Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 6
July 18, 2020
Nondual Passion: A Quality of Consciousness in Nondual Therapy
In Nondual Passion, you will take a journey to a grace-filled, epiphany of individual purpose. Passion is revealed as a healing elixir that arouses our deeper suffering into purpose. Bring unconditional bliss, the alchemy of passion promises a transformational power that will center you at the core of an unfolding universe.
This too will pass. How could this nondual wisdom be your master key to personal manifestation, healing, liberation, joy, and fulfillment? The answer is through the felt sense of passion. Passion is the elixir that arouses our deepest suffering into purpose, bringing the alchemy of service to the whole. In Nondual Passion, you will take a journey of inner exploration which could leaded to a grace-filled, individual epiphany of refinding yourself, home – loved, and cherished, in a universe that doesn’t need to make sense, because it is a sensory universe.
What is passion? Where do we find purpose? Why must we suffer? How can the horror of loss be healed through the wisdom that all is passing?
Nondual wisdom is evolutionary: activating, healing, and liberating the Western Psyche. The world can no longer ignore the tremendous healing effect of consciousness, and the qualities of consciousness and this book is part of the advance of understanding in how this works, spiritually, psychologically, and physically. When passion awakens, we open a profound sense of purpose, fulfillment, individual manifestation, and evolutionary service to the whole. Passion is a path-breaker, resting on the wisdom that everything passes.
Now is the time to open the nondual adventure.
In this book, you’ll journey into the quality of passion unveiling purpose, direction, choice, happiness, and fulfillment.
You’ll learn how to:
Find purpose at the core of suffering.
Clear passages through densities of boredom.
Recenter from addiction and emotional bypass.
Heal and resource the body, mind, and spirit.
Rise into compassion and wisdom.
International spiritual teacher and pioneer of nondual therapy Georgi Y. Johnson leads you on an experiential investigation into the mysteries of passion, purpose. life direction and personal fulfillment. Passion is a primal quality of consciousness, energizing, rejuvenating, path-breaking, and bringing a flow of unconditional fulfillment. You will learn how the free flow of passion can heal us, psychologically, spiritually, and physically.
Any exploration of passion is an exploration of consciousness and the nature of experience. In this, Nondual Passion will also take you into a journey of insight into the nature of suffering. This includes a tracing of the flow from suffering, to service, to passion, compassion, and wisdom. This energetic passage through the psyche is evolutionary, accelerating process of healing, resilience, and spiritual liberation. Resting on the nondual wisdom of unity and interdependence, the book shows how the passing of time, and the passage through space is all part of the passion which is at the creative core of all experience.
Georgi Y. Johnson
The doorway, the book proposes is through the resonance of experience. For example, for as long as we identify our purpose as a “thing”, positioned in the future, that can be won or lost, we will never find it. Rather, our purpose is a felt sense – the felt sense of purpose – that is a navigational flashlight of consciousness that lights up the direction which is attuned to the deepest need and facilitates the flow of passion. Page after page, Nondual Passion invites you on this experiential journey.
Georgi is also author of Nondual Therapy – The Psychology of Awakening, which presents the principles of Nondual Therapy and which includes a masterly compendium on the qualities of true nature and their associated sufferings. Nondual Passion is the first focus book on a quality of consciousness and opens the series of Nondual Healing books on the healing effects of true nature.
Georgi is mother to seven children and lives in Israel with her partner and co-teacher Bart ten Berge.
June 28, 2020
Together in Separation – Finding Unity in Isolation
This article was published in Uplift Connect.
Creating Connection from Separation
Loneliness: A sense of separation, congealing like a knot in the gut, that pervades the body and mind with a sense of being cut out of time and space. We can be surrounded by people, but still experience the despair of being lonely and lost in the crowd.
The sensation of loneliness can be a condensed mix of sadness and badness that can feel like a physical pain or obstruction. Indeed, research shows that loneliness has medical consequences. Long-term sufferers of loneliness are more prone to heart disease, cancer, depression, diabetes and suicide. And it’s an epidemic, according to US surgeon general Vivek Murthy, to be “associated with a reduction in life-span similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day and even greater than that associated with obesity.”
It’s easy to recognize the felt-sense of loneliness and even its lack of correlation with having loads of people around. Loneliness springs from a belief that we’re ultimately separate entities: Separate from the planet and nature; separate from each other; separate from our ancestry; separate from the other gender; separate from joy; separate from our bodies; and separate from life.
But loneliness is clearly not separate, it’s hanging over humanity like a dark cloud that needs to rain. For example, The House of Parliament, a bastion for the belief in the separate “I”, can effuse a daunting mood of loneliness, which Britain’s Minister of Loneliness, Tracey Crouch, experienced as: “A very dark place, a very lonely place.”
Minister of Loneliness? Yes, that’s right. Let’s take in that even some global law-makers are recognizing the horrific consequence and cost of the belief in separate self, and even more innovatively, the importance of a feeling in forming reality.
For far too many, loneliness is a sad reality of modern life. I want us all to confront this and take action to address loneliness endured by the elderly, by carers, those who have lost loved ones – those with no one to talk to or share their thoughts and experiences with. pic.twitter.com/42DbUKuDYb
— Theresa May (@theresa_may) January 17, 2018
The new Ministry was created in 2018 to honor Jo Cox, an opposition Labour MP who was murdered by a Neo-Nazi affiliate in June 2016 as Britain raged over the Brexit vote. According to the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness, over nine million people in the UK feel lonely. Jo Cox was campaigning to acknowledge loneliness, as well as the suffering of refugees, the importance of community, and in general, the power of belonging in the deeper sense. She said, shortly before her death:
While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me is that we’re far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.
From a Spiritual Perspective
What is loneliness from a spiritual perspective? Is it inevitable, like death, and can it therefore only be postponed, denied or repressed? Or is something else going on? Certainly, it’s never just loneliness. The sense of loneliness is always mixed up with deeper currents of pain in the form of rejection, grief, shame and guilt.
