Once you realize that existence is a conscious state, the field of infinite potential is no longer abstract. It exists, in plenitude, here and now. I side with thinkers who say that life can only be lived here and now. Everything else is a dream or spell or illusion concocted by the mind. It testifies to the enormous trauma inflicted by past suffering that the human race would rather exist in a mind-made, dream-spell of illusion than wake up, live in the present moment, and take advantage of our infinite potential.
These shortcuts came about out of necessity. “I am That” refers to something indescribable, formless, without substance or qualities, unborn, undying, and beyond language. People wanted something they could see and feel and hold on to. In the Old Testament, Jacob wrestled with an angel. He was lucky; wrestling with duality, entangled in the dream-spell of illusion, is far harder. But if we remain true to “I am,” there is no need to wrestle with anything, including oneself. The flaw in every story, even the most spiritually inspiring ones, is that they always involve a choice. As soon as the mind is faced with either/or, duality has won. It wins by setting the terms of the path that lies ahead, and such a path only leads deeper into duality.
The emergence of monism, nonduality, and panpsychism in our time indicates an advanced stage of getting unstuck from duality. The next step, I believe, is to arrive at a process for awakening that is based on choiceless awareness. When you are enmeshed in duality, life is nothing but choices, the countless decisions, big and small, that life demands of us. But each step on the path to waking up reveals how many choices can be done away with. Rid your life of whatever is an illusion, and nothing will remain but what is real.
Choiceless awareness can only exist by living in the now. What you do or say or think should have no history or baggage. That’s what the now is about. You are not repeating the known, but opening up to the unknown. In a word, you are testing if being here is enough.
If existence is the same as consciousness, and if consciousness is a field of infinite potential, then being here must open a door to that very field.
The rishis who said, “I am That,” were also saying, “This is what awaits everyone, once they wake up.” I started by asking what is the best, simplest, and most useful thing we could say about our existence. Here’s my answer: “Being here is enough.”
The essence of modern spirituality is that we humans are full of paradoxes, yet penetrated by mystery. Transcendence and immanence are two sides of the same coin. Enlightenment is intimacy with any experience that arises in this human being. In a nutshell, we are perfectly divine in our imperfect human form.
There is no ultimate truth. No teacher, no scientist will give us all the answers. Let us simply bow to the intelligence of our hearts, drop into not knowing, keep our minds open, cherish the questions, and let the answers arise and evolve, all the while celebrating this mystery called life. Thank you for being here, for reading this book. Welcome home!
Part One: Voices of Contemporary Spirituality
Today’s spiritual teachers point to the intelligence of our hearts and spark a love affair with truth and wonder. They meet us where we are, in our very struggle, and invite us to tend to our human experience while remembering our divine nature. They direct us to discover each and every moment as the ultimate teacher and remind us that we are never apart from the mystery, from the truth of existence, from consciousness, from God.
Can you live with all the ups and downs of the experience of being human, and still be conscious of, and nurtured by, the truth of who you are? Yes! Awakening to this truth is not just for the sages of the past—it is for you too. This is a time of ordinary awakening. If you can cross the line into conscious self-recognition, then everything that arises in your awareness does so only to deepen that conscious self-recognition. The rest of your lifetime can be lived in that recognition and in the celebration and the sharing of that. Once an awakening has occurred in the boundless, unconditional freedom of your true nature, is there then a responsibility to live in a certain way in the world? To this I would also answer yes! When you are called home, when you are somehow struck by the absolutely mysterious and irrevocable desire to know the truth of who you are, then you must be willing to put aside every story of separation. Every story of separation is a story of war.
When I use the word “responsibility,” I am not talking about responsibility as a whip, a burden, or even a duty. I am inviting you to take responsibility for the truth of who you are, in this precious body, in this precious human incarnation, for this precious time on Mother Earth. Many people I speak with across the globe seem so beaten down and bound by their own internal self-abuse that inner freedom eludes them. Yet the way out is quite simple, if often supremely challenging. It means saying “no” to the totalitarian voice in our heads and “yes” to the possibility of inner equanimity. “Yes” to inclusion. I am suggesting that you simply open your mind and allow your life to be used by the force that is alive in your heart.
Closer to Heaven, Closer to the Mud Jeff Foster
I recall the moment my dear father passed from this world. One final exhale, and he fell into infinite silence and deep rest. I was filled with an ancient sadness, not just my own sadness but the sadness of all sons saying good-bye to their fathers throughout history. I was vast, filled with the hearts of all who have ever mourned, and yet I was minuscule,…
When we are awake and no longer numb, we can open our hearts to all these paradoxes, and let go of ever resolving them. We enter life and are entered in return. We know less and we feel more. We break more deeply and more light breaks through. We are more transparent, more supple. We are beginners again, newcomers in the Garden of Eden, eyes wide open and full of wonder. I sense that the old spirituality is crumbling. The sad patriarchal spirituality that suppressed the feminine, shamed the body—its feelings and its mortality—frowned upon our sexuality and our longings, and tried to numb our deepest questions and urges to protect the image of “the calm, peaceful one,” or worse, “the invulnerable, untouchable one,” or even worse, “the pain-free superhuman.” A spirituality that wanted to eradicate our anger, and tried to liberate us from our sadness, fear, and doubts, so we could be pure and enlightened and “free.” Something new is emerging now: a spirituality that actually embraces our humanity in all its mess and its longings, its ecstasy and its bliss, its intense pleasure and its outrageous pain. A spirituality that does not seek to…
Just vulnerable human beings, falling in love with “what is,” drenching our ordinary…
Nonduality is nothing if it is not a tantric love affair with this glorious, artistic mess of duality. Awareness is nothing if it is not radically in love with every form—every thought, sensation, sound, and smell, every wave of anger, fear, and sorrow—that arises and falls on its astonishing canvas. We are not simply “Pure Awareness”—no, we are sex and dirt and longing too. We are blood and guts and passion. We are wildness and we are fire. We are gods, and we are so very fragile—heartbroken gods, gods who ache, imperfect gods. We are invulnerable, untouchable, indestructible, and yet we can sometimes feel the world’s pain as our own. We live so close to life, so close to death, so close to…
The pressure in the head, the yearning and the expectancy of the dear heart, and this wonderful sense of being alive, prior to words, prior to all the teachings of the world. There are no experts, here where you are. There is only a single living question, the question that is meditation itself—unanswerable, yet complete and beautiful in its absolute unresolvability: What is life?
The Magic of Shared Awareness Sally Kempton
One of the sweetest ways I know of to recognize nondual presence is to gaze into the eyes of another being. The first spiritual group I worked with, in the 1970s, practiced left-eye gazing. If you’ve done that practice, you know how psychedelic it can be. You look at someone’s face, and watch it morph and shift. Young faces take on sage-like qualities of wisdom, then become fierce or opaque. They can shift gender, or age fifty years in a moment. Sometimes you see ten or twenty different faces on the same person. Our group got fascinated with these phenomena for a while, but it soon became clear that something deeper, something much more interesting, was going
When we talked about our experience later, we’d often remark that there seemed to be no such thing as “my awareness” and “your awareness.”
Normally, when I’m with another person, their thought stream and my thought stream negotiate, each of us inwardly wondering, Am I seen? Am I okay in this relationship? Will I get hurt? Is this person my kind of person? In meditative intimacy, two people can discover that when they both inhabit aware presence, they create doorways into truth and awareness that can take them far beyond the ordinary level of human communication. Sharing presence in this way is naturally therapeutic, because it lets you hold your own or someone else’s suffering in a field of acceptance. It is inherently creative, because it allows ideas and solutions to surface out of the shared field. More than that, it is a doorway into the infinite. Traditionally, if you practiced sharing awareness with another person, it was with a guru or teacher, and the transmission of consciousness only went one way. Eye-to-eye transmission of shakti has always been a technique by which a teacher transmits grace and inner states of awareness to a student. If you were the student, you tried to take in the high or enlightened or loving state of the teacher, and if you were the teacher you intended to pass on your state to the student.
The Essence of the Mind Rupert Spira All knowledge and experience is known in the mind, by the mind. Therefore, in order to know what anything truly is, it is first necessary to know the nature of the mind through which it is known. We cannot be sure that the mind’s knowledge of the universe is anything more than a reflection of its own limitations. Therefore, there can be no higher knowledge, nor any higher endeavor, than to know the nature of the mind. What is it that can investigate or know the nature of the mind? The mind is that through which all things are known, and therefore the mind can only be investigated by itself. The name that the mind gives itself is “I,” “myself.” Therefore, the mind’s investigation into itself is the investigation into who or what I essentially am. “What is the essential nature of the mind?” and “Who or what am I?” are, therefore, two ways of formulating the same question, the answer to which is the absolute knowledge upon which all other relative knowledge must be founded.
Who or what am I? I am seeing these words, I am knowing my current thoughts, I am aware of my feelings. “I,” the essence of the mind, accompanies all experience, irrespective of its content. “I” could be likened to a golden thread that runs through a beaded necklace. When we look at the necklace we cannot see the thread, but without the thread there would be no necklace. “I,” the golden thread that runs throughout all experience, cannot be known or seen as an object of experience, and yet without it there would be no experience. If we remove one, ten, or all of the beads from the necklace, it is still a necklace. If we remove all thoughts and perceptions from experience, we are still our self. Only that which remains when all the objects of experience have been removed qualifies as “I” or the essence of the mind.
“I” is the illuminating or knowing factor in all knowledge and experience, and as all there is to experience is the knowing of it, “I,” the essence of the mind or pure consciousness, is all that is ever truly known. Just as, relatively speaking, the sun’s light renders the world visible, so “I” renders experience knowable. It’s not a physical light but a knowing light, a knowing presence that illuminates, knows, or is aware of all experience. It renders all experience knowable but is not itself an experience. It
is the essential ingredient in all experience but cannot itself be found as an object of experience.
An open heart is open to suffering as well as joy. Life includes fear, injustice, despair, anger, grief, and death of the form. Yet the true heart does not close. It moves with compassion in response to suffering; it is frequently suffering that leads to the desire to know if something lies beyond.
