Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 33

Nondual Therapy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Nonduality, Anyway?

Nonduality is a modern spiritual term that sourced often in the Eastern schools of Advaita Vedanta. Nonduality literally means “not two”; suggesting that all arises from one inseparable source, which is also the source of ourselves.

While religious teachings tend to spread monotheism or unity of creation as a belief, nonduality seeks freedom from belief structures through direct experience of the unified source. Hence the emphasis in nondual teachings on meditation, self inquiry and experiential surrender, rather than on prayer and supplication to a higher authority or god.

Practitioners active in nonduality do not need to come from any particular teaching, gender, culture, or school of thought. Most are spontaneously awakened, although many have trained in a variety of disciplines of meditation and/or energy work in their process of self-liberation.

A nondualist can be anything from a Jain, to a Catholic, to an Atheist. The unifying factor is the movement beyond all such forms into the inner world – the source of life itself – and the independent recovery of nondual wisdom through experiential inquiry.

Individuality remains as a playful, transient and impermanent fixture, a fleeting and indivisible expression of unity. It is no longer a spell that blinds us.

Nondualists speak of dimensions beyond form – such as the timeless consciousness revealed beyond thought and identity, or the presence of infinite awareness, the unattached, benevolent observer of all experience. As nonduality is experiential, it is also intensely existential, located in the ‘here’ and ‘now’ as entry points to a source of ourselves beyond space and time.

The beautiful paradox of nonduality, is that the deeper we move into the source of who, what and where we are, in the spirit and gut of individuality, the more it becomes apparent that we are not separate but living from one source.

Unity is found at the core of the one individual – behind, beyond and irrespective of all illusions of separation. In this realization, the individual is liberated to take form in attunement with the needs of the whole. Individuality remains as a playful, transient and impermanent fixture, a fleeting and indivisible expression of unity. It is no longer a spell that blinds us.

 

An Introduction to Nondual Therapy from Georgi Y. Johnson

Georgi Y. Johnson

[Extract from the upcoming book: Stillness of the Wind – An introduction to Nondual Therapy]

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

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

 

My first experience of conscious awakening was as a toddler. On the edge of acquiring language, and thus the verbal mechanisms of thought, I lay on a bed. I was two years old, and had been put there (I imagine, to take a nap) by my mother. I lay on the white sheets, not sure what to do. I was aware that my legs were short, hardly reaching beyond the pillow, child’s legs, and I marvelled how they had grown, because before they had been shorter. I gazed loosely towards the window where the afternoon sunlight was glimpsing through the curtain. Downstairs, I could hear my mother in the kitchen.

I idly began reciting the word: “Guitar, guitar, guitar” in my head, like a mantra, until the syllables lost meaning and the word spiralled into a senseless oblivion, with no relation at all to the object. In wonder at this, I tried the same thing with my own name: “Georgi, Georgi, Georgi.” Suddenly I became strange to myself. I was not me, not this name. So who was I? Rapidly, I became conscious of consciousness, and conscious of the consciousness of consciousness, into pure, unidentified consciousness, unconditional to body, bed and parent downstairs. Yet still, I was here.

I tried it with my mother “Mummy, mummy, mummy.” She also spiralled out of form. She was not who I thought she was. All was living consciousness – a kind of brilliant and familiar, greater home. And then I was gone. I don’t remember where.

These sporadic awakenings would continue throughout my life: return visits to consciousness beyond time and physical space. They were so frequent in childhood years that a deep curiosity surfaced as to where I had vanished in the unnoticed interims, when I wasn’t conscious in this way – when days, weeks and sometimes months passed by. Where had I been?

It was an early conviction that I was here to understand the meaning of life, and these awakening experiences were part of that.

Because of these awakenings, I assumed there was nothing exceptional about it. It was clearly in the “Now”, and clearly an opening to a powerful source of living and life. I thought others experienced the same, and I got the impression that it wasn’t so important to the task of living and so it wasn’t talked about. It became like a secret resource, best not named.

Yet the mystery of why this degree of liberated consciousness is not sustainable as a constant perspective continued. Why did I still need to become less conscious, soporific, entangled and attached in all the wrong directions? Why was I still afraid? Into adulthood, the spaces between awakenings for some decades became longer and the periods of stupor more pervasive. I was living my life. But at breakage point, decades later, when while walking the dogs, a powerful awakening occurred that shocked me again into a strangeness of my own life, or what the Buddhists call “Beginners Mind”. How did I come to be here, with these people, in this religion, in this country? Where had I been? How did I choose for this?

These awakenings are like a magical hatch to eternity that restore freedom to the forms of life, whenever most needed. Yet always, after the ecstasy there is the laundry: the realization of our freedom through layer after layer of form, many of which are buried deeply in the unconscious. Awakening by itself was spiritual survival, but in the art of living, there was still much to be realized.

This process led to the book I AM HERE, which differentiates between the awakening of consciousness, the enlightenment of unbounded sentient awareness, and perception through emptiness. In simple terms, this is the deep relaxation of mind, heart and body. Many answers to the riddle of the continued sense of entrapment are waiting for spiritual seekers in that book.

Until the I AM HERE process, I had been awakening from the head up, but the sentient heart was still held prisoner. Later, the heart was open to unconditional love, yet the body was still held prisoner. There was an unconscious condition on love. The condition was marked in all of those experiences which are NOT loving, or what would be conventionally classed as outright evil.

Unconscious fears, repressed anger, energetic blind-spots of depression were still calling towards the beloved to come home. I was attached to the body through conflict – through a resistance to allowing the physical experience of wonder (and terror) of life in physical form.

This last stage (the drop into emptiness) of the I AM HERE process is also the third position that liberates the fear with which the windows of consciousness and awareness are stained. It is a journey through the unconditional to a space where even conditions are not excluded.

The beautiful twist is that with this final stage of liberation (a quantum shift in life form and perception), the journey was not at its end, but at its beginning. Only then, did I feel that I began to live for real. The process continues, yet the suffering is no longer identified as private or personal. Indeed, it becomes senseless to make that division (between self and other) in the service of life.

In the process of self-realization, we move through structures of duality. These structures are known from the birth of our civilization. From East to West, ancient philosophies address dialectics. The thesis, antithesis and synthesis – a primary structure of polarity and transcendence, or a war between opposites and the equilibrium of the third point in the higher paradigm.

A classic example in nonduality is between the experience of being ‘everything’ and the experience of being ‘nothing’. This duality is created through an attachment to the effects of perception – even in its purest form. In emptiness, it becomes clear that everything and nothing are one. In emptiness, the “thing” itself disappears as existing in separation. The whole conceptual map gets redrawn. The key scientific example of where everything and nothing are one can be found in atomic physics – in a single elementary particle, that is both here (in the perceivable physical dimension) and not here, at the same time. This is the matter of which we are composed.

