn’t free ourselves of this purity even if we spent millennia condemning ourselves.

In purity we are one, and through purity we belong: also to ourselves. Shame and disgust both crave this purity. Their agenda is purity. They seek it out. The whole energetic contraction of shame is composed of purity that was severed, rejected and thrown back into separate form in a kind of existential shock. When the contraction of shame and/or disgust is fed the energy of purity, the purity within the contraction begins to sing and return to source. The more it de-freezes into unconditional purity, the less the cement of separation hold between one individual and the whole. Bringing the existential energy of purity towards the energy of shame and disgust is a high-note of healing, from the core of the mother wound, out into a purification of consciousness on all levels.

A Flickering Light: Continuous & Discrete Conscious Awakening in 400 Milliseconds

In a new paper on brain processes and consciousness, EPFL scientists suggest that consciousness is discrete, indicating the ‘Perceptive Blinks’ of consciousness, described experientially in the book I AM HERE – Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty. What they miss is that consciousness (like photons) can manifest either as particle or wave, where inherent continuity allows both the discrete and the quasi-continuous effect on form.

Consciousness arises only in time intervals of up to 400 milliseconds, with gaps of unconsciousness in between, according to a proposition of a scientific research team at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

When we play a game of ping-pong (especially with two balls at once), we move with astounding speed and precision without any conscious thought, reflection of decision. Our hands and our body (our fundamental reflexes) have an ingenuity that far surpasses the calculations of any conscious mind. This mystery of life is now given substance with a scientific study of the time lag it takes for information to become ‘conscious’, with implications for consciousness studies (or definitions of the word “consciousness”) in general. The bottom(less) line is – there is an unconscious or preconscious depth at subliminal layers of mind that is far more precise, fast and responsive than processes inherent to the ‘conscious’ brain.

What is consciousness? It’s an age old question:  is it a continuous stream or a series of bits of information compiled to create reality like the flow of a movie? Now, EPFL scientists have suggested a model of how the brain processes ‘unconscious’ information, proposing that consciousness arises only in intervals up to 400 milliseconds, with no consciousness in between. The work is published in PLOS Biology.

Michael Herzog at EPFL, working with Frank Scharnowski at the University of Zurich, have a new conceptual framework of how (the mental aspect) of consciousness might actually work. They reviewed data from previously published psychological and behavioral experiments that sought to determine if consciousness is continuous or discrete.

The new model proposes a two-stage processing of information. First comes the unconscious stage: The brain processes specific features of objects, e.g. color or shape, and analyzes them quasi-continuously and unconsciously with a very high time-resolution. However, the model suggests that there is no perception of time during this unconscious processing.

From the perspective of I AM HERE, this quasi continuity correlates with the timeless often dream like dimension of sentient awareness (right brain). The scientists are struggling through the midway point – the Quasi continuous dimension of awareness that is a critical integrative dimension between source emptiness and conscious awakening (or in the language of psychology, between conscious mind, sub-conscious and unconscious).

In addition, the paper sees a linear process in perception (from unconscious, to subconscious to ‘fully’ conscious) when what is more experientially true is that all three layers co-exist. For example, even though you are ‘awake’ now, conscious awakeness is added to the sleep state that is always also here in any moment. We can access the unbounded peace and rejuvenating power of sleep in any given “blink”.

The second level of processing, according to the paper, is the conscious stage: Unconscious processing is completed, and the brain simultaneously renders all the features conscious (say the scientists). This produces the final “picture,” which the brain finally presents to our consciousness, (oops – consciousness – like an overlord- precedes and exists unconditionally to the data?) and the stimulus is processed.

The whole process, from stimulus to conscious perception, can last up to 400 milliseconds, says the paper, which is a considerable delay from a physiological point of view. “The reason is that the brain wants to give you the best, clearest information it can, and this demands a substantial amount of time,” Herzog told Science Daily. “This model focuses on visual perception, but the time delay might be different for other sensory information, e.g. auditory or olfactory.”

It is interesting (from the perspective of I AM HERE) that the paper focuses only on visual perception, when resonance is so clearly at cause of visual effect or imprint and involves all the senses, not just imagination. Because of the close connection with consciousness, the visual is the first sense that needs to be surrendered in the movement from consciousness to the dimension of sentient awareness.

