January 4, 2002
Your writing on ‘Medicine Sounds’ [unpublished] has made such a deep impression on me that I am really looking forward to getting back to work to ‘try it out’. And what made the difference? The stuff about blushing! That is, it is we who blush, not the body or the mind! And why the impression? I went for one of my long walks the other day and during it, I experienced a familiar burning sensation in the centre of my chest (which on previous occasions I have probably flirted with the idea of ‘heartburn’ or ‘heart disease’ — this discomfort has happened on and off for years). This particular time, it occurred to me spontaneously to say to myself, “I am burning, not my chest or my mind” (which was my shorthand to stop myself from ‘analysing’ what the burning could symbolise). With that, I began miming and mouthing the word ‘burn’ very slowly and then the individual letters, but really got no further than the letter ‘b’. Then it seemed that I was experiencing the burning sensation as an explosive bursting out in my mood. I began to feel incredibly expansive, and excited and began to almost want to run home, when a few moments before I was a little tired and hot and ‘in pain’. I was so surprised that I ended up in a ‘mood’ which was so expansive, from a pain, when my thinking would have gone down the track of ‘there must be something wrong with me, and the pain is a symbol of what is wrong’, when now I think that I have a tendency to create ‘dramas’ almost deliberately, almost to create imaginary problems and enemies in my head just so that I can solve them, in my head. My ‘burning experience’ was to remind me that expansions of consciousness, feeling great, or truly wonderful, are my birthright, not rewards for solving problems and that I could resonate with that mood at any time if I could change the focus of my awareness. But even more, it was a jolt for me, a surprising jolt that a pain lead to the wonderful feeling, that pain is not indelibly a sign that we have a problem or that there is something wrong with us.
May 7, 2002
I did a staff development session for mental health social workers in my local area on Monday afternoon, on the topic of deep listening and talked about resonance. I collected a few actor’s voices from the internet, small midi files, and played them to the audience until every person in the room had a voice that they knew but couldn’t put a name to. I then went on with my session talking about resonant listening and two amazing things happened. I had asked the people to still try and come up with the name of the actor and one of them did so, and when I asked him if he could describe how he did it, he said (and I kid you not), “Oh, I just feel my way into the voice, linger there as long as I feel the resonance and withdraw when it fades away, and then it came to me”. When he said ‘feel my way’ a sort of shudder went through me, a sort of shock of recognition thing, and I realised in that moment what my 30 years of counselling has been about. It is, as you put it, pure ‘into-the-body experiencing’. But that is not the end of it. At the same time I was reading Part 3 of your book INNER UNIVERSE [www.thenewphenomenology.org ] and absolutely loved the part on topology with all the diagrams, M theory and especially ‘Sembrane Theory’. And this morning everything clicked into place somewhere in me. I knew that when I am counselling, simultaneously two things are happening — the outer field of my awareness is enveloping the client’s body, feeling the shape and morphe of their outer surface, while an inner field is sort of shaping itself to their inner surface feeling out their inner sound. I literally feel my way into the story they tell and stay doing this until it becomes clear to me as to the meaning of this story for them!! That’s it. And THAT is having a psychic experience! What else does a clairvoyant do for God’s sake, I said to myself! Strange to recognise oneself so clearly, to come home really at last. All my life I have felt or dreamt my way into peoples words, but have been so adept at it, that I took it for granted until this week. Another thing I found reading part 3 of Inner Universe, that I kept saying to myself, “Of course I know what Peter is talking about” and as I read it, I did in a different way than anything else I have read. I realised at long last, that everything you write about is so native to me, so much the sea that I swim in, that I ‘can’t see the wood for the tress’. Membrane theory? Simple. The client’s looks are the membrane, the boundary surface between two fields of awareness etc etc.
May 19, 2002
I was talking to someone who had asked me about phenomenology and what it was, and I began by saying that all phenomena are phenomena within awareness and they couldn’t get it. And I realised that I couldn’t just continue to say that all objects existed within a field of awareness and weren’t pre-given because those words weren’t allowing them to get a felt sense of what I was trying to convey. I found myself saying something like — when a baby (I could have said cat, I suppose) hears a ‘car going by’ or sees a clock on the wall, it neither hears a car going by nor does it see a clock. It hears a sound and sees a shape. They understood that, easily. Then I found myself saying that when we read some text, do those words exist independently of human consciousness? That is do they have meaning without being read? And the person said obviously not! I then said that like the baby analogy, all objects in our experience had the same character as words in a text — that is, as words in a visual vocabulary. They got it and then lost it, but could get it back again. My point is, I GOT IT! and I taught myself in a way that I had never got before.
June 18, 2002
It’s 4.32 Wednesday morning (8.00 pm Tuesday night your time) and I’ve got my coffee and in front of my beloved Mac. Got into Melbourne about 24 hours ago and finally got back into Adelaide some 2 hours later. (In total some 18,000 km round trip). Driving into the driveway of my house it seemed that everything was different. The colour of the air, the colour of the light was all different to what I remember. Inside the house I could have believed it was a different house! All the colours were different, richer, more fuller in themselves, somehow more coloured. I’m looking around my room now and the colours are still different. The LIGHT OF MY AWARENESS has changed, I know that. I knew it had on the ride into Heathrow with you, Karin. When we got to the traffic jam and was crawling along, I behaved completely differently than I ever had before. Normally I would have been panicking and worrying. But I was always aware of a dual awareness. My body wasn’t worried at all, my mind thought up scenarios to worry about but somehow my body awareness knew it was going to work out. The plane trip home was utterly different as well. Apart from a sore arse, the ride was simply long. On the way over I was in physical distress as you know for 6 hours, but there was none of this at all on the way home. I seemed to be able to sit there and be solidly rooted in my body with my dual awareness operating — my head saying things like 3 hours to go and my body sort of sinking into itself and simply resting or reading or listening to music but no distress!
July 22, 2002
If I say that every morning now I get up about 4 and sit in my armchair in my room with the heater on and tune in to my residual sense of my nightly activities and what I was meditating on the day before; if I say that I watch TV only until I feel it’s time to go off by myself to my armchair; if I say that I remain in touch with my chest and belly more and more each day; if I say that the writing flows out of me at times; if I say that everything is becoming utterly simple and obvious; if I say that at work I can remain in touch with my felt body more and more — you will probably get an idea of where I am and why my time with you was so precious! The other morning I was sitting in my armchair and I was aware of myself, my field of awareness sort of out there in the room, sort of thick with ‘stuff’ waiting for me to tune into it. I was aware of a strange sensation that I can only say it was as if this field sense of myself usually contracts inside oneself on awakening, but this morning it was ‘late in doing so’. But I knew without any shadow of a doubt that awareness is an entity with substance, depth, tone etc. And yes it feels great to me to know that we are exploring something that has never been done before. Why? Because it was so bloody obvious and ‘in your face’, it is impossible to see. Clients come to counselling because they don’t understand certain events in their life. If we don’t understand a certain word in a sentence, we may not be able to get the meaning of the whole sentence. Clients may lose the sense of their whole lives. Therapy is about helping them to understand the meaning of certain events. How do we do this? By helping them get back in touch with themselves, with their felt bodily sense of themselves. How do we do this? By being in touch with our own felt bodily sense and resonating with them and bearing back the message of being in touch with themselves. This deepens their felt understanding of the personal significance of the certain events they don’t understand, and the words we use together become the stabilisation of that felt sense. Being in touch with oneself is essentially being in touch with the felt body. And I, too, have been realising the absolute primacy of bodyhood. Intelligence, creativity, insight is all a bodily phenomena not a mental thing. That is the problem with the word insight. It suggests something intellectual but it is actually felt sense, something bodily. Sitting in my room in the early hours I have experienced how my body is all bodies. I am the whole room centred in me. My dictaphone is the whole room centred in the Dictaphone. When I look at the dictaphone, it is the whole room looking at itself from 2 perspectives. Of course I am the dictaphone, therefore, of course my sense of bodyhood includes the dictaphone. By centering myself in my body and simply feeling, I can experience all these ‘other’ objects in my guts, and sense them from the inside out, especially how one day one aspect is revealed to me of the dictaphone and on another day, it means something else to me. So in my own way I am blobbing around the room, flowing into all these other things and into who I am with and what I am reading.
August 4th 2002
Thanks for BODILY SENSE AND THE SENSED BODY [see www.thenewtherapy.org ] which, next to Heidegger on scientific method, are my favourites of all your work, including Inner Universe. I can’t wait for THE QUALIA REVOLUTION. I’m not sure whether it was Bodily Sense by itself, maybe the subtle way everything was reframed, or synchronicity, but I have made another huge leap forward in my grasping of the Body. What I can say is that I am beginning to experience my body not as the physical thing I thought it was but as a field of awareness. It is quite amazing that previously you wrote about, “we see, not the eye; we hear, not the ear; we think, not the brain; etc” yet did not make the step to, “we sense, sensate and bodily sense the significance of things, not the body” or to put it bluntly — “We body, not the flesh”. Yet, everything in its own good time. Did Heidegger make this step? I suspect not? One question, Do all fields of awareness have extensional qualities? I know the source field doesn’t. Or is it that we are at a stage where our field of awareness has extensional qualities? Do all awarenesses body themselves in some way? Camouflage. In order to enrich itself, the source field dreams up fields of actuality. Non Being puts on clothes and camouflages itself in a bodily way so that their real shape and form as fields of awareness is not noticed by blending in with all the other bodily shapes. And why? So that the experiment is REAL, and the enrichment process can go on. Only by not noticing the blindingly obvious can intensional reality be enriched through actuality. Intensionality would have to hide itself from itself or the game would be up. Your wonderful essay makes it quite clear to me how the whole of science and philosophy has foundered over the simplest and most obvious step. That bodies, from atoms, to cells to cricket balls to human bodies, simply aren’t what we think they are. I was at a concert last night (Brahms Violin Concerto and Shostakovich’s Symphony No 10) and during it I began to wonder what a science would look like if everyone became blind or what it would have looked like if we never had sight! I was completely thrilled at the solution to the mind-body problem which is so utterly simple that it leaves me breathless. I was also struck by something while reading Bodily Sense (and this was during the first of the 5 reads on 5 successive mornings at about 4 am in my room next to a heater — I can assure you, an absolutely joyous time). The whole essay brought to life the idea that awareness isn’t an empty nothingness that simply receives from the environment. It bespoke of the substantiality of awareness AND of the substance itself — qualities of awareness, which I began to gain a deeper felt understanding of. And what struck me was how much your essay reminded me of Einstein’s fundamental intuition about space. Einstein made the leap from space not being an empty nothingness which things simply moved in, but he ‘saw’ it as a substance which could be curved and bent. You saw awareness as ‘curved’ in a way - that is, made of something in order to be curved! Let me get this straight. Are you saying that I, as a field of awareness sense another field of awareness in terms of its qualities and shape and form what I sense into a felt body, which when viewed from the outside looks like a physical body? I was out walking the other morning and was crossing a busy street when I heard the sound of a garbage truck up the road making a squealing noise. Part of me went on full alert, ready for action. Now, I was getting confused because I think I was saying to myself, “I heard the squealing noise and ‘worked out’ that it could be due to something dangerous to me so I went on full alert, but it seems to me that you are saying that that is tantamount to saying that awareness is a function of sensation and sense perceptions, which I know to be silly (akin to saying that meaning is a function of words). I take it that you are saying that I had a bodily sense of danger which shaped itself into my body readying itself for potential action. I was thinking along these lines saying to myself that if I ‘worked it out’ from sense information, then a computer could as well. So we should be able to programme a computer to be able to know the difference between TEARS of grief and ‘drops of liquid’ in someone’s eyes. We should be able to programme a computer to be able to know when a human being should be frightened in the street and when not to be. I realise that we cannot do this. I understood all this in a deeper way from your essay. Space. The Final Frontier. I wrote this morning, “This is MY space. I occupy a unique position in my space, the centre of it, and I affect my space as does the cup on my table. The cup has its space and casts its own light on it. When I move, my space moves. I do not move in space.” And the idea that we are all composed of qualities of awareness points me in new directions which I am going to explore. Ironic that I am gaining an understanding of QUANTA through your explication of QUALIA. Linking this with Seth’s units of consciousness helps me out as well. Lastly, I loved the way you ‘upgraded’ the concept of ‘timebinding’ in the last paragraph of the essay. I really feel like an explorer here, knowing that you (and I) are pioneering something no one else has touched. Very exciting.
August 18, 2002
Since receiving THE QUALIA REVOLUTION [www.thenewscience.org ] last weekend, I’ve been in a sort of ferment really. All my life I’ve had continuing dreams like the one I had the other night, quoting from my diary — “I dream a lot of not getting to my destination. Or getting out at a previous stop and not being able to complete the journey. I dreamt I was going to Melbourne and got off or was put off at Colac. I was asking people how to get to Melbourne but no one seemed to know. I wandered around looking for information. I finally asked some one, called him Peter though I knew it wasn’t him. He said I’m not Peter but pointed me in the direction of what I knew. A white building that had Town Information written on it.” I’ve had frustrating dreams like this for years, but I am prepared to bet that they will change now. Why? Qualia Revolution. It is what I have been searching for and feels like completely coming home. At last, I say to myself. Through what I have read I got a very real sense of the substantiality of awareness itself on a much deeper level than before. I got a vivid image of a person’s gaze as a substantial ‘thing’ in itself. In this image (like a dream really) was the body and its organs of perception, the objects of perception ‘out there’ and a third entity, the gaze or awareness. Being an entity, it possessed substantiality just like the body does, and this substantiality was made up of qualities like warmth, lightness, distance, etc. It all became blindingly obvious. (My vision in NY in 1976 then became obvious as well. In this vision I experienced my ‘view of the world’ as an indelible and indestructible and significant part of the universe and now I know I experienced the reality of the gaze.) I got a picture the other night on awakening suddenly, of shapes of awareness as alive ‘amoeba’ or blobs and I was struck by how obvious it was that awareness was the stuff that made things come alive, not something mysterious called energy or…? Interesting side issue here. When we look into a person’s eyes we see the colour of their gaze while when we look at their eyes, clinically, we see only the colour and shape of their eyes etc. It occurred to me that a beautiful use of the language can be employed here. When we ‘look into’ a person’s depression we can sense the individual tone or colour of that depression while when we look, clinically, at their depression we see only the black colour of depression!!! I love that double meaning of look into! I digress. Back to THE QUALIA REVOLUTION. As I went through the article other things became apparent to me but none more so than the astounding conclusion that the body simply isn’t this physical body that I have thought it was. I have become aware of this in a million ways since reading Sensed Body. It is one of the points that has to be hammered away at over and over again. It is so radical and outlandish but simply solves so many pressing philosophical problems. John Wheeler, the black hole man, had a famous saying that, for him, summarized Einstein’s general theory of relativity. I used to like it. ‘Matter tells space how to curve, space tells matter how to move’. I now understand that matter does not bend space, and space does not direct matter and motion is not something that physical bodies do, and heat is not something that bodies give off and bodies are not shiny or hard or have density or any of a thousand other things which I took for granted just a few weeks ago. Now it is obvious to me that all these things like density, movement, shininess etc are qualities of awareness. This all crystallized for me in your account of the four spatial dimensions of awareness. It is now blindingly obvious to me how awareness has bodily dimensions, spatial dimensions etc and that therefore we have bodies. How lame it is to write these words! To break the hegemony of bodies being extensional realties and mind or awareness being intensional realties is the real breakthrough here and makes it all utterly simple. I loved the part about the redness of a sunset and sadness permeating our awareness completely. I got a clear picture of the falsity of our current understanding of emotions as internal objects, which is simply taken for granted. I could see that you cannot separate the redness from the rest of the sunset as if it is an object like the sunset’s hotness. Sadness is a quality of awareness as wetness is a quality of water. Wetness isn’t hidden inside water. It permeates it. This exposition of yours about qualitativeness is fundamentally important and needs stressing over and over again. I got a clear picture of every moment of my life being unique, every situation that I experience being unique. Nothing being the same as anything else. Two reds being qualitative different while two atoms or two electrons are completely interchangeable. And the crucial meaning of what Peter calls SIMFERENCE in all this – not similarity OR difference but SIMILARITY-IN-DIFFERENCE and DIFFERENCE-IN-SIMILARITY.
June 25, 2003
Just a short note, my dear friend. Got up this morning at 3.30 am, bloody cold, fed the cats, and settled down with my cappuccino to read some of ‘HEAD, HEART AND HARA’. Struck anew by the breadth and depth of your work and the immense time and effort you put into it. Here is one being who genuinely appreciates the labour of love that went into it.
September 25th 2003
Thank you for your phone call. What a night! I woke up at 4 went to the toilet, came back to bed, allowed my being to just lightly sense ‘what is death?’ And it all came to me. This is how I wrote about it a half hour later. It means so much to me.
“The self that I think I am is a pattern of consciousness that I identify with. Andrew Gara is the overall gestalt of awareness of my whole life, all the personality aspects (sub-selves in Peter’s latest terminology) I have ever manifested and will manifest in this life. It is that background sea that is my source, that I am constantly emerging from and ‘dying’ back into, or falling back into or diving back into or being absorbed back into. Latent or potential or unmanifest portions of this sea rise to the surface, embody themselves, have their day in the sun, then fall back into the sea, mix and merge with every other sub self, while never losing themself. It is as if when they fall back, the whole sea turns itself inside out so that every portion, every molecule, every atom, every qualia, touches every other one, indeed becomes every other one — the sea is stirred, not shaken, and then another sub self rises to the surface etc. The trick is that ‘I’ am not actually the sub self that arises, although I am. I am actually the container, the shape that they flow into. I am neither something separate from the experience — an inviolate I that has this self or this experience, nor am I (merged with) the particular aspect I might happen to be. I am the ever shape shifting pattern, that awareness flows into and out of, the permeable, porous membrane or boundary surface. I can shrink or expand, others can enter me and I can enter others. I am the pattern I identify with, not the content on either side of the surface or boundary, while of course, I am all of that totality.”
November 6, 2003
Just had one of those nights!!! Woke up with this massive revelation of something old and very new. I was in the feeling tone that I was when I met you all those years ago and when I was in NY with Mike [Professor Michael Kosok – see www.thenewdialectics.org ]. I woke up having a bodily knowing of what it is like to be a ‘field’ or ‘clearing of unboundedness (I almost was feeling myself to be a flat clearing of land with no boundary). That is, I felt myself to be a field of awareness and knew that without a focus all I would be would be this awareness of? That is, unboundedness is non Being because Being-ness can only be in relation to an other. By definition unboundedness is all that is. Unboundedness cannot be black, white, fat, thin, round, smooth, good, bad, tall, small etc because all those qualities only exist in relation to an other. Therefore unboundedness can only be an awareness containing all these potentialities. Non Being. In order to ‘know itself’ as a self, unboundedness must create realms of self and other within itself. So it hives off or shapes its own innards into portions with self enclosed boundaries, which can then know themselves in relation to each other. And as Seth says, unboundedness is knowing awareness itself and it puts a portion of itself into every formation and in that way is knowing itself. For you, Shiva is knowing awareness and Shakti is all those self created boundaried beings. The relation between Shiva and Shakti is reality.
I woke up having this weird image of all phenomena, whether they are planets or thoughts or nails or frogs, as being like fuzzy objects having to drag around this enormous encircling field, that a tree is as much the field it grows in as it is the wood. But at the same time and with even greater knowing I had an image that all fields of awareness have a focus in their centre, through which they view or know reality!!!
November 14, 2003
Yesterday on my walk I sort of had a waking dream, an experience of knowing something while I was walking like I usually do on awakening from sleep. Very difficult to translate the felt sense of it, but the wordless knowing is clear. But it was something like awareness being a very slow burning fire, the fire itself, not what streams off the fire, is potentiality and the light of awareness was like the light and smoke and flames that leap out of or off the fire. The light and smoke and flames condenses into the very phenomena that it illuminates and warms up, while the light also penetrates into all the phenomena AND goes on to shine out through the eyes (Is) of all the phenomena, thus perceiving other phenomena in the light of that awareness. Since all phenomena have their own unique sound shape, the light that shines out of each is a tone, like the tone of the double bass in the storm sequence of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony.
What came through the most was the SLOW Ness and the burnING. And also a sense that the portal through which the smoke and flames and light emerged was a whitehole and and that therefore there was a blackhole through which the light and smoke etc returned or was reabsorbed. And lastly the light of awareness was like the ‘background radiation’ that scientists say is the remnants of the Big Bang. As if this light is still shining out of that original creative impulse of the drive to Beingness, that the Big Bang is still happening, it hasn’t finished yet, indeed it is all that there is, this big banging!
November 26th 2003
Peter, this was the ‘annual report’ I sent to you for something you put together that year. Thought it was good to include.
Over the past twelve months I have determined to remain aware of my felt body as much as I could. Over that time I have made more progress in my gnostic quest than I have made over the previous 30 years. And it is strange — it has become much easier because it happens in its own way. My waking ego has no control over it whatsoever. I cannot hurry the process with my intellect, it is the perfect example of an underground experience. I seem to wake up knowing more than I knew the day before and knowing it in a deeper way. I have only to meditate on something as I go to bed and there it is in the morning or next morning. If there is something I am finding hard to digest from life, I simply focus on the felt sense of ‘unclarity’, and when I wake up in the night, it usually is clear as a bell.
Interestingly, as I have become so aware of my body and how it feels to me I am aware that I have always thought of myself as being a person of robust good health, yet I realise that I have been in pain a lot in my life. It is staggering to me to realise that in the last twelve months I have had a bout of the flu for 6 weeks, diarrhoea for 6 months, recurring pains in the neck, on and off a burning pain in my chest (like heart burn), some hay fever in the spring, pain from my last wisdom tooth coming through, a very sore fore arm (some sort of RSI or what feels to me like ‘sciatica of the arm’). But the weirdest is the one I saved to talk about until last since it symbolises for me the essence of the whole process. One night a few months back I woke up, got up to go to the toilet and couldn’t maintain my balance, I nearly toppled over. After a while I was OK, but this shook me up. Have I had a mini-stroke? This went on for about a month then disappeared.
I have always thought of myself as ‘never being sick’ but I realise this is because I have always regarded my illnesses as dis-eases, as far back as the seventies when I first met Peter and he introduced me to ‘Seth Speaks’. From then I always thought of illnesses as materialised psychic stuff and so never really worried about whatever pain I was in. I knew that I would always heal myself of these temporary upsets. That’s why I have never thought of myself as getting sick, although it is obvious that I am in some pain a lot.
Having been in close touch with my felt body for the last year it is obvious to me how much the body reflects our inner music or feeling tones. In fact it is exactly as Seth said — the body is a reflection in matter of what you think you are, not what you are” . I never quite realised how literally Seth meant that. Whenever I look in a mirror now and see my reflection it is as if I see my body as a reflection in matter of my inner body. The flu was the initial process of being ‘completely sick of myself’ at the time — the way I had been living. Soon after this I stopped working full time and went to 3 days a week. The diarrhoea for 6 months was the process of finding something solid to found myself on. I believe I moved from my ‘solid’ physical body to my ‘subtle’ awareness body, the diarrhoea being the physical manifestation of this process. My toppling experiences were the perfect manifestation of me finding my balance in my new world, a world of feeling tone and processes not bodies and outcomes. Pains in the neck — well, who wouldn’t have pains in the neck being an Australian living under a government that puts children in concentration camps in order to get votes, justifying it as protecting our borders (I won’t even mention invading Iraq along with the US).
I found the process of shifting to my felt body difficult to negotiate at work. I work in the public mental health system with such horrifyingly crass ideas of health and illness that I felt even more unbalanced than usual. In a way I’m allergic to these ideas, they get to me at times, irritate me with their dumbness — client walks around their boarding house at night, crying and screaming; 15 mental health workers sit around in a meeting ‘discussing this’ and come to the astounding conclusion that the medication must be wrong; no one is curious as to why the client is crying and screaming at night. I first got hay fever when I started at university 38 years ago. Allergic to Framework 1?
December 9, 2003
Have been thinking about our phone call the other night-morning. My New York experience with Father Al, the Byzantine priest who was also a Silva Mind Control teacher. Why he was into Silva Mind Control? I read my journals again and discovered that I did the course again while I was in NY just to be close to Father Al. I had completely forgotten this.
Anyway, whenever he was preaching I found myself crying almost non stop. Not a sentimental crying but a deep recognition that Christ was THE ONE and what a tragedy it was what we did to him. Not just or even for the fact that 'we' physically crucified him but the spiritual crucifixion — the absolute inability to see him for who he was, because of spiritual ignorance. In NY I knew directly that he was the messiah, and now I can see that when Christ was walking around as a human being, he was asking people to know him directly. Just open yourselves and receive me and you will know who I am. Don't ask me for proof of who I am, don't look at me through your theories, through the prophecies, through any frames of reference, just let your own gnosis tell you all you need to know. It was this appeal to gnosis, that I recognised in NY and that pained me so because it was so simple and yet so tragic, because if you don't know your own gnosis, how frustrating it must have been to be in his presence. And who was he? As much as free awareness as anyone could be. I mean the true definition of freedom must be that you are so grounded in your own being, that you simply rely on this to ground others in theirs, and if they refuse to go inwards, well … It would seem to me that Jesus’ life is a living testament to all that political radicals today search for. Christ was the ultimate radical, the most real revolutionary that ever lived, because he never betrayed his own knowing by taking shortcuts. This was something else I knew in NY and was part of the crying. He was not at all a martyr, he simply knew that direct subjective knowing was what it was about and the only way to do that was to embody that, and in embodying that, he completed his mission. Of course he could have done this and that with all his power, but what would have been the point? That would have been the equivalent of New Age magic. He knew that it was about Gnosis, the direct aware experiencing of reality. On a demo in 1969, I saw ‘radicals’ roll marbles towards the police horses, and I was upset at the pain one of the horses went through as it slipped. A completely innocent animal hurt as a ‘necessary’ bi-product of political, ‘direct’ action to stop a Terrible war in Vietnam. I KNEW that that was not the way.
I think that Father Al was into Silva because in it he felt or glimpsed the wider awareness field and maybe it was his way of being a new Gnostic.
March 28, 2004
Deeply moved by the additions to your essay on ‘Relational Revolution’ [see www.thenewsocialism.org ] When I read the bit on the secretary with the bullying boss getting an ‘angry’ red skin rash on her face, I cried. I said to myself is that you mean by embodied relating? I have been doing this all my life as I think I tried to say on the phone. It is the only way I could have worked with violent anti-social men over the years and never get hit. I can remember in the Willows 20 years ago, simply embodying the inner cognition I had of a huge biker’s weakness and fully feeling it within me and simply looking back at him with a certain cast to my posture and tilt of my head. The person I was running the group with said after, ‘You’ve got more nerve than Ned Kelly’ which I took as the ultimate compliment. It is also the basis of my crying with Father Al. I recognised in Christ that embodied relating in his way of simply collecting himself and in response to the Sanhedrin asking him if he was the Messiah, said “You are saying it” or something to that effect. I was crying at the utter simplicity yet complex nature of embodied relating.
