Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 31

That Awful Dread: Dealing with the Energies of Anger & Fear

By Georgi Y. Johnson

[This article was first posted on Beyond Meds]

Dread is a fusion of anger and fear, in a cloud of threatening horror, that moves between and through people. In the social field, it is channeled through hidden agendas of entities that have lost connection with a deeper truth and purpose.

Firmly rooted in the belief of either-or, or kill or be killed, the agenda of dread is mostly occupied with possession: the possession of another human; the possession of things; the possession of truth; or the possession of status. Dread reduces form through forcing contraction (synchronizing it to a denser vibration) for the purposes of possession: an illusion which is closely knit with structures of control and power. In order to have power or control over another, they must be defined, objectified and available to be grasped and/or rejected.

In its subtlety, dread is the in-breath and out-breath of the twin movements of grasping and aversion, acting as one. Its toxicity can take the natural breath away.

Dreadopolis

When we can allow dread to be felt when and where it arises in our experience, allowing it to move through us, (just as we move through it), it has the flavor of pure suffering. Yet it’s origin is not in authentic physical hardship, but in a sense of endless lack found in structures of ego or false identity. As such, the energy of dread is often grandiose, inflated and vastly disproportionate to the perceived injustice.

Dread can be generated locally, but it is at the same time transpersonal: it broods through atmospheres in collective fields. It hangs around cities, families and places of historic horror. Mostly unconscious, it can be a torture to sensitive individuals that are formed with a low toleration of the grossness of its vibration.

When those individuals are led to believe that this is their own, private, emotion or feeling, they can begin to fear the dread to such an extent that they move into anxiety. Identification with dread as personal failing creates further contraction and isolation. These broad energy fields – such as anger and fear and their threatening blend in the form of dread – are like clouds of cause-less suffering on the surface of the planet. Mostly unanchored in the present moment, dread is the source energy of toxic illusion: it is composed of the unhealed horror of memory and the undefined threat of what could be.

In our weakness, we channel that energy towards each other. In our ignorance, we might even consciously direct it with angry, jealous and vengeful thoughts and stories. These stories are powered by a general feeling of ‘wishing bad’ towards the other, and inner satisfaction at their misfortune. Yet the dread itself is not inherent to who we are at source. It is an effect of the divisions that allow creation. Sooner or later, its mirage, whether individual or collective, will dissipate in the realization of the here and the now

Division Bells

Dread thrives off the belief in the separate self: that individuals are inherently separate units, sharing nothing other than what they choose to share through mind and body. Through the window of sentient awareness (the subconscious) it moves as a polluted form of conditional love, trying to grasp at objects rather than allow them as impermanent phenomena. In this, it gives the sense of solidity to appearances and binds consciousness to form.

Ensnared in the belief that ‘might is right’, dread moves mentally through a logic of either-or, you or me, kill or be killed. It energetically threatens others into contraction or retreat. The origin of this threat is fear: the fear of the separate self that tries to uphold the pleasurable side of the lie of its own invincible, surface individuality.

It is especially unfortunate that sensitive individuals that suffer more from this dread in the collective field, often get further isolated with the label of mental disorder and worse. Mental institutions are excellent schools to teach us what we are not.

A Dreadful Lock-down

The energy of dread encourages contraction, freezing and the distraction of consciousness. In this, it encourages disguise: the sentient, protective cover-up of form to shield from an unknown danger. It moves with a vibration of absolute authority as if it were truth itself, when in form, it is closer to a transient and temporal cloud of dense vibration. In this, it tends to shut down the sense of space and freedom within time. Resembling the tunnel vision of a traumatic state (which in a way, it is), it righteously believes itself to be a complete universe of absolute truth.

The undefined sense of immediacy within the blend of fear and threat generated from a dread field falls short of the eternal present, replacing it with a sense of existential threat (as if existence itself were temporal). In this, dread directly puts form in danger, as it drugs the immediacy of real danger with a sense of spooky abstraction. It stupifies the mind and confuses the nervous system and as such actually compromises our natural, living instincts towards safety and preservation of form.

