Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 36

October 2, 2015

Stress, Vitality, Consciousness & The Book of Life. Part 4

Not dealing but healing

Again the secret is in allowance, the allowance of life in all its forms. Healing does not come by refusing to see the affliction. It is always an effect of allowing the affliction into perception, both into our feeling awareness and into our waking consciousness. We cannot heal a disease by avoiding the disease. Healing is not to be found elsewhere, with another authority, a different medication, or with another technique. It is found at the core of allowing life, with the wisdom that life, with its tendency towards harmony through all layers of form, is the greatest healer. The prescription of what is needed is found in the contraction. Where else could it be?

To open to Life, the greatest healer of all, we need to be able to open. This opening occurs as an effect of relaxation. In relaxation, we open up like a flower. In letting go, we reconnect with deeper layers of ourselves. In letting go also of these layers, we can suddenly and unexpectedly find we are home, in the formless, living, unrestricted and unconditional source of all we are, irrespective of time, space and speed. This source in unconditioned and exists outside of conditions. It excludes nothing.

We don’t need to be good enough for the transient portion of who we are to reunite with life through the portals of the here and now. We don’t need to first fix things about ourselves, because all we are is here already, in transformation and in the imprisoned, familiar emptiness in which all transformation occurs.

The healing is not in control, or conforming to an agenda or in anything we could plan. It is in the surrender, the allowance, the relaxation and the opening to the miracle of life itself.

Stress, Vitality, Consciousness & The Book of Life. Part 1 – Relax. Don’t Do It
Stress, Vitality, Consciousness & The Book of Life. Part 2 – No Time. No Space
Stress, Vitality, Consciousness & The Book of Life. Part 3 – From Stress to Depress
Stress, Vitality, Consciousness & The Book of Life. Part 4 – Healing not Dealing

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Published on October 02, 2015 06:00

Stress, Vitality, Consciousness & The Book of Life. Part 3

Part 1: Relax. Don’t Do it.

Part 2: No Time. No Space.

From Stress to Depress

Relaxation is not created by conditions. It is the conditions that obscure the natural relaxation. Conditions are the mental portions we allow ourselves in how we imagine our possibilities in time and space. These move way beyond the grounded physical possibilities, and into areas of feeling and thought. Our sense perceptions, emotions and feelings and our thoughts are the areas where we create restrictions on the relaxation which is always here.

Out of habit or conditioning from society or our family home, we create old boxes and live within them. These boxes are a degree removed from life, as they are based on a historic condition of time and space. They are carried with us from the past, rather than being attuned to the needs to the present. These awkward, uncomfortable boxes of time and space create stress. Disharmony, discord, misplaced rhythm, and incompatibility with the flow of form around us generates a resistance to life. This resistance is stress.

This stress a deep suffering of always being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It gives a daunting base note of feeling eternally not OK. Not good enough. Not worthy. This births an agenda to get good enough, or at least to seem good enough to others, which brings more stress. Pretending to be good enough, or being seen as good enough by others, can be very stressful when beneath that we are sure that we are pretending. Our stressful sense of secret condemnation can go from bad to inherently evil.

Stress breeds feelings and beliefs of inherent wrongness, fault, not belonging and isolation. It makes us separate. We withdraw not always into spiritual retreat, but instead into a retreat from the oncoming superior forces. A ‘run for your life’ kind of retreat, based on fear. This withdrawal or escapism is based on the physical instincts of fight or flight triggered by the sympathetic nervous system.

Unable to physically run away, or immediately escape, the third fear response can kick in. This is the instinct to freeze. As the survival options of running away or fighting to the death are blocked, and the stress continues, we begin to freeze parts of ourselves.

This freezing appears in the form of depression. The depressed areas of ourselves are where we have closed the Book of Life. In depression, life is frozen, as a last ditch attempt to prevent annihilation. Again, in order to survive, we shut down on life. Again, we find the same paradox of survival based on misconception mentioned at the opening of this chapter.

The areas of pure vitality frozen in depression become invisible first of all to our consciousness. We even use our consciousness to actively exclude them from sight, thus increasing the freeze. We consciously decide to distract ourselves, with a “relaxing” glass of wine, with a program on TV, or by compulsively thinking about something “else”.

