What it is Like to Awaken: The Dreamer & the Dream

Below is something I wrote on April 27th, 2008. This was the time immediately following my tumultuous radical awakening. By now I had discovered Eckhart Tolle so I had posessed the raw material to understand what had happened to me and what I could do with it. This period was characterized by a predominant interest in how, or even if, I should help others wake up, especially my girlfriend, Amber, and my son, Tristan. Eventually I came to accept that it is better to lead by example than to try to shake someone awake. That said, it is not unreasonable to be prepared with answers to questions that they may eventually ask. The process of assisting in others awakening is still something that resonates strong with me, and I suspect it will be a part of me for a long time.

The writing below discusses how I came across one of Tolle's metaphor's that describes what it is like to awaken. It is both awkward and fun for me to read the almost child-like exuberance that shines through my writing. It's also quite funny for me to think about what my state of mind was only six months ago. It makes me wonder where my head will be six months from now. It is evidence of how far you can go in such a short period of time, and it encourages me to press forward.

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April 27, 2008

I have been awake for several months now after a long, slow awakening process. My kensho, my moment of awakening, was spontaneous due to the intensity that I allowed my ego (my Level 1) to assign to the events that were occurring in my life. It has been a very odd realization that the vast majority of spontaneous awakenings occur to those that have accepted great stress, pain, and/or suffering. Naturally, why would those with “the good life” need to wake up? But it wasn’t so apparent when I first started delving into the topic.

Now that I am awake, I have been seeking a way to awaken my friends and loved ones, including my nine year old son. [He is now ten.] I have been very cautious to avoid a “born again” approach, as it has always been a red flag for me when others have been evangelical about their causes and beliefs. Yet the significance of awakening is so clearly important and, to me, the issue is irrefutable, so I am compelled to find a way to help those around me wake up. Like the Tao, I have been seeking the most natural way, the path of least resistance. Many of those close to me know that something has happened to me, but I have resisted going into great detail until I’m prepared to help them open the door to enlightenment.

Tonight, as I was flying over Vietnam on my way to Singapore, I had an epiphany. I will write what I scribbled down on the plane tonight and I would appreciate any input in making the message clearer. I hope that you might be able to use the metaphor to explain it to those around you.

I was reading Chapter 7 of Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth” entitled “Finding Who You Truly Are.” It is a phenomenal book for those of us who are already awake. I am concerned a bit that it might be beyond the unconscious masses, but time will tell. Regardless, I was reading “The Dreamer and the Dream” that starts on page 206. I will quote from Eckhart’s passage and then I will provide my proposed explanation to the unconscious of what it is like to awaken.

Eckhart Tolle wrote:

“Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe. Through it, consciousness (spirit) is freed from its imprisonment in form. Inner nonresistance to form – whatever is or happens – is a denial of the absolute reality of form. Resistance makes the world and the things of the world appear more real, more solid, and more lasting than they are, including your own form identity, the ego. It endows the world and the ego with a heaviness and an absolute importance that makes you take yourself and the world very seriously. The play of form is then misperceived as a struggle for survival, and when that is your perception, it becomes your reality.

“The many things that happen, the many forms that life takes on, are of an ephemeral nature. They are all fleeting. Things, bodies and egos, events, situations, thoughts, emotions, desires, ambitions, fears, drama... they come, pretend to be all-important, and before you know it they are gone, dissolved into the no-thingness out of which they came. Were they ever real? Were they ever more than a dream, the dream of form?

“When we wake up in the morning, the night’s dream dissolves, and we say, ‘Oh, it was only a dream. It wasn’t real.’ But something in the dream must have been real otherwise it could not be. When death approaches, we may look back on our life and wonder if it was just another dream. Even now you may look back on last year’s vacation or yesterday’s drama and see that it is very similar to last night’s dream.

“There is the dream, and there is the dreamer of the dream. The dream is a short-lived play of forms. It is the world – relatively real but not absolutely real. The there is the dreamer, the absolute reality in which the forms come and go. The dreamer is not the person {in the dream}. The person {in the dream} is part of the dream. The dreamer is the substratum in which the dream appears, that which makes the dream possible. It is {they are} the absolute behind the relative, the timeless behind time, the consciousness in and behind form. The dreamer is consciousness itself – who you are.

“To awaken within the dream is our purpose now. When we are awake within the dream, the ego-created earth-drama comes to an end and a more benign and wondrous dream arises. This is the new earth.”

Pardon me while I reread it again and thank Eckhart aloud. Through his writing and Plume’s publishing he has reached out across the universe to me and planted the seed to grow into the explanation that I will be using to help those around me to awaken. Awesome.

As I first read the passage above, in my awakened state, I clearly got the picture that Eckhart was painting. But my mind began to race. Would this be clear enough to shake my unconscious loved ones and friends awake? Alas, I felt that it only unlocked the door, maybe cracking it open. But if the metaphor of the dream could be fully explored, maybe it would be the alarm clock that I had been seeking. You tell me if it was. Please read the passage below and tell me what you think. Be brutal. I’m thick skinned and need, want, beg of you to fine tune it. If your comments allow me to awaken just one additional person, you effort is immeasurably worth it.

Here goes. Imagine laying this out for one of your most significant persons:

Can you remember a time when you were dreaming, and while you were in the dream, you were aware that you were dreaming? For some people, this happens quite frequently. If you can remember a time like that, try to recall the sensation of being both in the dream as well as knowing that you were dreaming. What did that feel like? Can you describe what it felt like? Did it feel like there were two of you? What we are looking for here is to feel as much as possible the sensation of being both the person in the dream as well as the dreamer, the person who is aware they are dreaming.

For active and frequent dreamers, you might even be able to recall the feeling of being able to control your dream, somewhat like a video game. Perhaps you have played video games, or those near to you play them. If so, you might be familiar with the concept of a “first person shooter” game, one where the perspective is that you are seeing through your character’s eyes and you see their hands in front of you. Is that what the dream felt like, like you were playing a video game like this, being both the character in the game and the person on the couch playing the game?

You might be able to recall your character in the dream knowing that you, the dreamer, can control the dream. This might possibly be accompanied by a sensation of relief or satisfaction. For some, the dream ends quickly after they experience this. The sense of relief causes the dream to dissolve and often times they wake up almost right away. For others, the most lucid of dreamers, they enjoy the point where they realize they are in control and the dream really takes off. You might think that the real lucid dreamers would control every element of their dream, but experienced lucid dreamers know that it’s much more fun to not control the environment, to just control their “character” and allow the dream-world to unfold before them. Some even think this might be a way to understand future events.

This is exactly the experience you have when you have an awakening (kensho). Before you awaken on your path to enlightenment, you operate as the character in the dream. When your being starts to awaken, it is the same sensation as the sleeping person who realizes they are having a dream. At first, you are only aware that you are dreaming and can only observe the you that is in your dream. The real you, the Presence, is observing your ego, your character in the dream. As your Presence awakens, you learn how to be more aware, and eventually you learn how to influence your environment, just like the sleeper is able to learn to control his dream. (The movie “Being John Malkovich” is a great exhibit of this process.)