Could there be a way out? The Dalai Lama claims he never suffers loneliness. We could rephrase this to say that he’s radically free of the illusion of a separate self. Perhaps it’s this belief system–in the absolute separation between us that is the deeper affliction. As the Londoners say: “Mind the Gap”.
If awakened beings like the Dalai Lama don’t feel lonely, then it seems they enjoy the fulfilling interconnection of all expressions of life. Nondual teaching would advise that to allow this experience, we need to let the fixed idea of a separate ‘Me’ fall away. This ‘Me’ will always be lonely in a paradoxically shared field of illusion, because separation defines it.
The software of suffering we collectively carry is punctured with either-or thought structures based on competition. It’s coded with belief structures around ‘Me vs You’, ‘Self vs World’, ‘Kill or Be Killed’.
When the separate self starts to dissolve, an intimacy emerges towards all experience, which of itself flows into a sense of unity. This sense of unity directly affects our experience of being alive. According to Rupert Spira:
Presence itself is so utterly, intimately one with all experience that separation, alienation, non-interaction, loneliness and fear are simply inconceivable… What would be separate from what? Space separate from space? Love separate from love? The ocean separate from water, the sun from light?
In response to the Cox Commission, the British mental health charity MIND is offering a list of eight suggestion to help manage loneliness. We share them here, but with the twist of insights in Nondual Therapy.
Think about what is making you lonely
Inquiry into the kind of thoughts that generate loneliness can lead to an increase in mindfulness, which of itself will disinvest power from the belief in ultimate separation. Relaxing the body and opening the senses, notice how certain repeating thoughts affect our feelings. Examples include thoughts like: “Nobody cares about me”; “I have to do it all alone”. Imagine how it would feel to think the opposite, or without these thoughts altogether. An excellent resource for this is the work of Byron Katie.
Make new connections
In doing the above, we are already connecting to different neural networks, expanding the mind, and releasing the software of suffering. Indeed, the wisdom of interdependence, interconnection and inseparability is a direct antidote to the suffering of loneliness.
Loneliness screams for a connection which is already here but which blocked by stress. For example, our loneliness can seem to be the only thing that connects us to our lost partner. We disconnect from the world and the present moment to try to preserve the connection with the past. Yet if we make a new connection, let’s say to the existential joy shared with our partner, then the need for loneliness is undercut. We become increasingly able to open up in both directions (towards the departed and towards our present environment).
Open up
Opening up is often more easily said than done. To open, we need to relax. For example, to truly open our eyes, we need to relax into the environment. To truly hear, we need to relax into listening. The problem is, that there is this great big, stressed out affliction labelled loneliness in the gut, and it can seem that when we relax, it expands and gets worse. The art is to relax into the sense of loneliness, with a softness and curiosity about the felt sense of an affliction shared by millions.
When we reject the sense of rejection, then we generate more pain of rejection. When we disown the pain of abandonment, then we generate more abandonment. When we isolate the sense of loneliness, we feed the suffering of loneliness. Open up to it, share the sense of it with the universe, the planet and with all existence. If we can do this, we might find that the felt-sense of loneliness is the melody of homecoming.
Take it slow
Loneliness is suffused with the pain of separation. It can seem we are forgotten, lost or cut out of time and space. Because of this when we move too fast, it somatically suggests that there’s not enough time and space for you precisely how you are in naturalness. But you’re not a waste of time and space (no-one is). Give yourself the gift of all the time and all the space. Especially, offer time and space to the contraction of loneliness. Be intimate with it. Share yourself with it and share it with all you meet, whether it be human, animal, mineral or the miracle of the sky.
Be careful when comparing yourself to others
In order to compare yourself to others, you need to first separate yourself from them. In addition, the agenda behind comparison is to check if you’re worthy of belonging, before opening up and risking intimacy. These two beliefs: In being not good enough, and in being comparable, fuel the suffering of loneliness. Habits of comparison will always leave you with a greater sense of rejection.
Comparison leads to competition and in no time, the left hand is competing against the right and we’re back in the limited belief structure of ‘Kill or Be Killed”.
As Krishnamurti wrote:
To live without comparison is to remove a tremendous burden. If you remove the burden of comparison, imitation, conformity, adjustment, modification, then you are left with what is.
Check how you are feeling
Yes. How you are feeling matters to us all, and to the whole existential universe, so it should also matter to you. Our feelings are at the heart of the matter. Feelings affect our levels of stress; our mental freedom; our sense of peace; and our ability to connect to others.
Indeed, feelings and emotions are the substance of our reality–how we experience being in the world. When thought says: “I don’t want to BE here”, let yourself check in on the feeling of that. Loneliness or isolation is just the tip of the iceberg. As the loneliness unfolds, it could well reveal a deep pain of rejection, and when this unfolds, it could release a powerful longing to belong. This longing to belong–to God, to others, to the planet, to your own life–is the compass to the loving, seamless sense of unity in community indicated by Rupert Spira, the Dalai Lama, Byron Katie, Krishnamurti and so many others. Of itself this wisdom of unity births compassion (for better or worse, we’re in this together).
Get some help
It sounds simple, but it’s often not easy. To open up to help from the outside, we have to admit a degree of helplessness within ourselves. Some have spent lifetimes avoiding the sense of helplessness due to a traumatic confusion between helplessness and power abuse.
Again, move slowly, honoring your feelings. The allowance of the sense of Helplessness is intimately entwined with humility (letting go of the idea of the separate ‘Me’) and the wisdom of interdependence or togetherness. Only when we release control and the habit of conformity and relax into the helplessness, can the deeper call for help be released. This is because precisely what we need is hidden within this denied helplessness. In the words of Rumi:
Prayer is an egg. Hatch out the total helplessness inside.
When the unified field hears that call, a response will come. In unpredictable, uncontrollable ways, life always takes care of itself.
