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A Keynote To Selves: Golden Earth Tales

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(This is Part Twelve of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

(Raphael delivered the following address on Saturday, May 7, 2016)

I would like to begin by thanking each and every one of me for your presence here this afternoon.

I am especially grateful for your curiosity, your desire, along with your hopes and your dreams.

I called this private meeting by specific invitation to each and every one of you as the personalities that make up what is tragically and all too simply referred to as ‘me’, as if ‘you’ didn’t exist. I know we all too often seek to be seen as one, understandably so, given our culture and the cults we are inescapably a part of, but we are in fact a glorious ‘we’ that I seek not only to address today, but desperately also need to get to know.

I know that you as distinct persons live in me as I often experience two or more of you as a tension or a polarity between two choices or energies inside of me. When I am less present to that tension, one of you willingly and sometimes willfully steps in to hold that tension. Here I again see your presence, your reality, your power, and your being. I could go on with example after example of your distinct and separate reality, but that would be in service only of convincing others, not present here today. You, I sense and feel, need little convincing.

I wonder what it is like being a part of me. I wonder what it is like for you when in my partial or full absence, you are left with doing life as me and in my name. What is it like for you to feel the power of my life; the identity of my life; the realized and unrealized dreams and potential of my life? What is ‘my’ life to you? How much of it is a shared reality of yours and ‘mine’, and in what ways? When and why were you born? Who in me did you rule over or submit to, and why?

Though we share one body, one brain, one physical history, and the illusion of being only one, we are in fact many. We are each different. We are each unique. As the Apostle Paul tried to convey in his teaching about the body of Christ when he said ‘Can the hand say to the foot, I have no need of you,’ we must recognize that we are a ‘we’, both separate, distinct and an inseparable oneness at the same time. Both are true. The folly would again be quite plain if when asked, “How are you?” to reply, “I am doing great. My liver has cancer, but I am just great, thanks.” As Paul went on to conclude: ‘When one suffers, all suffer. When one rejoices, all rejoice.’

I would like to not only recognize the fact of our distinct beings, but go on to get to know and feel the distinctions among us. I cannot say that I know you unless I am allowed and afforded a way to feel what you feel, to see what you see, to hear what you hear. I can no longer overlay my view of life onto you and rob you and myself from the sensational pleasure of mutual curiosity.

If one of you is not well, ‘I’ am not well. One of you, or I, may wish to hide another part of me that is in pain for a variety of reasons, as I know too often is the case for most of us ‘humans’. But let us be much clearer here in this private place than we are in the public place; ‘I’ am not well when one of you, one of ‘us’ is in pain, or disconnect, or has a deep unmet need.

All too often, ‘I’ have presented the conclusive “I am fine, thanks,” in response to an inquiry about how I was doing. I was quick to divert the lie by returning the presumptive non-question back to the other ‘person’; “And, how are you?” We have for so long co-signed this co-dependent perception of self as being a single personality that it is truly stunning that any functionality and sanity remains in us. We have even gone so far to as to culturally outlaw the very idea of being more than one with labels such as ‘multiple personality disorder’. I would like to go on record in this meeting, in this place with each of you present, to say that the term we must now accept into our lexicon is in fact ‘single personality disorder.’ The source of so much of our neurosis and the suffering of people is found here in this denial of being.

Before I wax too strong in my convictions and again fall prey to an old focus on others, I must apologize to you, the parts of me that I present as ‘I’. I deeply and profoundly apologize for my complicity in this appearance of being well when I was not. I was wrong. I am sorry. I am sorry for all the pain I caused to each and every one of you in a multitude of ways that it will take some time to fully feel. I wish to end this cycle now. I wish to take all the time it takes to feel it all, even if it extends beyond this life, or to alternative realities of what I’ve thought ‘life’ to be. I want to feel what you feel. I want to experience life from where you experience it. I must also ask each of you to join me in this apology to one another; to accept the end of this façade along with all of its attendant maladies that take away from our true and glorious wellbeing.

Both I and we have lived a long time in a picture of reaching out to others. I and we identified strongly with attaining a picture of being a leader with influence over others. Here, we felt and thought and imagined would be our fulfillment to the full. Others would convey and reflect back to us our worth, our sense of a life well lived. Today, I am inviting each and every one of you to see that the others I sought to help, that I sought to gain the favor of, are in fact not ‘other’, but WE are the ‘they’ we sought to heal and help. The realization of self that we sought to attain inside of a picture of being a healer to others is now dawning on our consciousness as the realization of our selves. There is no other to heal. There are no others in need of healing for me to offer or affect healing to.

Just as Jesus said, ‘I am the door, If anyone enter in by me, he shall find rest,’ so too each of us must find the grace and power to say the same thing of our-selves. Each singular one of us, in this multiplicity of being, is responsive to and responsible for our own healing. We must each own our own healing. Each one of us is responsible for our own conditioning, our own beliefs, and our own relationships to all of life. Each of us must now find the door to our hearts to search our souls deeply to determine what is worthy of remaining and what must be let go of in the sacred domain of our lives.

What we previously imagined to be the good life of being known by others must now be transformed into the much deeper and more glorious good life of knowing our selves. Our sense of meaning and purpose and gift to the world must also now originate and complete inside of our selves. Our fame must spread deep and wide to all the ends of our own kingdom.

How could I have imagined that we could have been of service to others while there was violence to our selves? How could I have dreamed of a world at peace while our own world was not even acknowledged? I want to sacrifice these imaginations and dreams on the sacred and holy altar of this new calling that is here now. I now know however, that unlike I thought in the past, I cannot mandate anything. I have no mandate today.

I have a desire. I have a dream.

In my dream, I awoke. I awoke to the presence and personality of you. In my dream, I was pierced by acute curiosity of who and why and what you were and are, and will become. This dream has overtaken me. I wish to yield every remaining breath and sunrise to this dream.

I surrender my future to us. I will love you in every breath. I will long to get to know you in every joy and in every sorrow.

