Foreword to the second edition
WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? Who is the one that is conscious of the question?
What do we feel we are? What within us can feel this energetic substance of self – this existential “you-ness” from behind time and space?
Where do we find ourselves? Can we be limited, caught, or ultimately defined? From where does location come? Where is the perceptive center of all dimensions of time and space, out of which all experience emerges?
I AM HERE is a text that takes us behind the mysteries of who, what, and where we are, through the primal portals of direct experience, to the singular source of the one that perceives – the source of you.
When I AM HERE was first published, many viewed it as abstract, conceptual, and beyond reach. Already in the last century, Jiddu Krishnamurti presented teachings aimed at shifting the human psyche beyond fear-driven prisons of mind and artificial structures of time, yet although he was honored, many deemed him incomprehensible. What hope could there be then, for a popular reception of a meditative work that aims not only to liberate the mind caught in forms of thought, but also the heart caught in densities of feeling, and the body trapped in reflexive patterns of stress and depression?
In its purity, I AM HERE describes phenomena that can easily be experienced by every one of us.
In the dimension of mind, it asks for mindfulness, which is chiefly mindfulness of the many ways we have been programmed into states of mental slavery. This slavery is found in the insistence that “I think therefore I AM.” If I don’t think with my head, I cannot exist. Check this out. Is it really true to our experience?
This is the dimension of thought, where many of us chiefly live. It is a different chamber from the dimension of feeling (where we experience, love, sadness, happiness, and all that for which we strive). This, in turn, is a different chamber from the dimension of physical sensation.
Just as different brain areas reflect information processing through these three dimensions of experience, so does each chamber of experience activate a subtly different perceptive faculty.
Mind
That awakened consciousness experienced when we release attachment to the linguistic structures of mind is often called transcendental, as it shifts our perspective to a place of overview, beyond the agenda of separate identity.
Conscious awakening releases us from the limitations of thinking patterns inherited from the past which are structured around the short-term, separate agenda to get the pleasure from life and not the pain.
Because we never feel quite sufficient in knowledge, reality, or truth, we try to conform to that which we are “supposed” to be, thinking that which we are “supposed” to think.
Caught in the wheel of separate survival, this area of the mind is programmed like an old binary computer, with either-or, mutually exclusive, options. It degrades experience to good or bad outcomes and generates enormous pressure in making the right, either-or choice. It antidotes this unbelievable mental stress by braving it out, setting up consensual truths in the form of the “known” and shutting down the mystery of infinite possibility found in higher faculties of the mind. In this contraction of mental ability, flexibility is lost, and the individual becomes even more unsafe in an exaggerated dependence on outer authorities for the “truth” or to reference “reality”. This further generates the biochemistry of stress and fear, locking down consciousness within the mind of duality. The binary mind is addicted to the dictation of experiential reality. Rather than receiving sensory and sentient impressions, it censors, creates, and tries to control them.
Because we never feel quite sufficient in knowledge, reality, or truth, we try to conform to that which we are “supposed” to be, thinking that which we are “supposed” to think. To do this, we split from our inherent direct experience, importing programs of conformity from consensual authorities that might pretend power, but are reactive and based on autonomous patterns for which no-one is either responsible or in control. Our mental form becomes subjugated to the dictates of fear – hardly taking form before it is deformed in order to conform to what we imagine the world wants of us.
Evidence that this state of mind is so prevalent (it is even blindly inculcated through our educational systems), doesn’t make it an ultimate reality. It might be a collective prison, but it is still a prison – a temporal restriction on the unending landscape of consciousness. Even though the software claims an exclusive hold on the processing of reality, that doesn’t give it a monopoly on experience. This collective conditioning of fear and threat – the murderous dictates of competing opposites within binary thought-forms – is unsustainable and generates existential fields of suicidal despair. It is a cuckoo’s nest which is disintegrating through epidemics of stress and the criminalization of existential freedom. In droves, individuals are flying out of the mental programming of thought-based limitation, and this is creating whole subcultures of conscious awakening and nondual wisdom.