The Face of Truth: The Mystery Present Here and Now Totally at one with every experience in our daily life is a silent presence awake to the moment. No one owns it, no one creates it, no one can destroy it. It is wordless, yet aware of words; formless, yet one with form. It makes no judgments, holds no opinions, claims no identity, and has no name, though it does not reject any names that thought may give it. Some of those names include True Nature, the Self, Nondual Awareness, the Heart of Awareness, Buddha Nature, the Divine. Yet words will never capture or define this truth. Writing, speaking, and pointing arise, yet our essential nature is empty of definition, concepts, conditions, or limitations. It is nothing our mind can “know” as an object. It is the knowing itself. It is what we are. As infinite presence reveals itself through the mind, we experience moments of clarity, wisdom, and insight that do not arise from what is learned, but from our essential nature. Whoever or whatever is in front of us, or within us, is a manifestation of the self that we are—sometimes moving through veils of conditioning that limit our view, but ultimately arising from the heart of awareness that is our true nature. In Ramana Maharshi’s words: The Self is only one. If limited it is the ego, If unlimited, it is Infinite, and is the Reality.
The Face of Freedom: No Separate “One” There simply is no separate “someone” who awakens. What we imagined was a person with a birthdate and future death date is actually transparent in the eyes of deep truth. We are spirit, infinite potential, free beyond birth or death. As the formless takes endless forms moment to moment, experiences simply happen. Any authentic awakening always carries a shift of identity. But…
In the movement of life’s causes and conditions, the awareness that illuminates appearances is not threatened by any experiences the body-mind may be having; yet it is not separate from them either. There is freedom to be, to have the experiences that arise spontaneously. Freedom then moves to unwind illusions…
The Face of Wholeness: An Ocean of Awareness We are living, breathing, eating, sleeping, doubting, crying, laughing, loving in an ocean of awareness and beingness that is life itself. This ocean is totally still and silent in its depths, yet teeming with life, fluidity, and impermanence on its surface. Presence is not personal; time does not take us to the timeless; a separate self does not produce love or truth; we can only be awake now. From undivided wholeness, the true “eye” within sees unity and differences…
Extraordinary Within the Ordinary Later in the evening, the little ones are sleeping. As I sit sipping tea, I am reminded how life shows its extraordinary truth in the simplest, most ordinary moments of our lives. A hummingbird, a hug, the milk that just spilled, laughter bursting forth, the pattern of light on the wall, the warmth of evening tea, the tenderness of our compassionate heart in the face of pain, the sound of wind moving through the trees, or breathing a gentle breath—all are expressions being sung…
The Wonder of Unknowing Mauro…
Even nondualism (as with any other -ism, without exception) is just a conceptual description of reality, which hopelessly tries to point to the unknowable “whatever it is.” And insofar as it becomes an ideology that relies on words and thoughts, it is unable to enjoy the taste of being. We live in concepts without realizing it. We blindly believe that reality is just as our thought represents it. Science gives us an “objective” description of the material world that, to some extent, can be very useful for the improvement of humankind, however relative and incomplete it is. Nonduality—as far as it relies on words and thoughts—is just another conceptual description of reality, though its understanding of non-separation can dispel a huge amount of suffering in one’s life. Neither of these conceptual descriptions is more or less right, and both are useful. But as long as we rely only on them, we remain trapped in the net of concepts.
The “water of awareness” can never be detected by the net of the thinking mind.
Indeed, awareness is a paradoxical mystery. On the one hand, its evidence is undeniable, for the very reason that we are aware of objects. On the other hand, it is unknowable—just as the existence of the eye is undeniable for the very reason that we can see objects, though the eye always remains invisible, outside the picture. However, even “awareness” is just a concept: Through it, we are ultimately confronted with the unknown “bottom line” of any human knowledge. No understanding whatsoever can touch the unknowable source of everything. What if any idea about who I am, including even the idea of “consciousness,” totally collapses? What if any idea about reality, including even the idea of “nonduality,” totally collapses?…
Then, out of frustration, the thinking mind cannot help saying “I don’t know” and finally quits. But when that “I don’t know” plunges from the head into the heart, the philosopher dies and the mystic is born. It is not a process in time. It is a singularity where all the known collapses and disappears. It is a timeless explosion of pure wonder and awe that blows everything else away. And what remains is a wild, free,…
Part Two: The Rebirth of…
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with first principles—being, knowing, and identity. It seeks to understand what doesn’t change, what was never born and will never die, what remains as the background of all human experience. When we started SAND, that deep longing to understand the nature of reality and who we are was the driving force behind the absurd endeavor to bring scientists and spiritual…
Nondual vs. Scientific Views of Reality A. H. Almaas
What is the view of nonduality and how does it regard the scientific perspective? And how does the world of science view mystical traditions and nondual experience? We need to have that understanding for there to be a true meeting, instead of just talking about it. The two must touch each other, so that there is a mutual benefit. Nisargadatta Maharaj said, “Consciousness is the greatest painter. The whole world is a picture.” Everything is a picture that consciousness paints. Everything—what you consider you, I, the whole world, the universe, the stars, atoms—all of these are nothing but consciousness and the way consciousness manifests itself. They don’t really exist the way that people take them to. One of the basic things that nonduality says is that the world as known conventionally, which science has been studying—whether from a classical perspective or a quantum perspective—is really all an illusion. There are no microtubules, there are no brains. If you look at all the theories of consciousness, the brain is very important, but from the perspective of consciousness the brain is nothing but consciousness manifesting something that somebody calls a brain. Nisargadatta Maharaj did not think that his experience had been interpreted by his brain. He thought his brain had been interpreted by him, by his consciousness.
In other words, consciousness, or what is called “being” or “true nature” or “Buddha nature,” is so fundamental that the usual view that there are people who have individual experiences—and some of those people are scientists who study those experiences and try to understand the basis of matter—is an illusionary way of experiencing reality. And going deeper into the states of matter, into atoms, particles, quarks, strings…from the perspective of a nondualist, it doesn’t matter. The idea is to recognize that you are consciousness, and everything is consciousness—and that is the freedom.
The neuroscientist says we don’t know what we perceive; the brain interprets the input from our senses, and that input then creates a picture and we see the world. From the perspective of nonduality there is no input that is going into the brain; that is a story you are telling yourself. The arising of light, of sound, the movement of sound, the brain cell—all of those are created as one unified picture, and that picture is like a movie screen. It keeps moving one frame at a time. The movement of the frame makes it appear as if there is an electron that appears and moves, and we have a theory that the brain interprets that. But the brain itself is seen from the perspective of nonduality as nothing but a manifestation. Just like the whole body, the whole universe is a manifestation of the same consciousness. We are not awake, we are not free, we are not liberated, if we do not recognize that we are this pure awareness, this pure truth. That is the view of nonduality. I am not saying I’m buying that. I’m saying, that is what nondualists say. I know the experience. I live nonduality; I’ve lived it for twenty years or so. Before that I lived a few decades in duality. The experience of nonduality makes everything from the perspective of duality delusional, even though people in the dualistic world think that science is improving their understanding of the physical world. Maybe it is. But from the perspective of the nondualist it is irrelevant.
Those are just different stories to explain things from a delusional perspective, the perspective that there are separate brains and each one is having some kind of interpretation of experience. So we need to understand that nondualists don’t care. The real nondualists don’t care how science is going.
We know that even Nisargadatta Maharaj, who says everything is arising in consciousness—even that he is the source of awareness and consciousness—he himself had to go to the toilet and he had to wipe his ass. Regardless how realized the nondualist, when they see a street full of cars, they make sure their body does not cross in front of one. Physical reality is still with us and its laws are still operative, regardless how much we think of it as a delusion.
When most scientists hear that everything is consciousness, all is delusion, they think this is just mystical talk. It is superstition. Science became scientific by divorcing itself from the church, from religion. It liberated itself by not taking the religious point of view as the description of reality.
Quantum theory brings the whole world into question, but they’re not saying that it is all consciousness. They believe in particles, in electrons. Nisargadatta Maharaj says, No! There are no electrons. An electron is just the appearance of consciousness. From the perspective of the nondualist, the double-slit experiment is just like any other delusion. But for the scientist, it is a real thing. We need to think a little more carefully before we say it’s a delusion or illusion. The proposal I have, which comes from my direct experience, is that the nondual way of experiencing is one way of experiencing reality. Obviously, it’s a valid way of experiencing reality. The scientific point of view, which makes precise the ordinary dualistic point of view, is also a way of experiencing reality that is just as valid. Why do we have to think that one of them is right and the other is wrong? Why can’t both be correct—that the world can be experienced in two distinct ways? Each has its own validity, truth, and usefulness, and human beings live in both worlds simultaneously all the time. Maybe they will meet. I am not saying they are different realities, I’m saying it’s the same reality experienced in different ways.
I do not live in either one of them. I don’t live a nondual reality and I don’t live a dualistic reality. For me, these are two of many ways of experiencing reality. Sometimes I experience the nondual, sometimes the dual, sometimes both together, sometimes I have nothing to do with either. Reality has many ways of experiencing.
Of Consciousness and Paradox Jean Houston
As this infinite self expressing aspects of God, and as a form of the living universe, we find ourselves capable of creating and sustaining an individual finite self—that is you, the human being, that is the microcosm, or, if you will, the fractal of the infinite self.