Without a strong consolidation in the timeless and unbounded aspects of ourselves, the dread of abstract, ungrounded danger and threat can obscure the perception of actual physical challenges in real time. Dread even robs fear of its naturalness.

In addition, by clouding and closing the windows of perception, the vulgarity of dread confuses our natural psychic capacity which is possible through the refinement of our senses. It can make us feel and behave awkwardly, out of harmony with the environment. It inflates the visual and auditory imagination with fearful apparitions of ‘otherness’. These images are far removed from the here and now – such as the silence of a room; the miracle of the feet on the floor; and the gentle rhythm of the breath.

For some, it can only be with the deeper release of form (such as in the death process), that the impotence of a lifetime of dread becomes clear, as it dissipates in the living vastness of unrestricted space and time. For others, the realization of the impermanent nature of dread occurs through the realization of the thinking mind and belief systems as nothing other than an organ of consciousness.

Some pointers to help with dread:

Dread is a teacher (of what we are not).
The threat of dread is always a lie.
If we let dread be (surrender be allowing ourselves to become empty), it cannot take hold.
Dread fails in real time and space. Physical movement, coupled with attention in the here and now, neutralizes the amorphous dread energies.
The antidote to dread is compassion. Do something for someone else. Open the window of empathy.  The movement of service releases the unconscious ego structures where the threat could be attacking. It brings togetherness, and dread is all about division and conflict.
Breath in whatever nasty energies are around, breath back infinite peace. This grounds us in the body, which is more existentially present than any imagined threat or suffering.

Georgi Y. Johnson has an international practice in spiritual healing and inner growth with her partner Bart ten Berge. She is author of the book I AM HERE – Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, which is a study of three layers of perception: consciousness, awareness and perception through emptiness.

 More articles on Beyond Meds here.

Nondual Awakening, Depersonalization & Existential Angst

“Fear is a natural effect of consciousness – the seeing itself that suggests the unseen.”  

Traditional psychology posits four collective fears. These are: the fear of sex; the fear of death; the fear of physical illness; and the fear of insanity. All these fears are nominally based on loss – the loss of life, virility, health and sanity. The formulation assumes a rationality, as if any of any of these loses can be avoided in the long term. They can’t. They can only be postponed.

Sooner or later, we will lose our sexual potency, perhaps even becoming sexually repugnant or neutral. In addition, it is pre-given that we are physically restricted to be either one gender or the other. The ‘otherness’ of the opposite sex (with all its collective labels and restrictions) will accompany us to some degree until we leave this body.

Sooner or later, we will physically die. This is one of the few certainties in life. It’s a natural law. Repression of the fear of death does not release it.

Sooner or later, we will experience physical illness. It is an inherent and natural part of our physical biology and life process.

Sooner or later, we will lose our minds. This is one that many choose to sublimate. Yet we lose our minds each night in the depths of sleep. Beyond normal confusions of identity, part of physical aging involves the break-down of mind. When we leave our physical body, we also leave the mind as we know it. No mind that survives physical death is recognizable to this ‘mind’ we have in a body, which we believe to be stable.

Actually, it’s not sooner or later. In the stillness of the present moment, it can become clear that all of this loss is already here, now. Our death is here, in this moment, not in an imagined future. Our experience of not yet being born is here, in this moment. The dreadful split between male and female is also, here and now. All that we are, is now. It already happened, and it’s really OK. The energy of dread would have you believe otherwise, though.

Putting the four categories of collective fear aside for now, and moving into an existential inquiry, it becomes clear that fear is a direct, multi-layered shock response to separation. Fear is all about boundaries: it’s about protecting the physical boundary of the skin surface, but also the sentient boundaries of self – protecting our vulnerable hearts. Fear is the shock of being temporarily divided into separate form, supported by a belief structure that grasps at appearances and in its longing for stability, claims this separation as absolute. In the trauma of creation, in which male divides from female, child from mother, earth from sky, and light from darkness, fear is born. Fear is a natural effect of consciousness – the seeing itself that suggests the unseen. As such, fear is a primal phenomenon at the core of creation, moment by moment.

