Posts Tagged with videos

One of the mental exercises that faces the newly awakened consciousness is how to think about the body. It’s the form your awareness inhabits so there’s no real getting around it. And yet the awakening makes clear that you are most definitely NOT your body, which leads to countless hours wondering, ‘So what is it, this body? What’s its purpose? Is it a distraction? Is it a help?’ These questions demanded attention from my newly stretched awareness, while another part of my mind pushed to return to business as usual – feed the body, rest the body, exercise the body – or risk feeling even further out of whack. So I continued tending to my body but in the days immediately following the awakening, it felt strange to be tending to a form that clearly wasn’t ‘me’ and the feeling didn’t fully subside until almost a week later (cannabis helps with this, btw).

The teachings and experiences I encountered in the months that followed helped me gradually come to understand the role of the body. First, there was the insight I wrote about in Experiencing ‘The Now’; the body is for communication. It is meant to communicate with true self through the perceptions we experience – intuition, creativity, love – and it is meant to communicate to others through the things we do with our bodies – talk, dance, create, hurt, heal, etc. But while this insight – which felt more like a memory – provided a purpose for the body, it didn’t reveal much about why exploring consciousness brings up such intense emotions in the body, like overwhelming fear or deep sadness. What’s the body trying to communicate in these situations? (“Turn back and never come this way again” is the answer the egoic self usually offers.)

Additional insights about the role of the body came from several teachers who helped me identify and navigate energies stored in the body, an example of which I shared in this post. From these teachings I’ve learned that our physical form, being made of a kind of energy, can also store energy patterns. Some of the patterns we store are easy to recognize – a feeling of happiness when hearing a certain song or an emotional pain when remembering a deep loss. Others patterns, harder to recognize, are created when we encounter an emotional energy we can’t fully experience in the moment, like intense pain or trauma. The mind protects itself by deflecting the energy and storing it in the body. … For later … Lucky you.

From this perspective, it’s easy to understand how a person can end up carrying around a lot of painful unexamined energy in the body, especially if raised in a culture that values controlling emotions over exploring them. Later, when we come to the time(s) in our life when we want to clear out these stored energies, we end up flailing through what feels like lots of emotional muck. And not just our own muck; many of us also encounter large energies related to ‘inherited trauma’ (a concept used to explain how trauma moves through generations and results in the much higher likelihood that a child will grow up an alcoholic if raised by an alcoholic parent, for example).

So, to summarize – an awakening delivers opportunities to work through your own trauma and, AND! any inherited trauma that has been stored as energy in the body! Doesn’t that sound great!?

In case this is sounding a bit bleak, let me assure your skeptical self that the initial experience prompting all this introspection will deliver more than enough motivation for slogging through all this turmoil. Which is not just my observation, by the way; I recently listened to this video in which Rupert Spira acknowledges to an audience member that the wonderous experience of our initial awakening is what provides the momentum we need to push through the challenges that follow. He says ‘it was included in the fine print’. I’m doubtful.

These two insights on the role of the body – that it is for communication and is made of an energy that can store patterns – went a long way towards helping me re-orient myself to this physical form my awareness inhabits. But it was this recent video that connected these new ideas to the light/dark image from my awakening. In his presentation at the SAND 2017 conference (looks like it was nice and warm in Italy!), independent scientist Dr. Chris Fields introduces a startling concept; all human bodies are continuations of the same original cell! As I rolled this incredible concept around in my head, the image from my awakening snapped into my mind and it was clear; the light moving into and exploring the darkness was the image of this one continuous cell expanding into the vast unknown darkness that is life’s next moment of possibility. Human life on the planet is a single cell whose membrane takes on the shape of many forms as it reaches out to explore the next moment … and the next … and the next. We are the expanding membrane, you and I and everyone. We are the edge of life that takes in energy as it grows and learns and changes and evolves. And when I asked Source consciousness, ‘What is the purpose of the dark?’, I was shown its purpose; it is the space into which life is unfolding. It is an emptiness that holds all possibility. It is a field of probability that can become anything.

And now this image is finally understood.

