Awakening Together 2: What We Are Awakening From
As mentioned in Awakening Together 1, our human species of consciousness has been living for millennia within a mind/world-dream/body which is built upon a mistaken conceptual foundation of separation and the reifying of everything. All of the ways we have identified ourselves as separate ones among others in this world constitute our current versions of our personal mistaken identity within this soup of our shared consciousness. As the light of our shared oneness dawns in our consciousness, its illumination reveals both itself as well as the dissonance and the darkness of what has been in the shadows of our minds’ mistaken ways of constructing, projecting and perceiving ourselves in our lives.
Whereas recognizing and getting used to living as our natural state is the first side of our awakening, the deconstruction of what we have mistakenly taken ourselves to be is the other side. We’re going a little more deeply into that now. First, we begin noticing how the ways we experience ourselves in our lives with others in this world don’t seem to be working for us. At some point we mature beyond blaming “them” for our discomfort and our misery. We recognize that, regardless of what “they” have done, are doing or not doing, it is our energy, attitudes and behavior which feel dissonant compared to our glimpses of the self-contained peace, stillness and well-being we have begun noticing during our practice of short moments of re-recognition. We begin choosing, to the best of our current ability, to live from what we have begun to know is deepest in us.
Often after an event or interaction, when we are reflecting on our version of us and them, we sense we weren’t aligned at that time. We begin to have a little space around our action figure/persona in this world of separation and, although we may not yet be able to simply switch channels from our conditioned identity to our natural state, we begin to be able to observe our action figure enacting his or her roles. Eventually our ability to rest in our recognizing gets strong enough in our consciousness and its underlying nervous system that we can work with our identification patterns within the clear, open and acceptant space of our awareness of being.
Essentially this involves extracting our consciousness from the stream of thought and noticing the mental and emotional/relational construct of “my separate self” in relation to my construct of “you,” or “them” or “it.” The process involves holding both my experience of myself and my experience of my world in consciousness simultaneously within my awareness of the presence as I begin examining what’s really going on here. As a first step, I recognize that my narrative description is just a story superimposed upon my experience. To the best of my current ability I take all the labels and descriptions, all the words and concepts, and put them aside and focus on the emotional/energetic sensations, within and around my body and, in my representational field of self-and-other; that is, I notice how I have been holding self-and-other energetically and I accept it, as it is.
At this point, a number of things might unfold. My experiences have included holding the two energies which represented my version of me and my version of them and feeling the tension between them and my discomfort with the ways it intensified until the tension resolved itself in my awareness. Then, I found myself in what I call one of the 100 namable names of God – some kind of peace, clarity, openness, love, etc. At this point the charge is gone from the incident. At other times, the felt-senseof tension between my “me” and my “them” took me all the way back to a long-forgotten, early imprint in my life which helped solidify my early identification as separate. Then that resolved.
The truth is that each of us is an Immortal Spirit, a living spark of Infinity, incarnating as a Biological Entity in this world. Apparently, by agreement, after we were born, we largely or wholly forgotten the IS part of our BE-ing as we adapted to what we found around us after we arrived here; we each adopted a set of separate personality patterns, a kind of imaginary false-self to fit within the false world of separation we were learning to be a part of. Over time this has matured and developed and we’ve branched into areas and fields of interest and endeavor that are far beyond our initial imprints. But, all of this development was still grounded in our, typically, unconscious premise of separation from our IS, from one another, from this Earth and from the Divine. This whole process of becoming disconnected from the actual, underlying Reality is, in itself, a traumatic experience. All of us experienced it; few of us consciously remember it. And, this is only the beginning of the imprints which traumatized our nervous system and psyche.
When a group of people are traumatized by war, oppression, privation, exploitation and enslavement or even natural disasters, it doesn’t just compromise the functioning of that group of individuals. Their nervous systems, their psyches and their relational capacities are affected by these impacts. And so, everyone in their families and among their friends gets affected. It is well recognized through longitudinal Family Systems and Sociology research that there is a multi-generational transmission of trauma.
The truth is that there is not a single group of humans on this planet who do not carry and express inherited trauma in their nervous systems, psyches and in their relationships. We develop tendencies to get agitated and frightened and/or angry and/or we get shut down – pulled in, morose and depressed. In these states our autonomic nervous system becomes unable to access any sense of the ease, well-being, safety, connectedness and contentment which characterize our natural state.
Check yourself and see: most of the time, do you genuinely feel safe, at-ease, peaceful, loving and engaged? If not, you may also be one of us ordinary humans tasked with waking up through redeeming a wounded psyche and a traumatized nervous system. It is a big job. But do not despair. Many of us have been at this for quite some time. Some of us have developed very skillful ways of shifting the organism out of it’s current, limited adaptation to life as we have known it and uncovering capacities and potentials as well as supporting their fuller expression. We can help one another.
Our native ability to be fully alive, to develop and express our innate gifts, strengths and talents; to be both genuinely vulnerable and clear and honest and strong in our relationships; to live from our inherent intelligence expressing our caring heart, etc., have been hamstrung by the ways our wounding have shut down the higher functions of our nervous system. Accessing, activating and integrating the resonances of these higher functions of our nervous systems is a significant aspect of this process of awakening upon which we have embarked.
Recognizing and repeatedly re-recognizing, more and more deeply, our natural state is an important dimension of accessing the higher possibilities of radiating the spark of Infinity through our nervous system and our genetics. Making skillful use of the methods that are available to us to shift out of parasympathetic shut down or sympathetic rev, allows us to reset the system from sympathetic or parasympathetic dominance and restore us to the pleasant hum of what’s called our ventral vagal, social engagement system. Living from our social engagement system is how we’d feel if our whole village was sitting around the fire on a beautiful evening -- telling stories, laughing, singing together. There’s plenty of food. We’re getting along with our neighbors…there’s no lion in the bush.
The ventral vagal, social engagement system is also known as the brain setting of “Rest and Digest.” This is because of the way everything relaxes toward the natural state and blood flows back into digestion and the higher centers in the brain. It moves us toward all systems getting balanced and functioning well together; immune function is optimized, what used to look like roadblocks are bumps we encounter as we move forward, into our vision of our lives.
Our neurological system is designed for us to spend most of our days, most of our lives humming along, flexibly responsive to whatever life brings into our awareness of now. Our default setting is to just be here, at ease with ourselves and at ease with our life. We are just here and we are open. Our presence and spontaneous impulse are naturally benevolent.
Who among us lives like this?
Anyone?
Not many. Yet. But this is where we are going.
The fundamental way our experience of life is disconnected from Source that underlies and animates our every moment; the way we are all living as if the concepts, descriptions and stories in our head are reality is painfully out of resonance with the enveloping and infusing field of the One that Is. This is what I meant when I said that adapting to this world is inherently traumatic. Again, this is what we are awakening from.
As we are releasing ourselves out of it, we get to re-evaluate some of our earliest decisions about how things are, how men are, how women are, how peers, bigger kids and elders are. What it is like to be in this world. All of those distortions, all of that shadowy material is gradually or suddenly is out shown by our dawning awareness of the light of our Immortal Spirit, the light of all being. But most of us need skillful processing for a while to clear our trauma and relational wounds. It’s available. Let’s talk!