Mental

The mind is highly responsive to fear, as it is deeply rooted in natural programs of survival. Yet it is able to complicate simple survival issues in a spectacular way, by grasping on minute details and imagining grandiose outcomes. From the natural physical instinct to avoid pain, it has evolved to avoid discomfort of any sort, whether in the body or in the area of feelings and emotions. Left to itself, it would contract experience to a box of no feeling at all in order to avoid discomfort.

The mind also has an ability to select that which it chooses to see, and to edit and amend the content of experience. This feeds it with an awesome responsibility, but also the fear of being exposed. It knows that beneath the censorship and the amendments, other spooky, unseen stuff is going on. As a result, it works even harder to grasp, establish and consolidate its desired (safe and pleasurable) reality.

All this leaves a shadow. The mind also needs to know what to fear and for that it needs to study it. It constantly needs to keep an eye on the source of threat, lest it be surprised. As such, the mind is often more preoccupied with fear than in allowing the comfort and pleasure that it pretends to desire and claims to protect.

The natural energy of fear can transform naturally into bliss, which like fear, also passes through waves of expansion. As in orgasm, or in the release of any restriction or block, the transformation of losing form can be blissful. The sheer sensitivity of boundaries expanding to the point of explosion, the adrenalin of pure freedom through capitulation, the surrender in letting life move as it will – bring fear in resistance and bliss in allowance. Always, in and of itself, a new form emerges: often one that is more attuned, more natural and more responsive to the living energy of being here, now.

Capital Fear

The resistance to transformation is based on the fear of fear itself. The construction of fear-based, protective fences around fear adds frontier after frontier to the separate self. Often, there is no longer apparent what all the fear fences are protecting. In this it takes on the characteristics of the horrific, imaginary outcome: that which no one must ever know, or that which no one must ever feel.

These empires are of fear are the source of the existential angst that often comes forward around a spiritual emergency. In awakening as the timeless, existential core of all we are, life-times of protective structures around fear begin to shake in their foundations. In the release of pure, unconditioned consciousness beyond the individual ‘I’, light is also shone on indiscriminately on the whole entity of the separate self. One effect of light is that it awakens form. Frozen fear comes to life.

These suddenly revealed structures of fear are the matrix on which the personal identity and the sentient life of personhood are formed. Together, these inner forms are believed to make up the shapes and contours of character – an individuality that was previously believed to be absolute, as it exists in the blind-spot of transience. The outcome can be nervous breakdown or psychosis, and the great tragedy is that the medical and social choice is often to medicate the patient out of the ‘Now’.

Rather than escorting the individual through the awakening process out of a constricted, afraid and angry sense of personhood into a wider, more organic and natural expression of human life, they are diagnosed with ‘depersonalization syndrome’ and banished to the shameful quarters of the mentally ill. There is also a subliminal rage towards fear interwoven with this ongoing industry of medically ordained exclusion of those for whom fear has temporarily gained possession.

Such is the solidified fear of the establishment towards awakening.

Fear in Naturalness

There are three classical fear responses to a perceived threat: fight, flight and freeze. All of these are survival responses of the form itself. Yet all form is in perpetual transformation. These responses are natural parts of that process of transformation, slowing in down, allowing it to occur in a way that is more safe. Both the flight and the freeze buys time for the individual to consolidate in a perspective beyond form, for example, that which can witness the birth and death of all forms. This gives them a position from which to let go. It can even allow a ‘higher self’ to come forward as a loving escort to the death process of the lesser ‘self’. When the instinct to freeze or fly is repressed, especially through the intervention of drugs, the deeper process of re-attunement and letting go can also get blocked.

The paradox is that these drugs are supposed to restore the individual’s sense of ‘reality’. What is meant by this, is to restore the individual’s compliance and functionality within the collective illusion of ‘reality’ – an illusion for which the death knell sounds moment by moment. It is not reality that is lost in mental disorder, it is the ability to conform to structures that are, of themselves, mental skyscrapers built on the foundations of fear. Yet ultimately, only a movement deeper inside, to the unity that resides beyond the constructs of mind, will bring the freedom to move through that city-scape with ease.

