Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 44

Look back in wonder. Death, beauty and a living dimension.

I was 17 years old and riding my bike through a field in Belgium, where a solitary, almost archetypal tree marked the midway point of the path, giving a feeling of security as night was falling fast, and only the little dynamo bike light broke the looming fears of the imperceptible in the dusk.

There are doorways to infinity and eternity to be opened in riding a bike over the bounded territory of the Belgian wilderness. There is something immediately centering in riding a bike, perhaps anywhere. It could be the circling of the pedals; right-brain, left-brain; the body in motion; the flow of visual perception; the sensations of the rhythm of the earth’s crust beneath the tyres.

Stillness comes forward in motion. As we charge forward, the veils over that which never moves are blown away. As the muscles and tendons tremble, with the blood racing joyfully through the veins and arteries, that which never was attached to blood and bone is shaken out of its shell. As we face our direction, that which has no face is revealed. As time passes, that which allows time to pass, stays still behind the programmed clock of arriving “somewhere” into that timeless gaze which is itself not passing. Through infancy, childhood, now the teenage years, and soon the adult struggle into form, it is always untouched, perhaps even amused.

The right leg in harmony with the left, in harmony with the right, and sailing above, this body, with its destiny, its future along the path, and its past on the track behind, already lost to view.

This was one of those moments – moments that today have become an art and science – moments where there is a paradigm shift in perception. Such moments are often equated with awakening, enlightenment and self-realization (sometimes all three at once). I think it is enough to call them moments: moments in which the momentous breaks open.

What happens?

So addicted are we to perception, that the flow of consciousness is habitually forwards – towards that which can be ‘seen’. This primal instinct of consciousness is connected with survival – to avoid riding the bike into a hole, or to anticipate the madman in the bushes waiting to pounce.

The expansion of awareness is also habitually outwards – towards the atmosphere of the night, the mystery of the earth as it releases the day’s light, the sense of solitude on a journey.

All of this is fine, an outward natural flow. The shift to the momentous happens, however, when perception literally turns back on itself – like a cyclist stopping in her tracks for no apparent reason and suddenly, senselessly looking back.

Consciousness turns back on itself and awareness melts into itself.

Consciousness stops seeing objects and forms, and looks back at itself – consciousness – delving into its own substance. It becomes shockingly conscious of consciousness, immediately timeless, and alive irrespective of any way or journey.

Awareness stops sensing and become aware of its own ability to sense – suddenly melting in a wonder of vibration – the limitless infinity of Being in feeling.

What is revealed in this shift of direction in which perception looks back at itself, or senses back into the mystery of the sensory, is a whole journey between dimensions. This shift is existential – it leads to sudden existential reset. I am here. A miracle. It’s all here.

Past, present and future collapse in the momentous.

The way home is still there, as is the cycle track, but it is just a temporary aspect of a miracle.

Forwards, backwards, behind and to the sides, North, South, East and West, collapse in the wonder of boundless space. This body on this planet comes to life and beauty.

The feet continue to cycle the pedals. Circling forward through the physical dimension, quite independently of the vast mystery of being here now.

Fear and the destination of death

On this occasion, what fell into the momentous was the coexistence of physical death. It became suddenly clear that death is not an end-point, a destination, at the end of the cycle track of life.

In the collapse of time into the eternal present, there can be a realization that death is always here and now, behind the back, an old, existential friend. It is not “something” that will happen in the future. It is always here – coexisting – in the dimension of the Now – always, eternally.

In this, the fear falls away into the cycle tracks left in the Belgian mud. No more running from that which is always, anyway here – that which has a vast humanity in it – the ‘death’ which has the seamlessly intimate, familiarity of home. Here, behind perception, this death timelessly is. Not manifesting physically, but no stranger at all.

When the moment cracks open into the momentous, we can remember that death is no stranger – just a rhythm of purpose in our universal service to life.