I long for this day to begin now.

May we enter a new world now,

world without beginning,

world without end,

Amen.

Thank you to each and every one of me.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter via @raphaelawen, or on facebook: ­­­­­­­facebook.com/raphaelawen1. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

The Magic Of Your Power Combined With Your Vulnerability: Golden Earth Tales

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(This is Part Eleven of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

Life is about growth and change. Not even death affords an escape from this reality; for death is not a cessation of being, but only more change.

Our journey into and through a physical life is a great metaphor and reflects this reality. Our soul being accepts the journey of taking on human flesh. This journey into human flesh begins as the microscopic combination of sperm and egg, which gives way to a time of exponential growth and change, becoming comfortable and familiar with a home environment, only to be burped out into a brand new world, and then another. Infancy gives way to toddlerhood, which gives way to childhood, then adolescence, teen years, adulthood, mid-life, and into our fullness of life, and completion of a life.

Our soul chose the change of taking on human flesh, human emotion, human gender, and human experience.

You chose to incarnate.

You chose to change.

You chose to surrender to having needs and desires.

Most of us forget this for much of our lives or even for many entire lifetimes. Most of us become attached to belief systems and ways of life that enable us to maintain this forgetfulness of the power and presence of our choice. We do this at almost any cost.

This is not without good reason. In our power, we chose human life; we chose vulnerability. We are unable to escape human vulnerability with any obtainable thing or relationship. In fact, every desirable thing you obtain only heightens the fear of losing that good thing. Even life itself, we fear losing. Most of us can barely stand to feel the utter susceptibility we find ourselves in. We’d rather effort a myriad of feelings and distractions to not have to feel this vulnerability.

Strangely, we put our power in service of denying our vulnerability. In so doing, we miss out on the magic of both.

You have most likely structured your relationship with life to provide you with a sense that life is happening to you. Like a monk who has chosen life in a monastery, you surrender to an arrangement of what you can expect in return for what you are expected to give. Life is fearfully bigger than you. You make a deal for some predictability, some security, and accept the monotony that comes with that. All of this as an exchange to maintain the sense that life is safely bigger than you.

Now, you get to feel like you are riding the waves of life as best you can with the choices you have. You have outsmarted life. You have surrendered to it. You have made yourself smaller than life. You let life circumstance direct and lead you. Aren’t you spiritual? Aren’t you surrendered? You have given yourself to God (in some form) and God will take care of you.

What if this is only a set up perception of life from this part of you that hasn’t reconciled itself to the vulnerability you find yourself in?

What if life isn’t actually happening to you, but instead, you are happening to life?

You are not the victim of another person, or an illness, God or any devil, a slowing economy, aging or any other of the multitude of things that are felt to occur to us.

What if life is only and ever reflecting back to you the power of your choice?

What if life is in such deep and reverent gratitude to you for the gift of your power filled surrender to human vulnerability that life only wants to reflect back to you your power and greatness?

Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search For Meaning, shares his experience in the hell hole of a nazi concentration camp where he came to the deep and profound realization that it was he and only he that could interpret and apply meaning to his experience. His captors, he came to realize, had not even the slightest ability to take that power from him unless he gave it to them.

What meanings are you applying to the circumstances you find yourself in? Are the circumstances happening to you or are you responsible for creating and drawing these circumstances to yourself? What is life and its never ending change wanting to awaken you to?

What courageous step is life asking you to take now in this never ending discovery of who and what you are?

What are you done with that’s time to let go of? A relationship? An identity? A habit pattern? A way of life?

What are you ready to embrace and allow entrance into your life?

What courage are you in possession of that can fuel your next step?

Life only and ever wants to take you into more of you. Life understands your fear, for it has felt its own fear of the life that it finds itself in. Life invites you out to play, to discover, to be curious of who and what you will become around the corner of your next choice.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter via @raphaelawen, or on facebook: ­­­­­­­facebook.com/raphaelawen1. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive your support.

Who You Are And What You Are Is Not A Question: Golden Earth Tales

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(This is Part Ten of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

Who you are and what you are is not a question. A question is something by definition that you seek an answer for and when that question is answered, the quest is over.

Who you are and what you are is part of the great unknown. Who you are and what you are cannot ever be known.

You are so much more, so vastly much more than you ever dreamed of. In fact, most all of your dreams and imaginings so far have been about trying to manage this ferocity of your being. So too, have been your relationships and occupations.

You have pulled most everything about you into your orbit in hopes of, on one hand, obtaining a clearer picture of who you are and, on the other hand, needing to dim the piercing light of who and what you are.

Your greatness has no measure. You are forever a part of the great unknowable.

What quest remains, it is not the quest to know, but instead the quest to be.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter via @raphaelawen, or on facebook: ­­­­­­­facebook.com/raphaelawen1. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

Consciousness And ‘Single Personality Disorder’: Golden Earth Tales

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Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive your support!

(This is Part Nine of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

I hope you’ve been enjoying this series and that it has been tweaking your feelings and your awareness on different levels and in different ways.

We’ve covered together how who and what ‘you’ perceive ‘yourself’ to be is but a fraction of who and what you really are as a human being, as a person, as a self. We looked together at how the self, both in its essence and its expression, is something closer to Infinite Love. We may be limited in our use of linguistics to describe this reality, but our ‘Arising Isness,’ as we called it, is powerfully unlimited.

We stretched our consciousness together in the previous eight blogs to get a feeling tone of what we are speaking about. I encourage you to take in each of those prior blogs with an open and desirous heart before taking in this one, as we are going to take this to a new level today that I hope blows your mind.

But first, a little lead-in…

You are awareness. You are consciousness. You are not your body. You are not your emotions. You are not your mind. You have a mind. You have emotions and you have a body. What holds body, mind and emotion in containment is consciousness.

You may be new to this idea that you are an awake and aware consciousness, and you may not readily see yourself as a consciousness. I would say then that you are less conscious of being a consciousness. Your consciousness is not then a big part of your waking awareness. If this is true, then you have more of a ‘density’ and less of a ‘porosity’ in your aware sense of self. This density then is an energetic block or filter to you having deepening and growing self-awareness.