Even after we are consciously blinded to these frozen areas, they can remain perceivable in our feeling awareness. They surface as feelings of discomfort, generating dreams that seek relief when we sleep, when the hold of the conscious mind has released.

But as sense and sensitivity decreases in these frozen, detached areas, we can also become increasingly numb in awareness, closing down whole areas of our feeling connection to life. This closure forms a barrier between the inside and the outside worlds. Our friends and relatives become “other” and we, by degrees, become “other” to ourselves. This alienation, isolation and unfathomable sense of loneliness breeds more stress and more depression. We experience ourselves as separate from life.

All the time, from the core of these frozen areas of stress, life is calling our name. It is calling us home.

The healing of depression is found through allowing our awareness to surround the frozen area. It is found in a gradual melting of the frozen energy in the natural heat of our awareness. As we become aware of depression, the life in us reaches out to connect to the life within the depression, and it responds. Not in a moment, not in an hour, but over a period of sentient time the defrosting of frozen life is allowed and the transformation from ice to liquid begins to occur.

Part 4: Healing not Dealing

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Published on October 02, 2015 05:53

Stress, Vitality, Consciousness & The Book of Life. Part 2

Part 1: Relax. Don’t Do It.
No Time, No Space

The thought that we are relaxed is not in itself the relaxation. It can be astounding how much more we are able to relax than our thoughts would let us believe.

Habitual, relative and context-dependent states of relaxation can actually be more subtle forms of stress. Relaxation is a process, not an end point. When we reach what we consider the floor of relaxation, it is possible to relax even more deeply into that floor. We can relax through the floor and fall.

This falling sensation is in itself an effect of relaxation. As we let go of all the particles of stress we have been needlessly carrying, it can give the impression we are falling through space. But when the stress is no longer visible, the impression of falling also disappears. We are stillness itself.

We could believe that relaxation depends on spatial conditions, when more truthfully, spatial conditions depend on relaxation.

In our organization of time and space, we tend to create alternative spaces of less stress. This could be designated as an imaginary sacred house in a guided fantasy, or as the time we sit down to practice meditation. It could be designated as the home of our parents, or our own private bed. It can also be designated as an area in the body, the memory of a relaxing experience, or in a set of conditions involving a substance such as alcohol or hashish, the right company, or the right kind of stressful show on TV.

We can allow relaxation in any space, in any moment, through relaxing unconditionally into what is appearing. We can even relax into our own resistance. All the space in the universe is available to us, and it’s free.

We could believe that relaxation depends on temporal conditions, when more truthfully, temporal conditions depend on relaxation.

We also tend to make relaxation dependent on time. This is different from taking time for relaxation. Each movement with relaxation is a movement out of the gross forms of time and into more subtle and more expansive dimensions. An effect is a reclamation of the more timeless aspects of ourselves.

Time is elastic and our experience of its speed is subjective. When we begin to relax, we release the more constricting, slow rhythms of the controlling mind or the controlling circumstance, and access the more refined, expansive and faster rhythms. The effect of this faster vibration of the more subtle areas of ourselves is that regular time seems to slow down. Just one moment can have the quality of pure rejuvenation.

At any moment, we can let ourselves surrender into whatever is happening. This movement actually creates space and time, not the opposite.

Space is released from its mental restriction and time slows down. In both, there is a liberating expansion beyond local forms and conditions. The freedom that is always here gets revealed.

One breath can be stressed, contracted and panicked, or it can be an opening to the timeless and infinite aspects of ourselves. Same inhalation or exhalation, but a different degree of relaxation. One resists life directly through contracted breathing, the other allows it, through relaxing into that one breath. Technically, there is the same portion of space and time, but in relaxation, the portion can become a portal to freedom.

Part 3: From Stress to Depress

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Published on October 02, 2015 05:45

Stress, Vitality, Consciousness & The Book of Life. Part 1

Relax, don’t do it.
The opposite of stress is relaxation. Consciousness has no opposite.

Relax. It can sound prosaic, which masks the tremendous spiritual and creative power of physical relaxation. From one perspective, spiritual liberation begins, continues and ends with relaxation. In relaxation, there is an opening. In opening the Book of Life, the opening is critical. The opening is more important than any single book.

We all know what relaxation is. It might seem unexciting, simple and obvious. But how could the unexciting, simple and obvious ever be excluded from the Book of Life?