Some people become very proficient at controlling their dreams. This is called lucid dreaming and literally anyone can learn to do it. (There are many resources on the web, just google “lucid dreams.”)

Eckhart Tolle, Wayne Dyer, Abraham-Hicks, The Secret, and What the Bleep Do We Know discuss the concept of manifesting your world. The lucid dreaming metaphor can be directly applied here. Just as the lucid dreamer can learn to control every aspect of their dream, these sources would say that you can learn to manifest every aspect of your world.

Well, that’s it. This is a brand new concept to me, as I just came up with it tonight and banged it into the computer as soon as I could get to my hotel room, so I’m sure it could use some tweaking. But as we are all truth seekers, I’m sure that the collective (Borg/Universe) will provide an improved version. I welcome the constructive criticism as my objective is to find a method to awaken the most number of unconscious persons as possible.

Thanks for your help.

Sean

PS – If you haven’t yet discovered him, please seek out material by the late, great Alan Watts. He is my inspiration and reason for awakening.

Essential Teachings & Resources

I admit it. I'm a consciousness junkie. Since my awakening late last year, I have had an insatiable appetite for both the academics of the topic as well as the experiential high I get when I elevate my consciousness. Early in my quest, however, I realized that the resources are not very well organized. It's kind of a big puzzle and the puzzle is growing as more and more authors put out book after book.

What I'd like to know is what book, movie, audio collection, or teaching system has been pivotal in your growth? I'd be interested in hearing about every influence that you feel might help other members along their path.

Just to save everyone typing the same thing, it is pretty clear that Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now" and "A New Earth" are essential reading, so you don't have to mention those two. But if you have listened to one of his audio or video resources and found it to be effective, please definitely mention that.

I'm constantly posting this kind of info, but here's a few "Can't Miss" from my list. A few have affected me when I read them, but are not on my can't miss because I have come across other material that I would cite as more significant or effective. (For example, James Redfield's "The Celestine Prophecy" was exactly what I needed to read at the time I read it, but it's not a "must read" if you are already onto the Tolle road.)

Alan Watts: Out of Your Mind (12 CDs)

This was the most significant work that affected my pre-awakening personal paradigm. Alan almost seduces you into understanding nondualism and then making it part of your own paradigm. His British accent and pleasantly applied charm present a very entertaining explanation of nondualism through mostly Buddhist and Taoist filters. The first six CDs are critical in understanding his topic. The second CDs are a practical explanation of Buddhism, Taoism, and some Hinduism, still they contain many Wattsian nuggets and shouldn't be missed.

Richard Moss: The Mandala of Being

This is the best consciousness reading that I've encountered since I came across Eckhart. Similarly, their concepts are very compatible and very close in nature. I suppose that one could say that their paradigms have great overlap. The book does a good job explaining the basics, preparing you for the deeper work. He then provides you with a tool that will help you get into the Now more often, longer, and deeper. If you want to tweak the high you get from truly being in the moment, this tool is an excellent technique. Richard describes the various stages of awakening and then shows the path of what it will likely be like in the subsequent stages. He has described my experience very well so far, so I feel I trust that the next stages will be as he describes, and that's comforting. As you might guess, I strongly recommend this book.

A Cource In Miracles (ACIM) (Foundation for Inner Peace)

I have not read very much of the entire collection of three books, which is the case for the majority of those that would say they have an interest in ACIM. Likewise, I have read several of the books that describe the ACIM concepts. Ken Wapnick, Robert Perry, and Gary Renard are three pretty renowned authors in the field. This perspective provides a one-step-away view of the course, and it also provides opportunities to hear several opinions of how the massive text could be interpreted. The overall concept in ACIM is total nondualism. The source of the text and the way it was documented is somewhat controversial, but that does not matter as to the validity of the course. The material in the course is a very sound explanation of one's view on reality and offers an answer as to why we are here in this life. I find the ACIM community to be very awake and wide open to ideas to further their quest for the truth. I recommend you find a local ACIM meeting group, as the Level 2 conversation there is outstanding.

I have a lot more favorite works to pass on, but these are the three that I would consider indispensable to my path. Your path might be different than mine, but for me, they are just what the doctor ordered.

So, what are your favorites, the ones that impacted you the most? Even if you just throw up the name of the material and the author, I'd like to know.

Sean

E=mc^2, Einstein, the Theory of Everything, and You

This is a post of something that I wrote on May 20th, 2008. I emailed it to a few friends, but I wrote it mainly to capture something that I got in my head during while I was sitting in the cockpit. I would imagine that my perspective has changed a bit in the last five months, but I'm posting this exactly as I had it in the email. I might come back to it in the future to see if I can improve on the theory. In the next few weeks I'll dig through my email and post some more of my ramblings.

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Well, I'm at it again. I've been reading, listening to, talking with friends about, and dreaming of all of this stuff for months now. You know the stuff. Tolle. Abraham. Watts. Einstein. Taylor. The Secret. What the Bleep. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Super String Theory. Relativity. At times, it seems there's so much to learn, so little time. But other times, when I get it into the proper perspective (the present moment, right?), I am thankful for how much I know and understand. Yesterday was one of those days. Funny enough, I know that yesterday was a "bad" day for some of you. I wonder if that is random, or if that is, as Abraham would say, intended by ourselves. I know I am recovering from a cold, so I probably brought the cold on, too, right? Maybe I brought the cold on so that I would once again have an "excuse" to stay in my hotel room for 40 hours straight while I dive into more material.

Enough of that, as my emails are already notoriously long. I would like to try to explain something that came to me while I was flying yesterday, something that moved me more than anything I can recall in the last 20 years. I was enroute to Hong Kong from LAX. We had come off break and my flying partner and I got very little rest. He was a bit tired so he decided to, um, meditate for a short while, which was fine with me. I was wide awake (physiologically as well as mentally) and was reading Tolle's "The Power of Now." Specifically, I was on page 84 when I had my epiphany.

I should preface this (as I have a penchant for doing) by mentioning the graphic that I had drawn up about 20 minutes earlier. Something that Jill Bolte Taylor (the neuroanatomist that recounted her own stroke) said has really made me aware of why the left and right halves of the brain do what they do. The left half is responsible for the past and the future. Every memory of the past is stored in the left half of the brain, just like a hard drive stores the digital frames of countless movies. Each day a 24 hour movie in and of itself. At 41 years old, that's about 15,000 movies, which is a lot. But the left half has to store all of the movies that I've projected into the future as well. And while there are probably 15,000 more days ahead, I can imagine quite a few paths that I could take, so I have several movies per day. I know I don't have every day ahead of me mapped out in my brain, but in the upcoming days and weeks and months, I have many different paths that I could be on and I have imagined many of those days, so I'm racking up the hard drive space. Add to that the dreams that I have (most of you know that I'm an avid and often lucid dreamer) and my terabyte drive is reaching capacity. (Think about it, every song that I've ever heard, every movie and television show that I've ever watched is somewhere stored in that left half of my brain, too.)