Everything I’ve said so far today I don’t think would be too different from so many spiritual practices that are out there today. I may be using unfamiliar words, but the energy is the same. Even Christianity, as I practiced it for most of my life, was about expanding my sense and experience of self into a place of being ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’ that was meant to color my life. Also imperative in Christianity was holding an identity of ‘who I am in Christ’ as an elevation of consciousness. Daily devotional practice of prayer and meditation in the scripture was intended to induce an inner change of self-awareness.

Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism alike all offer something similar in that they want to raise your consciousness to something they deem as some kind of a higher plane. This blog series is no different in that sense. Soulfullheart is also no different in that sense in that it too seeks to raise consciousness to something different from the more common or status quo.

I’d like to make a grand deviation today from this common denominator of all spiritual practice. I’d like to offer you something truly new and different from every spiritual path that I’m aware of. I believe this has the power to truly rock your world in a profound sense.

That is of course, if you’re up for it. Please open your heart, feel your desire, fasten your seatbelt and come with me for a ride. Come fully and then decide what your truth is. Here’s the ride:

All spiritual practice is greatly limited by a self-perception of oneself being a single personality. Of course the ‘you’ that considers itself a single personality is a single personality, but that is because this is in fact only a single part of you doing your life as you. ‘You’ have in effect been hijacked by a part of you and you don’t even know it.

You are in fact a ‘multiple personality’ within a larger conscious awareness. What you call ‘you’ is in fact a whole family of personalities, sharing a body and a mind. I hope this isn’t such a stretch for you to see, because it really feels like a ‘no, duh’ to me.. ‘how could we have missed this huge piece?’

Like any family, there is inside of you a huge range of being what we call functional or dysfunctional depending on the long list of family dynamics at play. Power plays, shutdowns, pleaser roles, etc., with all of these coming from distinct parts or subpersonalities of yourself, to make up what you have just called ‘you’ up till now.

We’ve been told that being a ‘multiple personality’ is a disorder that one needs to seek therapy for. I’m telling you that the true disorder is rather a perception of being a ‘single personality’. The ‘you’ that leads most people’s lives and does everything from their spiritual seeking to their careers and their relationships is only one part of them, or one part of them in a strategic alliance with another part to give it its functionality or dysfunctionality. This is the part of them that is running their life and doing their life. It is primarily a part of you that is reading this series, evaluating it, and deciding if this new idea I’m offering today is for ‘you’ or not.

A part of you may be having a big reaction to my line of reasoning today. I’m writing provocatively to press this part of you and its distinct reaction into your awareness in an attempt to make my point.

Could this really be? Could it be that you are not anywhere close to the integrated being that you imagined yourself to be? If this is true, it really explains so much. It takes huge pressure off of yourself. It also puts a new and healthy pressure on you to discover who you really are.

Up till now, you see, with this perception of yourself being a single personality, there is only this poorly equipped primary part of you holding your ‘you show.’ You are in fact a whole cast of characters seeking to get their needs met and adapting in a host of ways and means inside of you – all the while only under the care of this primary part of you. It’s like a teenager barely old enough and responsible enough to babysit has been charged with doing life.

What I want to impress upon you today is that a profound change occurs when you let in this self-perception that I am offering you. Then it changes again another huge degree when a new and deeper sense of self can arise as a healthy parent to these parts of you. This is nothing less than a tsunami of change to let into your life, and some careful consideration is called for.

If you wish to go on doing your life as you’ve known and perceived yourself to be as a single and unified self, you of course have most of current consciousness to support you in that choice. I personally would not trade what I have discovered in coming to know myself as a tapestry of parts for anything, especially not for alignment with a deeply suffering and struggling collective consciousness.

In this blog series, we’ve looked at ‘you’ as being an individual or an ‘in-divi-dual.’ In that, we saw that a human being is this paradoxical ‘duality that can’t be divided.’ The duality we are talking about is on one hand a ‘singleness’ of being and on the other hand an ‘allness’ of being that can’t be singled out. This whole range of being is like a cosmic projection of the Infinite Love that is the essence of all life – projecting itself onto a screen where you show up as a you. If any of this sounds confusing, that’s because it is confusing! We don’t at the best of times have much of a clue as to what and who we are. We settle for measly roles and identities to make up for this unbearable wonder of being that we are. This blog series has been an attempt so far to expand out your sense of self into the cosmic realities we’ve dove into together.

Where I want to take you in today’s blog is to feel into that who you feel yourself to be in this cosmic sense is very different from who you feel yourself to be in an everyday sense. Embracing the cosmic Nondual, as it is called, into your waking reality is a challenge that most people seeking it become very focused on and dedicated to. I’m saying that the reasons behind your interest (or disinterest), focus and struggle have to do with this entire undiscovered world of you being a tapestry of parts, rather than the single personality that has been running your you show up till now.

There’s this magical and expanded sense of self that extends into and includes no less than all of life and the universe. Then I am offering that the single you, the you that differs from me, is in fact an entire another wild ride of discovery into yourself as being so much more again than you imagined.

So, how does this ride land in you, or part of you rather? Does part of you feel ready to let go of doing your ‘you show’ the way he or she has? Is part of you ready for a new you to show up that hasn’t been around up till now?

‘Part of me’ so enjoyed sharing its passion with you today. ‘I’ enjoyed feeling this part of me express its passion.

I invite you and your parts to read more about parts of yourself, in an article Jelayan and I wrote in an article here.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter via @raphaelawen, or on facebook: ­­­­­­­facebook.com/raphaelawen1. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

‘I seek, therefore I am’: Golden Earth Tales

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Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive your support!

(This is Part Eight of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

Who are you, dear reader of this blog? What brings you here? I hope I am not being too forward with asking such pointed questions. Let me back up.

First, I want to thank you for being here.

