Realizations: On The Paths Of Transformation

BEGINNING ON THE PATH

REALIZATION 1

Energy

The energy of life, aliveness itself, flows around us and will flow through us if we open ourselves to it.

Energy is simultaneously the meta-level which connects us to the existence and gives life meaning and at the same time the base, the ground, which underlies our freedom to be ourselves. In our search to know ourselves, to grow, to find and travel our path, we can explore our minds, our emotions, our behaviours, our creativity, our sexuality, our capacity to love, but these are all dependent on our choice to let life flow through us. We choose in each moment how much to open ourselves or close ourselves to life in all its expressions.

We take in energy through food, we take it in through breathing - as much or as little as we allow ourselves to breathe deeply; and like the plants, we receive it from the sun and the earth as the two energetic poles between which we live, above and below, plus pole and minus pole.

It is through energy that the world touches us and we touch the world.

Understanding the keys to this energy brings us more into contact with ourselves, our aliveness, our power, and our joy.

But we also live as part of a whole field of energy, all of life that surrounds us, people, nature, landscape, the cosmos.

The question is can we embrace energy, and experience our excitement and our aliveness, or do we fear it?

The culture we live in teaches us to adapt to its expectations by unconsciously fearing our own energy. Society doesn’t give us many positive models for energetic expression but tends to teach us that inside us is something we cannot trust, something possibly monstrous or evil. We have to control ourselves to be good people. We become alienated from our own energy and our energetic flow to the point where we fear to allow our spontaneous impulses.

If we can raise our energy levels, access the inexhaustible sources of energy available to us, and express our energy, we become identified with our flow rather than with our control.

As we become more present in our physical body and realize our energy body, we begin to experience directly the mysteries of life - relationships, love and sex, healing and spirit, and the nature of the sacred and the divine.

As we find more freedom from self-consciousness – an orientation towards norms, high-performance and what should be, we replace it with consciousness - an orientation towards what is and a sense of who we are.

So that we may not fear wildness, but welcome it as an expression of the sacred.

So that we may overcome our fear of awareness.

It can be painful to experience what really is, because the consciousness of reality shatters our illusions and mental concepts, revealing the gap between what should be and what is. But when we allow this shattering, we can embrace truth and feel reality as the one place where we are in contact, the one place where we are safe.

REALIZATION 2

The Mind

The human mind has a superb and unique ability to create a virtual reality.

It can function in the conditional tense – what would be if….It can project possibilities into a fully fledged world that could be. It can create a vision, to sense dangers, to explore hopes and dreams and ambitions, to make plans and projects.

It is so good at visualising these virtual realities that it can become hard to distinguish between what is a projection, based on hopes and fears, and what is real, now.

The mind is concerned with our safety and our survival. If we touch something hot and burn ourselves, the mind will remember and categorize this experience as dangerous. The thought will then trigger the emotion of fear in an attempt to protect us. The same will happen if we are repeatedly told, careful, don’t play with knives they are sharp, don’t talk to strangers. The emotion of fear can be triggered without our conscious awareness of the thought that released it, so we can experience generalized anxiety.

The mind assesses the past, drawing conclusions, making rules, viewing the past through the filter of duality: what was good, what was bad, what worked, what didn’t work? What is me, what is not me?

Individual experiences often become generalized into our mythologies, our stories about how life is. We experience rejection from a boyfriend, and the mind concludes: I am not lovable. Our partner finds a new lover: conclusion, women will betray you, don’t trust them. In a court of law, these generalizations would be rejected as circumstantial evidence.

The mind projects into the future. What will the consequences be? What will people think? How will they judge me? How will I judge myself?

Thinking quickly becomes judging. The inner judge takes up residence in the courtroom of the mind and begins to compare. He compares ourselves with others, others with ourselves, putting ourselves up or down in value. The obsession of the inner judge is: good enough? Or not good enough? This evaluation creates a semblance of order, of a system, among the chaos of life experiences. What it really does is to isolate us from others. Both positive and negative judgments do this. It feels better to be up on a pedestal, but it is just as lonely as feeling abject with inadequacy and worthlessness.

Just as importantly, the inner judge compares us with norms and standards based on what will people think? If we meet these standards, we are safe from rejection. We do not belong, but we are acceptable. To feel that we are valuable, we have to do better, to out-perform others. The fastest way to achieve this favourable judgment is to put others down, save for a few fellow favoured beings who are there to hide our loneliness, but with whom we secretly compete.