The right half of my brain is free from all of that. Think about it. NOTHING is taking up the space in there, none of that past, none of that future, none of that imagination and dreaming. Nothing at all. The right half is there only to take in RIGHT NOW. So the right half of the brain has all the room that my ENTIRE PAST, and future, and imagination takes up in the left half. That is a LOT of information that can be utilized EVERY SINGLE MOMENT. Can you even conceive of how much data about THIS MOMENT that I can have in that right half? Amazing.

Well, I wanted to figure out how to convey that idea graphically. So I drew up several drafts on some scrap paper (my departure clearance and my weight and balance data sheet) until I finally came up with a graphic that I think conveys how the left and right half of the brain have the same amount of data, one half containing X information about the past, future, and imagination, the other half containing the exact same X amount of information about ONLY THIS MOMENT. I will get onto Photoshop or Illustrator and come up with the graphic soon, or at the very least I will scan it in and send it to you when I get back stateside.

But that wasn't my epiphany. It was with great satisfaction that I completed the drawing, but it was the connection I made on page 84 that rocked my world. Alas, I must preface again.

In school, I thoroughly enjoyed algebra as a subject. It made a LOT of sense to me, and it seemed to have a lot of practical applications. Geometry was okay, Calc was interesting but beyond the basics it seemed too focused. But algebra was entirely intuitive. So was general physics. Not the astrophysics that I'm enamored with but understand very little, but the basic physics stuff, like mass and velocity and acceleration and the like. I rarely aced these subjects, mostly because I didn't apply myself to them, but I did enjoy them and the enjoyment lingered well past college.

Another thing about my past was my weird, distant affinity for Albert Einstein. I don't know why, but I have always gravitated towards him. I recall having a poster of him in my bedroom for many years around the time I was in late grade school or in middle school. My mom bought me a copy of "Einstein's Dreams," a book that I admittedly did not read back then. But I liked the idea of it. I have constantly been baffled by the Theory of Relativity, and while I can discuss the basic concepts and effects, I have never really understood it enough to explain it to anyone. The reason was, I never really focused on finding the right explanation for me. I just never took the time or effort to do so. (That will change in the very near future, I will assure you.)

This past March, I was really sick, twice. I hadn't been THAT sick in quite some time. There was a five day stretch (over Tristan's Spring Break, BUMMER) where I was literally sick in bed. As I live alone, I was definitely isolated in my bedroom. (Don't worry, when I get sick, I PREFER it that way... lock me up, don't bother me, I will emerge when I'm whole.) It was one of those sicknesses where you just beg for it to be over... ugh! But even in those sicknesses, you still have to endure the day(s), you have do do SOMETHING. I was so weak that I did very little reading, so you know how rotten I must have been feeling. What I did do, however, was watch a ton of videos that I had been downloading over the last year. I don't download very many movies. I have been downloading awesome videos like Cosmos by Carl Sagan (which I do own on DVD). The Universe by The History Channel. 30 hours explaining the Super String Theory. Philosophy videos by Alan Watts, Jack Kornfield, and Joseph Campbell. And all the stuff I could find on video and audio by Tolle, Abraham (Hicks), Dyer, and the Buddhist/Taoist writers. I watched several videos in those five days, but the most notable was a NOVA production called "E=mc^2 - Einstein and the Worlds Most Famous Equation" (Writer/Producer/Director Gary Jonstone was spot on.) It was 102 minutes of outstandingly produced material on how Einstein was able to have his breakthrough moment with E=mc^2. The first half explains, step by step, from E to m to c to squared, how the world of science got him there. Michael Faraday, Antoine LaVoisier (cool dude!), and Emilie du Chatelet each bring a piece of the puzzle to the table, and Einstein is the one who makes the leap and pulls it all together. Amazing. The year was 1905 and Einstein had five major breakthroughs in that year. What a year! I was extremely happy to have watched this video, but I did not then know how much it would affect my thinking.

Clearly, Einstein went on to an illustrious and long career, something that we can all be thankful for. One of the things that Einstein spent his later career on was the quest for The Theory of Everything. Basically, it was said to be a theory that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena. Several "string" theories are working towards that end. But before there were string theories, Einstein sought out this answer, obviously to no avail.

Wouldn't it be odd if it was right under his nose the whole time? Or, more accurately, behind his eyes? What would the irony be if Einstein spent his later career seeking out The Theory of Everything, never to be satisfied, and yet HE was the one who came up with the equation? Wouldn't it be fitting that the answer would be nothing less than E=mc^2, the equation that made him famous in his first year on the international scene?

I propose that that is exactly the case. E=mc^2 can be used to prove that we are, and everything else in the universe, physical and not, manifested and unimaginable, are all one in the same. After all, if that is the case, it would answer something even broader scoped than the original Theory of Everything, and that would be even more impressive.

Alright, to get to the answer, you're going to have to be able to follow some very basic algebra (see, I didn't ramble on about my juvenile fascination with algebra for nothing.) But it's much easier than the Theory of Relativity, and it's much shorter than the email that you've read so far, so you might as well go the distance with me. Trust me, it'll be worth it. Just the notion that I could possibly conceive of the idea has brought me to tears twice in the last 24 hours, so indulge me a few more minutes.

Okay, so let's break down E=mc^2 a little bit so we can use some of the inner workings. First of all, you should know what the parts of the equation mean.

· E = energy,
· m = mass,
· c = the speed of light in a vacuum (celeritas),
· and the superscript 2 indicates the squaring of c.

For a detailed explanation of what the equation means, you can visit the Wikipedia page on the equation. Basically, it means that mass has an associated energy and vice versa. The equation is utilized in his Theory of Special Relativity. Honestly, you don't even need to know that to get what I'm about to explain to you.

What you do need to know is that c, the speed of light, is basically velocity. It's just a very specific velocity. But for my explanation, we can use v instead of c, as the value really doesn't matter, just the variable. So we can now write it E=mv^2, or Energy equals mass time velocity squared.

Velocity, v, is the same thing as distance divided by time. Think about your car. Your velocity is your speed, or your miles per hour. Miles per hour means distance (miles) divided by time (hour). So v can also be written as (d/t). So we can now write the equation as E=m(d/t)^2, or Energy equals mass times the square of distance divided by time. With me so far? We're almost there.

Now, look at time. Since it is on the bottom of the fraction, it is called the denominator. When a denominator is very large, the fraction is very small. Clearly, 1/2 is much bigger than 1/100, right? Because if I divide 1 by 2, I get 0.5, but if I divide 1 by 100, I get 0.01, right? So the bigger the number on the bottom, the SMALLER the whole fraction is. Make sense? It should, that's not too hard I don't think.

Now, if a bigger number on the bottom makes the value of the fraction smaller, logically a smaller number on the bottom would make the value of the fraction... bigger. Right? This is really important to understand here, because this is one half of the crux of the epiphany, so you really gotta get this idea. If I divide 1 by 2 (or 1/2) I get 0.5, but if I divide 1/0.2, I get 5. Do you clearly see that? And if I were to divide 1 by 0.002, or 1/0.002, I would get 500. If this isn't making sense to you, pull up your calculator on your computer and just try a few division problems until it makes sense. Just a few examples will make it clear to you.