We all depend on relaxation as a fundamental, gross and subtle aspect of being here. We know it as a relative degree of release.

Relaxation is the release of something. It’s a letting go. Its feeling has a direct relation to the stress that was there before. For example a tired leg, with contracting muscles, will experience relaxation in resting in an elevated position, letting it sink so that the energy caught in the contracted muscles can release.

Chemically and physically, stress and relaxation are in a dance of form. The stress hormone cortisol is as important to our functioning as the endorphins released through relaxation. The central nervous system is whole through the efficiency of both the sympathetic nervous system (linked to survival and stress) and the parasympathetic nervous system (linked to nurture, procreation and relaxation).

Getting on our own nerves

We are formed in an environment in which the sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive. We run from A to B with a basic drive to survive. Most of what we are trying to survive is life itself. When the governing drive is to survive life, then the only reliable, final relaxation would be death.

Imagine the destruction inherent in this misconception – the misconception that we need to survive life. Consider further that while death might be a great transformation – the end of individual physical form, it is not necessarily the end of individual consciousness.

The physical and chemical impact of belief systems based on personal survival is high. Stress levels are increasing exponentially in the Western world. 10% of strokes are attributed to work stress. In America, three quarters of doctor visits are reported to relate to stress-related ailments. Stress is cited as the cause of a forty percent increase in the risk of heart disease; ten percent in the risk of heart attack and a fifty percent increase in the risk of stroke. Forty percent of stressed people over-eat or eat unhealthy foods. Forty four percent report sleep disturbance.

In addition, stress has been shown to literally shrink the brain. Extreme stress events such as divorce, job loss or moving house reduce gray matter in regions related to emotional and physiological functions – a forerunner of psychiatric distress.

Yet all this stress is (right now) a ubiquitous part of the Book of Life. Our partner can scream at us: “RELAX!!!!” but that’s not really going to help, is it?

We can flagellate ourselves with the thoughts “I am stressed, I need to relax.” But the feeling behind these thoughts could be spiced with self-rejection, inner condemnation and isolation. Those feelings are clouding our pure awareness.

Relaxation is not something we can do. It’s not an active movement, but a receptive one. It’s about agreeing to let go – even for a microsecond.

We can make time and space for relaxation, but the relaxation itself is a movement that needs to be allowed. The return to the lax state of being – beyond borders and beyond conscious control can be fearful. Just the thought of relaxation can create more stress.

Within the competition between stress and relaxation is more stress and the potential for more inner split and division. The deeper magic can be found in the relaxation into the stress itself. Here, relaxation and stress merge, becoming one, and allowing a conscious receptivity beyond the conditions of space and time. It stands up to inquiry? What needs to relax? What part of ourselves needs the relaxation? That which is stressed.

Stress is beckoning to the energy of relaxation “come”. We only need to agree to that. But to give this permission, we need to be at a third point, beyond the dance of stress and relaxation, a conscious space which is here irrespective of the activity occurring through the central nervous system. This conscious space is not a thought and not a feeling. It doesn’t depend on either, although both thought and feeling depend on it.

Relaxation is an effect of the release of agenda. It comes with the abandonment of striving. Not just mental agenda and striving, but also energetic agenda and striving, grasping and pushing away. Relaxation is the natural effect of the silence of mind as the living, causal source of all thinking and agenda. This peaceful, living silence is here, irrespective of any thought.

Relaxation is found in the release of conscious will, conscious control, and conscious form. The letting go of these three orders of illusion is made possible through a direct connection to what is real in the here and now. In deep relaxation, consciousness dissolves in feeling awareness and in the vast, unrestricted, familiar emptiness beyond that.

In the initial stages of relaxation, the transient impressions arising and fading in the moment begin to pale in comparison to the light of unburdened consciousness. Our consciousness becomes disentangled, unhooked from the energy of holding, resisting, clinging or rejecting. It just is, and as such it has the possibility to relax still more deeply beyond itself.

Part 2: No Time, No Space

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Published on October 02, 2015 05:37

October 1, 2015

A Perpetual Opening of the Book of Life

The secret of life is in allowing life.

So as we open this book, and moment by moment, we open The Book of Life, what is the most important movement?

