This Awakening Life

Going on a 10-Day Silent Meditation Retreat

2010-01-06T07:44:00.000-08:00

Kitty and I, along with six other members of our Las Vegas group, are heading out this morning for a 10-Day silent meditation retreat. The event actually spans 12 calendar days as today is Day 0 and the last day we only meditate for about two hours. So there are ten full days where we meditate for about 10 hours and 45 minutes, mostly in one hour chunks. Accommodations are rather Spartan, although when you have your eyes closed and are completely silent for most of the waking day it doesn't really seem too important how posh the setting is as long as it's warm and dry.

The dining schedule is rather minimal, with breakfast coming at 6:30, which is 2.5 hours after we wake up. Lunch is very light and there isn't really a dinner other than some fruit. I suppose when you are very sedentary for that long you really don't need to eat much. I've done a 9 day Master Cleanse diet and during that I realized that it was mostly a psychological thing. But that was done as I was fully integrated in my normal life and the challenge was adapting not having to eat into my normal life. This may be even easier as our schedules will be completely new to us so there won't be nearly the integration issue. We'll see.

The retreat is called Vipassana and can be discovered at www.dhamma.org. It is a free retreat run by donations from past members and volunteers who have previously completed the 10-day course. My company has been very gracious in rearranging my schedule to allow me to come on a retreat of this length. I am very grateful for this as well as my ex-wife who has been awesome about watching Tristan the whole time. Thank you, thank you, I'm so grateful.

I've gone into this with complete detachment. I have neither anticipated it nor have I been concerned about it. I'm not doing this intentionally, I really have had no feeling about it as it has been approaching. I meditate quite often and do a lot of introspection, so I'm looking forward to what may come. It will be very interesting to observe my perspective on it when I get back. Full details to come here on my blog, be sure of that!

Imagine: Me. Silent. For ten days. Go figure!

It's all B.S.

2009-12-23T21:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I met with Bhagwan Kevananda for our weekly lunch conversation. Over the last several months, Kev and I have been meeting for a few hours for what would be called Jñana Yoga, basically using dialog to burn out the thinking process. My personal meetings with Kev and Jim allow the time to be spent very tactically deconstructing my thoughts and beliefs with the ultimate objective of not thinking or believing anything at all. While the Sunday Sangha satsang is still my favorite public event that I regularly attend, these guys have been gracious in taking the time to help me surgically remove the remaining concepts that are rather subtle and elusive.

Yesterday was a big step for me. I know that the flame of truth has been raging for quite some time now. Kitty and I saw it catch with Rich and Buck back in April, and somewhere around late May, Andre’s second visit, the flame jumped to us and we rapidly began to disown the more gross concepts. Quickly concepts like karma, reincarnation, and souls went up in flames. Long standing beliefs were like dry kindling, disappearing as quickly as the trivial ideas, sometimes surprisingly so. Kitty’s thoughts of past lives, angels, and guides went up in smoke, too.

Just as a fire will quickly sweep through a dry forest and then lose momentum as the foliage is consumed, the intensity of the flame decreased as there became less fuel for it to burn. It’s easy to have a bonfire in your brain when you believe that there may actually be meaning to life or when you’ve heard from all the spiritual namby-pamby tree huggers that “God is Love.” “God is Love” has gotta go. God is Love and Hate and Fear and Bunny Rabbits and Jeffrey Dhamer. Even that concept has to go, too.

At the beginning, it is easy to explore your mind, find a belief, and then set fire to it. But eventually you start to have trouble finding the beliefs to burn. You have to start sifting through the ash to find the remainders of your belief system, and this is where the ego starts to make it hard on you. It sure as hell doesn’t want to make it easy for you to burn the whole house of cards down so it finds tricky ways to hide the beliefs that remain. They become subtle or hide out in lofty places, disguising as the Truth. Somewhere along the line you have to realize that there IS NO TRUTH, because anything you can think, any concept that you can speak or envision, is all a product of your mind. Even that sentence is a load of crap because it is a thought, an idea, a concept, and it is part of duality and therefore a lie.

So I know that the flame of truth has been burning in me and in Kitty for quite some time. I have sensed that this is a key phase as we work towards Liberation. (B.S.) I have been sourcing multiple mirrors that have supported this. (B.S.) As I recently worked a trip to Frankfurt, I had lots of travel time, and that’s where I get most of my reading and listening to audio files done. In Adya’s “From Awakening to Liberation” recording, he provides one possible outline of a generic path towards Liberation. It’s closely related to the Buddhist concept “Mountains, No Mountains, Mountains.” (B.S.) That’s where you start off where there are mountains and rivers before you, as you believe that there is actually such a thing as a mountain or river. Then you get to the point where there are no longer mountains and rivers before you because you come to know that there is no such thing as a mountain or river, or anything else for that matter, including yourself. Eventually you get back to where you see the mountains and rivers again as you learn to bring together the Relative world (this world of duality, the world of mountains and rivers) and the Absolute (the non-dual perspective where no thought or concept exists). (B.S.) Tim Freke would describe this last phase as Both/And instead of Either/Or. (B.S.)

In Adya’s description, during the first phase of mountains, you have mountains (thoughts, concepts, beliefs) to burn. At the beginning of this phase the Spark of Truth catches on the dry kindling and spreads via the Flame of Truth. Burn mother fucker, burn, as you watch idea after idea go up in flames. As I still see mountains but they are becoming obscured by the thick smoke. I sense that I’m running out of fuel for the flame, but I know there is more to burn. I am just having trouble finding what’s left to bring to the bonfire. (B.S.)

And this brings me to my interaction with Kevin yesterday. Over some yummy Chicken Panang and Moo Goo Gai Pan (B.S., but it was yummy!) Kev hit home that EVERYTHING is a bunch of B.S. Conceptually I knew that “this is all an illusion” and that “everything is a projection of my own mind,” but I wasn’t incorporating EVERYTHING. I was leaving room for some things that seemed closer to the truth. Like non-dualism. That’s a biggie for me. What do you mean that I have to give up the idea of non-dualism? But it does not matter how directly the finger is pointing at the moon, it is still the God-damn finger and NOT the moon, so it’s gotta go. So do things like the concept of the ego and the idea that I can do anything, anything at all, in the world of duality, that is not coming from the ego. The idea of Oneness, that you are God, that you are the Creator… it’s all gotta go. But the biggie, the end game that any authentic Seeker is ultimately trying to let go of, is the idea that you, your self and your Self, are anything but part of the illusion. That there even could be a You has got to go, and the idea that the You has got to go has also gotta go.

Where our conversation really started to help was when I realized the correlation between my shower meditations, my trips to the desert, and my waking life. Back in July 2009 I started to have these awesome meditations in the shower. A big part of these meditations was getting to the core of Self-inquiry. At least that was my experience at the time.

Self-inquiry sounds like an interrogation, where you’re asking questions like “Who or what am I?,” you get an answer, and that allows you to move on to the next question so you can seek out the next answer. It doesn’t work that way. Self-inquiry is looking within. It has to do with getting away from words and turning to experience to reveal the answer.

So in July, I found myself looking within. As I stood in a meditative trance, perfectly balanced in the stream of water, internally I was diving, falling into the center of my being. As I dove, scenes flashed before me. As I recall them now, they were very bright scenes, a lot of white light with a little dark black background. The visual image was very often two-dimensional, as if it were appearing on a large TV screen. Sure, there were times where it was 3D, but for the most part and in contrast to my my trips to the desert months later, there was much less depth to them. As I plummeted endlessly towards my core, these scenes would appear and my fall would cease as I stopped to evaluate them.

Early on I realized that these scenes were diversions, figments of my imagination thrown up by my ego to distract my inner journey. While some of the scenes were revelatory, most of them were trivial. Some were awesome sexual visions and I could take them off on wild rides as long as I wanted. Fortunately my sex life is already rather incredible so while these diversions could really be tempting to take way down the rabbit hole, I didn’t feel too pulled in by them and I was able to let them go.

Other scenes were of other worlds similar to Salvialand. Sometimes people unknown to me would act out meaningless vignettes and it was easy to let go of them. But when you’re inundated by scene after senseless scene, it can get kind of boring. This, too, was an ego tactic, trying to fool me into thinking that I really wasn’t onto something. The fucking ego is a crafty bastard and it will run through every program it can to distract your quest to discover who or what you really are.

Fortunately I had been drowning myself in this stuff for several months by this time. Since January, when I met Kitty and started attending the Sunday Sangha satsangs, I had been living, breathing, talking, and dreaming about this material. I had plenty of opportunities to employ the concepts (B.S.) like “nothing outside of self exists” and “why am I manifesting this?” So when it came to these scenes in the shower meditation, I was able to deflect them rather handily.