So looking at our equation, if E=m(d/t)^2, if t is really small, that makes the value of the fraction very large. And since E is equal to the fraction times the mass, E also gets very large. As t gets smaller and smaller, E gets larger and larger. As t approaches zero, E approaches infinity.

Okay, so now here's where we really get into the meat of things. I'm going to switch from physics and algebra to philosophy. (Thank you Alan Watts.) Remember a long time ago, in the beginning of my email, when I mentioned Jill Bolte Taylor? In her presentation to TED, she gave a brief yet powerful explanation about how we are all energy beings. This isn't theory, this isn't spirituality, we are truly all made up of 100% energy. I will spare you the quantum mechanics explanation (What, me spare you any detail? Ha!) Basically, we're all made up of atoms, which are made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons (and those are made up of things, too). But the distance between the electron orbit from the nucleus is proportionately massive, so much so that we are basically almost all empty space. Like a tree appears solid but is said, by golfers, to be 99% air, we, too, are pretty much nothing, and the something that we are made up of is energy. Everything in the universe is made up of the same stuff... energy. Again, this isn't something I think or believe, it is just plain fact. (Or as factual as anything can be in this reality, but I'll spare you an ontological digression.)

So now we are all on the same sheet of music with us being energy beings, or basically E. We're just one step away from having all the pieces of the puzzle.

This last piece is where you might need some understanding of the current discussions of presence and awareness. I think most of you are familiar with the ideas that are being discussed, at least you are close enough to someone that IS very familiar with the ideas so you might at least grasp the basics. While each teacher and subject matter expert has a different focus and different way of explaining it, almost all of them come down to the concept of the present moment. THIS EXACT MOMENT. Not the past, not the future, not ten minutes ago, not at dinner coming up in a few hours, not one minute away, but RIGHT.NOW...NOW...........NOW..........................NOW.

What you're doing is getting out of the left brain, getting it to shut up for one damn second, or minute, or more, and letting you get into the right half of your brain. And if you can just get in there and STOP your left brain from running off at the mouth (just like I run off at the fingers) for just one second, you can experience what it is like to absorb all the information that your left brain has stored up from the past and future and let your right brain take THAT SAME AMOUNT OF DATA in at this VERY MOMENT. ALL AT ONCE!

Can you conceive of what it would be like to just consider this very moment at all? If you can, how immediate of a moment can you get yourself into? Can you get into this very second? What about a half of a second? I'm not saying to get into your right brain, into Level 2, into your Presence (and out of you Ego) for just a half of a second. What I'm saying is to be totally present and absorb EVERYTHING THAT YOU CAN in that brief half second. If you try to take it in chunks of a second or two, you are trying to fit too much data into your right half of your brain, and you have to leave too much information out. You don't want to leave ANYTHING OUT so try to absorb as much data as possible in that very brief moment. Shave the chunks down, down to a tenth of a second down to a hundredth of a second at a time. Going from tenth of a second chunks down to hundredth of a second chunks allows you to take in TEN TIMES MORE of everything. (And when I say "everything," I do mean EVERYTHING, as in the Universe.) Ideally, you would bring the chunks down to nanoseconds at a time, being aware of ALL that information nanosecond by fraction of a nanosecond, and the more narrow the chunks, the MORE information you can take in at once.

I will admit, either you are with me here or I lost you. I sucker punched you, didn't I. I had you thinking that the algebra (gasp) and the physics (ick) were going to be the hard part. But it wasn't really, now was it? But the philosophical stuff, the fuzzy stuff, the degree that everyone laughs at, THAT was the real bitch, now wasn't it? Well, as Cypher would put it, fasten your seat belt Dorothy, 'cause Kansas is going bye-bye.

Let's get back to our equation. E=mc^2=mv^2=m(d/t)^2, right? E=Energy. We are energy beings. We ARE E. Remember our friend t? (LOL, Eckhart would say that t, time, is our enemy, a tool for the ego.) We learned that if t, the denominator, gets really small, E get's really big. As t approaches zero, E approaches infinity. Infinity=Universe, right? So if we can get our t down to almost zero, if we can slow time down to almost nothing, chunks of almost no time after chunk of no time, E gets to be infinity.

I propose that if we can slow our time down to almost absolute zero, our energy would approach that of the universe. If you can make the leap and be entirely aware in the most negligible fraction of time, you will realize that we are all one in the same, we are all the energy of the Universe.

That is an idea I think is worth spreading.

Sean

Deciding for the Greater Good

Earlier this week I had been running some ideas around my Level 2. I was on a trip so I was pretty much by myself and that gave me a lot of time to process this. I was mulling over a particular situation in which a decision needed to be made. Much deeper than "do I go shopping for knock off watches or hang around the room and read" kind of decision, it required a lot of thought. Or at least I thought it required a lot of thought. But as I thought about that, I realized that thought is a process of lower consciousness. Thought is not exclusive to Level 1 (the Ego), as I definitely have thoughts in my lightest Level 2 moments. But the deeper I get into Level 2, the more heightened my awareness and therefore more aligned with divinity or the Tao, the less things come to me in words and the more they come to me in a sense of knowingness.

Have you had a time where you just knew something is right? You don't know why, and if you tried to explain it in words, you know that you would inadequately describe it. But you intuitively knew that you were right. This is not the same as when people are just adamant about being right because they just want to be right. What I'm describing is more an innate sense of "ahhhh," as a sense of correctness, almost a relief of perfection, that the essence of what you are holding in consciousness is just right. It is because it is. It is because it is flowing with the Tao.

Leading up to my awakening, I read and listened to a reasonable amount of Taoist oriented material. Of the major religions and philosophies, Taoism is one that I draw the most major concepts from as I have built my personal paradigm of understanding. Certainly, the biggest one is going with the flow of the Tao. On the surface, that concept might be easy to understand, but that simplicity might make it easy for you terminate your examination of it, and to do so you would miss some of the beautiful subtleties about it.

The basic idea is that there is a natural unfolding of space and time. This can be visualized using the popular "leaf on a stream" metaphor. You can go with it, or you can try to go against it. If you are a leaf on a stream, you can only go with the flow of the stream, and it takes you where you should be going. If you fight across the current, you will find it hard going, and if you try to swim up stream against the current, you will find it impossible.

With that in mind, when you make a decision, it is up to you as to whether you let your Level 1 make the decision or you choose to open up to the Tao, let divinity flow through you, and the decision comes to you without thinking.

For example, let's say you get pulled over for a speeding ticket. As the cop comes to your car, you can decide to try to be like Ben Kenobi and use the Jedi Mind Trick "These aren't the droids you're looking for." You can attempt to use your energy to influence the cop to not write you a ticket, and often times you'll find that you succeed.