Read others’ stories
When we connect our sense of loneliness with the loneliness of people around us, a melting occurs. We’re also one in the suffering of loneliness! In this process of unfolding, we need each other, and the stories of others can be a tremendous support. But don’t stop with stories of loneliness, move on to stories of awakening. And you don’t have to read, you can tune in to Conscious TV, Buddha at the Gas Pump, UPLIFT or any of the other channels of light.
Let’s imagine that what has been called “An epidemic of loneliness” is totally connected with a torrent of spiritual awakening to the unity of all we are, together with the falling away of the sentient limitations embedded in beliefs of separation. It could be that the sense of loneliness arises like smoke from the burning embers of the separate self, or the private ‘me’ with its separate suffering. Perhaps loneliness is the symptom of a deeper awakening that signifies our evolution into a more essential community born through the wisdom of unity. Could it be that the collective trance of separation is melting and that this dark space of aloneness is weather on the way to oneness?
All about Compassion
Suffering is a catalyst for spiritual awakening and spiritual awakening is a catalyst to compassion. Compassion is another word for Together (Com) in suffering (Passion). Compassion is perhaps the most powerful healing drive available to modern man, and with loneliness, it brings the felt-sense of unity that makes all difference precious. When we can have compassion with compassion, how much faster we’ll be free of loneliness!
In the words of the Dalai Lama:
If you wish to overcome that feeling of isolation and loneliness, your underlying attitude makes a tremendous difference. Approaching others with the thought of compassion in your mind is the best way to do this.
Georgi Y. Johnson is author of Nondual Therapy: the Psychology of Awakening. Her website is http://www.iamhere.life
May 27, 2020
Accidentally on Purpose #Passion
Sometimes, people look puzzled, confronted with the possibility of pointlessness, individual uselessness, or the dangerous death-trap of failure. With confusion, fear arises, and panic to come up with an answer.
Knowing the answer calms the system, bringing stability, identity, and the confidence of being informed. But even when we come with an answer – my purpose is x or y – the answer itself can seem to expose a field of questions waiting to be born. There could be a background sense of the lie, a subtle frustration, a lingering expectation for a long-forgotten miracle, or an ancient sense of disappointment surfacing as fresh as the morning dew.
Knowing our purpose is not always the same as finding it. Finding it means we’ve got a sense of it – in our heart, gut and bones. Between knowing it, finding it, and living it, there can be whole rifts of despair. We can feel cheated by God, denied by the world, and betrayed by life. The pain of an unfulfilled promise can be worse than no promise at all. So, sometimes we deny the promise, to try to get rid of the pain.
When we do something on purpose, with purpose, we do it consciously. Consciousness brings a qualitative richness to purpose. It aligns head, heart and body. It bridges those rifts of despair where we don’t make sense to ourselves.
Our sense of purpose is intimately connected with the Nondual Quality of Passion. When we find a depth of purpose, we become alive and thrive. Purpose is the intelligence of passion. At the formational layer of the psyche, it activates the unique information within the individual with vitality. It offers that information into the collective field, making it useful, as it goes into service to the whole.
In so many ways, to question our individual purpose is to question the purpose of life itself.
This kind of question can be a catalyst for healing and evolution, an accelerator of transformation and a compass in our return to the natural flow of True Nature. Yet the answer will come from the Felt Sense – from the somatic sense of being alive. The purpose of life is found in a sense of purpose. It’s in the feeling of mobilization in which individual skills and talents get orientated toward the wellbeing of the whole. There’s a quickening of energetic flow, arousal of the nerve system, and alignment of head, heart, and body. This agreement between dimensions of experience lets us rest back as the source of all quality. Quality energy flows through us, merging with fields of resonance. The separate “I” becomes a perfunctory label, appearing here and there when it’s technically needed in service to the wider purpose.
Imagine a singer who is delivering a song to wore-torn soldiers. Traumatized and grief-struck, they are energetically clinging to the tenderness of her voice, as the power of her melody supports them in the long journey back to the open heart. When her song is done, she steps off the stage.
“Hilda!” says a voice. “Hilda!!!” They need to call several times because she doesn’t recognize her name. For a moment, the singer looks confused. Who the hell is Hilda?
Her whole being is still residing in the purpose of the song. Informed by the sense of purpose, the quality of passion had transported her beyond the limitations of the thinking mind and personal identity. As the song moved through her, so did the voice of heaven, calling its forsaken children home.
The Felt Sense of purpose is primary, and the many ways it expresses through action are secondary. The sense of purpose is the compass of passion, giving purpose to the actions that arise out of it.
Purpose is not an ambition, it’s a felt sense.
Yet we have a top-down approach to the world. We tend to believe we are our thoughts and that our consciousness is also kind of thought. This can give us a superficial feeling of control. at the same time, it generates a background atmosphere of victimhood and dreadful impotence. We are mentally required to manifest a purposeful reality, at the same time that we seem to constantly make a mess of it.
We actually contract our consciousness into this provisional control center within the thought storms of the head. From this contracted mental state, it can seem that our purpose is a battle. Any success is in spite of the hostile environment of an unfriendly world. We are commanded to be purposeful, even while weathering the strange, unpredictable climate of our emotions and inner states. We get alienated from purpose, just as we are attached to the strange and unsafe territory of a physical body. In a purposeless universe, gas-lighted by the gods, we are required to find purpose, and the whole thing feels like a big fail.
All this anguish is arising from a core conditioning that we are the thinking mind. Thinking defines us, or, ‘I think therefore I am.’ Yet so often, it is the thinking process that takes a simple sense of pain and whips up a whole psychic split.
This split can mean that on the one hand, we are raging against life, declaring it meaningless, while threatening god and wife with non-existence and personal suicide if we don’t get what we desire; while on the other hand, we are stroking our dog with a tenderness that says you will never leave her. Do you recognize such splits in your psyche? Between the mental rage at senselessness, and the body’s ongoing, purposeful movements toward wellbeing?
When we look into nature, we will find an abundance of the sense of purpose. It seems that all forms are hardwired to experience it. When I give our dog a piece of sausage, she sometimes looks at it, like a bizarre object. If I ask her to sit, lie down, follow me around the room and rollover, and then give her the same sausage, she is in ecstasies at its flavor.