What does this mean for winning the ping-pong game? Abandon conscious control. Surrender to the unconscious. Don’t look for the ball. Be free of agenda, even the agenda of winning. Fly with the 2-balled joy of it.

LION IN WAITING

Here you are, my enemy, my friend,


again here, as you never left


the strange, familiar


cliff-edge of existing,


with vision compelled


into an abyss,


that powerlessly,


will dismiss


both time and timeless,


as if it never was


and never ought to be,


(you see).

Some call you Death, my enemy, my friend.



Footing a self, out of sight, no mind,


but enemy friend, lover, betrayer, wise man,


goddess and deadly secret, blind


to fools and the disillusioned night,


some don’t call you


any thing at all.


 


(Can I touch you?


No. In touch, I’m undermined).


 


I forget you never, ever leave,


and here you are, enemy, friend


as dust of form flies nowhere


in orgasmic torrents of


whatever it never was


nor ever will be.


 


And here, in this silent womb alone,


thrown again forsaken


in a wilderness of belief,


notice the relief,


as if


(behind this,


grand universal, time-space


curtain of the whole


gravitational misdemeanour),


we were always waiting


for this bodily, sweating, needing 


task of life to cease


so freedom can breath in peace


in no time now, for real.


 


Georgi Y. Johnson

What to expect at i-exist England with Georgi & Bart, April 2016

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i-Exist 2016 will include out-of-hours private entry and meditation within the heart of the sacred stone circle of Stone Henge.

i-exist is no regular retreat, often cutting a life-time shift in perception – in consciousness, awareness and above all in the integration between the spiritual aspects of our being and the physical.

We chose Neolithic England as the back-drop to these annual events, as certain places in time-space, such s Glastonbury Tor, Stonehenge and Avebury, represent a global legacy of timelessness.

They have a power that shifts us to a continuum beyond history and have the potential to open channels to the non-physical dimensions that stay open – resources to draw on for a life time.

For us, Stonehenge is like Jerusalem’s Old City: it is one of those places that each one of us should strive to visit at least once.

And yet, (at least for us), each time we return to these places there is a deepening of the channel. Each time, the visit has that timeless quality, as if we never left. It is a deep joy to share this channel with others.

The Assembly Halls (Someone else’s healing event) :-)

i-exist combines walking, visiting and meditating in special places, with indoor group meetings of inquiry, deepening, and relaxation into the inner source.

For the first two days, we are congregating in the ancient Assembly Halls of Glastonbury. Built according to the golden mean, the halls are in the center of town and are generally used for community events. This combination of antiquity, centrality to the town with the synergy of our group (from four different countries so far) will be an adventure and learning experience for us all. As usual, we like the bustle of the high-street outside within the general ideology of integration – bringing our spirituality to life and our life to spirituality.

At the weekend we take to the road. On Saturday, we will visit Wells and return to our special chamber within the amazing Wells Cathedral for a flash mob meditation. Flash mob means that we sit at some distance around the huge chamber and meditate. It has a powerful impact both on unwitting tourists and tour guides, as well as on our cultivation of our natural right to center in deep peace and source, regardless of social masks. It tends to be a beautiful experience.

The chamber within Wells Cathedral

After lunch, we will move to Wookey Hole. We have a feeling that this area is the zone of Merlin (the feeling is what matters!) The incredible gorge and nature around Wookey Hole reaches over the extensive network of caves and natural pools underneath (the hills are vastly empty). The energy is so strong, the air can be experienced as almost liquid. There is an incredible potency in this site, where there is such a confluence of the elements.

On the Sunday, we follow the lay lines further away, visiting Stone Henge (this year we are trying to get a private viewing inside the Stone circle) and then on to the processional walk towards the great stone circles of Avebury. Avebury has a relatively inexpensive English pub where we can also sample (for better or worse) the joys of English food.

The Way of Happiness Bart & Georgi in London, April 2016

April 15th at 1pm – April 16 at 5 pm
Inspiration, nonduality and healing with Bart ten Berge and Georgi Y. Johnson.