I guess I am writing about this because I want to congratulate you on this piece. It is the first time I have consciously connected together ‘embodied relating’, ‘surface of inner cognitions’, ‘bodying a feeling rather than expressing or repressing it’. And it came out so beautifully in your use of the example of the secretary. The number of times I have screamed out reading your stuff over the years, ‘Give me a f….ing example’ is too numerous to mention. I can’t begin to tell you how much the section on the secretary has meant to me. For some time now I have been going about my life trying to ‘work out‘ what embodied relating is, how to make the turn to the other etc, especially after the last phone call. Now I know I have always been this way, it is what attracted me to you, Mike and Seth in the first place. What I am able to do now is articulate what I do. That is, KNOW that when I embody and fully feel another’s way of being in the world, it communicates. I can only advise you to use more examples. If you do your work will be so much more accessible. I think that if you use more examples, you could even begin to introduce more complexities and subtleties that I sense lurking beneath the surface of this paper.
April 9, 2004
Attached you’ll find a piece of rubbish that I produced for my Team Leader. It represents my accountability, apparently. Apparently it is very good!!. It is the culmination of a lot of heartache for me as it took so long to do. Why? Because I couldn’t understand what they wanted from me. Now I can see how, tragically, everything from politics to commerce, medicine and mental health is dominated by what, in ‘Relational Revolution’, you call ‘practical relations’ – rather than ‘relational practices’. There is not one word in the document required for the Team Leader about ‘relational practices’ - how I relate to people. That simply doesn’t matter to them. For them relational practices are no more than an idiosyncrasy of my behaviour - or anyone’s behaviour. As long as I do what these documents say that I do, then if something goes wrong, I am covered, whatever that means! And if something goes right, I suppose they believe it is because all the procedures were followed.
I understand that all my exasperation with them was because I thought they wanted to know about my relational practices and I was trying to say that these can’t be fitted into the forms they designed, but now I see that they don’t even know what relational practices are. They were always referring to practical relations. I was stuck because now I can see that they really believe that if you do all the relational practices, that is good practice!!!!! My God, how can people have sunk so low? Their lives have become so dominated by practical relations, that anything of a relational nature has been squeezed out. Having meditated on Relational Revolution so much, I have achieved a good deal of peace at work. I feel so compassionate for my colleagues because they are labouring under such a delusion, that work must be a nightmare for them.
Anyway, I thought I would send it to you in case it prompts more ideas in you or just for a moment you might have thought things are getting better. They are not, they are getting far worse, but maybe that is a good thing, in the long run.
April 10, 2004
Had a transcendental experience with a client this week. While they were talking to me I SAW that when we speak we never say the same thing twice, everything we utter is always changing, even if we say the same thing daily like, “G’Day’ or Good Morning, it is different, mooded differently etc. I SAW that so should our bodily being in the world always be changing! Yet, we try as much as possible to stay the same!!! In that moment with the client I felt myself breathe in who they were, felt that go down deep inside me and could feel my body altering as a result, changing shape to manifest or image this felt change in me. I KNEW in that moment how my bodily being was a language itself, constantly changing, BUT also that it was being breathed in by the other and so was constantly changing them, if only I could become aware of that. I could SEE how our bodies shaped themselves to each other like our sentences do, constantly altering subtly to express different shades of meaning. I then KNEW that all my life I have been into aware relational practices (as distinct from most other people into practical relations), but as you say, there is a difference between that and aware BODILY relational practices [see ‘Relational Revolution’, www.thenewsocialism.org ]
I experienced the magic of just being with someone and ‘changing’ them because I was being changed by them. No need to get hung up on the ‘therapists don’t change clients, they change themself bullshit’, we change each other all the time and have always been doing so.
In my own life, I am having small magics and small miracles daily. The question I am asking myself is How can I relate to Nature as a YOU not an IT? It is important for me to sit in the back yard at home or walk around the streets, and breathe in all that surrounds me as I breathe in clients. To be aware of my whole body at all times and stop this walking around completely in my head, (exhilarating though THIS can be), and having no awareness of what is around me. I am acutely aware of making a sacrifice, of giving up being lost in thought for an embodied relationship with the world. For me, only a miracle can save me from being trapped behind a sealed boundary, separating my inner and outer fields of awareness. But I’m over the hump, and can sense what I am becoming.
June 7, 2004
I’ve been thinking back to our phone call and meditating on what we talked about ‘no one having a clue’. I’ve been trying to get to the essence of what people don’t have a clue about. I think it has to do with the difference between radical phenomenology and phenomenology. I mean, if some of the greatest phenomenologists ‘didn’t have a clue’, is it surprising that non phenomenologists have even a lesser clue? And what is the distinguishing feature of radical phenomenology? The FIELD theory of awareness. I think it always comes back to this. I think people are so stuck on awareness being like a tight beam shining from the lighthouse of the brain (even Seth talked about this aspect of consciousness) that thinking of awareness as a field is just too alien. I think that is why they can only talk of ‘energy’. They know about heat energy and light filling space so they can grasp what a field is so that when they sense that a field is involved rather than focused particles, they turn to energy rather than awareness. But if they can grasp what a field is why the difficulty in grasping awareness as a field?
I think the problem with a field of awareness is that our ego experience is of a beam shining out of the head and focusing on what we see out there. My own difficulty for years with a field of awareness was with how this field related to my physical body. Does a field have a centre and is this centre the body? Does the field radiate out from the whole body? Does the earth’s magnetic field radiate out from the matter of the earth? Does the matter create the field? Or does the field condense at its centre into a body? I now have a clear sense of the relationship but I cannot as yet put it into words.
August 4, 2004
Just to recapitulate. From my notebook this morning — “I now understand in a feeling way what Peter has been irritated with on and off for some time. I have been misunderstanding the nature of unknowing knowingness. We all have this. We all feel reality. But most people repress that disconcerting part of them which doesn’t know something, that gnawing feeling that there is something one knows but doesn’t know what that something is. The only thing they need do is to recognise ‘that gnawing feeling’ as a type of knowing in itself - an ‘unknowing knowing’. The point is neither to ignore it, nor just immediately try and grab at and grasp it in black-and-white concepts. but let it gestate and take form in its own time. But even when the unknowing knowing is formulated it is all very well to know that you ‘always knew something’ but another story altogether to embody that knowing and communicate it to others at a deep bodily level, or in words as well.”
It has given me a much greater feeling appreciation both of the enormity of the task you have achieved in the sense of the aloneness that it necessitated but also of the incredible dimensions of experience that you must have delved into inside yourself. The richness that I have uncovered in the last few months is something to treasure. The riches that you must have uncovered .....
September 9, 2004
The massive breakthrough that I am currently making is extremely hard for me to articulate at present beyond the rather lame words that I seem to have made a transition to BEING in my sensed body now ‘rather’ than my physical body. Having understood that there is only the sensed body, I seem to now BE that. What I mean by this is that I am able to FEEL ‘truths’ or meanings quite directly and almost at will, especially when reading or with people or watching people on TV. I can FEEL directly the most subtle senses and meanings whereas ‘before’ I would get a sense of meanings and have to ‘go away’ and feel them or think them or write them down or... Something like more direct knowing and less reliance on residual sense? Sometimes I can look at the bare wall of my room, or feel the darkness at night when I awake and sense all this rustling beneath the surface. When you spoke about the wise old tree outside your house in manor Road, that is what I am beginning to feel will be in my own future.
September 10, 2004
It's 1.00pm at work and a client has cancelled so I wanted to write and let you know how much I am loving the little additions you made to the ‘Introduction to Inner Bodywork’. [see www.thenewtherapy.org ]
I have really grasped the sense that I think you were wanting to get over - that is, that we can change our outer perceptions of people to inner proprioceptions of ourselves and, in this way, resonate with their proprioceptions of themselves.
In the last counselling session I just finished, I found myself staying with completely all the subtle senses of the 'body language', feeling myself feeling them and subtly changing them from the inside out, BUT THIS TIME quite consciously and precisely. Gnosis.
The client was someone whom even I had almost given up on. Agitated, anxious, fearful, bombed out on medication, can't be alone, can't be with people etc. She arrived crying and ringing her hands and by the end was sitting back still, peaceful, only slightly teary and saying over and over again, "in the present moment, I have no problems".
November 22, 2004
Attached you’ll find proofed copy of ‘Yoga Today’. While reading it, something became a lot clearer to me about what I wrote yesterday to you. The way you wrote about yoga today being a passing on of second hand knowledge resonated with me strongly. The way you wrote about Munis and Rishis resonated even more strongly — that is, one can only pass on knowledge that one has re-experienced in oneself, wordlessly. We have to reproduce in ourselves the experience that the ancient masters went through. In that way we contact the wordless source of knowledge and the source of wordless knowing – Gnosis - ourselves [see www.thewnewwgnosis.org ] Then we can express it in our modern language. That is all very well, but what if our modern language has no culture or ‘spiritual vocabulary’ to use. Your work is as much about the creation of that LANGUAGE as anything else. I am already beginning to take that language for granted without realising how many new terms and words and meanings you have contributed.
Also, ‘Yoga Today’ awakened in me a certain knowing of my own about my own process. Unless I can go to the source within myself and re-experience what you did, in my own way, than I don’t really know what you are talking about. It is as if you are the ancient master and I am refusing to pass on second hand knowledge. That is why I might seem to you (I certainly do so to myself) so slow to write and contribute to your work. Unless I experience the truths wordlessly, all I am doing is mouthing second hand Wilbergian mantras, and that I will not do. So you will be able to appreciate my writing to you of your essay on ‘Spanda’ yesterday [see ‘Further Teachings’ section of www.thenewyoga.org] , for I experienced the ‘stretching’ or ‘spanning’ of inner space, space as ‘making room’ (Heidegger), the protection of this awareness space for knowledge to come to light. I experienced all this wordlessly, and so can now say, “I read Peter’s thing on Spanda and this is what it meant to me”.
Having said all this I come to your extracts from a letter to X. In this you are writing about the teaching of The New Yoga and the teaching of teachers. I have some thoughts about this. And my own doing of the exercises in the Yoga of Space. And why so little has come of the Seth books, in the sense that you meant it. Maybe it is best left for a phone call, but let me start here. I must re-create in me what you write about in order to understand what you are saying. Wordlessly. I must go to the source and sense that wordless knowledge and allow it to form into words within me etc. Than I get what you are on about. For me this same process must happen with the exercises. I must experience the inner truth of the exercise before I can do it, if that makes sense to you. I certainly did not know what Seth was meaning in the vast majority of the exercises he proposed. I simply ended up ignoring them for they didn’t mean anything to me, not that I didn’t try over and over again. Not everyone could go and attend a group with Jane and Seth, not that that seems to have done anything for those group members who did attend!!!!!
After reading the essay on ‘Spanda’ I feel a sense of excitement for I feel the reality of awareness in a way that I didn’t before. From the wordless experiencing, exercises are forming themselves in me, I am creating my own exercise for the expansion of my awareness, and relating these to yours. Not everyone can go to Whitstable and meet up with you. Do you think that people can learn the New Yoga by themselves’ and/or need one-to-one teaching from you?
November 26, 2004
Dreamt last night that I had created or found a computer whose electronics were not confined in and by a ‘black box’ but ‘delocalised’ throughout space, and this computer was keyboarded by me at a localised point. Woke up with the sure feeling of space as a space of awareness that I was part of, but also a centre of, or a core. From this core I can ‘feel’ myself immediately into any point in my space and ‘light’ it up. I remember Seth saying that ‘consciousness is the direction in which a self focuses’ and not having much idea of what this meant. Now I feel it. My space is a space of ‘pressure gradients’ or intensities and it ‘moves’ according to ‘where’ I focus. It can move outwardly or inwardly through the boundary field of ‘my body’ — the breathing of awareness. I can’t put into words the joy of feeling the reality of this breathing, and the reality of an alive and vital field that ‘space’ has become overnight. It is also a feeling cognition in me of what potentialities are — literally charged potentials of the field (and I might say how useful science is in creating such wonderful words in describing ‘electric and magnetic fields). It is also a feeling cognition within that, of course, reality must be localised into centres or cores for how else could the field come to self-consciousness — be able to focus itself or feel itself in a multiplicity of ways. But MOSTLY, what a sense of anticipation I feel in going to work today, feeling that I will be within every person I meet and I can ‘light myself up’ within them by simply intending and feeling it.
November 28, 2004
I recently re-read a little piece of yours called ‘Gnostic Spirituality’ (it’s stuck on the wall, above my desk at work) in which you write that KNOWING PRECEDES BEING - not the other way around. I got a vivid sense of knowing awareness moving through the boundary layer, being breathed out and emerging into outer awareness as the sentence we speak.
While driving the other day, it occurred to me that there was no essential difference between driving and speaking. That is, I experienced driving as speech. I felt that as in speech when I stop in the middle of a sentence to find just that most fitting word, why aren’t I ‘stopping’ in the middle of driving to find the most appropriate ‘way of driving’ — posture, demeanour etc. And then I went to, well - why aren’t I doing this in all my everyday actions? I felt I had come to an understanding of WHOLE BODY AWARENESS in a way that meant something very significant to me, discovered its inner truth in your words. As I go about my day now, I remember my own knowing. Am I sitting in the most fitting way? Does this way of getting out of bed fit with who I am in this moment? I have also become aware that most activities humans do are just done by habit. We think that it doesn’t really matter so much how we speak, how we walk, how we drive because the only reality is actually behind the phenomena. Maybe only in speech do people search for the most fitting way to be. It seems to me that we act by rote just so that we can lose ourselves in thought or in the outer world. I say this because I know that sometimes when I tell myself to be aware of myself completely, another part says, “Oh, just shut up, let me lose myself, I want to have a rest”. As if it is hard to maintain whole body awareness. But I am coming to regret this losing myself, for it inevitably results in me being cut off from myself to such an extent, that when I reconnect, I am amazed that I drifted so far away from my essential being.
January 6, 2005
Attached you’ll find proofed copies of the new writing you sent me. I have been meditating on ‘From Shiva to Bhairava’ [see Further Teachings section of www.thenewyoga.org ] constantly and have felt many new things. During our last call I talked about trying to understand or feel from within the primary cosmic dilemma Seth expounds on in ‘The God Concept’. You said on the phone that you had answered these questions in the above paper, and so I found out. One of the missing links that I felt through meditation was the autonomous and self actualising nature of inner potentialities. I felt the reality of my own thoughts, dreams, desires, senses as autonomous and self actualising — that is, they yearn to BE, as much as I yearn to free them. It is not a matter of All That is first becoming aware of his dreams and then yearning to give them freedom. These two processes or awarenesses are simultaneous and of equal ‘value’. Another HUGE link I felt was that about Shiva being the ultimate agent not the ego. From your paper I felt you to be saying that the crucial step in the creation of All That is, was All That Is ‘realising’ that the dreams he sensed within him were not his creations but autonomous and self actualising. In All That Is recognising this, he makes that step that I feel I am making now, that of granting true freedom to my own thoughts and feelings etc. They do not have to be managed or controlled, or watched or this or that, simply left to be and they will go their own way. Simply felt from within, our posture and demeanour accommodating to their growing shape like a pregnant woman. I felt the link between this recognition of awareness as the ultimate agent not the ego and the depressive process and whole body awareness and the pregnancy metaphor, how they are all aspects of creation.
Another link I made is that a thing is actually a ‘thing-ing’ or ‘th-ing’. That there is only the actualising process – the ‘-ing’ and that science gets stuck because it recognises only that which is already actualized or actual as reality — ‘things’. In only recognising things, it doesn’t have to consider awareness and yet things only emerge – thing themselves – from within awareness fields.
January 29, 2005
Thanks for the reformulation of the agency/identity thing. I was actually asking you about a slightly different emphasis. I get the agency/action thing completely, in fact, it has been my constant source of meditation, contemplation and work with clients, friends and the world for some time now. It is the ultimate feeling of liberation, empowerment and new connection with the world to feel that I shape what is flowing through me. I don’t create it out of nothing (private property) nor do I just let what is “created by my soul” (public property) flow through. But that potentialities within me (be they thoughts feelings impulses whatever) desire to be born from their point of view. All I can do is make myself the best possible ‘shaping’ tool or ‘musical instrument’ — a sort of Stradivarius focus personality, and FEEL my SELF as best I can. I keep saying to myself, Just get out of the way! I mean by that, Stop trying to manage it, control it, think it up, just remain connected with the feeling. I woke up yesterday morning lying there in bed, just luxuriating in the knowing that my body (as circle) was a living thread or string, spanning and stretching and connecting inner and outer space, continually changing.
February 24, 2005
I’m so absorbed in Lesson 1 of The New Yoga Manual. A quick scan of the lesson revealed several things which I felt were of immesiate and deep significance:
“The AWARENESS OF EXPERIENCING leads to a new EXPERIENCE OF AWARENESS itself as our true self. The way in which awareness of experience provides a reflection of our experiencing self or ‘awareness-self’ was termed Vimarsha in the teachings of tantra. The yoga of awareness is therefore Vimarsha Yoga.”
Together with this went the understanding inherited from Mike that thoughts and feelings we have ABOUT our experience form PART of our self-experience. If we identify with these thoughts and feelings therefore, we reinforce our identification with our experience.
Practicing the yoga of awareness means sustaining our awareness of all that we are experiencing, including our experienced self. Awareness of experiencing is what allows us to actively identify with, deepen and intensify our experience rather than being identified with it. To be ‘unconscious’ of something is the very same thing as to be identified with it. The Self that can consciously identify with an element of its experience is not the self that is (‘unconsciously’) identified with it. It is a Self that must by definition be distinct from all its own identifications and from every aspect of its own experience. That Self IS awareness. Having arisen as mental words however, thoughts ‘work’ awareness into patterns of worldly experiencing. All that we experience in this world therefore, is already a patterned interpretation of underlying qualities of awareness or soul. In a word therefore – you mantra that “Wording is Worlding”. As you write, the ‘wording’ or verbal patterning of our thoughts is what shapes or ‘works’ our awareness into patterns of experiencing and action. Therefore it is only through awareness of our thoughts as mental words and word patterns that can we prevent these words and word patterns from working our awareness into unhelpful or limiting patterns of experience and action.
Thus as you write, instead of thinking “I am angry” - thereby identifying with this ‘anger’ and acting it out - we remain wordlessly aware of HAVING THE THOUGHT that “I am angry”. That awareness of a thought IS NOT a thought, but is THOUGHT-FREE. Similarly, our awareness of an emotion is not an emotion but is something EMOTION-FREE. Awareness is thus the very essence of freedom or liberation – ‘Moksha’.
Your ‘Questions to ask oneself’ -
“Was I aware of that thought arising in me before I expressed it or did I automatically identify with it?”
“Were my words an expression of awareness, or of identification with my thoughts and feelings?”
I have spent a lot of time meditating on the sense of these quotes. If I ‘have a thought’, this is like a thought arising in me which I allow to pass through me, without getting involved in it. Of course this can only happen if I am in whole body awareness – the STEP BACK into WHOLE BODY AWARENESS. I can also ‘get involved’ in any thought that arises. And when I say get involved I could feel at the same time just what this means! Just thinking a thought initiates a stream of action, patterned action. I could feel all sorts of motor patterns rustling within, feel my own slight physical agitation if the thought was a troubling one (like is the phone going to ring and I will have to answer it or not answer it) etc. And of course, on countless occasions I would get completely lost in thought (sometimes ecstatic, sometimes quite fearful). Amazingly I became aware that in order to STOP this, I would ‘breathe in deeply to clear my head!!!!!!!!’ and get back to where I was before I got lost (a feeling of pushing down into my lower abdomen — in fact the whole experience of whole body awareness for me is a feeling of alert, relaxed tightness in the belly), in the sense of what question was I exploring. Or sometimes I would blow air out of me fast, to clear my chest space. (Now I have always done this without any awareness of doing so — clearing my inner spaces.)
In the last day I have become aware of something quite illuminating and astounding to me. If I have a thought and let it pass, yes, I am free. If I think a thought and ‘get involved’ in it, it is as if the whole body awareness of having the thought, slides inside the thought and expands it from the inside into a living reality, a sort of capsule — that is, something with a boundary around it — that is, IDENTITY in Mike’s terms. Your becoming identified with. Of course I can see how this would apply also to selves that we sense etc, and how we have become used to certain selves which are ‘kosher’ and certain selves which are not!!
An amazing sense of freedom as I feel these realities, to actually get a sense of how I create my own reality at that level ‘before’ thoughts are produced.
Another thing I have got out of meditating on this lesson is the following: If I maintain whole body awareness of anything, say a wall or plant or the look on a person’s face, I get a sense of a double looking. There is the everyday conscious self seeing the wall or plant, and there is whole body awareness ‘seeing’ the whole experience, taking it all in. By being wordlessly aware of a thought or object, we don’t get ‘involved’ we are just aware of it, and thus can get a new experience of this awareness — stop seeing it as a green tree, and see the green and the shape as what they are — shapes and colours of awareness. Whole body awareness doesn’t name things, doesn’t create identities for things to hide within, and thus enables us to experience the very Qualia that they are made of.
February 25, 2005
After writing to you yesterday I had one more feeling experience at work. Wordless awareness is NOT a ‘mental’ or ‘psychic‘ or ‘spiritual’, ‘pure’ inner experience. It is a bodily feeling. They are inseparable aspects of a unitary experience. But even more than this I felt what you mean by embodied awareness. With a client yesterday I was aware as they were talking about being sexually harassed at work that I was feeling something significant about what they were saying, feeling it bodily. In holding to that feeling, while looking at her eyes and face and posture, and not putting it into words or thoughts, I was feeling that wordless awareness bodily, consciously, clearly and precisely. In a word I was embodying that, in the sense of allowing it to be felt bodily. But not only that, it translated itself into a direct way of working with her. Because as I started to feel a ‘smallness’ in her that was the ‘cause’ of her easily being sexually harassed by anyone, she said that she was small, had always been small, in that she was a small woman, soft voice, shy, quiet etc. It was clear to me that she was completely identified with feeling small but had obviously never sustained or explored – in a wordless bodily way the wordless sense of smallness.
May 2, 2005
My own personal work? Quite an interesting experience I had meditating Rado. For the first time in my life, I can understand electricity and magnetism!!! Rado talks about the Aether as a spiralling, rotating ‘gas’ which forms ‘circular boundary layers’ within itself in the form of sink vortices from galaxies to electrons, with the boundary surfaces completely permeable and the aether circulating through and within and around ‘matter’!!!!!!!!!. Even though Rado has no idea of awareness, his ‘science’ is a total metaphor for New Yoga awareness. The other day on the morning that I received your Grand Unified Theory I was on my walk feeling out Rado’s aether theory, I could see that his conception was that (1) space is not empty; (2) space has a substantiality of its own — aether; (3) and this space is ‘within matter and surrounds matter’ and (4) this space forms matter, interacts with the matter that it forms. Something became very transparent within me — inner space and outer space are the ‘same’ space. The macro and the micro (Relativity and Quatum Mechanics) can be united only through a different conception of space itself. I realised that I had, without knowing it, completely separated inner and outer space. Meditating Rado helped me to see that only through unifying macro- and micro can progress be made. Then I got home, logged on and your pice ‘Unified Field Theology’ was waiting. What perfectly clear sense it made. Both in terms of inner and outer being united and that we exist in awareness as we exist in space. For as you have written, the Awareness IS the spatial ‘Aether’ or ‘Etheric’ space called ‘Akasha’ in Tantric META-PHYSICS.
June 11, 2005
Today I went shopping in to the Adelaide Market. Had to pull over to the side of the road to write the following down or I would have had a crash.
“I am awareness. By that I mean who I regard myself as is a feeling awareness of myself. I take in awareness, digest it and ‘become’ the output awareness. That is, The Being breathes awareness in and breathes ‘me’ out, as the spoken word on its out breath. If awareness is Space, then I AM THE CIRCULATING AWARENESS. That is, the body is the means whereby awareness is taken inside a space where it can be ‘assimilated’ and its potentialities brought to light. It would be as if the air and matter of the earth is circulating in and through plants and bodies in order to use and bring to fulfillment the inner stuff of the air.” A liitle clumsy but you get my drift. I was hit with full force that I am the flowing awareness and that the body is ‘secondary’ - that the relationship between air and body is actually reversed. Air as awareness breath or ‘Prana’ is primary and bodies are secondary.
August 1, 2005
Thanks for New Lesson 5 and Lesson 6 of the ‘Manual of The New Yoga’. Over the last few days, I was going through an accelerated transformation. The culmination of something which I mentioned on the phone. I was walking to the shops when I FELT my body as this vast wisdom-speech. When we say something the words that we speak also say something in their own right. I FELT the reality of my whole body speaking in its own right. That is, if I as soul am speaking the flesh, then outside my (ego) awareness my body IS far more than I think it is. But as I was walking, feeling what it felt like to be walking that day, I knew that I could increasingly encompass and enact more of my SOUL by feeling my body while I was doing whatever it was that I was doing.
I was struck reading lesson 5 even more by ‘it is not what you do but the way that you do it’ as identity. Who is Inspector Clouseau? He is just one way that Peter Sellers acted!! That is so clear to me. I have even heard that Peter Sellers occasionally lost track of ‘himself’. Forgot who he was acting that day? If Inspector Clouseau is one way that Peter Sellers acted, then a painting by Picasso is just one way that he painted.
Last night I was watching this programme called ‘The Jurassic’. Apparently in the early Jurassic there were very few species of dinosaur, by the late Jurassic there were a plethora of species. The programme was about this fossil site in Argentina which was from the middle Jurassic. Scientists were searching for the cause of the blooming in dinosaur species. It was quite interesting to see them searching for the cause in the way that they did. A combination of the breakup of the one continent that existed in the early jurassic with the climate change that this triggered that caused the proliferation of the dinosaurs. I could see clearly the absurdity in the theory of evolution. Just the way they talk about The Dinosaurs is absurd as if those creatures are things apart from the Climate and the Continents in the first place. Dinosaurs no more evolve than books evolve. Of course in writing a book, the book continually grows and changes, evolves. But really the BOOK doesn’t evolve just by itself. It is the evolving form taken by the author’s evolving awareness. The author’s ideas evolve and the book’s evolution mirrors this change. But in talking about the evolution of the dinosaurs (or the evolution of the planet for that matter) nothing at all is aid about the ‘author’. Awareness playfully evolves and changes through forming its potentialities and transforming itself and them.
August 8, 2005
“For that vibration (‘Spanda’), which is a slight motion of a special kind, a unique vibrating light, is the wave of the ocean of awareness, without which there is no conscious experience at all. For the character of the ocean is that it is sometimes filled with waves and sometimes waveless. This awareness is the essence of all” Abhinavagupta
Reading this I am reminded of the scientific thing that Rado points out. Science is stuffed when it comes to ‘what light is’. Because it refuses to have an ether, a field condition for ‘light’, it is forced to believe, without ever even making it explicit, that ‘waves of light’ come from the sun, with no field present that they are waving in. And, on top of this absurdity, this ‘wave’ is actually made of particles!!! That is, particles are streaming from the sun, but overall (in Space-Time) their shape is a ‘wave’. Thus having their cake and eating it too.
Abhinavagupta speaks to me of the faintest vibration, that is so subtle or peacefull that I call it Stillness. This IS the ocean of awareness, which can have waves in it or not. Thus, really having its cake and eating it too! Actually makes sense of the scientific nonsense.
August 28, 2005
Went and saw ‘What the bleep do we know?’ after a few clients told me to. Quantum mechanics. Talk, talk talk. Including ‘Ramtha’ channelled by JZ Knight. I bore it well for an hour and then the hubris, smugness and false wonderment got to me and I shifted around in my seat for the last half hour, wanting to get out and ‘scream’. It was really all about the mystery of matter, nothing about the mystery of awareness or the mystery of? And in the end, it was all about how everything around us is a creation of consciousness, AND how wonderful our brains are, as if, when it all came down to it, brains produce everything. But not one word about how the brain is produced.