What Are Our Bodies? Chris Fields (2017)

(SAND video info) “Our bodies, like our minds, appear to us to be separate individuals, distinct from the bodies of other people. From an evolutionary perspective, however, this is not true. Considering our bodies from the perspective of deep evolutionary time, it is clear that they are not distinct from, but are rather continuous with, the bodies of other people and indeed of all other organisms. Our cell membranes and the cytoplasm they enclose are continuous with the membranes and cytoplasm of the very first cells. We and all of the organisms we see around us are appendages, organs, and sensory surfaces of a single, planetary-scale, almost 4 billion year-old organism that is exploring and altering the physical environment of Earth. What we call “evolution” is the developmental process of this organism from one to trillions of cells. We have only the most minimal understanding of this developmental process. However, rethinking our bodies from this deep-time perspective is perhaps useful for rethinking our minds and self-identities.”

top image: NASA 

Not that you’d know it by looking at me. I live in the same house, wear the same clothes, listen to the same music and so forth. But everything that I believed in that brought me to live in this house, wear these clothes, listen to this music – that all feels ‘gone’. By which I mean that the reasons I used to motivate me to live in this house, wear these clothes – these reasons no longer make any real sense to me. These ‘reasons’ were part of an illusion, the dream of the egoic self that didn’t know she was dreaming. But I woke up – just for a moment – from that dream and from that point forward, I always know, on some level, that this is a dream. Since that day, nothing has looked quite the same, felt quite the same. The jig is up and there’s no going back to ‘normal’. (Matrix, anyone?)

And thank all the merciful gods for that – I mean, who wants normal!? Who can say they’re happy to live in a world that generated today’s headlines? … Anyone? … Howzabout yesterday’s headlines? You get the drift; it only takes a hard honest look at today’s ‘normal’ – mass shootings, racial violence, political corruption, financial fraud, environmental degradation – to recall just how unsustainable our way of being in the world has become.

But let me be clear – though I was deeply troubled about the state of the world when I went on my psilocybin-fueled quest a year ago, I hadn’t necessarily intended to sign up for a complete overhaul of how I perceive … everything! I had in mind something more along the lines of experiencing some wonderous cosmic energy field of the type hinted at by quantum sciences. Failing that, maybe I’d just end up adding a groovy psychedelic experience to my bucket list. Instead, the awakening put me eyeball-to-eyeball with the very thing I said I wanted to know – The Truth – and then went silent, as if to say; “now what are you going to do about it?”.

Looking back, I can see I did the only thing it made sense to do – and the very thing it just so happened I was perfectly set up to do: learn. Read the books, listen to the meditations, watch the films, round after round, day after day. For a year now, I’ve bounced back and forth between lessons on understanding the awakening and lessons on recognizing egoic illusion, largely from a desire to avoid getting wrapped up in the illusion all over again. This post-awakening period of deep exploration is often called ‘the unfolding’ (or something similar); a process by which you find your story about the awakening and begin walking down this new path, exploring what changes you will let it bring into your life. And as an awakened person learns to live in the awakened state, they’ll often experience what’s called ‘flickering’ (or something similar); feeling the identity jump back and forth between the illusion of ego and true inner awareness. And especially for many of us born and raised in this ego-focused western culture, these two post-awakening phases can bring experiences that feel emotionally and physically exhausting due to the dense egoic identities we’re confronting.

Luckily for those who seek to awaken and remain awake, Nature loves the seeker and rewards such courage in lots of little ways. For myself, it’s taken the form of an article with just the right words of encouragement on a difficult day. Or a guided meditation that helped me recharge my flagging batteries. And sometimes the boost comes from simply giving myself permission to say, “enough already!” and take the day off from the endless stream of books, films and meditations for comfort food, some sci-fi and a hot bath.

The frequent little coincidences that have followed me along the path for the last year have been fun to notice and have occurred so often I sometimes wonder just how much synchronicity one can expect in one lifetime! Case in point, I recently experienced another significant shift in consciousness and the encounter left me feeling pretty wiped, mentally and physically, for the next day and a half. As I was resting, I reached for my ipad to watch whatever video was queued up from a few days earlier; it just happened to a short YouTube from Rupert Spira called  The Non-Dual Honeymoon is Over.  The video ends with a message that spoke directly to the very tired person on the other end of the line: keep going; it takes courage; persevere.

And again this morning, as I sat down to finish this post, I noticed a new video on the site that’s my homepage, the title of which caught my attention: The Crisis of Waking Up: Shakti Caterina Maggi.  I wasn’t familiar with (Hindu teacher) Shakti Maggi but as the video seemed connected to what I was writing about, I had to watch. Yup, you guessed it – it was the perfect video for a post about the changes an awakening brings. (See!?) Shakti Maggi has a wonderfully loving but frank characteristic to her teaching – and she also shares a welcome reminder of the joy that is part of our time in this human form (we get so focused on the pain!). Her insights about how our sense of separation originates, how to recognize an awakening and about the emotional shifts that surround this transformation perfectly summarized so much of what this last year has been about for me.

If you are curious about awaking, about the nature of consciousness and ‘self’, your journey has already begun. The next step is to find the courage to continue, and then to continue again. And when you face your suffering and you push through, you do it for us all.

Find your courage. And the world will help you.

top image: gorbash varvara / shutterstock.com