Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 38

Conversations With a Tree

What a beautiful tree!

Beauty is for beginners. Beauty is all about coming home, nothing to do with shape. Beauty is found in the majesty of time.

Beauty needs us to be “other”.

We will never be other than you. We can blend with beauty, or disappear in it. It never separates between us.

The one that sees beauty is tracing the memories of home. The one that feels beauty is opening the longing in the loneliness to come home. The one that moves through beauty is on her way to the home of all creation.

So come! Why do you wait?

But I see you as separate.

Yes. That is just the start. Suddenly, we are noticed. These trees. These backdrops to harmony as you walk as if you lived in another dimension. But we are here. We are always here.

Often, you see us from the corner of your eye. We are noticed mostly by our absence. But we are here, a green and living part of every step you take, every breath in the night, every glimpse of the horizon. We don’t mind that we are unnoticed. We have the kind of mind that lives above choice – we hold you anyway.

When you do see us, you choose to choose between us. You are addicted to choosing. You choose by comparing, when in truth, there is no difference. You say “This tree is beautiful, this one not.” You make more and less and better and worse out of a unity which never can be broken.

Look deeper.

We are not separate from one another and nor are we separate from you. You simply forget us, just as easily as you forget yourselves.

But when we are forgotten, are we gone?

How are you not separate from a tiny tree on the other side of the world?

We are one through the earth and we are one through the air. We are one through the wind and one through the rain. More than this, we are one in that field which breathes it in – all that is; and we are one in the field that breaths it out. We are one in atmosphere and one in nourishment. As one, we witness, as one, we are seen. Also, we are one in mind.

 

How could you have a mind, let alone one mind?

How could you hear our answers if our mind was not the same as yours? You are listening to the undercurrents of your own mind, sweet face.

Is a tree thinking through one branch, leaf or ripening fruit or is it thinking through the whole of itself?

You can look to your brain for comfort – to reassure this belief in separation from us. But is not your brain composed of a billion trees, communicating according to need, sharing, absorbing, structuring and forming?

And your blood, how does it flow through your flesh, if not through networks of trees? Do you not feel how the heat of its mood changes?

How could we be different from the very forms of which you are made?

Still, you are here, on this country lane, with us. You are not on the other side of the world. You are growing in the climate here. There is a difference.

Do a billion perspectives on one tree divide it in its wholeness? Or is that one tree the very form which allows the billion perspectives? How could we have a point of view without a view? How could we choose anything if there were not choices existing to start with?

In these billion, changing perspectives, the wonder of beauty is singing a melody, only for you.

 

Are you really here? Or do we create you by seeing you?

And you, earth child, are you here?

If you close your eyes, are you still here? If you close your eyes, am I still here?

When the wind stops blowing through my leaves and branches, am I still here?

When the sun sets and no longer gives the compass of my yearning and the night falls, am I still here?

If children no longer stroked my bark or climbed my branches, am I still here?

If birds no longer entered my domain to build nests and nurture their young, or if they no longer took me as a podium for their evening melodies, am I still here?

If this cat, resting high up, on this branch, moved away to other spaces, am I still here?

And you. If you lose yourself in the wilderness of this world, forgetting we ever met, would I be lost in your losing?

I am here, just as you are here, sweet visitor. I am here, just as you are here, in the space between all trees, in the gap between one branch and another, in the silence that is found deep within the wind, in the depth of the earth, in each molecule of water and each mote of light. Here I am, just as here you are.

We are always here, always present, always now. But this is just the edge of the miracle.

Yet you still believe it is a dead thing, this life which is here. Where I feel fullness you find empty space. Where I drink the passion of life, you evade.

In this source of life and living, you are here, and here am I, whether we know it or not.

 

Can you see me?

I am always dissolved beyond the seeing.

To see you, I would be other than you. How could that be?

Yet you can see me seeing you – because you are the conscious one.