If we knew what life is, there would be no need to open.

The magic is in the opening. The evolution is in the receptivity, in the allowance of impressions and in the surrender to the unknown.

As we read a text, impressions are happening. These are impressions on the mind, feeling and body which can lead us to new patterns of identification, thoughts or contemplation. These include energetic impressions, in which even beyond our thinking mind, feelings and emotions are in movement, responsive to a deeper tone or subliminal transmission within the text.

For example, the resonance of a scientific text book is often “truth, fact, reality”. It tempts the reader into believing in the existence of objective, dependable facts. The same applies to the resonance of newspapers. This is the resonance of authority and consensus, and we can respond to that either in conformity, resistance, entanglement or disentanglement. None of these responses say anything about the truth. The truth of what we are exists unconditionally to any response in form. The core of who we are is unconditional to form. If it wasn’t, how would change be possible?

The opening of The Book of Life begins with the allowance of effects through our own living responsiveness. The opening of a book, more than anything else, involves opening. If there is no opening, there is no book, it book of life is here through us.

The more we allow ourselves to open, the deeper the impression on form and the more authentically form responds through expression.

This can be framed as positive or negative. We tend to favour the good impressions, while resisting the uncomfortable. Yet also the areas where we feel discomfort, are impressions showing where we are not yet free. Signs of resistance or discomfort are golden tickets to reveal where we are identified with effects or impressions, rather than opening to the deeper source behind them. They show us where we are caught.

What happens if we are slightly irritated and we immediately close the book we are reading and do something fun instead like shopping? The book that closes on our own irritation, will re-emerge over time in many, many little frustrations. We become an irritable person, resisting life itself. We get depressed.

It is worthwhile to take some time in allowing such impressions, even negative ones.

For example, the irritation. If it is allowed to be, to live and to take form, then it is also allowed to be part of the living stream of transformation. It can be startling how just an initial impression like irritation has the possibility to lead to a depth of release in an area such as anger (and our attitude or fear of anger), vitality and freedom. Irritation has the potential to reconnect us with our passion for being here, which is our passion for life.

Every impression appearing in what is happening here and now has the potential to lead us to a wider and more unconditional space beyond form. This is what The Book of Life is about.

The beauty is that we don’t need to “take” space for impressions, thoughts or feelings. It is enough just to allow them. Impressions appear in infinite space. We don’t need to grasp at them or resist them in aversion, all we need to do is to let them be, let them live, and to let them be part of The Book of Life.

Impressions don’t define us. They only signal our evolution, the process of our liberation, and the wondrous, beautiful becoming of life itself – a life which is here prior, during, after and irrespective of every impression on form.

In opening The Book of Life, both author and reader move with surrender, surrender to the living, palpable, changing rhythms that lead us into greater harmony.

For a writer, or anyone expressing their qualities, what would seem like an active movement of writing is actually a movement of receptivity. The quality of writing is a direct reflection of the writer’s ability to open, surrender and take in the impressions from beyond their own identity and personal attachments. In this, there is an opening of a channel, a surrender to form, and an allowance of the expression of the form through the writer.

In order to write, the author has to get out of the way of any ideas he or she might have about personal authority.

In a way, the writer is the just the first one, by a whisper, to open the book, (or to allow the writing) through the physical putting down of the words. Creation is a function of receptivity.

Inspiration, whether in the arts or sciences, is about a willingness to open to a source beyond the grasping and rejecting patterns of the individual mind. Expression is about a surrender to the form which emerges through you. But the words, the composition, the spirit, never belong exclusively to any one of individual and never will.

The subtle rhythms of the Book of Life, as reflected through a myriad unique impressions, are happening in the here and now. The opening to life is found in the present moment, where impressions are made and feelings are felt. They reflect a happening in time from a space beyond time. They form a resonance in space from a dimension where space as a concept disappears. This is a ubiquitous source where infinity and zero distance are one. It has infinite possibility as well as profound intimacy.

The opening to life is found here, within us and in the core of us, with no need to exclude anything. Life is here, not in another place, not in another person, and not in the authority of any text. It is here, in the familiar, intimate layers of form we carry, the pulsating responsiveness of that form, and in the transformation we sharing. It is here, in the allowance of that unspeakable, ubiquitous, infinite depth on which all impressions depend.