We live in a holographic universe where all is connected with all, regardless of where any thought or action is located in time or space. In fact, from my years as a student of spiritual traditions and psychologies, I find that in virtually every tradition, especially in the mystical form of each, when we enter into the depths of ourselves through different states of consciousness, we always find we are connecting with the flow that sustains the entire universe. Therefore we have access to the wisdom, knowing, skill, and transformative power that it contains. The wisdom of creation is directly accessible to us in our everyday life experience, as the hum of knowing resonance is the core of our being. The universe is an infinitely creative organism that imparts its creativity to us, and we, in turn, reflect this by delivering our creative nature and process to those objects of our creation. These in turn change the nature of the universe, bring new material into the Akasha, which sparks it to still greater…
The stupendous import of this statement is a mind-cracking, soul-buffeting, life-enlarging realization. Once understood and internalized, it adds tremendous power to our freedom to be, our enormous capacity to grow, evolve, and re-create ourselves, and our ability to live simultaneously as finite and infinite beings. The infinite self has a part in directing the development and unfolding of the finite self, and the finite self offers joy, entertainment, and knowledge to the infinite self. This is the paradox of partnership resolved. The game is to overcome the illusion of separation. It may be the ultimate goal of living in a time of renaissance, one in which consciousness, the ground of all being, is central…
Be Blissful Robert…
You see no difference and you feel the feelings of that beloved. Therefore, all you want is for that beloved to be happy, to be free of suffering. The suffering of that beloved is as unbearable to you as your own suffering. There’s no question, should I do something about my hand in the fire? Shall I be compassionate to it? No, you just pull it out of the fire. Absolutely, without a moment’s hesitation. Buddha is a being who has become like that for all of us. That is the Buddha nature, the Buddha as us. Buddhas feel that what they call their dharmakaya, the reality body, has become all of reality. All of reality includes all sentient beings. All sentient beings includes us. We are, therefore, from Buddha’s point of view, the same as he is. From his point of view, or her point of view, or its point of view—there are male Buddhas, female Buddhas, and some third option—they are us. It is said that they are like a mother who considers every being as her only beloved child. Though each one of us is Buddha looking out at other Buddhas, do we know that? No, we don’t. We think we are separate beings, sitting in our separate places. Of course, to…
This is all I want to share, that this is the best of all possible worlds—it couldn’t be better for each of us. We are at exactly the evolutionary place we need to be. Everything that happens to us is just what we…
That’s what life is: our ability to give ourselves away. Death just stands there as the reminder that we should be giving ourselves away at all times. Of course, nobody really wants us, so don’t go jump in anybody’s lap, because it won’t help. But you should be willing to do so. In certain moods, in certain states, suddenly everything is really beautiful—every flower, every tree, every blade of grass, even a piece of concrete, even the metal left over from an auto wreck. Anything is beautiful when we’re in a certain state—a nondual state. A dual state is where your mind immediately separates you. You believe “That’s a bad thing, that’s a good thing,” and then suddenly everything sucks. In the conventional, scientific perspective, we think the universe is a bunch of hard objects. Buddha says the universe is made of the intersection of the minds of infinite numbers of beings. In reality, it is voidness, like empty space—but it’s not empty space, because space doesn’t get in the way of the things that are in it. Nonduality means that the empty space of nirvana, of emptiness, is all of us—all these differentiated things—in this place. The idea that there is a state of bliss somewhere else is wrong. Sometimes it is blissful to be somewhere else, to be blown away somewhere else, but that’s…
Buddha smiled when he understood the nature of reality, because he understood that, actually, it’s a gas. It’s nirvana. Here, we’re in nirvana. Everyone’s made of bliss. That’s what you’re made of. You don’t notice it because it is you, and it’s the chair you’re on. But all you notice is that this chair is not soft enough. “My butt hurts. I’ve had to sit here far too long.” Your mind is carving this up in a negative way because your culture told you to do so, and you don’t realize it. It’s a big effort for those of us brought up like that. It’s not just a Western thing. Eastern authoritarian cultures are just the same: all those macho-looking forms of the Buddha they make, who look like everybody’s worst bureaucratic nightmare. The Buddha didn’t look like that. Buddha was really beautiful. He wanted people to see him as beautiful, because he wanted them to see themselves as beautiful. That’s the whole point. We can keep being reborn stupid, and fight with everybody as long as we want, but we can’t avoid being enfolded by a loving awareness that is the ultimate teacher. Somehow everything is well arranged for us. It didn’t create our situation, it doesn’t have the power to automatically bomb us into bliss, but it has the power to reshape our circumstances, to give us optimal lessons, to teach us how to understand, how to trust our own Buddha intuition, and how to realize that this is joy, and bliss, and happiness, and perfection. Loving everyone is the only way to go. You must do that, and you feel like doing that when you’re blissful yourself. So be blissful.
The Qualitative Science of the Heart Kabir Helminski
Our physicists are compelled to use metaphoric language to attempt to talk about what their equations imply. As charming as the poetics of subatomic physics may be, let us remember that it is something like poetry. A simple definition of poetry is to say one thing and mean another. Furthermore, even talk of the mind’s influence on reality (thought’s influence on reality) neglects an essential aspect of human experience—the human heart, through which we experience our most precious moments and relationships, and through which life itself is valued. It was as if I had a glimpse of a parallel reality. Side by side with the material universe of measurements was a dimension of qualities experienced by human consciousness. It seemed to me that this magnificent science, based in quantitative measurement and mathematics, is observing reality from the outside. For instance, we can measure and observe that the patterns of electrical activity in the brain of a
spiritually developed human being are different from the average human being, but this tells us little about the experience of that human being.
The qualitative science of the human heart has more to do with the experience of being inside, with how that experience can be transformed and deepened, and what that transformation does to the sense of self.
It is through the heart that we experience existence qualitatively, that we are motivated to do what we do, that we are touched and moved by events and situations. All value and meaning is experienced through the heart. In other words, the heart has a profoundly cognitive function, allowing us to experience a dimension of values and qualities side by side with the material universe that is described by the physical sciences.
As we know, conventional science still has not solved the mystery of what consciousness is, how it arises, and what its purpose is. Some neuroscientists even question whether it truly exists, believing it is a mere illusion created by the brain. Others are curious about the interface between consciousness and the so-called physical world. In a nondual universe, how can we have two distinct realms: one of quantitative scientific measurement and another of human values? I believe this is the implicit question behind the whole undertaking of “science and nonduality.” The accomplishments of physical science and mathematics bring us to a threshold in which matter, energy, and time are interwoven. Matter, energy, and time are like a list of ingredients for cooking the great bagel of the universe. If the universe is a bagel, who is going to taste it? Along with the great scientists of history, there have been equally great men and women of taste, of inner knowing, of moral and spiritual greatness. Such people have moved us, inspired us in that highly subjective inner world where we experience the ultimate mysteries of human consciousness: peace, intimacy, love, enlightenment. In the language of Sufism, the divine oneness addresses the primordial human being, saying: “But for thee I would not have created the universes.”
The Anomaly of Consciousness Peter Russell
is easier to explain how the universe evolved from the Big Bang to human beings than it is to explain why any of us should ever have a single inner experience. The initial response to an anomaly is often simply to ignore it. This is indeed how the scientific world has responded to the anomaly of consciousness. And for seemingly sound reasons.
Yet whatever ideas are put forward, one thorny question remains: How can something as immaterial as consciousness ever arise from something as unconscious as matter? If the anomaly persists, despite all attempts to explain it, then maybe the fundamental assumptions of the prevailing worldview need to be questioned. This is what Copernicus did when confronted with the perplexing motion of the planets.
This alternative paradigm doesn’t change anything we’ve already discovered about the correlations between the brain and experience. This is usually the case with a paradigm shift; the new includes the old. But it also explains the hitherto puzzling anomaly. In this case, we no longer need scratch our heads wondering how the brain generates the capacity for experience; it is already there. The brain merely determines what appears in consciousness.
Radiant Intimacy of the Heart Cynthia Bourgeault
When people hear the word “contemplation” nowadays, they tend to register it as simply the Christian equivalent of “meditation.” It has something to do with stilling the mind, not thinking, not calculating—”resting in God,” in the celebrated formulation of contemporary Christian spiritual master Thomas Keating. But while this popular revisioning of contemplation has no doubt been useful for getting many Christian practitioners back on meditation cushions, it does represent a substantial diminishment of the original understanding of the term. In the early centuries of Christianity—and borrowed directly from the great philosophical tradition of the Greeks—the real meaning of contemplation is not resting in stillness; rather, it designates a path of luminous knowledge of an extremely high order. It’s not content-free by any means. It’s simply that the content is so high and so densely ordered that it tends to overwhelm the faculties of our usual rational mind, and the mind falls still and silent before it. “Knowledge impregnated by love” is how John Chrysostom, a sixth-century Christian master, described it. Overwhelmingly, these ancient masters saw contemplation not as a practice for stilling the mind, but as a different kind of mind altogether, something more closely approaching what we would call a level of consciousness.
It’s all too easy to dismiss the effusive, nuptial language as a sign of perception operating at a dualistic level—but I’ve actually come to believe that it contains a very different piece of information. And when this piece of information is seen for what it is, it brings a very powerful piece into our understanding of what nonduality is, and how it functions.
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” This well-loved quote from The Little Prince is not only a wisdom teaching in its own right, it encapsulates the very Christian experience of the nondual. What if “knowledge impregnated by love” doesn’t refer to the emotion of bliss or rapture but rather knowledge centered in, seated in, and generated by the heart? Or, even more precisely: knowledge accessible only when the mind is in the heart—to use that phrase so beloved by the ancient masters of the Christian East.
Nonduality is not, in Christian experience, simply an extension of the cognitive mind. Its signature feature is that “the mind is in the heart,” as the masters of the Christian East hammered home again and again. And this statement is no vague or sentimental benediction; it implies, and in fact explicitly stipulates, both a physiology and a pathway of transformation. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” Jesus announced in his set of teachings traditionally known as the Beatitudes. The tradition of the heart as an organ of spiritual perception flows through the esoteric traditions of the West. It reaches little peaks of particular intensity in the desert fathers and mothers of the fourth and fifth centuries, in Eastern orthodox mysticism, and then, profoundly, in Sufism, which takes the traditions and the teachings of the heart that were the common language of this Western insight and develops them into a highly reformed art.
