On the nondual highway of inner-growth there can come a stage where gross egotism replaces authentic unfolding. Called by some the ‘spiritual ego’, this is the valley of temptation where the individual mind pulls every punch to maintain its supremacy in the world of “might is right”.
The underlying motivation is sound enough: to protect the whole from facing that which must never be felt, or experiencing that which must never be experienced.
Regardless of the customized version of individual horror, there is always one word that repeats in this last battalion of ego defence: that word is ‘helpless’.
Helplessness. On reflection it makes sense that this pure and innocent quality should have become so condemned in a culture which is in creative overdrive to the point of self destruction.
Yet it is a nondual position which is always here. We never get rid of our helplessness, no matter how we try to build battalions on the shore lines of supreme creative control. We can’t manifest an antidote to helplessness. No amount of adoration and no quantity of cash will make it go away. We are born out of helplessness and our first impressions of this world are formed through helplessness.
Actually, only through helplessness can we allow impressions at all. We are helpless, whether we want it or not, in every moment of our waking life and during every drop of sleep. We are helpless in stress and helpless in relaxation. We are helpless in the past, present and future. We will be helpless in the dissolution of our minds and in the decay of our bodies. We are helpless in getting born and helpless in death.
Awareness can only allow. It is purely receptive, utterly non-exclusive.
Pure, unidentified awareness is also helpless. Helplessness is its nature (That is perhaps why awakening can often spur such a reaction of control and superiority). Pure awareness exists beyond conditions. It doesn’t get to choose what arises and what dies away. It can’t alter reality through intent. Awareness can only allow form. It is purely receptive, utterly non-exclusive. It even has to allow separation and the possibility of its own negation.
There is much that the stubborn vestiges of conditioned mind would like to exclude. With roots reaching deep into the not-yet conscious precincts of our minds, these forms repeat in old patterns: patterns often inherited through the generations or mimicked from each other in our natural passion to belong as one. They are hardwired neural networks frozen in time, passed from father to son and from sister to brother.
Yet the map of the brain can be rewritten. The program is not absolute. Only the separate self gasping its last breath would say otherwise.
Unity opens a horror of helplessness. How often we hear the question: but what about the holocaust? What about ISIS? Just when the separate self is beginning to shake in its rooftops. As long as there is ISIS, the logic of fear says, we must divide ourselves from the whole. If not as individuals, then at least as a clan.
“Why do I have to kill everyone?” weeps the Italian Mafiosi in a well-known (ironically Israeli) comedy.
Trees are not separate, and as such, have no fear of death.
A subtler lie of the separate self is found in the belief in the separate suffering of the separate self. This is barely understood and yet reveals the nature of suffering at a new depth.
Is my suffering separate from the suffering of someone in another nation? Where do we draw the line? Is there a line? Is suffering separate from our experience, even after enlightenment? Isn’t this absence of separation from the whole the very scared motor behind the desire to teach, serve, write?
Yet like a psychopath on a bad day, the separate self pitifully weeps at its own separate suffering. In this, it keeps itself alive. “Why do I have to kill everyone?” weeps the Italian Mafiosi in a well-known (ironically Israeli) comedy.
The root source of all suffering is the belief in a separate self. That means that humanity itself is afflicted by this agony – the agony of believing themselves separate, helpless and alone. Each and every one of the 7 billion people alive now suffer this belief, or are liable to. There is nothing exclusive about the suffering of the separate self. It’s a zone. A dimension of dread. It’s hell on earth. And when we choose for it, the noose tightens.
There is a well-known technique to deal with the pain of loneliness – one of the attributes of separation. It involves deeply allowing our own loneliness, and then connecting that to the loneliness of others around us, anyone, (or soon) everyone. In the paradox of being lonely together, a transformation begins.
This shock of judgement is a by-product of free choice – a myth which is on a collision course with life beyond illusion.
Right now, humanity is one, unified separate self, as seen from a certain dimension. It is separate from the universe, separate from nature and separated from its own present moment. It is also a great being which contains tremendous loneliness. Alone in its journey through the darkness, alone it its inner fights, alone even with its self-destruction.
Humanity is helpless in the vast expanse of space from which it seeks release, above all from the historic forms that hold it captive. These forms are born of the great and infantile collective mind that cultivates an amorphous and toxic reality based on the shock of judgement between good and evil. The self and the stranger. Us and them. This shock of judgement is a by-product of free choice – a myth which is on a collision course with life beyond illusion.
We can only be responsible for the war between good and evil when we are consolidated in a deeper source that precedes all such binary equations. Both good and evil are motivated by a fear of annihilation. Until there is freedom from that fear, or from the belief that we at source could ever have an end-point in time and space, then the war will go on.
The whole organism is in crisis, but everywhere individual cells are awakening. Awakening represents not the activation of creative mind but of receptive mind.
Receptive mind is able to receive what is real without distorting perception through the artifacts of fear. Receptive mind is able to allow multiple perspectives. Receptive mind has no business with absolute truth or authority. Rather than dictating the reality, it receives it.
When mind is in a position of allowance it becomes an open sense organ – perhaps perceiving the universe of itself for the first time.
Through this perception, the whole body of humanity begins to resonate at a different frequency.
The more we are consolidated in that perceiving source that can open in pure receptivity, the more humanity as a whole will begin to unfold in freedom.
It is happening anyway. And every one of us is helpless in that.
Thank goodness.
Spiritual teacher Georgi Y. Johnson is author of I AM HERE – Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty. You can watch an interview with her on Conscious TV here. You can also connect with Georgi through Facebook, Twitter and Youtube