“Pain and pleasure go always together. Freedom from one means freedom from the both. If you do not care for pleasure, you will not be afraid of pain. But there is happiness, which is neither. Which is completely beyond.”

Nisargadatta

Is happiness our birth right? Where is it lost? Can we be happy even in difficult conditions? How does uncovering our inherent happiness serve as a compass to lead us home on the inside, while also allowing greater fulfilment in living?

 

Registration:

The Way of Happiness includes meditation, discussion, healing techniques and awakening to deeper layers of ourselves in form through unconditioned source awareness.

Hosted at the Friends Meeting House in Hampstead, the workshop is in one of London’s most beautiful areas, with easy transport and refreshments nearby.

Bart and Georgi are international spiritual teachers with a background in nonduality, spiritual healing and spiritual psychology. This 2-day intensive offers bring tools for experiential inquiry into that which divides us from our natural joy in being alive, in order to open the space for release and transformation.

The seminar takes place shortly before the i-Exist active spiritual retreat with Bart & Georgi in Glastonbury.

You can watch an interview with Bart & Georgi on Conscious TV here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CORT1bE027Y

On Friday, we meet at 13:00 and continue until 21:00, with a break for dinner at 17:30.

On the Saturday, we meet at 9:00 and continue until 17:00, with a break for lunch at 13:00.

Venue: Friends Meeting House, 120 Heath Street, Hampstead NW3 1DR

Date & Time: 15-16th April 2016. 1pm-9pm (Friday), 9am-5pm (Saturday)

Cost: £190

Nearest Tube: Hampstead

Details & Reservation: info@iamhere.life

 

When Hell Freezes Over: Trauma & Nonduality

Even when hell freezes over, it is still here. We can numb ourselves to dread for a while, but sooner or later we will move through its precincts in processes of expansion and liberation.

In a traumatic environment (in which natural and authentic responses are repeatedly oppressed or punished), or through a traumatic event, the energetic impact can be uncontainable for the sentient form as a whole.

Pure perception of what is happening can pose a direct threat to structures of identity, character and freedom of feeling. As an emergency response, the windows of perception slam shut: the conscious mind stops processing, retreating to a witness position outside of the body; the sentient awareness shuts down at its root, as the emotional pain is so great. A way to express it is to say that the doors of the heart slam shut, leaving the body and mind to somehow negotiate connection and direction through a bypass of feelings and emotions.

Sometimes, (such as in childhood or in extreme events), the system is simply not mature enough or capable of processing the consequences and depth of traumatic experience. To a greater or lesser extent, forms of personality are being carved out in real time, mostly through the reflexive rejection of un-consumable mental and sentient data.

Yet the energetic impact doesn’t vanish because it is uncontained mentally or unprocessed through feelings and emotions. It is absorbed into the physical matter of the body, from where it exudes a mist. When the light of consciousness falls there, it begins to sing its tragic story. Sometimes that song is a scream of panic and rage, like one facing an immediate threat of death. Feelings and emotions come forward that are out of all context with the present situation. In psychological terms, there is a “loss of proportions”.

The traumatic state and frozen emotion is held in sensory freezes and visible through muscular postures. It is collected in the spine and pushed down to the tail-bone which is a storage hall of living experiential memory awaiting reunion (as well as a space of unlimited potentiality and unconditional power).

At the same time, all traumatic events are witnessed from the higher mind, outside of the body. They are witnessed and imprinted on a substrata of memory, yet without a natural linkage to feeling responses. This lack of integration even of conscious information with appropriate emotional responses is why a highly traumatized person can relate the most dreadful incidents with a totally incongruent feeling – such as laughter, or a wave of the hand as if the story is far from relevant.

In modern psychology, these deflected and buried energetic forms are believed to be sourced in the ‘unconscious’: an indecipherable black box of the psyche that somehow escapes time and space and threatens to make us wild with its raw, irrational power.

It was only Carl Jung who introduced and researched (on himself) the possibility that this so called “Un”conscious could actually be the same dimension of unity, spiritual liberation, collective mythology and ultimately, freedom within form. “There is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites;” he wrote, “hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind.”

Part of our collective responsibility while we are here is to do what we can to defreeze the surface of hell. This can seem counter-intuitive: when hell is no longer frozen over, all hell breaks loose. Yet the trapped living energy in these subterranean halls of our collective being will not vanish.