Inside of two weeks I had hit what I then thought was the core of myself. This came about as I became more and more adept at brushing the scenes aside. As quickly as they could appear, I was able to release them, discarding them as a distraction thrown at me by my ego. But as quickly as I could brush one aside, the next would appear. This became quite an interesting challenge and I had to adapt by stopping from discerning what the scene was before letting it go. This realization, that ANYTHING that the ego would throw at me was an illusion, a distraction, an untruth, allowed me to switch from using a sword to cut away a scene before me to just disbelieving EVERYTHING as it came. I became so effective at this that I could let go of the scene BEFORE the ego could throw it up. (B.S.) The ego tried to keep up, but the scenes truly became a blur. My visual image became so filled with white light as the residual image of several previous scenes piled up on each other. I was no longer distracted by any images, I was just aware of a white light that was imposed over a pure black background. (B.S.) The ego saw what was happening and not long after it realized this wasn’t going to work so it gave up. (B.S.) And that is when I came to some of my most profound revelations of that period. I came to the center of my being, which was a deep, dark, single pixel of pure blackness. (B.S.) I came to know that I was truly NOTHING. (B.S.) I tried to fling myself into this Nothingness, what I came to call at the time The Void. (B.S.) At first I was unsuccessful, it seemed impossible to do so, and I was flung out to the far edge of existence. (B.S.) I was able to have an awareness of still being right up on the Void while also being on the edge of the Universe looking across it to its center where I, the Void, was. (B.S.) Eventually I was able to insert myself into the Void, a paradox I know, but this journey is filled with paradox so why not? (B.S.) I was able to be no-dimensional as I was the pure Nothingness which meant that I was also the Everything of the Universe. (B.S.) I was even able to be the membrane, the screen, between the Everything (the manifest) and Nothing (the unmanifested potential). (B.S.) I experienced what it was to be God. I experienced Creation, not as a mastermind genius scientist who created objects, but as the actual Source of creation and I could actually FEEL the Universe and everything that was being created as it came from me and projected into the world. (B.S.) I realized that I was being projected, as if on a multi-dimensional screen, and I was able to determine where the scene was being projected from, to look back down that projection through the column of light back into the projector and see that I was the projector itself. (B.S.)

Now, over the weeks that this was happening, I was blown away by the revelations. I was able to support my conclusions by seeking out writings by many authors, some famous and highly regarded, others that were lesser known but had resonated with me. (B.S.) I had finally found the Fountain of Knowledge and my understanding of this world and how it works was expanding rapidly. For an intellectual guy like me, I had hit the jackpot. (B.S.)

Or so I thought at the time. Around October, well into my shower meditations, I started doing two things that would take me to the next phase of my growth. (B.S.) The first was meditating in the savasana pose, also called the corpse pose. It’s really quite simple, you just lay there on your back, hands by your side, and meditate like you would in a seated position. But for some reason this pose resulted in some very deep meditations. The other thing that dramatically changed the game was I prepared for and went on two Vision Quests out in the desert. (B.S.) During these sessions, I had revelations that were mind blowing. While the revelations in the shower appeared to be very real, it seemed that they were lacking a dimension when compared to the intensity, complexity, and beauty to these new realizations. (B.S.)

During my normal daily life I was aware that I had gone from having a mystical or deeply spiritual experience once every month or so during 2008 to several per week, often several per day. There was a sense of expansion, or of consumption, or of progress, or whatever it is that enabled me to contrast what I thought last month or at the beginning of the year and then note the understanding and lack of belief in my current understanding. (B.S.)

But in the last two to three weeks I realized that something was amiss. I was looking for things in me to burn up and I was having trouble finding them. I started to sense that on one hand I needed to burn up all of my beliefs but on the other it would be impossible to search and destroy each belief, one by one. A feeling crept in that I was going to need to transcend this method of changing struggling within the level of illusion to something that was from a higher level, a greater magnitude. (B.S.) Where I was using a sniper rifle, I needed an H-bomb. But where was I going to find that H-bomb? They don’t just sell them down at Wal-Mart, or Soul Depot for that matter. (B.S.)

Finally, in my discussion with Kevin yesterday, I was presented with my H-bomb. (B.S.) I suppose if you listened to our conversations in reverse order you might be able to find a thread and could find a way to describe it as linear. But we don’t go into it that way, and we have no planned topic or any intention of issues to resolve. We just sit down, get our food, and Kev starts to download a program streamed just for me. As the conversation meandered we started discussing the Maya, a rather typical discussion in most spiritual circles. Why this time it struck home with me when I have participated in this conversation countless time, I cannot explain. But several things clicked and I started to realize that all of those apparent revelations in the shower and desert meditations were really just distractions keeping me from getting to the heart of the matter. (B.S.) It’s not that the revelations aren’t meaningful in the world of Maya (B.S.), it’s just that my ego had found my weakness for knowledge. Forget the awesome sexual visions that some guys would get hung up on. And it long discovered that I was truly fearless and that visions of devils and serpents and gruesome corpses was lost on me. (B.S.) It even had to give up on threatening me with thoughts about my son, Tristan, as I, along with assistance directly from Tristan himself, was able to break the very strong parental protective shell that I had long held for him. (B.S.) (It’s incredible having a conversation with an eleven year old who is not afraid of death but is so attached to his iPhone and Xbox!) (B.S.) Screw all that, I had told the ego, and so it quit trying to ply me with those visions. But that crafty mother fucker finally found the one place that I didn’t even think to look as a distraction, and that was revelation and knowledge of the “Truth.” (B.S.)

Somehow in our conversation yesterday I was able to see that all of those grand visions were just distractions keeping me from going even deeper. Many Buddhist and Hindu tales talk about diamond dust, gold dust, rubies and gems galore, blinding seekers, dazzling them while the elusive Truth lay just beyond. “These eyes are blinded by sadhus (Seekers) and siddhis (powers that come with spiritual growth) and this third eye is blinded by diamond dust” Jim once said. And while not directed at me at the time, it is certainly appropriate for me now. (B.S.) The diamond dust are the revelations and visions that I had been having. They were keeping me from the First Bardo state described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the state where, if you can just keep brushing aside the fantasies and fearful visions, Grace just might step in and tap you on the back of the head. (B.S.)

After my two Vision Quests, I knew where I had “gone wrong.” (B.S.) Out in the desert, especially when I was alone, I was “blessed” with many visions that most people never, ever get to experience. In deep meditation, rather than going back to the First Bardo, I allowed the temptation of obtaining vast knowledge to surpass my desire to become truly Self-less, and I spent that precious time soaking in the revelations. (B.S.) To be fair, it does not seem that I did not consciously make the decision to revel in the visions in lieu of returning to the First Bardo state. (B.S.) When I contemplate with deep integrity on how things went down, it seems that it was a lack of experience that allowed me to become so distracted by these great visions. (B.S.) And so my practice of late has been focusing on becoming mindless in my meditation, retraining myself to forego the wonderful revelations that come so that I can have as pure of a clear mind as possible. (B.S.)

During our conversation yesterday I started to recognize a pattern to the distractions, from the two dimensional child’s play of the early shower meditations to the deeper, more realistic and convincing visions in savasana and during the desert Vision Quests. But all of these distractions were coming when I was in deep meditation. The big ah-ha of the conversation was that THIS was the ultimate distraction. This “reality,” where my body supposedly is made of matter and I am supposedly an individual, this is the craftiest illusion that my ego has come up with, and it probably is the best it will come up with. (B.S.)

Think about how friggin’ detailed this illusion is. The tattered Windows OEM sticker on the bottom of my six year old Dell. The ground in my coffee that slipped through the filter and into my mouth to annoy me. Blech! The tattered, yellow registration sticker on the license plate of the dirty car in front of me. The tiny shred of skin on the top of the roof of my mouth from the insanely hot nacho cheese that scalded me… it won’t go come off no matter how much I toy with it with my tongue. The stack of bills on the kitchen counter waiting for me to address, enabling me to maintain mild level of anxiety about finances. (B.S.)

This is a very short list of the infinite details that make me think that this place MUST be real. (B.S.) And it’s not only the mundane things help solidify this reality. (B.S.) The super lows easily drag us into thinking this place is real. For me, when I get angry I start to lose the observer. It has been a while since I totally lost the observer, but it is definitely the easiest way for me to get lost in the Maya. And the super highs are the diamond dust that I just talked about. Basically, it’s EVERYHING that we can think about that anchors us into thinking this is reality. (B.S.)

This was the main revelation that I had in the conversation with Kevin. Intellectually, I understand that “this is all an illusion.” (B.S.) When we say this, we mean that everything that we think is real is just a dream in the mind of God. (B.S.) The key word there is “everything.” Once you’ve been at this game for a short while, it easy to look at this text in front of you, be it on a screen or on a piece of paper, and acknowledge that it is unreal. (B.S.) You can easily adapt to accepting that from the Absolute perspective all of the material things in front of you are part of a dream, is one big video game or holodeck, is projected from an intricate holographic projector. (B.S.) You can learn to gradually train yourself that the hard, manifested objects are part of a grand illusion, but at some point you have to disbelieve everything including abstract concepts such as suffering, the Tao, high spiritual experiences, your intuition, and ultimately, your sense of self. (B .S.)