The Way of Authority – Authoring the Way to Freedom

Who is the author of all you are? Who gets to say what was and what wasn’t, and what we feel about it?

Who will determine the truth of what all this lifetime and lifespace is to you? Why is the pain around authority one of the critical areas where the expansion of our awareness, and ultimately our freedom, becomes limited?

We sit on the balcony at the Chashymie Center, that overlooks the street where Friday shoppers are busily doing their thing before the entry of the Sabbath in Israel. A woman passes, lost, and looks up towards us.

“Do you know where there is a dentist on this street?”

Bart doesn’t hesitate. With pure authority, he states: “On the other side of the road, to the right, three doors down.” The woman is very grateful and goes on her way.

There is a silent pause on the balcony. “Isn’t that a learning, center?” asks Dror, “There is no dentist there – ”

“I think there could be a dentist there,” says Bart.

I am a little shocked. A minute later, the woman passes back again, close to the bushes. There is no dentist there. But she doesn’t want to be seen – to expose the authority as wrong. Respect.

I look towards Bart, searching a trace of shame at sending her the wrong way. There is not a schmitch.

There is a deep rage forming in my pelvis – an explosive rage.

What gives the male aspect of ourselves the pure right to move like this? Randomly taking authority and throwing it out onto the chaos of life as if this structure were absolute? When, back then in the Garden of Eden, God told Adam to give names to everything in creation, was this the birth of this unhinged, random authority? Why call a dog a dog? Why call a woman a woman? It is a chaos of freedom in authority which is totally unhinged from something else – the living experiential truth of appearance. It is closure. It is dictatorial. It is stolen power. It is crushing and confusing. It divides.

OK – so this is a live demo of a sneaky authority coup. Authoring that anecdote about our beloved Bart is interpersonal revenge, which has absolutely nothing to do with truth, with me, or with Bart. It is just perception happening through shared process (including authority wounds) So let’s switch perspective and make relative.

Part of the reason Bart has such a powerful authority (that can even cause shame in others at HIS mistake) is that in the area of authority, he is deeply free. He doesn’t pin absolute truth on his authority. He has a purity of self permission to be wrong. He is not addicted to judgement or the whole formulation of right and wrong. Paradoxically, it is an authority born from the liberation of truth from concept or from separate existence to the whole.

Within this, the purity of his heart means that there is instant forgiveness, in which the ego cannot find a grip, as there is nothing to defend. It means his guidance to others is much more comprehensive than a definitive ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to any question. On the whole, this authority is empowered through an affirmation of all that is playing out in the moment – the whole picture – not a detail.

Author > (Consciousness) > Author

Authority > (Awareness) > Authority

Authenticity > (Perception through emptiness) > Authenticity

Who is the author of who we are? The realization of this inner author – the one that secretly composes the stories out of the raw matter of destiny and evolves them into three dimensional movie scripts – this realization is one of the key movements in spiritual maturity.

No author believes his novel to be an absolute truth, even when it is an autobiography. 

In the context of the three windows of perception opened through the I AM HERE teachings. The author, when realized, is that which through the window of creative consciousness actively chooses where to invest perception, pouring the omnipotence of existence into a “reality”. If this reality is seen as “absolute truth” it can rapidly become a prison.

Let’s explain this with an example. Let’s say we have a trauma around dogs, which means they terrify us, which means we seek a world without dogs. Our consciousness needs to exclude the threat of doggies. This need to exclude means that we also need to see every dog – because if we don’t see it first, it could burst through our screen of what is allowed to exist in a sudden reality crisis. So we begin to see dogs everywhere. Not only dogs, but signs of dogs – dog shit, dogfood adverts, dog hair. That which we are trying to exclude from our composition of reality is creating a Hitchcock film in the background – which at some stage will be projected (even enacted) regardless of our fear.

