Often, we read about awakening, enlightenment and self realization as if it is an instant “happening”. Our shared craving for this “end-point” is part of the momentum which drives us forward in our lives, and which is giving us the impression of being in control of our personal and collective evolution.
Yet in this constant drive towards the end-point, the true magic is lost – a magic that can never be created, attained or held by hand, mind or heart. That reality is the simplicity and immensity of who we are.
“Live in the Here and Now.”
It is easy to say. Yet even masters such as Eckhart Tolle do not claim to be perpetually (and exclusively) in the here and now – instead they point towards an ongoing process.
In this, in honesty and authenticity, the teaching of awakening (realizing that the past and future are mental constructs), evolves into the teaching of enlightenment (letting ourselves rest in the infinite space in which we shine like a sun from our own being). Yet this too, is not an end-point.
Those who really listen and follow the teachings of those such as Tolle, will notice a vital sub-clause to his moment of awakening. This is: “Do not resist anything”.
It is not surprising that Tolle’s teachings evolved into A New Earth, as enlightenment in itself cannot believe it can be private – excluding the “other” – or the vast web of consciousness in multitudinous forms presently here as part of the planet. The language changes from individual salvation, to collective evolution, and quite rightly.
Resistance is a brother of rejection, of denial – above all of the denial of the full experience of being human, here and now. It is through this opening to the here and now, that the transience even of the here and now can be realized. This is self-realization, the process of shedding the layers of private and collective fears that are glued blindly to perception itself, and that continue to hold us hostage in our freedom to be deeply, beautifully human. Ironically, the core of most of these fears is the illusion of rejection.
“Ultimately, creation can be ignorant in only one way. This is the ignoring of its own source. In allowing its own source, it must also allow the duality of destruction.” ~ Georgi
Yet in the subtle switch from the present moment to the beauty of being, there is still not one who will honestly claim that this is the final home. Yes. we will hear it preached, pointed to, by those who are not in “being” at the bank, with the accountant, or at the local drug-store. Again, it is position, or perspective, which is pointed to.
What these broad schools of spirituality are doing is bringing forward perspectives of tremendous value in the art of living. To take a second in a moment of mental warfare, drop all identification with form and outcome, and to come into the Now, does have enormous power. It gives a reset which opens our possibilities of choice.
To move beyond the emotion, pain or grief of the heart, and to rest in our own unconditional being, likewise brings a highly beneficial inner soup kitchen where we can re-tank in a safe space unrestricted by fear, before moving outwards again to negotiate or heal that same grief, trauma, or pain in the area of feeling.
When these teachers put themselves to service, they position themselves in the Now, or in pure Being, or in a combination of both, in order to open those channels to others. Then, as Eckhart Tolle said at one recent show, they go home, and still squabble about who has to take the garbage out.
Where are we not yet free?
Many of these teachings have a repeating theme – perhaps adopted from their Eastern origins, or perhaps because it was so much part of the awakening of these same teachings. The theme is “You are not your body.”
As such, there is a rejection inherent to their teachings, together with a subtle duality between consciousness and body, or between Being and body, or between consciousness and mind. Again and again, a choice is presented as a precondition to wholeness. To find yourself, you must reject the body. To find yourselves (and in the blurry language many call this enlightenment) you must reject the mind.
I would be convinced if there was any example of a fellow human functioning without mind and without any body. But this is not the case. And I have a thing with rejection, and with subtle forms of deceit.
“Emptiness is the window of perception through which something and nothing become one. The ‘Thing’ melts.”
It is entirely true that it is a form of insanity to identify with the body, as if the body was an absolute definition of who we are. Cosmetic surgery, sex changes, the ageing process and inevitable death kind of put a dampener on this belief. Perhaps we sometimes need the reminder that we could lose a leg or two, and that we would still be here. Yet it seems entirely clear that we ARE the body right now, and that it would be more precise to say that we are not ONLY the body – it is one emanation of all we are from one moment to the next.
In the same way, it is a form of insanity to identify with individual being. This also is changing, although often through processes of gentle cause and effect. Being can refine, and can even vanish into non-being. It can also be obscured by more vulgar emanations of itself. Mixtures with different energies bring out different qualities of being. Some qualities leave us, while new ones arrive. Yet we are our being, it is just more correct to say we are NOT ONLY our being.
The only area we are not free is in our need to identify. To exchange the identification with thought processes with an identification with pure consciousness is productive, but just a step on the way for a karmic moment of unconsciousness. To exchange identification with the body with the identification of being (as being ALL we are), is again bringing forward an entirely needless limitation of identification which is based on nothing short of control and fear.
Yes, I have met those who will hammer on about pure awareness as an absolute end point of who we are. These ones, tend to be frustrated, superior and quite shockingly wed to a doctrine which was never created even out of their own experience. The evident clutching for an end point can only be a creation of the same thinking mind they claim to be free of. It is as if these new age evangelists are talking about a distant home, that they visited ONCE and can hardly remember, holding onto the memory of a shadow of an experience of something that never could be held, still lest defined as absolute.
The ID Dance.
It is also OK to identify with a state, position, or experience, as long as we leave ourselves the freedom to release the identification. In the realm of self-realization and living unity, there is no longer a compulsion to divide, judge, and claim status. The compulsion is gone because the very movement is senseless. Yet pure curiosity remains – in such a way that where we lose our curiosity, we begin to build ego.
This pure, feeling curiosity can be guided through an allegiance to passing through the eye of the here and now to the truth which is always here – in every particle of human experience, including unconscious, unaware, physical, mental and emotional.
In this space – through the eye of the here and now – even the concepts of here and now, boundlessness and timelessness, infinity and eternity, lose reference.
But who has words for that?