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Published on October 01, 2015 11:51

September 20, 2015

Comfort Zones, Sacred Familiarity and Coming to Life

There is a widespread belief that the spiritual side of ourselves is somehow “other” than the side we know and trust. Partly, this is a result of reports of people whose world fell apart, and who as a result underwent a spiritual awakening.

Confrontations with our own mental instability, with sudden loss, or the emergence of post traumatic stress triggered by circumstance can often be followed by spiritual awakening. Reality cracks open, we look death in the eyes, and we realize we are still here. But who are we? The ‘spiritual’ possibility and potentiality opens up in a shock of long forgotten freedom.

This kind of awakening experience can be a precious and momentous part of an individual process, but it’s not an end-point. Our world does not have to break open for us to access the light which created it. We don’t need to die suddenly inside, in order to come to life.

The power of the familiar

The spirituality dimension, or the nondual awakening, is not a strange phenomena. It’s not to be found in alienated corners of the psyche, in temples, or in shanti clothes evoking the Far East. The fastest, safest and most gently way into our spiritual core is through the heart of the familiar.

The miracle is here, in all this we take for granted. It’s in our patterns, our habits, in our partner, in our routine lives. It’s in the familiar way we relate to being in a physical body. It’s behind our birth name, looking back from our face reflected in the mirror, or within the pressure in the muscles of our feet when they rest on the ground. The door to the source of all we are is not in another corner of the universe, it’s here, at the intimate core of all we feel to be “normal”.

The alchemy of awareness

In programming and habit we fall into a non-alert state where much of the system runs on automatic pilot. We trust that it works – through some kind of ingenious in-born power of its own – and most of the time it does. We get in our car, drive to our known destination, and often couldn’t recall anything along the way. Sometimes, we are so deeply sunk in our programs that we go on our usual route when we actually planned to go elsewhere.

In this cordoned-off zone of familiarity, we shut down the familiar; or to say it differently, we cut ourselves out from our own living vitality. By gaining a sense of the familiar, we stop sensing altogether, letting the body and part of the mind run its routines without being present. It can feel comfortable for a while, like a soft drug. For some time, it can give a sense of safety: living your life, doing your job, in your country, among your people. The problem is, that the source of all you are has a deeper drive: it’s not enough. You didn’t enter again through the gates of physical life in order to – well – not really live.

One way or another, we try to shake ourselves awake. Mid life crises; unconsciously designed disasters like divorce or debt; accidental romances; vicious arguments with friends we once swore we loved – these are all wake up calls we give ourselves. And if we don’t call ourselves home, then sooner or later, life (or karma) steps in. Accidents, broken bones, bereavement and a variety of shocks bring opportunities to awaken out of the narrow dimension of physical consciousness and into more subtle, more invincible aspects of who we are.

An exercise with comfort zones

A powerful nondual practise is to be vigilant in maintaining awareness. Staying aware is not as easy as it sounds, as awareness itself quickly can bring a sense of discomfort. This discomfort can be in the body, in our thoughts, or in our feelings. It is this discomfort that causes us to turn on the TV, seek distraction, fantasize about the next fashion purchase, or focus on a hypothetical argument in the head.

Yet the simplest of tasks is to notice where there is discomfort, and to stay aware of it. Discomfort is where the magic is. Just the continuation of our awareness has an effect, like a flower opening in the sunshine. The more we stay aware of where there is discomfort of any kind, the more space is opened around us, and around any area of trouble.

At a certain stage, the duality of comfort and discomfort begins to spin. We could notice that we are quite comfortable with patterns of discomfort, for example. This would be the unravelling of a habitual pattern of reactivity. Moving beyond the local loop of comfort with discomfort, and even wider comfort opens up – a kind of comfort in being aware.

It takes some time as the nervous system begins to recognize new dimensions of safety, but it happens.

The more comfortable we are in awareness, the more freedom we find to manifest. The more awareness becomes our comfort zone, the less we can be satisfied living within the box of habitual action and reaction. Both we, and the “other” are so much more than that.

Distractions will come, pulling us back down the trauma tunnel of entanglement and emotion, and we will go through those tunnels and emerge again on the other side. The more aware we become, even to say “I am in a trauma tunnel right now”, the more free we become from the limitations of habit, which in the end, are the limitations of karma.