We are driven by the desire to belong, but the more we compare and compete the greater our aloneness.

REALIZATION 3

The Red Thread: I Am The Continuity Of My Experience

So, in this flow of what is, who am I?

Since Descartes it has been our mental concepts that have given us cohesion, I think therefore I am. In the sixties, people began to react against the limiting belief that we are only our thoughts, the search for who we are turned to our feelings. But this, in turn, is limiting, a reaction against one thing by focusing on another.

A more complete truth is that we are the sum total of all that we are aware of, in us and around us. This total is what creates our experience, in each moment.

To embrace this total we need to stop reacting against the mind by focusing on the feelings, stop reacting against spirit by focusing on our bodies. Instead, we need to value equally all these aspects of ourselves and to find the cohesion of these parts, by realising that we are all of them.

Together they weave a thread that gives us a sense of continuity, a sense of a self that is always there as the experiencer. I am the continuity within the variety, or maybe within the chaos, of my experiences. It is not through ordering that I make sense of my experiences, but rather through sensing the experiencer who is having all these different experiences.

If I go beyond the need to survive life, then my life becomes an exploration, a voyage of discovery. And what am I discovering? On the one hand, I am exploring life, experiencing the adventure, the many facets of life. But on a deeper level, I am discovering the self, the person who is having the experiences. Beyond good or bad experiences, beyond approval or disapproval, beyond the judgments of the mind. I am the continuity of my experience. Warts and all. That is the red thread. The witness of my experience.

So am I the experience, or the experiencer?

This is the journey of growth, of self-awareness. At first, we are our experience, positive and negative. Our body remembers, the old experiences and accompanying emotions are stored in the body memory. We are in a sense then victims of our experiences, victims of our past. Through witness consciousness, we develop a sense of the experiencer, the self that is having the memories. This separation becomes the base for the healing process. We no longer drown in our memories, the self does not disappear into the past, we become the diver in the sea of memory. The duality rescues us, I am the experiencer, not the experience. The experiencer develops a sense of choice. A choice is a consciousness in action. I choose who I am by placing my awareness consciously, on the present rather than the past, on the liberation of a healing rather than on the fear beforehand, on what I have achieved rather than what is still undone. That choice of where I place my awareness is the source of my freedom.

As I come to trust my capacity to choose my experience, I can hold the duality more and more lightly, I can drop the detachment. I feel the place where the two poles meet, and simultaneously I feel the space between them that both connects and separates them. I perceive the continuum between experience and experiencer, the place where one flows into the other. Through perceiving energy both in me and outside me I become one with the experience I have chosen, no longer a victim of it. I become one with my life. There is just energy. The experiencer is energy, the experience is energy, there is just energy.

I experience, therefore I am.

VIRTUAL OR EXPERIENCED REALITY?

REALIZATION 4

Don’t Join A Club, Join Humanity Instead

Groucho Marx said that he would not want to join any club that would have him as a member.

Do we want to join the club that condemns us to a life of trying to fit in, following the norms, doing what others think we should do, not doing what they think we shouldn’t do? Can we feel that we have value by successfully adapting to the expectations of others? Families can quickly become such clubs, so can groups of our peers. Our social personae are accepted into the club, but is this who we truly are? Maybe we can feel that we belong if we suppress all parts of ourselves, all impulses, feelings, desires, and visions that are unacceptable to the club. This is an option, but does it truly make us happy? Or do we feel that we are valuable, lovable only in as far as we do what is expected of us? Do we have the freedom to live any other parts of ourselves?

So we can create or join an anti-club, based on being alternative, breaking the norms, building a revolutionary cell. But are we then free? Or are we still defined by the shoulds and shouldn’ts, by being in never-ending rebellion or reaction against them?

If we give up being good enough for the others we want to belong to, give up being special and superior, we can become equal with all of humanity. In fact, we can become equal with the animals, the plants, the stones, the planet, and join the circle of life. There is nothing to prove, it is only about being oneself. Not in the virtual reality of the mind, but in reality, in truth, in contact, in respect for oneself and for others and for life. Instead of belonging to a superior club, we can humbly belong to all of life. Welcome to the human race! Welcome to the planet! This is not your club, but it is your home. You belong!

REALIZATION 5

Experience

So with our mind assessing and evaluating life, how can we get to experience without the filter of its running commentary, the inner dialogue?