I guess the major leap I took in this conversation was the understanding of the totality of the concept. (B.S.) Whereas before I would say “everything is Maya” but not fully grasp what EVERYTHING was, I now genuinely understand the depth of what this meant. (B.S.) Kevin recognized this major step and we spent some time hitting home that not only were these high spiritual revelations just as unreal as the rest of the Maya and were just diamond dust, but the mundane “real world” and my own sense of self were illusion, too. He suggested that with every single thought that I remind myself that this is all just a bunch of bullshit, and that is why you’re seeing (B.S.) throughout this writing. (B.S.) Every time that I complete a thought I try to remember that this is all bullshit. (B.S.) As I am going throughout my day, I am silently saying “B.S.” to myself as often as I can. (B.S.) And you’re seeing how often I am doing this in this writing. (B.S.) It’s my own personal mantra, and the theory is that after reminding myself that this is all B.S., all an illusion, all untrue from the Absolute perspective, my Relative perspective should start to lose value.(B.S.) The idea is that by devaluing this Relative perspective enough I can slip into accepting the Absolute perspective as the default view. (B.S.) That’s the “No Mountains” phase in the Buddhist “Mountains, No Mountains, Mountains” saying. (B.S.)

Don’t get too wrapped up in the idea that this Relative perspective has no value. (B.S.) Once you get back to the second “Mountains” phase the Relative world has meaning once again. (B.S.) But we’ve been conditioned our entire lives to believe that this Relative perspective is the ONLY reality, and this process requires that one entirely gives up that attachment, however so briefly, to perfectly own the Absolute perspective. (B.S.) After that we can take Buddha’s Middle Path and accept all perspective, the Absolute and the myriad Relative ones, as the total truth. (B.S.)

And so now my practice is to acknowledge that every thought, every concept, every material object, and ultimately my sense of self is all a bunch of bullshit, pardon my language. (B.S.) And that includes everything in this writing. (B.S.)

Living Authentically

2009-12-16T07:40:00.000-08:00

I recently began to listen to Aydashanti’s retreat, “From Awakening to Liberation.” It’s a great selection that I highly recommend listening to, and I’m only about 15% through it. The first hour was a discourse on Awakening, the first of three phases to Liberation. The retreats are done satsang style, and after the first discourse, attendees are able to ask Adya questions regarding the discourse. The first question was decent, but the following questions resulted in some really great insight. A woman asked about Choice and Free Will vs. Fate and Destiny. Adya’s answer, that all answers depend on where you are coming from, was clear and concise and it really allowed the concept to gel. (Which is funny as we’re trying to get away from concepts!) He said that if you are coming from a relative perspective (the ego), then you probably feel like there is such a thing as choice. If you are coming from the absolute perspective, then there really doesn’t seem to be free will at all. But you can come from both at the same time, and while that might result in a paradoxical answer, the paradox does not make the answer wrong.

That flowed into a question about living authentically. A woman said that she had been living a spiritual life for a decade and was feeling drawn to move on. But when she envisioned moving on, she felt guilty about not living up to her highest potential. She would no longer be feeding the poor children or helping others expand. She asked Adya what she should do and he threw it back at her with “What do you FEEL you should do?” Because WHATEVER she felt she should do, THAT is what she should do. The key is to be authentic with your feelings. She might be feeling to move on and someone else in her exact situation (which is impossible for anyone to be in the EXACT situation) might feel that they should remain, and both would be exactly right in going with their feeling. He said that someone could be living in a cave and another could be feeding 1,000 children and both could be living authentically.

This inspired me to take it one more step. They had been talking about living authentically in making decisions to move forward, but it did not address living authentically in the past and in the present moment. As I mulled this over, it struck me that THERE IS NO WAY TO NOT LIVE AUTHENTICALLY. The fact that you have done something indicates that it WAS authentic. The fact that you are in a current situation, by default, means you are in authenticity. Because we do what we really want, from our true Self. Our egos may tell us that we are in agreement with what is unfolding or not, but if we have done something, that is exactly what we ultimately wanted to happen.

For example, let’s say that Kitty is facing a decision about whether she should move for employment. She may have job offers in Boston, Montreal, San Francisco, and she might have the option to remain in a Las Vegas position with minimal job security. At the present moment, she may FEEL that she should either stay in Las Vegas or move to San Francisco, but that she should not take the positions in Boston or Montreal. And if she chooses to remain in Las Vegas in accordance with her intuition, then she is living authentically in the moment.

But let’s say that a month from now something disastrous happens with her job in Las Vegas and she ends up moving to Boston in three months, a place that she didn’t feel right about moving to. Was she out of alignment? No. What mattered was that she was in integrity at the time that she made the decision to stay in Las Vegas. Who knows what lessons she experienced or what she avoided by not moving to Boston immediately. (From the absolute perspective, she missed nothing because she was always going to delay three months moving from Vegas to Boston. From that perspective there wasn’t any choice; the choice was only from the relative perspective.) But working within the context of living authentically, AT THE MOMENT SHE MADE THE DECISION, SHE WAS IN INTEGRITY. The very next moment was a completely new situation. Things in the world changed. And as time went on (which is a valid concept from the relative perspective), many factors surrounding the situation changed. If she had been tuned into her intuition about this throughout the whole period, she would have noticed a shift in her feeling about it. At some point, if she had checked back in, she may have even noticed that her feeling had changed and that she it was now authentic to move to Boston, in spite of her genuinely authentic feeling about staying in Las Vegas before.

The key is to become aware of our feelings about our present situation and then go with our intuition. That is how we start to live authentically IN THE MOMENT. And by living authentically in the moment, our paths unfold the way our true Selves genuinely want them to unfold.

Spiritual Partners

2009-12-11T00:06:00.000-08:00

The significance of living with someone who is as focused on Self-realization as I am is unquantifiable and has been one of the greatest impacts on my personal development. (The fact that I hang out with a few Enlightened beings a few times a week is the other massive factor in the rate in which I am feeling the change.) From the outside, I sense that even our closest friends wonder how two people can live and breathe almost every moment discussing, contemplating, and introspecting this Self-realization game. And yet that is what Kitty and I have done for each other for the last nine months together, and even for a good part of the first two months before we became a couple.

Prior to connecting with Kitty, I was in a three and a half year relationship with someone I loved very much. I still do love her as she is an awesome, beautiful person. But as much as I truly loved her, we were miles apart, spiritually. This was our second time around as she and I were high-school sweet hearts and lived basically next door to each other when we were growing up. After 16+ years of marriage to two other people we reconnected during our 20th high school reunion. Fairy tale, right? And it was. But two years into our relationship I had a radical awakening that turned my world upside down.

For two months in November of 2007 I became disoriented, thought I was going insane, and spent most of that time disassociated from my body. When I came out the other side in January 2008 I had no clue what I had just gone through and had no support system to explain any of it to me. Fortunately for the internet and my penchant for used books I eventually came to The Celestine Prophecy and then the big breakthrough with Eckhart Tolle and I had discovered that what had happened to me was consciousness oriented. And so began my interminable march that ultimately led me to the path of Self-realization. That was also the beginning of the end of my idyllic relationship with my then-current lover.

About a year into my intense exploration of consciousness I met Kitty. We first met on January 6th, 2009 when I attended a MetaMystics meeting about shamanism and she was the speaker. But we had heard about each other a few weeks earlier through a mutual friend named Julija. Kitty had already joined the Meetup group that I had started a few months ago and was receiving the myriad emails that I was sending out to the group. And Julija emphatically encouraged me to read Kitty's blog (www.PoetKitty.com) and so I did... and was blown away by her candor and incredible writing style. And while the attraction was certainly there when we first met, it wasn't until we had got to know each other while attending the many various gatherings that we realized how we were not only on the same sheet of music, but we were on the exact same 16th note.

We found ourselves faced with a rather precarious situation. I was engaged to my current partner and while the wedding date was a year and a half away (to coincide with our 25th high school reunion), our love was very deep. And in 2008 Kitty had reconnected with a long-term former boyfriend herself, someone who loved her very much as well. As synchronicity would have it, both of our relationships were with people who did not live in Las Vegas. Why would we have both put ourselves in the exact same situation is only evidence of the perfection of how we manifest things.

So there we were, both in love with people who loved us, and yet there was something that each of us recognized in the other that was so compelling that five weeks after meeting each other, Kitty had left her boyfriend. To top it off, I had not left my girlfriend and when she left her boyfriend she did so in blind faith. She had no commitment from me that I was going to leave my current relationship. She was like a trapeze artist who had let go of her bar, flying through the air, trusting... trusting that whatever was supposed to happen would be there when it was supposed to be. So two weeks later I went to my partner, the woman that I loved, and I told her that I had to leave because my path was calling me to do so.

She must have thought I was nuts. While I did tell her that the stress of the long distance relationship was becoming rather challenging from an integrity perspective, which it was, I made it very clear that it was, as I naively called it at the time, my path towards "Enlightenment" that was the primary driving factor in my leaving her. She was graceful during the breakup and it was one of the most mature and natural separations that you could imagine. I know that there was a ton of pain on her end as there was great anguish for me in my leaving her, but the pull drawing me towards Self-realization was infinitely compelling.