When the liberated author is free to work without a belief in the absolute truth of the story, dogs can also exist. A few of them here and there, together with cats, rats, mosquitos, cream buns and a trillion other features of reality. Some dogs are even friendly.  Investment is withdrawn. The magnificent everything gives rise to the pure freedom to choose, and change perspective.

On the level of awareness, we are not talking about the author, but about authority itself. Here, there can severe energetic blockages connected to where we have been wounded through rejection by the perceived “other” dictating our feelings. For example. Granddad (who used to hit you regularly) suddenly dies. The whole family says that you should be sad. In fact, it is decided that you are sad. If you are not sad about the death of Daddy of Daddy, you are not part of the whole. Mummy gets angry because you made a joke. Something inside the heart freezes as your actual feeling vibration is being disallowed. You are so relieved that Granddad is dead. Dead, dead, dead. You are not sorry. But these feelings are not allowed to exist.

The energetic blockages around authority (concentrated in the dip of the collar bone and at the point of the chin) can be devastating, obstructing manifestation and leading to all kind of strange, artificial voices, as we try and ‘pretend’ ourselves into a place in this world. For non-dualists – it is precisely this kind of authority agony that can lead them to liberation into the space of “Nothing” “No-One”, “Nobody here,”

Some make it all the way back into form through loving attendance towards the energy frozen through authority issues. Others whiplash into ego structure – finally becoming the authority – the authority on the “Nothing”. Rapidly they start to Satsang others and to attack and degrade honest dialogue – especially when it involves an authority. It is a crazy loop with an agenda to avoid the pain frozen energetically in awareness around rejection.

On the level of perception through emptiness – the level of perception through which we begin to liberate the core karmic wounds manifesting through this incarnation into the physical – the authority thread manifests as AUTHENTICITY.

Authenticity can be felt, smelt, and unconsciously recognized. It is the all powerful truth of the one that pretends nothing beyond what is here at any given space and time. It is for real. It doesn’t need to defend. It doesn’t need to fixate or maintain any position. It vibrates with living honesty and vitality. It can be trusted to the core, through all dimensions.

Authenticity, rising as authority and taking the identity of author is the means through which we give temporary form to what is happening here and now. It is the means through which we take responsibility for our universe in guiding its evolution, through all the layers. It is a fundamental part of our service of being here. As such, it is a birth-right which is both an individual and a shared process.

There is a transpersonal negotiation that takes place, which is at its best rooted in our present authenticity. We can be subordinate to an authority, and follow its lead. We choose to subordinate ourselves to the social authorities – our teachers, our doctors, the police, the courts, the taxes, to name a few. Yet this subordination is never absolute, it is temporary and bordered, arising out of a choice to delegate authority based on our inherent interdependency. And when this subordination extends to the judgment of the loudest neighborhood critic, we could get a red flag of rage.

WE are the one that allows this temporary delegation of authority. We are the always the meta-authority. No power structure can define us. And at any time, we can reclaim the authority to align with our inner authenticity.

It doesn’t matter if you are a girl or a boy, young or very old, a respected politician or a freak, a guardian of sanity or one labelled with mental disorder, NO-ONE has the right or long-term ability to mess with your inner authenticity. The only one who can commit that crime is you – in a myriad forms of self abuse. Even then, authenticity will call you home, sooner or later.

As the source of our thoughts, we are free to change our minds. As the source of our feelings, we are free to feel what we feel. As the source of our truth, we are free to forever alter our direction to stay in alignment with That.

What is the source of authenticity? Freedom. An all-powerful freedom that is allowed to manifest through all we are – a freedom that has no beginning and no end, which can never be damaged or taken away, which is always here, in every second, every happening, every prison, every state of being and in every moment of perception.

Let it go (thoughts), Let it be (your true feelings), Be for real (loyal to what is here, moment by moment).

Happy to be able to tell you what’s what and what’s not.

