AWAKENED LIVING NEWSLETTER Vol 11 3/29/20
Creating Community for Those in the Spiritual Awakening Process
PRESENCE AT THE CENTER
(Excerpted from Chapter 7 of my upcoming book Being Awake)
If we wish to discover the innate happiness within us it is important to take time out of our lives to rest in our center – the deep stillness available within our hearts, but often clouded over by the demands, distractions and worries of modern life. Meditation retreats, with the added dimension of silence, offer a return to our Self, but you can also give yourself periods of retreat at home, slipping out of your normal routine in a way that works for you.
I spent many years slipping out of my family life to meditate, especially when my children were in school, to answer for myself the question of whether god existed. This question had troubled me ever the since the death of my mother. One day I fell through this question and into a spaciousness I did not understand, but which felt like whatever god was had to be totally inclusive and part of me, not the limited, demanding and judgmental character I had been taught was God. These moments were beyond description in language. The experience was an invitation to seek and explore the core of existence and the nature of self.
Today, I occasionally offer a retreat, and find I become very busy in those days when I have a retreat planned, especially if I am doing other events such as webinars or consulting with students. It feels like I am riding a fast-moving train for several weeks, and then skidding to a halt at the retreat center, where I need to find my own deep silence if I am to invite others into it. Most lives today seem to have a similar hectic pace and distraction. Finding our true self is about Stopping!
Upheaval in the Mind
Mental activity, emotional upheavals, multiple engagements in our lives, the many voices surrounding us with expectations – all of these can fall away if we STOP, leaving us in the pure sweet awareness that has always been waiting in the center of the cyclone of our lives. There is a place within each of us already still, accepting, and open to the quiet joy of being. The challenge for many in the modern world is allowing our self to take the time for this inner discovery.
You may find when you are first silent there is an upheaval of mental activity, and even of unconscious material that arises. Both meditation and energy work (such as yoga or Qigong) open us to that which needs to be seen in order to be released, so that our subtle energy field can become free. Release and insight bring growth and widen our access to inner harmony and relaxation. Be patient with what arises, as it is consciousness within inviting you to meet, release and move toward awakening. Suffering unwinds itself from our systems as we learn to meet our life experiences with equanimity and to meet ourselves with love.
The Underlying Presence
You are always present first, present before activity, even before thought or feeling. You are presence. Awareness is presence. Sitting in silence is presence.
When we shut off the world to sit, we are welcoming the possibility of becoming this presence in its purest form, free of distraction, clear and open. To the mind this may seem a bore – the mind wants always to have something to do or at least to think about. It generates endless possibilities. Occasionally in a meditation hall my mind has created stories about people I do not even know, or thrown up country music songs that I never listen to. The mind abhors silence. Possibly the little me is simply afraid to face the possibility it is not the ruling dictator of life. It is the emperor who wears no clothes, but thinks s/he must be greatly admired in the world.
But if you are not in charge, then what is? Are you willing not to know?
Resting as presence invites a great unknowing, which always accompanies a great openness. It even undoes the one who is looking for answers. It is a knowing of itself, of being nothing and being All. Awakening happens when we are willing to be stripped of all our accumulated knowledge, identities, desires and goals and just see what remains, to discover what our original consciousness feels like standing alone.
Spiritual awakening has no religious preference and is open to all. It is not about a belief, or embracing a system or tradition, although these may offer some initiating practices that will bring an invitation that encourage you along the interior path. Sometimes a true guide arises within a spiritual tradition and offers a useful hand. Sometimes instead, a great devotion to a tradition or a teacher is shattered, and leaves you with a painful emptiness that becomes a door to discovering what is true. This longing to awaken is human, and is felt like an unfinished business in the lives of many who are not part of a traditional practice or religion.
Awakening is an intimate touching of our natural state of spirit embodied, a direct inner knowing of our connection with the All. It cannot be clearly defined in language, although poets and sages have found ways to offer pointers. Unusual events may arise when we follow our longing to know our true nature, such as energies and shifts in our bodies, minds and lifestyles. But when the process is fulfilled, the outcome is an awareness that consciousness is vast and unbounded, and a return into a form that knows a deep relaxation into life. We begin to live from our true center, connected to what has been compared in Chinese Taoism to the “flow” of the river. Awakening is not meant to help us escape the world but to find wholeness and congruence within it.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
PRIOR TO CONSCIOUSNESS: TALKS WITH SRI NISARGADATTA
Edited by Jean Dunn
This collection of talks is rich with messages for the spiritual seeker, and less intimidating than the I Am That tome that many of us who have been touched by Nisargadatta’s intense Advaita message are more familiar with. There are many direct messages in it such as “Your consciousness alone is taking care of everything; look at your consciousness as God. The first thing you do after waking up is to meditate on that consciousness, that ‘I Amness’, worship that consciousness for some time before you start your day activities. Before you fall asleep at night again abide in that consciousness, ‘I amness’. Be devoted to that, and in such a mood go into sleep.” (p. 64)
Or “Once you are your Self, where is the question of faith? Just be your Self. Operation is brought to a standstill. When you are that, it is finished — the circle is closed, you are your Self..That Self-realization is god, the Self itself is God…”(p. 92)
Every page is rich with succinct messages as he answers the questions of students. It’s a bit like being there and absorbing the energy of a great master-teacher.