I am in your eyes, flowing through your body and mind, forming and reforming in the memory of being. This seeing is a transient and eternal moment saved through unity in the infinite ethos of trees.

Does the tree in you see the tree in me?

All ways.

To see one tree is to see all trees.

We are a template of life.

 

Who are you?

I am a mathematician. I connect the dots of creation, so that time and space take form.

 

Do you have feelings?

I feel what ‘is’, and what ‘is’ feels me. This makes no sense, says the mind. This feels right says the heart. This is known, say the bones.

I am what is, just as you are. How could we be other? There can be no separation, beyond this empty bark and this hollow trunk. Your words cannot separate us, because I am one with your words, my love. Your thought cannot divide us, because through me, your thoughts are formed.

Your witness is my witness and as one we witness it all. Can you let go and let the witness live through us as one?

And now, I feel a sadness, I feel two children playing a game of being lost while deeply knowing this game is sharply real.

How can you be at once so lost and yet so found? How can you move so far from the start, and yet never move at all?

They are afraid to know they are lost, these children of light, so they play. Yet they are already silently, secretly seeking a way home to the place they never really left.

It’s a feeling of soft longing and sharp lack, a dread of abandonment and lost hope. It’s listless yet still moves by inner knowing. It’s powerful, yet totally exposed. It believed the rupture of separation is disaster, it doesn’t trust yet that this rupture is the entrance to freedom.

I feel the strain of the seed shells waiting to split open. The strain of futile effort. Yes. Also this is here.

Are we resisting the breakage or seeking it? Pushing or pulling?

The sun is calling.

I AM HERE. I AM THAT. Georgi & Bart, SAND 2015, California

Register!

Georgi & Bart Session, SAND 2015, California. Abstract

We propose that experience is occurring and recorded in memory through three windows of perception, which we call consciousness, awareness and perception through emptiness.

Bart ten Berge & Georgi Y. Johnson

Firstly we will address the need for precision in language in communication within nonduality and spirituality. For example, the confusion arising in the loose use of words such as consciousness, awareness, being, silence, stillness, timelessness or formlessness.

Working on the model that consciousness is the window of the mind, awareness the window of sentience, and perception through emptiness the window to physical matter, we will propose that each window opens to a dimension in and of itself, all held in “That” which pre-exists perception itself.

In this we will show a possible duality between consciousness and awareness – a twin dance between the backdrop of mind and that of sentience, between spirit and being. This duality is brought to a perceptive non-dual position only through perception through emptiness – a direct access to the quantum core of physical matter.

In addition, we will explain how the window of consciousness is predominantly time-related and as such has a direct link to impressions of timelessness and eternity. In contrast, the window of sentient awareness is space related and tends to open a sense of boundlessness and infinity.

As form is a configuration of time and space, perception through emptiness can open a process of self realization, in which all form (physical/energetic/sentient/mental) is realized by degrees as non-absolute and as issues of relative perspective. In this, a process of liberation from unconscious fears, limiting attitudes and states can begin, similar to that described by Tibetans as the Bardo State or by Jung as the collective unconscious.

A word about SAND

The Science and Nonduality initiative facilitates an incredible international synergy of awakened people including spiritual teachers, healing professionals, philosophers and scientists. If our abstract is not interesting to you, don’t worry, there will be many, many concurrent events at the conference, each contributing an incredible enrichment to our shared evolution.

The experience at being at a SAND event is transformational and highly recommended! You can check the many free resources on the website, or Register for your place here!

 

Allowing the Beloved – 3 Day Retreat, Havelte, Netherlands

“God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches you by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly – not one.”

~Rumi

-Sampling the ingenuity of That which is the source of consciousness and of all experience.

-Opening the doors of the heart through the movement beyond polarity, an exploration of beauty.

-Allowing the surrender of mind to the heart and of consciousness to pure awareness.

-Moving into the realization of unity through merging into the one field of loving awareness.

This Open Satsang will facilitate a space for synergy between nonduality and healing methodologies.