The heart works as a radiant mirror and a magnifier of a truth, of a knowingness of a different order. As long as it’s whole—or “pure,” as it’s sometimes called, meaning undivided—it can do this. But as soon as it gets co-opted by the so-called “passions”—those tempestuous, stuck emotions that we often perceive as the seat of our emotional selfhood—then the whole thing loses its capacity for seeing. That’s the teaching, and in the most profound renditions the goal of learning to see with the heart is always a two-pronged process. The first is an active spiritual attitude of letting go, a surrender of all attachments—literal, psychological, and, ultimately, perceptual—to objects and thought forms. As Simeon, an eleventh-century Greek orthodox spiritual master, writes in his treatise on three methods of attention and prayer: “You should observe three things before all else. One, freedom from all cares…even about good things. Two, your conscience should be clear so that it denounces you in nothing. And three, you should have a complete absence of passionate attachment so that your thought inclines to nothing worldly.” Remember, passion here means stuck emotion; in other words, so that you don’t get reactive. That’s the practice he lays out. In such a way, and only in such a way, he claims, is it possible to develop a capacity that he calls “Attention of the Heart,” the foundational prerequisite for actually being able to follow the teachings of Christ. Simeon implicitly recognizes that these Christic teachings emerge from a much higher level of consciousness than the ordinary mind can sustain or comprehend. As he says, if you don’t have your mind in your heart, it is impossible to do the Beatitudes, to even understand them. In our modern Levels of Consciousness, he’s saying that the Christ teaching comes from a nondual level, and you can’t run it when you’re running a dualistic program.
neuroscience would more typically describe as an entraining of the brain waves to the rhythms of the heart. Putting the mind in the heart was then referred to as “vigilance” or “nepsis.” Nowadays, it’s often understood to mean thinking about the heart, but the Christic texts, again and again, describe bringing warmth down, collecting sensation in the region of the chest, holding it as an embodied accompanying practice to an attitude of letting go of identifications, passions, issues, agendas.
I want to make very clear that this awareness is not absent in the Asian traditions. I vividly recall the story of a Buddhist master being asked how he had arrived at some insight. “My mind tells me,” he said, pointing to his heart. The Asian masters may simply never have conceived of separating mind and heart in the first place.
You’ll often hear it said in nondual circles that the nondual is nonpersonal, and that access to the nondual realms requires moving beyond the personal. And Christianity’s stubborn attachment to the language of love and adoration is often taken as a sign of a religion operating at a lower level of consciousness—still wedded to the personal view of God, not yet fully launched into the transpersonal. But I think something else is at stake, and it becomes clear when you experience attention of the heart phenomenologically. In other words, what actually happens when you collect attention through sensation in the region of your heart? Be forewarned: This is not an easy spiritual exercise. It’s all too easy to fall off the razor’s edge into either visualization or emotivity. Collecting sensation in the heart depends upon a finely honed capacity to hold attention. It requires patience and it requires practice.
But when you finally arrive at the goal, a literally “mind-blowing” revelation awaits you: namely, that when your attention is gathered in the heart, the felt sense that emerges is one of pure intimacy—objectless, radiant intimacy that exudes from the core of the heart without needing an object to attract it. Try it for yourself. Intimacy is what it feels like to look at the world from the point of view of mind in heart consciousness. Perhaps Christianity’s stubborn attachment to the language of the personal has nothing to do with projections onto Big Daddy in the sky, or of egoic pain and pleasure. Rather, consider that every genuine insight and teaching that has ever been generated in Christianity, or in any other tradition for that matter, has been generated in the heart—that is to say, through intimacy. This is how and where mystical perception actually occurs, at least according to the unanimous testimony of the West. The nuptial language simply bears witness to the place of origin. It’s a way of authenticating that divine revelation transpires within the domain of heart, under its aegis and agency, making connections not through the cooler logic of metaphysics but through the warmer language of vulnerability, surrender, and belongingness.
Part Three: Science Embraces…
We both clearly remember the angst, the insatiable curiosity, the constant burning desire to find answers. Whether studying higher mathematics, quantum physics, and evolutionary biology, or creating media on leading scientific theories of consciousness, we both always had the intuition that, by looking more closely through these very different lenses, we would have a more complete picture of who we are and what life is. According to the great spiritual traditions, consciousness is all there is. Variously called the Universe, God, or Self, it is the ground of all existence. Everything that we experience and perceive arises and subsides in consciousness. The mystics…
Ultimately, we might never be able to unravel the mystery of consciousness. What unites scientists and mystics is their desire to question, to challenge assumptions, to experience truth, and to live in the awe of the mystery. In that spirit of discovery, in that awe, in the silence of the heart—that is where science and spirituality can really meet. —Maurizio and Zaya
A Brief History of Consciousness Stuart Hameroff
As a quantum process connected to fundamental space-time geometry, consciousness may conceivably occur at deeper, faster scales in the nonlocal structure of the universe, perhaps independent of biology. Will life continue to evolve to optimize consciousness? Where will we go from here?
Reality Is Eye Candy Donald Hoffman
have a stroke in V4 in the left hemisphere, you lose all color experience in the right visual world—it just looks like shades of gray. If you take a magnet and inhibit V4 in the left hemisphere, you lose color temporarily in the right visual field. Take the magnet away and color comes back. This is just one of hundreds of correlations we’ve found. Every conscious experience that we’ve been able to test has a neural correlate, and this has raised the scientific question: How does matter, perhaps neural matter, create conscious experiences?
When you analyze the equations of evolutionary game theory—which attempts to model strategies and predict results for evolving populations—it turns out that, whenever an organism that sees reality as it is competes with an organism that sees none of reality and is tuned to fitness, the organism that sees reality as it is goes extinct. It’s very clear. If our senses evolved and were shaped by natural selection, the probability that we would see reality as it is is zero. The probability that space and time and matter are the right concepts to describe objective reality is precisely zero. Back in 1633, Galileo said, “I think tastes, odors, colors, and so on reside in consciousness. Hence, if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be annihilated.” He thought that colors and tastes were not objective properties of the world, but subjective properties of consciousness. He still believed that physical objects and space-time were objective. Galileo took the first step. There’s another step. You have to let go of space, time, and physical objects as well. Space, time, and objects exist only in consciousness. That’s a bitter pill for most scientists, but some are coming around. Nima Arkani-Hamed is a professor working on fundamental physics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and he’s come to the conclusion that space-time is doomed. He says that in the underlying description of the laws of physics, there’s no such thing as space-time.
Our theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity, which assume space-time, are deeply wrong. We’re going to have to give up space-time. What is space-time and what are our perceptions of objects? I think a good way to think about them is that they are just a user interface. We evolved a user interface. If you’re crafting an email on your computer and the icon for the email is blue and rectangular and in the right corner of your screen, that doesn’t mean that the email in your computer is blue and rectangular and in the right corner of your computer. The interface is not there to resemble reality. It’s there to hide reality and to give you eye candy that lets you do what you need to do. That’s what evolution did: Three-dimensional space is our desktop. Physical objects are the eye candy. They are there not to show us the truth but to hide the truth and let us act in ways that keep us alive. Space-time is not a fundamental reality. It’s a data structure that we evolved. We’re living in the matrix of our data structure.
And here’s the kicker for the problem of consciousness. When I look inside the skull and I have a conscious experience that I describe as a brain and neurons, I’m interacting with an objective reality, but that reality is not brains and neurons. It’s something utterly different. The best I can do as a humble member of Homo sapiens is to describe it as brains and neurons. But brains and neurons do not exist, unperceived. They have no causal power, and that’s why we’ve never been able to boot up consciousness…
Science and spirituality can work together and bring our insights to make a very human, very rigorous approach to understanding the question of consciousness, so we can finally understand who we are. That’s my hope. Science and spirituality, working together, can explore, and I think understand, consciousness.
How to Make a Universe Jude Currivan
How does the duality-based appearance of our universe arise from the nondualistic oneness of an infinite and eternal cosmos? In other words, how is our universe “made”?
An experiment led by Antoine Bérut and Eric Lutz reported in 20123 demonstrated the innate nature of information by showing that deleting one digitized bit releases physical heat, in line with theoretical predictions.
To paraphrase Marcel Proust, the real voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes. This is the case with the growing perception of an informed and holographic universe. Restating the first and second laws of thermodynamics in terms of information or “infodynamics,” and viewing our emergent universe as a cosmic hologram, not only offers a way to reconcile quantum and relativity theories, but shows how the two laws respectively enable our universe to exist and evolve as a coherent entity and an expression of a unified cosmos. This requires not new laws of physics or additional mathematical formalism—but for us to see physical reality with “new eyes.” We do so by recognizing the physicality and fundamental role of information and considering key attributes of our universe, as follows: Spatially, our universe is geometrically flat, which has been cosmologically demonstrated. Otherwise, the equivalence of energy and matter would be violated and E=mc2 would not apply. The universe is finite in both space and time. No infinite physical quantities exist within space-time, only finite manifestations, including the cosmic microwave background (CMB) wavelength distribution, which has a finite cutoff. Beginning 13.8 billion years ago, most hydrogen in our universe has already been processed into stellar nucleosynthesis. The temperature of ambient space (currently at approx. 2.7 degrees K) reducing to at or near absolute zero also suggests a finite end-time. Space expands. Universal time flows unidirectionally. Otherwise the laws of physics would not be constant.
The universe is also closed/isolated in space-time. Otherwise universal conservation of energy-matter would be violated. The universe is nonlocally integrated. Bell’s Theorem requires this for quantum mechanics to function, and nonlocal entanglement has been experimentally demonstrated to at least six hundred light years from Earth.
The first law of thermodynamics states that the total energy of a closed system is conserved. As our universe is a closed/isolated system and energy and matter are equivalent, this can be restated: The total energy-matter of our universe is conserved. Given that quantum theory is a description of universal energy-matter, this is also its simplest and most generalized statement.
Initially investigated by Ludwig Boltzmann, the concept of entropy was originally applied to the behavior of gases and measured the number of microstates of a gaseous system. Its inexorable increase over time led to a common view that it marks an increase from order to disorder. However, building on early insights by Claude Shannon, it is now being viewed by quantum information physicist Vlatko Vedral and others as the informational content of a system.
This leads to the second law of infodynamics, which states: The informational content/entropy of our universe, expressed as space-time, always increases. Essentially, the first law of infodynamics shows how our universe exists and the second law of infodynamics how it evolves as a unified and finite entity—a finite “thought form” in the infinite and eternal mind of the cosmos. This new perception also explains why space expands. As a fine-tuned Big Breath, rather than the implied chaos of a Big Bang, the expansion of space through the flow of time enables ever greater amounts of informational content, embedded as digitized bits on its holographic boundary, to be projected as the experiential reality of our universe’s evolutionary impulse. In revealing how our universe is “made,” this emerging whole-world-view integrates with universal spirituality to confirm that mind and consciousness aren’t something we have, but what we are. It shows our universe not only exists and evolves as a unified entity—it exists to evolve. And as microcosmic cocreators, it verifies that we are part of its evolutionary impulse and share a vital purpose at this pivotal moment for ourselves and for our planetary home.