Thank you for being here.

You are here with your being.

Your being, I venture to say, is seeking something. You would not be here (or anywhere else online for that matter) if you were not seeking something.

Seeking something is what makes you a you.

You may be someone who stumbled on this blog series or seen it mentioned somewhere. I welcome you here.

You may be an old friend coming to check out what I am doing, or a family member who misses me since we left off contact. I welcome you here. I miss you too. Our curiosity about each other and missing of each other evidences that we are unified in our need and desire for something. We may have parted over a debate over what particular something is worthy of seeking, but we are joined back together in the realization that we share a deep and profound commonality in that we seek.

You may be someone who feels sharply in disagreement about my life choices or what Soulfullheart is about and you’re here seeking to confirm those suspicions. I welcome you here as well, fellow seeker.

That we are all in search of something is a reality so deep that we are willing to separate over what we seek in order to insure that our freedom to seek, and to seek as we choose, be held intact.

‘I seek, therefore I am’, is our shared humanity.

I have a growing awareness that who and what you and I are is so much more than what we have even hardly begun to discover. What we call, ‘The Self’ is so vast that even our disagreements and differences are a necessary part of our journey of discovery.

I also deeply feel that this quest to know will never be fully realized because who and what we are is an infinitely expanding reality. We can grow in our acceptance of the wonder about what we are, but we will never arrive at any destination of fully knowing ourselves. We’ll have to settle for more instead of all.

As you read these words, can you feel an awakening in you of an expansive feeling of your own bigness? The feeling that you are so much bigger than you have ever realized about yourself is a challenging feeling to let in.

Your current experience of life is but a fraction of what there is to experience, and this will remain true for the rest of your life.

This points to the reason most of us fill our lives with so much busyness and distraction. Underneath the busyness is an unfelt and disturbing feeling of ‘I don’t know who I am.’ When that feeling is made conscious as well as accepted to be a beautiful part of your humanity, it changes so much about how life looks and feels to you.

Your seeking to know yourself is but a part of the universe’s search to know itself.

The love that you seek is but a part of the love that you are.

The life you seek is but a part of the life that you are.

I am one with you in that experience. I am one with you in this essence.

Here is where we are utterly inseparable.

Here, between you, me, and whatever we call the Divine, there is no ‘other’.

We are all One.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter via @raphaelawen, or on facebook: facebook.com/raphaelawen1. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

Realizing Reality Together: Golden Earth Tales

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Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

(This is Part Seven of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

Thank you for joining in on this blog series. I’m really glad to have your involvement.

I have this expanding sense humming through me today of what a human being actually is. I could say more accurately is that I really don’t know what a human being is. And as I accept that into my consciousness, I let in arising wonder. This sense of wonder and childlike curiosity extends to me, you, and even to the Christian couple who this past week accused me of being ‘a cult leader who talks to demons’.

Friend, foe, or in between, we are all part of the human cult and we are all in search of something. We affect each other and we are an intertwined part of each other way more than we realize.

I’ve also had a growing sense of some other ‘participants’ in this blog series from another dimension called Golden Earth. It’s actually what got this blog series launched and I wrote about it in part one. I don’t have any five-physical-sense ‘proof’ of its existence, but I have been afforded the self-permission to imagine it being ‘real.’ I ‘see’ and ‘feel’ through my imagination the active interest of a group of students that like hanging out together in the Golden Earth café and are keenly interested in brainstorming together around what I’ve been putting out in this blog series.

Of course, this all sounds like a science fiction story, and I can say that maybe that is in fact what all this imagination is – a story from beyond our normal scope of perception. What’s crazy though for me (in a good kind of crazy way) is that I get this growing sense that what you and I call ‘real’ and verify as everyday normal reality through our five physical sense perception of reality, doesn’t sound that far off from my ‘Golden Earth’ reality. My sense is that the reality that you and I participate in as ‘real’ is only real because you and I have in fact ‘realized’ it together. We made it up. We made it up in our own personal ‘fact-ory’. And then to top it off, we agreed that it was real. What a bunch of conspirators we are! I guess I am a powerful cult leader after all….wow…. and so are you …. like it or not. We make stuff up as we go.

If any of this stuff is a more accurate picture of the underlying reality that undergirds what we call reality, then at the very least, it puts us back in a place of childlike wonder. That childlike wonder opens out all the edges of what I consider real and true. This lens of childlike wonder filters and swirls through my adult mind and leaves me with a, ‘Holy shit, who the hell are we?’ feeling. ‘Holy’ and ‘hell’ are now in the same sentence somehow.

I mentioned the couple who called me ‘a cult leader who listens to demons’ as I’m still digesting this week the energy of our all-too-real confrontation. While my personal boundary is that no one gets to be a part of my life while they want to energize their reality in an intolerant way towards me, there is another way that none of us can escape anyone else. As we’ve been feeling into in this series: we, at a deep and fundamental level of reality, are all One. We cannot even differentiate enough from that Oneness for there to be an ‘other’ to have a difference with, let alone fight with them.

My mind starts to ride out on some of these feeling waves and mind waves, like a great surfboard ride, and it comes up with more and more profound questions. It’s hard staying on one train of thought for very long. It isn’t too far off from getting stoned really. But before you judge that as a bad thing, consider that what you call ‘reality’ may be, in fact, coming from the completely intoxicated and drug-impaired perception of what you and I just made up and declared real. Hell, you’re not the safe designated driver to get me home safely that you imagine yourself to be. Nor is the Christian couple offering me their Jesus picture of deliverance and salvation. I may not even be safe to drive myself home! I just may need to walk, or stumble, or just pass out on the sidewalk and try again tomorrow, thank you very much!

I love this madness!

I can feel the students at the Golden Earth café really rocking about now, so excited to feel us feeling into this together. If we can soften our perception of reality back to a place of childlike wonder, then they and we get to come out and play. I see the universe knocking on the door of my childhood home – “Hello, Mrs. Awen. Can Raphael come out and play today?”

