Notes from the Heart of Awareness
As we have begun awakening together, many of us have begun both noticing the awareness of being and distinguishing those moments of open clarity from when we have been operating within our conditioned sense of self-and-world. Awareness is an unconstructed openness that is the living essence of the now. Our conditioned persona is the current version of our initial, constructed adaptation to the people and environment that we found when we arrived in this world. What I mean by “this world” is our experiential, three-dimensional world of polarized dualisms and separation. We not only adjusted to being here but we lost track of our natural state. Thus, our impulse to awaken.
Upon arriving here, we found ourselves embodied as and raised by others human beings - a sentient species of consciousness on this planet. Being an innately intelligent expression of All-That-Is, we each applied ourselves to the task of how to be here, with these others, how to survive and, somehow, how to be who we came here to be. This world did not make sense to the wisdom of our innocence and yet, we gradually adjusted and adapted and, finally, we adopted a relatively stable sense of identity-in-context within our shared, human mind-world/dream-body of separation and reification. At this point our native intelligence became mostly constricted to expressing itself through our falsely premised, conditioned version of ourselves as a separate individual.
To tease this out a bit, our experiential sense of self-in-context is processed through a mental field of representation, which constitutes the narrative in our head of ourselves, others and the world - our experienced description of life itself. It is a mind-made filter through which we experience ourselves and our world and through which we express ourselves into our world. Getting raised here, we learned to build, within our own minds, emotionally charged, conceptualized images of ourselves, specific others and various groupings of others as well as the world around us. For the most part, we have been living within and through this conceptual filter. We believe that we, others and the world are what our reifying, separative thoughts
say in our head.
The problem with this is that our whole world is based upon a false premise. We mistakenly believe that we are somehow separate from the living expression of the One that is All-That-Is -- this One in, with and by Whom we all live and move and have our being. Because it is based on a false premise, this world of our conditioned minds’ is a false knowledge; the world we experience through our conditioned mind's filter is inevitably frustrating because it is neither aligned with the actual nature of reality nor the actual nature of our awareness/intelligence-being. As we awaken together, we recognize that we have believed and perceived ourselves as separate from one another, from the earth, from the Divine source and substance of all being and from our own essence. This is not and can never be true; but because we do indeed believe it is so, we experience and perceive as if it were true. As with the underlying quantum reality, we experience what we expect to experience – reality conforms to our beliefs.
We were born within a species entranced by a false understanding of reality; we were born into a dream-world mixture of reality and illusion on this planet. Our task, if we recognize it and are willing to take it on, is to retrain our attention, a subsystem of our nervous system, to avert from our conditioned mind’s descriptions and interpretations and increasingly focus into and as the peaceful, silent awareness of being which we always notice, each time we stop thinking for a moment. Thereby, we shift the default neurological settings of our organisms into atunement with the resonances of reality.
It’s useful for us to recognize that we were each born into a specific, localized version of this shared, human mental-representation of separation and reification at a particular moment’s zeitgheist in the midst of a process our species of sentience has been moving along for centuries, if not millennia. This process within our species of consciousness finds us now releasing ourselves from the illusory matrix of separation, lack, and reification and restoring our consciousness to being a conscious species of oneness. At this point it appears that this process proceeds in fits and starts and it appears to take time. And yet, it appears we may emerge from this process, as a species of consciousness whose members recognize themselves and all others as holographic fractals of this One which animates, illumines and expresses Itself as All-That-Is.
Discovering, turning toward - again and again - and immersing ourselves - soaking every cell and neuronal fiber in the actuality of our being - as we interrupt our current train of thought and turn our silent attention toward what we can experientially notice here - this is the most essential practice. As my dear wife, Lynn Marie Lumiere, stresses in her recent book, Awakened Relating, living an awakened life requires recognizing and exploring awareness and distinguishing it from the myriad thoughts, states and experiences that move through us in each successive now moment. Recognizing and then re-recognizing again and again; giving this attention so we notice the impact of exploring the silent stillness of being awake on our organism, our nervous system and our lives is the next phase; we clarify ourselves and our understanding as we go along. Once we have done this for a while, we find ourselves coming to rest as this awareness of being more deeply, more frequently and for longer moments in our lives.
Sooner or later, we come to rely on this ever-available openness at the core of our intelligence; it becomes our “go to.” As we come to rely on awareness, we cannot help but notice that the ways we respond to life from our openness are spontaneously clearer, kinder, wiser and naturally, mutually beneficial. Enough extended moments of being this silent, still awareness/being and we notice that it is experienced as both being the living essence of ourselves as well as pervading the field of experience. We realize our oneness with All-That-Is and with each other; its all us. In short, Recognize, Re-recognize, Rest, Rely and Realize constitute the overlapping stages of this most essential practice.
So at some point, it makes sense for us begin this practice of turning away from the stream of mental noise and noticing our natural experience of alert presence - discovering what it is like, here – non-verbally and non-conceptually - in the actual now of our life. Pretty soon we also discover what it is that keeps distracting us and taking us out of the living now. We all eventually realize that it is the labels, descriptions and stories generated within our reifying and dualizing, conditioned mind that pull our attention away; despite the sincerity of our intention to re-recognize and rest as the open and inclusive awareness of now. This is because these conditioned patterns have well-established groves flowing through our neural real estate.
Therefore, I see the deconstruction of our conditioned identifications of self-in-context as a process of de-tuning our nervous systems from their current, well-worn habits of self-with-other and self-in-world. Simultaneously, we are re-attuning our nervous systems, re-aligning our whole being to the resonances of our natural state. Having a general understanding of how we manage to construct the world that we have been living within helps us to have a sense of what’s going on as it is unraveling and/or, as we deliberately deconstruct it.