When you look at all animals, you can get a connection with the sense of purpose. It’s in how the bird flies with the twig in her mouth, in the awesome engineering of the bees in the hive, as well as the individual gathering of nectar. It’s in the salmon, determined to swim backstream up the river, as they must. It’s in the trees, stretching toward the sunlight, and in the cloud, decorating the sky as he awaits that moment where he must become rain down and become.
The spiritual teacher Russel Williams used to say that everything is perfect. It can be perfectly good, or perfectly bad. But it’s perfect according to the conditions that surround it. It’s the same with the sense of purpose.
Everything has its purpose, even the feeling of being useless has an undercurrent of the sense of purpose. Even our wild declarations that life has no meaning, are infused with the frustrated vitality of purpose. Even existential absence, negation or non-being, have a sense of purpose. Why would this be? Could it be that the sense of purpose is integral to our consciousness? That wherever we are conscious and alive, we are blessed with a sense of purpose? Even though we have learned to ignore it?
May 20, 2020
The Secret about The Secret #Passion
There is a lower magic about how we create realities. If we imagine we are already rich, already have that partner, or already have that job, then we will manifest that reality in the physical. Through generating the resonance within our thoughts in the present moment, we become co-creators of all future moments. We manifest our visions. This is because the quality of each present moment births the next. The proposition is that the physical dimension will follow and conform to the higher dimension of thought resonance.
Often called the Law of Attraction, this popular ideology around spirituality, manifestation, and success has done much to enforce the notion that our thoughts can master all external forms of reality. It’s a curious blend of idealism and materialism and lacks sentient depth. It has left in its wake many frustrated, despairing individuals swathed in the sense of failure that they haven’t managed to ‘manifest’ the stuff that they want in their lives.
Nevertheless, the notion is half-true, and is still compelling and hypnotic, especially as it plays into the mainstream conditioning of materialism. We’ve been primed for lower magical thinking by our culture, education, and mainstream beliefs since the industrial revolution. Gratification and fulfilment, we are taught, can only be taken in from the outside. The world should be our oyster and we are the consumers.
We are under a spell of limitation. Threatened by a stick bashing our ass with the threat of disease, death, and destitution, we follow the carrot of material attainment, even sacrificing our freedom of thought to the materialist objective. Because we are our thoughts, and our thoughts are consequential, then we must think the ‘right’ things in order to be happy.
While under this spell, we believe that fulfillment is to be found through getting things from the outer world. This depends on a belief that our wellbeing can be separated from the wellbeing of others, or the planet. We are drugged into believing that our life has to be earned and that this life is in competition with other people’s lives.
To get on the winning team of successful manifestation, we need to be shamelessly self-interested, attracting the resonance of our future gain with real-time fantasy.
But one person’s heaven is another person’s hell. The invocation is all about personal reward, the conscious resonance doesn’t necessarily include those who have been hurt, forgotten or exploited to achieve our success. It doesn’t include the deeper yearnings of the soul and the furious scream of the heart for liberation from the bonds of energetic isolation.
This conditioning isolates the individual, while gunning to become the winner and not the loser, to get success and not failure, pleasure and not pain while being fenced in on an island of separate happiness and private fulfillment.
This isolation of the separate self brings a whole set of limitations. The person themselves becomes a finite ‘thing’, subject to loss, just as all the stuff that has been gained is subject to loss. In trying to be separately more, we find ourselves to be claustrophobically limited to a space that is exceedingly small. The scope of sensitivity and responsiveness gets reduced to the shady borders of me, myself and I. The impact of our manifestation is not a bang, but a whimper.
The popular culture of The Secret has enticed a generation with an ideology of personal gain that generates a sense of being apart from the unified field of all life. The disconnect from the field of unity evokes an inner sense of loss of epic proportions. This can feel unbearable, so we numb it down, boarding up the inner world as a no-go zone.
This inner sense of boredom, blankness or dense nothingness further feeds an addictive dependence on the outer world to compensate the dullness and to distract from any frustration or suffering within the inner world. You wouldn’t expect it, but boredom and dense nothingness are a tremendous suffering. It’s like having a numb pelvis, or not feeling the weight in a leg. It’s bewildering, frustrating and gets us out of balance. This other kind of suffering – the suffering of numbness – again sends us outside in a quest to do something, get something, to break the state. But whatever we get, it’s never really enough.
“Happy thoughts superimposed over existential despair will attract existential despair with a few happy thoughts pinned on top. Because sooner or later, experience will catch us off guard, when our personal agendas have been put to rest for the night.”
Just as The Secret works as a lower magic, it delivers a superficial crust of experience that barely conceals the mists of dread and mortal impermanence from the darkened inner world. This is because when we think of something we desire from the world – a reality that we want to manifest – we are also thinking about the reason for that thought.
Based on resonance, the law of attraction says that like attracts like. Happy thoughts attract happy things. But this has a depth. Happy thoughts superimposed over existential despair will attract existential despair with a few happy thoughts pinned on top. Because sooner or later, experience will catch us off guard, when our personal agendas have been put to rest for the night.
There is a vast difference between looking happy and being happy. The field of resonance goes way beyond the ice-tip of appearances. For example, when we are bringing the bank balance of $30 million plus into the present moment of our felt sense, we are also bringing the methodology of that wish – the dread of poverty, the existential insecurity, the slavery of the sense of value to bank account numbers and not actual worth, and on and on. We are consciously affirming and recreating a whole reality – those same energetic sufferings that caused us to want $30 million in the first place.
When we fantasize about what we want, as if we already have it in real time, in order to manifest it later, we are also investing in fantasy. Each moment of illusion births a moment of illusion. Even that physical Mercedes Benz will have a slightly fake, illusory quality to it. Make-believe breeds make-believe.