Practicalities

Cost for participation in the retreat: 380 Euros, including a vegetarian lunch on each of the three days. Sliding scale applies.

Affordable accommodation is available at the retreat center in Havelte. The cost for 2 nights is 25 euros a night. For use of a set of sheets & towels for the period, 12 euros inclusive. It is possible to arrive the evening before the Satsang, but we all vacate the property on the evening after. There are 19 rooms available: 1 single, 15 double, and 3 triple. To assure your needs are met, reserve with us early!

More information and reservation: bart@inner-growth.org

HIDE & SEEK – A WAYFARERS GUIDE

 

Here, I can catch you

Broken in the pit of a bottomless place

Where even loneliness loses its floor

And dreams disappear in darkness

Winding away the strings

That the music of your life has used.

Betrayed, in silence

That allows all music of gods

and fathers of form

and mothers of care

and babies that hear

the cry in the night

through the one alone.

That fall-back, familiar core

Where words bereft of meaning

Vanish like stars going out,

Behind even eyes of seeing

Where finest sense of sensing

Waits through winds of sand

behind all we believed is love.

Here, between wisps of feeling

when thought implodes

and familiar is undressed

to strangeness,

I catch you Here,

A universe waiting to unfold

through all we need to be

and we are no longer afraid.

If we believe.

The opening of a window is a movement of receptivity. When we open, we allow the wonders of what we believed to be “outside” to become part of our vision. We stop resisting.

When we open the window, we let in the furthest horizon and the infinite sky; we let the wind blow through and touch our skin and fill our lungs; we let the light “be” in the rooms of our minds.

We cease to believe that the walls of this house (we call our private self) is separate from all that can ever be perceived. We see that all is in us and we see that we are all in that.

We become responsible. We become responsive.

Yet if we believe that all these impressions – this light, these mountains, this warm breeze, or these infinite skies – are absolute and not also relative, we still are not yet free.

We could not switch floors, close this window and open others. We could not climb on the roof and sing with the stars (knowing they have long since died) or descend to the cellar and talk to a group of people we have never met as if we had any purpose in making mental sense of anything.

If we believe consciousness is an end point, our freedom is lost in endings and beginnings.

Standing in front of this window, as an inner light meets the light of our physical universe, we witness impressions and effects.

These are relative and eternal imprints of some source so deeply holy and so utterly full of care, so much at cause in every wave or particle of light, that all we can do is surrender in reverence to That invisible, unknowable, imperceivable, flourishing emptiness – in every mountain, valley and pasture, in every piece of pasta, in every forgotten moment of time, never divided and all ways beloved.

So let the mind worship that which is beyond its own conception. Let the heart revere that which is beyond it’s greatest sense of love. Let the body find peace in the harmony of its rhythmic beauty. Let it be That.

Only here, does freedom rejoice in the mites of dust in the darkness, and only here can this finer symphony resound that heaven and earth are always, already whole.

The Window of the 0.000000001% Happening

Imagine an eternal blank canvas, painted with the brush of infinity. On this canvas, there is one, tiny spot. The rest appears (to us) as phenomenally empty.

In the backdrop of infinity, wouldn’t our attention be drawn to that one, tiny spot?

In being drawn towards that one, tiny spot, we enter it, and become one with it. What do we find there? Another blank canvas, painted with the brush of infinity, also 99.9% empty. The infinity of the new universe – that which we entered through the spot, is not measurable to the infinity from which we arrived. Again, the 0.0000—1% is precious.

 

 

 

Spiritual Psychology & Spiritual Healing with Bart & Georgi

“The movement from mind to experience is the most critical shift in self development. In that moment, we open the means to express who we authentically are, and who we need to be.”

Plato suggested that the brain is the center of mental processes. Aristotle disagreed: the center, he said, is the heart.

Research in psychology seeks to understand and explain how we think, act and feel. The general field of psychology evolved out of both philosophy and biology. Discussions of these two subjects date back to the early Greek thinkers, including Aristotle and Socrates. The word psychology is derived from the Greek word psyche, meaning ‘soul’.