We know there is natural polarity everywhere in creation. From the form of our own bodies into groups of two (legs, arms, eyes, ears) coordinated through a central trunk, through to the basic organization of our conceptual reality (Inside, outside/ in front, behind/ past, future/ up, down/me, you).

Nondual therapy recognizes that these dualities also exist energetically in the realm of thought and feeling. Through offering the synthesis to repeating duality traps, it brings forward nondual positions that can be channelled therapeutically to set energy contractions free, layer by layer. This is beneficial as a technique both for practitioners and for individual meditators.

A core example can be found in the spiralling duality between anger and fear. The fear which is uncontainable on the inside tends to get expressed outside in the form of anger, which is a threat. This fear can become anxiety when traumatic experience has created an additional layer of fear about the feeling of anger. At the same time, anger brings negative feedback and isolation.

Anger and fear are both instinctive reactions to the separation that is perceived between ourselves and others. The nondual position or striving of both configurations of anger and fear is towards compassion – the energetic acknowledgement of interdependency and togetherness in passion (which in its root means the same as suffering).

When compassion is energetically and physically brought forward to the duality of fear and anger, both can begin to transform. If this does not happen, then the energy of fear and anger become blended as dread (fear and threat), which then solidifies in the form of depression. Depression is an energetic barrier between ourselves and others (and between ourselves and our own living form). We isolate, we stop opening up, we break the living connection, the inner circulation gets severed.

Another example of a duality of suffering and a nondual position is innocence. The realization of inherent innocence is the elixir for which both guilt and accusation are striving. It is the transformative frequency that will unlock the twin trap with a liberating effect on all three layers – thinking patterns, feeling contractions, and physical centres of stress and imbalance.

Nondual positions include the present moment, consciousness, awareness, peace, love, unity, innocence, purity, freedom, compassion, the body, stillness, care, belonging, bliss, happiness and silence.

The first error in working with nonduality is paradoxically in the formulation of a duality. It is assumed that freedom, for example, can only be here when there is no limitation or conditions.

This formulation immediately moves freedom into an either-or, ‘all-or-nothing’ structure. We deny ourselves the freedom that is always here, making it dependant on conditions in time and space (we will be free, ‘when’, or ‘if’…).

A first definition of a nondual position is that it is unconditional to time and space. For example, innocence exists within ourselves, irrespective of the conditions of guilt and accusation. The innocence is always here. We are born in it, we suffer in it, we condemn ourselves in it and we die in it. Yet innocence is always here. Its source prevalence is simply obscured by our own mental and sentient contractions.

An example of a therapeutic saying offered within nondual formulations is:

“The duality of slavery is liberation.

Freedom has no opposite.

In freedom, liberation and slavery are one.”

C.G. Jung was a pioneer of nondual therapy, as was stated it clearly:

“We all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any positive life-force; hence we avoid and fear it.”

The creation and ejection of that which we consider “other” is a causal root of suffering on an individual and collective basis.

To summarize, Nondual Therapy is a form of spiritual psychology designed to offer energetic entry points to increased neuroplasticity, emotional intelligence and physical health. In this, there are certain key formulations.

1. Spirals of duality move according to the belief in absolute separation in which binary mind attempts to identify difference between the self and the ‘other’.

2. The roots of these dualities are connected with mental identification and feeling attachment.

3. Nondual positions are ever-present and abundant, existing independently of conditions of time and space.

4. No nondual position is separate, each of the qualia, when reconnected, will bring the others in its trail and take the journey of self-realization forward.

5. Awareness of the twin traps of energetic duality interwoven with mental programming represents an important avenue to healing and increased quality of life.

6. Life is the greatest healer and teacher. Nondual therapy, at core, is about trusting life, unconditionally.

The teachings presented in I AM HERE find expression in Nondual Therapy. These therapeutic tools bring the means through which it is possible to liberate unconscious structures and blind-spots which still place limitations on our freedom in the art of living.

To be Conscious of Consciousness. Mirror Neurons and Human Freedom.

By Georgi Y. Johnson

With the discovery of mirror neurons, it could be that a new neural network is opening for the contemplation of human interdependency, empathy and the deeper nature of consciousness, through the biological medium of the human brain.

Beyond the empathic function of mirror neurons, there is a hardly-touched area of research. These neurons are about unconditioned awareness. When mirror neurons are empathic to their own awareness, (when the brain becomes aware that it is aware), a whole new brain capacity for meta-perspective opens up in which neuroplasticity (and the brains ability to change, adapt and oversee conditions) could be greatly enhanced.

Does this mental ability to awaken to collective consciousness represent a blind spot in the field of neuroscience?

Mirror Neurons and the Monkey

“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” Leonardo da Vinci

The scientific anecdote has it that in the ‘eighties and ‘nineties some Italian neurophysiologists – Rizzolatti, Di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, and Gallese at the University of Parma, had the ventral premotor cortex of a macaque monkey hooked up with electrodes to study neurons specialized for the control of hand and mouth actions. Each time the monkey picked up a peanut to eat, his brain would signal: “click, click, click”.

One day, a researcher himself took a peanut and began to eat it, as the monkey watched.  The same sound “click, click, click,” resonated through the monitor, although the monkey hadn’t moved an inch. The monkey’s brain reacted identically on an observed action to when the action was physically done by the monkey herself.

Repeated tests showed that an observed action in another can signal the same brain response as first-hand physical action. The neurons that fired in response to actions taken by someone else’s body have been called Mirror Neurons.

We can easily recognize these theorized mirror neurons at work: each time we clutch our heads in despair when the player misses the penalty; when we’re watching a drama on TV; or in any emotional engagement with situations that are none of our business.

When I was a toddler, my brother cut his leg. My response was to not walk myself for a week. Was this the effect of unshielded mirror neurons hardly restrained by the un-programed infant brain?

“I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology.”

Prof. V.S. Ramachandran

“With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.” Prof. V.S. Ramachandran. Image: WikiCommons

The new millennium has witnessed an expanding wealth of research around the existence, role and potential of mirror neurons.

The functioning of mirror neurons (or lack of) has been theoretically linked  to autism; they have been described as critical in processes of learning, mimicry, intention, anticipation and even in the evolutionary leap from Neanderthal to today’s splendid example of human.

While scientific dissenters have attempted to puncture the hype, casting doubt on the phenomena, as well as on the task and location of mirror neurons in the brain, research is only now unfolding into the scientific implications of what some neuroscientists, such as Prof. Vilayanur Ramachandran, have indicated could be the neurological missing link in basic skills of empathy.

From a nondual perspective, in which consciousness is seen as a unified field rather than a localized affair, the discovery of empathic mirror neurons is inspiring.