Almost immediately Kitty and I committed to a path together. From the outset we made it clear that our individual spiritual paths would take precedence over our relationship. It was to be a great lesson in detachment, one that many believed was doomed to fail as "they had heard that one before." But here we are, almost a year later, and many have witnessed how true to that consecration we have remained. Our detachment from the relationship itself has made our bond stronger than almost any couple I have ever met. It is not a bond of codependency. It is a bond of kindred spirits honoring each others expansion. It gives true meaning to the cliche, "If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it's yours; if it doesn't, it never was." What is funny is that it is never mine and it is never hers, and paradoxically, because it isn't either of ours, it just is. And that is perfection.

But it is easy to talk about the lovey-dovey part. Yeah, we're very attracted to each other. And yes, we have many important compatible likes and dislikes. Our musical taste is remarkably similar. And we're not just talking about liking to listen to the same radio station. We love some very niche genres like Psytrance and Psybient that most people have never even heard of. All of that makes it easy to be around each other all of the time.

The significance of having a partner that is right there with you, spiritually, is discovered in the hard spots. It's not found in the awesome rapture of tantric embrace, it is found when face-to-face when one or the others' ego is large and in charge, or more challenging yet, both egos are out to play. To the unawakened individual, these rough spots are looked to as "the bad times." But to those who have discovered the keys to personal growth, those situations, the times when tension is high and tears and anger come forth, are the greatest opportunities to uncover and resolve issues that we have traditionally learned to repress and avoid.

One of the most important part of being a spiritual partner is to hold the space for one another so that the egos can expose themselves fully. In doing so, both of the partners are able to observe the flaring ego and, with practice, can track back to the origin of the issue. At first the tracking back can be done after things have cooled off, but with practice it can be done even while the ego is in the middle of its expression. Not only is this more effective, but it allows the person who is operating in egoic mode to learn to be both the ego and the observer. The one holding space can remind their partner to connect with the observer, not so that the observer takes charge or dampens the ego's response, but just so that the person gets used to having a dual awareness where one is fully feeling the egoic response and the other is the unobtrusive observer holding space for one's own ego.

Kitty and I stumbled into all of this. We made it up as we went. Our commitment to integrity, even when in the most egoic state, allowed us to not take things personally. That was a key element in the evolution of our conflict resolution process. Our conflct resolution process shifted from trying to figure out how to resolve the issue into trying to just hold the space, observe what was going on, and trying to find the lesson that we had gifted ourselves with.

Another key to this was our ownership in a concept that Kitty has often called "nothing outside of self exists." That means that we accept the perfection of exactly how everything is, and that we manifest EVERYTHING that we bring into our lives. In doing so, we were able to look at each of these conflicts as true lessons that we had orchestrated, sometimes entirely subconsciously, so that we could have this opportunity to observe and track back to release. We humans are ingenious, as the system worked so that if we were observant enough we could begin to see these things when they were small. But if we weren't willing or able enough to utilize the subtle manifestations, our incredibly perfect system would gradually amplify the next manifestation until we WERE able to recognize it. If we still chose to consciously avoid releasing the issue we might be able to side-step it this time, but the next time it was going to be bigger, bolder, and more in our face until we did release it.

It is only as I type this that I realize that the act of holding space for your partner is exactly the same process of learning to hold space for yourself. All those times that Kitty held the space for me she was learning how to hold space for herself. For every egoic break that I was able to observe and be there for Kitty and her ego, Kat, I was learning how to hold space for my own ego.

It was this morning at 4 am and I found myself lying in bed pondering our conversation from the night before. We were discussing the two concepts of Personal Mastery and Abiding Non-Dual Awareness when Kitty and I did something we almost never do. We allowed ourself to discuss how we felt each other's observer awareness compared to the other. I have felt that for several months, probably since my September 9th breakthrough, that I have been in observer mode for many days in a row, and Kitty agreed. Kitty stated that she felt that she was very close to that, but that there were many times where her ego had risen up and expressed itself. It was in this moment that we realized that we had gotten into the habit of gauging ourselves in how often the egoic programming was affecting our behavior. Kitty said that almost all of the time that her ego was expressing itself that the observer was there, but that it was just a shred of her total awareness. And that is when we both realized the crux of everything that we had been discussing, in satsang and with each other, for an entire year. Our goal is to have the observer there 100% of the time, but it is only so the observer is AWARE, it is not for the observer to manipulate or affect the situation at all. So while we first were thinking that I might be more "in control" than she was, we realized that both of us have the observer going on at all times, she's just allowing her ego to express itself fully and unmolested more often than I have been.

As I type this, I realize that there is great benefit from allowing the ego to fully express itself without the "higher Self" manipulating the experience. And that is great during the bulk of the day. But there seems to be a great benefit in allowing the Self to consciously direct the egoic programming to be more in flow, to learn Personal Mastery.

If you have gotten to the point where you are the observer 24/7 and you are in the mode of allowing things to be unmanipulated, where does the ego's personal preferences end and the manipulation begin? In other words, if I am laying on the bed and the cat's licking sounds are driving my ego nuts, is it manipulation of the scenario to pull a pillow over my head or to nudge the cat off the bed, or is that just letting the ego do what it wants? It seems to me that "manipulation" comes in when there is a "should" or a "judgment" about the action. The organic response of being annoyed by the licking sound seems to be "what is." That by avoiding my initial, thoughtless response is the manipulation. The avoidance is a result of my judging that it is "wrong" to not like the noise. I don't judge the noise, it is what it is, and my ego doesn't like it. That's FINE. It is when I step in and "should on myself" that I am manipulating the experience from what it is.

Since the beginning of the year Kitty and I have had numerous breakthroughs and ah-ha moments. Some of these come while alone in meditation or in the shower. Others come while spending time with some of my favorite sounding boards like Steve Mikrut, Rich Belsky, or Jennifer Korsten-Mills. And others come during my weekly events with my Enlightened teachers. But I have to say that most of the big breakthroughs come while discussing all of the above with Kitty, my incredible spiritual partner. Perhaps our story sounds a bit extreme. Leaving your current partner, someone whom you love dearly, to blindly leap into a relationship that is going to take a back seat to your own personal path is not for everyone. But I can't convey to you the impact that having such a partner has been.

My Awakening

2009-09-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

This week Kitty and I went through a major transformation. In a cosmically beautiful orchestration, we experienced Self-realization and a level of abiding nondual awareness that is resulting in radically changing how each of us perceives who and what we are. Just as beautiful was the stark contrast in the way that each of us has woken up and how each of us is processing it differently and yet ultimately the same.

Below is what I wrote the morning that I had the realization. I am sure that as time (within this dualistic existence) marches on, our perceptions of how things went down and what they mean will change. I just wanted to share my attempt at describing what happened to me this past week. Again, this is my description of what I went through during those three days. It does not reflect what Kitty went through nor her revelations as I wrote this before we fully realized what was happening to her. Her story will be just as dazzling, I can assure you that.

Sean

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September 9, 2009
Las Vegas, NV

This morning I had a realization that resulted in the connection of several other big realizations. Self-realization, to be precise. Self-realization plus the knowing that the key is to be Self-aware at all times while allowing the human experience to take place and occupy a portion of your awareness.

This realization came as a culmination of two months of shower meditations that resulted in cosmic or mystical experiences. These meditations imparted insights, or lessons, experientially upon my awareness until the final three days whereupon a fusion reaction connected the insights into a major revelation.

It was in my shower meditations that I was able to move my inquiry from a verbal dialog into a true inner dive. I was able to seek to the core of myself until I truly came to the realization that there is a beautiful nothing deep down in there, and that nothingness was me. I was able to have the awareness of the Void itself. I was able to project from the Void all that is created, and therefore know that I, the Void, am the Creator.

During some meditations, I practiced creating. I would create anything I could imagine and it would be. Whether or not this was creating a true manifestation as I meditated is not of much importance. The fact was that I was able to practice creation and learn how to relax into it.

Many times I would seek the Void and attempt to go as deep as possible into it. Many times I continued to effortlessly fall head first into the dive. Other times, there were many distractions from all of the levels of the default world. This made it necessary to develop and strengthen an ability to wake back up and return some level of the awareness back to the Void. This is where a sound meditation practice became a factor, as I was able to deflect the distractions as I had been deflecting the thoughts before.

On Monday, September 7th, Kitty and I were discussing our long weekend with Adyashanti and a friend who channels to a small, private group. I was describing where I was in my shower meditations and we got to discussing falling forever into the Void. She asked why did I ever stop falling in? I said I didn’t know. Something always came up or the hot water would start to run out and I’d just stop going in. She mentioned a mantra that Jim MacKenna recently gave her: “I am following God, I am following God, I am never coming back.” She also mentioned that for what is often referred to as ego death to occur you must be unconditionally willing to lay down this world and not expect to ever come back.

At this point I felt that I needed to jump into the shower to see if I could fall endlessly into the Void. I began in my usual manner and quickly, almost immediately I was able to perceive the Void. I began to fall into it, consciously releasing into it, almost surrendering into it. As I attempted to completely surrender into it I became aware that I needed to relax my entire body. As I was standing, this led to a problem of not being able to completely relax. I briefly attempted to reposition in several seated, kneeling, and lying down positions but none of them provided even a remotely similar water pattern as I was now much closer to the ground.

