Who’s Got Your Back?
After a lifetime of reflective inner work and spiritual practices, I now know that anytime that I am feel I am contracting, pulling or collapsing into myself or feeling threatened and aggressive, this is not who and what I actually am. My consciousness is just focusing through a set of, well conditioned, thoughts, which are out of harmony with the luminous and expansive nature of awareness/being. As I continue awakening, I increasingly realize that this clear, open, awake presence is what I really am.
When I am living from within these mental filters of the conditioned, 3-d character in my movie of separation and reification, it is all so real. Within those lived moments it seems to be the only reality that there is. I imagine it is this way for all of us.
And yet, throughout this process, somehow these glimpses of an awakening into another way of us being ourselves with one another and together continue to open the doors of my perception and let a clear, natural light in. For that moment at least, this consciousness releases its grip. At some point I began to choose it for myself by deliberately interrupting the stream of thought, which had captured attention, and notice what’s already and always here: the living, alert presence of our being. But that seems to be slower than I’d hoped.
If we can get some sense of the understanding that the one that is All-That-Is is necessarily all of Itself including all of us and our consciousness on this planet; then, That, whatever we are accustomed to calling It, is what has got our back!
Not only has this One got our back, Its got our back, front, sides, above, below and within – It is the One and only of the whole display; there is nothing else, except in our distorted imaginations of separation and disconnectedness. The next question is, “Is this recognition our ongoing experience or are we living an entirely different experience of our life?” Following up on that, “How would we like it to be?” And, what can we do if we really want something different from our day-to-day?
Some of us have begun noticing that our deepest felt-sense of “I am,” our non-verbal, non-conceptual, direct experience of our being aligns with this paradigm/vision version of ourselves in the world. The more we attend to it, the more we experience the sensations of it. The more we turn away from our familiar mind of duality, turning toward the immediacy of non-verbal, non-conceptual experiencing, the more this way of being moves into the center of our life.
To foster this, we have been leaning toward complete, resonant alignment with the One that Is. When we happen to notice we’ve been caught in the mind-stream, and the moment’s felt-sense is less than optimal, we are learning to choose to hold an intention in conscious awareness to experience any of the wonderful, light, expansive qualities that are inherent within our natural state: peace, love, harmony, compassion, kindness, appreciation, gratitude, contentment, being supportive, etc., for example. Then, attending to the non-verbal, non-conceptual dimensions of experience, the sensations of our chosen quality gradually emerge into our conscious awareness within and around our body
Our capacity to sustain conscious awareness in the present moment grows with practice. Inevitably, we choose this practice when our capacity is limited in the ways it is at that moment. We all start where we are and we deepen into the presence from there.
It makes sense that what makes the new state become more resilient and last longer – less of an occasional state more of an ongoing trait - is how steadily we can focus and learn to hold our conscious awareness on the beingness of our quality du jour, and the experiential qualities of being as they emerge within and around our body. In today’s world where most of us are lucky to have a 15 second span of attention, sustaining conscious awareness in the emerging, present moment is a quality we might decide to cultivate. Within the neurological substrate of our experience and expression in this world, practice transforms momentary states into lasting traits. We can change our experience/our neurology by repeatedly turning away from our conditioned, habitual perspective and giving our attention (and its underlying neurology) to what is emerging from within us (also correlated with its underlying neurology.)
The way I see it, our awakening involves the dissipation of the neural networks that both underlie and constitute our experiencing and expressing ourselves as separate ones in this mind-world of polarized dualities; where every sub-system of the One is regarded as another “thing” that we’ve labeled, described and then, imagine we actually know what it is.
Simultaneously, as our old adaptations and interpretations are being outgrown, our awakening involves the neural connections and the resonant dynamics within our nervous systems becoming restructured in harmonic alignment with our dawning acknowledgement and recognition of conscious awareness of being, its open intelligence and its resultant spontaneous benevolence. What’s not to like?
This unraveling of our sense of identity(ies) and our co-arising sense and description of others and the world is not always welcomed or easy; although once we have navigated these tumultuous waters, we are so grateful for the results of the process. As we increasingly experience this ascension into conscious awareness of our natural state, it is often our beacon of hope, evincing our deepest aspirations. Even when we imagine this Oneness is nowhere to be found, once we have touched it, something in us knows it is the truth.
We can begin with an intellectual understanding that - whatever we choose or have been raised to call the one that is All-That-Is - this One is the source and substance of all of Itself. It is everything we experience and observe, including all of us. In the beginning, this one shared itself as the underlying quantum, zero-point field and then this ever-expanding Universe and all that is in it. Since It is all that is, we are in, of and by this same One. Our bodies are It’s light, energy and information in dynamic process and exchange with others and our environment. Our consciousness is It’s consciousness. That-Which-Is are Us.
When we are experiencing ourselves as separate, we are misperceiving based on a set of false premises we were raised to believe. The indoctrination occurred before narrative began accompanying our memories and they became explicit and linear. The earlier implicit and procedural memories are recorded somatically and in the unconscious premises that we later built our declarative, autobiographical memories upon.
On this mistaken basis our mind’s have created a filter that only reveals our 3-d world of separation, polarization and reified dualities; through which we thereafter see and experience ourselves and our lives. This is how we’ve been “seeing through a glass darkly.” In the East, our living within this mind-made delusion is called, “our human, karmic vision of samsara.” In both depictions, this is distinguished from the moment when our vision is restored, we see clearly and re-claim our inheritance as one of the One. After all, This already and always is the way It is! (Regardless of how we may have been mistakenly perceiving it.)
In short, Now is The Time! Wake Up!
I am here to help.