When your Level 2 gets humming, you find that synchronicity really starts kicking in. Synchronicity, a concept created by the very interesting Carl Jung, is when a non-causal connection between two events has a low probability of randomly occurring, and yet they do. Many people write these things off as "coincidence," as if they no longer need to appreciate how amazing that they occurred simultaneously. The deeper you get into Level 2, the more you find synchronicity happening, and you find that you can steer things to happen the way you want. As in the case of the speeding ticket, you will find that where most others might get the ticket, you didn't. Can you prove it to anyone? No. Do you need to prove it? I don't think so. It works for me, I really don't care if they think it works for them. So much the better for my individual Level 1, right?

This is the crux of the manifestation and Law of Attraction material that is so popular these days. But how do you know what outcome you should be focusing on? I want a million dollars, I want a Mercedes, I want to never have to work again. These are all very Level 1 concepts, very concrete, very me oriented. But are they in accordance with the Tao? How would you know, especially if you are there thinking words in your mind, isolated in the me of Level 1?

So when you move from Level 1 into Level 2, you get away from the me stories and you take more concepts in consideration. The deeper you get into Level 2, though, the less you are thinking in terms of words and the more you are thinking in terms of feeling and intuition. The closer you get into the absolute now, the farther you get from "me" and the closer you get to the Tao or the source of divinity.

It seems the trick is to hold on to the essence of the issue that requires a decision, and then get into the now as much as possible. So you're doing two things here, holding the essence and becoming present. At my level of experience with being present (in deep Level 2), if I go too far into being present, I "forget" the essence of what I was trying to resolve. (Getting into real deep Level 2, into real deep presence, you start to forget all the issues of "the world" that you have built in your Level 1 mind. And yes, it is blissful, which is why we want to go there!) So it seems there is a sweet spot where I lose as much of my Level 1 as possible but I retain enough of a separate entity as to be a container for the essence of the issue. From the other side, I let divinity come through me (the Tao flow through me; the Christ mind to act; the Holy Spirit to affect me) and observe that which is in the container. And then innately, purely, the proper resolution becomes obvious and the decision is made.

How do I know it is correct? It is a knowingness. Once I'm out of the deep sense of Level 2 and more into a symbiotic "Level 2 observing my Level 1" awareness, I can "try on the decision." I start to become more present but now I hold the essence of the decision in mind (as opposed to the essence of the whole issue as we did before.) Does it feel right? Do I sense any red flags? Likely not because it seems that the Tao has a pretty good track record, but if you do, perhaps you weren't as purely present, truly devoid of the influence of the ego as you might have thought. So if the essence of the decision feels good, then what more could you ask for?

Back to the speeding ticket. You could focus on the cop not writing you the ticket. Or you could choose to not focus on that but focus on the greater good. Focus on that which is with the Tao, and what ever comes is what is supposed to come. It could very well be that you don't get the ticket and I will naively say that you probably wouldn't get the ticket, but then again maybe you were meant to get the ticket. Maybe you getting the ticket will cause you to slow down so that the next time you are driving that stretch you didn't hit a kid that was in the road. There are myriad reasons that getting the ticket could be in line with the Tao. Do you think your measly Level 1 contained brain could analyze everything that is going on with the entire Universe? By tapping into the Tao, by allowing the divinity to come from within you, you are able to tap into the infinite resource of the universe, everything manifested and unmanifested, the grand network of life itself. To say it is like tapping into the internet is like calling the Pacific Ocean a pond. It is like tapping into everything that has been or will be. How can your eight pound brain compare to that? If you focus on not getting the ticket and don't get it, or you focus on the greater good and don't get the ticket, then the greater good was that you don't get the ticket. But if you focus on getting the ticket and you were supposed to get the ticket, then you are unwittingly trying to fight against the Tao. Why guess at what you should be focusing on when it is always right to focus on the way of the Tao?

I know what you're thinking. It sounds too easy. Don't have my Level 1 think about it, just let something pop into my head and then go with that decision. That is not at all what I am saying. If you are grounded in Level 1 and have no capacity for Level 2, no awareness at all, then you can't do this. It is necessary for you to open up to Level 2 so that your Level 1 can give up the responsibility to make the decision. This is because Level 1 won't let divinity flow through it and it will taint the decision making process. If you can't get into Level 2 and let the Tao flow, then you are better off sticking to your Level 1 decision making process and all the issues that go along with it.

Even when you are able to get into Level 2 it does not mean that you shouldn't put in an effort to analyzing an issue. I flew with a guy who is one of the few pilots that are open minded to this kind of stuff. He said to me that judgment is wrong and that all decisions must be made by feeling. He then told me how he had bought this investment property. Instead of using spread sheets to analyze the cash flow and looking at what the market rent rates were, he went out, looked at houses, and this opportunity spoke to him. He had said he had owned it for a few years so I asked him how the investment was going. He said was awful. He had had issues with the renters, there were maintenance issues that were a pain in the ass, and it was consuming time that he'd rather use elsewhere. Is there any surprise?

Now, I find two interesting things there. The first observation is obvious. Going with the flow does not mean that you throw your hands up and guess. You still need to analyze things. The Tao isn't just letting go of everything. The Tao does not expect you to live ignorantly. If it is according to the Tao that you will invest in a property, then it will happen. But it could be (and probably is) just as much with the Tao that you were to analyze them. Going with the Tao does not mean taking your hand off the tiller and bouncing off the sides of the stream. It means going down stream with it, gently guiding it through insight and grace.

When you go with the Tao, though, you can go with it automatically, or you can go with it integrally. The Tao is the Tao, and everything that unfolds is intended to unfold with the Tao. Everyone, whether they are in solid Level 1 or if they are deeply present, are in the Tao, it's just the Level 1's are going along with it automatically, unwittingly. So if you throw your hands up and allow things to happen, that is going along with the Tao. If it happens, it was meant to happen. But you can also open up to the Tao, to become one with the Tao. To do so, you do so honestly. You slip into the sense of the Tao, allowing it to take you over, allowing you to blend into it. And when you honestly wrap yourself in the Tao (and you know when you do this), things just unfold.

So it is okay to look at a situation from all angles to try to get an understanding of it. But once you have analyzed it, once all the data collection is done, then you can get yourself out of Level 1 as much as possible. Get into the present moment and allow Level 2 to take over. The more you get into the Now, the deeper you get into Level 2, the more freely you allow divinity to flow through you. Shut that left brain down and let your right brain take over. If it is right, and more often than not it will be, then an answer will come to you. An answer that you just know is right. It might not be the answer you thought it would be, and the results of following the answer might be different than your Level 1 might think it wants it to be, but it is with the Tao, and that is the best decision that you can make.

That brings us back to the second observation of the pilot investor. He was right. He could make the decision to buy the property without any form of analysis and it would be according to the Tao. It would just be that the Tao had something different planned for you than having a successful investment and the financial gain that you might have thought you wanted. The Tao would have meant for him to go through the frustrations of crummy renters and a run down property. Had the Tao meant for him to analyze and pick another property, it would have been so. Don't fall in to the trap of thinking that going with the Tao means a laissez faire Level 1 life free of responsibility. There's just as much work (at first) in learning how to properly and truly opening up to divinity as there is to the way we do things now in Level 1, so there's no free ride.