It is a pandemic of sanity. Not the kind of socially conformed sanity positioned as a contra to the ominous threat of being deemed insane, but open-ended sanity that involves the pure sight and clarity of mind that is revealed when old thought forms lose the strength to conceal the unlimited power of consciousness. Though this infectious wave of awakening, original thinkers and changemakers are emerging in droves, through all walks of life.
When we become conscious not just of thoughts, but even conscious of consciousness itself, then a doorway opens to infinite mental possibility. It is a space of no thought, out of which every thought can arise, but through which it is realized that no thought-form can ultimately possess the consciousness that birthed it.
Zen Buddhism has called this the mind of non-discrimination. The mental shift from the discriminating. binary mind to include the mind of nondiscrimination, is akin to the shift from a mechanistic view of the world made of levers, triggers, and artificially composed sequences of cause and effect, to a quantum view. Whereas the mechanistic view offers a repeating drudgery of patterns, as the psychological machine grinds on with little real change from generation to generation, the quantum view reveals the skylight of freedom. This pure, unthreatened, unified field of light offers clarity, insight, inspiration, and natural genius to the human endeavor. It opens all possibilities. It resets the machine so that the miraculous has perceptive space to appear.
In terms of brain anatomy, we could see this shift in consciousness as a movement in which the prefrontal cortex is liberated, leading to an enlightening of possibility throughout the whole cerebral cortex, especially the midline between left and right brain regions. Neurologically seen, it is a nondual awakening out of the bias toward the “rational” mind. There is a liberation of light in which the binary, “either-or” dogmatism gives way to what feels like a transcendental dimension. The whole brain begins to reform neural networks in service of this field of existential freedom. The biochemistry of the brain also changes as the liberation of the sense of truth and the revelation of higher, unlimited conscious identity – the one, spiritual “I” – activates the reward system. This reward system is immensely healing, generating a sense of wellbeing, unconditional fulfillment, and bliss. Worldly addictions with overloads and whiplashes of guilt, shame, and stress, simply pale in the context of these clean, spontaneous, natural endorphins.
When we become conscious not just of thoughts, but even conscious of consciousness itself, then a doorway opens to infinite mental possibility.
Heart
When consciousness is released from the exclusive energetic clutch of thought forms, our second perceptive window – that of sentient awareness – opens more widely. The spatial dimension of the right brain areas can now become flooded with fresh sentience. We feel our feelings in the present moment. We do not feel them yesterday or later. Yesterday’s feelings can only be relived in the present moment. Tomorrow’s feelings can be anticipated in the present moment. All feeling only happens now.
The Now is the window through which we dive through the floor of mental dominance into the dimension of sentient awareness. The more we are at peace in the heart area, the more durable the effect of conscious awakening. When suffering in the heart seems impossible, we can bypass this pain by seeking increasing transcendental experiences through higher consciousness. This phenomenon is becoming known as spiritual bypassing, which can develop into spiritual psychosis. The gravitational pull to incarnate into the direct sentient experience of being alive is so strong, that to resist it is to create a split – a split which can only be sustained through dogmatic beliefs and a kind of spiritual covert aggression toward “life”. When the bright light of liberated godly consciousness shines on our worst sentient nightmares, it can feel like the most horrific and unexpected fall from enlightened grace. This is why the realization of the perceptive window of sentient awareness becomes so critical to wellbeing.
The gravitational pull to incarnate into the direct sentient experience of being alive is so strong, that to resist it is to create a split – a split which can only be sustained through dogmatic beliefs and a kind of spiritual covert aggression toward “life”.
This area of the heart – where we feel joy, happiness, belonging – or peace, is also an area of undefended suffering. Without the numbing shield of the thinking mind, there are energetic contractions that when exposed to the objectifying light of consciousness can freeze as impossible, or unbearable. This can result in the sense of “senselessness”, or a thick, liquid, feeling of “nothing”. It can seem so much easier to think about what or who we are than to feel the resonance of it in the present moment.
Our conditioning has told us there is nothing there. Our experience has told us that when something shows up there, it is mostly disturbance – a sense of heaviness, depression, or lack on the one hand, and an unforgivable rage, destructiveness, unreliable evil, or betraying horniness on the other. We learned young to censor feelings and emotions and to dishonor this dimension of experience as a kind of evolutionary quirk that distracts us from our role in life. This means that we cloud the window of sentient awareness, forgetting how to feel anything at all, and becoming locked down in cycles of stress and depression.