Whatever the desire, it is driven by a sense of lack, and when lack is at its essence, the future results of the mental hocus pocus will be equally alive with lack. Only now it will be clear that $30 million can’t buy an exemption. No amount of money can buy out the lack. So, there could be some evolution.
It’s not a crime to want stuff and to seek the attain of certain positions from the outer world. It’s simply where we’re at in our evolution of mind. We’re hard-wired by our conditioning to this materialistic striving based on a background belief in lack. We all do it, as we’re coded by this software of suffering.
We became so addicted to dictating experience, that we are losing our receptivity – our ability to sense and feel the spontaneity of living impressions in the here and now. Not knowing exactly what’s going on around us makes us unsafe and generates an amorphous sense of threat. This sense of threat directs us to avoid the unknown still more, as the unknown could hide horrible outcomes (such as disease, incarceration, death). In this, we lose our way. We get numb to the sense of purpose and our passion often goes offline. At a certain stage, we can begin to feel incredibly lost.
What is it that we truly desire? Do we have the faintest clue of what is really needed for our personal manifestation? If fulfillment is our destiny, do we remember what fulfillment feels like?
In our boredom on the inside and addiction to the outside, we have by degrees forgotten how to feel. Our senses have dulled and our thought are increasingly dumbed down. We don’t expect the earth to speak to us, or the cells of our body to have a genius, so we stopped listening, stopped asking, muting the energetic conversation. After a while, as we don’t experience any aliveness in nature and in our own bodies, we stop believing in it, and because we stop believing in it, we stop experiencing it. We become cynical indeed. But not cynical enough yet to take a sword of truth and slash the curtains of illusion down.
In this, our individual purpose has become scripted as a future based agenda, rather than a Felt Sense of purpose that is alive as a sentient compass in the moment. Our passion has been traded for the ambition to get to get somewhere else in an imagined future life, as opposed to the experiential quickening, heat and uprising of the whole organism in order to clear a way for the soul to express.
Could it be that whatever we dream up as our own fulfilment from our position as a work-in-process could never compare to what the universe has planned for us? That to follow the plan, we first need to open up in receptivity of body, heart and mind to the authenticity of all that is being felt?
Could it be that the deeper secret and the higher magic is right in the heart of those areas where we suffer the most? Those same areas that we have always avoided?
There is an offering of wellbeing beyond belief waiting at the door of every individual, but it is a door that many have forgotten how to open. It is the door through which we receive experience into the infinite inner word, without discrimination.
This offering of wellbeing leaves no part untended. It touches the form, but also the soul of the form. It arouses the suffering but also the creational power within the pain. It welcomes adversity but also the hero within the moment of strife. It takes the horror of death and instantly holds the wonder of birth.
It will not forsake the forsaken or expel the refugee. It will not despise the despicable, nor will it reject that which has been hounded out of form. Rather it will touch each thread of living experience as if it were meeting itself, initiating the alchemy in which suffering becomes passion, passion becomes purpose, and purpose becomes manifestation. All this is suffused with the sense of unconditional reward and fulfillment – a reunion of sorts with life.
This is the deeper secret and the higher magic. Our sense of purpose and our passion is right here, in the instantaneous fulfillment of cracking open the intimate kernel of our suffering to let it be of service to the whole. In this, we shift from the dictation of narrow experience to the reception, offering and sharing of boundless vistas of life.
“Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.” – Rumi
May 18, 2020
The River of Life
The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.
― Leonardo da Vinci
Between the intoxicating vibrations of our thinking mind and the robust, indefatigable fact of our physical body, there is a river – the river of pure experience.
This river runs between our ideas and our actuality. It flows between our imagination and our reality. Its torrents arise out of the space between the silent impulse and the sensation, between the darkness and the sensuous arousal. Its currents move between our attitudes, habits and reflexes, and our genes – the minute templates of our physical presence here, now.
Like all rivers, the river of experience is in constant flux. It rolls and winds, unique in each snapshot of perception. Its ripping surfaces reflect patterns of light and shadow, glinting in a blessed conversation with the sky above. At the same time, its undercurrents can be slower, more powerful, and pulled by deeper forces.
It is in this river of experience that we come to life, and the deeper we investigate the river, the more deeply life comes to us.
What is a thought, a fact, or an imagination, but the experience of that mental movement?
What is a yearning, an emotion, or a depth of feeling, but the experience of those sentient moments?
What is a physical sensation, a sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell, but the experience of those sensory impressions?
All that we could ever think ourselves to be, all the vast cumulation of memory living through us, and all that we could ever imagine ourselves to be – all this is alive as the river of experience.
The river is a changing, turning, through an evolution of impressions of who we are, what we are and where we are. Yet just as it defines us, the river can only itself be defined by its perpetual movement.
It flows with the vast paradox of life. Unchanging, it never stays the same. Indestructible, it dies to every moment. Ungraspable, it sustains all life. Undeniable, it willows each definition into the equanimous stream of its perpetual unfolding.
All knowledge, no matter how evident, hard-won, proven, attested and scientific, has arisen through the river of experience, and it is only through the experience of the fact that it continues to live.
Even the absence of experience exists as an experience. Even negation, absence, falsity, and the lie can only appear as twists and spirals within the ongoing movement of the river of life. From the supreme creator, through to our worldly authorities, oracles, conspiracy theorists, and the dictatorship of collective mind – all are but part of the same river, turning, reflecting, and undulating as one inseparable, multidimensional spiral of life. All arise in sensation, through experience, as experience, out of experience.
The work of mind, the play of the body, and the grace of the heart merge and unify within the river of experience. Even the sense of separation and split flows there, undivided from the whole cosmic circulation of water through ice, fluid, and cloud.
What is experience? What is this unifying source in which body, heart, mind, inside, outside, self, and other flow as one elemental manifestation of all that we are? How to navigate this river, and who would be the navigator?
Each droplet of the river is a moment of consciousness. In that timeless moment, past and future arise in the present. In that one molecule of water, subject and object merge as one happening. The perceiver is one with the perceived and the seer is one with the seen. Here, there is the love story of life occurring within the push and pull of oneness and differentiation.