As we emerge from being sunk in a Level 1 dominated way of functioning and start to allow Level 2 to take over, we need to learn to not take everything to extremes. The pilot clearly took the idea of not judging and "letting the Tao decide" to too much of an extreme without incorporating the basic function of connecting with divinity before letting go of the tiller. It has been my experience as my Level 2 has gained dominance in the Level 1-Level 2 relationship that the more gentle and parental my Level 2 is with my Level 1, the better things have gone. Rather than being the strict parent and having my Level 2 force it's ways upon my Level 1 (except, of course, the initial awakening which no Level 1 will like going through), have a more genuine relationship with your Level 1. I have a great relationship with my 10 year old son, Tristan. I am still "in charge," but we work together to raise him. I find if I inform Tristan about why he needs to do something or why he can't or shouldn't do something, he is more receptive. He sees that I respect him as a person and knows that I'm not making decisions without full consideration. The same goes for my Level 1. It knows that my Level 2 has it's reasons and that Level 2 is respecting him to the extent that it can, so my Level 1 is pretty compliant.

So when you are learning to allow divinity to flow through you in order to make decisions based on the greater good of the Tao, show your Level 1 that you are taking it's world into consideration, respecting that in which it lives. There are many philosophies out there and some of them consider the world of Level 1 to be false or unreal or just a dream. That may very well be, but it may also very well be that all dimensions and universes and levels of conscious are just as real as the next. If reality is nondualism, the oneness that contains everything, manifested and unmanifested, then every aspect is part of that oneness. So what makes this level or dimension any less real than any other. It is what it is... it is.

With that in mind then it does make sense to continue to function normally in this world and that there is meaning enough in this dimension that your decisions merit a fair analysis. But once you have done as objective of an analysis as you can, if you learn to open to the greater intelligence of the combined consciousness (ultimately the Oneness or the Tao or God) your decisions will be made with the greater good in mind, and that objective sounds rather decent to me.

By the way, overcoming the inertia in making your decisions this way is the hardest part. There is something called the Quantum Zero Effect that says the more you choose something the greater the likelihood that you are to make the choice next time. You have to consciously work to make this your process, but once you do it only a very few times, it starts to become more natural. And I'm only talking about doing this with three or six or nine major decisions, and then all of a sudden you find yourself using this process almost automatically. If you start to focus on the greater good in every situation, life becomes entirely much easier. Rather than having to think about and fret over all the different decisions and they trying to pick one, you open yourself up to infinite wisdom and let it decide for you.

To summarize, here is what needs to happen so that you can start making decisions based on the greater good. Recognize that you have a decision to make. Analyze the situation as objectively as possible. Doing this from a light Level 2 perspective is much better than from an isolated Level 1. Once you feel that you have adequately taken all things into consideration (but have not excessively toiled over it) it's time to turn it over to divinity. Get into the now as deeply as possible while maintaining the essence of the situation (not words about the situation, just the feeling about it, the knowing about it). Just like a thought or memory pops into your head in your old Level 1 world, divine inspiration will come to you, more likely in a feeling rather than words. You will know it is right when you "try it on" again to feel it. If it still feels right, and if you were genuinely in Level 2 it will be, then you have a winner.

Sean

Background on My Awakening

It would make sense to explain why I had a spontaneous awakening, or at least how I believe that the awakening occurred. In my understanding of consciousness today, I realize that I am not my past nor my future, but it does help give a point of reference, especially to those that have not yet awoken or who are just now waking up.

I graduated from Ohio State with a degree in Aviation-Computer science. I was enlisted in the Air Force for six years and then flew as a pilot for another six years. I helped start up Frontier Airlines, as my father, a pilot and serial entrepreneur and his wife were instrumental in getting Frontier started. My time in the Air Force and with Frontier enabled me to get hired by United in January of 1995.

In some ways I am like many of the other United pilots. Getting there is pretty competitive so the resulting work force is highly educated, highly focused, and reasonably responsible. Fifteen years ago, the job paid well and if you scheduled yourself right, you could bunch your time off so that you could work hard and then play hard. Real hard.

This left most of us with a lot of time and a decent amount of money, so many of us became garage entrepreneurs. Clearly, my observation of my dad preconditioned me to be an entrepreneur, and I took to it whole heartedly. I started and ran a few interesting businesses through the years.

And then came 2003. The post 9/11 aviation industry was in upheaval (and is now nearly decimated.) United had entered bankruptcy and management had literally stolen our retirement (easily verifiable). While many pilots had built their entire identity on being an airline pilot, there were a lot of us who decided to look outside aviation for both personal growth as well as revenue generating. United was laying off hundreds of pilots and I was in Las Vegas looking at the cheap houses. So I got my real estate license and started selling investment property.

My timing could not have been better. I quickly became the top selling agent at my large national brokerage. I also quickly built a business around this and had a sizable staff. For a few years, this worked fine because we were continually growing. Unfortunately, this masked my weakness in financial skill because I would use my talent to bring in more business to pay the rapidly growing overhead. Within three months I had taken a voluntary three year leave of absence flying 747's for United and started selling real estate full time.

During all this, I came up with a brilliant plan to build a large national network of investment savvy agents. No one had to pay any money to join or use the service, as the commissions were big enough that the selling agents were happy to pay us referral fees. Infinitely scalable, I realized that it could be worth a couple hundred million dollars in less than three years. So I set upon the task of raising a million dollars to finance the project.

That was quite a fateful decision, although through my eyes today, I wouldn't want it any other way. (I know that from someone's Level 1 perspective they couldn't believe that I really mean it. Until you awaken and realize what it is to wake up, I can understand why you don't understand.)
My Level 1 has some pretty cool strengths. I have been tested by the Results Foundation and I am an extreme Creator and Star. This means that I am most productive in dreaming up incredible systems and then using my charisma to promote the product. And I have really learned how to maximize both of these. What this means, however, is that my ability to handle the financial aspect of a somewhat large and rapidly growing company and my ability to go out and generate cash by myself is very low, relatively speaking. I do realize this now, but what this meant in 2006 and 2007 is what is important to this story.

Right when I started seeking capital, the market started so show signs of weakening. Clearly, we have never seen a real estate market crash in the United States ever before, not even during the great depression (mortgages weren't really around back then so it was a very different thing.) Had I known then how bad the market was going to crash I would have closed up shop, gone back to flying, and rode it out like the rest of the nation. Lacking a crystal ball, however, being an eternal optimist, and relying on creativity and charisma like I had for the first few years, I pressed forward.