One of the most important insights of the systemic understanding of life is the recognition that networks are the basic pattern of organization of all living systems. Ecosystems are understood in terms of food webs (networks of organisms), organisms are networks of cells, and cells are networks of molecules. The network is a pattern that is common to all life. Wherever we see life, we see networks. Indeed, at the very heart of the change of paradigms from the mechanistic to the systemic view of life, we find a fundamental change of metaphors: from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network. Closer examination of these living networks has shown that their key characteristic is that they are self-generating. In a cell, for example, all the biological structures—the proteins, enzymes, DNA, and cell membrane, for example—are continually produced, repaired, and regenerated by the cellular network. Similarly, at the level of a multicellular organism, the bodily cells are continually regenerated and recycled by the organism’s metabolic network. Living networks continually create—or re-create—themselves by transforming or replacing their components. In this way they undergo continual structural changes while preserving their web-like patterns of organization. This coexistence of stability and change is one of the key characteristics of life.
process of knowing, in the process of life. Cognition, according to Maturana and Varela, is the self-generation and self-perpetuation of living networks. In other words, cognition is the very process of life. The self-organizing activity of living systems, at all levels of life, is mental activity. The interactions of a living organism—plant, animal, or human—with its environment are cognitive interactions. Thus, life and cognition are inseparably connected. The process of cognition—or, if you wish, of mind—is immanent in matter at all levels of life. For the first time, we have a scientific theory that unifies mind, matter, and life.
Mind and the Wave Function Collapse Henry Stapp
This mental or spiritual part is different from the physical part, and is choosing which option the brain is displaying. That’s really where my interest lies. This understanding of the mind/brain connection is what it’s all about, as far as I can see. It’s a blending of neuroscience and physics—quantum physics in particular.
Idealism Reloaded: The End of the Perception-Imagination Duality Bernardo Kastrup
This nonexperiential “something” out there—that is, subatomic particles and force fields—allegedly is the world we all share. The problem is that an increasing array of evidence seems to contradict the notion that experience is somehow created by patterns of brain activity. If this notion were correct, one would expect richer experience to always correlate with increased metabolism in the neural correlates of experience. Yet the opposite has been observed. Indeed, psychedelic trances, which represent unfathomable enrichment of experience, are accompanied only by reductions in brain metabolism. Similarly, it has been observed that the brain activity of experienced mediums is reduced as they write or record in the process of psychography.
Teenagers worldwide play a dangerous game of partial strangulation, because the reduction in blood flow to their heads leads to rich experiences of euphoria and self-transcendence. The list goes on, but the point should be clear: there are many cases in which brain function impairment correlates with enriched awareness, which seems to contradict the mainstream materialist paradigm.
These images—lightning, flames, whirlpools—say something about the process they are an image of. For instance, we can deduce many things about combustion from the color and behavior of the associated flames. More generally speaking, we say that there are correlations between the process and its image, for the latter is a representation—incomplete, as the case may be—of the former. Returning to the whirlpool example: notice also that there is nothing to a whirlpool but water. You can’t lift a whirlpool out of the water. Yet, the whirlpool is a concrete and identifiable phenomenon; one can delineate its boundaries, point at it and say, “There is a whirlpool!” Images of processes can, after all, be very concrete indeed.
The brain doesn’t generate experience for the same reason that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. Yet brain activity correlates with inner experience—the localized contents of the whirlpool—because it is what the latter looks like from a second-person perspective, just as lightning is what atmospheric electric discharge looks like from the outside.
In the same way that there is nothing to a whirlpool but water, there is nothing to a living body but universal consciousness. Yet, just as one can delineate the boundaries of a whirlpool and say, There is a whirlpool,” one can delineate the boundaries of a living body and say, “There is a body.” This explains the felt concreteness of living organisms under the hypothesis that all there is to them is universal consciousness. This is but a teaser of a much more elaborate theory of reality, developed in a body of work published in the areas of analytic philosophy, psychiatry, neuroscience, and the foundations of physics, which interested readers are invited to explore further.
Part Four: The Wonder of Nature
As little children, we feel no separation. Our connection with nature is immediate and profound. Filled with innocence, staring at the stars in a calm night sky perhaps, we got in touch with the immensity of life. Then, as wounds accumulate and the ego began to play its role of survival tool, we lose that innocence.
That realization was nothing new for humanity. Indeed, the ancient thinkers and mystics inspired by the beauty and order of nature saw life and spirit in all things and the cosmos as a living organism. Their quest to understand the patterns of nature and our relationship to them inspired a view of life and nature as an intelligent, interconnected whole.
Looking through the lens of emerging science, we come to realize that nature, far from being a static environment in which we exist and evolve, is an unfolding, dynamic process, characterized by the power of transformation. Our bodies are not separate entities; they extend throughout the whole of nature. This realization can trigger a deep emotional connection, a profound somatic understanding that our bodies are not where we begin and end, and nature is not located outside of us. It provides us with an embodied perception that we are not separated from anything else in life. As the mystics have told us for centuries, we don’t live in the universe; the universe lives in us. As our bodies become more attuned to the cycles and patterns of a living universe, we become more available to respond from that understanding of oneness and wholeness. Earth becomes our body. If it hurts, we hurt. We no longer take care of the planet from a place of righteous indignation, but simply from a deep realization that we are taking care of ourselves. The deep reverence and awe we feel when looking at the stars is the same feeling we have for life, spirit, and ourselves, confirming once again that nothing is separate. —Maurizio and Zaya
Fundamental Awareness: The Universe Twiddling Its Thumbs Neil D. Theise
Complex systems theory describes how interacting agents self-organize into unplanned, adaptive, higher-level structures through a process of “emergence.” Think of how ants create large-scale structures (food lines, nurseries, cemeteries, farms) through their local interactions “on the ground,” without any high-level, system-viewing organizer. It is bottom-up rather than top-down. Complex systems at all levels of scale display similar behaviors: ants, people, birds, plants create colonies, cities, flocks, or forests. These can all self-assemble into ecosystems. Downward in scale, cells self-assemble into tissues, organs, and organisms. Cells are self-assembling molecules, which are self-organizing atoms, which are self-organizing subatomic particles, and so on down to the quantum foam. This brings us to the biological and cosmological scale set of complementarities, because now we see that all complex systems exist in hierarchies of complex systems (or holarchies, as Arthur Koestler called them). If you see an ant colony in the distance, it looks like a solid thing. It may be changing shape or moving around, but it looks like a thing. But when you walk up close you see that it’s not a thing at all; it’s just a community of ants self-organizing. And since the ant bodies are themselves made of cells, when you go closer to the ant and view it at the microscopic level, the ant as a thing disappears and becomes an interactive dance of the cells that make it up—a phenomenon rather than a thing. Thus, we have another form of complementarity: at one level, every living thing looks and behaves like a thing, but at a lower scale the thingness disappears and the system reveals itself as a phenomenon arising from smaller things. And so, when the universe is considered across all scales, from all perspectives, there’s no object, no thing, that has inherent existence. Like the two faces and the vase, every thing is both a thing, from one perspective, and a phenomenon, from another. This is a direct correlate of the Buddhist concept of “the emptiness of inherent existence.”
All of these traditions point to a ground of being that is comprised of pure awareness that is nondual—that is, without a subject-object split. If we take the experiences and insights of these traditions seriously as data, not as fantasy, then we can posit that if this pure awareness becomes aware of itself, a process emphasized in Shaivist thought, the nondual becomes aware of “a this and a that,” or “an I and a that.” As differentiation within awareness proceeds into a true subject/object split, separation arises, in space and time.
All views and experiences are, in fact, nothing but qualia within the awareness that is the ground of existence. Every field, every wave particle, every atom and molecule, every living and non-living aggregate of such, anything and everything observed, experienced, or imagined, is in fact nothing but qualia within the awareness that is the ground of experience. In this view the human brain is not the creator of our conscious experiences, but the transducer of the fundamental, nondual, nonmaterial consciousness into our own, personal, human minds.”7
There is no atom in your body that you didn’t eat, drink, or breathe from the planet. We are beings that both live on the earth and are the earth, having self-organized into beings that think and talk about the nature of existence. More sublimely still, we don’t live in the universe; the universe isn’t an empty space or box. We are the universe, arising from
its substance. In Buddhist terms, the “relative” and the “absolute” reflect this complementarity; we are both these separate beings in the universe—the relative—and the universe that is seamless and perfect as it is—the absolute; nirvana and samsara are not two—but not one. Going about our daily lives, we are the universe twiddling its thumbs.
Rethinking the “Dumb Random Universe” Model of Existence Robert Lanza
If gravity was 2 percent different, or if you changed the power of the Planck length or the atomic-mass unit, you’d never have stars such as the sun, or life. So, by any stretch of wishful thinking, a cosmos that allows life is inconceivable by chance alone. Randomness is not a tenable hypothesis. Truth be told, it’s close to idiotic—right up there with the dog ate my homework. Let’s sum up the most basic do-or-die physical conditions for life to come into existence. First, two fundamental forces—electromagnetism and “the strong force”—must have specific values.
In short, yes, it is a perfect universe. And we haven’t even yet gotten to the “life-creation” business, with its own crowded stadium of requirements—such as worlds that are not too hot or cold. Or radiation-filled. Or the specific properties of key elements—like oxygen and carbon—that need to exhibit just the characteristics we observe. Even here on Earth, life would be near impossible if we didn’t possess our massive nearby moon, because the axial tilt would wobble wildly—sometimes aiming straight at the sun, producing impossibly hot temperatures.