Why? Because the one who can say “I am in a trauma tunnel right now” is not the same one as is found in the tunnel. He or she, is already so much more than that.

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Published on September 20, 2015 09:07

September 6, 2015

Jewish New Year, Nonduality & Creation

There is a view put forth by the rabbis in the Talmud that the day of Rosh Hashanah (Jewish new year) coincides with the sixth day of creation, when humanity was created. According to this view, Rosh Hashanah becomes the birthday of all peoples; the birthday of human kind, undivided between male and female, black, white, east and west. When I told this to a bedouin in the Sinai desert on the evening of rosh ha shana, he grinned wildly and proclaimed: “So tonight, it is the birthday of all of us!”

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I AM HERE ~ Conscious, Aware, Empty

It is a beautiful myth, seen from the perspective of a relative point in history – humankind looking back to its own unified origin – the first happening of creation. But what does it mean from a more metaphysical perspective?

A great uncle of our children, Rabbi Abraham Twerski, wrote that creation is not a happening of the distant past. In fact, the Rabbi (a direct descendant of the Baal Shem Tov, and a pioneer in Recovery centers for addiction across the US), is pointing to the nondual position of perpetual creation. There is no past, no future, only the now.

This is not far from a perspective of modern physics:

“All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.”

Max Plank

Even the raw DNA of life can be seen as a language. DNA is read by ribosomes which translate the message from DNA language into the language of amino acids which sculpt a 3 dimensional shape into space. These objects are more like “utterances” into 3 dimensional space, rather than the hypothetical “matter” because they are 3 dimensional messages coded by DNA.

The genius of DNA.

The creator, the rabbi says, is singing a melody. At any moment he could fall silent and the whole of creation would collapse. That is, if the creator would cease the vibration that is the energy moving behind, in and through, every atom, particle, molecule and cell, would fall silent, both the perspective of the ‘here’ and the ‘now’ would implode.

The Book of Genesis is quite precise in it’s description of creation. The creator says “Let there be light” and then there is light. The movement is one of allowance and acceptance, a permission given to take form. It is not a dictate, or an order. It is an act of opening. Each day of creation is concluded with the reflection and affirmation: “and he saw that it was good.”

Perhaps this is an early description of pre-human perception. God saw. Allowance, followed by the affirmation of seeing.

Out of this movement: allowance, seeing and affirmation, the human is perpetually created in the image of the creator. This primal form – the first human form, is an image – a reflection of something way beyond itself – a component held in universal imagination which is allowed to take form, moment by moment.

In the words of Krishnamurti:

“Out of perception comes energy; and it is this energy born of perception that is going to shatter the petty mind, the respectable mind, the mind that goes to the temple, the mind that is afraid.”

Later on, in the Book of Genesis, in the Garden of Eden, the creator is searching for Adam. Adam and Eve are hidden in the bushes, struck with shame. This cardinal shame, the perception or belief in separation or “otherness”, has arisen as they ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They began to judge, and their perceptive universe was already sliding into an absolute belief in division and separation. The creator called: Adam, where are you? Free of shame, he would have replied: I AM HERE. Instead, the sacred couple hid their forms in shame.

All of this is not history, it is alive in the here and now, at the core of our civilization, in structures of collective memory. Shame is one of the last feeling afflictions in the here and now to be realized as non-definitive in the passage through emptiness to unity. Shame arises where there is a belief in the reality of separation, which tends to be coupled quickly with dualistic beliefs in the possibility of good/evil, superiority/inferiority, kill or be killed. The original sin – knowledge of good and evil.

Who is this creator? This one that allows, sees, and affirms? Who is this one, who beyond the here and the now, beyond the light and the darkness, beyond all seeing, allows the creative need?

For us, Nisargadatta gives the most refined pointer:

“In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, making everything shine. Unperceived, it causes perception. Unfelt, it causes feeling. Unthinkable, it causes thought. Non-being, it gives birth to being. It is the immovable background of motion. Once you are there, you are at home everywhere.”

To be human.

This one is at the source of all we are, moment by moment. It is pure beyond judgement, prior to Eden and the division into male and female, prior to light, prior even to universal chaos. This is the one we should honor at the core of ourselves, and running through every thought, every breath, every feeling and every sensation. This one, always already present even before memory and the inscription of any bible – this one is ubiquitous to all we are.