This conscious moment can be at once a single drop, and at the same time the universal ocean of life.
Yet there is depth to the momentous. Within the unity there is a vibrational quality in which experience is flavoured with subtler resonance. This teardrop can be alive with the atmosphere of pain, the next with joy, the other with the succulence of physical yearning, and the next with the frustration of vital force. This resonance creates structure in how one molecule dances with the next. It is inseparable from a morphic mist of quality in which each atmosphere is wondrously unique, essentially immeasurable, and incomparable.
Some atmospheres are ones of yearning, reaching into the ether toward completion. Others are unwell, seeking their own disintegration as the last promise of future reunion with wholeness. Here there is a sacred rhythm of destruction, chaos, and reformation, a healing current of creation.
Subtler still, there are atmospheres that are instantly rewarded, alive with harmony and the fulfilment of pure becoming. These are alive in the subtle potency of well-being and yet expanding in formless unity. Unaltered by collisions of greater density, they gracefully move through the empty spaces around and within each moment of becoming.
These atmospheres are not just the mists hovering over bodies of water, at the threshold of transformation. They are also the mists alive within each molecule of water, humming melodies of a formative nature, shaping whole structures of being and impregnating the earth of the physical form.
These moods and states are found in the space between and around electrons, brushing the membranes of molecules and spiraling through the epicentre of the biochemical bond. They emanate out of and return to the field of pure awareness.
When we are aware of our loneliness, we are that awareness out of which a resonance of loneliness sound. As this loneliness infiltrates our blood, our muscles, and our bones, we become that ache of loneliness, which arises within that pure awareness – like a question.
It is a question about belonging, about reunion, about coming home and becoming the home we never left. Out of awareness our consciousness sprouts and touches the area of pain, blessing it with memory – the memory of what this fracture of experience is in essence. The touch of consciousness initiates the sense of wholeness within the sense of separation. And often, easily, in this way, a crunch of pain becomes a touch of bliss, as the river of experience flows on.
The currents of the river move with a formula of creation, of transformation, of evolution and of manifestation. Just as light effects every moment of form, we are naturally steered toward bliss and fulfillment.
From great heights we have swooped down into the river of experience. We have felt her freshness and changeability, her newness, and her antiquity. We have tasted her moments and we have bathed in the presence of her being. We have travelled within the moment of the single molecule to the charge of vitality and its mists of emotion. Here, intoxicated by the perfume of nascent beauty we have fallen through the crevices of conscious control. Within that enticing resonance, we suddenly, penitently knew ourselves as an unadulterated awareness, boundlessly existing through all the empty spaces – even within the emptiness of the densest bodies of form.
And yet, within that single, individual water drop, the facilitator of the vast universal ocean of life, there is more. The journey is perpetually beginning.
Deep within the river of experience, not beneath, behind, or above, not underpinning or transcending, but within, there is the sublime mystery of all that we are. Ubiquitous and so subtle that we might call it empty.
This is the perennial, indivisible space existing through and between all currents of experience. This is the space that allows dimensions, variations, differentiation, and movement.
Prior to awareness it is self-identical, everything and nothing, being and non-being, neither light nor dark, neither subject nor object, not I and not other than I. It is that which allows the ecstatic reunion of life with itself. It is the area in which touch occurs and so is the facilitator of bliss. It is the source of all perception and here, where it perceives itself through the many apparitions of beauty, it wonders at the revelation from the inner to the outer.
Without this self-identical space of infinite and eternal singularity, without this wellspring of the self, no passage of experience could occur, and the river could not flow.
At the core of all matter there is this expression in which the hidden becomes visible. Its command, rippling through all the rivers of the universe is to ‘be’, to manifest, to elucidate the melody of the living. In resisting the command of being, we suffer resistance and we lose our direction, bereft of the sense of purpose. And these are sad corners of the river, where experience slows – for a while. In moving with the command of being, we arise with universal power, unique within the manifold field of unity.
Yet in that instance of expression, in the release of manifestation, we are unconditionally received. All moments of the river, from its newborn reflections of light, through to its subterranean passages through darkness, are received as living impressions into the unified field.
And here it the river of experience flowing through all dimensions, charged with the vast mysteries of perceptive emptiness, the living core of all we are. Here is the command and the fulfillment; the release of life, and the sense of reward; the question and the answer; the unknown and the knowing; the confusion and the meaning; the insentience and the sensing; the purpose and the passion.
The river of experience flows through degrees of light, a conscious, aware, emptiness, spiraling through the vastness of creation and always found, intimately, in this tender, naked, scarcely earthed moment of your unique becoming. Guided by wellness through paths of least resistance, the passion insists on the unfolding mystery of the living, the awesome sustaining of a perpetual cascade into wholeness.
This is the solemn prayer of this work: to show you some of the majesties of all you are, that together in unity, we will unfold through these words some of the passion – the turbulence of the living miracle – that timelessly waits to awaken through you in this at once sublime and yet radically human moment of divinity.
May 15, 2020
Be happy: Your genes may thank you for it
A good state of mind — that is, your happiness — affects your genes, scientists say. In the first study of its kind, researchers from UCLA’s Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology and the University of North Carolina examined how positive psychology impacts human gene expression.
What they found is that different types of happiness have surprisingly different effects on the human genome.
People who have high levels of what is known as eudaimonic well-being — the kind of happiness that comes from having a deep sense of purpose and meaning in life (think Mother Teresa) — showed very favorable gene-expression profiles in their immune cells. They had low levels of inflammatory gene expression and strong expression of antiviral and antibody genes.
However, people who had relatively high levels of hedonic well-being — the type of happiness that comes from consummatory self-gratification (think most celebrities) — actually showed just the opposite. They had an adverse expression profile involving high inflammation and low antiviral and antibody gene expression.
The report appears in the current online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
For the last 10 years, Steven Cole, a UCLA professor of medicine and a member of the UCLA Cousins Center, and his colleagues, including first author Barbara L. Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina, have been examining how the human genome responds to stress, misery, fear and all kinds of negative psychology.