An Intriguing Invitation
Time of the Sixth Sun - the MOVIE
I have not yet watched this series but through it might be of interest to my readers. I’ve lifted the details from Facebook:
The promo says “It's Time to Remember Who You Are, Why You Are Here, and Why You Have Chosen to be on Earth at this Time of the Greatest Change EVER! I'd like to invite you on a beautiful journey…that answers all the questions about the biggest changes happening on our planet right now! “Director & producer Nikki Williams traveled to over 16 different countries and interviewed Indigenous elders, wisdom keepers and visionary thought leaders to create this series that has 8 episodes related to global consciousness, healing ancestral wounds, ancient and future technologies, sustainable futures, wisdom from elders and even trance channeling. You can learn more and watch the documentaries for free (for a limited time) at:
https://watch.timeofthesixthsunlaunch.com/
Adyashanti Meditations on youtube
There are some lovely meditations with Adyashanti, some taken from retreats, available on youtube that I encourage you to tune in to if your desire is to awaken or deepen your connection with source.
Adyashanti Guided Meditation — The Unconditional Nature of Being
Adyashanti Guided Meditation — Resting in Being
Adyashanti Guided Meditation — The Art of Listening
On Spiritual Drives and Liberation
I have an unfinished book on Liberation, meant to be the third of my series that began with The Kundalini Guide and The Awakening Guide. My experience today is that my time is limited and so I am offering my writings through Substack so that those meant to see them may find them. This writing is from the introduction
The hunger for liberation sneaks up on the average soul, often following a shattering personal event of such magnitude that none of the evasive and protective programs adapted by the psyche can hold the pain. Of course, one can also be born with this hunger, or discover it after their years of practicing prayer and meditation have uncovered a more stable sense of center, and suggested a potential for a much greater realization.
This is a hunger to leap out of the ordinary frames of reference, to transcend the boundaries of our small identifications, and above all, to know the Truth.
It would appear, on the surface of things, that only a few rare souls on this planet have ever seen the Truth, known the source, or displayed the so-called powers that are believed to accompany enlightenment. But every human has access to this Truth. The problem is our collective culture has no paradigm for this experience, tends to sell faith over substance, and would not recognize a self-realized person under any guise, any more than most Jews and Romans saw any value in Jesus when he walked among them, agitating for change. There is nothing for the egoic mind to gain in the experience of self-realization, for it is the end of the battle to be someone, accomplish something, or prove the power of any one belief system over another. As Jesus put it so succinctly, “My kingdom is not of this world.” He was speaking for all of us. Complete peace of mind and heart can never be found through pursuing the conventional worldly drives. Our greatest wealth cannot be found in the external world of form.
Where great teachers have been turned into great religions the consequences have been separation, competition, bias and even war. This is what the mind can do with Truth, because its tendency is to divide. No enlightened person would support or condone any of these as values or solutions for any problem in the world. It is easier for the world, both politically and spiritually, to ignore and even repress evidence of true enlightened perceptions and revelations, despite the fact that thousands of people intuitively are seeking the bottom-line Truth about the nature of their human experience. These “seekers” are relegated to the status of a sub-culture, which in the end may actually be the best thing for their own protection.
So why, if nothing can actually be gained, would the human mind even be curious about a path leading to liberation, let alone engage in a lifetime of practices aimed at accomplishing it. This is a mystery: one that can only be glimpsed when you understand that the human mind cannot supply the answer to this search. One has to drop into the vastness before thought.
This draw to be liberated is the core of consciousness ready to be awakened out of the dream of our limited personal identity. It may rear its head at any moment in life — during childhood, as an adolescent, in mid-age or during our dying moments. In fact, it is always there, under the surface of things, this presence and awakeness that is capable of turning inward and knowing itself fully. Those who have been turned toward a path of spiritual seeking have been invaded by their own inner presence, longing to liberate itself from the mind-body identity that suffers so profoundly, both through exterior and interior assaults, during our lives. As a small and basically inconsequential self, whether we puff ourselves up to be warriors or silent witnesses, or we feel tossed and turned by the vagaries of fate, we know in our hearts we are destined to experience loss.