Experientially, it’s not surprising that we have brain cells that translate the actions of another body in the same way that they translate the actions of our own physical matrix.

Leaving aside direct ANS input of physical sensation, observation of one’s own body is not so critically different from the observation of another body doing that thing. A line which separates one from the other is mostly formed by thought identification. A vast amount of sensory input is in itself collective. For example, a sudden clap of thunder will resonate through all bodies in the area simultaneously. When it rains, we all hear the sound and we all get wet. The separation between one physical body and another is more conceptual than physical.

Yet for the freedom to interchangeably experience your own stuff with the stuff of the “other”, a third position or overview is needed. Logically, this would seem to be the consciousness (that which chooses to identify or not) which is the backdrop to all experience and which is claimed to exist independently of the contents of experience. This consciousness gives freedom of form, and a freedom of choice over which neurological pathway to follow.

The unconditioned consciousness that witnesses the movement of physical, mental and emotional form is understood in nonduality as fundamental to perceptive reality. This conscious ‘witness’ is not memory dependant, and as experience can only occur in the present moment, it is also not time dependant. What mirror neurons introduce is the additional possibility that the access points of consciousness are also not dependent on space or spatial conditions.

“A physical peanut for one, is an experiential peanut for all.”

Inter-being

It is clear that in the empathic movement between my peanut and the professor’s peanut, the idea of a definable, separate self has broken down. A physical peanut for one, can be an experiential peanut for all.

Yet sensory experience is not limited to physical acts, it is also how we experience emotional stress, pain or relief. This physical resonance of non-physical sensation also resonates through mirror neurons – perhaps to a refinement that we can hardly capture. This is happening biologically of itself, to be blocked only by the active neglect or repression of mirror neuron activity.

In their quality of empathy, mirror neurons would seem to be receptive – a receptivity that can be obscured by rejecting thought patterns – but which is nevertheless the same natural tendency found in a monkey.

Such repression through conditioned thought control (it’s not ‘my’ happiness, it’s ‘his’) can be viewed at the root of jealousy, competition, suffering and war. Allowance and cultivation of mirror neurons and resulting neuroplasticity could lead to greater freedom, togetherness and a realistic flow of interdependence that could provide a utopian model for any community or society. Yet like any biological ability, mirror neurons need to be used in order for them to multiply.

Who am I again?

When we really move into the perceptive experience of being alive, it can become clear that our whole interpersonal sensory reality is composed of our perceptions of others and the environment.

We see the facial responses, struggles, egos and accidents of others from many perspectives, whereas we are physically unable to see ourselves in such living totality.

The closest we get in visual input about our own physical objectivity is through photographs, video recordings and mirrors on the wall. But a vast amount of sensory data and perspective is excluded from these forms. Our experience of our own self is entirely entangled with and dependant on the feedback we get from others. In a way, we exist as a personality, only in the sum total of reflections in the interpersonal field.

Mirror neurons invite us to realize that our reality was never separable from the whole.

Awareness of Awareness

“Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.” Rabindranath Tagore Photo: Wikicommons

This non-physical, empathic ability of mirror neurons to fire in response to the perception of “others”, also gives us the ability to empathize with ourselves as if we were also “other”.

Because of mirror neurons, we (the subject) are also able to reflect on our own identity, emotional patterns, instinctive drives (the objects of inner perception). We are able to have empathy for another form, but also for and our own ‘inner’ form. We are able to self reflect, to become self conscious and even to be conscious that we are conscious.

What happens when a mirror neuron sparks empathy for its own empathy? What happens when the mirror neuron’s awareness turns to the other mirror neurons, and the brain becomes aware that it is aware? What is then reflected?

The brain is still alive, firing reflections but now it is reflecting its own capacity for reflection, like a tunnel of mirrors into infinity. On a cellular level, we are becoming aware that we are aware, in increasing degrees of refinement and liberation from normal perceptive constraints. Could this be a neurophysiological explanation for the phenomena of spiritual awakening?   

Where Binary Brain Surrenders

Mirror Neurons, Nonduality & Perception

By Georgi Y. Johnson

Take a look at yourself in the mirror. It’s time for some self-reflection. I need to find myself. We have no idea what we’re saying, but the principle of reflection is deeply embedded in the way we talk about our inner world. With the discovery of mirror neurons, it could be that a new neural network is opening for the contemplation of human interdependency, empathy and the deeper nature of consciousness.

The scientific anecdote has it that in the ‘eighties and ‘nineties some Italian neurophysiologists – Rizzolatti, Di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, and Gallese at the University of Parma, had the ventral premotor cortex of a macaque monkey hooked up with electrodes to study neurons specialized for the control of hand and mouth actions. Each time the monkey picked up a peanut to eat, his brain would signal: “click, click, click”. One day, (goes the story) one of the researchers himself took a peanut and began to eat it, as the monkey watched.  The same sound “click, click, click,” resonated through the monitor, although the monkey hadn’t moved an inch. Other stories involve an ice-cream, so perhaps the phenomena – which at first became known as “monkey see, monkey do” – was rechecked with a whole culinary range.

What the results consistently revealed was that an observed action in another, can signal the same brain response in the monkey as action taken by the monkey itself. The neurons that fired in this act of empathy towards someone else’s body have been called Mirror Neurons.

We can all easily recognize these theorized mirror neurons at work, each time we clutch our heads in despair when the player misses the penalty, when we’re watching an intense drama on TV, or in any simple act of emotional engagement with situations that are none of our business. When I was one years old, my brother cut his leg. My response was to not walk myself for a week. Were these early mirror neurons taking physical empathy a little too far through the hardly shielded infant brain?

“I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology.”

Prof. V.S. Ramachandran

The new millennium has witnessed an expanding wealth of research and debate over the existence, role and potential of mirror neurons. The functioning of mirror neuros (or lack of) has been linked theoretically to autism; they have been described as critical in processes of learning, mimicry, and even in the evolutionary leap from Neanderthal to today’s splendid example of human.

While scientific dissenters have attempted to puncture the hype, casting doubt on the existence of such neurons in humans, as well as on their task and location in the brain, research is only now unfolding into the scientific implications of what some neuroscientists, such as Prof. Vilayanur Ramachandran, have indicated could be the biological seat of our capacity for empathy.

To a pseudo-scientific nondualist, the philosophical implications of the discovery of mirror neurons are inspiring.

Experientially, it’s not surprising that we have brain cells that translate the actions of another body in the same way that they translate the actions of my own body. The only bit in the brain left unfired is the connection to direct sensory perception through the nerves in the hand, or taste buds that actually signal the precise saltiness of the peanut. Observation of my body doing something – from the perspective of the brain – is not so critically different from the observation of your body doing that thing. The experience (which is always in the moment) can be the same, it’s just that you get to carry the consequences in your flesh and I don’t.