At the core of Western mythology, an emanation of this one would speak to Moses in the Sinai Desert from the core of the perpetually burning bush. When Moses asked his name, he replied: I am that I am. That is the popular English translation, but in Hebrew the words are more: Be that will be (perpetual becoming).

Wishing you many eternal moments of freedom, joy, and perpetual rejuvenation!

With love and peace,

Georgi & Bart

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Published on September 06, 2015 17:40

August 11, 2015

Nonduality as an entry point to many nondual dimensions

Nonduality – a buzz word classically meaning “not two”. There is actually nothing new about it. On the one hand, the concept of unity is intuitive, ancient and on examination hard to refute. On the other, the seemingly innocuous nonduality craze in modern spirituality is tending to grossly simplify inner inquiry to choice states of being which are fixated as absolutes.

The error is found in a deep programming of beliefs in the existence of starting points and end points. This often plays out in the form that “you” (imperfect, not good enough, suffering, divided) are the starting point, and that nondual awakening (perfect, whole, free, blissful) is the end-point. Just in the emergence of the linear program of start and end, the survival of the whole program of lower mind (that believes it can dictate form onto life and that it is, of itself, uber alles) is sustained. The start and the end is already the birth of a new duality.

Part of the misconception of end-points is in the belief or wish that Nonduality is a quick fix to all life’s problems, and that in the awakening into nonduality, we are all the same. This is in no way true.

There are many experiences of nonduality. Yet the deeper movement beyond duality (even the duality of duality v nonduality) is always happening through a dimension prior to all experience – that same dimension which are the source of all experience. This dimension is here, regardless of whether we are grossly entangled in addiction, or in the midst of a Satori. It is perennial.

Following is a partial list of nondual dimensions that are nevertheless still held within the creative form of experience. Intuitively, the nondual perspective arising out of the conflict within any particular duality or conflict, offers the choice energetic perspective out of which healing and synthesis can occur.

Some Nondual Dimensions
Love

The duality of hate is self-sacrifice. Love is here irrespective of thoughts, feelings and emotions. It is here irrespective of attachment or entanglement. When the aversion, clinging and delusion cease, love is still present.

Unconditional love is the energy needed to heal afflictions around rejection, hatred, self-criticism, self-pity, jealousy, victimhood, resentment and discontent.

Peace

The duality of war is surrender. Peace is always here. It preceded our conception and it follows our demise. It is the backdrop to every conflict, mental, emotional or physical. It can never be damaged or taken away.

Unconditional peace is the energy needed to heal afflictions around rage, destruction, addiction, enmity, social fear, entanglement and attachment.

Freedom

The duality of slavery is liberation. Freedom is always here. Whatever happens to us, whatever is done by us or done to us, whatever is said by us or said about us, despite all decisions and all consequences, freedom is always here – at the beginning, middle and end of all cycles of form.

Unconditional freedom is the energy needed to heal afflictions around manifestation, judgement, rejection, gender identity, condemnation.

Purity

The duality of shame is disgust. Purity is always here. Both shame and disgust are a whiplash of the purity which is always here, and a suffering within the difficulty to allow the purity to be here unconditionally to our changing manifestation in form – any form.

Unconditional purity is the energy needed to heal afflictions around the inner child, family constellations, abuse, sexuality, food, anger.

Innocence

The duality of guilt is condemnation. The very idea of condemnation rests on the illusion of separate form. Innocence is always here – irrespective of the guilt we carry or the way we try and throw that guilt between us through the rejecting reflex of condemnation.

Unconditional innocence is the energy needed to heal afflictions around judgement, social norms, rejection, psychopathy, cruelty.

Unity

The duality of separation is togetherness. The unity is always here, regardless of whether we consider ourselves in absolute separation or as a seamless part of the whole. Separation and togetherness relates to the ways in which aspects of form seek to find harmony in manifestation.

Unconditional unity is the energy needed to heal afflictions around loneliness, rejection, specialness, selfishness.

InterBeing

The duality of loneliness is intimacy. Both navigate the belief in separation or the manifestation of different form in search of the interbeing and interconnectedness that is always here, regardless of whether we are isolated or at the heart of the party.