This is an extremely unlikely universe. So unlikely that even the most die-hard physicists concede that the cosmos is insanely improbable in terms of its life-friendliness. This hyper-unlikely nature—just on a strictly physical level—makes many
physicists sigh with discomfort and admit that some sort of scientific explanation is badly needed. If we apply Occam’s Razor—that is, the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one—biocentrism offers the most obvious explanation for our improbable life-friendly universe. Why? To me, the answer is simple: the laws and conditions of the universe allow for the observer because the observer generates them. Duh!
The Origin of Life and Consciousness: Lifting and Gifting Our Collective Future Bruce Damer
As a similarly dreamy teen, I began my quest to solve the riddle of the origin of life by visualizing a self-organizing bundle of molecules. For forty years I strove to answer the challenge posed to me by that bundle: “Figure out how I made a copy of myself!” In late 2013, working in collaboration with Professor David Deamer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, part of the answer flowed into my consciousness. We had been focusing our work on pools connected to hot springs in volcanic geothermal sites, a hotter and more active version of the “warm little pond” that Charles Darwin wrote about as the place where he thought life could begin.
As the human mind has emerged on the substrate of the living world, it is a massively complex example of a P-I-M system, and therefore a potent probability-shaping machine. From this insight I offer the following: What if our minds, intimately connected through our sensory nervous system to the larger world, have a much greater power to shape the future through intention—matched by action—than we have presupposed? Could this be an explanation for the ever-increasing pace of synchronicities and seemingly miraculous events that infuse our lives and our world? And could we use the power of clear intention to actively shape a future of desirable, yet seemingly improbable, outcomes? Such a tool could well be the key to our survival.
Perhaps this can be replaced by a new narrative to live by: that evolution actually works by a process of lifting, through adaptation to selective challenges, and then gifting the resulting innovations to the next generation. Individuals’ efforts (and sacrifices) enable the community to progress. This lifting and gifting narrative of our evolution and current situation is a more constructive beacon to guide us through treacherous waters into a bright, increasingly collective future.
Resurrecting Real Magic Dean Radin
There are four kinds of magic: Fictional magic like Harry Potter. Fake magic like Harry Houdini. Marketing superlatives like “Magic Baby Shampoo.” And then there’s real magic, which I argue is the authentic power that underlies the enduring fascination of the other types of magic.
Real magic is sometimes spelled “magick,” to distinguish it from the other meanings. It involves practical applications of an ancient worldview generically known as the esoteric traditions.
them fall into three main categories: divination, manifestation, and theurgy. Divination refers to perceptions that transcend the usual constraints of space and time. Historically, these practices include prophesy, astrology, mirror-gazing, tarot cards, and the I Ching. Manifestation involves the use of focused attention and intention to influence the world around you. Common practices include spell-casting, affirmations, and prayer.
The Mycology of Consciousness Paul Stamets
Psilocybin dephosphorylates into psilocin, and when you ingest these mushrooms, psilocin becomes a temporary neurotransmitter, creating a heightened state of awareness.
Men who had tripped on mushrooms tended to be nicer to their spouses. I think that is extraordinarily interesting.
The Ecological Initiation Charles Eisenstein
The living planet view leads to different priorities. Seeing Earth as alive, we understand that its health depends on the health of its organs and tissues: rainforests, mangrove swamps, grasslands, coral reefs, elephants, whales. We understand that if we cut down the Amazon and compensate for the lost carbon sequestration with a giant array of solar panels, Earth will still die from organ failure. This principle is not easily encompassed in carbon metrics. You have probably heard about the precipitous decline in insect biomass around the world. It’s tempting (though erroneous) to blame it on climate change. Because once we have a cause, then the solution is obvious, too. Find the cause and fight it. Find the enemy, destroy the enemy. Find the terrorists, kill the terrorists. Find the criminals, kill the criminals. Disease? Find the germ. Overweight? Suppress the appetite. That works in a linear system, but not in a living system. What is the cause of the honeybee collapse? Is it killing the bears that were scratching the trees, which oozed sap that fed fungi that carried antiviral compounds to the honeybees? That’s part of a whole matrix of cause. The cause is everything. From the living planet view, we’re invited to release reductionistic war thinking.
Let’s face it, the corporate-government elites, with their media, their money, their armed forces, their surveillance apparatus…in conventional terms they have the power. If they are irremediably evil, it is hopeless. But are they? The story we hold about somebody creates an invitation for them to step into that story. Can we hold a story that invites a change of heart? What blocks that innate love of life? What trauma, what ideology, what system? Exiting the good-versus-evil formula for “fighting climate change,” we are in new territory. We don’t know what to do—which is an improvement over thinking we know what to do, but actually not knowing what to do.
Part Five: The Body as Teacher
A common pitfall on the spiritual path is to focus on transcendence, while disconnecting from the body. Indeed, many spiritual traditions seem to invite the student to disidentify with the body, through different practices and teachings. If misinterpreted, these teachings can lead to denying the body and the wisdom encoded in it. This not only greatly limits our experience of life, but also makes our spiritual path narrower as we disconnect from our life force, our vitality. While our search matures, we may experience a distinct transition as we descend from the lofty realms of transcendence back into the body. All of a sudden, all the teachings and realizations we previously experienced and perceived in intellectual form become solidly anchored. We realize they were already living in the body. Along with this descent comes a deeper surrender to life in the immediacy of each moment. No matter what the experience—illness, trauma, anger, bliss, or ecstasy—they all arise as a flow of sensations devoid of interpretation or story. As much as we love our spiritual teachers in the flesh, the situations we confront moment to moment become our everyday teachers. The tenderness in our chest, the tingling in our belly, the trembling of our voice—these become our teachers. Inside our bodies we explore the essence of billions of years of evolution. We track traces of the pain, fears, and hopes of our ancestors and we connect with the intelligence of life itself. We realize that our bodies are collections of thoughts, experiences, and sensations moving through us at dazzling speed, constantly changing. It becomes apparent that we can never fully comprehend, only feel. When we put all understanding, all knowledge aside and listen to the body, each sensation becomes a unique portal through which we enter into a deep silence and intimacy with all things. Enlightenment is intimacy with any experience that arises in this human form.
What Are Our Bodies? Chris Fields
The Essence of Yoga: Exploring Our True Body Ellen Emmet A little girl runs down a street. Warm air caresses her skin, and the pounding of feet and earth bring an intoxicating counterpoint to the expanding of her heart. Her body unravels like threads of light into the surrounding space, and she melts into its open embrace. The liquid, dancing world anoints her vibrating body with its loving substance… We have all experienced blessed moments in which our true nature of undivided and universal awareness resounds at the emotional, tactile, and sensual levels of experience. Our body is almost transparent, without borders, suffused with a subtle quality of vibrating intensity and sensitivity. It is impersonal yet intimate, and shares its substance with all that is experienced.
This creates feelings of solidity, cohesiveness, emotional inertia, and contraction, designed to perpetuate the projected image of the “I” that seems to live at its center, with the past and future on either side. The dynamism of such a body is ruled by the complex and restrictive impulses to protect, defend, or affirm itself. In this way, the body-mind seems to become the envelope or cage in which “I” appear to live, and the stuff that “I” seems to be made of, while the real “I” of undivided awareness has shrunk itself into confinement, limitation,
When we touch our true nature of awareness in the presence of a teacher, a teaching, or an intuition, we submit our rational thinking mind to the pure light of intelligence that is its source and substance.
We hear and understand that “I” is the open awareness in which all experience arises, unfolds, and dissolves—including thoughts, sensations, feelings, and perceptions (mind, body, and world). We hear and understand that this awareness is not a perceived experience, yet is that which perceives all experience, and is not an object, yet is found at the center of all experience as its only, invisible substance.
In the yoga of nonduality, we deepen our exploration of our essential nature to include the level of feelings, tactility, and perception. Taking our stand as the field of openness in which all experience arises, we listen to our experience of the body directly, as if for the first time, free of any labels, evaluations, comparisons—without any mediation from the past or any agenda for the future. We take our time, descending below the threshold of rational experience, allowing thought to relax in the background while opening to the flow of tactile sensation that is our actual bodily experience. In time we may be invited to feel that the body of sensation arises in, flows through, and takes itself back to presence or awareness, my true self—as does all experience. When the welcoming of the body is open, it is as if the body, like a frightened animal, feels an unconditional invitation to come out into the open space. In this friendly, loving field, the body stands naked and undefended, and naturally begins to liberate what it had been holding in and as itself: the crystallized energy of separation that lives as layers of contraction and tension in the cellular, muscular, skeletal, and nervous systems of the body. As the body unravels in this way, the “me” charge that lives embedded in its layers is returned to the openness of awareness. Gradually and effortlessly, the body is left free to relax into and reunite with the openness that surrounds it. It is as if each feeling and sensation, like an offering, gives itself back to the invisible altar of awareness, telling its true story on the way. In time this allows a gentle and natural realignment with the felt understanding that the body’s essential nature is this very openness.
Over and over again, we realize that, like sounds and thoughts, the bodily feelings and sensations are subtle in nature. They are not solid or tangible and cannot be held or measured. Rather, they are like vibrating ripples on the surface of myself, intimately one with myself, made of my own invisible substance. We feel and know that the body is the openness that I am. Unlike most of the conventional yoga practices that are taught in the world, nondual yoga is not a pragmatic endeavor intended for the physical or energy body to increase well-being, strength, flexibility, or to encourage expansive states of consciousness. Rather, it is a sacred practice that surrenders the body back toward its source of open awareness: what we only and always are. Every time the offering is made, the body is returned as it truly is—limitless, transparent, relaxed, easeful, and loving. It is realized as the very breath of the universe.
The Cerebrospinal Fluid and I Am Mauro Zappaterra Fluids come together, and the I Am appears… What is the primary imagination? It is this—I-Amness. The touch you have of the consciousness of your beingness. That is the primary dream. The unimaginable has imagined: Oh, yes—I Am! —Nisargadatta Maharaj
Hence, any signal can be transmitted through the fluid and synchronize the tissues. In short, CSF may serve as a vehicle for signaling to major control centers in the brain and transmitting source energy, chi, or prana to the body and the felt sense of I Am. Some traditions believe that source energy may be transmitted through a “step-down” process, via condensation, or differentiation, from the unmanifested source to our physical self. In Taoism, this would be depicted as differentiation from the Wu Chi (the Void) to the Tai Chi (the Ten Thousand Things)—all one energy but with various forms of manifestation. As this energy condenses, it becomes differentiated and visible to the human eye as physical form.