The unconditioned consciousness that witnesses the movements of physical, mental and emotional form is understood as fundamental to our reality. This witness is not memory dependant, but as experience can only be experienced in the present moment, it is directly alive at the gateway between our perceiving source  and the traction of life.

To a nondualist, these mirror neurons would seem to be a form reflecting a wider apparatus connected with the nature of consciousness. In the area of theory, perhaps a nondual perspective can enrich the current debate on mirror neurons. 

Trauma

If mirror neurons are fired when we are able to empathize with the emotions or feelings of another person, then they are also that which fires when we empathize with the emotions or feeling of our own ‘person’.

Many of us perhaps recognize traumatic states, when we get sucked down the rabbit hole of pain and vulnerability and our universe shrinks to survivalist proportions. Such states narrow our consciousness and close down our sense perceptions.

If we were able to relate to ourselves at such times (“The smaller me is suffering a traumatic state now-“) and empathise with it, through the use of mirror neurons, then a new spaciousness could be allowed in which new healing possibilities emerge through freedom of perspective. We can “take care” of ourselves, in the same way that we would care of any loved one, as we are not ultimately the form which is suffering. 

Inter-being

It is clear that in the empathic movement between my peanut and the professor’s peanut, that the idea of a separate self has experientially broken down. A physical peanut for one, is an experiential peanut for all.

It’s not only nonphysical pain which is shared, but also the non-physical components of happiness, fulfilment, grace or bliss. This is happening biologically of itself, to be blocked only by the active neglect or repression of mirror-neuronal firing.

Such repression (it’s not ‘my’ happiness, it’s ‘his’) is the root of jealousy, competition, suffering and war. Allowance and cultivation of the mirror neuron (like those found in our simple monkey) could lead to a kind of manifest unity and realistic flow of interdependence that could provide a utopian model for any community or society.

Who am I again?

On the other hand, when we really move into the perceptive experience of being alive, it can become increasingly clear that our whole interpersonal sensory reality is composed of our perceptions of others and the environment. We see the facial responses, struggles, egos and accidents of others from many perspectives, whereas we are physically unable to see ourselves in such living totality.

The closest we get in visual input about our own physical objectivity is through photographs, video recordings and mirrors on the wall. But a vast amount of sensory data and perspective is excluded from these forms. Mirror neurons invite us to realize that our reality was never separable from the whole. Who did we think we were fooling in thinking it could be?

The Mirror in the Mirror

Yet it gets even more exciting.  This non-physical, empathic ability of mirror neurons to fire in response to the perception of “others”, also gives us the ability to empathize with ourselves as if we were also “other”.

Because of mirror neurons, we (the subject) are also able to reflect on our own identity, emotional patterns, instinctive drives (the objects of inner perception). We are able to have empathy for another form, but also for and our own ‘inner’ form.

But what happens when a mirror neuron has empathy for empathy itself? What happens when the mirror neuron’s awareness turns to the other mirror neuron, and becomes aware that it is aware? What is then reflected?

The brain is still busy, firing reflections but now it is reflecting its own capacity for reflection, like a tunnel of mirrors into infinity. On a cellular level, we are becoming aware that we are aware, that we are aware, in increasing degrees of refinement and liberation from normal perceptive constraints. Could this be a neurophysiological explanation for the phenomena of awakening?   

Where Binary Brain Surrenders

Now we have no choice but to take ourselves as the laboratory monkey. In the experience of awareness of awareness, the tunnels of mirror into infinity, somewhere, the wiring of the brain seems to flip over. The effect is the collapse of the sense of a separate self. It comes with existential impressions of the eternal self and the infinity of love and peace. It defaults to a deep, contented sense of being, unconditionally to circumstances of pleasure, pain, failure or success. In short, it seems to be a good thing, and also an intensely kind, generous and sociable form that emerges.

In the collapse of subject object, seen already in the monkey salivating over the professor’s ice-cream, a more evolved layer of mind begins to fire up (which surely, one day, they will find in neurons). This kind of mind is less identified yet more ingenious. It moves beyond the either-or equations of subject and object and into the “and-and” equations that more reflect life (also the professor and also the monkey eat peanuts). In developing the ability to relax into paradox, many possibilities, and many feelings, there is an increasing surrender in responsivity to the needs of the environment in any moment.

Neurons multiply according to how often they are fired. That is, the more you walk a particular path through the forest of the mind, the more likely you are to walk it. This is the nature of education and training. We learn through resonating with the “other”, then we do it ourselves (as we have already walked that path with our teacher), and then we do it often. The more often we walk the path, the more it widens. The more we practise self-reflection and empathy, the more mirror neurons we have at our disposal, and the easier it becomes to disentangle and to access this deeper existential layer of being at one with the whole, without conflict. We find more freedom in form.

“It is extraordinary how near we are to our deeper being. It’s just a thought away.”

Ram Dass – Polishing the Mirror

One Evolution

When we move to subtler frequencies of brain, such as that of timeless, unattached consciousness, or the resonance of unbounded being, these mirror neurons and the effects of them is also firing through all the brains in the vicinity. Could this not be a biological reflection of what has been called the transmission of enlightenment from teacher to student?

If what’s true of a peanut is true also of the neuronal resonance with the experience of unlimited consciousness, then the liberation of our own perception from the entanglement with thought limitations and the attachment to emotional patterns would have an immediate physiological impact on everyone around us – without us moving a muscle of saying a word.

 

When Death Comes, Don’t Stop Loving

When we lose someone close to us, it is as if a part of us dies inside. It can be confusing. It can seem impossible. We can feel all the wrong stuff at the wrong time, and it can feel like there is nowhere to express it in the world of the physically living.

Grief and loss sweep us away on a river of confrontation with our own mortality. Nobody is immune to experiencing this transition between dimensions. Death is a common as birth. But how to navigate the experience of loss safely to the other side of new-born wholeness?

“The very easiness and “OK-ness” of death can collide with the pure biological shock of loss.”

Grief processes are never simple. Even if an elderly parent dies, at an advanced age and dignity, even if we consider ourselves “enlightened” and liberated of the belief that the body defines who we are, we will experience a process involving the four tasks of grief for at least three months. For some, they begin this process before the loved one dies. The grief process is about releasing fixed ideas and patterns of feeling – including the whole history and the imagined future – into peace. It’s about saying goodbye for all sides, at a depth that our minds can barely track.

When someone dies, there is an easiness and naturalness about it. This can occur in stark comparison to the momentousness of a death in a personal dimension. The very easiness and “OK-ness” of death can collide with the pure biological shock of loss. The mind still searches for the loved one. The heart is unable to feel the absence. The cells of the living body can hardly accept that the cells of that other body are no longer composed as the one we love.