I had been married since 1990 and while I felt (and still feel) the marriage was good for quite a few years, things changed somewhere after our son, Tristan, was born in 1998. It was not the event of him being born, as he is one of the coolest (and awakened) kids you'll ever meet, and we are both very loving and actively involved parents. But that was the timing of when thing started going south. We moved to Vegas in 2000 and were touch and go, several times discussing divorce. Each time we decided not to "for Tristan's sake." In early 2005 I had a discussion with a friend of mine who was a psychologist and I had resolved that the next time if we got to the divorce discussion, if I was not going to stay in the marriage for love, then I was not going to stay at all. That summer, I ran into my high school girlfriend and her husband at our 20th high school reunion. The next month my wife and I got into another argument I told her I wanted to leave. As I wanted to try to clean up some financial issues before the divorce and she need to have a minor surgery done, I delayed in leaving. A few months later I told her I wanted a divorce and I moved out. There are other details that at this point I don't need to share. This isn't a mea culpa and out of respect for my ex-wife there are things that are not pertinent to understand my mindset as I was approaching my awakening.

Around this time, a big problem that my company faced during the initial down turn was integrity. Frankly, had we been a scummy outfit, we would have and easily could have sold hundreds more units in 2005 and 2006. But the company I created hinged upon and built it's foundation on integrity, and we stuck to it until I grounded the company in late 2007.

My leave of absence was up in July of 2006. Fortunately, the market downturn came six months earlier so I could see the writing on the wall. I chose to go back to fly for United rather than give up the job. This is a decision that my father fully encouraged, and I'm glad that I did make the decision as that is what I'm doing today. But you should realize that it was a great acknowledgement of defeat to me. I had really never failed at anything before in my life, and while the acceptance of failure was okay, the combination of the magnitude of failure and an undeveloped sense of how to deal with failure is another piece of the puzzle.

Bills mounted and revenue dried up to nothing. I methodically let employees go, although I tried to find jobs for each one of them as they left. Two of my most faithful employees, Sue and Jerry Rudden, worked without pay. Jer worked for over a year without being paid, and his attitude was bright and still is today. This is the kind of company we had built. Unfortunately, I did not have the proper financial savvy to keep us afloat.

In the middle of 2007, facing looming bills, missing several mortgage payments, I realized that bankruptcy and foreclosure were next. As I had personally guaranteed everything and the company was not small, my company debt was over a quarter million dollars. I had sold all of my investment properties to pay the bills and the house, which was supposed to go to my ex-wife in the divorce, had depreciated below the first and second mortgages. This led to about two weeks of what I would probably have to consider as depression, as I cannot think of another way to describe it. After this brief encounter, with help of Sue, Jerry, my great friend Tamara, and the incredible emotional support of my girlfriend Amber, I tried to go at it again. But there was very little fuel left in me or anything around, and things came to a crash in November. This is when I finally resolved myself to Bankruptcy.

Oddly, while I very much recall the two weeks of depression in July, I don't remember it being so darned depressing in November. I just remember the sensation of pressure, intense pressure, but not depression. Finally, about the last week of November, I cracked.

I have read about other's awakenings and have listened to how they describe the exact moments of awakening. Like something from a Kafka film or Van Gough painting, they vividly relate how things looked and felt. Not for me. For me it was really just a bizarre, radical shift of perspective. It was like I went from being the character in a video game to the perspective of the person controlling the player in the video game. I was literally not seeing "through my eyes" but from a perspective above and to the right of my head by about 2 feet each direction. This extreme sensation lasted for a week or two as I recall. Somewhere in there, I found that I was going back and forth between the perspectives with little control over it and little desire to control it.

Mind you, I was still on the hook to fly. I was on reserve (on call) and I fortunately wasn't called much in the early days of my awakening. I can't recall if I called in sick or not, but I do know that I was very safe about knowing my capabilities. Additionally, I am almost always a relief pilot so I would not have been at the controls during take off or landing. Regardless, if I had felt unsafe, I wouldn't have flown.

Remember, I wasn't having hallucinations at all. The only real oddity was that my perspective was changing from first person to third person. I was fully functional. If I were in third person perspective at the time, I could will my body to do things just like we are all used to willing our arms to move up, our hands to grasp things, our feet to step on things.

Things started to stabilize. I was getting more and more back into first person perspective and the jump in and out of third person became more deliberate. It is this time that I recall most fondly, because once you learn to be able to control this, it is mind blowing what you can do. Sadly, the control over this slowly waned over the next few months as my first person perspective once again became dominant.

Tamara was going through some pretty huge issues herself and in the greatest moment of synchronicity and grace, she woke up almost simultaneously! One of the things I feel most blessed about is the fact that I had someone to wake up to consciousness with. Perhaps it would be better to awaken by yourself because the loneliness would intensify the awakening and might propel your consciousness farther than what occurred with me. But I believe that it is an incredibly rare opportunity to waking up with someone else, especially if that someone is a great friend. I imagine that would be something that occurred in concentration camps or prison camps, or maybe during warfare. But to civilians in a civilized country, I imagine that most people who spontaneously awaken are alone. (Remember, many of the experts say that once you are through your awakening, you look at the circumstances with thankfulness, not anger or sadness. So if you are or do wake up by yourself, you will eventually come to realize that the intensification of doing so will be something that has helped you advance your consciousness and therefore a good thing.)

If you haven't picked up on it, the first person perspective is my Ego or what I refer to as Level 1. This is a term that Tamara and I coined when we were trying to figure out what the heck was going on with us. We had no clue that it was about consciousness. Other than a conversation that I had at a party of mine on March 5th where someone mentioned Eckhart Tolle's name, I had never heard of him nor did I know anything about awakening or consciousness. We had no clue what the Ego was (I wouldn't really start to get it for another three or four months) and really had no idea what to call the bizarre third person perspective. So we called the first person perspective, the one lower to the ground, Level 1. The third person perspective was higher, another level up, so we called it Level 2. Conveniently enough, Richard Moss describes the Ego as "lower self-consciousness" and being present "higher self-consciousness," and that jibes with Level 1-Level 2.

I am sure it is due to Grace that my Level 1 allowed the search for truth in the matter to be so aggressive. My creative and system development skills enable me to become a madman when I dive into something. I am an exceptionally quick learner and given the right leeway, I could master the issue in short order. But it was necessary for my Level 1 to not interfere too much. In retrospect, it is amazing that my Ego (Level 1) allowed me to be on a mission that would ultimately nullify it, and yet it did and still does.

I must comment here that I have always had a very good relationship with myself, even before I awoke. I had a good upbringing. Yeah, I come from a divorced family, and my mom and step dad had to bust their ass just to keep us going in a very low-end house. But both of my parents and my step-dad were very good people and they taught us good values. (Alas, they were all far from being awake, but very good natured people none the less.) Somewhere in young adulthood I unconsciously chose the path of integrity and have stuck by it as much as a human ego could. "He without sin cast the first stone," and I fully admit that I have not been perfect. Everyone has done things that they feel go against their character, and I am no exception. But the general operating standards that I held myself to were very high, and they got higher as I matured. So the person that I was just before my awakening was someone that I liked and still do. I think it's one of the reasons that adapting to the integrity demanded by Level 2 has been so easy for me.