In this study, though, the researchers asked how the human genome might respond to positive psychology. Is it just the opposite of stress and misery, or does positive well-being activate a different kind of gene expression program?
The researchers examined the biological implications of both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being through the lens of the human genome, a system of some 21,000 genes that has evolved fundamentally to help humans survive and be well.
Previous studies had found that circulating immune cells show a systematic shift in baseline gene-expression profiles during extended periods of stress, threat or uncertainty. Known as conserved transcriptional response to adversity, or CTRA, this shift is characterized by an increased expression of genes involved in inflammation and a decreased expression of genes involved in antiviral responses.
This response, Cole noted, likely evolved to help the immune system counter the changing patterns of microbial threat that were ancestrally associated with changing socio-environmental conditions; these threats included bacterial infection from wounds caused by social conflict and an increased risk of viral infection associated with social contact.
“But in contemporary society and our very different environment, chronic activation by social or symbolic threats can promote inflammation and cause cardiovascular, neurodegenerative and other diseases and can impair resistance to viral infections,” said Cole, the senior author of the research.
“Doing good and feeling good have very different effects on the human genome, even though they generate similar levels of positive emotion. Apparently… the human genome is much more sensitive to different ways of achieving happiness than are conscious minds.”
In the present study, the researchers drew blood samples from 80 healthy adults who were assessed for hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, as well as potentially confounding negative psychological and behavioral factors. The team used the CTRA gene-expression profile to map the potentially distinct biological effects of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.
And while those with eudaimonic well-being showed favorable gene-expression profiles in their immune cells and those with hedonic well-being showed an adverse gene-expression profile, “people with high levels of hedonic well-being didn’t feel any worse than those with high levels of eudaimonic well-being,” Cole said. “Both seemed to have the same high levels of positive emotion. However, their genomes were responding very differently even though their emotional states were similarly positive.
“What this study tells us is that doing good and feeling good have very different effects on the human genome, even though they generate similar levels of positive emotion,” he said. “Apparently, the human genome is much more sensitive to different ways of achieving happiness than are conscious minds.”
Other authors on the study included Jesusa M.G. Arevalo and Jeffrey Ma, both of UCLA, and Karen M. Grewen, Kimberly A. Coffey, Sara B. Algoe and Ann M. Firestine of the University of North Carolina.
The research was supported by National Institutes of Health grants R01NR012899, R01CA116778 and P30AG107265.
April 28, 2020
Child Abuse, Inflammation and Obesity in Mid-life
Source
Objective
Elevated inflammation biomarkers are associated with incident cardiovascular disease. Several studies suggest that childhood abuse may be associated with inflammation later in life. This study examined whether childhood abuse predicted elevated levels of C reactive protein (CRP) and whether the association was due to body size.
Methods
Participants were 326 (104 Black, 222 White) women from the Pittsburgh site of the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN). SWAN included a baseline assessment of premenopausal or early perimenopausal women in midlife (mean age = 45.7), and CRP, depressive symptoms, body mass index (BMI), and other covariates were measured over 7 annual follow-up visits. The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, a standardized measure that retrospectively assesses abuse and neglect in childhood and adolescence, was administered at year 8 or 9 of follow-up.
Results
Approximately 37% of the participants reported a history of abuse or neglect. Generalized estimating equations showed that sexual and emotional abuse, emotional and physical neglect, and the total number of types of abuse were associated with higher CRP levels over 7 years, adjusting for race, age, education, smoking status, use of hormone therapy, depressive symptoms, occurrence of heart attack or stroke, and medications for hypertension. The coefficients for indirect effects for emotional and sexual abuse, physical neglect, and total number of types of abuse on CRP levels through BMI were significant. A history of emotional abuse and neglect was related to percent change in CRP over the 7 years but not through percent change in BMI over the 7 years.
Conclusion
A history of childhood abuse and neglect retrospectively reported is related to overall elevated inflammation in mid-life women, perhaps through obesity. A history of some types of abuse and neglect (emotional) may be related to change in inflammation, independent of simultaneously measured change in BMI.
Early Trauma, C-Reactive Protein and Eating Disorder
[Source]
Objective
Childhood trauma is known to be related to inflammatory processes in adulthood, but underlying psychological/behavioral mechanisms have not been fully characterized. To investigate associations between childhood trauma and inflammation (indexed by C-reactive protein (CRP)), we used a structural equation modeling approach on a subsample of the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) biomarker project.
Methods
Participants included 687 men and women without history of cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease or stroke who completed a physical examination, extensive questionnaires and provided blood. To test for gender differences we held as many parameters invariant across gender as possible while still retaining good model fit.
Results
Tests of direct and indirect effects revealed that childhood trauma was significantly associated with elevated CRP, via elevated body mass index (BMI; p
Conclusions
Our results are consistent with a model in which childhood trauma is associated with elevated C-reactive protein, a relationship associated with stress reactivity and compensatory emotional eating. Men and women may experience trauma in qualitatively distinct patterns but share many vulnerabilities which can lead to elevated health risks. Emotional eating may be an important target for intervention in this population.
Keywords: C-reactive protein, inflammation, emotional eating, childhood trauma, anxiety, stress, cardiovascular disease
Anger, Depression & Inflammation
[Editors notes]
C-reactive protein is made by the liver and is a biomarker for chronic inflammation. CRP levels in the blood increase when there is inflammation in the body. While much inflammation is a natural part of the immune system to bring white blood cells to an infected area, long-term and chronic inflammation can be the result not of physical distress, but psychological distress. This can mean that the immune system starts are attacking healthy tissue. When you have chronic inflammation, your body’s inflammatory response can eventually start damaging healthy cells, tissues, and organs. Over time, this can lead to DNA damage, tissue death, and internal scarring. All of these are linked to the development of several diseases, including cancer. In this article, we find more evidence of the direct interface between emotional freedom and physiological wellbeing.