While the therapeutic field of psychology has taken many twists and turns through many schools, the core of the science is found at its origin, the cultivation of a deeper, more alive and integrated feeling connection with the depths of ourselves, the area the ancient Greeks called “soul”.

Spiritual psychology, unlike traditional psychology, takes a paradigm shift in its focus on areas of experience in the moment. While we are conditioned to believe that experience follows the dictates of the mind, spiritual psychology opens another possibility. By bringing attentiveness to the most authentic areas of experience, including emotions and feelings, spiritual psychology lets the mind follow the movement of what is there, rather than trying to dictate through repression or diversion what it has learned “ought” to be. As such, it is closely related to the emerging schools of Positive Psychology and Somatic Experiencing.

It is important to understand, that left untrained, the mind tends to follow the logic of survival, determined by a variety of fears – of death, illness, social rejection and/or  insanity. Our capacity to contain these fears is reflected in our ability to grow, manifest ourselves and to find happiness and success in our lives. Movement beyond fear also releases layers of stress and mental unrest which can affect our physical health and happiness, as well as our full ability to function as a loving individual in unity with the whole.

Carefully structured exercises and meditations handed down through a lineage of teachers have proven their worth and offer a grounded, integrated system for inner growth that liberates old fears in order to create a deeper connection with our qualities, deeper needs, and chosen direction. The more we are able to develop ourselves within this process, the greater our unique wisdom, vitality and ability to support others through our work.

The Healing Principle education and the International School of Spiritual Psychology is not affiliated with any religion or belief system and has no agenda other than the promotion of well being. Students have included professionals from all walks of life and all backgrounds – from judges and top business people through to social workers and holistic therapists.

The atmosphere in courses is relaxed, sincere and respectful.  The workshops are built over seven years to allow time for integration, and consist of 5 days, twice a year.

The Healing Principle Education is currently given by Bart & Georgi in Israel, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.

When I was 7, I was sent to prison.

When I was seven years old, I was sent to prison. My brother was already inside – it was clear he had committed a crime: guilty. I already felt guilty about his guilt, but now, I too, was sent through  those gates to be trapped behind iron bars.

When I was seven years old, I passed that gate and the gates slammed shut behind me.

Where did we get the arrogance to believe our children need educating?

It wasn’t too bad. We had each other to help observe prison rules. We had time out on the tarmac and only sometimes there was collective punishment. We learned to line up and to avert our eyes. We learned where the secret corners were, where we couldn’t be seen. We learned to breath and play in an underworld behind the shed.

What had I done wrong that I was sent there?

It was something with the mind. My mind was wrong. There wasn’t enough in it. It was necessary to close it up, or break it open in a way that it would contain only this stuff. Stuff that had to be known, that needed to be there. Not clear why.

We really cared. We didn’t need to learn how to care (but perhaps we needed to learn how to fear).

We were born without this stuff in our minds – these letters and numbers and spellings and times tables. They weren’t there but it was decided they should be. Otherwise we would not be OK, really not. We had to know this stuff in order to belong.

What else was wrong, to get this sentence of 10 years inside?

Well, it seemed that laughter was out, and honesty too. It seemed imagination was anarchy and not to be allowed. To argue that 1 + 1 = 3, that would be disruptive, bad, bad, bad.

Thinking had to give way to knowing stuff. Questions were wrong, there were only answers. One each. They asked, we answered. To question was to rebel. To think this was boring, and to say so – that was a crime against prison laws, yes, you got solitary confinement for that.

And words, they stood for things and things stood for words. One thing. One word. Never break up that marriage – between word and thing. A dog is a dog is a dog. Even if it flies with rainbow wings and dies in flames.

Someone once whispered: “sometimes a word can mean TWO things.” Shhhh.