In the instinct to fight, however, the individual can become a danger to themselves or to others around them, and this is often the medical justification for sectioning. Within the fight instinct born of fear, we uncover the partner of fear at the existential borders of the separate self: anger.

 

JERUSALEM NOW

Now, histories disperse

in memory’s hollow curse,

in post gun-shot silence.

Just as Now, futures break

through the terrorized fake,

And Now, no win nor gain,

just a burst pipe dripping

of pleasure and pain.

And Now, this haunting dread

from circuits in the head

drops down like lead.

And passion, she’s redeeming

Here, Now, beyond the seeming,

Her fire is rising

through holier witness,

scared smoke deceiving

a brighter light

pure in the midday sun.

Now, Jerusalem,

she cannot reject

this sacred sky,

and even time

will not divide.

I am here.

In many-cultured

garments of peace,

a cousin of eternity

infinite in the manifold.

Georgi Y. Johnson

∞ Sense Perception

How would it be to taste infinite sweetness; to listen to endless, exquisitely tuned harmony; to see the true vitality of color; or to feel love without any restriction?

How would it be to suffer not a little, but to experience the awesome division and loss that is at the core of all creation?

How is it to be conscious, with unveiled perception, of all that appears, irrespective of conditions of time and space?

What is this one, that is able to perceive? Is it not beyond the conditions even of infinity and eternity?

Shortly after my brother Oliver died, I had a connection with him. He was watching at the people around me who were talking about his tragic story. “I’m dead?” he laughed. “I’m not dead. Everyone down there is dead!”

It was in character. Yet how often do we get the feeling that what we sense of the world around and within us is only the tip of the ice-berg of what could be sensed? How vital is our living experience, and how is that vitality contracted?

The awakening of the senses is fundamental to our physical purpose. Imagine the difference between eating a carrot and tasting just ‘carrot’, (the same flavor of carrot you tasted every day since you started solid food), and eating a carrot and tasting its uniqueness, its subtle edge in sweetness, or its uncommon undertone of earth. In the former, experience bounces off a layer of depression; in the latter, we are coming to life.

From Aristotle on, we have been conditioned to believe we have only five senses. The age of materialism further stiffened the burden of bland limitation with the idea that the senses are the organs of a solid “thing” (this body), and as such, are only receptive to external stimuli. The one sensing, they state, is the body itself. Nothing more than that. It senses the outer world, as the inner world is ‘only’ imagination.

“How would it be if consciousness was not a “hard problem” at all?”

Yet as science progresses and the understanding of the brain and the body itself became more refined, the consensus around what this “body” is really made of, has collapsed in quantum weirdness. What has again risen up is: “The hard problem of consciousness”- the question of what consciousness is, and whether it is the result of matter (or sensory input), or whether it exists independently of matter and sensory input. (Followers of these writings will know that such either-or choices will never hold: a rational answer is ‘both’ and ‘neither’. But now, more into the senses).

To the left, are listed the vast amount of physical senses which are now generally accepted as part of the human physical organism, and which lead far beyond the famous five. Most notably, we find here the sense of time (strangely enough, not yet the sense of space or infinity). Also missing from this standard list is the sense of sexual arousal and fulfillment; and the sensory organs involved with the drive to procreate. (A strangely Victorian, scientific blind-spot).

Perhaps from the same omission, there seems to be no medical attempt to formulate more subtle kinds of sensory experience that are critical to all experience. The sense of love, peace, care, bliss, ecstasy, freedom, wholeness, innocence, purity and belonging, just to name a few. Perhaps the aversion to these areas (which so much preoccupy actual experience) is connected to that same “hard problem of consciousness”, which being hard, precludes any discussion.

Yet how would it be if consciousness was not a “hard problem” at all?

If we can fully allow that consciousness is the unconditioned source of all sensory perception – that it is the backdrop to all experience of any nature, then the multitude of sense perceptions is no longer a problem. In sensing the sensor through any window of perception, we move to the perceptive eye at the center of the storm.

And that eye opens.