October 31, 2005
I agree with you 100% with your comments in your last email to me about it being a good sign that so few are reading your work. Since you have left, I have realised all too well that the difference between your work and all the rest (including Seth, Castaneda, Gendlin, and dare I say, Steiner, and even darer, Mike) is quite simple — your work enables the serious student to REALLY change, precisely because its emphasis is not on any ‘ego’ goal whatsoever, whether that be changing one’s beliefs, stalking personal power, focusing, self knowledge but rather on the process of linking ego with awareness, thus enabling awareness to work within us. In order to achieve this you have outlined, for the serious student, just what awareness is and isn’t (a property of a being). Personally I didn’t gain the slightest conception of the true FIELD nature of awareness (that awareness enowns us, not us owning awareness) from all the others! Intellectual yes, but nothing that could lead to anything. It is the way you write, the musical knowing that you have, that allows the serious student to resonate with the musical nature of their own being. I listen to music without any goal at all, just to be moved! That is the beauty of your work. There are no goals whatsoever in your work — no explicit ego goals. Control your emotions, lose weight, get more money, gain power, find a better job, blah, blah, blah, even become a warrior, great therapist etc. The serious student will get one thing from a serious study of your work — a sense of the Divine, and what more could anyone ask.
Interesting that you wrote:
“I no longer have any desire to sacrifice the quality-depth of the work I do - with a growing but still small number of people - just for the sake of a mass readership or to expand the QUANTITY of people working with me. Quite the opposite: for the first time in my life I understand fully that The Few can actually do more than The Many. For the fact is that Christ and a mere twelve disciples accomplished - quite unknown to the mass of people at the time - much more than the countless subsequent organisations and mass movements, religious or political. Indeed it has always been such organised mass religions or the sort encouraged by Paul 1 that have resulted in distortions. That does not mean I do not still intend to work on simplifying my teaching and my writings - and above all its message. Yet I now realise fully that it is the inner work we 'few' each do - the inner metamorphoses we continue to undergo, the ways we embody them and the inner message we give to others through them - that will truly change the world. It is through that process unfolding that my writings will eventually - and quite naturally - find a wider readership.”
I came to the same conclusion myself just about the time you left. I mentioned to you that the biggest influence of your visit here for me was your bodily presence. What I mean by this is that I could feel myself responding to an inner ‘stimulation’. I don’t mean responding to any ‘spiritual’ or psychic’ ‘goals’ that you might have had for me via ‘transformative resonance’ (although I assume they were there aplenty). What I mean is that you are an ‘Apostle of the Lord’ and that is something that worked away within me, quite independent of anything we talked about, did together etc. I could feel it. If one can successfully yoke their ego to the awareness self, THAT changes everything. And THAT must happen first in order to create the very readership that then comes along seeking an explanation for what is happening within them. This has meant an enormous amount to me personally. I now know that I am an Apostle of the Lord, and that it is my presence that does the changing. I do the yoking and the results flow out over ‘my corner of the world’ as Seth said.
January 14, 2006
On my walk this morning past my favourite tree, a huge palm tree with its branches so big that they flow upwards and then completely drape downwards almost touching the ground. I experience the tree as a being dangling its branches as 'feeling organs of perception'. It was a feeling being. It felt like an undersea creature feeling the movement of the ocean around it and the subtle vibration of everything in it.
January 16, 2006
Out there is power, knowledge, awareness. Stored potential action. I can feel it. Out there in the world around me is all I need to move me to action or provide the insights I need to resolve all my challenges. If I am struggling to know what to do with a client, out there around me in the minutiae of my everyday life are the 'answers'. Out there are sensory qualities of awareness (the tone of a crow's 'caw', the light of the sky, the texture of the bitumen) with which I can resonate. Those sensory qualities can evoke in me resonant qualities of awareness and trigger what I need. What is out there are sounds and colours and shapes which I can feel and FEELING them is all I need. It is indeed a magical universe. In order to use this magic I relate to reality directly not via the screen of thoughts, the internal dialogue. In Peter's words, not identify with the mental or bodily contents of awareness but with awareness itself, the containing field. Simply open up and receive it like I do a client's expressions.
January 20, 2006
I was out walking this morning. To be completely open to what is around me is to take in all the sensory qualities there are to be aware of. Then feel them as qualities of awareness. I felt so fully in that moment that I was being addressed by the world as I am by a person I am with. The world is talking and gesturing and posturing to me. It is facing me. I am so familiar of the subtle meanings of a person's look in their eye, the way they sit, the meaning of that particular silence, of that shift of the eyebrows etc. How can I have taken so long to feel that the world around me was just as alive? The world around me is ME, just as much as another person is. I see in others' faces and gestures answers to silent questions deep in my own soul. The world around me is in the same way the living 'answer' to my unspoken questions. The world around me is the words my soul is using to express my questions. My soul dreams up the environment, including me, the dreamed. If I take it in fully, re-absorb it, re-member it, I become my own soul in that moment.
January 23, 2006
I've just become aware of the whole 'internal dialogue thing' with the emphasis on aware. I was in the backyard and wanted to water something for which I needed to attach the hose to the tap. So I undid the irrigation system that was attached to the tap (as I've done many times and reached for the connector to attach to the tap so I could connect up the hose. It wasn't in its normal spot. Instantly I got frustrated, pissed off and began muttering things like, "bloody Pauline, why doesn't she put it in the same spot every time?" (I might add here that it was commonplace when I was a kid, that my mother would always look to blame someone for anything that was amiss. I learnt quickly. It became standard for me to say instantly, 'That's your fault' whenever something didn't work out). Back to the garden. I was aware that there is an automatic, reactive response in me to get angry whenever things don't work out. I could see that this was the internal dialogue stuff of Castaneda here. There were a whole series of assumptions buried within my simple reactive stance. The connector is not where it should be. Therefore someone must have moved it. Cause-Effect. Reason. As usually happens, when I calmed down I found the connector, about three inches away behind some greenery. In that moment I was aware that there was another way I could have seen the whole situation. That is, the connector WAS there all the time. That I didn't see it was magic, an unfathomable mystery of the universe in Juan Matus's terms. One of the ploys of Death to entrap me. It was a challenge set by death - don't go down the path of Reason (the whole cause-effect find-someone-to-blame game). Go down the path with heart, impeccability. That is, death is stalking me, challenging me to directly relate to reality, not get lost in thought. I was aware at that moment of the TV programme on Michaelangelo that I saw the night before. Michaelangelo said that he discovered the figures inside the marble, the marble suggested to him the form of what he was sculpting. I sculpted the tap incident in the same way.
January 24, 2006
When something goes wrong in my life I have a reactive, conditioned response. I get angry and look to blame something or someone. Whether this is a paper jam in my printer, something at work or a tap that won't work. In those moments I turn to a certain mental explanation of the world (the internal dialogue) to explain my discomfort. Instead I can feel now that the world is addressing me, trying to help me. The discomfort is actually an aid, the path with heart! I am intending to evolve in awareness. In order to do so I must disrupt that routined habitual response. Here the world is on my side, momentarily hiding the connector. The world is addressing me, calling me to 'not do'. Stay fully in my whole body, feel the whole situation, the garden, the space, the tap the sky, my thoughts. The call is to 'stop the internal dialogue', be aware and BE awareness. Become a conscious animal, if you want, on the alert for predators, for Death is stalking me. When I am confronted by the missing connector, I have a choice. I can either think reality should be this way or that way, it's not fair… whatever. But with all these thoughts I am identifying with the mental contents of awareness, rather than awareness itself. Or I can be utterly connected with reality. Reality is responding to my intent to evolve awareness by calling to me. Stay fully in your body, stay fully in the Now. Feel the whole space around you and within you. Why? Because that whole field is the source of the very answers that you seek through identifying with the internal dialogue. The question is not what are the right thoughts to think? What is the right way to behave? That misses the whole point.
February 8, 2006
I suddenly became aware as I was reading this morning that my tongue constantly moves in my mouth and there are also subtle movements of my jaw. I am literally talking to myself as I read 'quietly'. Normally I have no awareness of this, but I suppose because of my constant exercises at becoming aware of my whole body this has manifested in my discovery. When we think awareness is a product of the body, the body itself slips from view. But the body is another thing that we can become aware of. Thus, I can become aware of my whole body, the space around it while continuing to read. So I am adopting my own unique ‘not doing’. I keep my tongue touching the upper palate or even clench it between my teeth as a reminder to really be silent within. This is a perfect example of how awareness of the body slips from view if we regard awareness as a possession of the body. I have been reading quite literally all my life, for over 50 years yet was never aware that my tongue and jaws move while reading just as if I was reading aloud!!!!
February 10, 2006
Yesterday on my walk I experienced that the substantiality of awareness was the airiness of space, that the space of awareness was like infinite space expanding forever, that awareness was a breathing awareness taking in and finding a ground within itself for the new knowledge. I am as light and airy as air is. I can feel that. I am 'hooking' who I am to the field of awareness rather than the goings on of the rational mind. I am the wind blowing in the trees, embracing all of the tree at once, moving and circulating. When I contemplate reality there are things attached to the earth, grounded etc and there are the heavenly things. Awareness and what awareness is aware of - space and what has condensed out of space. Here is the self recognition of the Shaivists? I am feeling myself in the world around me, feeling my own substantiality and make up, my spatiality, my moods. How could I, without this mirror, ever have come to self knowledge? And all this around me is a manifestation of my own potentiality just for the purpose of self recognition. The sky lightens and darkens (verb-action). It isn't light or dark (noun-object). I lighten and darken. That wall is a 'walling'. That green is a 'greening'. All of this in the sense is BE-ING as action, as dynamic manifestation. What I see in the mirror is a reflection — it is a reflect-ing of me. Awareness is darkening and the sky is dark. It reflects that I am angry. Wrong. I am aware that I have angry thoughts. I am aware that ANGRY THOUGHTS ARE EMERGING within me. When I say that I am angry, I am identifying with the angry thoughts, rather than the awareness from which they emerge. When I regard the awareness from which they and I emerge AS MY PRIVATE POSSESSION, then I become identified with its contents. All things are emerging from within awareness alongside each other. That wall is emerging from within awareness as a baby emerges from the womb. Every THING is a doing of awareness itself, its own action, and not a doing of the products of awareness. There is no way in which awareness itself can be a product of any thing – the body or brain for example - because that would make it into a product of its own products!
April 1, 2006
It has become clear to me that the 'key' to a good' life - no, not just that - the 'key' to a life which would revolutionise society at a mass level, is utterly simpe - 'meditation'. That is to say, real meditation as defined by THE NEW YOGA – taking time to be aware and then being able to identify with awareness itself - as something distinct and FREE from any particular 'thing' we are aware of. When it comes down to it, this 'key' is not a 'doing' - that's what makes me say it is utterly simple. You don't need to pay any one anything, don't need to go to a doctor, do any painful physical exercises, analyse yourself etc. On the other hand it is the most difficult thing I have ever done and continue to do, because it is so 'alien' to current people's way of being, which is dominated by doing - for even 'yoga' is seen most as something to be done. What makes this simple 'key' seem complex is only that when people hear the word 'awareness', they translate it, at best, as 'perception' (which is also awareness OF something) or, at worst, as thinking ABOUT something. Then again, with the best of intentions, people try to come to deeper insights into what they are doing by thinking about it, rather than simply being aware of it, or else they 'take time out' from that doing – from their general 'busy-ness' - by doing things like going on holidays - anything but simply taking time to be aware and to BE AWARENESS. Everyone has to slow down many, many times. If we all did, that is abided in awareness, then the whole world would look entirely different. In almost an instant, people would say "I'm not doing this anymore" and walk off the job and go home. Just like those quantum leaps people made in Eastern Europe in 1989. Suddenly the wall is coming down - yesterday I was terrified to do this, today it comes down! But the fear in slowing down for everyone is the fear of 'nothing to do', or emptiness or boredom. What is revolutionary about THE NEW YOGA is that when abiding in awareness, one experiences BLISS - the antidote to boredom and the only real counter to the seductiveness of modern society and its busy-ness and its toys (technology, cars, games, TV etc.). The bliss of abiding in Transcendental Awareness is what is needed to FUEL the revolution.
April 21, 2006
As I was experiencing myself as the space around me, I began to lose sense of that space and I experienced losing myself in thought. I realised that I had contracted that huge field of awareness I was in touch with to the confines of my body and the centre of this contracted field had itself contracted from my whole body to a 'point' in my head, thus I was identified with the mental contents of my head. It is odd that many people think that Peter’s writing is obscure sometimes or dense. I have thought this at times. But actually that is quite wrong if you know anything of philosophy or anything about writers who attempt to deal with 'occult' matters. I have had occasion to read some of Theun Mares. He is a Toltec seer, a South African Nahal with a band of warriors etc. Unbelievable how complicated it is. And the difference between his (and other) work and Peter’s? He has got to the core of the issue, which I see as awareness as such and what awareness is aware of. When a writer hasn't got to this core they are reduced to going around and around a surface. To be a Toltec according to Mares, one has to do this, then that, then another 500 things while recapitulating this, going into the north, the east the west, the 21 jewels of awareness, the this and that - it never ends!!! Peter’s work in contrast because it gets to the core - the essence ends up being simplicity itself compared with the tortuous writings of Mares and Sartre and others.
April 26, 2006
On my walk the other morning I made the crucial connection for myself that makes BEING AWARE and BEING AWARENESS a doddle. For me to be aware of everything there is to be aware of means to BREATHE in awareness. This alternative way of feeling the issue came about through the following: I go back to the jogging analogy. When one takes up jogging it is to become physically fitter through aerobic activity. But a paradoxical situation soon becomes apparent to the jogger. We have to become aware of breathing. Our jogging speed, which is under our 'control' has to be adjusted to our breathing (which is not under our control) or we 'get out of breath'. In normal life we never really have to be aware of breathing. It simply goes on. Thus most peoples' normal breathing is 'up to shit' — shallow, fast, whatever. But while running we discover that breathing is a level deeper than running itself. A slow but inevitable evolution happens as the breathing body and the running body grow together but in a very delicate balance. Fitness or endurance seems to be the simultaneous development of increased speed and an ability to breathe deeper in order to accommodate this. But always one must run at a pace which means that we can comfortably breathe. Well, I reasoned for myself that spiritual evolution is the 'race' to re-connection with the source — awareness. As we are able to stay in touch with, be aware of, everything there is to be aware of, we connect with that larger awareness field, the source of all. But being aware of the space around me IS breathing in that ether. Thus spiritual evolution for me has become like an endurance 'race'. Can I moment by moment be aware of breathing in the space around me? If I lose touch with that, it is akin to trying to run too fast — allowing the goal to over ride the process. In spiritual evolution, when we have a crisis, a printer jam or a biggy like a house dislocation, don't we 'run too fast? Aren't we then drawn into the delusion of thinking that we should control or manage this process? And in doing so, doesn't our awareness contract to the physical body and our centre into the head or heart and subsequently get lost in thought or emotion? Don't we then 'get out of spiritual breath? Lose touch with awareness? I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. Before the other day I could never feel the reality of your emphasis on breathing awareness. Now I can. To breathe awareness is to Be Aware. Such bliss at feeling this and it means that I can now maintain Being Awareness so much more.
April 27, 2006
In a camping ground in Spain about 30 years ago, I had a dream and on awakening all I could remember were the words, "I am in the centre of the one I love". I have never forgotten those words. The other day I experienced the reality of 'being in the centre of the one I love.' I felt that the whole surface of my body was kissing or abutting the whole inner circumference of the awareness field that surrounds me. I felt this and identified with the field while it was touching me. I experienced the reality of being out there at the horizon, being the whole space of awareness, with the centre of this field as my whole body. If All That Is IS all All That Is, then there is nothing outside All That Is. Everything is inside All That Is. How would All That Is come to know itself? It would need internal 'organs of perception' to see itself as we see ourselves in a mirror. My physical body is just one of the countless internal organs of perception (along with other people, nails, frogs, atoms, planets etc for All That Is to be able to know him-her-self. When I experience myself as the whole space around me, the centre of that space is my whole body – I am in the centre of the one I love.
April 29, 2006
Earlier today I was in the bathroom emptying the washing machine. In looking at it, I felt I was space with my body as a face of that space 'facing' space with the face of a washing machine!!!!! I am beginning to feel a lot that my physical body is a face, an eye, an ear, a nose, a BODY of the space that surrounds it and the space that it surrounds. Really beginning to get a sense of what embodiment means.
May 8, 2006
Normally I am fixated or focused on the objects of awareness, what awareness is aware of. I lose sight of my very awareness! I look at my cat, lying on his back, with his legs stretched out in utter sensuality. For my focal awareness, I am completely unaware of my body and my eyes while I am engrossed in the cat. So, sitting here, I become aware that I am a body looking at my cat. I become aware of me as a whole body, looking at the cat. I am taking steps backwards, as it were, from my 'normal' stance. A few minutes ago I was focusing exclusively on the cat, now I am able to be aware of me as a whole body in space looking at the cat in space through my eyes, hearing the cat through my ears, smelling its catness etc. Without losing awareness of my body as a whole, feeling my feet on the floor, the contact between armchair and legs etc, being aware of the pictures on my walls, the computer on the desk, the feel of the space in my room, I can still 'focus' on the cat. That is, I have expanded my field of awareness dramatically. On top of that I now have an intellectual understanding that I am a body in three dimensional space surrounded by other bodies in space. This becomes a sort of 'mantra' for me. There is far more for me to become aware of than I first thought. I realise that I can be aware of many things at the same time. And even more than this, for while I am aware of the cat, the space, other objects in my room, the feel of the space in my room, my body in the chair, I am also aware of thoughts that come to light, emotions that flow through me connected with my cat. I am becoming aware of more and more. I think about all this. Well, not really, certain thoughts just come to me that surprise me with their intensity, their depth and their ring of truth. Normally, or formerly, I was looking at the cat, focused on it. Normally I would 'have' thoughts or emotions, and I might focus on them losing awareness of the cat. The ‘I’ in that situation is my ‘normal’ I, the ego, the everyday self, the experienced self. But who, then, is the I who can be aware of all this MORE - of the cat and my body and the objects in my room, and the space and thoughts and emotions etc? Certainly it can't be my normal I, the experienced self. That larger I, that ‘more’, IS THE VERY FIELD OF AWARENESS ITSELF. Field Awareness – not Focal Awareness. THE awareness, not just ‘my’ awareness’, what Peter calls the ‘divine awareness field’. The experiencer of my experienced self. The very source of the thoughts that have just come to me allowing me to write what I am writing!
May 13, 2006
This is the gist of what I say to clients. It is usually in the context of them being utterly nervous in front of me, or talking too fast or not really listening to me. But it all stems from me commenting how lost in thought they seem to be or how they seem to not really be with me in the room:
"People like to think that the difference between animals and humans is that we are aware of ourselves and they aren't. I would like to challenge that. I want to suggest to you that we are just as if not even more unaware of ourselves than any cat or dog. I have never seen a cat trip itself up or walk into something like I have done when I am pre-occupied with thought. I bet the same is true for you. I would like to suggest to you that when people say that we humans are self aware what we are actually referring to is the ability to reflect on ourselves. For me that is not what I now understand as awareness. For example, if I ask you whether you are aware of the hum of my computer as we are talking or aware of the pictures on my walls, I don't mean do you KNOW that the computer is humming or do you know that there are pictures on my walls? I mean quite literally are you aware of the pictures while being aware of what and how you are talking to me or listening to me? Before you say that you can only focus on one thing at a time, let me say that awareness is not focusing. That is the whole point. Let me give you an example. I want you to feel your feet resting on the ground while you continue to listen to me. Can you do that? The answer is obviously yes, you can, when you are asked. But the trick is to 'know' how you did that and maintain that awareness. Why you ask? Because if you are aware of your feet, and your back and legs touching the chair, and your hands resting on your thighs and indeed, aware of everything there is to be aware of in this room, while continuing to be aware of me, then you cannot be 'lost in thought'. I suggest to you that if you are not lost in thought, then you cannot ever be anxious or 'depressed' or uptight or stressed out or anything like that for, while in that state, you will be FREE of all thoughts and emotions. As I said the trick is to maintain that awareness of the whole field around us. It's a bit like a batsman at the crease in cricket. The batsman has to maintain an awareness of where all the fieldsmen are even while the bowler is walking back to his mark, while he is running in etc. The batsman knows that he has to be aware of the whole field of play while fiercely concentrating on the ball in the bowler's hand and when it is actually coming through the air towards him down the pitch. The batsman allows his awareness to flow between that fierce focusing and a more laid back awareness of the whole field of play. Otherwise he would never be able to 'hit the ball between fielders'. It is not just a fluke that a good batsman does that - he 'knows' where all the fieldsman are all the time. All cricketers know that if they start thinking about the game, they are lost. They don't want to think, they don't want any interruptions to the flow of play, they just want it all to be 'instinctive'. Sledging is designed to interrupt that field awareness through the personal comments made to the batsman to try and make him REACT - that is think about what has been said. OK, back to you in this room. Over the coming weeks and months I hope that you will be able to become more aware of the whole field of play in which your life is happening. For if you do, then life will flow far more instinctively than it has for you in the past. You will not be so stuck in thought and drowned in your emotions as you told me you were. You also said that you were sick and tired of thinking all the time, of being unable to sleep because of the thoughts circling around inside you at night. Which reminds me of something. I have had personal success with getting a good night's sleep through this awareness principle and thought you might like to try it. At night I simply lie in bed in my favourite sleeping position and I try to just be totally aware of just lying in the bed. I try as hard as I can to simply feel what it is like to be a body lying in bed in the way I am lying in bed. I feel my body lying on its side against the sheets, I feel the quilt touching the other side, I feel how my leg is bent, I feel how my face rests against one of my palms, I feel whatever bodily sensations that are present, I am aware of whatever sounds are in the room or I can hear from outside. But in the main, I have a 'mantra' which is 'what does it feel like to be my body lying in bed in the way I am lying?' Just that, nothing else. When I do this 'exercise', and I do it religiously whenever I get in bed until I fall asleep, whenever I awaken in the night, I find that my mind is FREE of thoughts, just as the batsman is as the ball is delivered. I soon go to sleep. I can now regularly lie in bed completely empty of thoughts, utterly still. A very unique experience, almost blissful. I said before that the trick is to maintain awareness of the whole field of play. I am challenging you to 'have a go' at this. In the beginning I am sure you will find it hard to do. You will continually forget to be aware of the whole field and find yourself lost in particular thoughts or particular feelings or a particular TV programme you are watching, or a car going past, but mostly you will be lost in thought. Let me explain what I mean with a couple of most mundane examples. If you are at home and working at your computer or playing on the internet let's say that you decide to go to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. Now I bet that while walking to the kitchen, you will be lost in thought, thinking about what you have downloaded, or what you are going to cook that night or whatever. While filling the kettle, boiling the water, getting the cup, putting coffee in it, getting the milk from the fridge, I bet that you are thinking of something else while you are doing this. I challenge you to ask yourself why is it like that? Why is it that when we are walking to the kitchen we are completely unaware of 'walking to the kitchen'? I don't mean to imply that we don't know that we are walking to the kitchen, I mean that WE ARE NOT FEELING WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO WALK TO THE KITCHEN, feeling the space around us, aware of the walls, the floor, everything there is to be aware of. And I also don't mean that just because we are unaware of all that, we will automatically crash into things or forget what we are doing, although that CAN happen at times. No, we can go about our whole lives completely unaware of ourselves and still function. You might ask why would anyone want to be aware of what it feels like to walk to the kitchen while we are walking to the kitchen? I could say what is the point of thinking about what you are going to be cooking that night while you are walking to the kitchen? But in a way I think you have hit the nail of the head. You are implying that the normal mundane activities of daily life are 'boring' and thus we should escape from them into our real 'home', or minds and think about things to distract ourselves from that boring mundanity. But my whole point is that our 'homes' are not our minds but our BODIES, and our whole bodies at that. And lastly, it is precisely because your whole upbringing, the culture around you, friends, family, society continually says that your real self is your mind, that you have all the problems that you do have! We are a society of people who are completely divorced from the reality of our bodies. No wonder we are so obsessed with them. We are desperately trying to get back in touch with them. The other example I want to mention is something you can try when you leave my office. I am going to suggest to you that you stay aware of your whole body as you leave my office. That as an experiment you simply feel what it is like to walk out the door, cross the landing and go down the stairs. That you try and maintain an awareness of what this feels like as any cat or dog would do. I am prepared to suggest that by the time you get to the stairs which will take you about 10-15 seconds, you will already be losing awareness. You will be lost in thought, reacting to the 'sledging' of your own mind. What I would like you to do is to become aware of just how unaware we are. Over the week before you come back to see me, I hope that you will take up this challenge. If you do, you should find that you will be FREE of thought at times. Good luck!"
May 15, 2006
Pretend that life is a war and is made up of many battles. War against what? The idea of the self as ego. It is also a war against the ego’s wholly irrational way of seeing the world. And it is a war, a pragmatic war of putting this understanding into practice – transcending ego awareness. However, as we go about life we act as though, when defeated, we are victims of something or someone. But the way I see it, to be defeated means no more than what it means in sport. You came fully prepared, given it your best shot but lost the battle! In life we are also totally prepared in every moment, because the world around us contains everything we need in that moment if only we can BE AWARE. Thus, if we have a bad day, feel 'defeated' or depressed, it is like losing in sport. When a cricketer makes a duck, of course he has been defeated, he has lost the battle and feels like hell. And he really feels it. Sometimes he throws his bat around the dressing room, swears that he was cheated by the umpire, or God or whatever, but he also knows that all this ranting and raving is about getting the shit out of him, so he can go out and perform again. He does not take it that seriously because he knows that he may have lost the battle but not necessarily the war. In Juan Matus’s words, a ‘warrior’ believes without believing. But most cricketers when they have made a duck, simply feel the disappointment of 'failing' keenly, simply feel it and it soon passes. If a cricketer drops a catch in the slips, of course he has been 'defeated', lost that particular battle, but not the war. A cricketer does not have time to identify with any thoughts of 'I'm a victim here', it's not fair. The next ball is coming in 1 minute and if he isn't fully aware and alert, he will drop the next one. If he indulges for a second in self pity, the captain will send him down to the boundary to field but I have never seen it happen. And what do sports people do with defeats? They will analyse the videos in minute detail, every play, every shot will be looked at in depth, every relationship on the field will be examined, the shape of the team as it moves forward (soccer) will be examined as closely as possible, everything will be put under the most minute scrutiny. Also it will be done with the utmost honesty, ruthlessness and integrity. Every sportsperson knows that there is no point in blaming the weather, the bowler, the umpires, the sledging, whatever. On the day, they lost and the other team won. AND IF THEY DON'T LEARN FROM THE LOSS THEY WILL SURELY LOSE AGAIN. But only if they are ruthless in their determination to look at what happened as clearly and soberly as possible. If a cricketer makes a series of low score, loses many battles, he feels very bad, down and wonders where his next run is going to come from. If he makes a century, then he doesn't care one iota about the run of bad scores. Sports people know that one success redeems a thousand failures. People who play sport know that they will probably lose far more battles than they win, but overall they will all win the war. And what does winning the war mean? Most sports people will say that the game gave them far more than it took away, the game is bigger than the individual, they made lots of friends through it, they owe everything to it, and all they want to do when they finish is put something back into the sport that gave them so much. Sounds very much like Juan Matus saying goodbye to the world before leaving it forever. 'It was a privilege to walk in this marvellous desert in this marvellous time'. As we go about daily life, when something happens that we don't like, for example, we get dumped by a lover, lose a job, there are two overall ways we can view reality. If we take the 'normal' perspective, we feel utterly defeated, raped by reality, victimised, and we fall into a deep depression. We act as if we have lost the war and it is all over. We say that we were unprepared for it or we didn't give it our best shot because we were tired or some other excuse. In some way we regard the event as a bad thing. It shouldn't have happened, it could have gone differently if only… There is another view though. If we go into every event as fully aware as possible, then we cannot lose the war - LIFE. If something doesn't go the way the ego wants, then we have the choice (through awareness) to act like the true sports person - to feel the defeat in all its aspects and learn what we can from it. In fact, even if it is an utter disaster, the only way forward is to take the attitude that we were fully prepared, we did our best, and that REALITY HAS SET IT UP THE WAY IT WENT FOR US TO LEARN SOMETHING. By BEING AWARE, by BEING AWARENESS we can be in that 'detached' position that sports people are when they look back on the video dispassionately and see just what DID happen free of prejudice. And if we are AWARE as possible, aware of everything there is to be aware of, we are always fully prepared and we will always win the war that is LIFE. It’s just that along the way we will lose many battles and the ego will feel hurt by this or that.