Once I resumed my standing position I was able to get back into falling into the Void. I then was struck with the idea that I did not need the water to be aware of the Void so I stood out of the stream and expected and experienced the Void. After a few minutes I realized that I could also do this with my eyes open. At this point I was out of the water flow, open eyed, and completely conscious of the default consciousness and I was still experiencing the Void before me. I called for Kitty and left the shower for the bed.

I told Kitty that I had been falling into the Void but that I was encountering distractions that were becoming stumbling blocks. I told her that I wanted to lie next to her to see if she could experience it via transmission. I asked her to be prepared to help in case I got stuck, distracted by another egoic program. I hoped she might be able to recognize and point out my sticking point so that I could release further into the Void. Interestingly I was able to release into it completely on my own and suddenly I came to the realization that the Void that I saw before me was a big part of the puzzle that I was trying to piece together. I finally realized that seeing the Void and knowing and accepting what it was was the moment of awakening, it caused me to laugh out loud (which Kitty and I actually recorded.)

While the awakening occurred at this moment, it was not until approximately 36 hours later when I finally understood the concept of abiding nondual awareness. I had been aware of the Void and was pretty much able to “see it” at almost any given moment. At approximately 10 am I was intending to go over to meet Rich Hughes and Buck Precht at the 15th St house, so I jumped into the shower. Once I got into the shower I decided to make it a shower meditation and when I did, things started happening quickly. Almost immediately it came to me that the key to remaining awake was to keep some level of the awareness of the Void in my consciousness at all times. Once that was clear, I got out of the shower, sat on the couch and let the realization sink in that what I was doing was committing myself to, forever more, hold the awareness of the Void over that of the awareness of the default world. It is at that point, where I surrendered the focus of the awareness of that which I call “myself” from the default world to the awareness of the Void, that I would refer to the moment of accepting abiding nondual awareness. Abiding: persistent, eternal, never ending. Nondual awareness: the awareness from the perspective of the Void as Creator. Together this means that at any given moment I am able to perceive existence from the perspective of the Void itself and to feel the creation as it is going on.

I realized that once I had awakened, the abiding part would probably be something that needed to be worked on. Once the realization had been owned you could always go back to it. I even said it was like a bookmark and that I could put it down and pick it back up and be right where I left off. But I knew that the trick was to become so comfortable with the awareness of the Void being ever-present in my consciousness. I practiced in relaxing into the default world while still maintaining the awareness of the Void. I would let myself slip slowly back into the default awareness while maintaining my awareness of the Void. I would allow the bulk of my awareness to focus on the default world so that the awareness of the Void was just a sliver, but it was still there. This is what I have come to call one-mindedness, or the ability to have the experience of the Oneness, the perspective of that of the Void itself. My current primary objective is to maintain that perspective above any other.

As I became comfortable with this I started to play with how deeply I could slip into the default world and still maintain a sliver of awareness of the Void. I questioned whether the task was to maintain awareness of the Void at all times with no exception. It seemed rational that I could want the experience of allowing the awareness of the Void to be completely forgotten and then to be able to come right back to the awareness of the Void. (This reminded me of an experiment I did with Tamara Bostrom in 2007 where I would intentionally try to forget something that I clearly knew but then I could have a trigger that would allow me to remember it. Basically, I wanted to be able to forget something completely but still have the ability to recall it indirectly, and it worked very well.) Interestingly, during bedtime discussion with my son, Tristan, we actually got into a discussion about this and he felt very strongly that one must always possess at least a sliver of the Void Awareness.

At this point, it seems that the human existence is to allow for the potential of the Void to manifest. Without the ability to manifest, the Void would just be potential and that is it. The act of manifestation is what enables the potential to actually come to fruition.

Upon awakening, it seems one of the first tasks is to stretch and strengthen one’s ability to dive into the default world but to be able to come back to the awareness of the Void at any given moment. The more solid the abiding awareness of the Source-as-Self, the more one can allow the human experience to become part of one’s awareness. The trick is to allow as much of the human experience to fill your awareness while always maintaining a sliver of the Source-as-Self awareness. Experience allows one to play that line of how much opacity the human experience has before it obscures the connection with the Ultimate Source (Void, Creator, Ultimate Awareness).

Mucking through the Maya

2009-07-01T20:02:00.001-07:00

A good friend of mine, Rich B., was asking me if I had read anything about Drunvalo Melchizedek, a guy who has written on many topics including numerology. Below is my reply. I felt it seemed topical enough to repost here.

Rich:
Have you had a chance to look at any Melchizedek stuff yet?

Sean:
Yes, but my problem is that I'm having trouble connecting with just about every topic. I'm really in a mode of not really caring about anything going on in the Maya right now. I was standing in my library, packing for my trip, looking for something to take to read. There were only a handful of books that I was even remotely interested in reading, and it took me some time to even select those. Most of them have to do with straight-up, hard core Enlightenment. I thought of bringing a book on Tarot and said now. I thought about Astrology and said no. I didn't even bring an Alan Watts book! Make that !!! So Melchizedek is not on my radar right now. (Shit, I should have brought Shanti's book! Crap, that would have been a good one. Well, next trip!)

Adya has some pretty interesting things to say about the paradox of looking within and finding Nothing AND Everything. Fuck, everything is a fucking paradox... At some point I'm just going to have to stop trying to resolve every damn paradox, which means that I'll have to let things go unresolved, which means that I will no longer have a solid paradigm in place, which means that I may as well stop thinking all together, WHICH I KNOW IS THE ULTIMATE OBJECTIVE OF THE PATH TO AWAKENING BUT IT STILL DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE!!!! ARGH!!!

What really sucks is:

A: Through the process of awakening I'm supposed to get confused at these paradoxes and let my understanding entirely fall apart.

B: I am fully aware of this.

C: By being fully aware of this, any time that I really feel that this is happening, I have to question myself and ask "Is this my spiritual ego that is coming to this conclusion?" Because if it is, then I'm trying to fool myself into thinking I'm somewhere further into the process than I really am.

D: In the past I would work hard to increase my understanding until the paradoxes were resolved. Now when I get to a paradox, I don't know if I'm actually at a real paradox that I cannot possibly resolve or if I'm just being lazy and am letting the paradoxes (paradoxi?) build up.

So now I don't even have the satisfaction of running into a paradox and letting it go because I can't figure out if it's my ego or not. (Hmm, maybe this is where intuition is supposed to come in.)

Whatever.

Synchronicity in a False Universe

2009-06-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

It has been a week of incredible synchronicity. There is a nice sangha legend (kind of like an urban legend, but known in the spiritual community, not "on the street") that once you experience Self-realization everything is rosey and things come together perfectly. While they might come together perfectly, I think there is a disconnect about what it is meant by "perfect." From the unawakened perspective that likely is attached to a favorable outcome, one that is desired by the individual. But from the Enlightened perspective, EVERYTHING is perfect, so that something that would have been viewed as a failure or shortcoming from the yet-to-be-Awakened perspective, it would be viewed as EXACTLY the way it is supposed to be and there is no desire to have it any other way.

Well, I've yet to pop so I'm coming from the yet-to-be-Awakened perspective. That means I desire and enjoy when things line up in a manner that would traditionally be viewed as "good." For example, on Friday I was coming on to a six day stretch of being on call for United. There was one person on for 3 days ahead of me on the list and there were at least a half dozen people who were on for 4-5 days that were after me. That meant that any long trip that was coming up, I should have gotten the assignment.

When I looked at the open flying, there were at least four trips open for Saturday and Sunday that were 4-5 days long, which meant that barring a miracle, I was going to have to fly out on Saturday or Sunday for 4-5 days. This was quite a bummer as Kitty had been gone for 10 days on the Richard Moss Radical Aliveness retreat and was set to come home on Sunday. Things were lined up so that I would be leaving on a trip right when she would be returning... hence the bummer.

If we are lined up for flying there is a mechanism that allows us to influence which trip we get assigned to, and I considered looking at the list and figuring out how to get on the trip that would return me as soon as possible. But something in me said "You've been trying to take your hands off the tiller and become a leaf on a stream. Let go now and see what happens." It wasn't the B-movie "voice in the head" thing, it was more of a knowingness that I should just detach from the outcome and let things happen as they will.

I shit you not, about an hour and a half after I did this the Crew Desk called and said that they had an assignment for me. They needed a pilot to go fly as a passenger to Denver on Friday night and show up at the training center to be the second pilot for another pilot who was receiving training. The assignment would officially end around 2 pm on Saturday, and I would fly back, on the clock, Saturday evening. As I need a reasonable amount of time off before a long Pacific trip, that basically guaranteed that I would not be going on a long trip on Sunday and would really be back in the hot seat on Monday.

Here's the amazing part. With me having 6 days (which is the most days you can be on call before you have to schedule a 24 hour period off), there is no way that I should have been assigned a 2 day trip. There were many people behind me on the list where that would have made more sense, and one of our scheduling rules is that they assign the trips to someone who has that many days on or one day more. (In other words, if a 3 day trip comes open, they have to find the first person that has "3 or 4" days on in a row. This saves the people with 6 days on for the longer trips, if there are any. By assigning me the 2 day trip, it essentially shot me for any long trips this time on call. Again, to assign me this trip, there had to be some extrordinary circumstances to assign it to me, a pilot with 6 days of availability.