With love, respect and appreciation,

Georgi

“The opposite of authority is subordination. Omnipotence has no opposite.” ~ Georgi

 

The Way of Shame – the shameful way to self liberation

“WHY ARE YOU WEARING NOTHING ON YOUR LOWER HALF???!!!!!!”

I am ashamed. Out of context. A discord in a harmony. A misfit in a world of perfect order. The hot sensation of pain rises to the chest as if the collar bone would burn to a cinder. The nerves quicken, the eyes twitch, lips tremble, fingers shaking. Run to China – away from these eyes that see this worsening phenomena – the shame of shame, the shame of being ashamed. Don’t read more – it could make it worse.

Is there a reality in shame? Is shame, even a bad thing at core? Like guilt, when you grasp for its form, it becomes amorphous. Yet shame is a pervasive part of our collective state – and the avoidance of it a prime motivator of our collective direction.

“Shame is a mother of rage, destruction and a range of psycho-spiritual disorders. Yet the mother of shame is the belief in absolute separation between our individual self and the other. The illusion of rejection.” ~ Georgi

How to antidote the shame that we don’t want to feel? Many spiral into disgust – so that the shame should never be theirs – passing it on from sister to brother, or family to family, nation to nation. Yet disgust is shame and shame is disgust. There is no “other” to alleviate this affliction, the only way is through the realization of shame through the allowance of the inherent and absolute purity which is always, anyway here, regardless of experience, underlying all happening and unconditional to all situations and consequence.

Putting the light of conscious attention on the shame can be counterintuitive. Consciousness tends to affirm form. It’s light exposes an energy block that is formed by a freeze under the misconceived threat of exposure. To consciously name shame as shame could create a thousand masks. It is like trying to persuade someone to give up smoking. The craving sky-rockets to hit the bell. What is needed is an affirmation of that which is lost in the spiral of shame and disgust – the inherent purity which exists through all layers of form and perception. The energy of purity is best channelled through the pure listening witness of consciousness, and the finer vibrations of the unconditional love emerging through all-allowing awareness. To allow these perceptive channels to be open, there is also a need for stability in perception through emptiness – where all illusion of division and all agenda is released.

Shame is not a small energetic barrier. It is the emotion that in Genesis, led Adam and Eve to hide in the bushes from God. They were ashamed of the consciousness of exposure. Yet even here, the purity is never lost. The fault was in the belief behind the deception of Adam and Eve, which led them to “hide” from the source of all they are. Their nakedness never lost its purity.

There is a simple, nondual logic in it. Purity is deeper than shame. Purity is existential – it is here, irrespective of time, space and form. We are born pure. Our body is pure. Every electron and proton of every thought and twitch is pure. We are pure above and pure below. Even in lies, entanglements, sexual outrage, disgrace and cut-throat war, the purity is never lost. It is our rejection of inherent purity that means we lose connection, not the other way around.

“The opposite of shame is disgust. Purity has no opposite. Purity is always, already here.” ~ Georgi

One of the first reactions to the experience of shame is to slam shut the windows of perception. We cover our eyes, we lower our head and hide our face, we cover our lips, we put a bag on the head.

At the same time, on the level of awareness, there is a reaction of closing the heart. It is too painful to feel – the rejection and separation embedded in this shame. So we short-circuit the heart, shut down our sentient awareness, and speed into the head or loins – at some stage spiralling into a habit which alleviates the shame. This could be slagging off the neighbours, it could be a bottle of gin, it could be the needle. Anything to heal the whole.

Shame is most sensitized when there has been trauma - either through the anchor of an event or repeated trauma from repeated messages. More often than not, it shows up in the fault lines of the “other”, rejection, separation, loss. All those spaces in which our experience has been impossible to integrate with the collective human whole – so the experience gets thrown out into the emptiness (where it stays and grows waiting for reintegration, but threatening the surviving form with the possibility of its exposure at any moment into the social field).

