Awakening Together 1: What’s Emerging in Our Consciousness
As we awaken, we realize something different about ourselves and each other. We begin to experience, behave and relate differently because we are living from within a deeper, more genuine place of being. Our mind is wide and clear; our heart is open; our actions are spontaneously for the benefit of all of us. In short, we are awakening and, as we realize what this means, we, so deeply, want to share it so others can experience this peace, this presence, this freedom we are finally able to access, merely by turning toward it. At some point we are drawn to collaborate with others, sharing the journey as our human species of consciousness awakens together. All-be-it, in fits and starts.
To awaken, it helps to recognize that we’ve been asleep. Certainly, as the light of our awakening keeps getting brighter, it is revealing the darkness that’s been hidden within our darkest shadows. Awakening together also involves noticing that we are all here together. Awakening, we come to realize that we have all been co-creating our world by constricting the living flow of consciousness through the mental constructs we each had come to take for reality. We have been perceiving things as we conceive them, rather than as they are.
As we awaken together we realize we are all sharing this apparent journey out of our mind-made world of separation and reification and learning how to support the discovery and enabling of each ones unique path to clarity, wisdom and connectedness .Each of us, in our own ways opening and opening more deeply to our natural state. At some point, awakening involves each of us recognizing and coming to live as the silent, luminous ground of our being that we actually are. We know we are the boundless openness of this spark of Infinity in the fullness of Its expression as us, in this world.
Awakening together inevitably involves focusing our attention, differently. The way things have been, most of us have had our attention absorbed by the ever-unfolding events, circumstances, and people of our lives and we have been wholly engaged with our perceptions and stories about all that. The main problem with this is that this whole mental representation of what is real and true in our world is mind-made; it may correspond with some of the underlying reality, but it is fundamentally flawed. It is all grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding that creates an experiential illusion of separation and reification.
Allow me to explain.
We have all been raised to see, experience and believe that we are separate and disconnected from one another, from this Earth and from what many humans have intuited as the Divine Source and Substance of all Being – named by different cultures among us as God, Allah, Great Spirit, Brahman, The Beloved, The Tao, All-That-Is, etc. It seems inconceivable to me that we actually believe and live our lives as if we could ever be separate from The One that is All-That-Is; and yet, we do. Physicists and Mystics of all ages agree: everything is connected to everything else within All-That-Is; quantum entanglement ever since the Big Bang, so to speak. Each of us is a conscious, living spark of this One.
Never-the-less our species of consciousness has for millennia been living with some version of this conditioned mind/world-dream/body of separation and suffering in our waking life; this mind-made world is referred to in the bible as the Tower of Babel, and Mammon and, in the East, it is called our Human, Karmic Vision of Samsara. I say we have all been enslaved to a fundamental falsehood and we have all been suffering our enslavement because of it. Recognizing that we’ve been living within a mind-world based upon our misunderstanding of the already and always existent nature of Reality is an important realization as the awakening progresses; but it doesn’t really help very much.
You see, from birth we’ve all been taught to live as a separate one in the world of things – this is the description, perception and experience we’ve come to accept as normal; this is the world portrayed by the languages we speak and hear in our heads; this is the way we believe things are. Whereas in Truth, while everyone and everything is unique, no thing and no one is separate from everything else;. This One that is All-That-Is is all of Itself. Everyone and everything is interconnected and mutually sustaining; that is why one of the hallmarks of a viable, self-sustaining, self-evolving, community or ecosystem is simultaneously diverse and all-inclusive. Anyone with eyes can see that our world’s mistaken paradigm of perceived separation, polarization and reification, is not working very well for most of us at this time.
And yet, our nearly inescapable habit of mind is to automatically see through the separating, reifying lenses of our conditioned nervous system. When I say habit, here, I mean we have very durable, well-grooved, neural patterns, developed & reinforced since birth, which have a direct correlation with our reifying, dualistic mind chatter, with the energy fields of our body and its organ systems, with our psychology and with the energetic felt-sense of ourselves within our neuro-relational field. These constitute some of the underlying, well-groved neural habit patterns which enliven our moment-to-moment experience of ourselves, others and this world as separate and reified.
As anyone, who has seen a pattern in themselves they didn’t like which they decided to change, knows our habits are persistent; despite our understanding and our best efforts. So, how can we go about releasing ourselves from habitually seeing our personal version of this human, karmic vision of samsara? In accord with the ancient practice traditions that come down to us through unbroken lineages to this day, the simplest and fastest method is for us to recognize something that’s always been here; something which we’ve managed to overlook our whole life. It is called, among many other names, our “natural state” or our “original face.” Once we’ve gotten a glimpse of it, we return to recognizing and more and more deeply exploring this ever-present openness repeatedly until this ground of our being becomes the default setting for our nervous system/organism. For most of us, this takes a while.
As we return again and again to our nascent recognition, it reveals more and more of itself to us, so to speak. Sooner or later, we come we live and move and have our being in, as and through this clear, open, inclusive presence. It bears repeating; once this recognition occurs, the shortest path is repeatedly re-recognizing until this recognition pervades our experience in all the situations, circumstances and relationships of our life.