Unconditional interbeing is the energy needed to heal afflictions around jealousy, competition, self righteousness, superiority/inferiority, unworthiness.

THAT

The duality of experience is non-experience. The duality of a “thing” is “non-thing”. The duality of everyone is no-one. THAT is a space that is always here, in which the codependent pairs of everything and nothing coexist and disappear. Seen the other way around, it is that perennial space at the core of who we are, out of which the very possibility of everything and nothing arises. It is never lost, never take away and unconditional to all experience – while being the nondual aspect without which no experience at all could arise.

That is unconditional interwoven and prior to all other nondual perspectives. Out of That – which is prior and beneath even the experience of consciousness or pure awareness – life will manifest with precisely the right energies to support healing and the unconditional flow into harmony.

In THAT, duality and nonduality are One, indivisable, unborn and perpetually passing.

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Published on August 11, 2015 03:36

The River of Life and the Suffering of Resistance

“Life”. We cling to it, we discuss it, we dictate to it, we try to reject it and struggle to accept it. ‘Life’ is one of the words indicating a phenomena that is not remotely understood by science and not remotely defined within spirituality.

What is the relationship between life and consciousness? What is the relationship between life and matter? Is it possible to divide life? Does the big life have a beginning and an end? If so, where does it begin and where does it end? Is life at the core of spirituality or at the core of materialism, or both?

Is life good? Is it purposeful? Is it accidental?

Can life be controlled?

How does life itself relate to the experience of living?

Life according to the Mind

The mind would like to make Life into a thing which can be studied by the mind.

Mind takes a distance from Life as if it were separate, transcendental, and able to judge it.

Mind assumes that Life can be controlled, and out of this assumption is compelled to try and control it.

For Mind, Life is a phenomena that it can live with, but also can’t live without.

Life’s disobedience to the Mind is such, that Mind actively creates illusions out of judgement in the name of Life. For this it recreates Life using the faculty of imagination.

Driven by an agenda to get pleasure and avoid pain, Mind believes it can condemn and redeem Life, through the composition of stories, and through projecting desired outcomes.

Taking consciousness as the magic ingredient of creation and recreation, Mind actively denies the unconscious, the unknown and the unexperienced aspects of Life. Yet Mind is utterly dependant on these dimensions for the expansion of its own power.

Mind spins around Life perpetually, swinging without accountability between aversion to Life and clinging to Life.

As such, Mind has a great distrust of Life.

At the same time, Mind is obsessed with Life.

Life according to the Heart

Life. You can either allow it or resist it.

Life is the palpable dimension of attraction and aversion.

Life is moving through the heart, but is not the heart.

The forms of the heart are caressed, stretched, fractured and broken by the movement of life.

Resistance to the feeling of life creates suffering. Allowance to the flow of life opens the windows of beauty.

To the heart, life is always perceived through love. When this loving perception is frozen, then this love feels more like agony.

The heart reflexively preserves sentient form as life flows through it, partly out of conformity to the collective heart of other humans at this stage of evolution. It does this so in order to avoid isolation and to find harmony. Such separation resists the laws of life and love.

The heart is destined to surrender by degrees to Life as the greatest healer.

Life according to the Body

The body is conceived, transforms, manifests and decomposes through the dimension of life.

Life is the continuum through which all form, transformation and disintegration takes place.

As such, Life is greater than a single body or a single form, as all forms arise out of and return to the perennial which is life.

The body surrenders to life, and as life moves through the body it expresses as a great passion through forms of heart and mind.

Yet life in the body can continue irrespective of the functioning of mind and unconditionally to the state of the heart.

As such, life is the deeper happening, able to exist (and independent of) consciousness, sentience and form.

The body is mentally instructed to reject life, out of fear of death (the death of it’s own separate form).

At the same time, the body will cling to life beyond all rationality. This is one of the paradoxes through which human suffering is perpetuated.

Suffering and many illnesses arise out of a collective resistance to Life engendered through the mind’s attempt to dictate to the heart a false methodology of survival through resistance to what “is”.

Most of the healing of the body takes place through the deepening surrender to the healing intelligence of life itself, unconditional to the maintenance and survival of separate form.

Of itself, the healing of the body supports the opening of the heart and the liberation of the mind.

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Published on August 11, 2015 01:16