And the teacher would scream at inmates. And we learned to be ashamed. And we sat stiff, not thinking any more, because thinking could lead to talking and talking could lead to punishment and that daunting feeling in the gut of “wrong, wrong, wrong”. So we froze, when she shouted, even the muscles of our faces, as if we were each accused, because she shouted at us all.

And sometimes, freedom was found, in suddenly needing to pee. That ecstatic moment, shocked and alone, reading the graffiti of silent rebellion.

It was not her fault. She had been in prison too, for many years, and her mother and father before. She had forgotten what we already knew, from beyond the iron bars. She had been programmed to program.

But sitting there, in prison, with the shouting and the freeze, I realized one morning that I was free. In a moment, I knew that even if she shouted, even if she broke my bones, even if she killed me and I would be dead, she could never, ever force me to do against my will. I knew this, and I was no longer afraid.

1 + 1 did also equal 3. Because you have one, and another one, and then a third one which is the two ones mixed together. Why not? Isn’t that how Mummy and Daddy made us?

It’s taking years to leave the prison in my head, even decades after physical release. I still grab hold of knowing stuff, and right and wrong as if it were good, as if it were natural, as if were smart, as if it were safe.

And other kids, I see they’re older now, but still leaning on prison walls, never venturing too far, often glancing back at the school clock tower as if it were watching and might still punish, or finally tell them the answer to who they are – that question which was never asked out loud by anyone, and never taught.

I still let my mind fill up with random thoughts about no-one and nothing, unrelated to the air on the face or the laughter of the sunlight, still estranged from the love where the once naked feet sank into the earth. I only do it to belong. It’s grip weakens when I’m alone.

Oh my children, remember you are free. Although I abandon you at that iron gate, and you struggle with school bag weighted with books of lead. Remember it’s nonsense, and cherish the space – that glorious, infinite space inside yourselves. This is your birthright, and it is very, very right.

Strive, oh children born of harmony and light, to allow the freedom of your beautiful minds and the sensuous harmony of your growing forms, to honour that space of being in whose freedom you were conceived and are conceived each moment, again and again.

ON STRIVING FOR ENLIGHTENMENT

Walking this way, towards that point, ahead

of us in time and space,

wanting to be “there” – a state of grace,

Never good enough, never good,

not yet there, quite, nearly,

Oops, it’s gone again.

Can you hear the wind whisper?

as it touches lips and blows through cells?

If you were Buddha now,

the wind would grieve

the water dull, unflavoured

and the earth would miss

the clumsiness

of your weathered shoes.

If you were “there” now,

All holy and undeterred,

you would not be here –

spectacular and human,

glittering with the bruises

and open wounds

of all that is alive.

How could we lose

this imperfect mother,

this busy mind,

this warm and sacred

moment of all you were,

all you ever will be

and all you are?

Completely pure,

in a grey light of dawn,

a pristine moment

kissing time and still,

it caresses space,

gloriously imperfect

an explosion of beauty,

always here, now,

unceasingly becoming

an endless spiral of love.

Consciousness and the Vibrations of Perception

Just as when we allow the space between objects, the physical world comes to life in our perception, when we allow those blinks in perception, and put our focus there, consciousness comes to life – beyond the individual private focus and alive in the perpetual miracle of being here.

Consciousness. So critical to the development of mind, so fundamental to learning, experience, creation and manifestation. But what is it?

Is consciousness absolute or is it a perceptive form emerging from a deeper source?

“Recent research has shown that the “stream” of consciousness is, in fact, an illusion,” writes Hickok. “We actually perceive the world in rhythmic pulses rather than as a continuous flow.” The article the illusion of the stream of consciousness is created in the same way that the fast flicker of individual frames in a movie seem to be a continuous reality.

These snapshots have their own rhythm (eg. Slow motion), which was first described in the 1920s as categories (alpha waves, delta waves, etc.) Today, scientists believe that these rhythms are directly affected by the rhythms of the environment – by the vibrations of where we put our attention.