When exposure occurs, and the shame (or disgust) or both reach critical limits, the form collapses. The psychological form breaks down, the mental form is scattered and the heart cracks open. This can be a healing crisis of incredible agony – throwing us directly into perception through emptiness (the hard way). Nothing matters. Nothing is real. Nothing is true. Nothing can be believed.

This position, known to many addicts, is the horror that the bottle or substance attempts to antidote. Yet if this agonized form of cynicism is allowed therapeutically to be truly as it is, and to expand, the inquiry after the ‘nothing’ can lead to an expansion and liberation.

If nothing matters at all, and there is no truth, then what power does this shame have over you, or anyone else?

If matter doesn’t matter, then allow yourself to allow matter – to truly accept the physical body, the breathing, the movement, the flesh and the blood of it, without dosing it back onto a state.

Are you able to find the purity within each particle and expression of shame?

For some, this is a life-time journey towards liberation through the realization of inherent, existential purity. Sometimes it ends in death. Yet what is clear, that the only one who can allow this inherent purity is the one that is caught in shame.  Without purity, neither shame or disgust can exist at all.

With love,

Georgi

The art and science of trilogy in spiritual self-realization – refinement of perception

“Throw a pebble anywhere, in any dimension, and you will uncover a trilogy of three.” ~ Georgi

The art of the trilogy is so ubiquitous to evolution, life, science, mathematics, psychology, medicine, language and thought that it is hard to know where to begin when the need for a trilogy in the teaching of perception and self-realization is questioned.

The trilogy is a map of the three dimensional universe. As such, it is of tremendous service for humanity – which is more often than not – caught in two dimensional thought and experience. Let’s try and explain this better.

To be human.

The two dimensional universe is caught in polarity. It cycles (at best) in an endless figure of eight between subject and object. Mental, emotional and physical identification begins with one side of the polarity – in which the “opposite” side of the pole is “other”. This is the birth of relationship between the supposed “me” and the supposed “you”.

Right now, there is the author (of the post) which looks like “me”. There is the reader, which looks like “you”. At the junction of the two – is this post. Words strung together in a form through which meaning is totally amorphous, changing, evolving. In the world of deconstruction – they would call this the polarity between the “sign” (the word), the “signified” (that which the word points to), and the “meaning” (which deconstruction exposes as inherently empty.

OK – that’s intellectual. Let’s say it in a way that is easily familiar. The 2D dimension works through the logic of “kill or be killed”. It’s Me or You. It’s Either-Or. You win, I lose. If I’m right, then you’re wrong. If I’m a loonatic, then you are sane if you see that. This logic is at the source of war, starvation, abuse, cruelty, exploitation, selfishness, greed and endless misery and suffering. Yet in the short term, it can bring us a temporary feeling of being a winner, a success, or (dare I say it) an authority.

The present global shift in awakening is greatly a result of the realization of this two dimensional universe as non-absolute. The logic of “kill or be killed” will always lead – when we go all the way – to the shift to the third dimension. If we follow this logic, then the process of killing increasingly spirals to the core of the individual universe and to its source – the core of the inner fight. This is why the most startling pioneers of this logic – for example Adolf Hitler – espouse a psychopathy which in the ends means that they must kill themselves. The kill or be killed logic takes place in the bone, flesh and material reality of their own human mind and form. In this, the polarity collapses. In suicide, we are both the killer and the killed. They become one.

So what does this have to do with the three windows of perception, Consciousness, Awareness, Emptiness?

All of these contemplations on the screen, and the screen itself, and the space in which you are sitting, and the space outside, and the sounds in the room and the sounds in your head. All of this is perception. There is nothing that you see, feel, sense, or conceive which is not perception, and as such which is not part of the universe of you.

All you perceive is also what you are.

As such, perception (consciousness, awareness and perception through emptiness) also is the window between dimensions – a window that opens both ways so you at once can see and be seen.

Perception is that which allows us to evolve from the two dimension realm of suffering into the three dimensional and on into the multi dimensional.