Even therapeutically seen, behavior, conformity, and functionality are often prioritized over the deeper and more authentic experience of the individual. Intimacy with feelings and emotions is discouraged. “Negative” feelings and emotions are denied, while “Positive” ones are seen as fortunate by-products of the restoration of functionality.
For example, it is good that a client finds peace as a by-product of returning to work and managing domestic responsibilities. But if he finds infinite peace – a peace that overwhelms his conditioning – then we have a problem. The same goes for happiness. Psychology looks for us to be almost happy, but not unconditionally happy because that is somehow judged as delusional.
Another example is if someone uncovers the essence of unconditional wellbeing. The very software of collective conditioning demands that we never pass through the doorways of the unconditional. We need to worry, regret, be afraid, and strive to improve, or else we will fail. Failure means the most unbearable, amorphous, thing that we’ve been running from our whole lives will finally happen. We will be overcome by the danger which we dread so much to the core that we forgot what it is. Unconditional wellbeing deflates the threat which gets us all running to the unsynchronized rhythms of fear.
When we drop back into pure sentience, resting as that living entity that is able to “feel” all varieties of experience, then there is an empowerment of the heart. The window of sentient awareness opens. Our conscious attention is now following the revelation of sentient experience. It does not dictate feelings or emotions, trying to conform them to established norms, but rather honors the space of awareness in which they arise as sentient vibrations and through which they form and transform. This sentient awareness is at once fully empathic and intimate with the resonant content of our feelings, at the same time, that it is the sky through which the weather of our feelings and emotions moves.
Obstruction, restriction, contraction, and affliction in the energy of feelings of emotions, that cloud the vista of the heart, cause disturbances in the mind, contorting, and filtering mental consciousness.. We are so thoroughly taught to bypass our feeling awareness, that we often reach way too far out into the neverlands to try and solve the problems and unbearable restlessness we feel on the inside. The need to realize the window of awareness is so deep and central to the holistic needs of the whole human psyche, that this part of I AM HERE – the section on “AM” or “Being” has birthed the whole field of Nondual Therapy. The book: Nondual Therapy – The Psychology of Awakening lists over 100 contractions of spiritual qualities or qualities of our true nature, together with their associated contractions.
The resourcing of the qualities of true nature – which spontaneously arise as effects of liberated consciousness and awareness – presents a psychotherapeutic revolution. The introduction of love as being present even within the field of hatred, or the sense of belonging in and around the suffering of rejection (for example) has a transformational effect on experience which increases resilience within suffering without dumbing, numbing, or shunning any thought, feeling or emotion.
Since Nondual Therapy emerged out of the I AM HERE teachings, this deeply holistic and scientifically validated field is budding across the world and is increasing both in the number of practitioners and the demand for more enlightened forms of therapy.
Body
While the heart level – our sentient awareness – is critical to integration and mental wellbeing, it cannot be divided from the physical manifestation of the whole. To split the dimension of sentience from our physicality is to create an artificial floor of being – a threshold of consciousness – around the solar plexus. When we stand on this shaky floor, we conflict with our physicality (without really experiencing its miracle), and our sentience is unsupported. When the floor of our sentience is fear or the resistance to physical life, it can be hard to release energetic contractions. Experience remains conditional, often based on the fear of suffering associated with death or annihilation. This is why falling through the floor of basic fear into the dimension of perceptive emptiness is a master key to holistic liberation.
Only through the passage into emptiness do we become unconditionally free to dance in duality, through all forms of experience, without shrinking according to the dictates of fear. We even become free to be afraid, but fear now works for us as part of our orchestra of sensitivity, rather than against us as the prison warden of limitation.
To be alive is no longer to be trapped in life.
When liberated consciousness and sentient awareness – mind and heart – are no longer in conflict with each other, the two faculties blend, and we find that we are this existential perceiver that is outside of space and time, unchanging and undying, that underlies all experience.