Here's how incredible this allowed things to play out. By going on this assignment on Friday and getting done rather early on Saturday, I was able to fly out to LAX, rent a car and drive 1.5 hours to Ojai to spend the evening with the Richard Moss group on the last night of the retreat. I was then able to help Kitty drive back from Ojai which was really nice as she was emotionally wrung out (which is exactly what we expected and wanted from the retreat.) I basically had Sunday off so even if I were to get an assignment during this on call period, I was safe until Monday.

Had the assignment come on Saturday, I would have been able to see Kitty Sunday evening but I would have missed the last night of the retreat and she would have had to drive home by herself. If it got done on Friday and not Saturday, I would have been in the hot seat on Sunday and I would have probably had to fly a trip and be gone for 4-5 more days. Had they not given me this assignment at all, I would have definitley flown one of the myriad trips that were already open and, again, I would have been gone for several days.

Why was I assigned that trip? I don't know. I didn't ask. I received it with astonishment and gratitude and did not question why. Many things like this have been happening, and they seem to increase in frequency and impact with the amount of focus I have had on this process. I do realize that I need to look at everything as being synchronistic, not just the things that my persona would find handy, "lucky," or beneficial. I need to look at everything as being perfect and find the perfection in everything. But it is interesting how frequently these "favorable" things have been happening.

Now, how do I reconcile all of this with the fact that nothing is real, this is all a dream? Well, I know that I'm focused on Awakening and so I'm trying to mold my vessel to be as open and conforming to that reality. So I've been fundamentally denying EVERYTHING, labeling it all as untrue, unreal.

I do realize, however, that those that have Self-realized do end up reentering into the dream world and playing the game. Why play the game if it is all just an illusion, a dream of the pure Awareness? Honestly, if put on the spot, I'd have to admit that I don't know why. But I would suspect along with Self-realization comes the realization that pure Awareness is facinated with the dream and it is our purpose to live out the dream. So if we're going to play our part in this charade, we might as well understand the rules of the game.

The game has meaning only because we give it meaning. For the unawakened, we do that by accepting this perspective as "reality." For the Self-realized, I'm guessing they do that by coming back in the game and utlizing their ego-shell to function within the dream. Since we do give the game meaning, its interesting to note how synchronicity works.

So that is how I'm reconciling my interest in figuring it out while still working on integrating the "everyting is false" concept. For now, I feel a need to keep the focus on the "everyting is false" track and once I become that and cease to just intellectualize it, I'll know then whether or not I should spend any time at all on topics like this.

Acknowledging it is ALL A LIE

2009-06-26T07:37:00.000-07:00

I'm to the part where I'm actually acknowledging that everything that I can possibly think is untrue, based on a false foundation. When I say that I'm "acknowledging" it, I am transitioning from intellectualizing it as a possibility and I am assimilating it into my personal paradigm. Rather, since this will ultimately destroy my entire personal paradigm, I'm replacing my entire paradigm with this one concept.

Initially, once I chose to accept the concept it was quite easy to implement. Reject everything. Anything that anyone could say or that I could read, hear, or think would be false. For the time being, allow the destructive techniques to remain as they allowed me to find concepts that had remained hidden until looked at from another, more oblique angle. But eventually even those tools would have to fall to the prime directive of "Everything is false, nothing is true."

I said initially it was quite easy, and I realized that I'm still very much in the initial phase. But as I dig deeper into the more basic, fundamental concepts, it is harder and harder to reject them.

For example, it was easy for me to give up angels, spirits, and ETs. Not that I don't think there is life on other planets within this construct of reality, it's just that I don't believe that this construct of reality IS real. Therefore, no real universe, no real planets for the ETs to really exist on, poof, they are gone to me. Angels and disassociated spirits have always been external to me and I have not given them much reality in my universe anyhow, so, poof, without much thought, they, too were gone.

Mind you, not that none of this isn't real within the context of this universe and the dimensons that individual choose to perceive beyond this one. They all seem to work fine, all the explanations as to why they must exist are seemingly logical and rational (at least as far along as I'm willing to invest my brainpower to investigate.) I'm not denying that there isn't something like ESP in this world, in this reality. What I am denying is THIS REALITY, and in doing so, the rest of it is null and void as well.

But I was talking with Rich Belsky about the concepts of souls. At least for now, he has an affinity for the concept of a soul, that there is some thread that binds our individual incarnations together from lifetime to lifetime. This concept is what allows us to utilize the concept of karma. After all, if there is no soul connecting our past and future lives together, how would karma from a past life be a player?

As I understand it, when I look inward, I will find a void. A total emptiness of self. As I also currently understand it, according to general and basic non-dualism (which I will also have to drop during this massacre of ideas and thought), EVERYTHING, manifested (in this universe) and unmanifested, is contained in the one Source/God/Whathaveyou. Even when you condense it down into the tiniest speck, like how the scientists paint a picture of the beginning of the Big Bang, there is still something there. Likely not physically, but there is still the Source, the Divine Consciousness, the creator of it all. So if the Divinity is within me, and the Source is at the center of me, and when I look inward to the core I find nothing, and if everything is FALSE, then what of the Source itself. Is it not Consciousness? Is that not something? Is that NOT nothing?

So I find myself stuck at the paradox between the Void that I will find at the center of my Self and the fact that I am Divinity and the Source of EVERYTHING, even if that source is Pure Awareness and nothing else, it is still SOMETHING not NOTHING.

Rich hung in there with all of my rambling and paradoxical pondering. It was beautiful having someone there who had challenging questions that I could not answer, questions that had me questioning the idea that everything is False. I'm still operating under that idea, but Rich was very helpful in uncovering concepts that were not so easily torn apart by the everything is false approach.

When we ended our time together we discussed the idea of attacking the concept "Everything is false, nothing is true" with the "Everything is false" sword. That's a paradox that I'll probably be working with today.

Adyashanti - A VERY Clear Speaker

2009-06-25T20:44:00.001-07:00

In my quest for finding material about tearing everything down to the core I discovered Adyashanti. I am easily connected to what he is saying when I watch his videos. He makes them available for free on YouTube or on his own website, Adyashanti.org. I would highly recommend diving into a few of these videos to see if what he's saying resonates with you. It's a rare, clear voice speaking to a small crowd that can presently get what he's saying. You either get it and love it or you don't and you'll quickly drop it.

YouTube Adyashanti Channel

Videos on Adyashanti.org

Audio on Adyashanti.org

Douglas Harding & The Headless Way

2009-06-25T12:48:00.000-07:00

I have stumbled into another teacher that espouses methods to tear down the identity of self and even Self to leave only the Truth. Douglas Harding developed The Headless Way. It is an experiential process of seeing Who you really are, a la Ramana Maharshi.

The following is taken from www.TheHeadlessWay.org:

THE HEADLESS WAY

The Headless Way offers you a practical, user-friendly way to see Who you really are. This method was developed by the philosopher Douglas Harding. At the heart of this approach are the Experiments - awareness exercises that guide your attention directly to your deepest identity.

Who Are You?

Religion’s Answer
The world’s great mystics have a common message:

"There is a Reality which is Indivisible, One, Alone, the Source and Being of all; not a thing, nor even a mind, but pure Spirit or clear Consciousness; and we are That and nothing but That, for That is our true Nature; and the only way to find It is to look steadily within, where are to be found utmost peace, unfading joy, and eternal life itself." (From Religions of the World by Douglas Harding)

Science’s Answer
What you are depends on the range of the observer. At several metres, more or less, you are human, but at closer ranges you are cells, molecules, atoms, particles… Viewed from further away your body becomes absorbed into the rest of society, life, the planet, the star, the galaxy… Science’s objective view of you – zooming towards and away from you - reveals a hierarchically organized system of layers that is alive at every level, intelligent and beautiful. Thus you have many layers, like an onion. You need every one of these layers to exist. Your human identity, vital and important as it is, is just one of these layers. You are also sub-human and supra-human. (See interactive panel on the left. See also: The Hierarchy of Heaven & Earth.)

What are you at the Centre of your many layers? The scientist cannot say because she can only observe you from a distance. However close she gets to you, she remains outside you. What or Who you really are, the Ground of your Being, remains a mystery.

Other People’s Answer
Other people are like the scientist because they cannot see what you are at Centre either, only what you are peripherally. Reflecting back to you what they make of you, their feedback is about you as a person.

Your Answer
You are not distant from yourself, not outside yourself. You – and you alone - are therefore perfectly placed to see what you are at Centre. All you have to do is look.

How do you look into your Centre?
The Experiments direct your attention inwards to your centre. They reveal the One you really are, the One at the heart of your life. Take some time now to explore them.

When you have carried out the experiments, explore the rest of the website. You will find articles, short films, quotations, comments, interviews and more… You can also listen to the Audio Introduction, subscribe to the e-Course in Seeing, contribute to the Discussion Forum and, if you like, let us know your response to seeing Who you really are.