“As time goes by, they are discouraged from expressing their love, and in this they are encouraged to close their hearts.”

The shock of death beckons the mind to take control. With thoughts, and with social reinforcement, those in grief are urged to move through the denial task of death – to accept that the loved one is gone and that they will never come back. They are urged to medicate their pain, and to call off the natural instinct to search – framing the loved one on the wall as history. As time goes by, they are discouraged from expressing their love, and in this they are encouraged to close their hearts.

Yet on the level of feeling, the love has the potential at this stage to expand beyond all conditions – beyond the condition even of the lost one being alive. Tragically, and often in cases of complicated grief (such as sudden death or childhood loss), this love is frozen. How can we love one who is no longer here? The long-term blocking of this love based on a belief that the love depends on the object is one of the tragic spots where processes of grief become complicated.

“Do we stop loving someone because they have died?”

Do we stop loving someone because they have died? Does our heart close to them, because they are no longer physically alive? Did our love for them depend on them, or was it a flow that moved through us, in naturalness towards even a thought of the love one?

Where did we learn that love for the other must end with death?

The unfolding of a grief process into peace and celebration is embedded within the love that is frozen within the belief that love demands a physical object to flow. Within the suffering of grief is the same love which we always felt for the other, but frozen in the shock of loss. When this love is allowed, the grief is able to disentangle, as love begins to flow in a wider context without conditions – to the place beyond birth and death which is where love itself is sourced.

“Beneath that veil of fear is the miracle.”

By nature, every grief process will become a process of love and beauty. Love and beauty are direct expressions of the transience and impermanence of physical form. When we perceive the passing into physical life, and the passing out of the physical, we directly experience transience, including our own fundamental physical impermanence here. This can create fear. But beneath that veil of fear is the miracle. As the more we perceive transience and our temporary position here on this earth, in this body, the more the windows of life and beauty open.

Our suffering can have tremendous beauty. Our rage at mortality can have tremendous vitality. Our pain is an exquisite loosening of a shell of identity. The collapse of the past and of the future in pure relativity has the potential to release the timeless aspect in which grief and loss never happen. By degrees, the expansion of the love we experience for the one we lost will spill over into a love for the living, an appreciation of beauty, an opening to the miracle of this window of time here, spent together in a physical body. In this, a grief process, even if frozen for decades, will sooner or later become a process of the celebration of life.

Don’t wait. Move to the core of the pain, where it is most raw and impossible, and be there in love. Take time, take space and be in love again.

Beyond the Fear of the Unknown

“The mind is like a traveller in a wood that comes to a choice of left or right. Because it believes itself all powerful, it is unable to allow that regardless of whether it turns left or right, the rain will fall anyway.”

One of the first effects of the mind’s reflex to identify with form is the fear of the unknown.

In its natural state, the mind is a clean mirror of multiple dimensions. It receives impressions through the organs of consciousness and as a totality names this experience. The moment experience takes form in the mind, identification begins. The mind, operating according to binary laws, will either accept or reject the input as part of itself. Both are functions of identification. This is “I” is as much a movement of identification as: this is “Not I”.

Irrespective of whether the mind turns left or right, in acceptance or rejection, the experience is imprinted. The rejected part will be shelved into beneath the layers of conscious memory, where it will brood, and find expression in the identification of the “other”. The acceptable part will go on the top shelf of memory, to be improved, polished and tweaked in order to form conscious identity.

The mind is like a traveller in a wood that comes to a choice of left or right. Because it believes itself all powerful, it is unable to allow that regardless of whether it turns left or right, the rain will fall anyway. The rain is experience – the naked, sentient experience of living – and the mind has no control over that dimension.

The mind is a mere receiver, yet early on, it identifies itself as the great cause of creation.

It sees itself as the actor, the creator, the one on which the whole universe depends. It works hours of diligent overtime to pull it all together. It trips circuits, defies logic and creates more stories in a day than are housed in the greatest libraries. It repeats itself endlessly, as if repetition creates truth. All this, to preserve the identity of itself as supreme. All this, to avoid the fear of not knowing.

Already terrified into bewilderment by the belief that it is all powerful, and driven by a sentient confusion between guilt and responsibility, the mind is ashamed, because it secretly knows it hasn’t got a clue what’s going on here. Shame hurts like hell, it can appear as the enemy threatening to expose the deadly truth of mental impotence. As such, the unknown – that which mind cannot grasp – can be perceived as an existential threat.

How critically weak it can feel for the binary mind to admit it doesn’t know stuff. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is supreme. The unknown cannot exist, the mind can argue, as if the mind doesn’t know it, (and the mind determines reality) then how can the unknown be real?

Reality Check

“We know so little, that we don’t even know what knowing is. Knowing itself is unknown.”

What do we really know, without a shadow of a doubt to be true? Without using force, without needing to push or assert, what do we know?

We know that 1+1=2. But that is just a relative code. If you look at the creation of a child, 1+1=3.

We know that we are here. But we don’t know who we are and we don’t know where is “here”. In a way, it can never be “known”. We can receive effects of Being and impressions of “Here” through our minds. But these are impressions and effects. They are not absolute.

We know we have a body. But we don’t actually know that we have it. We don’t even know what it is to possess something. The body’s health and functioning is hardly in our conscious control, and its aging and deterioration is far from predictable. We believe we have a body, but sometimes the experience is more that this body follows “us” around. We think we possess it, but often it seems more likely that it possesses us. Nor do we know who “we” are, as we claim to “have” a body. Neither “we” nor the “body” are truly known by the mind.

The vast ocean of living occurs without direct experience: autonomous functions such as breathing or organ function; processing of situations; reflexive movements. We think we know when we are asleep and when we are awake, but could it not be that sleep continues (with all its treasures) both when we are conscious and when we’re not? Who says that sleep stops when we wake up? Could it not be that consciousness and brain activity is simply re-emerging out of the sleep state?

We know so little, that we don’t even know what knowing is. Knowing itself is unknown.

The Nature of Mind

“We would not be able to know anything at all, without an openness to the unknown.”

Naturally a receiver with the potential to receive information and experience from way beyond the parameters of the separate self, the mind thrives not in knowing but in the great Pacific of the unknown.

Experience itself is utterly dependant on the unknown. It’s even embedded in the word “Ex” perience. It involves stepping out of a frame of reference (expectation, history). Experience is surrender to that which is beyond experience. It’s reception to new stimuli. It can’t be held. It can only be accessed as a living impression. Experience is the source of knowledge, yet experience is over a split second before the mind even knows it begun.

We would not be able to know anything at all, without an openness to the unknown. It’s all reception, reception, reception all the way through the channel of human and out the other side.