In falling back as this living channel of perceptive singularity, stress releases out of a field of spiritual tiredness, and experience is released from prescriptive agendas. To be alive is no longer to be trapped in life. It’s no longer a subtle punishment, test, or unwritten assignment. Rather than being caught in a state of punitive detention, where we are obliged to compensate our own emanation with good behavior, we find we are now invited into a playing field of unrestricted possibility. This field of possibility is unconditional – it is unconditional even to the conditions of form. It reveals itself through an ingenious evolution toward the wellbeing of the whole. Through perception through emptiness, the underlying beauty of true nature can be experienced through perpetually alive impressions and expressions through all vibrations of form.
This window of perception is entered through the direct miracle of physical sensation in the here and now. The awakening of conscious awareness, deep inside the body, asks that our perception be cleansed of all agenda which often shows up in the subtle resonance of attitudes glued to consciousness on the one side and states of being on the other. Attitudes of consciousness can include, for example, an attitude of having to push or exert ourselves to gain something. States of being can include atmospheric backgrounds at the backdrop of reality such as gloominess or doom. They are unconscious until they become apparent as subtle vibrations in that space where we awaken within the physical body.
When we drop into pure perception and consciously touch the vibrational layers of physical manifestation, a field of pure possibility opens which is now incarnated, showing the potential of full human manifestation. A new kind of unity opens which includes the physical dimension and reduces any need to be fearful of physicality. Projections of form onto the physical dimension break down, and the mind begins to receive the miracle of living material, directly from the field of the unknown. With this, empires of stress and legacies of fear begin to release as the energetic material of experience out of the very cells of the body.
Real change occurs, which opens the wonder and realization of the naturalness of physical healing. We no longer work against the body, in its precious fragility and destiny. We are alive as a body, knowing the awe of the body as a miraculous emanation of life.
When we touch emptiness, then our sentient awareness is supported in even deeper liberation from the compulsion to contract fields of suffering. When we touch emptiness, then also the field of awakened consciousness is liberated, opening the primary organ of perception – the brain – as the receptive headquarters of multidimensional information.
All this leads to expression and manifestation unfettered by fear. This is what Buddhists have called the end of suffering or the deathless state. When we know the end of suffering and are no longer limited by the fear of death, then the deepest compassion for all forms of life is free to flow through us. This brings tremendous fulfillment and unconditional reward. We have transitioned from slavery to freedom and in this, perception of reality transforms, to an alive unfolding of a shared process that is far more truthful and purposeful than anything we knew before.
I AM HERE & New Scientific Insights
In the seven years since the first publication of I AM HERE, scientific, therapeutic, and cultural shifts have further validated its founding inspiration.
Polyvagal Theory and the work of Dr. Steven Porges[ii] has added to the field of Somatic Experiencing with tremendous insights around the role of the vagus nerve. This “wandering nerve” is the longest cranial nerve, stretching from the brain stem to the colon and with sensors on every physical organ. The vagus nerve is involved in energizing, awakening, and healing the physical body, physical heart, and physical brain. Yet most of the information it carries is sentient, meaning not only about physical stress or distress, but also emotional. The vagus nerve literally mediates between the part of our psychological physiology related to fear, conscious awakening, and shock, and that which is related to rest, digestion, processing, and contemplation.
That is, with fibers deep into the pelvic area, the vagal nerve allows the vibrational dance between the sympathetic part of the nerve system (which is involved with conscious awakening) and the parasympathetic (connected with sentient awareness). It is the perceptive information highway of physicality, sentience, and mental processing. When it is free, then experience is free. We are no longer hijacked by fear or afraid of being overwhelmed by any other kind of feeling or emotion. We shift from being captivated in agendas of survival as a separate entity, into the liberation of existence in the here and now. When this shift happens, the same neurological patterns reset to naturalness. Their natural function is in processing the miracle – in allowing the incredible charge of energetic arousal to move through the whole form and into the whole universe of forms. This deeper passion is motivational, inspirational, and fundamental to our sense of purpose and wellbeing. This in turn is immediately awakening the biochemistry of reward and fulfillment. The vagus nerve is now of service to the splendid movement of manifestation of our uniqueness as an inseparable expression of the unity of the whole. The deeper, more inclusive celebration of healing begins. The genius within this movement of passion is described in the book Nondual Passion.