Within the classic and recognizable trilogy of Mind, Heart and Body. We contemplate our “selves”. The mind perceives the heart (the dimension of awareness and feeling) and surrenders to the heart’s music. The heart’s music is received in the mind (consciousness). None of this is absolute as the perceptive movement and opening itself is allowed through emptiness. It is always a trilogy – spiralling into the individual liberation of pure unity.

Again and again in workshops, we say that “any window is good”. Each window brings light into the house. Each window allows a circulation of existence through dimensions. Each window opened debunks the principle that there is a definitive barrier between the inner and outer worlds, or between ourselves and all that which we still believe to be outside of ourselves.

I would take it even further. Any moment is good. Any particle of pain, of affliction is good. Any micro-second of non-experience is good. Each atom of being humanly here now contains the great trilogy of perception that leads to self-realization. For this we have to allow the miracle. To let go (of identification), to let it be (the feelings that birthed the identification), and to be for real (no form, thought or feeling is absolute or greater than the source of the phenomena which is you).

We don’t ask anyone to break open all three windows of perception at once (consciousness, awareness, emptiness). This would be silly, because actually, every moment of perception intrinsically engenders all three. As such, each moment of perception is a unique form – even in its happening. It is a unique form and the spring board to the expansion of the individual universe into the unknown – that which is as yet unrevealed and is beyond even perception itself.

The Way of Guilt – A Guilty Way to Self-Realization

“The opposite of guilt is accusation. Innocence has no opposite.” ~ Georgi

I arrived at Gatwick Airport with two of our daughters and stepped through duty free into that fresh and old, recognizable and new atmosphere of my home country, England. Between the suitcases and the passports stuffed into a safe pocket, between the smells of the greasy foods of childhood, and the need to smoke a cigarette and drink espresso (both at once if possible), suddenly SHE was there.

I had arrived back in the UK following the sudden death of my younger sister, Alexandra. At 35 years old, and with a baby under one year of age, she had been suddenly struck by a superbug in the form of a severe bacterial meningitus. Within hours, she was gone. It was off the map, random, without apparent cause or logic. We left to England on the first plane.

And then suddenly, here she was at Gatwick airport, as if meeting us in the arrival lounge. Blissfully free, yet joyful as if she had been there in physical person. Her message came through with a resounding clarity, in her singing, natural voice.

“It’s OK! It’s really OK!”

I recognize this, and for some eternal seconds we shared the joy of recognition and affirmation. I recognize it from some powerful existential moments in which perception itself falls away in this intense, self-identical liberated consciousness of awakening. The sense of everything being OK – irrespective of success or failure, guilt, obligation or lesser agenda, is remarkable. We are always, already, forever forgiven. Even the word forgiveness in it’s roots means: “given before”.

Yet in this world of many persons (parallel universes huffing and puffing in the espresso queue at Gatwick where too many suitcases negotiate a place in the line), the burden of guilt and responsibility is heavy. It can become so energetically oppressive that we lose all sense of our inherent innocence.

Guilt is one of those energetic fossils in the dimension of awareness that persists as an active block – whether or not we are conscious of it. When the guilt is too unbearable, we swing to the other polarity – accusation. You see it when there is a death in the family. We saw it collectively in the recent war in Gaza. We see it in every dynamic where there is a belief that there is some right to exist to be won or lost through the Russian roulette of the power-based sword of judgement.

Embedded in the guilt cycle is the belief that innocence is dependent on form. In this case: if the other is guilty, then I can be innocent.

The compulsive need to judge and to condemn the other – with all the cruelty in its trail – is a direct result of a difficulty in allowing the energy of guilt and in realizing the innocence behind both guilt and condemnation – an innocence which is never lost.

Alexandra

We are born innocent. We die innocent. Creation is innocent. Existence is innocent. In the dissolution of the self through perception through emptiness, the very concept of innocence no longer has purpose.