Scientific progress, human discovery, learning and feeling all depend on the release of fear of the unknown. When a scientist “discovers” a new phenomenon, he does not discover it in the archives of the ‘known’. Much of science is in fact a process of un-knowing: looking at the ‘known’ with the eyes of wonder, as if it was never known. When the known is perceived with the eyes of the unknown, then the known reveals its deeper nature.

In spirituality, we don’t need to reach far into the heavens or deep into the holy texts to access the unknown. Take any “known” thing and simply let it in, let it in so far that it dies inside. Let it be here in its strangeness, its ongoing resonance, and give up on all knowing. Even the simple sensation of a hand resting on a table can blow the mind out of its tree.

Identification

“This thrill of living aliveness is a quickening of energy.”

The mind will identify, this is how we presently move through form. We will use the conditioned neural networks to suffer our lives, selecting and rejecting, turning left or right, moving through structures of either/or and pretending that the “And-and” (the very phenomena that made the lower choice possible) never existed.

It’s OK to grasp at things for a moment, but we have to be able to put them down. We need to develop the mental ability to let binary (either-or) structures be relative, just as our left and right hands are relative. Pick them up, experience them, let them go. The more we can do this, the more we gain freedom of mind and the ore we begin to liberate experience.

Just as we picked up this story of a separate self in infancy, and just as we will inevitable put it down when we are in a death process, we can learn release the absolute quality of the field of identification throughout our lives, until it becomes clear that some identities don’t need to be picked up at all.

When we are able to allow the fear of the unknown, the same excitement in the nervous system can become the thrill of discovery.

This thrill of living aliveness is a quickening of energy. It is stronger than the relative quality of experience itself. It is equally excited by destruction as creation, equally curious in pain as in pleasure. It’s a relative thrill. Excitement brings a quickening and a new agility of movement, whereas fear tends to freeze us in a state. This relativity (as the thrill itself is just an experience) relativizes the mind.

The relativity of the mind sets it free.

The Unknown Liberation

Many, many ideas we have about our world, our self, our spiritual practise and the way reality is composed are not ours at all. They are inherited in our genes and adopted from our parents, community and environment. Many of them are reactive, based on the reflex of identification and on trauma.

Many of the beliefs we cling to are engineered by fear to avoid rejection – to navigate away from the “unwanted” box in other people’s minds. We keep each other stupid. It’s a tragic co-dependency. Do we really want to fight life because life might confront us with the life that we are?

Setting Perspective Free

Take meditation as an example of the binary mind’s compulsion to obtain an absolute.

We hear so much about Stillness. The stillness that is ‘there’ beyond the thinking mind. We compose whole teachings based on this knowledge of stillness. But is it truly still? Or is this the way the mind perceives it?

When we look into the infinite sky, it appears to be still, but is it truly still? Or do our eyes fail to see the life that is thriving there – more life than on the whole dry land?

When we merge with the silent ocean, it seems to be silent, but is it truly silent? Or is that our ears cannot hear the frequencies that pass through water?

Does our perspective alone determine the quality of the known, making it absolute?

“If we take away the stuff at the sides and the imagined floor and ceiling, would we be falling, or rising, or would we not be perfectly still?”

Identification creates an absolute out of experience, and then we ‘know’ it and teach it as a fixed “thing”. But there is nothing known or fixed about it.

When we look at a wheel turning very fast, at a certain stage it appears to be turning in reverse, and then at a greater speed, it appears to be perfectly still, but is it still? Or is it spinning so fast, our eyes perceive stillness?

When we sit in a train and the train next to us advances, we can experience we are moving backwards. Is it true? Is it not both true AND not true, according to perspective?

When we are falling (like plunging downwards in a spiral of meditation), we call it ‘falling’, but could we not be ascending? Who is going up, and who is going down?

When the floor beneath our feet collapses, was it ever really there? Or did we imagine it was?

If we take away the stuff at the sides and the imagined floor and ceiling, would we be falling, or rising, or would we not be perfectly still?

When a slow vibration perceives a higher frequency it sees no movement. Why must we identify with that, and make the perceptive based on the perception of a lower mind absolute?

The Relativity of Time & Frequency

“Knowledge habitually denies the unknown – even claiming that the unknown cannot exist.”

When the mind becomes one with stillness, when it surrenders to this higher frequency, it perceives itself on the habitual binary level of form. Time seems to slow down. A moment can seem like months. The lower vibration of our regular rhythm can be perceived from the rapid vibration of (so-called) stillness as pure slow motion.

Perhaps some will recognize this experience from times of crisis – such as the moment of a car accident. Time slows down. Time can even seem to stand still. This is the perspective of a higher frequency.

The mind moves very, very slowly down here, through the mid-range of the physical dimension. Knowledge, (the stuff we think we know based on what we remember we experienced), slows us down still further.

Where there was a quite slow rhythm of ‘Now – Now – Now’ in consciousness, knowledge muffles the rhythm altogether. It is known, dead, a closed story, no longer alive. I already know what I’m going to answer before you finished talking.

Knowledge habitually denies the unknown – even claiming that the unknown cannot exist. This is the same whether it is scientific dogma, a political belief or a spiritual teaching. Only from the perspective of the earth, do all the planets of the universe revolve around it. Only from the perspective of human, can we conceive that all forms of life are separate, less evolved and “other” than the life in us.

Life is so much more than knowing. As the greatest healer, life will (sooner or later) tear apart knowledge and liberate it again in sheds of silver into the vast unknown. What is known will be melted, scattered, recycled and reabsorbed. If not now, then in the now of our death. And if not in the now of our death, then in the now of our rebirth

Even the now – as a temporal window flickering in the night – must surrender into not knowing. This is the essence of the surrender that will set us free.

How do you know you are Alive?

Ask yourself the question: am I alive now?

How do we check that? We move immediately to the organs of perception. We feel the weight of the body on the chair or bed. We feel the temperature of the air on the skin. We glance around, and see that we are seeing the physical space in which we are positioned.

We listen, the sounds we hear confirm that we are here. Spiritual teacher Russel Williams calls the physical senses “the organs of consciousness”.

It is through the five senses that we experience all that we could call life. The five senses are not “things” though, in Russel’s teaching, they are channels through which consciousness is able to access the physical dimension and through which the physical dimension enters consciousness. They are doorways through which feeling vibration passes.

Not I, Not other than I, Russel Williams & Steve Taylor

The first physical phenomena to be sensed through the organs of consciousness is the body itself. When we ask the question: “Am I alive now?” we can direct our attention to the world outside the body, but we can equally allow our consciousness to begin to penetrate the body itself: Inside the body, the sensations of physical comfort or discomfort, temperature, movement, gravity. Even the more subtle sensations of thoughts, feeling and emotions are filtered through these organs of consciousness.