The pineal gland makes direct contact with the CSF and releases information into the fluid for volume transmission to the rest of the brain and body. This space has been called the Crystal Palace and the Cave of Brahma. The Crystal Palace is thought to be an alchemical space that contains the Crystal Water, which when activated anoints the crown chakra and becomes illuminated.
Imagine this: a dispersal of the life force energy within the fluid, with the CSF as the fluid conductor of this source energy to our physical body. Imagine the brain simultaneously bathed with the differentiated energy from the source, providing the synchronous, unified experience and awareness of our true essence. Imagine the CSF transmitting the experience of I Am, our beingness. Connect to your CSF, to your own fluid body, to your liquid light, your prana, your chi, to the structured, resonating primordial ocean within you.
Lessons from the Body Larry Dossey
The next day, Barbara went to the office of Thomas E. Marshall, MD, her internal medicine physician. Dr. Marshall said: I thought I was seeing an apparition! Here was my patient, who was not expected to live another week, totally cured. I stopped all her medication and took out her bladder catheter, but she wasn’t quite ready to have the tracheostomy tube removed until another visit. No one had ever seen anything like this before. That afternoon, we sent Barb for a chest X-ray. Her lungs were now perfectly normal, with the collapsed lung totally expanded with no infiltrate or other abnormality that had existed before. I have never witnessed anything like this before or since… Her case is reported by Dr. Marshall in physician Scott J. Kolbaba’s 2016 book Physicians’ Untold Stories.
In both cases, a profound healing of a near-lethal disease occurred following healing intentions from outsiders. In both instances, the healing intention was prayer, an endeavor whose main characteristics involve compassion, caring, and love, commonly offered from a distance.
The recognition of unitary consciousness is ancient. It is also modern. As Schrödinger put it: “To divide or multiply consciousness is something meaningless. The category of number, of whole and of parts are then simply not applicable to it.” And as the eminent physicist David Bohm observed, “Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty…and if we don’t see this it’s because we are blinding ourselves to it.”
The Body, the Medical System, and Modern Society Gabor Maté
The modern medical paradigm separates the mind from the body and separates the individual from the environment. It has a strictly biological perspective. Suppose you have asthma. What happens in asthma is your airways are narrow and become inflamed, so the airflow becomes obstructed. You are wheezing and gasping for oxygen. They give you medication. It’s a biological process; the medication suppresses the inflammation and opens up the airways. This approach is necessary and, insofar as it goes, it’s accurate. However, it’s also hopelessly narrow. There is much more to asthma than a biological process in isolation. For example, it has been shown that if you’re a black woman in the United States, the more episodes of racism you suffer, the greater your risk of asthma. And, if you’re a child, the more stressed your parents are the greater your risk of asthma. In fact, you can almost predict whether a child needs more or less medication depending on how stressed or depressed the parents are. There’s an epidemic of asthma right now in North America. That raises the question: Is asthma simply a disease of the airways—we call it “reversible airway disease”—or is it a disease of the whole person who is suffering stress, or is it a disease of the family system through which the stress is transmitted, or is it a disease of the society that creates racism and that in general puts families under stress?
From a scientific point of view, that’s not even controversial. My critique of my medical ideology, the ideology of the profession in which I was trained and worked for decades, is not that we don’t have the science; it’s that we fail to apply it. Science has proven what the Buddha said 2,500 years ago, what any system of spiritual exploration has taught for thousands of years—the fundamental unity of everything, that everything is connected to everything else. Science has shown the pathways, clarified the physiology right down to the molecular level—yet in our practice we completely ignore all of that. Never mind that we ignore ancient wisdom—we actually ignore modern science when we practice the way we practice.
The ruling ideology in this culture is that people are separated, individualistic creatures, hostile and competitive with one another, and that this is our natural state. There are all kinds of reasons why in a capitalist system that would be the ruling idea. Foremost, it justifies the exploitation of people and the disregard for human needs. In ignoring the fundamental interconnectedness of all phenomena, we are just following human nature—or anyway, our false concept of it, a nature of isolation.
The last thing a lot of people who go into medicine want is to be open and vulnerable. In fact, as I can personally attest and have often witnessed, what they want is the authority of the white coat and the stethoscope. They want to be sure and they want to be in charge and they want to control things. They talk about symptom control. What a phrase that is!
physicians. Furthermore, in the Western mind, in Western psychology, the best we strive for is to make the ego stronger, to make people more functional. There’s no awareness that there’s anything to human beings deeper than the ego. But there is a deeper essential self, and separation from it is at the heart of so many of our problems. There is a healing, a wholeness that’s available to us, which doesn’t occur to the left brain, the Western mind. Physicians have the concepts of cure, but they have no concept of healing. For example, you might come to me with pneumonia, and if I give you the right antibiotic I can cure the pneumonia. That doesn’t mean that you’re healed. What I haven’t necessarily addressed is why you got pneumonia. We think you got pneumonia because you got infected with a certain bacteria. That may be true, but why were you susceptible to it? I believe you succumbed to it because your immune system was weakened. Why was it weakened? Because you were stressed by something. By giving you the right antibiotic we’ll cure the disease, but until we look at the source of stress in your life, we can’t talk about wholeness, we can’t talk about healing in a deeper sense. The real question is: Why this disease? Why in this person? Why now? We have to ask these questions, and answer them.
Cancer as an Awakening Journey Joan Tollifson
Cancer is proving to be an awakening journey, a stripping and grounding process, a waking up to the immediacy of this moment.
We so often (falsely) measure dignity as being clean and tidy, independent, needing nothing—but I’ve needed help, and I’ve been down there grappling with all the things we can’t talk about out loud in polite company (poop, pee, bad smells, the body parts that are kept hidden, all those places unfortunately associated with shame).
We’re not just a human being. We’re not limited to the body or encapsulated inside it, and “the body” is not the solid, independent, persisting “thing” we think it is. We are the limitless, awaring presence being and beholding the whole show. But at the same time, we can’t deny the body or the person. We must all eat and poop, one way or another, however enlightened we may be. And it turns out, this is actually a gift, not a giant mistake. One of the gifts of apparent limitation, as I’ve discovered before in other situations, such as losing my right hand early in life, is waking up to the immensity of freedom right here, in exactly this moment, just as it is.
resistance—“This isn’t the morning I had in mind, I don’t want this.” And then something shifted, and there was the realization, this is my morning, this is what’s happening. And suddenly it was no longer a limitation, a disappointment, a drag, or an unpleasant, smelly task. It was wide open, interesting, perfectly okay, every bit as good as a beach in Hawaii or a trip to the Grand Canyon. (Yes, I really mean that.) My prognosis is good, but I know that death—when it eventually comes, as it always does—isn’t the end. I don’t fear it. My death will be the end of Joan, the end of “me” and “my story,” my movie of waking life, this particular life-dream, but not of the vastness, the dreaming consciousness, the unbroken wholeness, the Tao—whatever we call this infinite intelligence or awaring presence that has no inside, no outside, no beginning and no end.
I know that the light and the dark go together like yin and yang, and that somehow, we need the dark to reveal the light. I know that there is something that will still be here even if the whole universe blows up, and that I am that, and that is all there is. I was surprised after my diagnosis to discover how much I want to be alive. I was returned, more vividly than ever, to the present moment. The astonishing radiance and beauty of every sight and sound and texture is so obvious, whether it is an exquisite flower or a crumpled Kleenex on the table. I’m drinking it all in so deeply. And I am discovering something about love and community and the interconnection of all beings and how important it is to show up for each other. The love and support I’ve received has been heart-opening and life-changing.
This living reality is endlessly recycling and evolving, dying and being born, like the waves on the ocean, distinct and yet inseparable, moving together, intermingling, never the same from one instant to the next and yet ever-present as
the ocean itself. Whether we call that shoreless ocean consciousness, matter, primordial awareness, boundlessness, unicity, God, intelligence, energy, the Tao, the vibrant dance of existence, the universe, or no name at all, it flows on, ever-changing and yet always here, always now. It is our most intimate reality, obvious and unavoidable, utterly immediate, and yet we cannot know the whole in the way we know information or grasp objects, for it is not outside of us. It is what we are, and all there is. In this unbroken wholeness, there is no inside or outside, no self or other-than-self. Yet each wave, each person, each newborn, each snowflake, each moment is utterly unique and beautiful and precious and unrepeatable and perfectly formed, just as it is.
Part Six: The Heart of Intimacy
In this way, we realized that love and intimacy are not based on our needs and expectations. When we humbly experience our own need to feel safe and we don’t project it onto another human being, a deep transformation happens. We can love without demand, without fantasy. The beloved is not here to appreciate and validate our carefully crafted identity, but to challenge and at times disappoint us. Relationships,
surely, are the mirror in which we discover ourselves most deeply; they invite us to step into the terrain of the unknown and into the depths of our own hearts. —Maurizio and Zaya
But just as I drew upon it, my body (not my “self”) would suddenly unaccountably jerk the handlebars and turn the wheel directly toward the shard, as if to fulfill my fear—as if to perform some anarchy upon my senses, to say: your prudence is a veil, behind which, incurring pain and wound, is some kind of mystery. You cannot, will not avoid it—however much you steel yourself, with intelligence and foresight, against…life.
Suddenly, as I studied it, the spider leapt a full two feet inward, directly into the heart of the flame. Even before the bright yellow consumed it, its many legs folded inward instantly, as if kneeling. For a blink it was a black grain of sand, before it became smoke. And the flame, unperturbed, flared on. I felt I had witnessed a decision that was closer to desire than suicide. Or that—though I did not have this language at the time—I had witnessed a koan about the existential scandal of care itself. It was this strange sense—the visitation of an insensible absurdity—that made me look desperately to my friends.
Your purpose is not to understand yourself. Your purpose is to hold your beloved’s gaze, the gaze that disorients your ambition and destroys your attainment, until the space between you is more real than your selves. If you can exist there, insubstantial but with dignity, prayerful but without purpose, sycophantic neither to birth or death or the afterlife, almost beyond grateful, so that you are nothing so much as awe…then you are life’s intimate. The very air will undress your soul. That undressing, in a holier time, we called emotion. Your lovers are waiting for you to cry.