Of course most lives have many pleasures, large and small, and a sense of gratitude for the gift that living itself is. And this consoles us often in the face of suffering. For this reason we can continue for lifetimes entangled in the dance of personal identities, playing out roles of various complexities and potentials, until at last this hunger arises, which makes us long to know what is really true. This seeking is for a Truth that cannot be told or taught or given by anyone else (although many people have tried to offer it, usually colored by their own personal interpretations). It is the Truth we can only find by going to the very root of who we are. Only then can we know if it is real, and that we have indeed found the treasure, the wholeness and the freedom that is the highest potential of human experience.
3 Spiritual Drives
There are three drives related to authentic spirituality – the spontaneous drive of faith, the longing for spiritually-expansive experiences, and the hunger for Truth. I have engaged in all three.
Almost all theological literature is written to support the drive of faith, and there are many fine people who service their societies and their neighbors because of a faith-driven spirituality, which offers them a sense of comfort when the world presents its losses. Faith can move men and women to great acts, and allow them to accept death with equanimity, in the belief of a better world on the other side. Many of the great charitable movements in history, (such as the establishing of nunneries and monasteries, orphanages, hospitals and schools and other services for the poor) evolved from people drawn to leave the comforts of their material world, pray continually, and serve the most humbled of gods creatures. Many people have lived in holiness, humility, service and grace due to a spirituality based on their faith. For some this has led to mystical awakenings, and a personal sense of relationship with god.
Of course, there are shadow aspects to faith-driven spirituality, the most profound being its tendency to divide and separate one set of people from another, and to foster beliefs that cause disparagement, fear and even rage at those with other beliefs. For many people sustaining their faith appears to require a collective agreement, and they are threatened by exposure to alternative belief systems.
When Faith Is Challenged
If faith has never been a given in someone’s life, or events have caused his or her faith to wobble or shatter, another form of spiritual psychological development may commence. Sometimes true development begins with a crushing loss of faith, which leaves it its wake a great emptiness of heart. At this moment, if the opportunity to search for a direct experience, or the possibility of discovering the real Truth should be offered, the personal identity may take on a new role, usually known as a seeker in spiritual circles. This role may lead an individual into an entirely foreign new world, with dramas ranging from guru-initiations to UFO encounters, and disciplines as widely disparate as 3-month silences to tantric sex. We live in a commercial marketplace where every nuance of spirituality has been exploited, some with value, some without.
Experience-driven spirituality may start innocently enough with a yoga or meditation class, or an exploration of what new-age spiritual books have to say. I have seen it lead people into great adventures in the Himalayas, draw them into life-long relationships with eastern spiritual traditions, force them to open their bodies and psyche with breathwork and body therapies, encourage them to explore their spontaneous creativity and self-expression, and ultimately design entirely fresh perspectives of what their human potential is. The entire human potential movement of the sixties was fueled by this need for experiencing, and the field of transpersonal psychology invites and encourages taking the risk of new experiences on every level of functioning – physical, emotional, intuitive, and creative. Many indigent cultures used direct experience through dance, trance and substances to induce non-ordinary or transcendent experiences, and other societies have used isolation, silence, breathing practices, chanting, music and many other means to channel and support the kinds of openings direct experience offers to the human psychological structure. There are formalized systems of graduating experiences that are said to lead one to a culminating event of self-realization, often considered to be samadhi in the Hindu traditions, and Satori in the Buddhist lexicon. These provide glimpses of Truth, and the invitation to liberation, which only follows if the individual involved completely awakens both to the understanding and the spontaneous and unrestricted expression of their true nature.
Truth-driven spiritual seeking often leads people into quieter spiritual practices, more discipline, and more structure than the experience-driven. Both can occur simultaneously, and often do. Probably the most prominent examples of truth-driven spiritual teachings known at this time are those in the non-dual traditions of Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism or Dzochen. Chinese Taoist teachings and practices, although considered more philosophical than spiritual because they require no faith in any divine solution, are truth-driven. They can lead to direct knowledge of Self, or source or the root of consciousness, which feels like what we call God to the more spiritually-oriented, but more like endless spaciousness and freedom to those with a more dispassionate orientation.
(More in future Newsletters)
Notes about Bonnie Greenwell Ph.D
This newsletter is written by Bonnie Greenwell Ph.D., a transpersonal psychotherapist and non-dual teacher, author of Energies of Transformation, The Kundalini Guide, The Awakening Guide and most recent When Spirit Leaps: Navigating the Process of Spiritual Awakening. You can read more of her teachings on her websites: www.kundaliniguide.com and www.awakeningguide.com. Her books are on Amazon and Kindle. You can see interviews with her on youtube by putting her name in the search engine there, and read more essays on her blog shantiriver.wordpress.com. All recommendations in this newsletter are based on Bonnie’s experience and should never take the place of medical or psychiatric guidance.