When and how in the heaven and in the hell did we lose our sense of play? When and how did we make spirituality about being right or being saved or delivered?

The good news is that we fell and bumped our head and are suffering a bit of amnesia. We only fell from the grace of knowing who and what we are. We didn’t fall and bump ourselves out of god’s grace, as the Christian narrative goes. That story has held a good many of us (myself deeply included) for a good long time, and it’s running out of gas. New stories are now vying for our attention.

My truth is that you and I don’t have but the tiniest bit of what there is to be had as far as your sense of self extends. You are so much more than you ever dreamed yourself to be. We live in an Infinite-Love reality that is ever expanding, and so everything we come to treasure as meaningful or real only gets its value because it calls us to get comfortable with deepening our picture of reality.

With this blog series, I’m realizing I don’t have anything to sell you on. Well, to be honest, I’ve been putting out there my own ideas of reality and I guess making a case for that. But, in another way, I get to admit that I don’t know what I’m doing or what I’m selling. That, I feel, is what has earned me the title this week of being a powerful cult leader – I am in the great unknown and dangerously having some fun and dangerously enticing others to join me, and what this couple could see and verify for me is that I just might succeed in pulling that off – God forbid, hallelujah and praise Allah!

Reality is being auctioned off to the highest bidder. What do you have to bid for this treasure? What kind of reality do you dream of? What do you want? Deep down in the depths of your being? What makes you tick? What’s your wanter wanting underneath its wants? Are you angry that what you’ve subscribed to hasn’t paid off? I’m glad if you’re pissed. Get pissed at me if you need to. I’ll throw it back in your face and we can be a part of changing consciousness together.

As I said in my last blog, we as a species are at an epochal shift in our consciousness and existence. It is the time of the greatest change we have encountered so far. We go through periods of relative stability (history) that are followed by tumultuous and sudden change (herstory).

You and I get to be in on this, in whatever way we want to be. Once we begin awakening to that, it changes everything, and doesn’t stop.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter via @raphaelawen, or on facebook: ­­­­­­­facebook.com/raphaelawen1. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

Spiritual La-La Land In A Time Of Impending Collapse: Golden Earth Tales

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Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

(This is Part Six of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

It’s time in this blog series to pose a very important question.

The question goes something like this: How is seeking the nondual, or any other form of spiritual seeking for that matter, relevant at such a crazy time of global change that we are in the midst of? How is it not just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

We are in the midst of epic changes to our industrial society and its way of life that we are all embedded in. The long and the short of it is that gasoline from a gas station, water from a tap, food from a store, or electricity from a hole in the wall are not likely to persist for much longer. All of the inter-related systems that hold these realities in place are growing more and more vulnerable and tension-filled by the day. I am personally surprised each passing month to see the present order of things stumble against the odds into the next month.

The transition we are facing promises to be difficult almost beyond imagination, chaotic and marked with great loss of life.

My sense is that if you haven’t faced this approaching chaos and come to your own personal grounded choices around it, your spirituality (of any kind) is in la-la land.

Eighteen months ago, my wife and I and two close friends chose to relocate to living off grid two countries south and entered into a crash course of learning to grow our own food. It’s a long story and a great story and you can read it here in our free e-book called Living As If. It’s free monetarily speaking, but reading it will cost you. It will cost you some of your indifference; it will cost you some of your comfort; and it will cost you some of your happiness that’s based in denial. If you’ve been looking to spend those things from your life, the free e-book is a great place to start.

I almost want to apologize for pontificating here. Almost. I just called you indifferent, didn’t I? I am trying to build an audience, not thin one out, but this message cannot be pansied around with. If you haven’t considered the changes that you can feel are coming, you are fucking around with your own life. It’s just that plain and simple. It’s suicide and indifferent to boot. I’d much rather you got offended and left off reading my blogs than using my teaching on the nondual as a way to keep your pile of denial intact. What I’d most rather see, however, is that you could listen to your own heart without needing any prodding from me or anyone else and prepare to ride out the coming storm.

Facing into this with power and choice will feel like nothing short of joining a cult. Your seeking to get others on board in your circle of family and friends will be seen as proselytizing. It will probably add up to being the most difficult thing you have undertaken this life.

When you look at this though through a first-things-first lens, no other approach makes any sense at all. As humans, our needs for survival will always trump our needs for seeking meaning. We embrace spirituality only when our basic needs of food, water, and shelter are met and have a reasonable expectation of continuity.

You may be in a place of what appears to be life-stability at the moment, but I venture to say that you have been sensing the approach of deep structural changes coming to our collective way of life. How could you not? This has left you with an ungrounded feeling. Your ventures into spirituality and meaning are left with one foot outside of the circle. You’re not all here, and rightly so, you shouldn’t be. Maybe ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, this could be a different story, but not now.

As I’ve been writing this series on the nondual, I’ve had a growing sense of disconnect to be offering it into an audience I fear has done little to reconcile with these coming changes. I’m openly asking the question of myself: how does this form of spiritual seeking that I’m advocating for not just another form of a mind-numbing drug?

The shit is about to hit the fan – make no mistake about it.

Like the Captain in the movie Titanic so soberly said just minutes after the iceberg was struck, “This ship will go down.” The Titanic story is a powerful prophetic story for our time. Our collective hubris is only exceeded by our denial, and we are about to be called on it.

Big outbreath….phew. I had to say that… in that way.

My own tendency towards denial is as good as the next person’s; the difference though is that I am aware of mine. That awareness has led and continues to lead to changes – not talk of changes, but balls-to-the-wall grounded change.

So what then is there left to say about the nondual in relation to all this unavoidable change?

My truth is that all the talk in the world of the nondual isn’t worth a fiddler’s fart if you are not in your power facing this approaching storm.

Consciousness itself has prepared this transformation for us, not against us. Consciousness doesn’t see the loss of physical life with the same hysteria as we do. Consciousness sees it as a transformation, not an end in itself. What is at stake is not your consciousness per se, but your physical life and the goals you as a soul associated with this life.