May 16, 2006
I am one way that awareness experiences itself. I cannot experience the look of my own face without the aid of a mirror. Shiva cannot know himself, experience himself, without the aid of a mirror. So Shiva expresses himself in beings and then experiences those beings and in that way re-cognises himself. So my bodily experience is Shiva experiencing himself in one bodily way. And this way then comes to call ITSELF ‘I’ and experience itself as separate from the ocean of awareness (Shiva), as an ego.
My bodily experiencing of space is leading to a new experiencing of the space of my awareness. That is one way Shiva is coming to know himself. I am beginning to know myself as Shiva and Shiva is coming to know himself as me. My experiencing ‘I’ is Shiva, a reflection in matter of ‘him’ - of God. Thus, I am indispensable, sacred, precious, significant. I am giving shape to an aspect of Shiva so that Shiva can know and feel that part of himself. Words give shape to meaning because they are in resonance with the felt sense of that meaning, thus amplifying and intensifying it. As I embody myself fully, Shiva is coming to know and feel parts of himself, because the bodying is in resonance with potentialities of Shiva, and thus amplifying and intensifying aspects of himself.
Meaning is not contained in words but is given shape and form by them. Meaning ‘hovers’ around and within words but essentially it transcends the words. Awareness is not contained within the body but ‘hovers’ around and within it, it transcends the body. Feeling awareness is Shiva, an ocean, and the body is a shape or form of this awareness, a speech, so awareness surrounds the body completely and permeates it. Shiva has many centres. Each centre is a way of experiencing and expressing awareness. I am one way for Shiva to know himself. A cat is another way, so is a planet, a frog, an atom, a speck of dust. Shiva wants to know the totality of himself as we all want to know the totality of ourselves. Thus I am no more or less important than a cat, a frog, a nail or a speck of dust.
There are an infinity of ways of experiencing a reality just as there are an infinity of ways of perceiving a cat. So there are an infinite variety of ways of experiencing and expressing a good mood or a bad mood. Saying I am in a good mood is as meaningless as saying I saw a cat today. Awareness and perception are not separate things but inseparable distinctions. One is the face of the other. Awareness is immediately expressed and experienced as perception. My awareness of the morning or of space or light is immediately expressed and experienced as the perception I have. Everything I perceive is a way of experiencing and expressing awareness. But because they are distinct I can identify with the awareness side rather than the experienced side. That feeling of being in voluminous space is expressed as my perception of many things simultaneously.
May 17, 2006
Awareness or knowing. Western philosophy creates a dualism - subjects of awareness and objects of awareness. A subject which owns or possesses awareness or knowledge about an object out there. The knowledge is a bridge between the two, connecting them. Peter’s New Thinking is an ‘upgraded’ Indian philosophy - there is awareness as such - knowing (not anyone’s possession) and there is what knowing knows about or all that there is to be aware of. As a simple example, Westerners wonder how a beaver knows how to build a dam. They must have learnt how to do this incrementally, by trial and error via evolution. ‘The New Thinking’ has no problems with this. There are no beavers or dams to worry about. There is the knowing how to build a dam, a potentiality of the awareness itself, and this potentiality is actualised as beavers who do the building of the dam. A beaver is not a creature that posses the knowledge of how to build a dam. It IS a dam builder in its essence. While we are on that subject, humans know how to think, we were never taught how to think, nor did we evolve the ability to think. Thinking, like building dams, is a potentiality of awareness and found shape and form as humans thinking in the world. (At school we may be taught to think in certain ways, but we already know how to think!).
As you write, there is awareness and all that there is to be aware of, and they are related like space and the objects in space. They are DISTINCT BUT INSEPARABLE, like two sides of the same coin. Obviously one can’t know without having something that is known. “Yet the relation of knowing and the known is not a subject-object dualism or ‘duality’ as in Western Cartesian philosophy. Nor is it a pure non-duality (‘Ad-vaita’) as in the philosophy of ‘The Old Yoga’. It is a ‘non-dual duality’ of a sort that can only be properly conceived through Michael Kosok’s principle of INSEPARABLE DISTINCTION – like the two sides of a coin. This principle applies to the relationship between knowing and the known, to experiencing and the experienced – which is nothing but a relation between awareness and all that there is to be aware of - to experience.” So there is an experiencing self and an experienced self, one that I know about or am aware of. The self that I am aware of, that I can label, name, talk about is not the experiencing self but an EXPERIENCED self, the self I call ‘me’, the self that did this or did that, felt this or felt that etc. This is the not the important self. When we think it is, we fall into the ‘I’ disease, the curse of “self-importance” in Castaneda’s sense. For as you wrote, “the really important self – the one without “self importance” - is the experiencing self or Awareness Self. Whereas the ‘I’ of the ego – that self which thinks of itself as ‘having’ and ‘possessing’ its ‘own’ experiences – is just a pale reflection of this Awareness Self.”
May 20, 2006
The other morning I was out walking and as usual, I heard the first sounds of birds as they ‘welcomed the day’. Whenever I hear these sounds, my chest swells, I get filled to bursting, I ’laugh’ out loud, filled with joy. The sound is inherently joyful as beavers are inherently dam builders. The awareness of the sounds resonates and evokes a tone or sound of awareness itself which is pure ‘joy’ or ‘elation’ or ‘exultation’, something to do with the innocence of the birds as they do what they do every morning, but each time it is ‘brand new’ and so ‘ancient’.
This lead me to consider the following: take notice of all that there is to be aware of. Sights, sounds, smells, thoughts, emotions, sensations, your own body. There is all of that and there is still something else, something that I cannot be aware of (like I am a thought or a tree) but which is there — awareness itself. Whole body awareness is maintaining a sense of this ‘something else’ while being aware of all that there is to be aware of, simultaneously. The constant embodying of a tone of awareness. So the aim is to feel my body as a whole, especially the face and eyes and keep in mind that any and every posture is the embodiment of a tone of awareness.
What I mean by this can be shown through an example — try feeling a deep sense of ‘awe’ and ‘wonder’ (as if you were looking at an incredible painting or up at the stars at night) while keeping a poker face. Can you do this? Why not? Because ‘awe’ and ‘wonder’ are not purely ‘mind’ or ‘mental’ or ‘emotional’ things — inner things. They are embodiments of inner tones of awareness. They exist ‘across’ inner and outer reality. Unless you allow your face to move and morph, you cannot feel the deep ‘awe’ that you want to. This is what Peter means when he writes about intensifying and amplifying tones of awareness. ‘Awe’ is a bodily event and a body is neither inner nor outer but both and more. ‘Awe’ is something the awareness body ‘does’, and the awareness body is both inner and outer. It just looks like the ’physical' body from the outside, and just feels like the ‘inner’ body from the inside. OK, so we can see that unless we allow our face and eyes to be shaped by the tone of ‘awe’, we cannot really feel it. This means that whatever posture you are in NOW, whether it be sitting in a chair reading this or looking at it on a screen, the WAY you are sitting is an embodiment of a tone of awareness. And, as Peter writes, if we are not really feeling our bodies NOW, can we be feeling ourSELVES? In order to really feel ‘awe’ we have to allow our faces to morph. The more we consciously feel that morphing, the more we feel our ‘awe’. Thus as we go about our everyday lives, the more we feel our bodies in every moment, the more we feel ourSELVES. It is ironic to me that the secret of feeling more ourselves, which sends most people to therapists to ‘talk about’, can be got through REALLY feeling our whole bodies as we go about our lives. But if I was to say that at work to a group of therapists it would be met with incredulity.
May 26, 2006
On my walk at about 6.30 am, a cold, bracing, 3 degrees, I was looking up at the morning sky— space, the moon, stars, and began to feel a delicious joyful safety. At the time I felt it was encompassed by the quote from the Shiva Sutras:
“Thus identifying individual awareness with universal awareness and attaining divine bliss, from where or from whom should one get scared?”
While feeling this I exaggerated my facial expression, the look in my eyes and face and held this posture - thus intensifying the feeling tone of ‘joyful safety’.
Most importantly I also knew that this feeling of joyful safety wasn’t anything that I could logically explain as if it was caused by anything. Nothing I could rationalise as a product of the world or anything I did. The whole gestalt of me taking in the world around me, especially being aware of the space around me, evoked in me that feeling. It was a ‘not doing’.
At the same time I knew that whenever I really take in any object whatsoever, whether a leaf or tree or car, through resonation my body can take on the shape and tone of awareness that the object is itself a manifestation of. That way I can intensify and feel those very tones of awareness.
I also knew that if I hold that bodily shape and posture it helps me to keep on feeling those tones and qualities of awareness.
And here is a quote from Peter’s work but I can’t remember where I got it from.
"The true purpose of regularly establishing oneself in a fixed bodily posture ('Asana') is not to repeatedly endure it as a (painful) bodily stretching exercise, but to use it tantrically - to re-evoke and sustain a newly experienced, expanded or blissful quality of bodily awareness."
September 21, 2006
I recently re-read Qualia Revolution and the first essay ‘Being in Listening’ in Peter’s book on Heidegger. What follows were some experiences of mine while reading this stuff over a period of about two weeks.
The world around me is the sounds of silence, three dimensional sounds. Through those sounds, I can feel the music which is awareness. Awareness and its tones is the Music which I grasp through the things around me in the world, just as I grasp meaning through words. The whole world around me is the sounds of an invisible orchestra, the sounding of tones of awareness, the playing. The quivering. All around me are the words, the sounds of awareness. By listening to them, I can resonate with the tones of awareness that they are the sounding of, digest these tones and expand my range of tonal qualities. How do I listen to these three dimensional sounds, like cars and trees, and skies, and books and desks? Whole body awareness! My body as all ear and all eye etc. Feeling awareness is listening awareness. The listening body is the awareness body. Being aware of all that there is to be aware of IS listening to the three dimensional sounds around me - 'reality' with my whole body." On the phone I was saying something 'crazy' to you - that I had to have a reason for relating to the world. Now I feel it. When I go to a concert, of course I try to hear the whole orchestra, all of it as a gestalt, while being able to listen to individual instruments. Being aware of all that there is to be aware of means listening to the whole gestalt of whatever there is around me, the relationship between every element as a holy symphony.
Something truly awesome is happening with me. I can't even say that it is now 'on my walk this morning', but 'all the time' if I choose to re-member. I can look up from the computer, be aware of the room around me, and feel inside me a feeling which I cannot put into words but something like a 'religious fullness' which I can only assume comes from breathing in qualities of awareness that the things are manifestations of. (I even feel myself writing like William James in his afterdeath journal). The whole world and everything in it is simply holy. It is a religious mood that is pervading everything. Everything has a new depth for me, quite literally like a very mild LSD trip. The most over-riding memory of LSD trips for me was a feeling of almost being 'drunk' with an ecstatic joy of simply being, of being perfectly content, for example, of looking at a piece of bitumen and marvelling at it just because it WAS. That is what is happening now in my life. I can understand when you say that your 'religious-aesthetic feeling quality and God-concept of Kashmir Shaivism does not seem to be naturally shared by anyone'. Just as you say that religion without Yoga is such and such and yoga without religion is etc, I think that 'philosophy' has to be in that holy triumvirate. I think that one has to have a driving impulse to FEEL the essential nature of reality, not just understand it, in order to encompass God within modern life. And this feeling is a meditative feeling, and it is a questing!! And this is a philosophical act, that I suspect has to be cultivated from an early age. You mentioned in your previous email young people asking what does the universe expand into. That was what I asked as a child. That is the result of a philosophical act. People around me are in the main not philosophical and so I can well understand how when they walk around they may feel the wonder of colours around them, the sea, sand and nature, but they don't go that extra step, and ask, yes but why and how are they there at all? When I walk around, whatever I am aware of is like hearing half of the opening chord? of Beethoven's Fifth - it is a question. It demands an answering response, the rest of the chord.
October 12, 2006
Yesterday I read something in Vol 6 of Seth's Personal Sessions that meant a lot to me:
“You have been taught for centuries in one way or another that repression, generally speaking, now, was all in all a natural, good, social and moral requirement, that expression was dangerous and must be harnessed and channeled because it was believed so thoroughly that man's natural capacities led him toward destructive rather than positive behaviour.
Energy was feared, expression suspicious unless it was directed and tempered in conventional fashions. Through all of man's religions and philosophies that line of thought has been most prominent; those who had the most energy suffered from it the most, of course. If you did not believe that energy was more naturally dangerous than beneficial, you would not have any difficulties at all concerning issues like nuclear bombs.
Instead, your natural creativity and your natural energies would some time ago have led you naturally (underlined) to a more productive use of nuclear force, to ways of rendering such use harmless in the short and long run, so that it could take its place in a loving technology. You take the opposite for granted, of course, and you consider psychological energy in the very same terms”
I had never thought of things in quite this way.
Two points. It gave me a new insight into just why we fear the spontaneous self. Fear of ‘energy’. Fear of AWARENESS. We fear our own awareness because we are afraid of a ‘chain reaction’ of thought. ‘If I do this, then that might happen, and then I will have to do that and then…’ Also just the sheer exuberance and ‘explosiveness’ of action that we sense will flow from freedom of expression (explosion’?) is alive in this metaphor. We are afraid of going past a point of no return, of the die being cast, etc. I now really grasp what Seth means when he says that spontaneity knows its own order. That is, yes, if we let go into free explosion of felt sense, things will get exuberant and there will be a vast outpouring but it isn’t out of control (like our fear of a nuclear explosion), and it may go off in a million different directions, but it has its own order and left alone will seek out our own best value fulfillment. I know this with clients and friends. A million times, someone has said to me, “But if I do that, this might happen and then eetc.” My response has always been, “Yes, that might happen, and if it does, I will ask you what you FEEL about that, and with my support, you can make tiny adjustments to your initial impulse to counter what you feel.” In other words, we only get panicked because we fear the ‘chain reaction’ of thought. We forget that any chain reaction of thought can be broken up through awareness.
And the second point is the way Seth uses the breaking up of a chain reaction to hint at the way we could use nuclear energy in a loving technology. I had always assumed, uncritically, that nuclear energy was ‘bad’, too dangerous, blah, blah blah. I don’t think Seth has mentioned the issue in this way before?
Also Seth in this volume says that Jane (and others) have incarnated in these times to challenge THIS belief in the SINFUL self — that is, in the fear of expression of our natural impulses. My own little mantra is “I trust the spontaneous self and its expression.“ While sensing this I know that it also carries the sense of “I CAN trust the spontaneous Self, for that Self is Shiva or God and of course, I, God, can be trusted”.
At the moment, I am basking in another new understanding. Sounds so obvious and yet means so much. Was reading Shaivism and the part about Nagas. Snakes shed their skin. We can shed the sense of being confined by the body. What I also saw was that at death, we shed the body. I?ve never thought of it that way before, shedding the body like a snake sheds its skin. I could almost feel the awareness body wriggling out of it, and the body lying there like the crumpled ?space-suit? of the soul that it is!
Also as I'm going about my daily life, I'm starting to FEEL that I am the space inside me extending downwards and the space outside me extending outwards. Strange feelings of "I'm not a thing travelling in that inner space, exploring it, I AM the inner space, stretching and breathing". Coupled with the realisation of the body as a skin or spacesuit, I am shifting my sense of identification over from what I am aware of to the light and space of awareness itself.
You wrote: "Thanks for sharing your experience of bodyhood as Nagahood. It fits in very much with the message of the very first page I wrote on this - 'Nagas The Naked Truth of Tantra'. To feel, as you described that you are the space you are travelling in is a major siddhi. It is the sort of experience what I sought to express in a page on Kundalini and gave me a insight into the way the Sumarians travelled - not 'leaping and bounding' (!) but a coiling and uncoiling like a snake - in and as cosmic space. I had a further experience of Kundalini Naga recently - during a 'Puja' session. I experienced very strongly the reality that pure quiescent awareness (Shiva) is also full of all the action going on everywhere the universe at all times - as well as in every leaf and tree in the garden, every flame and object in the shrine, and in my body. Yet I felt my physical body just couldn't contain the sense of all this action (Shakti). It started to jerk and shake as it does when I get someone to effectively affect my inner body through theirs. Except this time is was Shiva doing it! Later the same day, in tantric partner-meditation this almost uncontainable but very vitalising sense of infinite action unfolding within awareness exploded into a felt image of intertwined snakes rushing up from the base of my spine, through the inner space of my body and head - and beyond, metamorphosing into the single divine serpent (Ananta/Shesha) whose single cobra hood covered the entire vault of the night sky."
I love it when you connect my experience with your experiences and their written expression and exposition in TNY. I get a sense of ‘spiritual science’ when I can ‘reproduce’ your results ‘scientifically’. You connecting things up like that enables me to understand your writing in a deeper way as well. I hope you get a sense of satisfaction and validation when someone else, following your NY, is able to ‘verify’ discoveries. As for the experience of ‘nagahood’, I think it is crucial for me to have made the ‘leap’ from a punctilinear self ‘leaping and bounding’ in space to the the whole of space being the self, coiling and uncoiling. When I had the experience I literally felt a strange inner motion as a part of me ‘knew’ what to do to make a ‘ripple’ move up and down an inner ‘rod’ or ‘tube’, while there being no rod or tube, just inner expanse. I haven’t had time to repeat the effort but can still FEEL it.
On awakening during the night I found myself in another slightly altered state of awareness, in the sense of each day of my life now is qualitatively different than other days, and I can feel that. Last night on awakening I KNEW that my task now was to BE AWARE ALL the time — as if all I have been WANTING, to be aware all the time, finally is bearing fruit. In the morning I wrote (a synthesis of the languages of Seth and The New Yoga: “If I am aware of everything around me and within me — that is, connected with Unified Field Awareness, not in my head thinking about what is around or within me, then only that unified field can move me, not any reflective thoughts, obviously. And this ‘movement’ comes in the form of impulses (Seth) or embodied awareness from felt sense (TNY). What I mean by this is that if I am connected with UFA, then my experiencing is unmediated by any reflective thought. I am directly present to reality and that directness is manifested in an unfolding of awareness into direct bodily manifestation. (Lately I have been wondering while walking, when completely aware of what is around me, just what it is that determines the shifting of my gaze? Certainly not any ego decision making to look at this or that. I am realising that it is felt sense directly manifested. That is, if we are connected to the all embracing and embraced fields of awareness, then whatever we are moved by is awareness itself in the shape of felt sense.) If the body and events are constantly emerging from UFA then that awareness is as it were unfolding directly into bodily action. But only if we are AWARE. If we are ‘lost’ in thought, in contracted awareness, we cannot acknowledge an impulse and embody it in bodily action (albeit subconsciously). Its embodiment into action is BLOCKED. Instead, rather than embodied in bodily action and bodily language, it is embodied in the language and action that IS the body, in illness or dis-ease. We can either embody it subconsciously or it will be subconsciously embodied! And lastly what I am discovering is that the subconscious is disappearing!!!!! For if I am wondering about what is prompting me to shift my gaze from here to there, then I am making all ‘subconscious’ action, conscious!!!!! Strangely enough I have been able to put into words a feeling that I have felt at the edges of my awareness for quite some time while trying to BE AWARE. Almost like a ‘burden’ of awareness — in a sense, a sense of a frightening awakeness. To be aware all the time is to be super awake, almost a feeling of “Give me a rest” — hence the desire to be simply lost in thought, to have a rest. But on awakening, that burden seems to have dissolved.
December 24, 2006
I was reading the Paul thing you sent — Steiner on Vedanta. Something in the way Steiner was talking about in-breathing and out-breathing gave me that ‘familiar feeling’ as I felt hidden significances below the surface of his words almost wriggling. How true it is that you wrote, “That is the joy I get from Tantras such as the Shiva Sutras is this sense of non-difference between something known to me and something transmitted through the wording of a text that gives it a new and divine sensual flavour or Rasa, thus also working on me in a way that is both affirming and transforming.“ How divine it is to read something and know that in that moment, a new taste ‘sensation’ is about to unfold. Anyway, two things I felt. One I’m not sure about but I felt something so utterly simple that I felt this can’t be ‘right’. I still wonder at it. It was this. In breathing in awareness, am I breathing in a sense of I-ness, and then breathing out I-ness, breathing in a new sense of I-ness, breathing it out? That is, I-ness passes through me, circulates, and passes out. But for me, it appears to be always there, this the ‘continuity‘ of the I and its seeming sameness and thing-ness leading to ‘ego’ as agent?
But this wasn’t really what ‘grabbed’ me. In the next moment I was feeling the whole of space etc and then suddenly it all got ‘reversed‘. What I mean by this can best be put into words in this way. You once wrote that the felt body is the physical body as it is felt from within. But then later you wrote that the felt body is not just the physical body as it is felt from within — the physical body is the felt body as it is perceived from without. Up til this experience of mine, whenever I meditated on being Shiva, or there being no agent, or my ego is not the agent causing action, I was always coming at it from ‘my’ point of view, trying to feel myself as Shiva. Suddenly in this moment I felt myself from the other way around. I WAS Shiva as me. I guess this is the ocean’s awareness of itself as the fish? What bliss.
I played with this for a day and then your article on Paul arrived and I thoroughly digested that breakdown of the wall between incarnate self and discarnate self. My own Shiva experience metamorphosed into feeling myself as Shiva Andrewing. I could actually feel the unity of Shiva/Shakti and how obvious it was and how it could be nothing other than that. I could feel myself as Shiva bodying, writing, walking, breathing, talking, looking, silencing… I could feel the analogy between meaning expressing itself in words and Shiva expressing himself in flesh, and thoughts, and actions through me. Now I have a constant sense of this massiveness as if I am the whole of space vortexing its way around through me as centre. And sometimes I feel no particular connection to ‘my’ body, just as you wrote about your recent puja experience.
And this morning on my walk (which I would have to call my puja) I became aware of something else. I determined to slow down everything to such an extent that I wanted to become aware of the ‘rustle of even atoms’. It was as if I wanted to listen to the heartbeat of the space around me. I walked so silently and slowly (and it was early enough in the morning that there were no cars, no sounds except for the birds) and began to simply feel myself as Shiva. A continuation of what I wrote to you before about the delicate balancing act. But this time there was a new twist. I wanted to see what tiniest movement of the aether would nudge me in what direction and why? I can only call it the most exquisite phenomenological research I have ever conducted. What I noticed was that when I got down to that ‘fundamental’ level, I was able to ‘see’ that whatever it was I was aware of instantly coloured awareness moving me in a new ‘direction’. I could see how the blueness, say, of a car I perceived, ‘caused’ thoughts about something I might do later today (although of course they weren’t thoughts but ... What can I say - indications of a probable direction I might take). This direction in time-space became a mood which coloured how I perceived whatever it was I was perceiving, so that in listening to the cry of a wattle bird, that cry was coloured by ME. I experienced the ongoing dynamic interaction — what I felt changing the self feeling it and vice versa. This state of consciousness was quite hard to maintain but overall I can still feel the unbelievable ‘swooping’ of my awareness and how my ‘mind’ changed about what I was going to do that day almost every second. It is quite obvious to me now how whatever it is that the ego thinks it is deciding to do at any moment has been determined for it by the micro movements of awareness.
January 25, 2007
On May 13th 2006, I posted something in my Awareness Diary about how I introduce the topic of awareness with my clients at work. I've rewritten it now so am posting it again with slight modifications and welcome any responses. So here it is:
LOST IN THOUGHT: How I introduce people to Awareness
People like to think that the difference between animals and humans is that we are aware and they aren't. I would like to challenge that. I want to suggest to you that we are just as if not even more unaware than any cat or dog. I have never seen a cat trip itself up or walk into something like I have done when I am pre-occupied with thought. I bet the same is true for you. I would like to suggest to you that when people say that we humans are aware what we are actually referring to is the ability to think about things. For me that is not what I now understand as AWARENESS. For though we may ‘consciously’ think about things or ‘know’ about them, that does not mean we are directly AWARE of experiencing them.
For example, if I ask you whether you are AWARE of hearing the hum of my computer as we are talking or aware of the pictures on my walls, I don't mean do you ‘know’ that the computer is humming or do you know that there are pictures on my walls? I mean quite literally are you aware of experiencing the hum and the pictures, experiencing the whole room - while at the same time experiencing your body, yourself, and how you are talking or listening to me? Before you say that you can only experience one thing at a time, let me say that ‘awareness’ in the sense that I am talking about it does not mean FOCUSING any ONE thing you are or could be aware of experiencing.That is the whole point. Let me give you an example. I want you to feel your feet resting on the ground while you continue to listen to me. Can you do that? The answer is obviously yes, you can, when you are asked. But the trick is to 'know' how you did that and maintain that awareness of your feet while being conscious of me. Why you ask? Because if you are aware of your feet, and your back and legs touching the chair, and your hands resting on your thighs and indeed, aware of everything there is to be aware of in this room, while continuing to be conscious of me, then you cannot be 'lost in thought'. THAT IS MEDITATION!
I suggest to you that if you are not lost in thought, then you cannot ever be anxious or 'depressed' or uptight or stressed out or anything like that for, while in that state, you will be FREE of all thoughts and emotions. As I said the trick is to maintain that awareness of the whole field around us. It's a bit like a batsman at the crease in cricket. The batsman has to maintain an awareness of where all the fieldsmen are even while being conscious of the bowler walking back to his mark, while he is running in etc. The batsman maintains an awareness of the whole field of play while fiercely concentrating on the ball in the bowler's hand and when it is actually coming through the air towards him down the pitch. The batsman allows his awareness to flow between that fierce focusing and a more laid back awareness of the whole field of play. Otherwise he would never be able to 'hit the ball between fielders'. It is not just a fluke that a good batsman does that - he 'knows' where all the fieldsman are all the time, but it is his ‘field awareness’ that is doing this ‘knowing’ not his ‘ego awareness’. Field awareness is basically unconscious or instinctive in us at the moment, but we can ‘train’ ourselves to make it conscious. All cricketers know that if they start thinking too much about the game, they are lost. They don't want to think, they don't want any interruptions to the flow of play, they just want it all to be 'instinctive'. Sledging is designed to interrupt that field awareness through the personal comments made to the batsman to try and make him REACT - that is, think about what has been said.