The life in this energy will anyway create movement and effect the whole. It vibrates through the causal layers of feeling. It rattles and haunts through repeating dreams and through life-time patterns of karma. Yet the movement of transformation and healing of trauma is entirely possible. In the words of the pioneer of trauma therapy Peter Levine: “Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.”

In this process, the energy of dread can expand, refine and integrate, manifesting as compassion. The other possibility is that it is pushed so deeply into matter that matter loses its harmony, and begins to destroy the local unit for the sake of the preservation of the whole. This is the origin of many physical afflictions, and perhaps a reflection of the way in which our planet is presently being injured by our collective difficulty in coming to peace.

Angels in the Dread Fields

There is an interesting feature of the polarity of heaven and hell. While from the vantage point of heaven, we are able to contain hell (in a way that we can even feel the beauty in painful experiences), from the perspective of hell, heaven is almost impossible to find.

The promise of infinite love or eternal light, even the soul of purpose, seems to have been ripped from experience, as if it were a mere illusion. The naked vibrations and discords of pain that underpin the atmosphere of dread are far louder and more apparently ‘real’ than any silent or invisible whisper of hope.

One who is caught in this field is hardly aware of the energy of dread, as there is a deep resonance with it. It is ironic that many of the occupants of the hell-zones are not aware of their suffering as there is such a depth of familiarity with it as the furniture of home. Solidified as “the reality”, the dread field has become the earth and sky of what’s possible, and living has generated to automated degrees of selfishness, jealousy and competition.

For many, when that ‘resonance’, or man-made harmony within discord is disturbed, there can be an incredible resentment, jealousy or even a despising of “others” caught in the fantasy of love, peace, innocence, purity, truthfulness or freedom.

A rage can break loose that intends to defile the holy places, rip the sanctimonious ones from their imaginary thrones, and educate the innocent in the hardship of the real world. This “real” world needs to be impressed, if needed, by force, on the gullible ones who have lost their connection with the ‘reality’ of suffering.

A key minefield in this, is in the split between male and female, which plays through family systems and the structures of patriarchy. As these forms are often passed on from generation to generation, leaving the dread field can be still more confusing as it can feel like betrayal.

In one sense, many enactments of cruelty and horror (such as today’s infamous ISIS), are embodying this raging scream of suffering, (in vain, heroic guise), screaming through the global media networks that physical life is fragile: we bleed; we can be hurt; we suffer the agony of neglect; injustice; sexual oppression; lies and propaganda. It’s a collective projection of the trauma of us all and the deeper horror is that everywhere it takes form, it creates more trauma, more dread and more division.

Hell is an isolated ward in a hidden asylum of our being, covered by masks of social conformity. Yet there are angels in the dread fields. They will not be seen, felt or sensed unless we reach out, in our despair, for help.

Assistance will come by virtue of form, which is pure, living presence. Angels of the dread fields both witness and open the senses to the experience of hell, yet they are not made of its energies. This is the I AM HERE of presence that can have an alchemical effect in releasing living quality from traumatic contractions. They are like rods of light, timelessly waiting for us to make that one critical movement of releasing the separate self: the prayer to the unknown; the surrender to the source; the calling towards a higher power to set us free; the allowance of source to move towards source.

This call from the gut of pure being towards the imperceivable, wider universe requires an allowance of the one energy that dread most abhors: the energy of helplessness. The admission of helplessness is the opening needed for help to come. This movement of surrender, the unconditional supplication into the darkness, ruptures the walls of the separate self. When these walls are fractured, the light of awareness shines through like a signal towards home. The angels are suddenly seen.

We can call them angels, but we can also call them real people. They are those who have been to hell and back themselves, and whose lives have been transformed through the natural arising of care. They care for the “other” because they have been the other. The awareness which suffered in hell is now the awareness that can stay in hell with another, releasing its walls which are based on isolation. It never leaves hell, it simply expands to include far wider and purer dimensions.

This awareness spontaneously answers the call of the awareness locked in trauma. In this, there is a live link set up out of the precincts of despair into the ‘heaven’ that can contain hell. Form cares for form through the shared unity of awareness. Compassion is born.