The Sensory Formula

There is a formula for the opening of sense perceptions. It goes like this: in order to open a sense perception it is necessary to let it go completely, standing in the absence of that sense perception.

For example, in seeing, it is necessary to un-focus the eyes. In un-focusing from any content, true vision of the whole panorama begins to emerge. Space comes to life, together with the shocking play of the duality of light and dark, and sometimes with the seeing of energetic color of a more subtle nature.

In listening, it is necessary to let go of attuning to any particular sound. The agenda of the listener needs to surrender. In this, the sound is free to move through consciousness, unconditionally, together with all other sounds. It is also helpful to release the notion of distance (near and far). How often do we only listen to the sounds in the mid-range, ignoring the sounds of the body itself, and deleting the sounds that are far away?

To open the senses, we need to relax behind them, while releasing control of the contents. This need to control what we taste, touch, hear, feel, blocks the channels of perception, and this cuts us off from from life. The great controller exists because of the belief that the individual is defined by her experience (created by sensory input). In trying to protect this individual, the connection to the whole is lost. (Is there a sensory organ for the feeling of loneliness?)

“To sense infinity, we simply need to allow the infinity which is sensing.”

To open our senses, we need to relinquish control, allowing the whole dimension behind and around any particular sensory experience to open up, unconditionally.

The movement into the present moment is a classic spiritual example in the realization of the sense perception of time. When we let go of the past and the future, or of notions of young and old, or beginning and ending, we find ourselves in the timeless moment, out of which every impression of time is born.

How would it be to sense infinity? To sense infinity, we simply need to allow the infinity which is sensing. The infinity which is you sensing the world will then tunnel a connection through all impressions to the infinity out of which all impressions arise.

Don’t just believe it. Try it for yourself.

The day will come when science finds the neuro-biological mechanism (they will call it a ‘distributed system’) that they will claim causes the sense of infinity. In advance, let us say that this mechanism will be a physical reflection, formed out of infinity itself, and out of dimensions to which science is still blind, caught as it is, in a limited methodology that states that consciousness is a “hard problem”.

Spiritual teacher  Georgi Y. Johnson is author of I AM HERE – Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty. You can watch an interview with her on Conscious TV here . You can also connect with Georgi through Facebook , Twitter  and Youtube

Some of the Scientifically Known Physical Senses

Sight – Color
Sight – Brightness
Taste – Sweet
Taste – Salty
Taste – Sour
Taste – Bitter
Taste – Umami (umami receptors detect the amino acid glutamate)
Touch
Pressure
Itch
Thermoception – heat
Thermoception – cold
Sound
Smell
Proprioception  (Sensing where your body parts are, relative to other body parts).
Tension Sensors (Monitoring muscle tension).
Nociception – Cutaneous (Pain in skin)
Nociception  – Somatic (Pain in bones and joints).
Nociception  – Visceral (Pain in body organs)
Equilibrioception – Balance
Equilibrioception – Gravity
Stretch Receptors –   (In lungs, bladder, stomach, and the gastrointestinal tract.  A type of stretch receptor, that senses dilation of blood vessels, is also often involved in headaches).
Chemoreceptors:  (Trigger medulla in the brain that detects blood born hormones and drugs. Also involved in the vomiting reflex).
Thirst
Hunger
Magnetoception. (The ability to detect magnetic fields)
Time:  (Experimental data has shown humans have a startling accurate sense of time.

 

Allowing ∞ Sense Perception

 

 

 

Some of the Scientifically Known Physical Senses

Sight – Color
Sight – Brightness
Taste – Sweet
Taste – Salty
Taste – Sour
Taste – Bitter
Taste – Umami (umami receptors detect the amino acid glutamate)
Touch
Pressure
Itch
Thermoception – heat
Thermoception – cold
Sound
Smell
Proprioception  (Sensing where your body parts are, relative to other body parts).
Tension Sensors (Monitoring muscle tension).
Nociception – Cutaneous (Pain in skin)
Nociception  – Somatic (Pain in bones and joints).
Nociception  – Visceral (Pain in body organs)
Equilibrioception – Balance
Equilibrioception – Gravity
Stretch Receptors –   (In lungs, bladder, stomach, and the gastrointestinal tract.  A type of stretch receptor, that senses dilation of blood vessels, is also often involved in headaches).
Chemoreceptors:  (Trigger medulla in the brain that detects blood born hormones and drugs. Also involved in the vomiting reflex).
Thirst
Hunger
Magnetoception. (The ability to detect magnetic fields)
Time:  (Experimental data has shown humans have a startling accurate sense of time.