In February of 2008, I was packing to move from a rental house back into my old house that had yet to be foreclosed on. (It's October of 2008 and I'm still living there, waiting for them to come kick me out. Bizarre. I will miss this house and remember it for a long time. But I'm cool with moving on, too, to the next cool experience.) As I packed my extensive library, I came across a book that was given to me by some clients, Jim and Cathy LeValley. It was "The Celestine Prophecy." I was needing a book to read for my next trip, so I tossed it onto my suit case. Perfect timing. While it was not the bulls-eye that "A New Earth" would soon be for me, it was on the board. I read it in one four day trip. When I got home I called Tamara and made her go buy a copy. (I think that I've given out more than a dozen copies and have had almost that many people buy them for themselves.) I read the entire Celestine series that month, and while it's a bit more ethereal for my taste, now and even then, it was describing synchronicity and group think, two concepts that were bombarding me very hard since my awakening.

An avid reader and book collector, I started hitting Half.com and Amazon.com buying as many used books as I could. I was in the process of bankruptcy by now, but when you can buy a hardback book for seventy-five cents plus three bucks shipping, you can find ways to get what you need. (And there's always the library for the major works.)

And then I found Tolle. Bliss! Eckhart was the first person that I came across that was describing EXACTLY what I was going through. You can't burn through a Tolle book as it is packed dense with deep, thought provoking ideas paragraph after paragraph. But I chewed "A New Earth" up as fast as I could, but insisting that I must understand every concept as I go before I could move onto the next. (This is a reading habit that I still maintain and cannot imagine anyone doing otherwise.) Immediately I went to "the Power of Now," another grinder that filled my head with explanations leading to more and more questions.

All of a sudden I became aware that I wasn't just dealing with consciousness. While it is still absolutely my main focus these days, I now realize that if you crack open the door with consciousness, you cannot stop spirituality from flooding in. It is as if I were in a pitch black room, with the door shut tightly. But once grace opened the door even a smidge, the intense bright light outside the doorway crashes into the room. When everything is totally dark, even a sliver of light can cause a startling amount of illumination. Once the door is fully flung open no darkness can remain. And that is why consciousness and spirituality are required for enlightenment, because consciousness opens the door, and spirituality is the light. The room is the essence of YOU.

And that is the how and why of my awakening. Since then, I have discovered many great authors, especially Richard Moss. I have also started reading "A Course in Miracles" and attend a few weekly discussion groups about ACIM and consciousness. (I love my groups!) In coming posts you'll get to hear about the thoughts that zing through my head and the authors, books, audio files, and videos that I read. But I hope this gives you some kind of foundation for when you read those other posts.

Remember, I only awoke at the end of 2007, less than a year ago. Progress has been incredible. If you have yet to awaken (then I don't know how you could have read this post to this point), know that it can happen at any time. Any and all preparation is worth your time. I can only imagine what it would have been like to wake up and already know what the heck it was that was happening to me. But we all have our different paths and I truly mean this that all paths are equal. If you have just awakened and are just now trying to figure things out, know that you are just a few months behind me. If you stick with it, you'll be here in no time.

I hope that future posts in this blog will enable you to make your leaps and bounds even more quickly than I. It is my path and the path of my teachers and companions to bring this material to help you along your path. Perhaps you can contribute to my path an the path of others by contributing to the insights and conversations herel. How fortunate we are to have crossed paths.

Namaste.

Welcome, and Namaste

Welcome to my blog and Namaste (The divinity in me acknowledges the divinity in you.) This blog will be a place where I will keep my thoughts and observations as I flow with the Tao. I keep a notebook with me and write in it quite often, but being a lefty from the 60's my handwriting is atrocious. I do type quite quickly and I find the process both cathartic and creatively inspiring, so I look forward to this becoming a part of my life.

At the end of 2007 I experienced an intense awakening that left me somewhat disoriented for about six weeks. While I could still go to work, there was no question that I was unclear why my perspective had changed so radically. As I gradually became accustomed to this new way of living, increasingly intensified my search to understand what had happened. After two or three months I finally realized what had happened to me. I had had an awakening of consciousness, from the Ego to Awareness, from Level 1 to Level 2, from being a program in the Matrix to being a part of the crew on the Nebuchadnezzar. I had involuntarily taken the Red pill but now that I had, I realized there was no other way.

You might be familiar with the work of Eckhart Tolle. He is the current King of Consciousness as far a popularity, and I am thankful that he is. While I had read several books that danced around the topic, as soon as I started "A New Earth" I knew that I had finally found the book that would explain what had happened during the end of 2007.

That really launched me into overdrive and I sought information on consciousness voraciously. I have since then devoured as much of Tolle's books, audio programs, and videos that I could get my hands on. As there is very little guidance on the subject, I painstakingly sought out the resources to further my understanding. My hard work has been greatly rewarded and I have been fortunate to be guided by the books of great teachers like Richard Moss, Leonard Jacobson, and David Hawkins. Much of this has been augmented by my devotion to the recorded materials (and a few books) by the late, great Alan Watts, a man I discovered almost a year and a half before my awakening. The greatest thing I have taken from Alan is that reality is nondualism, and that has made my understanding of all of the other teachers much, much easier.

Along the way I have enjoyed reading some of the popular manifestation authors who are teaching "The Law of Attraction" these days. Abraham-Hicks, Wayne Dyer, and Byron Katie are some of my more favorites. While I consider the idea of manifestation as a byproduct, something that is a few levels below deep consciousness, the teachings of these people are providing a gateway through which many are discovering consciousness and spirituality, and that is awesome.

I would be remiss to not mention my discovery of "The Celestine Prophecy" and line of books making up James Redfield's "Celestine Vision." It was the first glimpse of light that I was able to discover after reeling for six weeks, and it was from Redfield's material that I was able to develop some sort of vocabulary to eventually google my way to Eckhart. The Celestine material is much lighter and less focused than the material that I eventually gravitated to, but it was the first spiritual material that I had ever read without scoffing at it. Prior to my awakening, the closest I could come to spirituality was the more traditional Buddhist and Taoist concepts that I mostly took from Alan Watt's material. Anything more touchy-feely than that could not hold my interest. Anyone needing lighter material to work their way into the deep, thick works of Tolle and Moss might benefit from the Celestine material. (It's written in novel format, so it's a very quick read.)

I have been baffled by the lack of organization within the Consciousness and Spirituality world. Certainly, many of the authors will write endorsements for each other, but that is about the only way to connect the dots. Furthermore, few of the consciousness authors endorse each other, so you have to jump from Tolle endorsing Dyer and Dyer endorsing Moss to connect Tolle's work with that of Moss. Way too hard for the average Joe or Josephine, but that's one of my things: compiling. So a part of this blog will be to compile as much of the information that I come across so that others might be able to crawl through the spider web and not have to spin the web like I did.

As I said, I'm looking forward to making this blog part of my journey. I also look forward to comments on my posts. Participation in forums can snowball into too many threads and can become too time consuming to keep up with. It is my intent to keep my primary focus on this blog and go outside of this blog only when I have addressed all of the issues here. Feel free to email me if you have posted something here and I haven't responded in a day or two. I travel for a living and I'm frequently "off of the grid" for a few days at a time, but if you keep on me, I will get to it.

Thanks for visiting and Namaste.

Sean Brown