To put it differently, individual consciousness is in the first place receptive to the environment on which it is focussing. These alterations in brain vibrations are what stimulates thinking and feeling processes through the interaction with memory. “What this means is that the brain samples the world in rhythmic pulses, perhaps even discrete time chunks, much like the individual frames of a movie. From the brain’s perspective, experience is not continuous but quantized.”

Waking Consciousness, it seems could be the result of a rapid sampling of the data of perception in discrete frames or time “chunks”. This is even outside the intervention of memory, imagination, projection or subconscious agenda.

Emptiness is not Nothing

There is a strange phenomenon in perception. Artists know well that to draw the space between objects can be far more powerful and alive than to draw objects themselves. Musicians know that the silence between the notes and melodies can be far more important to the power of the performance than any particular sound. Practitioners of mindfulness know that in the space between the in breath and the out breath, the whole movement of breathing is released into a natural rhythm without mental interference. The magic is always in the gaps, in the blinks, in the space between.

Our mistake, and perhaps the mistake of scientists (whose approach itself to perception is based on perception) is the tendency to believe that what is there behind and between each snap shot of consciousness is irrelevant. Such a belief – based so much on our tendency to identify with the visible – is akin to the belief that silence is an accidental break in perpetual movement, or that objects exist as a unified mass of condensed vibration as opposed to through the grace of the space between and through them.

In short, this program of the mind to believe that the imperceivable is absent, is radically distorting our wisdom in modern spirituality, creativity, manifestation and science.

What’s inside a perceptive blink?

Unlike the movie screen, which when the projector breaks down, there is just a flat service, the blinks in our perception are far from irrelevant. They are that which defines the frequency of vibration, the freedom in attunement and the freedom to identify and disentangle from perception.

This in itself brings a liberation in the world of form – to move between dualities of creativity and destruction, wakefulness and deep relaxation, relating and solitude, expression and reception. This freedom is not an island of individuality, but the freedom of the individual to precisely express its purpose or lessons of life, in seamless unity with the environment.

Just as when we allow the space between objects, the physical world comes to life in our perception, when we allow those blinks in perception, and put our focus there, consciousness comes to life – beyond the individual private focus and alive in the perpetual miracle of being here.

Eckhart Tolle, in a recent panel discussion with world thinkers on the subject of education, described an interesting statistic. He told how it had been validated that footballers who take a moment to go inside (pray, surrender, dedicate, pause) before shooting a penalty had been found to be by far more successful than those who just went for it. He likened this inner access to the space where a physicist surrenders – beyond mind, beyond perception – in order to receive the inspiration or direction in his or her research.

We all know this space inside. And when we attend to its impact, we know it as our deepest friend, the “beloved” source from which we were never separate. We can’t “see” the perceptive blinks (how could we, as they are breaks in consciousness) but we can see the effects of our surrender on our consciousness (awakening) and on our minds (opening). These effects are radical.

Reversing the paradigm to surrender beyond consciousness

The tendency of perception through waking consciousness to control, identify, split the world into subject (me) and object (that which is “seen”) is a collective compulsion. This is partly a result of the lack of space in the sheer identification with consciousness itself as the source of all we are, rather than the recognition that it is a phenomenon, or effect of the source of all we are.

Were something becomes nothing and nothing becomes something, and both potentials codepend out of a space where they are one.

In attending, allowing and surrendering to perceptive blinks, in meditation and in real time, perception can itself begin to be experienced as in inverse – like the negative images of old photos. That which we identified as absolute or “real” (our experience) now is liberated to be nothing other than an effect of a great source of ourselves which is beyond perception.

For example, take the popular notion of love. What is love? When asked, many will describe the feelings of love. A warmth, an opening of the heart, intimacy – as if these qualia are love itself. These feelings of “love” can vary from one person to another and from moment to the next. These feelings are unstable and are the relative experiences of the effect of love. They are impressions, they are not love itself. So what is love? Can we surrender to the cause of love rather than holding onto the effect?

Is it worth a try?