I am convinced that most will not (as they say) know what hit ‘em, as they feel completely victimized and overwhelmed by circumstances outside of their control. Everything in their conditioning will support their chosen view of excusing themselves.

But for those of us who unmistakably sense this coming storm, such luxuries of consciousness don’t add up to much, do they?

The Christians believe strongly in Jesus returning to sweep them away before it gets too unbearable – that at least gives them some form of hope or comfort. Their collective sense of coming chaos is well founded and grounded; it’s just their solution that doesn’t add up. No savior is returning to take care of your business for you. All the universe, God, the Divine, and Jesus himself will be glad to help you – but no one and nothing is going to do this for you. Doing stuff for you is known as infantilizing, and we are moving past that now in our emerging collective consciousness.

You can expect to be infantilized if you must and that will ensure you some comfort in the midst of this great chaos, though it will also pretty much guarantee your early demise. Or you can adult-up and make choices with the power you have and ride out this storm consciously in the deep and personal transformation of yourself and the collective that this will prove to be.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter via @raphaelawen, or on facebook: ­­­­­­­facebook.com/raphaelawen1

Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

Letting In Arising Wonder: Golden Earth Tales

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(This is Part Six of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

I recall when I was first introduced to the terms ‘dual’ and ‘nondual’. The teaching intrigued me. It resonated in my heart.

I learned that an entire world of wonder had been dimmed down inside of me, as well as in my culture. This, I learned was due to the mind’s ability and propensity to categorize and ‘map’ my experiences, judging and evaluating them that in turn removed me from the essence and wonder of the experience itself.

The basic teaching goes that we, with our mind’s capacity, ‘dualize’ what we experience. We rate it, we judge it, we locate it – all of which we could not do were it not for this ‘dualizing’ ability. I was taught that the mind, metaphorically speaking, creates something similar to the grid lines that are established over an archaeological dig that provide reference points for where discovered items were found, allowing for mapping, cataloguing, and further study.

The problem, however, is that experience itself and the map of the experience are two very different things, but our minds have lost awareness of this. Our minds instead have become fused with the maps we create of our experience, causing us to lose more and more contact with the aliveness of the experience itself.

Let’s see if we can create a metaphor to bring this home a bit.

What are you doing right now? You’re reading a blog, and sizing up what you are getting out of it. That’s the mental map description/perception of what’s going on. But is there another deeper reality that you do not perceive right now, that is screened out from your perception by this mental map ‘doing’ your experience for you rather than the arising wonder of experience itself?

What else is there to notice? What are you missing, if anything?

What about the use of the written word, in this case English? Here I am referencing pen strokes that evolved into keyboard strokes, conveying written meaning into something called sentences that in turn produce a myriad of brain synapses firing that in turn produce wave after wave of rapid fire evaluations in you, and in turn emotional responses. I don’t guess your mind was paying attention to any of that just now. But isn’t it off-the-charts amazing reality that we came up with the motor skills and the mental skills to create squiggles in the sand that in turn came to be agreed upon and adopted as an alphabet to convey such specifics in meaning?

You are a participator in all of this and I’ll bet that you haven’t given yourself any pats on the back for your achievements in any of this since the third grade. Your use of alphabet and linguistics is all old-hat to you. Your mind has long gone on (or should we say ‘off’) in search of new things, which it will in turn deaden eventually into more of the same-old-same-old.

I could go on and on describing things that have just been assimilated into the mental map of how we navigate experience. There’s your eyeballs; there’s the temperature of the room you’re sitting in and however that came to be; there’s the lingering taste in your mouth from what you just ate; there’s the stream that became a river that became part of a hydroelectric dam that produced the electricity to illuminate the screen you are reading from.

Given all that experience has to offer, it’s an amazing wonder in itself that you are barraged with such oceans of experience without being totally stoned out of your mind in a hallucinogenic experience of what we would call total insanity. You have your mind to thank for that. Your mind ‘dualized’ the aliveness of the experiences themselves into an endless array of filed, categorized, and tamed representations of experience.

But how do we get back to the nondual, the raw experience and its plethora of the wild and amazing? I mean, I don’t want to be totally stoned and unable to function, but I would like a generous helping of arising wonder to be lapping onto my shores in an ever-increasing way. I’d like a good buzz for sure. I think you would too, right?

Here is the offer to discover the nondual where all is an arising wonder, where there are no (or at least, less and less) representational categories by the mind that kill off experience. It’s not too far at all to describe it as an altered state of consciousness. Of course it is.

At this point in my introduction into the world of the nondual is where I was kind of convinced this was for the particularly advanced or evolved in consciousness. It was an ‘attainment’ and that there were many steps between where I was at and where something magical like an ‘nondual awakening’ might begin occurring for me. My mind filed it off as something hopeful for the future, maybe one day. Maybe if I got really dedicated to some kind of meditation process to induce this for me.

My mind, in other words, just dualized the hell out of what I was being introduced to. Part of me pessimistically ‘knew’ that if I really let myself feel this desire for this kind of awakening, I’d probably fall prey to following a bunch of teachers and spending a lot of money in the process, and so it too helped to file this away for another time and place.

What I’ve been saying in this blog series and want to say over and over again is that nondual access isn’t something to attain. You already have it. You may well and correctly say ‘But I don’t experience the arising wonder in my daily experience that you speak of.’ That’s something different, isn’t it? I’m saying that the acceptance inside of yourself that you already have this something is what will precede it transacting for you in your felt experience of life.

You are already as enlightened as you will ever be – ‘positionally’ speaking. That’s part of your ‘In-divi-dual’ (your dual and nondual nature that can’t be separated) as we’ve been saying in this series. All that’s left is for it to manifest for you ‘experientially’. This is something that you are in direct control of. You choose to let into experience what you are already are and have.

Someone else may convince you to let this reality in or reject it, but only you can carry it out. You are the sovereign. There is no God, or god, that will take care of this for you. You have to want it; you have to let it in (if you want to that is!). You are the god who creates your experience here. Ask God/god instead to help YOU let-this-in.