In this article, the authors discuss anger and depression and its connection to disease. It would be more precise to say that it is not anger and depression, as stated, but our attitude to our anger and depression. Otherwise, the authors unwittingly promote a belief that we can ‘deny’ or ‘get rid’ of anger, or that anger doesn’t serve a natural and healthy function in nature. The denial or repression of anger is a cause of depression, which has a direct impact on the attunement of our immune system. This is not solved by more repression of anger (anger at our anger) or depression about depression, but by depth therapy, in which we change our attitude to whatever is appearing as emotional resonance in a healing process.]
Anger, hostility and depressive symptoms linked to high C-reactive protein levels
Microglial cells migrate to area of ischemic inflammation.
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have discovered that otherwise healthy people who are prone to anger, hostility and mild to moderate depressive symptoms produce higher levels of a substance that promotes cardiovascular disease and stroke.The substance, C-reactive protein (CRP), has garnered considerable attention for its role in both promoting and predicting cardiovascular disease and stroke in initially healthy people. It is produced by the liver in response to inflammation, and inflammation has recently been shown to underlie the plaque that forms inside arteries as they clog.
The Duke study is the first to link this combination of negative psychological attributes with higher levels of CRP in people without traditional risk factors for heart disease, said Edward Suarez, Ph.D., associate professor in the Duke Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
Results of his study are published in the September, 2004, issue of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. The study was funded by a grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
People with traditional risk factors for heart disease – obesity, smoking, diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, and sedentary lifestyles – have elevated CRP levels, said Suarez. But a large number of individuals without these traditional risk factors have elevated levels of CRP as well, without an identifiable cause.
The Duke study demonstrates that anger, hostile behavior and depressive symptoms could account for why apparently healthy individuals have higher CRP levels and are thus at increased risk for cardiovascular disease and stroke. Suarez said his findings could also explain why people with mild to moderate symptoms of depression are at increased risk for cardiac events and early death – a link that has been clearly established but without an underlying mechanism to explain why.
“Fifty percent of all heart attacks occur among people without any traditional risk factors, so it is critical to identify other factors that may underlie heart disease and the inflammation that contributes to it,” said Suarez.
In earlier studies, Suarez has shown that people who are prone to anger, hostility and depressive symptoms respond to stress with increased production of the stress hormone norepinephrine. Scientific evidence suggests that an increase in this stress hormone activates the inflammatory arm of the immune system and triggers the expression of genes that cause chronic, low-grade inflammation. This inflammation is characterized by high levels of CRP, he said.
“Individuals with these psychological attributes may evaluate their environment in a cynically hostile manner, and thus respond with greater anger, which is often accompanied by mild to moderate symptoms of depression,” said Suarez. “These psychological attributes tend to cluster within the same individual, and the clustering of attributes may produce even greater risk than any single trait alone.”
Suarez said the levels of depressive symptoms and angry/hostile moods necessary to raise CRP do not constitute psychiatric conditions. “That is, you don’t have to be clinically depressed or have extreme and frequent bouts of anger to show higher levels of CRP,” he said.
In the Duke study, 121 healthy men and women were asked to complete standard personality questionnaires in which they described their psychological attributes, including anger, hostility and depression. The volunteers did not have any pre-existing conditions — such as smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease — that would predispose them to having high CRP levels. High-sensitivity blood tests were then conducted to measure CRP levels.
Respondents who were prone to anger, had high hostility levels, and showed mild to moderate symptoms of depression had two to three times higher CRP levels than their calmer counterparts. The more pronounced their negative moods, the higher CRP levels they had, the study showed.
The highest levels of CRP were in the range of 1.7 mg/L to 3.0 mg/L. While these levels are still considered relatively low – fever, an active infection, or physical trauma is associated with CRP levels above 10.0/mg/L -CRP levels in this range are associated with a moderate to high risk of heart attacks and strokes, said Suarez.
“CRP levels at this range are associated with inflammation that is likely to eventually increase the risk of a heart attack or stroke,” he said. “If you add these psychological attributes together with the known impact of traditional risk factors, it could further elevate CRP levels.”
Suarez has previously shown that hostile people who exhibit symptoms of depression have higher levels of stress hormones and circulating levels of an inflammatory substance called interleukin 6, another marker of inflammation that has been shown to predict heart disease in initially healthy people. The current data build upon his earlier research and demonstrate yet another mechanism through which the brain and the body interact to contribute to poor health, he said.
“Most individuals tend to think of heart disease as a condition that is associated with factors such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking and sedentary lifestyle,” said Suarez. “Our findings, however, suggest the development of heart disease may also be due to psychological attributes that activate the inflammatory process shown to predict and contribute to the development of heart disease.”
April 3, 2020
Into the Unknown: Online Meetup with Bart & Georgi
April 4th, at 20:00 Jerusalem time.
Find the time in your area: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Into+the+Unknown+with+Bart+%26+Georgi+Webcast&iso=20200405T20&p1=110&ah=2&am=30
An open ZOOM webinar for the worldwide I AM HERE, Nondual Therapy and Spiritual Psychology communities.
ALL WELCOME!
In these times of uncertainty and social isolation, Georgi Y. Johnson and Bart ten Berge are offering an evening of exploration, meditation, and sharing.
Register here to receive a link that will automatically open Zoom for you to join the webinar.
On your screen, you will see a Q & A button where it’s possible to ask questions. You can also send questions by email in advance to: info@iamhere.life
Attendees will be invisible unless they are brought forward to interact with a question or sharing.
The webinar is free, but if you would like to contribute ($10-$25), you can do so here: https://www.paypal.me/VeReCreations
Into the Unknown:
From horror to Awe,
From fear to freedom.
From random shit happening to infinite possibility.
I’m so happy to offer you this online event together with my beloved @Chashymie and the open communities @PerceptionIAH and @ISSPmeditation https://t.co/1awTThv68Z
— Georgi Y. Johnson (@GeorginaYael) April 3, 2020
I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty
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