Quotation
Over the past [sixty] years a truly contemporary and Western way of 'seeing into one's Nature' or 'Enlightenment' has been developing. Though in essence the same as Zen, Sufism, and other spiritual disciplines, this way proceeds in an unusually down-to-earth fashion. It claims that modern man is more likely to see Who he really is in a minute of active experimentation than in years of reading, lecture-attending, thinking, ritual observances, and passive meditation of the traditional sort. Instead of these, it uses a variety of simple, non-verbal, fact-finding tests, all of them asking: how do I look to myself? They direct my attention to my blind spot - to the space I occupy, to what's given right here at the Centre of my universe, to what it's like being 1st-person singular, present tense. (From The Headless Way, a leaflet by Douglas Harding.)

Richard Rose & The Albigen System

2009-06-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

Several months ago while talking with Rich Hughes and Buck, I heard one or both of them say that they were done with finding new ideas to add on to their personal paradigms and were working on tearing everything down, throwing everything they could not prove as "truth" away to the curb. I recall then that I understood intellectually what they were saying, but it was not a technique or process that I was using at that time.

In the last month several concepts have finally sunk in. These days I'm having trouble identifying anything at all that is "true." The more I read and learn the more I realize how much more there is to read and learn if I want to master the dreamworld. Fortunately, I am simultaneously owning the concept that my main objective is not about mastering the dreamworld but in transcending it all together, so I don't have to worry about reading and learning about all that.

So my quest for the last month or so has been to seek out material that will help me throw out all of the rest of the material in my mind. If it is a system of BUILDING my paradigm, I don't want it. If it is a DECONSTRUCTIVE system, that is what I'm currently interested in.

To that end, my reading and web-surfing has led me to an interesting character named Richard Rose. There's a lot written about this guy, although this is the first time that I've really taken notice of him. (I think I landed on a website referring to him sometime late last year, but it did not ping strong on my radar then.) I'm becoming quite familiar with the mainstream authors and teachers (Tolle, Hawkins, J. Krishnamurti, Richard Moss, Leonard Jacobsen, and the lighter crowd of Dyer/Katie/Williamson etc.) I'm starting to find my way to the anti-teachers. Along with Ramana Maharshi, Richard Rose seems to come with favorable recommendations and he's reasonably well published so it's cheap and easy to acquire his material.

His first book is named after his method: The Albigen System. I found a page that gives you a good idea of what his approach is. Here is an excerpt from the site:

[i]"The Albigen System is a unique path created several decades ago by teacher/author Richard Rose when he first began working with those who wished to find a retreat from error and a vector that would bring them to a full realization of Truth or Enlightenment. Based on his book, The Albigen Papers, along with personal notes and observations he held about the psychology of observation and action, he “prescribed” a ways and means of “Becoming” as he put it – so that one could identify their obstacles and chief feature in order to become the Truth. He would often refer to the phrase, “becoming as a little child,” to bring about the understanding that a person must rid themselves of their “barnacles and bugs” to even begin to develop an intuition and clarity which would eventually bring them to an understanding of their essential nature.

The Albigen System aims directly at Self-Realization or Enlightenment. It is a practical, subtractive system. It is not jaded by political correctness, positive thinking, devotion, dogma or ritual. It is simply based on going beyond illusion, beginning with the self. His system of meditation is likewise simply based on going within and observing your thoughts, humiliations, errors and egos with a detached “massive indifference.” It does not seek for definitions of Truth but instead encourages the individual to develop a vector that leads away from untruth. He referred to this as the Maximum Reversal System. By uncovering and acknowledging the illusions, untruths and inconsistencies in our own lives we stand a chance of stumbling upon our true nature and our very Source."[/i]

CLICK HERE to read more about this process. There's a ton of free resources to be had. Basically, this material is focused on you realizing there is no truth to be understood in this human form, it is to be experienced, and to experience it you need to realize that there is no self and there is no Self... there is absolutely nothing.

Why do we meet and discuss?

2009-06-07T09:54:00.000-07:00

I can genuinely accept that I am not going to be able to think my way to Enlightenment. Why then do we meet in sangha and discuss things at all? Why don't we just meet and meditate together? I mean, if my ultimate objective is Self-realization, why talk at all?

Anything that is said is ultimately a bunch of BS. Even that from Jim and Kevin, and I believe they'd heartily agree. Yeah, it points more in the direction of the truth than anything else, but if it isn't true, then it's false, and so we're all sitting around lying to each other whether we mean to or not.

I know I'm setting myself up for a typical koan-ic response, but if nothing that I can say or think is real, and if all I need to do is realize that the self that I've identified with for over forty years is just a dream and my real Self is the source of the ENTIRE dream, then why can't I just get that and stop thinking about every thing else?

I know, I know: well get it then, already, and let's move on to the "Well, how's Enlightenment working for you, Sean?" days. I just haven't FIGURED OUT (yes, I KNOW) how to make the leap from ACCEPTING that to KNOWING that. Which is EXACTLY why I come do the dang Sunday Sanghas. Freaking circular logic.

So I come to the Sunday Sanghas without any expectation of what I'm going to say or hear, only in hopes that one of these days I WILL get it. Until then I will enjoy Jim's haikus and artwork, become befuddled by the the devilish observations made by the Enlightened ones, and listen to me and the rest of the somnambulists as we continue to talk in our sleep. Grrrr.

Dream: I am Tristan's Player

2009-02-12T09:26:00.000-08:00

After a very intense and vivid dream I got to a point where there were four of us in a car, two in front, two in back. At first it was John Cooper in back right, me in back left. We pulled over and we stopped and I could see a building about 20 yards off the road that had two open garage doors. As we stopped, however, a red building close to the road was going to block our view of the far off building if we didn't stop RIGHT NOW. We stopped and John and I could stretch back far enough to be able to see the far off building. (During the stopping it seemed like this was a movie and I could tell that it was scripted that we would stop PAST it, but we, the driver, was able to stop it early enough for us to see.) As we looked we saw nothing significant, but behind us appeared a man who had been trying to talk to me on the phone (he seemed unclothed) and a police man (non-angry looking, almost slight of build). We knew we shouldn't have looked and knew we had done something that was not appreciated by "someone" (some entity/organization). The cop was going to do something so the driver took off and accelerated to maybe 60 - 80 mph. As we sped up the cop started running after us (the other entity was doing something significant as well but it wasn't chasing us). The cop ran REALLY fast and we were amazed that it could actually catch us. I could sense that this was "real" and that if I had not seen this cop run this fast after us I wouldn't believe it, but here he was, doing it. As it appeared that he was going to catch us I turned to the passenger in the back right who was now Tristan (at his present age). When the cop finally got his fingers on the trunk we realized that we were going to be caught. There was a realization that the end of something (although not necessarily our lives) was about to happen and there was sadness and some fear about this. Tristan said to me "I hope that I can get you life and make you whole because you are my player." (As in, "This is a big video game and you are my character (like Master Chief) and he wanted to heal me so that I could be whole again and continue to play on and do things.) When I awoke and I realized this and thought about what he had said, it made me cry a considerable amount of tears for what that means to Tristan. It was an incredible honor to hear him say that to me, and I knew that he loved me more deeply than I had ever felt, in ways I never felt.

As the cop was stopping the car by dragging his feet, it seemed that I could see that he was a flash of an alien. The visual was as I was looking at him a Polaroid of him zoomed out from him closer to me than he actually was and I could see his true form, which was alien. The alien looked pale flesh in color. The head was fleshy and fell asymmetrically to the right (its left side of its head), it almost had one squiggle of flesh. There appeared to be an eye or eyes but I did not get enough detail to recall at this moment. It was clear it was alien, however. It also seemed that one or all of us were alien, too, although the feeling I got was that I was different from Tristan, either in race or species or something else. It was almost that he knew more than I what he was, but that his part in this was that we were supposed to be together, but that I was his avatar in a game and that he was supposed to forget that he was something other than my human son so that he could interact with me. (Almost like it was a super advanced way of controlling a character in a video game whereby he would infuse himself into the game as one character but he would really be controlling a complete separate entity, which in this case would be me.) By control, I don't mean by direct control. It's almost like he was nurturing a Sim inside the game and would nudge it with his own presence in the game. Regardless, this did not diminish his attachment to me, his character, his "player" and was somewhat sad that it might be over.

I do not recall who the driver was but it seemed female. It seemed to be a mother-like figure but when I tried to feel if it were his biological mother, Beth, it did not seem that it was. At this juncture I am unable to identify the driver as anything but a female with some maternal connection to Tristan, although it wasn't necessarily the entity that produced the entity of Tristan... more a mother-figure.

I do not know who was riding shotgun. It would seem logical that John Cooper and Tristan just swapped seats after we stopped, but that is not certain, as in no time did I get a sense that either Tristan or John were in the front right seat.

The dream leading up to this was very vivid, very detailed, very complex. There was an element of lucidity but I certainly did not control the environment nor the unfolding of the plot. I was very identified with my role but I'm having a hard time remembering if I intentionally guided my character or if it was just playing out. I definitely felt emotions. I can't recall if I felt tactile senses.