Then fasten your seatbelt because you are opening yourself to a depth of reality that the universe and you are alchemizing through your desire nature.

Why would you settle for anything less?

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter @raphaelawen. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary.

 

 

 

You As An ‘In-divi-dual’: Golden Earth Tales

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(This is Part Four of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

Just before diving back into the warm waters of where we left off, I’m curious what digestions you have going on inside of you from the last blog in this series. I’d love to hear from you through the comments of this blog.

Take a moment if you can to feel what feelings and reactions came up for you in the comparisons we made of your dual and nondual nature.

If you’re like me, the feeling that the nondual needed me (and us) in order to come to know itself, began to open some things out for you.

It suggests (and this may be sacrilege to some) that the nondual wasn’t complete in itself. It decided at some point to extend its completeness out of itself into the expression of you and I, and the rest of the conscious universe. It birthed something out of itself.

However we imagine the infinite completeness of the nondual to be, it would seem that in its consciousness, it came to want something. Even if that wanting was a wanting to share its completeness, the nondual came to have a need. It lacked. It wanted to have an ‘other’ both to share its bounty with, and as a reflective mirror in which to look back on itself. We, along with the rest of the conscious universe, were birthed out of this need.

Need, want, and desire is the stuff that parented us. This is a tough one for many people to come to terms with. Many seek out the nondual as a way to tame their desire nature, feeling that their desire nature is at root of their suffering. Many spiritual teachers in turn offer this as a hook to gain adherents.

Identifying with one’s nondual nature will not help anyone rid themselves of their desire nature, though many will stumble in making the attempt. It will change a lot related to your desire nature, but desire itself is an inseparable part of being the combination of dual and nondual natures that we are.

This brings us back to where you and I live everyday. As great and magical as the infinite fulfillment, infinite love, infinite possibility world was and is, it wanted to take that out for a spin. You and I are that test drive, along with shoes, cars, sex and having a unique personality.

From this comes a whole other scary piece about you not existing as a ‘you’ in the un-individuated consciousness world of the nondual. No ‘you’ to ever know shoes, cars or sex.

No ‘you’ to know desire and its offspring – personal pleasure and displeasure.

Here, without a ‘you’ or an ‘other’, there’s no way for relationship either.

The nondual’s hunger in its awareness was to find a way outside of itself in search for a relationship mirror to come to know itself. This longing for relationship, to be known and seen by an other, is at the very core of our being. It would seem then that this need to be known extends all the way back to our nondual essence.

We also looked in the last blog entry in this series at how the nondual (oneness) birthed us into duality (‘twoness’) but put it in an inseparable package. English language captured this reality well in coming up with the word ‘In-divi-dual’ – duality that can’t be divvied, or twoness that can’t be separated. Maybe, we’re stumbling upon the better way to describe the root of all of our suffering – attempting to separate the inseparable.

It was Charles Eisenstein who first introduced this awareness to me where he teaches about the illusion of the split between spirit and matter in his free book ‘The Ascent Of Humanity’, which offers a heart and soul expanding picture of this fundamental split in consciousness awaiting reconciliation.

Christianity, where I spent a big part of my life, is a great example of this split as well. But you can look to the world around you and find this separation attempt everywhere you turn. In Christianity, the separation of essence attempt begins with man having a ‘sin’ nature, a ‘fallen’ nature. It’s the age-old thing of ‘you can’t sell someone on a solution unless you’ve sold them on the problem first,’ which of course is all inside a picture of seeking to gain control over the essentially uncontrollable ‘others’ of our dualistic reality.

Money, (and this is some more of Charles’ influence here) is maybe the king of all spirit and matter splits, because to make money out of something, that is to ‘monetize’ something, you need to separate the thing from its essence. You need to turn people into slaves, you need to turn forests into marketable board feet, you need to turn personal desire and passion into jobs. And to be able to do any of that, you need the illusory-spirit-and-matter split kept well intact. All matter is spirit; recognizing that leads to more and more wholeness. Remaining Ignorant to that leads to greater and greater neurosis.

You, however, as both spirit and matter, both dual and nondual that can’t be separated, that one part can’t be made better or worse, that can’t even be differentiated for that matter – is a grand invitation into a whole new self perception.

If this is true, then what does that say about all the minutia of how you see yourself in every aspect of your daily life? Letting in this new self-perception begins to affect everything in your life.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter @raphaelawen. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary.

Expression (Duality) Vs. Essence (NonDuality): Golden Earth Tales

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(This is Part Four of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

I hope you’ve read what we’ve covered so far in this series. You may need it for where we’re going today.

In the previous blog, we started saying some things about the unknowable nature of the nondual. This of course is said to be the height of insanity and hubris both: using our dualistic minds to attempt to describe nonduality because the nondual ‘just is’ and cannot be known or described. The mind has this bent towards trying to grasp knowledge and, as we shall soon see, this approach doesn’t work so well with the nondual as it is not a thing to be grasped.

In today’s exploration, let’s see if we can get the mind to loosen up a bit from this attempt at capturing and possessing knowledge to be more in a place of childlike observation and wonder and letting the virgin unknown remain unmolested and wild. This would be a beautiful ‘letting in’ of our nondual nature – a nondual awakening of its own.

Sex is ever the great metaphor and teacher here. While sex is a great mystery that can be written about, described and portrayed – many hard-ons and orgasms later, it still isn’t any closer to being known. The more it’s explored, the farther away from being known it gets!

Today, with this childlike wonder, we’re going to do a side-by-side comparison of our Expression and our Essence, and begin to look at the oneness (inseparability) of these two. We’re going to attempt some technical description, but all in an effort to open out the childlike wonder further, and further, and still further.

Let’s start with what we mean by the two terms.