We are innocent, and we are responsive. We are affected by events, whether or not we consciously allow the effect or try to repress it. We are affected, and the purest form of responsibility is to allow the energetic response which is happening anyway. There is no guilt, and no judgement needed in this.

What is guilt? Is the body guilty? The dirty finger nails? The wrinkles around the mouth? Is the mind guilty? The thought that shouldn’t have been thought? The thought that was never thought? Is the heart guilty? Could the heart inflict such a crime against anything in its passive receptivity?

It is hard to find a reality to guilt, so let’s feel our way more into the phenomena.

How does guilt feel? To me, it is a dense, woody block. Like rotting wood. It is brittle, and stubborn. Love tends to flow around it, blind to its malignant obstruction. Love avoids it, because love has difficulty resonating with the dense vibration of frozen love of which the guilt is composed.

Perhaps we need to softly spend some sentient time with these blocks to allow them to return to the living stream of transformation and healing. Being around the guilt block with loving awareness, with acceptance and even inviting the channel of innocence inherent in existence, is the most effective way to let guilt unfold, perhaps telling its story of pain, cruelty and bloodshed, but sooner or later, returning home through the self forgiveness that was given before.

When that great, eternal peace moves through the heart, we will know that it is done.

Alexandra was at the airport. But her beautiful body was to be cremated in a few days time. I failed to save her from this fate. I failed to know it would happen and to say good bye. I could try and temper the old guilt of many failures we formed in the heart with accusations towards the National Health Service, abuse of antibiotics, the ex-husband whose court orders prevented me leaving Israel, general ignorance or God, but the accusations would just make the cloud of guilt more dense.

From the perspective of guilt, I would be always, already failed, and Alexandra – her refined qualities, beauty and grace, together with the core of her – all that she was, is and ever will be – would be abandoned within the trauma of an older sister who let guilt obscure the light of pure, unending existence.

From the perspective of inherent innocence – the innocence that can never be taken away, never damaged, never beginning and never ending; the innocence that  is always here irrespective of anything we have said or done or anything that has been said or done to us – from this perspective, Alexandra still comes softly to my side, through my heart and into the cells of this body –  an eternal companion showering the sweetest love.

I leave you with some words from Rabbi Cohen.

With love,

Georgi

 

On Perception, Memory and the Ex-factor of Experience

“Experiencing is conditioned by experience, the past. Freedom is the emptying of the mind of experience.”

Krishnamurti

There is an awesome space within the depths of sentience, at the core of the perceptive dimension of awareness, where the experience comes forward of one-ness or what is today known in non-duality circles as the source of all we are. It is as if we are merging and merged  with the eyes and ears of a loving, sentient God, indeed, we become that for moments of pure expansion into infinity.

This is the opening of the window to the one soul, where experience and experiencer become one, a fine, deep and flowing compassion itself becomes the very essential quality of perception, flowing through a living wind of pure empathy.

The liberation of awareness from its obscuring entanglements with the pain and grief of sentient person-hood is an experience that can be revisited, used as a position of pure healing, and is a tremendous human service.

At this position of release, knowledge, which until now was a precinct of the thinking mind, and experience, until now a precinct of the feeling heart, become one. To know is to experience and to experience is to know.

We move into a purity of knowledge reflected in the biblical poetry of Genesis in the description of the physical reunion of the male-female polarity – “And then Adam knew Eve.”

Beyond a layer of physical polarity, the opening of this window to pure observation (differing in its sentient flavour from the elevated and disentangled, eternal witness of consciousness), is a key moment in the process of spiritual seekers. The dam that blocked the river of life breaks open. The river flows through the heart into pure non-dual living presence in unity with all that can be perceived.

But then there is the body. The discord.  The ‘real’ life. The blood, flesh and raw spit of karma and collective trauma.

In this dimension of pure experiencing, and in the passage back to the raw blood and bones of daily life and physically being here, there can often be a whiplash of physical mind, ego and person-hood. This one, will claim that the experience is absolute, definitive and an end point.