We experience life through our five senses: we see it, hear it, touch and taste and smell life. The five senses are a direct bridge between experiencer and experience. They bring us into touch with reality, specifically the physical dimension of reality, allowing us to experience it directly, through the senses making sense of life.

The five senses, although they trigger sensory cells in the brain, are functions of the body. To enjoy them we need to focus our attention away from our minds and towards our bodies. We focus on our bodies and their perception of the world around them. So our first step has to be, get out of the head and into the body.

Our educational system does not encourage us to use our senses to learn, but rather to depend on what we are told. If our inner dialogue does not tell us and so confirm what we are, say, seeing, it is not real for us. When I teach a massage stroke to a class, they do not trust their eyes, but need to be told what they are seeing before they can fully realize it – before it becomes the reality they perceive. A typical interaction is:

Student: how strong is this stroke?

Me: you just saw me touch lightly, just with my fingertips.

Student: sorry, I wasn’t sure.

We have lost our confidence in our ability to notice, to perceive information rather than be told it. This is dangerous. We at least need to trust our sensory perceptions to check what we are told against the reality we perceive. If we cannot do this we have no reality check, and are susceptible to manipulation, to giving our authority over to others, to believing what we are told.

Moreover, many complex activities, such as playing tennis or skiing down a mountain, playing the piano, or simply driving, cannot be broken down into linear processes that the head communicates to the body. When we are learning to drive, we might turn left by telling ourselves to check the mirror, indicate, change gear, turn the steering wheel, watch out for pedestrians, but soon we let our bodies perceive and act without mental commands or thoughts which make us self-conscious and hesitant. To perceive energetic interactions with the reality we must trust our senses and our body’s responses.

Perceiving the world around us is to use our awareness. We notice. Our ability to be aware and the accumulated wisdom won through awareness is called our consciousness.

The mind lives in virtual reality, in images and concepts, and projects this virtual reality, for example, a memory of past experience or an image of how life should be, onto the present. Only consciousness, through awareness of bodily sensory experience, can bring us into contact with what is really there in the here and now. This is even more powerful if our awareness also notices ourselves as an observer and focuses attention on the process of perceiving as being equally important as the object of perception. We then can perceive reality as the meeting between an observer and observed and become aware how our perceptions are influenced and possibly distorted through the act of perception. So we can begin to stalk the truth rather than impose it. This takes humility, the ability to be wrong, the courage to be open and an attitude that sees life as a teacher.

If we do not become conscious of what is and refuse to let life teach us, thinking we already know it all, then there will be a gap between what we think is, and what is. In the medicine tradition, this is called the path of two hearts. If we have the openness and humility to let life change our minds, and if we allow ourselves to perceive what is true through awareness and to change what we think is true into more alignment with the truth we become conscious of, this is called the path of one heart.

So if we say one thing and do another, we are walking the path of two hearts. If we walk our talk, that is the path of one heart.

REALIZATION 6

Authority

Tantra is not a religion, it does not ask us to believe anything other than what we ourselves experience. Rather tantra invites us to try out certain experiences that can reveal what was hitherto hidden: the enormousness of our energy potential, and the vastness of our potential consciousness. We have the capacity for bliss and ecstasy as a direct experience of the sacred – god /goddess not as an abstraction or an authority figure but as a dimension of experience within ourselves. By questioning and dis-creating our learned feelings of toxic shame, which freeze us into conformity and insensitivity, we can begin to choose what feels right and has integrity for us. Healthy shame, a spontaneous heat flushing through the body, can then warn us of our moments of unconsciousness and inappropriate behaviour and bring us back to consciousness.

So in a natural, healthy state, we don’t need rules and external authority. Tantra teaches us to trust the inner authority of our own heart and our own experience. As we learn to perceive ourselves, others and the world in terms of energy, we directly experience the interconnectedness of all things and feel respect for the multiple realities of life. We no longer unconsciously act out the selfish demands of our own egos, for we see that true happiness is only possible in a loving and understanding connection with the experiences of others and the good of the whole; nor do we do battle with the world to enforce our one truth and colonize others into the empire of our own belief systems.

Instead of following rules without thinking, we make conscious choices.

REALIZATION 7

Self-consciousness Or Consciousness?

Self-consciousness would seem to be at first a useful and supportive concept – to be conscious of oneself. It refers, however, to a pernicious and inhibiting state of mind, in which we are watching and judging and analysing ourselves, worried about what people are thinking and their judgments of us, until everything we do or say feels unnatural, forced. It can become so strong that we are unable to act, feel afraid to make