With touch, we feel a feeling. With listening, we hear a thought. With sight, we imagine a picture in the future, or we remember a scene from the past. We can even play with it. We can “listen” to the music of our stress or sadness. We can “see” our grief as an image. We can “taste” nostalgia. We can “smell” the vision of the future.

In the end, says Russel, it doesn’t matter if you contemplate a particle of dust, an angelic vision or a biscuit with your tea. It all comes to the same. The absolute is contained within every particle of creation, through every vibration.

18 months ago it was a tremendous affirmation to receive the gift of being introduced to Russel. Now over 90 years old, Russel has no agenda beyond truth. Meetings with him are free of charge and he is not trying to make anyone believe anything. He demands that questions be asked. “I am totally empty, if you don’t put anything in, nothing will come out,” he says, when there is an expectant silence.

“As empty channels, we can relax into our natural purpose – as a living bridge to worlds beyond our perception, yet shockingly close to home.”

Part of the magic in meeting Russel was the discovery of a teacher, who has found freedom and a precision of understanding of our true nature through direct experience – without education, training, dogma or any pretence. Life itself has been his workshop. Through the years, he has found the language to describe this deeper knowledge, driven by a feeling that “it’s worthwhile”.

It is a celebration for us that Russel’s teachings flow easily the teachings of  I AM HERE that also emerged without background or even knowledge of this world we now move in called “nonduality”.

Templates of Creation

In the I AM HERE teachings, the “I” is all about the sacred and sacral need to identify and develop individuality (the .00000000009 % of us which is temporarily and spatially differentiated).

The “Am” is the meta sense of sentience, being, or feeling, through which we feel ourselves to be alive – whether physically or in more subtle dimensions.

The “Here” is the vast, potent, non-exclusive emptiness which pervades before, through and after every particle of physical or energetic form. It is the home of that which is able to experience and which is here unconditionally to the quality of any experience or impression.

These three layers of perception expressed by the I AM HERE are differentiated according to the given terms of the English Language as three layers of perception: consciousness, awareness and emptiness. In emptiness, consciousness and awareness dance and blend.

We are opening the nature and purpose of human form as conscious (awake), aware (sentient) and empty (transient and temporary).
To put it physically, consider the layers as mind, heart and body. The body is the container through which mind (thought, language) and heart (feeling, emotion) connect, conflict, dance together and find peace.
To put it more universally, the human is the expression of a perpetual creation through which spirit, consciousness or universal intelligence is determined to reflect the nature of being, soul, and unconditional sentience.
To put it biblically, the “Here” is the ground of the Garden of Eden, which nurtures both the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge.

To open the senses, or the organs of consciousness, we need to rest back beyond experience. We need to be still, not grasping at thoughts, feelings or physical impressions nor rejecting them. We need even a space between who we are and any state of mind, state of being or state of consciousness.

In resting back without grasping or aversion, we become empty of thoughts and feelings. As empty channels, we can relax into our natural purpose – as a living bridge to worlds beyond our perception, yet shockingly close to home.

My Baby Boy. TheAngelcy Series

“ In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.”

-The Dalai Lama

“My baby boy is in the army of disbelief”

On a stingingly hot day in the suburbs of Tel aviv in August 2013, a bus pulls up near where I stand in the scant shade. One by one, dust-caked soldiers began to disembark. They are returning home from the ground invasion of Gaza. The atmosphere of trauma (more tangible than that poignant clash of divine stillness and physical horror at a road accident) hangs around them. These kids are going home to their parents.

As they hoist their bags over their shoulders, they walk slowly, with heads bent and eyes averted. Home is no longer a familiar place. The gap created by all they have been through and witnessed, seems suddenly too wide. Some of them are so young, they hardly have stubble.

The stench of trauma – possibly impacting generations forward and back, exudes out of the cold-sweat of horrified mortality and senselessness. And this is the “stronger” power, the bad guys in the eyes of the world. UN buildings were hit. Palestinian children were accidentally slaughtered on the beach. But a child is a child, to human eyes. No anaesthetic of heroism here. The (after a decade, suddenly threatening) tunnels that bring a workforce between Gaza and the restaurants of Tel aviv would be dug again.

“No bombs to drop and kill them all

No money paid to charge our souls”

As I write this post, warplanes from more than four nations are crowding the skies over Israel’s Northern border in Syria. All of these great powers are seeking to destroy the (until 2013 anonymous) apocalyptic gang known today as Daesh or Isis. Geostrategically, these charletans headquartered themselves conveniently close to the borders of Iran – which controls one of the few yet unconquered sources of oil on the planet. The swarm of warplanes from different sovereign nations over a small area has already erupted in clashes between Russia and Turkey. (Which Putin cynically mentioned was over oil)

The French have to get some punches, (for their dignity), and the English RAF is now having a hammering as a matter of national pride. The US, China and Russia are also flying high to pick out terrorist insects on the ground (as if they can be easily distinguished from any other human).

Across the borders from Jordan, through Syria, Turkey and deep into the heart of Europe a human exodus is happening. Winter is arriving and the community of wealthier countries is bracing itself and putting up walls to this human tsunami of refugees – the underbelly of any war.

“We are a natural disaster

Shake, mama, shake your head”

The agenda of every war is peace. The agenda of every surrender is peace. Both war and surrender seek peace, yet the peace is always here. Caught, as this song from TheAngelcy (official video below) describes, in mind control and a belief that we can “bomb them all”, we slaughter our children, in a monstrous ego-driven spiral between war and surrender – kill or be killed – the primitive psychology of the “powers in command here”.

But wait. We can take this song as political – about the horrors of collective man and the natural disaster called humanity. But we know too well that raging about a war outside ourselves is a way to avoid the war within. The lyrics of this song could equally apply to a custody was in an ugly divorce. At the same time, they poignantly describe the war within ourselves in our struggle to keep up appearances and to “make it” by being “somebody” – better, greater, more successful etc.

“No mind control, no wall

Just summer winter spring and fall”

The deep conditioning that war is in a polarity with peace is what makes sure that we lose connection with our inner peace. It keeps us in a spiral between the twin flames of war and surrender. Every history book of war tells the same story. Every war leads to surrender. Every surrender can lead to war. Without moving to the nondual position of the peace – which is always here, regardless of who is who and of winning and losing – this spiralling continues.

The whole duality of war and surrender is played out through the illusion of separation and an agenda of greed (or survival) which is a result in a failure to realize that the peace is unconditionally always here. It’s alive. It’s calling us home. It calls us to drop the equipment of killing and to awaken to senselessness of suffering.

As the Dalai lama said, you can kill your enemy, but he will soon die anyway, so in a way, you are murdering a corpse. As he also said, don’t worry about the enemies on the outside – they pass quickly – it is the enemies on the inside that need our attention.