I will place the memorable details below, although they won't be in linear order nor make much sense.

I had some responsibility to complete some actions. I had a hotel room that had a living room and two bedrooms. They always seemed full, although as I was talking on the phone to work out a problem, I found that one of the rooms was temporarily empty so I went in there to not have so much noise as I talked.

I picked up a skateboard and put it in a pile with other skateboard like toys which were near the railing/banister of an exterior wooden deck. (Maybe like at Brigitte's Mt. Charleston deck outside her house.)

I recall a large truck with HUGE 8 foot tires was jacked up in the back a bit and was going to run its tires to spin off some of the treading. I recall that I needed to get past/behind the truck to get into a building and that someone/thing told me to be careful, its not a good idea to walk behind it or the part of the treading could fly off and hit me. I ran behind it into the building anyhow and was not injured but it was not the wisest thing to do.

There were a group of about six people wearing polyester dye sublimated shirts that had Ohio State colors, primarily black with white playing cards and red print. At first I thought they were OSU logo playing cards but when I got closer, it was apparent it was not, but I did not discover what the design was. They were in the main living area of the hotel room, and I left them there to go into the empty hotel room.

Leap! The Movie

2008-12-13T08:13:00.000-08:00

{This is a link to purchase the DVD: http://www.leapmovie.com/affiliates/jrox.php?id=10113. It is an affiliate link so a portion of the purchase price (which is the same as if you ordered it without using the affiliate link) will be paid to me, which I'll use to pay for some of the drinks and snacks at the meetings.}

If you enjoy watching movies like "What the Bleep Do We Know?," "The Moses Code," and "The Secret," then there is a new movie out that you might be interested in. It's called "Leap!," and it's posits the idea that the world is an illusion. Is the world literally an Illusion or is it just your perception that is the illusion? If the world is an illusion what then?

The movie features interviews with contemporary visionaries, scientists and authors and takes you on a journey that offers you a powerful way to perceive yourself and the world.

To me, the topic and trailer look very interesting. The production looks to be a little less slick than The Secret and The Moses Code, and frankly I kind of like that. While the messages of the other two are good messages, I almost feel that I'm being sold something by them. The slickness and cleverness also make things seem a little to basic, too simple, and it seems to degrade the value of the overall message. So I like to see that this is a little more documentary and a little less flash. (Oddly, I did like the packaging of What the Bleep except for maybe the narrative starring Marlee Matlin. I thought the acting was fine but I would have preferred to have foregone with the narrative, especially when watching the 5 hour version!)

The premise of the movie is that the world is an illusion, a cornerstone of the A Course In Miracles material. Gary Renard, author of The Disappearance of the Universe and other ACIM related material is featured prominently in the trailer. From the hawking of his wares on the website, it seems that he might be involved in the production, which wouldn't surprise me. I chuckled as I saw Michael Brown being interviewed in there (the guy with the South African accent) as my name is Michael Sean Brown and bought his book, The Presence Process, largely in part due to the novelty of us having the same name. (It would be neat if his material turns out having good merit.)

Below is a list of those interviewed, some of them part of the Usual Suspects appearing in the three movies mentioned above.

Dan Millman (Way of the Peaceful Warrior)
Gary Renard (The Disappearance of the Universe)
Robert Scheinfeld
Fred Alan Wolf (What the Bleep)
Nicole Casanova
Joe Vitale (The Secret)
Will Arntz
Peter Russel
Amber Terrell
Gary Crowley
Amir Zoghi
James Twyman (The Moses Code)

Here's what you find on the "About" page on the website:

Leap! is a film that compels you to consider this ageless theory that “The world is an illusion“. You may find it confronting to consider your reality is simply a grand illusion.

This idea may challenge your current beliefs and ideals. To think of yourself, your family, friends and everything you know and love is part of an elaborate illusion sounds insane….. but then again Einstein did say “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

Leap! explores ancient and modern philosophies and philosophers who support the illusion theory. To Leap! beyond the illusion is to let go and live from inspiration…. To Leap! beyond the constraints of your current perceived reality and what you think you know….

To consider The Truth of who you really are:
- You are an infinite being…. a participant in the illusion
- We are all infinite beings… most of us have simply forgotten
- Infinite power and abundance is your natural state

The purpose of Leap! is to invite each of us to live beyond the illusion by knowing what is really going on here.

This philosophy is not about denying our physical experience. Ultimately it is about Leaping beyond limitations and restrictions which this illusion appears to impose.

What would your life look like if you chose to live from a context of:
- You are an infinite being
- Your world is an illusion being constructed for your enjoyment
- There is nothing “to do” except what you are inspired to do
- You can’t make a mistake

Perhaps the following would be possible from a foundation of you are an infinite being:
- True Happiness, Peace, Fun, Love and Joy would be present
- You could live life with no limits or restrictions
- In every moment anything is possible
- Everything is perfect right here, right now
- Everything that happens to you is simply an opportunity for you to embrace these truths.

This philosophy is not about visualization, manifestation, or creating with intention. This philosophy is a complete paradigm shift in how you can live your life from a deep knowing of who you really are.

Even though we believe it’s all an illusion…. This life is still a great adventure…..

Ruth Schwartz: Music for Guitar & Stone

2008-12-08T08:21:00.001-08:00

While I was at the retreat one of the other attendees, Ruth Schwartz, read a poem on our final day. She had considered reading another poem about a dog, as Carl-Johan had touched us all with an incredible experience he had with a dog a few days before. But Ruth decided to read the poem below as it related to something that many of us, expecially me that day, had to come to terms with: failure and acceptance thereof.

I very much appreciated Ruth reading that poem and she was kind enough to send it to me in an email. Ruth is a poet, and the poem "Music for Guitar & Stone" comes from her latest book "Dear Good Naked Morning." Ruth's books can be found at www.RuthSchwartz.com.

Thank you, Ruth.

Music for Guitar and Stone

In music I can love the small failures,
the ones which show how difficult it is:
the young guitarist's fingers slipping,
for an instant, from their climb of chords.
He sits alone on the stage, bright light,
one leg wedged up on a step, his raised knee
round and tender, and the notes like birds
from a vanishing flock, each one more exquisite and lonely;
the fingers part of the hand, yet separate from the hand,
each living muscle married to the whole.
In life the failures feel like they'll kill me,
or you will, or we'll kill each other;
it's so hard to feel the music
moving through us, the larger patterns
of river and mountain, where damage is not separate
from creation, transformation;
where every mistake we make can wash
smooth and clean as stones in water,
then land on shore, then be thrown in again.
I want to sleep, like a stone, for a thousand years.
I want to wake with creatures traced smooth on my skin.
I want to forget I loved you and failed you
as you failed and loved me too, in the lengthy, painful
evolution of our kind; I want to sleep
for a thousand years, then wake up in some other world
where failure is part of the music, and seen
to make it more beautiful; where the fingers
forgive each other; where we can sit naked again
at the window, watch the notes fly by like birds
who have finally found their way home.

Catching Up: Whew!

2008-12-04T08:13:00.000-08:00

I've been wrestling with complications from gout (it's a chronic thing for me that pops into my life once or twice year) but it has allowed me a great amount of time to focus on my passion for awareness and spirituality. I spent some time with an incredible group organized by Richard Moss, and it has truly initiated a great transformation in my life. While not at a loss for words (could that really be possible?), it took a full week for me to be able to process what has happened so that I could discuss it fully with others. Frankly, I still don't have a complete understanding of it and I know (and accept) that I never will. But there are many beautiful things that I have experienced and learned and I would like to pass them on to my friends. I hope that I'm infectuous and others might want to have similar experiences, and if you do, let me know and I'll point you to Richard and Annalisa for more information.

I was very fortunate in discovering groups in early September, and the energy that has been built and cultivated in those groups has allowed me to grow incredibly fast. I love my groups! They have provided a great avenue to share my new found energy with and have made the come-down from the Richard Moss experience easy (because I didn't have to go cold turkey) and more memorable (in allowing me to share and reprocess many important lessons). Thank you, everyone, who has been to the meetings!

I can't tell you how much I miss the Richard Moss group. I know they are out there and we still maintain contact via email, but it is sublime to bask in their blended energy. Yes, I'm allowing my weight to shift out of the Now and into the Past, but I don't let it detract me from keeping aligned with my path and THE Path. One of the lessons I'm in the process of assimilating is learning how to keep weighted in the Now while allowing myself to feel nostalgia. I then try to recognize when my attention falls to heavily into the past so that I can get right back into the Now. It's a great exercise as it allows me to flex that Presence muscle while enjoying some wonderful memories (I just can't let it become a crutch or allow my ego to fool me into thinking I'm more weighted in the Now than I really am, but then that, too, is part of the lesson! Beautiful!)

Over eight pages written and I'm still documenting the events of the last night of the event. For me it was nothing less than a mystical experience and I am eager to share it with you.

Until my next post,

Namaste

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

2008-10-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

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.

******************************************

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

2008-10-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-08T15:48:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-08T15:15:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-06T16:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-06T13:28:00.000-07:00

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