From the sensory networks of the body to the cardiovascular networks of our endocrine and immunological systems, we find that a parallel, scientific, psychophysical revolution has occurred over the past decade. Through her research and in her book The Molecules of Emotion[iii], the late Dr. Candace Pert reveals to us through scientific evidence that has always been experientially apparent – that there is a direct and precise biochemical reflection of feelings and emotions.
The way we feel is not only the result of the biochemistry of the body, but it is also generating certain biochemistry. This means that the healing power of love, or perhaps even the effect of prayer is no longer unsubstantiated “woo-woo.”
Another development since I AM HERE’s first publication has emerged in the therapeutic arena of psychological inheritance. Research in the field of epigenetics has shown how trauma, or incomplete cycles of experience disrupted by stress, becomes encoded in the inheritance of the genes. Here, in the tiny, vibrational zone at the core of our physical cells, core disturbances generate emotional resonance and patterns of stress, thought, and behavior. This is such a clear example of how there is no such thing as “away” – an empty unconscious space where we can forever discard broken pieces of ourselves. The body keeps the score, stores the information, and releases it through an ongoing interplay with the environment out of which it is formed.
Only processes of emptiness – sometimes resembling a shamanic journey or a bardo state – have the power to release and reintegrate these lost and restless phantoms of pain.
As we look deeper, through an experiential lens, into the body, it becomes clear also that in the core of our bones – in that part of our anatomy that is considered most ancient and least alive – we are perpetually sourcing stem cells. Stem cells are the undifferentiated master cells of all life. Biologically seen, they are the equivalent of the field of infinite possibility. Like that field of the unmanifest that fills the emptiness, they take form according to the needs of the whole. The differentiation of stem cells into manifest forms happens according to the resonance of need. The more aligned we are to the deeper needs of the whole, beyond even the divisors of the separate self, the greater our physical attunement to wellbeing through all vibrations of form.
This new science invites us to take responsibility for the spiritual qualities of our true nature – those unconditional fields of resonance which are not pleasant accessories but rather are fundamental to our physical, mental, and psychological naturalness. As the current epidemic of stress, depression, and opiate abuse reaches unsustainable proportions, the need to rediscover, remember, and resource our true nature becomes increasingly immediate.
We are not passive recipients of an inert physical body, but the active field of conscious resonance through which the physical form manifests. When we find ourselves as that existential source of all form, through the windows of perception, we become observer participants, dancing through time in the unfolding of all creation through our conscious awareness.
Therapeutic fields that have grown out of these somatic insights have shown how powerful bodywork can be in processes of psychological healing, and how inseparable and permeable is the boundary between thought, feeling, and sense perception. All impressions arise, merge, and temporarily differentiate within the field of experience – the playing field of perception through emptiness.
This inseparability becomes apparent through the suffering caused where we try to exclude one of the perceptive windows – for example, to exclude the body in an emotional process, or to exclude the mind in a medical process, or to exclude feelings in either a physical or mental process. Yet inclusion is only possible through the liberation of the windows of perception – one way or another – in a way described by I AM HERE.
Just as in naturalness, a cat can be in one moment all-claws and in the next moment merging in seamless unity, and in the next, giving birth to her young with spontaneous knowhow and grace, so are we hardwired for the natural wellbeing and aliveness that comes forward when we move beyond the limitations of perception.
At first, this could be through becoming conscious of consciousness and witnessing our life beyond any local thought-form. Next, it could be becoming aware of awareness – resting as pure, unconditional sentience in an unconditional availability to any vibration. And of course, our passion, power, and purpose here are inherent to the movement moving as the miracle of physical manifestation – the vessel through which all thoughts and feelings are temporarily anchored in the miraculous touching point of being alive for real. In this moment of pure physical aliveness, heaven is revealed in the wildflowers of true nature.
We perpetually arrive to a home we find we never left.
Georgi Y. Johnson, December 2020
[i] Nondual Therapy – The Psychology of Awakening, Georgi Y. Johnson
[ii] The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation; Stephen Porges
[iii] The Molecules of Emotion: Dr. Candace Pert