 

Being Freedom, 23/3/16, Synchronized Online Meditation with Bart & Georgi

Join Bart ten Berge & Georgi Y. Johnson through the internet (ZOOM meeting) for this live and online event in which we will share silence, peacefulness and healing.

The Satsang online address is: https://zoom.us/j/707383655. Let Zoom download its stuff and it will launch automatically.

To get the right time from your area, go here.

ZOOM is very easy to use, quite stable, and we hope will be a beautiful, global way to take part

In English. Facilitated by Bart & Georgi.

“‘The only way to attain experience is to come to complete emptiness; that is to come to the end of the thought mind. But you will find that the emptiness was never empty because it is a potential for all that may come to be. We enter into an area of extremely fine aspects of consciousness that, dissolve into itself and lose duality. And then there is only ‘that.’”

– Russel Williams –

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

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.

What to expect at I-Exist England with Georgi & Bart, April 2016

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

We will be a hiring a camper van, which means that we have a kitchen on wheels for the famous soups and refreshments wherever we go.

The Suffering of the Separate Self is Not Separate

On the nondual highway of inner-growth there can come a stage where gross egotism replaces authentic unfolding. Called by some the ‘spiritual ego’, this is the valley of temptation where the individual mind pulls every punch to maintain its supremacy in the world of “might is right”.

The underlying motivation is sound enough: to protect the whole from facing that which must never be felt, or experiencing that which must never be experienced.

Regardless of the customized version of individual horror, there is always one word that repeats in this last battalion of ego defence: that word is ‘helpless’.

Helplessness. On reflection it makes sense that this pure and innocent quality should have become so condemned in a culture which is in creative overdrive to the point of self destruction.

Yet it is a nondual position which is always here. We never get rid of our helplessness, no matter how we try to build battalions on the shore lines of supreme creative control. We can’t manifest an antidote to helplessness. No amount of adoration and no quantity of cash will make it go away. We are born out of helplessness and our first impressions of this world are formed through helplessness. Actually, only through helplessness can we allow impressions at all. We are helpless, whether we want it or not, in every moment of our waking life and during every drop of sleep. We are helpless in stress and helpless in relaxation. We are helpless in the past, present and future. We will be helpless in the dissolution of our minds and in the decay of our bodies. We are helpless in getting born and helpless in death.

Awareness can only allow. It is purely receptive, utterly non-exclusive.

Pure, unidentified awareness is also helpless. Helplessness is its nature (That is perhaps why awakening can often spur such a reaction of control and superiority). Pure awareness exists beyond conditions. It doesn’t get to choose what arises and what dies away. It can’t alter reality through intent. Awareness can only allow form. It is purely receptive, utterly non-exclusive. It even has to allow separation and the possibility of its own negation.

There is much that the stubborn vestiges of conditioned mind would like to exclude. With roots reaching deep into the not-yet conscious precincts of our minds, these forms repeat in old patterns: patterns often inherited through the generations or mimicked from each other in our natural passion to belong as one. They are hardwired neural networks frozen in time, passed from father to son and from sister to brother. Yet the map of the brain can be rewritten. The program is not absolute. Only the separate self gasping its last breath would say otherwise.

Unity opens a horror of helplessness. How often we hear the question: but what about the holocaust? What about ISIS? Just when the separate self is beginning to shake in its rooftops. As long as there is ISIS, the logic of fear says, we must divide ourselves from the whole. If not as individuals, then at least as a clan.

“Why do I have to kill everyone?” weeps the Italian Mafiosi in a well-known (ironically Israeli) comedy.

Trees are not separate, and as such, have no fear of death.