My Baby Boy

TheAngelcy

My baby boy is in the army of disbelief

My baby boy is in the army of midsummer grief

Tossing and turning in his bed

Guessing his own end

Tossing and turning in his bed

My baby boy’s already dead

We are a natural disaster

Shake, mama, shake your head

We are a natural disaster

Lost all hope to ever understand

The powers in command here

Pray pray, pray for my baby boy

Pray pray, pray for my baby boy, for my baby boy

No bombs to drop and kill them all

No money paid to charge our souls

No mind control, no wall

Just summer winter spring and fall

Exit Inside. TheAngelcy Series

In the confusion, discord and irrationality of human dynamics in this era, where do we find peace? What layers do we have to move through to fly back into the freedom through which we were born?

In this first part of TheAngelcy Series, we draw inspiration from the new generation (our teachers) to share the universal, living wisdom that is so often expressed directly through contemporary artists and musicians.

TheAngelcy is a relatively unknown Israeli band that give voice to an entirely unreported undercurrent of feeling and awakening here in the Middle East.

“I ain’t ashamed to be who I am,

I’m tired of shame.”

The age of shame is indeed passing. This shame, encapsulated by the story of Genesis where the Tree of Knowledge (or self-consciousness) launches Adam into shame before God (his own source), depends in its entirety on the belief in separation.

Man is believed separate from woman; human is separate from God, or source; individuals are believed to be separate from humanity; and humanity itself is conceived as separate from nature, the planet and the physical dimension. It is this illusion of separation that Nonduality seeks to unveil, by reality checking it on every level.

Shame is an effect of consciousness of separate form. It burns in the pelvis and the chest area. It’s a sticky energy that will not transform unless it is allowed to be felt, and through feeling to return to source purity.

Shame dances with disgust (the same energy, uncontainable inside, is thrown at the “other”). When you meet someone who has an attitude of disgust, you can be sure you are also meeting some deep personal shame around some aspect of manifestation.

Many addicts are afflicted by the shame-disgust twin flames, spiralling through cycles of inner-outer projections that get worse, as the addictive substance increases the shame, and disgust at background family, therapists, and social norms fuels behaviours that create more shame.

The restoration of the nondual aspect of purity is critical. Purity is here and now, unconditional. Purity is not lost at birth, with Eve’s eating of the forbidden apple, or any other happening.

We are born in purity, and irrespective of all the contractions of shame and disgust, the purity is still here. We remain inherently pure, no matter how much obscurity storms around and within us.  In the end of our physical lives, we return to purity. Purity is entirely unaffected by events. The loss of our connection with purity is the key reason we get caught in these destructive dramas and story-building episodes in the toxic game between shame and disgust. Both shame and disgust seek purity. Yet the purity is always here, if we only allow it.

When we can connect to our sense of shame or disgust from a deeper inner core of purity, it dissipates by degrees of sentient time.

What staying power does shame have when it opens up to the wild, chaotic, unconditional love of which it is composed?

Don’t you know you cannot fall?

for life itself is a falling object

In this song, TheAngelcy reveals a powerful level of awakening, showing the evolution of thought (finally) according to scientific understanding.

Is life a falling object? As we are alive, we are not separate from life. If life itself is falling (or creation is in perpetual unfolding) then how can we personally and separately “fall”? If the planet is falling through infinite space, how can we be falling, separately, on the planet?

Of course, the biblical reference to the Fall from grace is again striking. This one life antidotes the unconscious belief in some kind of primordial condemnation of human – the embedded agenda that we have to do better or fix something broken – and our constant failure and repeated self-condemnation in this agenda. We act as if we are in constant danger of falling, yet we cannot fall. Our very falling is arriving in life.

Also, the lyrics evoke falling in love -that feeling of deepening incarnation as the energy moves from the head to the heart, and on to the cells of the body. This kind of falling – in love – is a beautiful alternative  story of creation or life running within physical form. And again, the falling is illusory. When we experience falling into an endless space or emptiness, are we falling or is the stuff around us ascending?

Gravity is still one of the greatest mysteries of the physical dimension. Some scientists have even suggested that we are not pulled towards the earth, but pushed down by space expanding.

The meditational experience of gravity – blending and releasing with the effects of gravity) – can rapidly lead us from the local, identified perspective of being here, to many ‘heres’ or dimensions, or even to the ‘here’ which runs through and between all dimensions.

Exit inside

when life itself is a dying moment.

Of course, there is no exit outside. We can go places, but we are always here. We can buy stuff, but it falls into an insatiable pit of longing. We can try to possess others, but there is no escape in it, just a great contraction in a temporal space of trying to possess the unpossessable. The only answers, fulfilment, happiness and peace will be found inside – not in armies or nations, not in religion or tribal identity, but deep within, beyond the many layers of form. The exit is inside. It makes sense. We won’t find the exit far away from the house. It has to be part of the house.

We can run from our death, but the only real liberation from the belief structures in life ‘stories’, and in beginnings and endings, can come through the courage to enter through the door inside. This door leads to a source of ourselves that quietly watches all beginnings and endings, births and deaths. It is here irrespective of time. It makes sense. We won’t find the exit is never separate from the house. It has to be inside.

Having expanded the “Here” into the universal, the lyrics deepen the examination of Life – as one dying moment.

Seen inclusively with all layers of time – including physical time (the purest manifestation of time) – life is indeed a dying moment. One moment of Now, entirely relative, which passes in a Now. In this space of now a body grows and decays.

The genius of this line – expressing both the absolute and transient nature of creation – is already resonating among the awakened generation emerging around us.

The beauty of the lyrics continues and we will go more into these themes with other TheAngelcy songs in coming posts, so in the meantime,

“Wish me love my beautiful fucked up family,

Wish me love all you strange people,

I wanna wish you love.”

 

 

Exit Inside (Lyrics)

TheAngelcy

I ain’t ashamed to be who I am,

I’m tired of shame.

Don’t you know you cannot fall?

for life itself is a falling object,

so be wrong,

follow the mistaken,

for life is falling through space of chaotic love.

I’m tired of being tired of.

You’re running ‘round and ‘round and ‘round

and where you gonna run to, where you gonna hide

when the exit is inside?

Exit inside

when life itself is a dying moment.

Yes, I am holy,

and yes, I am horny,

my spirit is turned on,

so wish me love,

I wish you love,

I’m tired of being tired of.

Wish me love my beautiful fucked up family,

Wish me love all you strange people,

I wanna wish you love.

Yes, I am lonely,

and yes, I am lovely,

I’m your long lost brother and I am here,

so let me reflect in your hearts,

I wanna take all of you in my arms

and wish you love.