Awakened Relating: Being Awake to Our Infinite Nature in Finite Human Relationships Lynn Marie Lumiere
Nowhere does duality and separation appear more real than in our close relationships. We long to connect, yet in relationship we experience two bodies, two personalities, two sets of conditioning, two different perspectives, and two different sets of preferences. We struggle to find connection and intimacy within all those differences. We search for connection by looking for a personality that resonates with ours, or those who share our points of view, preferences, and interests. This may initially help us to feel more connected, but ultimately it does not satisfy our deepest longing to be united in our shared being. True intimacy is only found through being awake to our shared being and relating as that, while fully appreciating all our differences. I call this Awakened Relating. This is relating from, and as, the wholeness of our self. Relating only from our conditioned, separate identity obscures our wholeness, and our partner’s wholeness. Consciously including the infinite being we share, and welcoming our limited human nature with all its beauty and flaws, creates a new kind of relationship.
In essence, our true nature is love. We actually are the love we seek from others, so seeking love outside our self takes us farther away from discovering the source of love. And, any resistance to who we are, or who the other is, will also lead to losing touch with the love that is always and already here. When we fall in love, we are looking into a magical mirror that reflects our essential nature; we are actually falling in love with the beingness we share with all “others.” Seeing through the eyes of infinite love, we accept all that our beloved is.
The healing of these wounds involves bringing them into the light of conscious awareness and fully allowing them to be experienced. This is the alchemical magic of Awakened Relating—all appearances of separation dissolve or transform in the light of nondual awareness. Relationship is the greatest opportunity for this, because that is where our primal wounds come up to be healed. Yet, without this understanding, we all too often rewound each other rather than heal.
In order to experience Awakened Relating, we must experience our infinite being, even if it is just a glimpse at first. This awakening is not the “pie in the sky,” big-deal experience that we may imagine. One doorway into being that is always available is to simply recognize the awareness that is always present and is looking out of your eyes right now. It is the awareness that is reading these words, while also being aware of your body and the environment you are sitting in, all at once. I am pointing to a simple shift: from being aware of inner or outer objects, to being aware of awareness itself. Then we know the knower—the silent background of presence in all experience. As we get to know this presence more deeply, we discover that it is the only thing we can rely on at all times for everything—wisdom, solutions, love, happiness, comfort, healing—everything.
As we learn to rely on the stable wisdom of our own being, we can turn to that when there is conflict in relationship. The conditioned mind is not a source of wisdom. It only perceives and acts according to what it has been taught. We do not find solutions or resolutions there. The imagined separate self can only push away experience or react to it. It is incapable of being present with what is, especially when its self-image is threatened in relationship. Acceptance of “what is” is what brings true resolution or transformation. As we get to know the presence of nondual awareness, we have the opportunity to rest as that and allow it to inform what we say and do.
Intimacy and Keeping the Spark Alive Michaela Boehm
Relationship is built on sameness. Sexual excitement is created by difference. For a relationship to work, the more two people have in common, the better. Common goals, friends, interests, religious and political views, and day-to-day preferences make for a harmonious partnership.
When we first meet someone romantically, everything is fresh. Most of us remember the delicious first weeks of talking into the night, sharing history, opinions, and plans. It feels thrilling to discover common ground and connect deeply. During this phase of enjoyable discovery, the sex feels exciting. The promise of deepening intimacy and the emerging dynamics of the relationship are a potent and enlivening cocktail. Then, over time, as familiarity grows, the couple develops routines, common friends and activities. By now they’ve heard each other’s best and worst stories, developed in-jokes and shared references. While the newness has worn off, in its place—if all goes well—a harmonious relationship built on commonality sets in. The relationship now involves the stress of day-to-day upkeep, a business or children. In this process the sexual spark often gradually diminishes…until one day the couple find themselves at home on a Saturday night, in sweatpants on the couch, watching their favorite show, touching affectionately but with no sexual impetus whatsoever. The “spark” has gone.
The important thing to know is that diminished attraction is not the sign of the relationship failing. The lost spark is caused by commonality, familiarity, and too much time spent together without conscious purpose.
This was the moment when spirit and matter became two separate and competing realms in human consciousness, when heaven and earth were split in two. This was the beginning of the dream—or nightmare—of the modern world. Pledging allegiance to the split-off Uranus, we abandoned our roots in wholeness, in earth and in our own bodies, planting our sense of self in uprooted ideals of superiority, in a rejection of the totality of life. Through Uranus’s eyes, we began to see our own bodies and Earth as objects to control and exploit. Our intrinsic belonging was kidnapped by a painful illusion of separation.
Tired of spiritual traditions emphasizing practices and beliefs that reject our bodies, Earth, and all things female, tired of outdated maps of spiritual awakening that tell us the wild realms of our feelings and sexuality are anything less than holy, we ache to embody love in its totality, where there is nothing other than sacred, where we don’t need to exile any part of ourselves in order to be free. We ache to embody the unbroken union of Gaia and Uranus that pulsates at the root of this world.
we know how to receive her with senses below the senses, to read the movement of a summer wind through the leaves, to feel the formation of birds in the sky, to drink the smell of wet earth and to know it all to be holy and made of freedom. Just as a seed doesn’t need to be taught how to become a tree, a fruit, or a flower, so your body carries the imprint of how to live rooted in an inherent belonging; how to be a human in a world of diversity, living fully awake to the union that breathes us all.
The Ego Cannot Love Eric Baret
We can’t talk about love, because it isn’t an objective experience. It’s what is here every moment—except when I pretend to love or when I want to be loved. When I want to be loved, I want something. When I want something, I don’t love. When I no longer want to love or to be loved, when I set myself free from this desire to own or feel something, what is left is love. If there is loyalty to this love, it is true loyalty. But every time I love someone, every time I want to…
Faithfulness to love isn’t something we do. It is what is constantly revealed—except when I want to love or be loved. Then there is betrayal,…
Loving someone is a projection, a fantasy—as is not loving someone. Saying that I don’t love such or such a person is a fantasy. It’s cutting myself off from my resonance. When I say someone isn’t friendly, I live in my fantasy, in my arrogance. I am cut off from reality. If I am present, there is nothing that isn’t friendly. But if I live in my fantasy, everything that doesn’t fit my expectation is unfriendly. So loving or hating belong to the same fantasy world and have nothing to do with reality. The nature of things is love. Therefore I can’t say that I love anything. Loving someone would mean loving others less. That is not love, that is lack of love. Love isn’t exclusive, it’s inclusive. Some people love their children more than other children. That’s pathological. The child in front of me is my child. Needing love, needing to be loved—we need to set ourselves free from this fantasy from women’s magazines! No one ever loved us, no one will ever love us. No one can love. The ego cannot love…
Needing to be loved is a disease; so is needing to love. The disease resolves itself in the awakening of somatic sensitivity. When this awakens, we become free of imaginary needs. Need is future. In sensitivity, in the…
Being in love is the expression of a lack of love. It means that everything I am not in love with becomes second priority. I am in love. If someone needs me I don’t have time for them because I am in love! That is not right. We are in love with what is here now, not with someone we need to go visit, neglecting all the suffering in our immediate environment. The only true faithfulness is to this obvious fact. Unconditional love for someone is a teenage girl fantasy. It’s unconditional…until it’s conditional. Most human beings need to be in a couple to live in a certain harmony. Many people like to talk and they need someone to listen. Of course they could talk to the wall, but most people have too many concepts to appreciate the depth of the wall. That’s why they get married; but it’s only a question of time before they talk to the wall. For most, marriage is a good deal. “If you give me this, I’ll give you that. If you love me, I’ll…
This doesn’t prevent us, for functional or economic reasons, from taking part in the strange rites of our societies. At some point, it simply becomes impossible to find any emotion in them.
Part Seven: Exploring the Shadows Exploring the shadows means becoming intimate with anything we have rejected, felt ashamed of, or have kept in the dark because of old, unresolved wounds or trauma.
This journey of descending into human messiness and vulnerability was, to say the least, a deeply humbling experience. At first, we tried to meet our shadow and “resolve our issues” from an intellectual or psychological perspective, but as we went deeper it became clear that the way forward was to focus on the somatic, which in turn revealed an entire universe of sensations and a whole new way of knowing ourselves. Facing our shadows, venturing into the dark and unknown inner territories, requires courage and vulnerability. But as the negative forces of trauma are transmuted and we begin to integrate and weave the trapped energy into our being,
our bodies become more alive, sensitive, and open. We grow more able to surrender to and experience life without judgment. Being a messy, embodied, weird human being becomes much more attractive than showing up wearing a blissful mask covering an ocean of unexpressed pain.
“Both the shadow and the light are the dance of love.” —Maurizio and Zaya
Developmental Trauma and the Transformation of Anger and Rage Julie Brown Yau
The dual nature of trauma can both potentiate and depotentiate our deepest capacity for knowing our essence. In this light, I view trauma as inherently spiritual at its core, as spirituality is about knowing who we are in essence—our beingness. Spirituality points to our direct experience of what feels sacred to us. Healing trauma, I have found, brings us to an experience of sacredness within us. This can be central for connecting to something larger than our individual self, and for the full resolution of trauma. As we heal trauma, we’re softened with the strength of vulnerability, reenergized with the unblocked flow of our life force; our heart opens to love, to knowing we are love, and fear diminishes or dissolves. When trauma is left unattended and unresolved, this interconnected and loving relationship to life is evaded.
In the face of perceived threat, with no loving other to tend to their needs, an infant or child has little choice but to shut down and disconnect from their body and overwhelming emotions—to go away.
Dissociation is the body’s oldest defense mechanism. Dissociation seems preferable to the perceived threat of alienation, abandonment, and perceived annihilation when essential needs go unmet. To avoid the emotional and physical pain and intolerable emotions of trauma, we may seek solace in our intellect or spiritual realms. The parts of our brain that transmit the visceral feelings that convey emotions may shut down, disabling our ability to feel—the pain and the joy.