OK, back to you in this room. Over the coming weeks and months I hope that you will be able to become more aware of the whole field of play in which your life is happening. For if you do, then life will flow far more instinctively than it has for you in the past. You will not be so stuck in thought and drowned in your emotions as you told me you were. You also said that you were sick and tired of thinking all the time, of being unable to sleep because of the thoughts circling around inside you at night.
Which reminds me of something. I have had personal success with getting a good night's sleep through this awareness principle and thought you might like to try it. At night I simply lie in bed in my favourite sleeping position and I try to just be totally aware of just lying in the bed. I try as hard as I can to simply feel what it is like to be a body lying in bed in the way I am lying in bed. I feel my body lying on its side against the sheets, I feel the quilt touching the other side, I feel how my leg is bent, I feel how my face rests against one of my palms, I feel whatever bodily sensations that are present, I am aware of whatever sounds are in the room or I can hear from outside. But in the main, I have a 'mantra' which is 'what does it feel like to be my body lying in bed in the way I am lying?' Just that, nothing else. When I do this 'exercise', and I do it religiously whenever I get in bed until I fall asleep, whenever I awaken in the night, I find that my mind is FREE of thoughts, just as the batsman is as the ball is delivered. I soon go to sleep. I can now regularly lie in bed completely empty of thoughts, utterly still. A very unique experience, almost blissful.
I said before that the trick is to maintain awareness of the whole field of play. I am challenging you to 'have a go' at this. In the beginning I am sure you will find it hard to do. You will continually forget to be aware of the whole field and find yourself lost in particular thoughts or particular feelings or a particular TV programme you are watching, or a car going past, but mostly you will be lost in thought. Let me explain what I mean with a couple of most mundane examples. If you are at home and working at your computer or playing on the internet let's say that you decide to go to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. Now I bet that while walking to the kitchen, you will be lost in thought, thinking about what you have downloaded, or what you are going to cook that night or whatever. While filling the kettle, boiling the water, getting the cup, putting coffee in it, getting the milk from the fridge, I bet that you are thinking of something else while you are doing this. I challenge you to ask yourself why is it like that? Why is it that when we are walking to the kitchen we are completely unaware of 'walking to the kitchen'? I don't mean to imply that we don't know that we are walking to the kitchen, I mean that WE ARE NOT FEELING WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO WALK TO THE KITCHEN, feeling the space around us, aware of the walls, the floor, everything there is to be aware of. And I also don't mean that just because we are unaware of all that, we will automatically crash into things or forget what we are doing, although that CAN happen at times. No, we can go about our whole lives completely unaware of ourselves and still function. You might ask why would anyone want to be aware of what it feels like to walk to the kitchen while we are walking to the kitchen? I could say what is the point of thinking about what you are going to be cooking that night while you are walking to the kitchen? But in a way I think you have hit the nail on the head. You are implying that the normal mundane activities of daily life are 'boring' and thus we should escape from them into our real 'home' — our mind — and think about things to distract ourselves from that boring mundanity.
But my whole point is that our 'homes' are not our minds but our BODIES, and our whole bodies at that. And lastly, it is precisely because your whole upbringing, the culture around you, friends, family, society continually says that your real self is your mind, that you have all the problems that you do have! We are a society of people who are completely divorced from the reality of our bodies. No wonder we are so obsessed with them. We are desperately trying to get back in touch with them. The other example I want to mention is something you can try when you leave my office. I am going to suggest to you that you stay aware of your whole body as you leave my office. That as an experiment you simply feel what it is like to walk out the door, cross the landing and go down the stairs. That you try and maintain an awareness of what this feels like as any cat or dog would do. I am prepared to suggest that by the time you get to the stairs which will take you about 5 seconds, you will already be losing awareness. You will be lost in thought, reacting to the 'sledging' of your own mind, thinking about where the car is parked, or what you are going to be doing at work, or what you should buy on the way home etc. What I would like you to do is to become aware of just how unaware you are. Over the week before you come back to see me, I hope that you will take up this challenge. If you do, you should find that you will be FREE of thought at times. Good luck!"
February 14, 2007
'Meditations on Peter's 'What is Thinking?'
Thanks for ‘What is Thinking?’I found (actually I still AM finding) it deeply profound. I have found myself taking in a couple of lines at a time and meditating them and they take me to extraordinary places. Just this morning it all gelled in me as to what was nagging away at the back of awareness. Since you sent me the first draft some time ago, every time I read it, there was something of significance in the words ‘have thoughts’. What was it about that phrase that was so significant to me? I kept meditating on this as I went about my day. I was also very well aware just how much of a giant shadow the thoughts that ‘I have’ cast on the things around me. I’ve written before of my own awareness of just how unaware I can be doing everyday things of life, like walking to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee etc, while being ‘lost in thought’.
I have always wanted to experience reality like I used to do on LSD. On acid, the experience of simply doing anything, filling a cup with water, looking at a piece of wood on the ground, the enormity of crossing a road with everything so fascinating, was almost overwhelming. Why? Impossible to put into words. Back then when I was taking it, I remember that ‘things’ were simply more than they were. That’s the only way I could put it. Reading ‘What is Thinking?’, the line, ‘See how things glisten and shine in that light’ jumped out at me and I knew that that was what it was about LSD. Somehow things did glisten and shine, to the extent that for me I wasn’t colour blind when tripping like I ‘was’ normally. Things glistened and shone to the extent that I could recognise ‘green’ as ‘green’, something which I could never have done when not tripping.
Reading the piece I began to realise that ‘having’ thoughts meant that I wasn’t able to directly face reality, and that was the reason why it wasn’t glistening and shining. That if the thoughts that I ‘had’ were, indeed, casting a shadow on the things around me, then they couldn’t glisten and shine in the pure Light of Awareness. But what did it mean to have thoughts?
And then while being in Awareness this morning, some wonderful thoughts came to me. ‘Having thoughts’ is not the same as being aware of thoughts. ‘Having thoughts’ is when you realise that you have just been thinking certain thoughts but you didn’t intend to and neither were you aware while you were thinking them that you were indeed thinking them. Being aware of thoughts is when you are aware of thoughts as they arise.
Saying that ‘I have thoughts’ is like saying ‘I have a cold’. When we say that ‘I have a cold’, we are implying that I didn’t choose to have a cold, I didn’t create it, that it happened to me. And that perfectly describes how I felt this morning when I knew what ‘having thoughts’ meant. All my life I ‘have had thoughts’ and upon realising that I am ‘lost in thought’ I sometimes curse myself for being lost in thought, wondering why these things just happen to me or I happen to think them and why can’t I control this? Why can’t I empty my mind?
Being aware of thoughts is actively or consciously choosing to be aware of thoughts as they arise. I am identifying with the awareness of thoughts. If I ‘have thoughts’ I am passively or not consciously choosing to be aware of thoughts as they arise. I am unconsciously identified with the thoughts that I have. In just the same way we say, “I have a cold’, meaning that we are unaware that we are actually ‘colding’, that is, aware of creating a cold, and instead we are identified with the cold, as we are identified with thoughts of anger when we quite literally say, ‘I am angry’.
Aware thinking is when you are aware of thoughts as they arise, and that you can consciously choose to follow them and think them. In this sense, we do not ‘have’ thoughts so much as actively think them. Aware feeling is the same thing. If you are listening to a piece of music and aware of what it feels like to listen, all sorts of subtle tones, textures and colours arise. There is a wealth of difference between this and telling someone that you ‘had a feeling’ of contentment while walking on the beach, or ‘had a feeling’ of anger while listening to John Howard on TV. Contentment and anger are as meaningless as describing the former listening to music as ‘good’. The direct ‘face to face‘ encounter with music is experienced in ‘technicolour’; ‘having a feeling’ of anger is like experiencing in monochrome. What colour was the anger? How did it feel?
Having thoughts or feelings reduces a technicolour reality into a monochrome, boring blah. Sometimes I have been out for a walk and I start thinking about a problem, I ‘have’ thoughts about a problem — for example, re-arranging my computer/scanner/printer/backup drive on my desk to maximise space. I can have the most ‘wonderful thoughts’, get slightly manic because I think I have solved a problem, I can’t wait to get back home and try it out. Then when I am home I walk into my room and I am confronted with its living reality. Suddenly, the great ideas that I had look so black and white that I feel deflated. Suddenly I am aware of all the aspects about my room, desk, telephone modem cable, position of the light, of the length of cables, of the positioning of power points etc that I couldn’t possibly have kept in awareness, so lost or locked in to what I was thinking about while on my walk. I stand still, breathing in the whole room, aware of myself in this living space and it comes to me what I have been searching for — the rearrangement. It comes to me fully formed from the very awareness space that I locked myself out of on my walk.
So this morning I became aware that ‘just having thoughts about things, we lose direct awareness of the things we are thinking about’. I decided to conduct some phenomenological research when having my shower this morning. Soon the water was falling on me and I was washing myself and was aware that I was ‘having thoughts‘. I became aware that ‘having thoughts’ while doing something is a ‘double distortion’ of reality. Having thoughts meant that I wasn’t directly aware of showering — feeling what it felt like to have a shower. And like the thinking about the computer problem while on my walk, the thoughts themselves are flat and colourless. So we lose all round.
For it seems to me that when we just 'have' thoughts our awareness becomes so centred in them that we look out at the world purely through the eyes and 'in the light' of that thought - not seeing how it is colouring and shaping our awareness of things - and not being aware of that thought itself in the pure light of awareness that brings it to light. Conversely, when we are in Awareness, aware of everything there is to be aware of, both within and outside us, we are not contracted but in an expanded awareness state. In this state, everything around us is bathed or illuminated by the Pure Light of Awareness, thus things are able to glisten and shine in this light, reflecting it to me. (interesting isn’t it that LSD was said to ‘expand awareness’).
So getting out of the shower I found a mantra arising within me — aware drying. I picked up the towel and probably for the first time in my life actively and knowingly dried myself with the towel. I felt everything there was to feel as I dried myself, I intentionally kept awareness of all that I was aware of while drying myself and was aware of everything that I am writing now in a sort of ‘wrapped up’ form at the same time as feeling the towel on my skin, the bathroom, the walls, the sounds etc. It all came to me in that moment. As I walked out of the bathroom and switched off the light, a mantra started up, ‘aware switching off’. As I walked to my room to get dressed, a mantra started up, ‘aware walking’ etc etc. It wasn’t exactly like LSD, but it was close. It was an alive, aware experiencing and while my mind wasn’t empty, it also wasn’t full of foreign thoughts, just thoughts arising and passing through me with me letting them go, neither getting lost in them nor locked into any one of them.
March 7, 2007
I loved 'What is Liberation?' and am far from finished with meditating it, if ever. What I most got from it so far is “Liberation is a sacrifice of this self and a surrender to the Divine, Not a surrender of our sense of self but of self-possession, disowning and restoring Ownership of our sense of self to God - that Divine Awareness to which alone all Experiencing and all experiences of self ultimately belong”. That is, it came over to me quite vividly that it is not about sacrificing the sense of self we have but ownership of that sense of self. A subtle but very important distinction. I think the mantra you have ‘Disown’ is quite powerful and meaningful and I am playing with it a lot. I had a feeling of being a ‘hand of God’ (isn’t that Hamas or one of those other terrorist organisations?). My hand does not own itself, I own it. I and everyone else are ‘hands or organs of God’, we do not own ourselves, Awareness owns us. I also visited lucid dreaming again. In a lucid dream, there is the realisation that there is only the awareness self and that the dream self is a delusion. But what a delusion. In ordinary dreams, one can wake up in a sweat at almost being killed or… This is where I found your reference to Bhairav so important and clear to me. We are terrified of dying for precisely the reasons you said in the verse. “The ego identifies surrender of self possession with loss of self and ultimate non being”. We do have to face Bhairav the terrifying one if we are going to take the leap into Moksha. Maybe that is why most don’t honour your work? It demands that leap without actually stating it, yet people feel it?
June 10, 2007
AWARENESS 101
Awareness and what awareness is aware of
There is an essential paradox reading Peter’s work on awareness. For unless you already have a ‘feel’ for what he is writing about, the words can be very ‘slippery’ as a friend of mine said to me the other day. She was trying to understand what I meant when I suggested to her that she was attached to the events around her and to the thoughts and emotions within her and that real freedom was attained through centering ourselves in the AWARENESS of the events around her and the thoughts and emotions within rather than what awareness is aware of. She asked me what I meant and I said to myself, ‘Good question’, for I had also struggled with this when I first came across it in Peter’s work.
If Peter has written about the ‘distinction between awareness and what awareness is aware of’ once, he has done it a thousand times. I would say until you can grasp this in a deep feeling way, that is, know it ‘in your bones’, just about all of his writings in The New Yoga will be mainly inaccessible to you. Like my friend, you may grasp it in moments and then it slips through your fingers like water and you find that the phrase the ‘distinction between awareness and what awareness is aware of’ again eludes you.
Mind you, I don’t think there is anything intrinsically wrong with struggling with someone’s words, for if you intend to feel them from within and you don’t give up, it will eventually happen. I’ve known Peter for over 30 years and have ‘struggled’ for all that time to grasp what he is saying and have found that I eventually gained a felt understanding of things that at the time I would have sworn were beyond me. But there is also nothing wrong with a helping hand if it can enable someone to feel the essence of a concept.
Lucid dreaming and dreaming
I was meditating the other day questing for a way to help myself (and therefore others) to FEEL the reality of the ‘distinction between awareness and what awareness is aware of’. On awakening one morning it came to me that ‘where I had just been’ (dreaming) was the answer. I am assuming that everyone reading this has had a lucid dream. That is, a dream in which you know that you are dreaming, a dream in which you don’t wake up FROM the dream but wake up WITHIN the dream. Sometimes in a dream, we become aware that the events are so outlandish that part of us ‘wakes up’ and says to ourselves something like, ‘This is crazy, this must be a dream!’ This ‘revelation’ usually leads to us waking up in the bed, but if we wake up inside the dream, then it becomes a lucid dream. (There are also ways to ‘stay awake’ while going to sleep – meaning that we can have an out of body experience from the waking state. I still remember vividly an out-of-body experience in 1976 in Peter’s house in London. I can still re-evoke the feeling of this experience now over thirty years later and it is this feeling that I am calling on people to re-evoke now. If you can you will follow what I am going to say. And of course some people have had ‘near death experiences’ and others ‘astral projections’ all of which put us in similar states.)
If you wake up inside the dream but not from the dream, you find yourself in a perfectly lucid state. You KNOW that you are dreaming and you know that, normally, you don’t know that you are dreaming until you wake up. You also know with absolute conviction that because you are dreaming, you are utterly free within the dream to do anything you want. (Whether philosophically true or not, in a lucid dream you know that the whole dream is happening ‘in your head’ or that ‘everything is imaginary’ or that it isn’t ‘real’). Death can’t stop you for you can’t die because ‘this is only a dream’. You know that walls can’t stop you, you just walk through them. Gravity can’t stop you, you just lift off the ground and fly. You know that you can direct the action of the dream with your intent. All you have to do is intend something and it happens. You intend to walk through solid matter and it happens.
Maintaining lucidity
The only problem in a lucid dream is maintaining lucidity. It is so easy to lose yourself in whatever you are thinking or feeling or lose yourself in any events inside the dream. As soon as you do lose yourself in thoughts or events, you forget that you know you are dreaming and you just start ‘dreaming’ again, sometimes until you wake up in the bed and recall that you were lucidly dreaming but ‘lost it’. Maintaining lucidity is an interesting business for it isn’t anything one can do. It is a pure ‘not-doing’. It is as if in a lucid dream we have to keep one ‘eye’ on remembering that we are lucid and the other ‘eye’ on whatever is happening around or within us. A sort of ‘dual awareness’, though dual is entirely the wrong word because it suggests separation which is not the case. While lucidly dreaming we become aware that our awareness is actually like a coin. It has two sides, distinct but inseparable. One side is our consciousness-of-the-world-around-us (the events of the dream) and the world inside us (what we are thinking and feeling within the dream) and the other side is the awareness that we are dreaming all this – that is, that everything that is happening in the dream world is happening within the dreamer’s awareness (within a field of awareness). To maintain lucidity, we must keep that non-dual awareness uppermost. Non-dual in the sense of , like a coin, a boundary layer of awareness, with two sides that cannot be separated, but are, nevertheless distinct. So a lucid dream is a dream in which we keep ourselves centred in the AWARENESS of what we are CONSCIOUS OF. A normal dream is when we are only conscious of what is happening in the dream.
Lucid awakening
You are awake now. What would it be like to be lucidly awake? How would you go about becoming lucid while awake? If you could become lucid while awake, wouldn’t you be ‘enlightened’? Surely to be ‘lucid’ means to be ‘enlightened’? If you could become lucid while awake, this would mean that you would centre yourself in your Awareness of what you are conscious of, rather than what you are conscious of. This is what Peter means. And it is essentially what Indian philosophy-religion is all about.
Let’s look at the possible state of ‘lucid awakening’ for what it can make explicit about Peter’s writing. Peter writes a lot about awareness and consciousness. He says that if we are lost in thought or playing on the computer we may be conscious but we are not aware. There is the use of the two terms, consciousness and awareness. Consciousness the way Peter talks about it is analogous to what it is in a normal dream. A normal dream is a dream in which we are, moment by moment, ‘lost’ in the events of the dream. A lucid dream is a dream in which we are no longer lost because we have realised that we are ‘dreaming all this’, that there is somewhere ‘surrounding’ or transcending all this that we really are. We have ‘found ourselves’ through the recognition that we are dreaming this.
While lucidly dreaming, just who are we? When we say, I am dreaming in a lucid dream, do we mean that I realise I am the dreamer not the dreamt self, or am I the dreamt self and do I realise that I am dreaming? Tricky one, this. For it is both and neither. Yes, I am the dreamer, but yes, I am also still dreaming, thus I am still the dreamt self. It depends on where you put the intonation. I am dreaming. If the emphasis is on the I, then it is the dreaming Self that I am. If the emphasis is on the dreaming, then it is I, the dreamt self who is dreaming. When the Shaivist Yogis said Shivoham (I am Shiva), this is essentially what this is about. If you became lucidly awake right now, you would KNOW that you were ‘WAKING’ this experience right now, that you were really ‘above’ or ‘surrounding’ this whole reality, that is, that you were in fact Shiva or God. While at the same time you would know that the you in the experience was God or Shiva. So what you might try to do as you go about your everyday reality is try and get a feel for everything that surrounds you as like a bubble of your awareness, that you actually enclose or surround everything. You would be expanding your awareness to the horizon of what you are aware of. You would maintain an ongoing awareness of being in the centre of an enormous volume of space, in front of you, behind you, below you, on either side while you go about your day. This ‘not-doing’ would ensure that you are constantly feeling your whole body and you wouldn’t be lost in any thoughts or feelings or any of the events around you.
The other day I woke up from a dream and felt really upset by it. In that moment, I realised that it is I, not the dreamt self, who is really ‘doing’ the experiencing of this dream. While dreaming, it is the dreamt self who thinks they ‘own’ the experience of dreaming. If in the dream I forget where I parked my car, and spend several frustrating ‘hours’ walking aimlessly around trying to find it, I take it for granted that me, the dreamt self, is the owner of the experience. It is only when I wake up, do I realise that of course the experience is mine (otherwise I wouldn’t be upset by it) and sometimes when the symbolism is so obvious, I again have further proof that what happens in a dream is my experience not the dreamt self’s. What I mean by all this is that on awakening I know that I, the waking self, act through, in and as the dreamt self. Now when Peter writes about ‘the delusion of agency’, about the delusion that we suffer from when we think that we own our experience, that these are my thoughts, this is my self, my awareness, this is what he is referring to. For if we could become lucidly awake, we would know with utter conviction that it is Shiva or God that is acting through, in and as us. That it is Shiva or God who is the experiencer, not us, we are the experienced self, just as when we dream, we are the dreamt self. That there is no such thing as my self or my awareness. There is only ONE self – Shiva or God, just as there is only one Dreamer, me, and I dream many dreams and many me’s.
Awareness is freedom
In an ordinary dream while we are dreaming it, we believe and so experience an ‘objective’ world outside us. Just like waking life, there is us ‘here’ and the world ‘over there’, separate and distinct from us. If we are confronted by a dog that snaps and barks at us and we start to get frightened, the dog may even grow in size and viciousness, until we wake up in a sweat. When lucidly dreaming we experience something entirely different. We know that in some way WE are everything. That everything in this world is us. If we feel ‘dark’ in a lucid dream, the atmosphere around may instantly darken and we can lighten it by brightening our mood. The scientific assumption that reality is ‘objective’ is turned on its head while lucidly dreaming. We know with certainty that reality is entirely subjective. In a lucid dream if we are confronted by a vicious dog snapping and barking at us we know that we are safely centred in the lucid awareness of the dog. We can simply turn our attention to something else or we can even make the dog disappear by ‘snapping our fingers’.
In Peter’s work you will read a lot about the distinction between awareness and what awareness is aware of, especially in its application to therapy and counselling. If a person is worrying about ‘what people think about them’, a cognitive behavioural therapist may try to help the person be ‘mindful’ of their thoughts, objectify them and through counselling analyse their ‘truth value’. Such a person may come to see that their thoughts aren’t ‘rational’ and may indeed gain some relief from them. But invariably, the problem returns in another guise sooner or later. In Peter’s New Therapy, the approach is based on the mantra that ‘the awareness of a thought is not a thought’. If you are worrying about things, the awareness of worrying is not itself worrying. It is completely free of worrying. Just as in a lucid dream, you can centre yourself in the lucid awareness of dreaming rather than what you are dreaming of and solve problems confronting you (you can make a vicious dog disappear with a snap of your fingers for example) so while awake, you can centre yourself in awareness rather than what you are aware of.
The feeling in a lucid dream is almost one of ecstasy. In fact, ecstasy means ex-stasis – out of the body. In a lucid dream we feel absolutely free, almost drunk with freedom. Nothing can hold us down or back, we are unbounded. Indian religious philosophy called this state ‘moksha’. It is the aim of all meditation and the aim of Peter’s New Yoga. If we can become lucidly awake, become Awareness itself, rather than what we are aware of, we attain true freedom.
July 23rd, 2007
Blissful experience while asleep, on awakening and it has lingered solidly as I write this several hours later.
I did my first sitting puja with the Shiva-Shakti murti before going to sleep last night. I had previously read The Co-Creation of God and Man and found myself meditating the felt senses of that article that stayed with me as I meditated the murti.
During the night I awoke at some stage in the most blissful state. I had a felt understanding, a warm and embracing feeling, a glow that was simply bliss. Each time I awoke it was there again and I knew I would remember it on awakening, that I didn’t have to write it down immediately. On awakening at 4 am in the bitter cold. I was still in that state and marvelling in it, luxuriating in it as I walked to my room and got dressed. In a way I was ‘pinching myself’, I felt so lucky and almost ‘chosen’. I asked myself at one time, “Did this come to me while I was asleep, REALLY, or did I ‘work it out’ the night before, before falling alseep?” I knew that it came to me and that I was blessed to receive it.
I then walked to the kitchen to feed the cats and make my coffee, knowing that I could wait to start writing down the experience in my workbook, that I didn’t have to hurry and get it down quick. When I got back to my room I wrote it down as best I could.
What came to me in the night was precisely that I (awareness) went to it (as it was ‘reaching’ for me)!!! {Almost as if Shiva is the desire to give birth and Shakti is the desire to be born}. I felt how awareness bestowed its light on something hidden within me, that the light of awareness bestowed life and being to whatever it lighted on. But the most thrilling thing about this whole experience was that when I awoke in the night with this illumination, what I knew that the light of awareness had gone to, was the felt sense of just-what-I-am-now-writing-about. That is, I awoke knowing that ideas, insights don’t just ‘come to me’, the light of awareness and a potentiality hidden in awareness meet in an embrace and the RESULT of that union is the ‘insight that comes to us’. The self-reflexivity of this experience was not lost on me. Awareness releases insights into actuality, and the insight that it released to me was that awareness releases insights into actuality! It is this knowing of me by Shiva, knowing how this would make me feel that I feel blessed by.
I can now FEEL how every thing from a rock to a thought to an atom to a planet is the result of cosmic intercourse between Shiva and Shakti, and how the great womb of the Mahadevi.
27th July, 2007
July 27, 2007
SHIVA-SHAKTI and the CO-CREATION of GOD and MAN
Blissful experience while asleep, on awakening and it has lingered solidly as I write this several hours later.
I did my first sitting puja with my Shiva-Shakti murti before going to sleep last night. I had previously read the 15th July posting of The Co-Creation of God and Man on 'Peter's Bulletin' and found myself meditating the felt senses of that article that stayed with me as I meditated the murti.
During the night I awoke at some stage in the most blissful state. I had a felt understanding, a warm and embracing feeling, a glow that was simply bliss. Each time I awoke it was there again and I knew I would remember it on awakening, that I didn't have to write it down immediately. On awakening at 4 am in the bitter cold. I was still in that state and marvelling in it, luxuriating in it as I walked to my room and got dressed. In a way I was 'pinching myself', I felt so lucky and almost 'chosen'. I asked myself at one time, "Did this come to me while I was asleep, REALLY, or did I 'work it out' the night before, before falling alseep?" I knew that it came to me and that I was blessed to receive it.
I then walked to the kitchen to feed the cats and make my coffee, knowing that I could wait to start writing down the experience in my workbook, that I didn't have to hurry and get it down quick. When I got back to my room I wrote it down as best I could.
What came to me in the night was precisely that I (awareness) went to it (as it was 'reaching' for me)!!! (Almost as if Shiva is the desire to give birth and Shakti is the desire to be born). I felt how awareness bestowed its light on something hidden within me, that the light of awareness bestowed life and being to whatever it lighted on. But the most thrilling thing about this whole experience was that when I awoke in the night with this illumination, what I knew that the light of awareness had gone to, was the felt sense of just-what-I-am-now-writing-about. That is, I awoke knowing that ideas, insights don't just 'come to me', the light of awareness and a potentiality hidden in awareness meet in an embrace and the RESULT of that union is the 'insight that comes to us'. The self-reflexivity of this experience was not lost on me. Awareness releases insights into actuality, and the insight that it released to me was that awareness releases insights into actuality! It is this knowing of me by Shiva, knowing how this would make me feel that I feel blessed by.
I can now FEEL how every thing from a rock to a thought to an atom to a planet is the result of cosmic intercourse between Shiva and Shakti, and how the great womb of the Mahadevi underlies all.