A subtler lie of the separate self is found in the belief in the separate suffering of the separate self. This is barely understood and yet reveals the nature of suffering at a new depth.

Is my suffering separate from the suffering of someone in another nation? Where do we draw the line? Is there a  line? Is suffering separate from our experience, even after enlightenment?  Isn’t this absence of separation from the whole the very scared motor behind the desire to teach, serve, write?

Yet like a psychopath on a bad day, the separate self pitifully weeps at its own separate suffering. In this, it keeps itself alive. “Why do I have to kill everyone?” weeps the Italian Mafiosi in a well-known (ironically Israeli) comedy.

The root source of all suffering is the belief in a separate self. That means that humanity itself is afflicted by this agony – the agony of believing themselves separate, helpless and alone. Each and every one of the 7 billion people alive now suffer this belief, or are liable to. There is nothing exclusive about the suffering of the separate self. It’s a zone. A dimension of dread. It’s hell on earth. And when we choose for it, the noose tightens.

There is a well-known technique to deal with the pain of loneliness – one of the attributes of separation. It involves deeply allowing our own loneliness, and then connecting that to the loneliness of others around us, anyone, (or soon) everyone. In the paradox of being lonely together, a transformation begins.

This shock of judgement is a by-product of free choice – a myth which is on a collision course with life beyond illusion.

Right now, humanity is one, unified separate self, as seen from a certain dimension. It is separate from the universe, separate from nature and separated from its own present moment. It is also a great being which contains tremendous loneliness. Alone in its journey through the darkness, alone it its inner fights, alone even with its self-destruction. Humanity is helpless in the vast expanse of space from which it seeks release, above all from the historic forms that hold it captive. These forms are born of the great and infantile collective mind that cultivates an amorphous and toxic reality based on the shock of judgement between good and evil. The self and the stranger. Us and them. This shock of judgement is a by-product of free choice – a myth which is on a collision course with life beyond illusion.

We can only be responsible for the war between good and evil when we are consolidated in a deeper source that precedes all such binary equations. Both good and evil are motivated by a fear of annihilation. Until there is freedom from that fear, or from the belief that we at source could ever have an end-point in time and space, then the war will go on.

The whole organism is in crisis, but everywhere individual cells are awakening. Awakening represents the not the activation of creative mind but of receptive mind. Receptive mind is able to receive what is real without distorting perception through the artefacts of fear. Receptive mind is able to allow multiple perspectives. Receptive mind has no business with absolute truth or authority. Rather than dictating the reality, it receives it. When mind is in a position of allowance it becomes an open sense organ – perhaps perceiving the universe around itself for the first time.

Through this perception, the whole body of humanity begins to resonate at a different frequency. The more we are consolidated in that perceiving source that can open in pure receptivity, the more humanity as a whole will begin to unfold in freedom.

It is happening anyway. And every one of us is helpless in that. Thank goodness.

Spiritual teacher  Georgi Y. Johnson is author of I AM HERE – Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty. You can watch an interview with her on Conscious TV here . You can also connect with Georgi through Facebook , Twitter  and Youtube

 

 

Suffer Me Not

To suffer the horror


of a psychopathic lie,


or let doors slam,


and in slamming


be timelessly crammed


in a lonely chamber


of the ‘individually’ damned.

 


For suffering was never a private affair.


It’s always shared,


(even if you’re not there).


 


And suffering the differing night


with its demons of threat and fright,


we notice false triumph in a curse


that twists love to rebirth


and rattles joy into drunken mirth


 


Yet we love them,


these drunken wreckers


of civilized form


we love them with passion


of endless night


as they kill us


on the inside,


the insane making us sane,


in a kingdom of fools


and a promised land betrayed,


afraid, afraid, afraid.


 


Wonder, wonder and wonder on


this circling trail of mind


(dot, dot, dot).


 


Wonder.


Until the mind dies again


with the old storyteller


stabbed and gone


without a word,


and the seeker


(more lost than ever) 


disinheriting herself


in precious paradox


as truth explodes


in a sacred source


where nothing


is full of it all


and emptiness is free.


 


That holy inner realm


of silent sound 


undulating


before it is heard.