The ego loves end points – how else can it measure itself for size?

What is often misconceived in this, is the nature of experience itself.

All experience, all perception, in real time and space, is already memory. To attach to the memory is to re-invest in the world of form and polarity.

The greatest teachers of our times were aware of this loop, and of the spiralling movement of life and perception. Experience, like knowledge, is always inherently dead, in relation to its source.

This is because experience, even in the pure here and now, is only ever a reflection through perception, just as knowledge, no matter how pure, is only a reflection of wisdom. Our experience is an effect of that which is imperceivable – that which is beyond perception that which has left an imprint on our perception and perceptive memory. Even in real time, experience as it is, is already a dead thing – an imprint of something much more fine and which has a far faster vibration. This imprint is formed on the experiential memory on the level of being.

Our experience of love, or peace, is an experience of the effect of an imperceivable source moving through our consciousness and awareness. We experience the exquisite suffusion of this source on our human form as a perceived “feeling” of love and peace. Experience is all ways the after-effect.

When we identify with experience – no matter how profound – we move still further into the reductionist field of the non-living. In no time, we have to defend it, prescribe it, teach it, argue it out defiantly – and all this is driven by a seemingly bottomless pit of need to grasp, to hold, to end, to close, to define, to slow down and to identify. Yet even this need is arising itself out of the all pervasive empty unity – that which could only be perceived through its effect on the human fabric.

In this deification of awareness, some try to surrender the body into it – a movement that can create an energetic split manifesting as spiritual psychosis. The natural movement is for Awareness itself to be allowed to surrender into the core of the living cells of the body and the planet – surrendering through the continuum of emptiness and through the fine but decipherable membranes where perception meets its own limitation – or the boundaries of its own form.

This need to state the end point as pure awareness – recruiting all the power of spirit and intellect to explain it into absolute form, is driven by a deeper woundedness – the lasting belief in inherent separation from the whole – even on the level of the soul.

In the I AM HERE teaching we often state that you ARE your body. But you are not exclusively, only your body. From the raw physical to the high precincts of perception, here we must say the same. You ARE pure being. But you are not exclusively pure being. You are not only pure awareness.

The liberation of this old belief in no way undermines experience. On the contrary, it gives experience and awareness the fullest right to exist beyond polarity within the great multidimensional fabric of being here, now. It is one perspective to live and teach from. The perspective of the temporarily individual soul in unity with the one great soul.

Yet when that perspective is seen as absolute, we deny the full miracle of physical creation, and a new split is created. Division breeds division, and at some stage, the pure awareness becomes a “state” and at some time, this less living “state” will splinter into the greater emptiness which was, is and always will be the source of all perception.

Soon, the teacher of pure awareness will start to talk of “intimacy”, the antidote to loneliness. This intimacy has “otherness” embedded in its core. How can we be intimate with anything other than the other? Intimacy as a word is born from the language of a process – a process with the miracle of the emptiness and the physical dimension; a process of reunion with the authentic unity that is the source of all perception.

If these words are outrageous to you, please take a gentle, allowing physical breath into the miracle of your multi-layered physical form. Be aware that love is even present in the emptiness within the oxygen that you breath, being carried through your lungs, blood, nerve system to every cell of the body. Does it sound like total surrender in prayer to something greater than anything we could perceive ourselves to be? Yes – this is what it is. A purification of the quality of humility, all the way.

You are warmly invited to let me know in the discussion panel below, if it still seems there is something to defend.

“Between the banks of pain and pleasure the river of life flows. It is only when the mind refuses to flow with life, and gets stuck at the banks, that it becomes a problem. By flowing with life, I mean acceptance – letting come what comes and go what goes. Desire not, fear not, observe the actual, as and when it happens, for you are not what happens, you are to whom it happens. Ultimately even the observer you are not.”
Nisargadatta Maharaj