If these ideas about our strange, human species of consciousness awakening together resonates with something core inside us, how, then, do we proceed? There are a number of proven, skillful meditative and prayerful practices, which deactivate the nervous system. They calm and focus the mind, relax the body and make both recognizing and coming to rest in and as this recognized presence and openness easier; and, they can be incredibly helpful. But the essence practice is available to us in every moment whether we are engaged, agitated or calm.
Most of us take a while before we can rest here all of the time. We are a complex and blended species of consciousness in the process of shifting our current, shared, multidimensional system of consciousness out of its millennial-old co-creation of this world of suffering and separation, dissipating the mind-made personal and shared structures and re-assembling all of itself as a shared-memory complex, each consciously aware of our shared oneness as pure sparks of infinity. In this new form of being conscious together, we each retain our unique energetic signature while gradually, because we are recognizing our shared Oneness and the misunderstanding we just extracted our consciousness from, the memories and learnings of all the rest of us becomes accessible within our new sense of being ourselves. Our individualities are radiant expressions of our fundamental, experiential understanding that in this amazing, mysterious way, in which we are all this same One while fully being uniquely ourselves. It is like those entangled electrons mentioned above recognizing their primordial interconnectedness.
One step at a time.
If you are willing, try this: Pause. Stop thinking for a moment and notice what is already, always here. Attend to the felt-sense of alert presence for a long as it lasts before distinctions, labeling and descriptions ensue…
That is the essence of the practice.
Then, if you sincerely want to take this on, whether it is after a few moments or days later, as soon as you notice you have boarded the train of dualistic and reifying thoughts and gone down the tracks, you can recognize that this is your stop. Once again, stop thinking – and notice.
Repeat as often as it comes to mind during your daily walk through life and as continuously as possible during regular sitting times. By the way, I wasn’t kidding that this is understood as the fastest way for us to fully restore our focus into resonance with our natural state.
The noticing part of this practice is at least as important as stopping the stream of thought. Here is the “neuro-plasticity” reason I say that. The acts of deliberately attending and noticing are distinct neural circuits from the experientially rich neural circuits of stillness, quiet, peace, ease and well-being which can be noticed as we interrupt our thoughts and sense the actual experience of the alert presence we find here. We want to deliberately connect these two sets of neural circuits. As Dr Hebb, the father of neuroplasticity, famously said, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Deliberately attending to our non-verbal, non-conceptual experiencing as we attune our consciousness to the resonances of the silent, peaceful, open presence and sense of being available to us as this moment. The moment just unfurls itself through our open, present awareness; this attunes the whole field of our organism to the ground awareness/being. We are resetting our systems each time we re-Source ourselves. The more we do this, the more it is becomes how we be ourself all the time in our lives.
And, as nearly all of us know by now, what we energize with our attention both grows within our immediate experience and, we increase the likelihood of its arising more frequently in our future moments. As we consciously notice what our body, heart and mind are like while we are in this timeless, non-verbal, non-conceptual state, we attune ourselves to the silent, still presence of being which is our natural state. For the vast majority of us, these “brief moments” are initially brief indeed and, often, few and far between during our day.
However, there are at least two forces which tend to amp up our motivation for this simple practice. When we can no longer turn our attention away from and shut out the needless suffering caused by the ways consciousness is being expressed through minds clinging outdated creeds of separation and disconnectedness, we find the resonances of our mirror neurons begin activating the circuitry of the intrinsically caring nature of our human heart. We begin swimming in a sea of boundless compassion for the world. From this love, a deep, seemingly impossible aspiration is born. An aspiration to restore our human species of consciousness to living connected to Source aligned with Nature’s Principles; each standing up in their heartfelt truth and offering their strengths, gifts and talents for the benefit of all of us. It looks like the kind of collaborative, mutually enhancing world I would love to live in! You?
Secondly, as we choose to take the time to practice, attending closely as we are releasing out of our mind’s stream, we gain a deeper, inner, felt-sense of the revelation emerging within our shared human consciousness at this time. This way of connecting within ourselves; this relaxing into our core Source point retunes us, each time. As we are repeatedly drawn to return, recognizing our natural state and resting in the non-verbal, non-conceptual experience of being, our nervous system inclines toward bringing re-recognizing into our awareness more frequently; we start to remember to remember more often. Our being wants this aliveness; we prefer resonating as this balanced, harmonious way of being ourselves in the world with these new, higher frequencies. We prefer it because it more closely corresponds to Nature’s Principles. Once we’ve chosen this path of presence, we become increasingly fulfilled in our own being; we come to live, more and more with an open, loving and inclusive heart and a mind that is clear, welcoming life and naturally intending benefit for all.
Any one of us can do this on our own. And, yet, though we each have to walk our own life’s path, our human species of consciousness has evolved as creatures both within and of relationship; most of us prefer being in mutually supportive connection with our tribe. Offering and having support in this awakening can save us time, effort and painful mistakes. We can collaborate, remind each other of what we are choosing to focus on and share a lot of enlivening fun along the way. The way I see it, awakening together is the best possibility on the horizon for our human species of consciousness.