I had been reading Chapter 4 of The Triadic Heart of Shiva by Muller-Ortega, when something I read triggered waves of feeling within. It was all to do with sound and silence. We hear sounds disappearing into silence and I remember Seth saying that from that point where they disappear, sound of a different sort grows into silence. When we speak we emit sounds on the outbreath. What came to me was the question is the speech of the psyche emitted on the outbreath of awareness? This insight filled me with something which I only wanted to feel more and more. It enabled me to go deeper within to a 'place' where I could identify with Shiva 'further back' than I had been before. I could feel that my body was being spoken on the outbreath of awareness, but also that when I silently spoke inwardly, I was 'listening' to what preceded that. That is the only way I can put it now. It was as if I was reaching towards something inner that manifested as inner sound. I then went to my room because I felt like I had to sit with the Shiva-Shakti murti and simply be in its presence. I went to bed meditating on inner sound, awareness, the Shiva-Shakti Trika and the God concept we spoke about on the phone. On awakening during the night I felt anew the reality of the delusion of 'ownership' in another way: Awareness is a light which is a shining and a knowing. It is not a something which gives off light, a torch shining a beam outwards but IS that whole, shining field of outwardness, of space and light, alive and aware. At the same time as that, it is an inward knowing and shining, not a torch shining a beam inwardly, but it is that whole shining and knowing Field of inwardness, alive and aware. In this sense awareness is a flame. It is not a thing that is burning. It is the essence of flameness. Awareness is a burning knowing that has a property of selfhood, that knows itself as it begins to sense itself as it becomes inwardly aware of ...felt sense. In our physical reality we suffer from the delusion that wood burns, that torches give off light, that walls are orange - it doesn't occur to us that it is Shiva that is torching, wooding, burning, lighting, oranging... etc. Awareness is not a thing or self that reflects on itself. It is an inwardly knowing light (self aware) at the same time as it is an outwardly knowing light (other aware). Awareness is like a light in that it shines, streams, expands, fills. Physical light illuminates, reveals what was hidden in the dark. But this has two meanings. The first is the purely physical, the second is the inner sense of revealing what is hidden - the sense of knowing what was previously unknown. Awareness is simultaneously an outward/inward field phenomena. It is a boundary phenomenon, an interaction. Awareness, in seeing inwardly is the outer looking inwards, and in seeing outwardly, it is the inner looking outwards. But another way of saying the inner looking outwards is saying that the inner portion 'takes in' what is outward - that is, breathes it in. There is a continuous two-way flow through the boundary surface that distinguishes and unites the inner and outer fields of awareness. Awareness reproduces itself. When we put meaning into words, we re-produce some thing inner in another form. Awareness in expressing itself outwardly, is reproducing itself so that it can see clearly what was formerly hidden. It reveals itself by creating a reflection of itself 'out there', shining the light of knowing on what it has created in order to reveal unthought dimensions. Awareness, aware of the felt sense of something hidden within the darkness, holds open a space so that its light (Shiva) can embrace and feel more the potentialities it senses (Shakti). This 'feeling more' is a loving. When we feel something more and more we are loving it. Shiva embraces its beloved more and more. They intertwine and the result is the world of actuality in which Shiva sees himself in recognition and Shakti is manifested. Awareness, in becoming aware of something stirring within and REPRODUCING itself through manifesting that within-ness comes ALIVE. Through intercourse, embracing, feeling more, LOVING. underlies all.
July 30, 2007
Since I began to grant awareness to the pain in my back that develops while walking, it has gone away. Not without ‘work’ from me, and that is what I want to write about. I can remember in Bali in 1990 I walked everywhere and the pain sometimes got quite distracting. I would stop and stretch and arch my back etc to try and make it ‘go away’. About three weeks ago, after a phone call with Peter, I decided to FEEL THIS PAIN MORE. And so I have felt it more and more when it arose. Strangely enough it stopped as soon as I felt it more. And also what came to me was the phrase from The Awareness Principle, ‘when we are watching TV, or playing on the computer or washing dishes, if we are too focused on those activities we may be conscious but we are not aware.’ This came to me in the context of marvelling on the absence of pain in my back through feeling the very pain that was there more and more. In walking along it was as if I was filling the insideness of my back with awareness, surrounding and permeating the pain with awareness, feeling it as much as I could inwardly and it went away. So I asked myself, so what was happening before when I was certainly conscious of the pain? What is the difference between the two states I was in, 1) when I was conscious of the pain which was very discomforting and 2) when I was feeling the pain more inwardly. Being conscious of the pain, I tried to deal with it physically through stretching and arching which would ‘work’ for about 2 minutes. I also tried to not focus on it, ignore it, tough it out, walk slower etc etc.
When we are too focused on any activity we may be conscious but we are not aware. And this includes thinking and feeling. If we are too focused on what is going on in our thoughts (lost in thought) we also may be conscious but we are not aware. Now when we are in pain, whether this be mental or physical, we may be conscious of the pain, but we are not aware of it. We are not feeling it, it is almost feeling us. That was my sense of the pain in the back. That it had me or I was reacting to it. And in fact, often I would deliberately try and be lost in thought to distract myself from the pain. Which of course would do nothing to get rid of it. Feeling the pain more is a whole new way of approaching it. Being conscious of the pain is feeling it essentially from the outside. Feeling it more is feeling it from the inside. I believe that when I felt it from the inside, what came to me was that this pain has been a call from my body, an address in Martin Buber‘s terms. Now that I have made this shift to Now that I have made this shift to Awareness and away from what Awareness is aware of – in this case the body and its pain - it seems to have gone, its purpose satisfied.
But I am struck by this insight that pain is almost the result of being conscious but not aware!
August 1,2007
I’ve had some insights recently triggered by Peter’s comments to me on ‘attachments’. I guess the main thrust of what I have to say could be paraphrased as “I may not be able to have the life I want, but I can always have the life I am having.” The other day I was out walking and as is my want trying to maintain whole body awareness. And as is also my want, feeling disappointed or slightly frustrated with myself for losing myself in thought or whatever and having to ‘drag myself back into full presence’. Then I remembered my own understanding that pain and discomfort are the way we are returned to the body, therefore THEY ARE NOT MISTAKES OR A WRONG WAY OF GOING ABOUT THINGS. Suddenly it came to me strongly in relation to the delusion of agency, that ‘mistakes’ also fall into this category! I realised with delight that not only are there no such things as mistakes, they are not ‘mine’ whatever they are! They are simply patterns of action. If ‘my’ thoughts aren’t ‘mine’, and my insights aren’t ‘mine’, then neither are so called mistakes or wrong ways of thinking or ‘bad’ ways of meditating! For so long now I have been identifying with wrong or ‘bad’ ways of meditating, breathing, being aware, slightly castigating myself to back onto the right or ‘good’ way to be. Then another realisation came all at once. Closet Christianity! Good and Bad. There was a delicious sense of freedom that I felt when I realised that I don’t have to look out for mistakes and correct them. It is Shiva insighting through me and it is Shiva mistaking through me. It is all Shiva. There is this action, then that action, then this action etc. Something is happening and coming to be through me. I don’t have to make it happen, and the ‘mistakes’ are part of that process of not having to make anything happen.
This morning when I was out walking, I was delighted to find a new sense of continuity that I hadn’t had before. The only way to write about it is to say that it is the same as before minus the castigating, frustration with self or ‘being on the lookout for possible wrongdoing’ (now isn’t that redolent of closet Christianity!). What I noticed was that my awareness flowed smoothly from whole body awareness to being less whole body aware to back to full presence etc, all without me having to watch over myself or be critical of myself when I slipped up or even having to remind myself of any particular way that I should be doing anything. Then, as I was walking along in this new found freedom, a unifying insight presented itself to me. What came to me was that only through awareness of the body as a whole, can we be aware of the Self as a whole — that is, Awareness. The Recognition that came with this ‘insight’ was how mistakes are a necessary part of this. How absurd it would be to expect to be able to avoid mistakes. It came to me in the following way. In reading what you wrote about ‘attachments’ several times, I was of course CONSCIOUS of everything in it, but I was not AWARE of a certain part. You wrote, “Without this feelING awareness, feelingS like pain, or 'difficult behaviours' are the way things and people are forced to get us to feel them.” It was only on a fourth reading that the significance of the capitalisation got to me. That is, only through the most closest and appreciative attention to the words can I grasp new dimensions of meaning! Then I felt a new connection between how important it is to have ‘the closest and most appreciative attention’ of the body in order for new dimensions of awareness to unfold. It became utterly obvious to me that I WANT to have an ongoing feelING for the body just BECAUSE I want to unfold new dimensions of awareness. Rather than I should do this or that, because it is the right way to do things. Then a connection came to me between the way I read and the way most people read. I savour and taste every word from every possible direction, trying it in this way or that way etc. Others give a surface reading to things AT THE BEST OF TIMES. And this way of reading demands the most painstaking effort, the most honouring of the author, it is real work, though pleasurable. I realised that in reading your email four times, I am actually ‘glad’ that I missed things the first time etc, because then I could enjoy the whole meal over again. Well, if I missed things you could say that I made ‘mistakes’ if I missed things. But thank Shiva for mistakes, for they are the very way I plunge deeper into words and grasp new dimensions of meaning. While walking all this came to me in a flash and I could see that losing whole body awareness, was like missing the meaning of soemthing you wrote on first reading a piece of yours. Simply part of the process! So it seemed to me that we quite smoothly move between feelING the body continuously and having feelingS which are there to call us back to the body. Feelings in the sense of losing the sense of an insight all the way up to outright pain. Discomfort and pain are not mistakes or things done wrong.
It is in this sense that I now understand ‘create your own reality’. If there are no such things as mistakes, AND even if there were, they wouldn’t be MINE, what possible objection could there be to create your own reality? Closet Christians have a big problem with CYOR because it clashes with the delusion of agency. They continually ask, Yes, but why would I want to create such a reality for myself. Me, me me! Even most followers of the Seth books only accept CYOR when it comes to their successes. When it comes to their aches and pains and failures they have a very subtle way of explaining it to themselves. They say that they got sick because they have negative beliefs about themselves. Big deal. What they are avoiding is asking in a particular sense why this illness at this time, which of course would mean that they would have to look at how they created this particular cancer, in the form that this cancer took — the whole metaphorical symbolic thing. They wouldn’t have a clue about seeing illness as a way to return ourselves to the Body, the Self, AWARENESS.
August 3, 2007
In meditating Left Hand Path and the feedback Peter gave me about my ‘there are no such things as mistakes’, I began to see the Blindingly Obvious much more clearly. ‘To err is human, to forgive, divine’. (Alexander Pope). Of course the Divine Awareness can forgive us our trespasses, or mistakes when we err, because 1) they aren’t even wrong in the first place, and 2) WE didn’t even ‘do’ them. Forgiveness is no big deal for Awareness in such a context.
The Blindingly Obvious that I was referring to was the commentaries on sacred texts. What else are they than men and women seeing what is unthought and unfelt in the original texts? I could go back and read anything Peter has written (indeed, anything I have written), and I could find new depths of meaning. There would be no end to this process. Only a fool would say that that means that I made ‘mistakes’ or erred in not discovering the extra depths of meaning the first time I read the piece, because later understandings are built precisely on the former. There seems to be an attitude today (which, of course, is at least, over 120 years old — Lord Kelvin in the 1880s saying that there was nothing new in science to discover?) that the meaning in any holy text (whether it be religion, science, psychology) has been exhausted. Of course there is new meaning to be unearthed in the Tantras, the Siva Sutras, Abhinava’s writings. Yet it seems that many people, academics and ‘thinkers’ believe that the truth has been exhausted and all that modern commentators can possible do is fiddle around the edges, so if anyone claims that they have made an ‘original contribution’ to any sort of ‘sacred text’, their claims are dismissed out of hand.
I have also had some thoughts about our old friend, Seth, and where I believe his teachings are ‘off the mark’ and where Tantra has it all over him. This was triggered by a comment of Peter’s in a recent email: “It has become increasingly clear to me that the whole essence of my work is about drawing on Seth, Mike and Tantra to formulate a fundamentally new Hindu-Tantric God-Concept.
Peter’s mention of ‘mental action’ nudged something in me as well. I was playing around with mental actions as acts of identification with certain thoughts and THAT MENTAL ACTION is what the ego ‘does’.
I was walking back from the shop having bought some milk when it came to me. The whole basis of ‘The Nature Of Personal Reality’ is that beliefs create reality. Thoughts create reality. WRONG! Beliefs or thoughts do NOT create reality. It is believING in them, on-goING acts of identification with them, that create our reality. Nietzsche was spot on: ‘Every belief is a considering-something true’, with the emphasis on considerING. It is awareness losing itself in thoughts, in identifying itself with thoughts (that it is aware of), believing them to be true as facts of reality that creates our reality. And it is awareness becoming aware of takING certain thoughts to be true, becoming aware of identifyING with certain thoughts, becoming aware of its own mental actionING, that enables us to create a new reality in an aware way.
My own meditating is making it real to me how important -ING is. It is quite literally holdING on the ‘light switch of awareness’. Only by constantly feelING my bodily reality from the inside out, by feelING it, do I maintain myself in awareness. As soon as I ‘err’ and lose myself in thingS like thoughts or feelingS or treeS or carS or..., I lose awareness, I lose touch with Self etc. This constant ING in terms of feelING awareness, is the key to freedom. To feel or have FeelingS — THAT is the question! To Think or have thoughtS. When people believe that it is thoughts that create reality, this provides a too strong focus or emphasis on thoughts. They forget that it is the very awareness of thoughts that enables us to know what thoughts we ‘have’! The ego cannot change its beliefs about reality by focusing on a new set of thoughts or beliefs, in the way Seth was advising. You cannot hypnotize yourself into new beliefs because the very self that is doing the self hypnosis is already the result of de-cided patterns of action as you put it. Only from Awareness (OF the ego) can we choose freely and in a conscious way. Egos are already frightened about reality, they already believe that THEY exist and are real. They are the result of a delusional belief PAR EXCELLENCE! Thus the already deluded ego cannot change any delusional belief about reality (for example, that one is fat, or poor, or evil etc.) just by itself alone. Only by becoming God or Awareness can we change our beliefs about reality! Only by becoming God can we Forgive our ‘erring’.
August 6, 2007
Don’t mention Awareness!
I was meditating something Peter wrote to me: “It never ceases to astonish me in the books I read, how within all the academic or philosophical intellectualising that goes on ‘about’ mysticism, gnosis, psychology, religion, religion, yoga, tantra etc. there seems to be an almost total unawareness of the distinction between conceptualising experiences through intellectual reflection and experiencing concepts - through feeling awareness.” The word that kept coming up was ‘DENIAL’.
Denial is connected with another incident. The previous day I had seen someone who was ‘depressed’ and ‘anxious’. He said he was worried because his blood pressure was very high and he was having panic attacks. He is a school teacher and had a sort of ‘nervous breakdown’ some years ago because of teaching and ‘retired’. Then he slowly started again relief teaching until it became a ‘habit’ and now he is suffering again. I was talking to him and was surprised at how unaware he was of his own life and of things in general to do with depression and anxiety. He had literally no idea. He also was adamant that he isn’t worried about anything in his life. When I asked him was he a little apprehensive about stopping work and ‘having nothing to do’, he said no. In other words all the anxieties that I am completely aware of in me, he denies having. If ever I needed a living example, of the idea that what we are unaware of rears its head in symptoms, here it was. Interesting sidelight — I am aware of all these anxieties but they don’t stop me from doing what I want; he is unaware of any anxieties, and is unable to do what he wants!!!
Anyway the point of my story was that I went to bed with ‘denial’ on my mind. This is what I wrote in my workbook this morning about this person, academics, society, denial and the New Yoga:
Any work that speaks of awareness rather than what awareness is aware of is ‘unconsciously’ resisted. The anxious person was unaware of ‘things’ he ‘should’ be aware of. There are issues he is not attending to or awarING. So they are making themselves felt in his body as anxiety symptoms. He resists being aware — he keeps it at arm’s length. As a society we do so as well. Academics as individual people, are like this person. So as individuals, they deny awareness of certain issues. Professionally it manifests as the denial of AWARENESS itself. Society simply denies that any such thing exists. Anything that speaks of awareness is to be kept at arm’s length, not mentioned, hidden.
Many people genuinely committed to their own growth, even spiritually, share this denial. They deny awareness but are committed to therapy, change and growth. Problem is that if you deny awareness, then your therapy will always revolve around things you are aware of, my sexuality, my fears, my depression, my this or that. Thus, they are wedded to these things, for in order to change and grow they must continue to have issues with such things. I am aware in myself, by contrast, that all I am working on now is being aware! In doing so, insights come to me about personal issues that are being resolved without me even focusing on them.
There is often talk of society as ‘death denying’ etc. And of course this is correct. We also as a society deny our effect on the environment and many other things. But I realise that when we say denial what we should be saying is denial (of awareness of....) We do not deny death, we deny awareness of death. We do not deny global warming, but our awareness of global warming. Sartre expressed this really well with his concept of good and bad faith. He said that we always know when we have done something ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ according to our own values because there is something inside that tells us. Awareness he might have said but didn’t.
I can see how this connects with Christianity and all the other Abrahamic faiths (Judaism and Islam). They are all wedded to the Being principle. They all deny the Awareness Principle. They resist it ‘unconsciously’. It must be kept at arm’s length. Anyone who mentions it is crucified. Jesus was crucified because he blasphemed, he said I am God (the Awareness Principle). The Abrahamic faiths cannot believe that we actually ARE God in the way the way the Vedas and Tantra meant it. Christians and Muslims and Jews MAY get to believe that God is within them but not that they ARE God. I can see even more why the New Yoga is ignored, because it speaks of something that is completely denied — Awareness. For them it just doesn’t exist, like Velikovsky’s hollow earth.
“The being of all things that are recognised in awareness in turn depends on awareness.”
August 21, 2007
INNER SPACE, OUTER SPACE AND HEADACHES
The other day I felt a truth about space. The space around my body ‘encloses’ my head and thus the ‘space’ in my head, so the space around me is actually the space around both my body and the thoughts in my head.
Or what I felt was, the space around my body and the space in my head are the same space! The body does not enclose an ‘inner space’ which is different than the outer space around my body. I knew that while I was feeling this new truth, that ‘before’ I had taken for granted without knowing that I was, that there were two different sorts of spaces. Now I could feel that there is only one space and along with this felt sense came a picture which is extremely hard to put into words. But the picture was of beads on a string. The space on the upper side of the string is the same space as that on the underside of the string, OBVIOUSLY! I could feel the reality of the body as a porous membrane (like the beads) with the space ‘outside’ and the space ‘inside’ all part of the same surrounding space. (I am wondering as I write this was this what Seth was talking about way back in The Seth Material about the infinite webwork and the threads and...is this what Tantra is — the loom? Duhh!).
Following on the heels of this insight it became a whole lot easier to feel ‘my’ self, ‘my’ awareness, as out there simply because there was no longer any separation between ‘in here’ and ‘out there’. Being all the same space, of course my awareness didn’t end at my skin, or abut another awareness, but there was a total awareness of which ‘mine’ was a portion (the physical body merely being a sort of illusory boundary that allowed me to be distinct, only to be dissolved in the next instant so that I was inseparable). So I started to feel my awareness as simply all of space on ‘either side’ of my body. I could feel myself shifting my sense of identification away from the physical body to this other translucent and spacious light and air of awareness. It was as if I was expanding outwards beyond boundaries that I didn’t even know were there. With this insight I could feel how I have ‘unconsciously’ regarded my inner head space as contained by the skull. Just as I put my shoulder and back pain down to a reorganisation of the assemblage point, so I feel strongly that the headaches are a manifestation of this belief in the contraction of my awareness to that of the space inside my head. The back pain has disappeared, now for the headaches.
The next development in this expansion of awareness was a vivid experiencing of the concept of the awareness body. My physical body looks out through the ‘5 peepholes of perception’. The awareness body ‘looks inwards’ via the whole physical body as its organ of perception, as all eye, all ear, all skin, all taste etc. And what is this looking inwards, and what is it looking at? Awareness is a mirror, but what is reflected in the mirror is the very hidden potentialities of awareness made manifest as all the beings of the universe. I am one way of Shiva seeing what is within himself. A tree is another way, and an ant and Mars and ... are other ways. When I point at a window sill (to quote a friend of ours), the whole physical body points with the finger. When I feel a surface with my hand, the whole body feels with the hand. Awareness feels with the whole physical body as its ‘finger’ or ‘hand’. So when I am perceiving that tree over there, Awareness feels that tree with the physical body ‘in here’. It is a bodily feeling because the whole body is the organ of feeling, the ‘hand’ if you want. If I was to burn my hand, all of me would feel ‘discomfort’, but it would be the hand where the discomfort was localised and felt.
Along with the expansion of awareness that I was feeling came a simultaneous knowing that this awareness was also the ‘agent’ of action not me. Rather than have two knowings — expansion of awareness and delusion of agency — they became united in me. While proofing Tantric Wisdom I could feel at any time that it was Shiva proofing, indeed, walking around my room at work, it wasn’t me but Shiva walking, Shiva speaking through me etc. But that whole enormous volume of space was actioning all that ‘I’ was ‘doing’. I also became aware of my tongue again, which I had forgotten about for quite some time. When I am centred ‘out there’, my tongue is still even if I am reading. When I am lost ‘in here’ reading, my tongue moves. In here the agent of action is the ego and it moves the physical tongue while reading. Out there, the agent is spatial awareness and it moves the inner tongue.
In meditating the relationship between agency and action I was reminded of the new addition to Tantric Wisdom that I stalked while proofing.
“Creation is not the activity of Shiva as divine being, agent or creator god. Nor is Shiva a divine being or ‘I’ endowed with independent will (‘Iccha’) or action (‘Kriya’) in the same way that the ego believes itself to be. Instead Shiva is that pure quiescent non-active awareness which, by its very nature, lets all potential beings be and sets them free – releasing them into their own free, autonomous self-actualisation, through their own innate power of action (‘Shakti’). ‘Iccha’ is not Shiva’s ‘own’ willed activity as divine ego, ‘I’ or agent. Instead it is the absolutely free, spontaneous creativity (‘Kriya’) latent in, and arising from pure awareness (Shiva) as its innate power of action (Shakti). ‘Shakti’ is not the power ‘of’ Shiva, in the sense of belonging to him. Instead Shakti is ‘the power of Shiva’ - without which he would be a mere corpse (‘Shava’), and as the divine awareness would be incapable of manifesting all realities.”
I began to appreciate the power of awareness as much as I appreciated Shiva. Shiva is purely a non- active quiescent awareness. It is a light which shines and illuminates things hidden. This illumination ‘brings them to light, endows them with being’ but it does not ‘do them’. Shiva does not make the universe, but he doesn’t even create it if this is thought of in the sense of him doing it, or even willing it to be. He allows it to be released from potentiality to actuality. It desires to be born, he may desire to give it birth, but it freely and autonomously self actualises as his light illuminates it. The light of awareness may as well be thought of as a ‘desiring to give birth’ light and the power of awareness is a ‘desiring to be born’ potentiality and as the light shines more and more on what it shines on, the charge is built up until… But all this got me thinking. If Shiva is not the agent of action, then Shiva is like the ego or, better, it makes it easier to understand how the ego is actually like Shiva.
Then I realised that the ego itself IS AN AWARENESS. Neither God nor the ego are agents of action.
Both are non-active quiescent awareness. Both feel around for what is latent within the space of awareness and free it into autonomous self actualisation. Which then reminded me of Seth’s primary dilemma. While the ego believes that it is separate from awareness, it believes itself to be an agent or doer of action. But in the beginning, it was All That Is ‘himself’ who believed that his dreams were ‘his’, that he possessed or ‘did’ them. It was this delusion that All That Is had to overcome or there would have been ‘a universe run wild and a world without reason’. So I can now see a delicious parallel between Shiva and the simple ego. When the ego can realise that it is not the agent of change and simply ‘let go, let God’ it is perfectly mirroring Shiva. Resonating with Shiva. Becoming Shiva. As long as we believe that Shiva is the ultimate agent of action, and the ego is trying to not be the agent of action, how can we become Shiva?
As I mentioned on the phone, in becoming that larger self, centering myself in that larger spatial awareness, am I becominga God? Am I giving birth to a God? Is that God coming to light, to self awareness, calling itself and knowing itself as an I, through me, is that lucid awakening, illumination? Did All That Is once give birth to me as I am giving birth to this God? I had a feeling, very Kosokian, of ‘Behold! I (awareness) am wakING, I am bodyING as a way to ‘manipulate’ within three dimensionality’. And it is THAT I that is walking, that is speaking, that is proofing through me not the ego.
There is something in Tantric Wisdom that I wanted to ask you about. You say: “Question: How can I learn The New Yoga?” “Answer: Principally through regular one-to-one sessions or longer intensive courses with its originator and Teacher or ‘Guru’, Peter Wilberg. For as in traditional yogas, it is the direct, one-to-one relationship with the teacher that is central to the learning process – allowing the latter to impart knowledge and awareness to the student directly, through ‘initiation’...” I wanted to ask you about ‘spontaneous initiation’ (initaition by the goddess within) of the sort seemingly favoured by Abhinava according to Muller-Ortega in the Triadic Heart p 164. Your own illumination is of this type and while I treasure all personal contact with you, my own ‘illuminating’ is also of the spontaneous variety. I’m wondering why you don’t explicitly mention that method by which both you and I (amongst other methods of course) have achieved what we have. That is, through the experiencing of concepts just as you wrote: “It never ceases to astonish me in the books I read, how within all the academic or philosophical intellectualising that goes on ‘about’ mysticism, gnosis, psychology, religion, yoga, tantra etc. there seems to be an almost total unawareness of the distinction between conceptualising experiences through intellectual reflection and experiencing concepts - through feeling awareness.” If I can feel my way into your writings and experience the concepts then surely so could others. You seem to be saying that there is only the ONE way of achieving enlightenment, paradoxically not the way you did! I am wondering whether enlightenment today is more along the lines of the ‘spontaneous variety’. Seth certainly seems to be favouring this way. I would think that anyone who does feel their way into your writing will quite naturally want to meet you, will write to you regularly, go and see you and become a lifelong friend and associate.
Lastly, this morning on my walk I began to actively feel the whole space around me and the beings within this space in an analogous way to how I felt my way into my shoulder pain. That is, in a way which I haven’t done before, I actively chose to attach myself to everything around me that there was to be aware of. I became aware of every sound in an active aware way, of as many sights as possible, moving my head in a sweeping arc, up and down, side to side.
‘Before’ I was more just being aware of the space. Now I was being aware of the space AND everything it it. I think I had deliberately stayed away from this before for fear of getting lost in things, but this turned out to be the opposite. When I got back home I had a new sense of the meaning of ‘without awareness there would be nothing for us to be aware of in the first place’. Let me explain how this came about. When I wrote my tome on Mental Physics many years ago, I remember trying to get to the bottom of Einstein’s intuition about the speed of light. I knew there was something unthought in all the physics about light and I kept at it until this came to light. And what came to light for me was the blindingly obvious of course, but it proved to be a massive revelation to me. Just because we have eyes and there are things out there to be seen does not explain how we see them! In physics terms, light carries or brings visual information about the object to the eye. It is from that implicit assumption that Einstein intuited what he did. On returning from my walk, after actively being aware of everything there was to be aware of, I realised that I may have been conscious before on my walks but I certainly wasn’t aware in the way I was this morning. And what came to me was the phrase, “Just because we are conscious beings and there are things out there to be conscious of, doesn’t explain how we are aware of them!” I could vividly feel how there just had to be a field or volume or space of awareness filled with the light of awareness in order for conscious beings to be AWARE in the first place!
September 20, 2007
MEDITATING SHIVA MEDITATING
I was writing and allowing awareness to ‘dictate’ through me one morning. I ended up writing, “As I let go and become unbounded, what is undifferentiated within me becomes a bounded being. The act of meditation — taking time to be aware — becoming part of a larger awareness that contains me, that is what releases potentialities into actuality.” Then I wrote something which ‘shocked me’ with its simplicity. “Shiva meditating — sitting in meditation — is what is releasing everything into actuality. It is Shiva becoming part of Anuttara that frees potentiality into actuality. Shiva meditating is creating reality RIGHT NOW!” I had always wondered why there were so many images of Shiva meditating. I had always assumed that it was because meditation was such an important part of Hinduism, so Shiva meditating was a symbol of the essence of Hinduism. Now I could understand it as something else. I wrote, “Why would Shiva meditate unless he grasped that he was part of something bigger? Shiva meditating means that the boundary state can be activated, because he is simply being aware of vast potentiality. In other words he takes his focus away from his creations to himself and his own freedom, freeing himself and thus his creations can go their own way.” It is Shiva sitting in meditation to achieve liberation that creates reality. The question is, “How would a Vedantist or Buddhist or … answer the simple question - Why does Shiva meditate? Why are there so many images of Shiva meditating?
Then just this morning some more stuff came to me triggered by another part of the quote from Seth on the beginning. “It was a state of agony in which the powers of creativity and existence were known, but the ways to produce them were not. This is the lesson that All That Is had to learn, and that could not be taught”. It is amazing that I have read this quote countless times in the last 30 years and basically passed over it. I have merely assumed that Seth meant that All That Is had to learn something and could not be taught it because there was no one to teach him, he was, after all, All That Is. I guess it was in the light of what I have written about above that lay the foundation for this bringing out what was previously unthought for me. The powers were known but the ways to produce them were not. And this is the lesson that All That Is HAD TO LEARN, that COULD NOT BE TAUGHT. Suddenly I questioned what it was that All That Is had to learn, and more importantly ‘what could not be taught’. Over the past few days I have been questioning, silently, ‘what I have learnt and what could not be taught’. On returning from my walk this morning I wrote, “You can’t teach someone how to have a blinding revelation, that they are contained as well as containing; you can only learn this through experiencing it, through opening oneself up to that very higher awareness within which these revelations exist’. I could have summarised it by saying that you can’t teach someone ‘how to get it’. Shiva had to learn himself through meditation that he was contained as much as contained his creations! That could not be taught to him. And if meditation is actually the way that one frees oneself, Shiva had to learn this too.
November 12, 2007
Some things have become clearer to me in meditating 'The Myth of Objective Science - Humanity on the Threshold of the Subjective Universe'.
Evolution is not a property of animals. They no more evolve than trees grow! Language is not a property of words, subjectivity is not a property of subjects. It is the other way around, Animals are immersed within evolution, words are immersed in language and subjects are immersed within subjectivity.
Depresssion is a manifestation of a downward pull within awareness, something felt. But when we feel that awareness is the property of bodies, depression must then be understood as 'caused' by some 'thing' in the body.
A belief in objects and in truth as objectivity is a belief that the fundamental make up of reality can be contained in particles, objects, things. This belief is accompanied by or assumes that consciousness is itself the private property or function of certain things. Consciousness is thought of as being used to create an inner equivalent 'in here' in words and pictures to what is 'out there'. We think we create an exact copy in our minds of what is 'out there' — a ‘one to one’ correspondence. Thus we think we use language as a tool to mirror 'things' in words.
In psychology, in this 'lost age' then, feelings within awareness are put down to labelled 'things' in the body/mind (like depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, etc). Language becomes a tool to point to or refer to supposedly 'objective' things in the body/mind that cause feelings we experience. So if I feel 'addressed' by thoughts, I can put them down to alien voices within or brain chemistry gone wrong. Every feeling and thought can be traced back to the brain. Since meaning is understood as a property of words, naturally enough then this leads to us believing that we can completely express ourselves IN words. The extreme manifestation of this is psychosis a la Lacan.
Thinking of language as a private means of expression we lose sense of how our words are heard by others (which we would be sensitive to if we knew language was shared by all), and we begin to become very literal and fundamentalist — that is, I feel explosive deep within, and what is wrong with me saying, “I have a bomb in my stomach”?
The belief in objects and truth as objectivity leads inexorably to quantum mechanics which ultimately says that there is only the observer and everything else is the observer’s creation. That is a new religion with its God being the human observer who controls and constructs everything.
So having got rid of a God that created everything in the beginning, quantum mechanics is forced to postulate the human observer who creates everything from the future backwards — an entity far more omnipotent than the old God, for this new God can reach back into the past and create the very conditions that will lead to it in the present! So the belief in objects and objectivity requires a supreme subject (an object that possess consciousness) to create everything. Sartre never said a truer word that when he wrote (or was it Dosteovosky?) 'If God [in the old sense] didn’t exist, we would have to create Him'!
As I went about my day while things bubbled within, something utterly simple then occurred to me. The nature of Objectivity. I realised that this belief in objectivity runs so deep within all of us. I continually discover just how much I believe in it! Or how deeply it is buried within me. Or on how many levels it exist. I suppose that this is only to be expected. But I realised that in my whole book on relativity theory and quantum mechanics I took for granted that there was a quantum field of matter, that space itself had a physical substantiality. That, for example, Rado’s aether was a 'subtle energy'.
That is how deep that belief was in me. Underneath those matter fields I believed consciousness somehow existed. Now I can see that there are no quantum fields of matter, no subtle matter field, no aether, just awareness. I discovered the belief in objectivity in me. Wheeler thought of Space as a quantum foam, with matter being ripples on the surface. Einstein conceived it as a physical something with matter being knots in this continuum. Bohm’s holomovement is conceived of as 'subtle matter'.
All are examples of 'Objectivism'. For in the long run, even these 'advanced thinkers', who got beyond 'things' to space and relativity as the 'final frontier', still conceived of it objectively, physically -The Myth of 'Objectivive' Science!
Lastly I wanted to share a little gem with you. In meditating the mad phrase 'a particle’s reality cannot be contained within the particle', what I realised was unthought in that was the following: 'Objectivity is not the private property of objects! That is what quantum mechanics is actually all about. So they created and then discovered waves or fields of matter ... 'fields of objectivity'. This offers a way of getting to subjectivity not being the private property of subjects - understanding subjects themselves as fields or waves of subjectivity ...
December 1, 2007
Awareness is personifying itself as Andrew Gara in a ‘continuous manner’. Continually speaking and sounding ‘words’ which I can feel in a delusional way as a solid pre-existing identity that is me. This then leads to all the familiar delusions that I have thoughts, that I am depressed, that I am ...
However, I am a continuous creation being born and dying in each moment. I am not a thing which moves through time but a continual presencing in awareness. It is not that I have thoughts or feelings, that I possess awareness. Awareness personifies itself as me, thinks thoughts feels feelings. Just as what causes people to smoke causes them to get cancer, so awareness is what personifies, thinks, feels.
So what is this sense then that I am a thing moving through time? It certainly feels that way. It certainly appears to be the case that I think, I feel etc. If we have a row of light globes and they are switched on and off in sequence, it will appear to me as the observer that there is a light moving across or through space. Within my field of vision I will see a light moving through space. Thus if I am being personified and materialised moment by moment and dying back into Awareness moment by moment, then it is TO AWARENESS (as the ‘observer’) that the sense of a me moving through time is down to!!!!! So as I go about my life feeling that the me that did this is the same me that did that, that there is a me that persists and is a pre-existing thing that moves through time is simply one way of constructing things. On my walk this morning I vividly felt that it was Awareness that was walking around, not me, Awareness that was thinking. If I am Shiva, then of course it will feel that I am a continuous pre-existing thing, but that same feeling is explained by Shiva being me, just as me, the observer, would feel that there is a light moving through space, when there isn’t. There is no separate little I, just as there is no light moving through space. There are only momentary ‘lights of consciousness lighting up’ or presencing within the AWARENESS that is Shiva, and Shiva feeling all this as me is Me feeling that sense of continuity! In the same way as I speak a sentence, there is a wholeness being expressed - something that flows through and holds the sentence together. It is Shiva that flows through and holds together the sense of Iness, that IS the sense of I-ness that I feel.
Space gives large scale matter ‘its marching orders’. The quantum wave function gives small scale matter its marching orders. It is awareness that guides consciousness ‘through’ time. The information contained in the wave function (in a purely physical sense, information about the environment of the particle stretching away to infinity) guides the particle and that is why its movement appears to be so complicated (random). The information contained within the ‘wave function’ of awareness (information about the past, the future and all the probable presents) guides consciousness. If consciousness chooses to guide itself based on narrow ego concerns (not taking time to be aware and being narrowly focused on each task that it is doing or going to do) a paradox is set up. Awareness guides consciousness whether it believes it or not, just as Seth said about reincarnation (“You will reincarnate whether or not you believe that you will. It is much easier if your theories fit reality, but if they do not you will not change the nature of reincarnation one iota” - the Seth Material p 146). If awareness is guiding consciousness, like space, awareness is shaping (bending or curving?) the whole physical, mental and spiritual environment of consciousness. Awareness shapes events so that consciousness follows certain pathways in time. So if awareness contains information that consciousness ignores, then those ignored things still guide and shape consciousness. How? If consciousness does not listen to awareness and allow itself to be ‘shaped’ by all it hears, awareness guides it ANYWAY by guiding the CONSCIOUSNESS that the BODY IS. So if I, for example, ignore the ‘stress’ of a meeting at work which I felt, awareness, the wave function which contains that information ‘guides’ or ‘shapes’ the consciousness that IS the Body ‘in a certain direction’ - I get a headache. It is what I do as a result of the headache that awareness is guiding me towards - hopefully the same place as if I had listened to awareness in the first place, embodied it at the time and done something about it. But if I don’t awareness will simply find another way to guide me via the consciousness that IS the body.
So in every moment it is ‘much better if our theories fit reality’ and we stay in touch with awareness, the wave function, listening carefully to all the echoes of past and future. We may as well do this since it is going to happen anyway! Awareness is guiding me and will guide me directly or indirectly whether I like it or not.
These are my initial meditations on your email! Goodness knows what will come. Every element of modern physics is a perfect metaphor of AWARENESS. It is quite fascinating how going back and forth from one to the other is itself a process of morphic resonance, physics giving form to ‘concepts’ of awareness etc. No wonder Paul Davies felt that quantum mechanics was the Mind of God. Yet this is conceived almost as if God is a Being whose thoughts are mathematics or something and the whole universe is held together by the quantum laws that are God’s mind. So near and yet so far!!!
December 4, 2007
Been feeling out field awareness. Just going about my day feeling myself as the space and light around me. Last night I woke up and could feel my awareness as ‘transcendent’ in a way I never have before. I could actually feel ‘non local effects’ is the best way to put it. That is, I had a feeling cognition of being here and there and that when I felt myself over there, I felt that it was a short step to materialising over there if I wanted to. Something like that. Anyway the feeling has lasted beyond sleeptime. Very strongly I am feeling like I stretch to the horizon, AND I surround everything from the horizon inwards. Also had some urges to read Heidegger and Scientific Method while asleep. Also woke up from some very confusing but important dream — this dream was about the whole of the history of quantum mechanics as if it was a dream! That is, if the history of quantum mechanics was a dream, how would we interpret it? Now I can feel how important again the metaphor of dreaming is.
Now it is the afternoon and having read the first chapter in Heidegger and Scientific Method, something occurred to me. When science (and people in general) believes that awareness is the private property of individuals and thus, purely subjective, it is obviously going to exclude it from any scientific study. Anyone would agree that if something is ‘purely subjective’in the way they mean it, of course it can’t be studied scientifically. Thus science must reduce the study of the human being to what is measurable. But the evil of that is due to the prior evil of the belief in awareness as private property. It then occurred to me that once this step is taken, then problems arise when we consider the nature of what lies behind the world we encounter directly. For something does lie behind it. And it seems that science can see that a ‘field’ reality must lie behind the everyday world of things. But having eliminated awareness because IT IS THE PROPERTY OF THINGS and thus cannot be a general field state behind things, it is left with ‘energies, forces and other supernatural forces’. So rather than awareness being behind everyday experience, its qualities manifesting as all the sensory qualities we experience, science is left with energies and forces, purely measurable quantitative things. They are then forced through the logic of that choice to construct the whole primary secondary thing, because what else can they do. Colour, taste, etc, like grief and pain are not quantitatively measurable and so must be purely subjective ‘effects’. The idea of awareness as private property has a lot to answer for!
December 31, 2007
What a fantastic year it has been for me! I feel like I have been peeling away layers of The Myth of Objectivity. It is so deeply ingrained in us that it takes years to divest ourselves of it. I feel on this last day of 2007 that I have taken a final step in that long process. Very symbolic to be entering a new year as if it is the gateway to something. When I had my dream about quantum mechanics, I woke up knowing that its message was that only metaphysics and philosophy can take us to the next step. Why, because it was metaphysics and philosophy that got us to where we are now and it has always been this way. It was philosophers not scientists who pointed the way towards ‘materialism’ if you want. The history of quantum mechanics shows us, if it shows us anything, that it is our very deeply ingrained ‘instincts’ about what reality ‘must be’ that are in question. Well, that is how I put it to myself on awakening after that dream. I also knew from that dream I was to read your book on Heidegger and scientific method. I read it 3 times very slowly and lingered over every word. It took me 7 days and those ‘7 days shook my world!’
What did I get from Heidegger? That’s easy now to answer. What it meant for me was that there are no ‘objects in empty space’. It is as simple as that and as radical as that. There are only ‘phenomena in awareness space’. Objects in empty space are abstractions from phenomena in awareness space. If you suck the life out of phenomena in awareness space, you get objects in empty space. I think before I struggled under the last vestiges of a certain ‘dualism’. That is, without knowing it, I was thinking in terms of that there WERE objects in empty space and consciousness somehow ‘converted’ them into phenomena in awareness space. In a way my own version of the quantum paradox — according to the Copenhagen Interpretation, before we look there is an abstract quantum field and when we look, it becomes particles or waves etc. Somehow I was labouring, without knowing it, under the delusion that there was an object ‘out there’, that thing over there on my mantelpiece, and that when I looked it ‘became a ‘cricket ball’. Something like that, not quite, but close to it. I kept on getting tangled up in silly complicated ‘equations’ like, physical light brings information about the object thing over there to my eye and inside, the light of awareness brings the essence of the cricket ball to me. But whatever it was that was deluding me has gone now. There are only phenomena in awareness space. And I understood from the Heidegger book, about embodied ways of relating. If you solidly believe in objects in empty space, that becomes an embodied way of relating to the world. That was what I referred to as ‘instinct’ before in my email. It is as if all those layers of belief are condensed in our flesh, as our flesh, an awareness in itself and we EXPERIENCE the world that way. For scientists it is a truth that we live in an Objective reality. They make it so! The number of times I would stop and swear at reality, quite literally, ‘you dumb, stupid piece of matter, why don’t you have the sense to do what I want with you’ etc.
Time and time again reading your book, I stopped and said to myself, How would scientists design an experiment to prove that there are objects in empty space? And then I realised another meaning of quantum mechanics that they don’t get. This is the whole Schroedinger cat in the box paradox. According to quantum mechanics, nothing is actualised until the observer looks. Reality remains in a sort of limbo state until the observer collapses the wave function. Take a photograph of the cat in the box. No good. You still need an observer to look at the photograph. There is no way to prove that there are ‘objects in empty space’ because a scientist must be involved, the scientist is a human being (that is probably debateable!) and …. Every scientist that looks at any ‘thing’ will see a ‘phenomenon’. Even if we put an ‘unknown’ object ‘out there’ (a completely made up nonsense thing) when a human being looks it will still be a phenomenon — at the very least we might see something that we-have-no-idea-about, but that is a context, a field of emergence! There simply are no such things as what Hume said is really out there — colourless, odourless, tasteless, measurable things etc.
And now I want to connect what I have written to your piece on ‘What is Meditation?” I found that reading that piece this morning I had no internal ‘objections’ to this sliver when I read it. “There is what is ‘going on’ right now … whatever it is you are doing, thinking, feeling, saying etc. And there is the awareness of what is going on – the awareness of whatever it is you are doing, thinking, feeling, saying etc”. Had I still been the same Self as I was when I wrote my email on ‘how we get over to people about field awareness’ I would have found that sentence ‘problematic’. But not anymore. And I also have my own direction forward because now I both know what was problematic for me about understanding the field nature of awareness, and how to make it clearer for others. (They will certainly never get it without meditating, but maybe it can be made clearer why they need to meditate!). Interestingly what has made a difference to me after reading Heidegger and meditating over it a lot, what enables me to read that sentence above without any ‘flinching’ is precisely the understanding that I have which is summarised in the next sentence you wrote! “This awareness embraces not just what is happening in the here and now but its larger where and larger when – the overall situation and larger life context within which it is going on, goes on, and out of which it is emerging. Ultimately it is an awareness that embraces all of space and time.” Have you yourself made a shift or a slight change or something because I don’t believe you have put it in quite that way before as if there is an extra element in your own ‘feeling’ for this issue?
From my workbook this morning: What is the meaning of a word? It is in the context. That is ‘where’ the meaning is. What is the reality of an object? In the context, the field of awareness, of meaning itself. What is that round, red thing on my mantelpiece over there? It is the cricket ball from the last game of competitive cricket that I played 25 years ago. It is the ball from the game in which I played together with my three brothers. The reality of that thing over there lies not inside its ‘matter’ but completely within all this meaning and a host of other meanings that cling to it and spread out in ever widening waves. That meaning is a larger when and a larger where. The reality of the object lies within this context, which is a field of awareness. This field is transcendent and it is also blindingly obvious! And every single ‘thing’ is actually a phenomenon emerging from its own field of emergence just like the cricket ball. When I am walking around the streets, and I look at a tree, there is a whole vast context ‘that is looking at the tree’, me having read your email, me having read Heidegger, me having watched Australia thrash India in the Test match etc etc. The tree is also ‘that tree that is on the corner of the road that I turn at to go down my favourite walk’ etc. I guess what I am saying, Peter, is that I am connecting together in a way I have never done before, phenomenology al la Heidegger/Wilberg with the real essence of NY meditation. Before they were slightly separate, the field of awareness more sort of abstract but not really connected with the field as I now understand it — that living web of relatedness that is the cricket ball, that is the tree, that is … any ‘thing’ that we see. I must also report that over the past two weeks, as I wrote to you about my experience with transcendence that third stage of meditation is with me always now. Pure joy! I feel blessed at the moment and genuinely sad for all the people who haven’t spent 40 years of their life searching for truth. Oh yes, and by the way, I got the difference between science (the search for truth) and scientific method (to be able to control things by making them fit with a purely idealist version of reality). At least children who believe in Santa Claus also know that he isn’t real. Scientists actually are so dumb that they believe in their Santa Claus literally.
January 7, 2008
Still meditating ‘An Introduction to Meditation’. Another change I found that stopped me in my tracks was the use of ‘There is...’ rather than ‘I think...’ This had such an effect on me at the time that over the next couple of days I stopped even thinking in terms of ‘I’ at all. It seemed so obvious not to use that little word. But it was only this morning that an insight came to me and that insight was that it was Awareness reaching into the darkness within me that actualised ideas etc. I had become accustomed to saying and writing that ‘it occurred to me’ or ‘this came to me’ which is correct but had obscured something - the role of the I. It is all very well to say that this came to me, or that occurred to me but that is not actually it. There is still delusion there. It is Awareness reaching into the darkness and the insight struggling to be, that connect together which results in actualisation. The role ‘I’ play is in holding an ‘open region’ within which this happens. Yes, things come to light and things come to be but this still obscures the double movement. So your phrasing, There is an awareness of a ‘feeling’ or a thought in me of such and such is quite accurate.
Another insight that came to me through meditating this piece was your emphasis on taking in rather than giving out, but it came to me in a rather roundabout way. I was out walking fully in awareness, (I have reached the blessed state of not having to try anymore, I have crossed some sort of threshold and now seem almost permanently in Awareness) when I felt more strongly than ever before, that the physical body is the ‘tip of the iceberg’ (in Seth’s terminology, the tail-end of inner events). I was walking and feeling completely my body, every step, every sensation, every part of it, while maintaining overall awareness of the body. An insight came to me that I had completed some sort of circle. Just as I linger over a word or phrase while keeping in mind the context of the whole article, so I was lingering over aspects of my physical body while keeping the whole body in awareness. I could feel myself embodying completely who I was and at the same time being aware of what I was embodying. A strange feeling a little like I felt when reading from you that subject in Latin was thrower and object was the thrown! Anyway having this feeling and walking on it became so clear to me that the body WAS the soul’s speech, that the words of this speech were comportments and stances and ‘looks on the face’ etc. At the time, I could feel the blindingly obvious, that Awareness instantly communicates since awareness is speaking the flesh and we are fleshly beings. Thus why speak? On the heels of this it was so clear that ‘real communication’ then was each person ‘reading’ the other, not telling stories about ourself. So I had a fresh insight into Deep Listening. We are constantly ‘sending a message’ through the language of the flesh, and like words on a page, we simply take them in and linger over them. We receive the other. Nothing new, but another winding path back to home!
On this walk as well I had the strange feeling at another stage of being inside my body like a hand is in a glove. I felt a new relationship between awareness and its manifestation and remembered Heidegger and his capacity and function etc. I could feel awareness filling out the body from within while the whole body was embraced by the outer field of awareness. When I use a glove as an instrument, it becomes an extension of me (just like any tool) that I identify with. I move the glove from the inside while looking at the glove from the outside. The glove has functions, I have the capacities etc. I found this a useful way to think about the other tools and capacities example (pen and writing etc).
January 13, 2008
Read Heidegger, Phenomenology and Indian Thought today. Lay down and dozed. Woke up feeling that ........... it is light that sees not the eye or people or... That’s the only way I could put it as it came to me. Then what came to me was that I was the space around me (the space within the horizon of MY awareness), that all this space (of awareness) was my body and its organ of perception was my whole physical body. As if this space body had an eye in it or an ear and this eye or ear was the whole body surface. Then something confused came (it was almost like a dream) which I felt had something to do with the body itself being an awareness so it had its own organs of perception, eyes and ears and... I could feel within a clear understanding of seeing, hearing etc being within awareness; yes there is an observer and an observed, but the seeing is within the light, as if it is light that sees. The light is a sea that contains everything within it delocalised at every point in it, and as Bohm would say, all things are enfolded within this light and unfolded at the eye. But the seeing is within the eye. This is the best I can do with the felt sense. Of course I could also feel another reality beneath all this having read the Mehta article. The truth of light being the light of truth! I am the light of awareness and all things are enfolded within this light of awareness and come to be or are unfolded at my I.
January 22, 2008
I am aware of being, of existing. That is how I know I am. Not a knowing about, not as Descartes said (I THINK, therefore I am) which amounted to a knowing that I am because I know that I am thinking ABOUT something. Not a knowing ABOUT but a DIRECT knowing OF.
I see a tree but how do I know that I see a tree? How do I know that it isn’t a dream or that I am imagining that I am seeing a tree or how do I know that I am not hallucinating a tree? I know that I see a tree because I am aware of seeing a tree. I directly know that I am aware of seeing a tree. This is the true meaning of the quantum mechanical ‘measurement’ problem. Quantum mechanics tortures itself with saying that nothing exists until an observer observes it. So in quantum mechanics, if a robot with a camera ‘takes a picture of an object’, we cannot say that the picture exists until an observer opens the camera and develops the film! How absurd. Forced into idiocies like this by its belief in observers and observed, quantum mechanics has nowhere to go but ‘down the rabbit hole’. At least Lewis Carrol knew his was an insane world! Simple phenomenological self study reveals the obvious. Awareness is aware of what is emerging from within itself. That is, Awareness (subjectivity) includes the ‘objective’ within itself as an emergent phenomena just as a hot liquid, on cooling, reveals crystals emerging from within itself. Awareness, thus, is prior to and the precondition of there being anything at all, just as a dissolving medium is prior to and the necessary precondition of the emergence of crystals. So of course nothing exists until an ‘observer’ observes, it’s just that there is no ‘observer’ and there is no ‘observed’ as separate things.
Beyond and behind all existing things is this background field of Awareness, of direct and immediate, knowing presence. No thing could exist without awareness being present to it — without awareness knowING it into existence, shining its light onto it and illuminating it.
Wait just a minute! I know I exist because I am aware that I am. But it is not the ego, the normal everyday me that is the I that is aware that I am in the above sentence. The normal everyday self, Andrew Gara, is the ‘object’ of the sentence ‘I know that I exist because I am aware that I am’. Andrew Gara is the final ‘I’ in that sentence. Then who or what is the ‘subject’ of that sentence? Who or what is the ‘I’ that is aware that I exist? It is Awareness itself that is the I that is aware that I (Andrew Gara) am! Awareness, Shiva, God, is the BIG ‘I’, if you will, that is aware that the little ‘I’ (Andrew Gara) exists. In other words that sense of I-ness that I feel when I meditate ‘How do I know that I am?’, that sense of being aware that I am, is God or Shiva within me, being the awareness of itself as me, as the ‘I’ that it experiences as Andrew Gara.
I am God or Shiva, knowing directly that I exist as me, Andrew Gara. And all this within that one little word and sense — I. How do I know that I exist? There is also an awareness within me that I act! Here too, it is not that ‘I’ am aware that I act — that is delusion if I think that the I that is aware is me. How do I know I see a tree over there? There is an awareness within me of seeing a tree over there. Again, it is not that ‘I’ am aware that I see a tree — that is delusion if I think that the I that is aware that I see a tree is me. I think this or that, I feel sad or angry. WRONG! There is an awareness within of this thought or that thought or a feeling of sadness or anger. Not I think this or that or I feel sad or — that is delusion if I think that the I that thinks or feels is me.
God or Shiva is the ocean of Awareness out of which I emerge constantly into existence. I am a ‘crystal’ constantly crystallising from the fiery hot liquid of Awareness as it cools. As it heats up I constantly dissolve back into Awareness. I am as much the breathing Awareness, the heating and cooling ocean as much as I am what emerges from it. There is no God, separate from ‘me’ and and there is no ‘me’ separate from God. That sense of I-ness which I FEEL directly and know as I, is as much Awareness as it is ‘me’. There is no part of me which isn’t saturated with God stuff, and there is no part of God which isn’t saturated with body-ness or being-ness. Both ‘I’s are inseparable but distinct, like the two sides of a coin.
January 19, 2008
I have just FELT what I-ness is or where it comes from or how it is generated. I have puzzled over this all my life and the other day, the blindingly obvious struck me. I was feeling out the question, ‘How do we know that we exist?’ The answer to this is we simply are aware that we exist. This basic Awareness of Being is an awareness of ‘other-ness’ in a sense. We are simply aware of ‘something’ besides us, aware that we are! This awareness of otherness implies an awareness of self — I-ness! In other words as soon as there is awareness there is relationality, there is I-ness and other-ness.
Jane Roberts channelled Seth and when Seth ‘took over’, she ‘stepped aside’ and allowed him to fill out her body from within. Then why can’t I be as open a channel for Awareness as Jane was for Seth? I want Awareness to flow through me unhindered. I want to be as empty of thought and ego as Jane was when she was in trance. I get the feeling now and then that I am choosing Awareness/whole body rather than ego/5 senses as a way of being. I want to allow Awareness to fully ‘take me over’, embody itself in me, fill me from within, look out through my eyes. Seth expressed himself through Jane. THUS SHE WAS AN EXPRESSION OF HIM when he was speaking. I want to be that for Awareness. In doing so, I stop looking out at the world or looking into myself as if awareness was mine to do something with. I would just start being an Awareness-being — a being of that Awareness that expresses itself through me. Just as in trance, Jane was an expression of Seth, a way for him to BE in this world.
January 23, 2008
There is an awareness of … within me. When I am waiting for a felt sense to come to me as an insight about something, when it comes, it doesn’t come from ME nor does it come to ME. It emerges from Awareness and comes to the light of awareness within me. I am the open space within which this process happens and the trigger for it, for without me, there would be no felt sense in the first place that spontaneously self actualises by ‘coming to light’ (of awareness).
January 24, 2008
When we regard awareness as bounded by the body or a by-product of the brain we tend to fall into the ‘delusion of agency’. Whenever I say ‘I did this’ or ‘I think that’ or ‘I felt this’, I am owning what I think, feel and do as if my outer and inner actions are my private creation, my private property. Awareness becomes something connected with the brain and body. In this way awareness has become bound to the world of matter and energy, hence the endless ‘scientific’ and personal scepticism over out of body experiences or near death experiences. ‘Are you sure you were out of your body? How do you know that you didn’t just think you were or imagine that you were? The questions can only be asked by a consciousness that is already taking for granted that awareness is bound to or restricted to the body.
We are binding or restricting our awareness, our very sense of self, to the confines of the body. We are enclosing ourselves in a box. It is said that the mentally ill can be encapsulated within their delusions. Quite correct as long as we realise that in this age of fundamentalist science, we are all encapsulated within the ‘delusion of ownership’. Awareness becomes dependent on the products of the body/brain — determined by what we think, feel and do, the events around us, what happens TO us. If we have negative thoughts, we feel negative. If we go through a negative event we feel negative. If the world around us is a negative place, it affects us negatively. How could it be otherwise if we believe that awareness is bound to the material world?
Anyone enclosed in a box feels like a cat feels on the way to the vet, enclosed in its cat cage. It howls. It feels unfree and trapped. It can’t wait to get out and as soon as you get back home, it runs into the garden to be free of confinement. We feel the same way constantly. Feeling trapped and pressured and stressed.
Sunday, January 27th
Seth says that awareness IS expression. We constantly seek to express ourselves. But if awareness feels encapsulated and confined within the body, then expression will take on the character of an endless repetition of words and actions, a constant giving out in order to get our ‘self’ or awareness out of the box in which it is confined. If however we feel our awareness to be unbounded and unrestricted to the body in the first place, and if we know that awareness itself IS expression, that awareness constantly is communicating itself, then expression takes on the character of silent reception, a constant taking in and listening. We don’t have to talk endlessly and tell our story because we automatically are doing that. Our awareness, our very self is out there in the world. Free of confinement, communicating itself to everyone and everything. We are free to focus on the other, to take other people in, free in the knowledge that we don’t have to ‘let it all hang out’ — it already does.
February 10, 2008
Thanks for your untitled piece. I’ve titled it and included it below because I want to make some comments:
EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS
"THE EGO IS THE ‘I’ THAT TAKES ALL EXPERIENCING AS ITS ‘OWN’. Through the use of the single word 'I' - indeed in the very act of uttering it in speech, the ego SEIZES UPON, GRASPS and APPROPRIATES all experiencing as its own personal private property - saying to itself and others: "I think this" or “I feel that”. The ego’s delusion of owning its experience is the essential block to higher awareness known in the yogic tradition as ANAVAMALA. In owning or APPROPRIATING all experiencing for itself, the ego both traps our everyday self in identification with 'its' personal experiencing, and EXPROPRIATES that experiencing from that trans-personal awareness that is its divine source - and the ultimate experiencer. That is why if, when instead of thinking 'I think or thought this' or 'I feel or felt that' we recognise and recall, sense and say to ourselves 'There is or was AN AWARENESS of thinking this' or 'There is or was AN AWARENESS of feeling that', we prevent the ego or 'I' from appropriating experience as its personal private property. No writings on yoga have yet pointed out the profound connection between Anavamala – the ego’s delusion of owning its experience, identity and body as PRIVATE PROPERTY - and Marx’s analysis of the role of property relations in shaping human consciousness. ‘Enlightenment’, then is not the destruction of the ego as such but the transcendence of the proprietorial or possessive ego – that ‘I’ which takes conscious experiencing as its ‘own’ activity, takes all experiences as its private property – and treats ‘its’ body and brain as a material ‘means of production’ of experience. In Marxist terms, overcoming ANAVAMALA means allowing awareness to 'expropriate the expropriator' – the capitalist or ‘bourgeois’ ego. When this happens the ego itself ceases to take itself as the EXPERIENCING self and owner of its experiences. Instead it becomes just one aspect of an experienced self among others – a self that THERE IS AN AWARENESS of experiencing. Out of this trans-personal AWARENESS OF EXPERIENCING comes an entirely new EXPERIENCE OF AWARENESS and an entirely new experience of self - an experience of that Self that IS awareness and of that AWARENESS which IS our deepest Self - identical with the Divine. The LIBERATED EGO or 'I' no longer immediately seizes upon, grasps, owns and 'appropriates' its experiencing as ‘our’ own. Instead it is itself ‘enowned’ - reowned and reappropriated by that trans-personal awareness which IS our divine Self. To be able, in everyday speech and communication to utter the word 'I' in this sense - from OUT OF AN AWARENESS wholly transcending it - is the highest and most demanding accomplishment in the Practice of Awareness that is 'The New Yoga'." Peter Wilberg
Read this short piece umpteen times and each time felt stuff bubbling beneath the surface. Slept fitfully last night; dreamt of Marx in a Sikh turban, and Shiva the Marxist revolutionary and other mixed metaphors. Woke up with a headache and started writing and words started flowing. Went to the market, came back, went back to sleep, the headache went away, went for a walk and now writing this.
The most interesting thing is that the insights I got about Anavamala illuminated Marxism and those insights further illuminated my understanding of Anavamala. It was as if the language of Marxism was ideal to illuminate Anavamala!
While I was asleep I could feel the parallels between the ego using awareness as a tool to produce thoughts and companies using workers as tools to produce commodities. The ego thinks it owns its thoughts as private property just as the company owns the commodities and the workers. Waking up now and then I was struggling to express to myself the felt sense of awareness ‘selling’ its ‘labour POWER’ to the ego as the workers sell their labour power to the boss. Of this labour Power of awareness as Shakti! Whenever I turn MY thinking as a tool on reality, I am expropriating the power of awareness from awareness itself, owning that power as MINE and in the process disempowering myself!!! And somewhere in there I felt that the ‘compensation’ or payment received from the ego for doing this deal with the devil was a sense of power OVER reality at the expense of a power OF!!!
Through all this I was going back and forth between Marxism’s obvious truisms about the evils of capitalism and the destruction of the planet and its metaphorical re-statement of the evils of egohood and its destruction of human being-ness. That is, through knowing and feeling how true Marxism is (it is a blindingly obvious fact to me and has been for 40 years) I gained a fresh and new positive affirmation of the truth of awareness as the source of everything. When I went for my walk, I wanted to be in awareness, to be the source out of which emerged thoughts, trees, bodies, cars, selves, I’s. I wanted this and the impetus came from a fresh understanding and connection with the desire for a true respect from all people for the source of life on this planet, the Earth itself. By wishing for whales to not be slaughtered, for water to not be polluted, for disgusting advertising to stop, for dumbing down to stop I could feel that the expropriators had to be expropriated, that capitalism had to go, and, on my walk, that seemed to be the same task and endeavour as the ego having to be expropriated by awareness!
On returning from my walk I wrote: The earth produces everything, it is the source of everything, it is the mother. But capitalism treats it as an infinite bank of re-sources to be exploited. In claiming ownership of our experiences and self, thoughts and feelings, actions and sensations, we treat the Source, awareness, as an infinite bank of re-sources to be exploited. We use them never CREDITING where they come from but TAKING CREDIT for PRODUCING them ourselves. We are the channel through which they enter the world. We do not make them or 'produce' them, we 'e-duce' them - bring them out. A woman does not make a baby. She is pregnant with it. It grows and emerges from her. Thoughts, feelings, actions, sensations, cars, selves, I’s autonomously and spontaneously gestate within and emerge from the womb of awareness. They are independent, autonomous beings. They cannot be owned, they cannot be the private property of anyone, anymore than slavery is allowed. Aborigines have always said that they took care of the land, the earth, that their role was one of a caretaker. They owned nothing, built nothing, left an almost invisible footprint on the land. That is what the ego needs to learn. It is the caretaker of awareness. Walking lightly over its surface, guarding it because it is its mother!
And lastly I just remembered that the dominating feeling from my walk was one of feeling my I as the sky and light and space of awareness. The Blue. And I could deliberately contract that expanded feeling of awareness, of I-Ness, to the old, familiar, ego sense of I, where I was rumbling around within myself thinking I am this or that, or feel this or that etc etc. I felt in a very real way: "To be able, in everyday speech and communication to utter the word 'I' in this sense - from OUT OF AN AWARENESS transcending it - is the highest and most demanding accomplishment in the Practice of Awareness that is 'The New Yoga'."
July 12, 2008
‘IT’
The presencing of the Sun is ITS shining
The presencing of the blue sky is ITS bluing
The bodying of the body is ITS bodying
Yet this IT is not the Sun and not the sky
IT is not blue and it is no-body
For that which presences is not its presencing
Its presencing is ITS presencing, that of
Awareness beyond identity
Peter Wilberg
Thought I’d keep you up to date with my experiencing. I’ve wanted to find a way to be aware all the time and this involved ‘remembering’ - that is, not forgetting to be aware as you wrote. I’ve also wanted to tie together all the reflections on Samuel Avery stuff that were triggered in me. And I’ve wanted to connect together these two streams with something you mentioned - to give my sensory awareness as much to to ‘objects’ as I was doing to my body. It all seemed to ‘come to a head’ after reading your little ‘IT’. I was looking at a chair in my room, gazing at it, and it came to me that it was a verb, not a noun. That is, even in its complete non-action, just seemingly sitting there, present, immobile, THAT was ‘action’, ‘activity’, movement, and that it was the activity or ‘doing’ of Awareness. I think before I was always conceiving (without knowing I was) of ‘ing’ as, say, the movement of a tree’s branches (what the tree was doing). I think that I was conceiving of ‘oranging’, chairing, bricking, etc (I’m talking of ‘objects’ here) as something that these things did, while believing that I wasn’t, if you catch my drift. For when I was gazing at the chair, I could feel and knew that the chair itself, whatever it was, was in its essence, awareness chairing. I suppose what I am saying is that I have rid myself of the concept of ‘movement’ — things don’t have to be ‘moving’ in order to be a verb or a process! Not such a surprise when you consider that I have been intending to meditate while not moving! In fact, you could say, poetic justice! From that insight I quickly moved to there being no things at all as things simply present, waiting to be perceived! The sun is shining. No, Awareness is shining! It manifests as ‘the sun’ and shines through that manifestation. There actually is no sun itself which is shining. In the same way as in meditation, when I have a thought that I take as ‘mine’ (Anavamala) I not only step back from it, and identify with Awareness, thus confirming that the local Identity, Andrew Gara, is just that - a local identifying of this thought as belonging to the manifestation – but also step back and see that both the thought AND the local
manifestation are the manifesting or presencing of ‘It’ - Awareness.
There is no sun simply present. There is only Awareness presencing as ‘The Shining’ of the sun, the bluing of the sky, the bodying of the body. I then felt something extremely difficult to put into words but it involves a thought from Samuel Avery. It went like this. If, in my simple fleshyness, still and unmoving, I am a verb, a presencing of Awareness, that could be likened to a state of ‘constant velocity’. And thus any action which ‘I’ perform, say, have an idea, or decide to walk to the kitchen, could be likened to ‘acceleration’, a change in velocity, velocity ‘velociting’. And in gazing at the chair I felt it like a ‘sounding’ of Awareness. Just as sounds emerge from silence, and only ‘exist’ while the strings are being plucked or the keys pressed, so do ‘sights’ like a chair, emerge from the silence of Awareness, and ‘exist’ only as long as Awareness keeps playing the ‘chair’. I write every day. A baker bakes loaves of bread every day of the week. How many times has Beethoven’s 5th been played since he wrote it? How can people go along and here it for the 50th time? How can an orchestra perform it more than once? We constantly do the ‘same’ things over and over again. How else could we
do this and get fulfilment from it, were these repeated things, not constantly new and emerging fresh from Awareness? I could feel around me the utter newness of each moment, of each thing.
Finally on my walk this morning, as I meditated on your particular way of seeing the Atman in the eyes of your mirror reflection, I began to feel the Awareness self in a certain ‘mudra’. Totally in Awareness I could feel the cast of my face, how it felt in my eyes and cheeks, as if there was a certain smile on my face. This all went with a certain ‘idea shape’ — a feeling of ‘my outer gaze turned inwards as my inner gaze turned outwards’. I can best summarise this whole experience by referring to what it feels like when I am in an accelerated state of consciousness (to use Jane Robert’s terminology) usually while reading. A certain relaxed alertness, a taking in of the words, while feeling them out inwardly, a waiting, a an awareness attuned to the slightest bodily feelings and an awareness attuned to the words. That was how I felt on my walk. As if I was ‘intending’ to read the environment I was in like reading a page and waiting for felt
sense to come to me. I was giving my awareness to the environment around me as I give my awareness to text I read, allowing it to shape me or me to shape myself to it. There were times on my walk when the environment was ultra alive, sparkling, luminescent, like on acid. I can take on that ‘mudra’ anytime I want. I can evoke that feeling in
my face and quickly body it completely. I can feel the act of identification shift from Andrew Gara, to It Andrew Gara-ing.
September 24, 2008
I can’t help but express myself on my face. I am constantly expressing myself. And just as my face expresses or reveals the vitality and aliveness within, so does my body express and reveal the vitality and aliveness within awareness. That vitality and aliveness is Prana, the breath of awareness which pervades space.
We cannot NOT express on our faces what is within. That is, it is not that we, as egos, express ourselves, but that our inner being is expressive by nature, and since aliveness and vitality ARE, they reveal themselves as much as the body reveals itself. How could it be otherwise? Just as ‘I’ do not have thoughts or have emotions, ‘I’ do not have looks on my face. The look on my face IS the revelation of what is within.
I look in a mirror. There is my body and on my face is a ‘look’, which reveals an inner world. There is a non-dual reality, I am not just a body. Awareness looks in a mirror. There is an unbounded field and on that field, beings, which reveal an inner world of vitality and potentiality. It is not just awareness. There is the power of awareness manifesting constantly as beings. Looks and postures are constantly being born on my face and in my body. They are constantly emerging from an inwardness, and ‘play’ on my face and body, and we cannot stop them from doing so. That is, they are part of the base structure of reality. Awareness (Shiva) and the power of awareness (Shakti) are equiprimordial. The potentialities of awareness are constantly being born as beings, and play on the face and body of awareness. They are born from the womb or matrix of awareness just as looks on the face emerge from within.
The revealing of what is within awareness IS beings. Within a vast field of awareness individual consciousnesses play on the surface constantly. When I look at another person, the meaning of that person, what they mean and intend, is revealed on their face and posture. It is all there made manifest as the look and posture. Nothing is hidden, there is nothing behind the body. All is a revelation of a person’s intent. I understand the meaning of an individual’s existence just through being present and opening myself to what is in front of me. Similarly with Awareness itself, the meaning and purpose of Awareness is all there, revealed. There is nothing hidden, nothing to be ‘worked out’. Just as the meaning and purpose of an individual is all there to be read, so is the meaning and purpose of Awareness all there, revealed. It is ‘the looks and postures’ on the face and body of Awareness - beings. That is why Seth said, the purpose is being as opposed to non-being!
The entire world and everything in it is a sacred revelation of the Divine. Texts are a revelation of meaning. We read them, and the meaning is revealed. The Divine manifests AS the world, thus the world is its divine manifestation, its revelation. Just through being present to the world we are present to a miracle.
The real meaning of Heidegger’s recognitions of things not simply being there, present, like mere end 'products' of a Big Bang or a God - is that things are a revelation of the divine, that is they are constantly being manifested NOW! Right NOW! Right Now, the Divine is manifesting them, playing them as if on an instrument - NOW! The divine is lovingly maintaining them in their own existence NOW! The divine is constantly plucking the strings, playing things and beings NOW! All being is be-ing, not the presence of things but their presencing.
In other words I grasped a real sense of the world and objects as emerging from and a manfestation of, an inner world of vitality and aliveness. Intellectually, of course, I always knew this, but not until I looked in a mirror and noticed the blindingly obvious, did it occur to me that faces reveal an inner vitality or aliveness and that this was a perfect metaphor for creation itself. There was something uncanny in seeing that in a mirror, there is not just the body present, but that it is merely a ‘stage’ for the ‘play’ of feelings and states of awareness. It is a non-duality in itself. Then it came to me that the whole universe was such a ‘play’ on the face of Awareness.
What joy, what bliss.
“… nothing can be more evident to anyone that is capable of the least reflection, than the existence of God, or a spirit who is intimately present to our minds, producing in them all that variety of ideas or sensations, which continually affect us, on whom we have an absolute and entire dependence, in short, in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”
“That the discovery of this great truth which lies so near and obvious to the mind, should be attained to by the reason of so very few, is a sad instance of the stupidity and inattention of men, who, though they are surrounded with such clear manifestations of the Deity, are yet so little affected by them, that they seem as it were blinded with excess of light.”
George Berkeley
I was walking around yesterday and it came to me that just because there is a world, that is all the proof of God we need. If awareness is not a product of the body which is self evident, then the world is a manifestation of the Divine (awareness).
January 5, 2009
THE PRIMARY DILEMMA AND TICKING CLOCKS
Woke up at 3 in the morning and ‘couldn’t go back to sleep’. I put it like that because I’m almost glad for these situations to play forth with awareness. Lying there and feeling the space around things and the silence around sounds. Heard the sound of the clock ticking and aware of the thoughts "Now I’ll fixate on the sound of the clock ticking and never go back to sleep". Then what came to me was a strange almost ‘double vision', an awareness uniting two seemingly distinct events. One was the clock ticking. The other was you writing in 'Absolute Awareness or Absolute Egoity' that:
"...ten thousand times each day the ego or ‘I’ works its way unawares into the life of every human being. It does so by appropriating for itself everything that emerges into experience from awareness, whether a perception, feeling or thought, and transforming the awareness from which it emerges into something quite different - the idea and experience of an "I" that is doing this perceiving, feeling or thinking, that 'owns' these perceptions, feelings and thoughts - and experiences awareness itself as its private property - the delusion called anavamala."
What came to me was that saying that I can hear the clock ticking is an example of the cause-effect thinking that afflicts the West in the light of the belief that things are simply present, there, waiting to be perceived. If we believe that, then of course a simple thing like hearing a ‘ticking’ sound must be CAUSED by something else - the clock. Ten thousand times a day we repeat this in ten thousand situations. I found myself in bed suddenly intellectually aware that there was no clock or ticking, there was a "playing forth" of the clock through its ticking, indeed a playing forth of the clock as such - a 'clocking' etc. In other words Paramshiva playing forth or releasing itself in the form of a clock and its ticking NOW, revelling in the joy of resolving Seth's account of the 'Primary Dilemma' (referred to in your essay on Awareness, Paramshiva and 'The Dreaming') by releasing from its ownership all potential things such as 'clocks', and all potential individuals that might look at or hear them.
In this way, I felt a different take on why we refer to ‘I’ ten thousand times a day. Because of the way we think about reality, that things are simply present, we feel that we are here, simply present, almost ‘waiting to be perceived by ourselves or others’, there must be a cause of that and that cause is the ‘I’. Just as the clock ticks so is the ‘I’ thinking, feeling, acting etc. And yet it isn’t like that. Intellectually I worked my way through the idea of Awareness ‘I’-ing, thinking feeling, acting etc. to a point where I've never felt it like that in that way before. And as I was lying there feeling the silence surrounding the ticking, I could sense Michael Kosok's wonderful phrase ‘endlessly once’. That is, that ticking is Shiva releasing that sound NOW and being released of that sound NOW - "endlessly once" and not back then. I got a real sense of just how present the Primary Dilemma still is and always will be the driving force.
Then I was playing with the question of why we must sustain the reality of God. It is obvious that if we are to save the earth and ourselves, we have to discover AWARENESS, take time to be Aware. If we don’t the earth will be destroyed as Seth says and another earth appear in its place and we have another go at it. So presumably, in order to not destroy earth, we must discover Awareness. That whole process is actually, like everything else, a process of dreaming it, feeling it, worshipping it (in the sense of me worshipping the search for truth) and finally giving birth to it. But it is obvious that if we destroy the earth, we have ‘fucked up’. Therefore to not fuck up - or undo the mess we have made, we must discover Awareness - which means re-discovering and, in the long run, sustaining and re-creating God as pure Awareness.
January 7, 2009
DIVINE AND HUMAN DILEMMAS AND DIS-EASE
I want to point out a correlation between 'The Primary Dilemma' (God's need to find a way to release all potentialities of awareness into actuality referred to in Peter's earlier post on 'Awareness, Paramshiva and 'The Dreaming') and the nature of illness (see also Peter's article on 'Awareness and Illness'). I believe that understanding an aware relation to illness in terms of what Seth called this Primary Dilemma can cast light on both, in fact on all human dilemmas.
Example: I find myself with a pain in the neck or shoulder. I don’t feel myself. I find myself in a state of discomfort or 'dis-ease'. From this feeling a sense of self develops and I start to experience and say, “I have a pain in the neck or my neck is stiff”. Of course I wish to free myself of that pain, but in owning or possessing it as something 'I have' I am trapped. "Everything is an Awareness" is of course one of the two basic axioms, maxims or mantra of The New Yoga of Awareness.
It means that everything we are aware of is also an awareness of something beyond itself.
The pain too, IS an awareness in itself of something beyond itself, for example an awareness of feeling something or someone as a 'pain in the neck' or an awareness of feeling I am 'shouldering' too much in my job.
Not yet RECOGNISING the pain as an awareness of this sort - it remains just a plain old pain in the neck.
It is only POTENTIALLY an awareness.
Peter has compared illness with pregnancy in his writings.
The state of 'not feeling ourselves' because we experience symptoms of dis-ease is a prelude to 'feeling another self' and giving birth to that new self - one that we are pregnant with in the way All That Is was pregnant with countless potential selves.
The pain in the neck or shoulder is therefore also the awareness of a pregnant or potential SELF.
I prevent this new self from being actualised through my sense of ‘mineness’ or ‘ownership’. The pain increases, I feel worse, my desire to free myself of the pain grows as the agony does. By virtue of feeling ill at ease, I gain a sense of being a self. I identify with what has emerged from a field of awareness and I identify myself as the being who ‘has’ the pain, and I theorise how I caused the pain by doing this or that, for example, sitting in the wrong position.
To free 'myself' of the pain, I must overcome 'anavamala' - the sense of it being 'mine'. By reminding myself that the AWARENESS of a pain is not itself a pain and not itself anything painful, I apply the 'Fundamental Distinction’ central to The Awareness Principle - between anything we experience and the pure awareness of experiencing it. In other terms I start to become 'lucidly awake', aware of the pain as a sort of waking life "bodydream" (PW). Applying The Awareness Principle to the pain means recognising that:
1. I am the larger awareness FIELD out of which the pain emerges and not the intense FOCUS of awareness that constitutes the pain.
2.The pain is an awareness of something that I can awaken to.
3.The pain is also a potential self that I can give birth to from the awareness of it.
The notion of God 'withdrawing-into-presence' introduced in “Awareness, Paramshiva and 'The Dreaming’” can also be correlated with an aware relation to illness:
The "withdrawal" is into the transcendental awareness of the pain (for example by identifying with the space around it). In doing so I open up a space OF awareness within which I can experience its 'immanent' aspect - taking time to inwardly experience the pain as a particular way of feeling myself - as a felt self. By thus "taking time to be aware" (the most basic Practice of Awareness) the feeling and self embodied in the pain will, in time, transform into another feeling and another sense of self. Reminding myself that the awareness of pain is not itself a pain, I am able to grant more awareness to the pain - feel it more. This in turn allows the awareness it IS to come to mind. It also allows a feeling of the potential self it is pregnant with to be felt in a bodily way and embodied - for example a self that feels able to no longer shoulder more than it wants to at work, or that can and does disattach itself from whatever or whoever was felt as a 'pain in the neck'.
Becoming lucid in the waking ‘dream’ of an illness, I can then fully become the new self through recognising what was merely a feeling that there was ‘more to it’ when I just wondered why 'I had' the stiff neck. The potential self too, is recognised in my thoughts and emotions, felt as a new bodily sense of self - one that is embodied through a new demeanour and behaviours.
Returning to the parallel with the Primary Dilemma - God's need to find a way to release the potential into actuality and the pain or "agony" that, according to Seth, he went through to do it - what I am suggesting is that not just 'my' pain in the neck but all human dilemmas and dis-ease are an ongoing expression and embodiment of that Primary Dilemma - since they TOO are a means whereby a potential awareness - and "potential selves" are actualised.
It 'was' through the Primary Dilemma that everything 'came' to be actualised, but it seems to be also an on-going template for anything that we can transcend and release ourselves from by releasing or 'giving birth' to the AWARENESS POTENTIALS and potential 'selves' or 'awarenesses' it bears within it.
February 20, 2009
Here I have just finished meditating the further reflections on the nature of individuality freedom and the 'ego' on your bulletin board. Again I see the new formulation of portion with inseparability, and expression with distinctness.
By juxtaposing ego as a portion of the awareness that we are, while being distinct in its own right, it is ‘easy’ to make the point that it is a small step to the ego regarding itself as separate from awareness, and then ultimately owning it. I also liked the no essential duality between egoity and ego-lessness. That is, it is not a case of either ego or non-ego behaviour. By thinking of it that way, people are forced into the crude interpretation of impulses that you refer to. If we are not to be bound up in ego, well we will just respond, ‘spontaneously’, to whatever impulse we feel. The over arching solution though, AWARENESS, provides one with a pool of potential actions, impulses etc from which to choose. Thus, for me, real freedom comes when we ‘have our cake and eat it too’ combining the best of egoity - we choose - and the best of egolessness - a vast ocean of awareness that we and our actions, choices, impulses emerge from.
I have been conducting some interesting experiments with myself. I have been listening to audiobooks with my iPod and found an interesting paradox. I was listening to Tagore’s Sadhana and was well aware of just how hard it is to listen to an audiobook. To concentrate, to focus on the words and actually take them in. So many times I find myself having to ‘rewind’ the ‘tape’ and play back what I just completely missed. It reminded me of batting when I was a cricketer which wasn’t easy for me. The more I told myself to focus and concentrate and ‘don’t get out, don’t take a wild swipe, watch the ball etc’ the less it worked. The more I tried to focus on the words in my head listening to the audiobook, the more I got distracted etc. The more I closed my eyes to ‘concentrate’, the worse it got. Then I finally discovered the secret. The way to concentrate and listen was to open myself up completely to the whole environment I was in, to be aware of the whole room, especially the space in the room, and be that space taking in the audiobook in the context of everything else in the room. I had to intend to listen to the words but take in everything else at the same time. And I found in doing so that I was in the blessed space that I should have been in all those years ago when batting, that is, relaxed but alert, not focused solely on the ball but aware of everything. Listening to this audiobook in this way I was then able to slip into that state where I was taking in the book but was especially waiting for those felt senses of significance that crop up in me hearing a certain phrase. So I would switch off the ‘tape’ and explore the unthought stuff in the words of Tagore. Now I have been saying to myself, what if I approached everything I was doing as if I was listening to an audiobook? That is, taking in all that there was to take in, while intending something in the forefront of attention? Quite illuminating to discover that the very meaning of focus and concentration that sports people go on about isn’t actually what they are implying.