Expression is the magical and captivating awakening that birthed a ‘you’ into the world of duality, a world of ‘twoness’, many ‘twonesses’ in fact, from a world of one oneness. I call it a ‘dual awakening’, because it was just that. You and I were awakened into a state of the wide and wonderful world of the dual. It’s so captivating that most of us struggle to retain any awareness of the Essence we were sourced from and actually are.

Essence is your awakening into the nondual, which is actually more of a re-awakening as you were parented out of the nondual. You knew it as part of the consciousness of the All. So this awakening is a remembering of being – being re-‘membered’ back to source, to our essence of nondual oneness.

Let’s start now with the side-by-side comparisons. Fasten your seat belts. Don’t worry if some of it feels a bit hard to track. This stuff is meant to bend the mind. We’ll debrief at the end.

The doorway into Expression is a doorway of fulfillment. You were individuated out from the nondual when and where all the nondual knew was its own satiation point (if there is one in an infinite world) of full-up ful-fill-ment.

The doorway into Essence is boredom. Boredom is our experiential saturation point where wonder has been so reduced by the mind, that the magic of arising isness has fallen prey to being normal. Here, boredom fuels a yearning and return to essence.

Expression is about being one of the many, an individual. Shoes, cars, sex, having a personality, career, etc., whatever makes up your sense of self-awareness and individuality.

Essence is about being one of the one. It’s all ‘Allness’. All just is in un-individuated awareness and stillness. No cars, no shoes, no sex, no personality.

You hold both of these polarities in your being, and when you feel both of them as real, you are moving towards deeper self-realization.

Our reality as Expression is about knowing through defining and comparing. ‘This, not that’ is the captivating mantra of expression. In knowing, we seek efficiency and effectiveness.

Our reality as Essence is all about ‘not-knowing’. As Essence, we get to yield and surrender to ‘not-know-our-way-to-knowing.’ Efficiency and effectiveness are useless here in Essence. You’ve already arrived.

In Expression, we give and receive love. Here, relationship finds an ‘other’ to be able to have a relationship with. Here, also, love attempts to get its definition by comparative difference. ‘Love is kind, love is patient, love is not evil or hateful.’ Love, in expression is very much conditional. It is ‘conditioned’ upon me feeling loving towards an ‘other’, or an ‘other’ deeming me worthy of love. Also here in Expression, hatred and evil serve to magnify Infinite Love’s reality by way of comparative difference.

In Essence, all is love and only love. No hate or evil to contrast it with. Here love doesn’t transact or relate, for there is no ‘other’ to relate or transact with. Love ‘just is’ in stillness and fullness. Here is where we get our ideas about ‘unconditional’ love. There is no other to condition love with.

Expression ‘happens’ to make up a story. Essence has no such drama. All is infinite stillness. You are deep stillness expressing in story.

Where expression has quest, essence has rest. The unsettling questing questions of ‘Who am I?, Why am I here? What is God?’, etc. are the result of our self-birth-awareness into duality. Essence knows only the rest of ‘love is all’, and ‘love pervades all’. You are inseparable quest and rest. Only your perception of being separate makes for your illusory unrest.

While expression seeks containment, essence seeks escape. Expression is like a child seeking to be held, reassured, that all this energy and ‘outboundness’ can return to a resting place when needed.

Essence has no need or any place for reassurance. It is somehow a full-up-full infinity. It fills All with All. You can’t get any more in. Instead, Essence seeks to pop out of itself, to ‘blow a gasket’ if you will and find a mirror in which to see itself, to come to know itself.

You, as inseparable Expression and Essence, get to breathe in the magical best of both worlds. Maybe we could call this ‘Expressence.’

In Expression we are vulnerable. Attesting to our vulnerability is that we seek medications of all kinds, both pharmaceutical and behaviorally, including our essential need for an ego to manage life. Suicide, in the form of literally killing oneself, or in the form of closing ourselves off to life by shutting down desire; all attest to this vulnerability.

In Essence, we are invincible. Here there is nothing that is not us that can stand opposed. Essence is the presence of ‘Allness’, which bears the burden of fullness. Joy without end.

Expression’s Utopias are many. The Christian Heaven is a good example, where the basic idea is all needs are met, joy and love filled, absence of evil, etc.

Essence’s Utopia, on the other hand, is its desire to come to know itself. To do this though, it had to come outside of itself to enter duality, the domain of comparative difference.

Let’s pause on the comparisons for now and see what we can feel about it all.

In all of these comparisons, I’ve hinted strongly at the central feeling point. You are a distinct ‘twoness’ that can’t be separated. When you try to separate them, you become a neurosis factory, hopefully helping you fall back into what you already are. So, don’t go looking for a nondual awakening as if it’s something outside of yourself to be found. You’d be like the confused fish who went off in search of water. You’re swimming it! By the same token, don’t attempt any form of making your duality bad, something to be transcended. You’d be a fish making water the issue.

Popular teaching on the nondual does just this when it teaches that all suffering comes from the nasty fact that we seek and we want all the time. Were it not for our desires and constant seeking (including spiritual seeking), we would avoid all suffering. Identify instead with your nondual nature, they say, and you’re free.

But you as an ‘individual’ are an ‘in-divi-dual’, which by definition is two parts that can’t be divided. You cannot identify, not healthily at least, with only your nondual nature any more than you can your dual nature alone. I’d like to offer that the real cause of suffering is related to this very splitting of consciousness that they are advising. In other words, you get to be both on fire with your wants and desires and surrendered to having need of nothing. The freedom from suffering is found in having both, not suppressing one at the expense of the other. That’s an alive and prospering human being! ‘Whatever you do, don’t kill your wanter,’ I hear the universe crying out from every cell that contains life!

Though the universe has so much more going on than we may ever come to know, it hasn’t got this all figured out as much as you and I would like to think it does. That thinking is a child’s projection on a parent. We’re coming of age now and maturing in how we see life. It’s literally making this stuff up as it goes. It’s ‘not-knowing’ its way to knowing, and you and I are on the cutting edge of its experiment.

The universe needs you to know itself, and you need it to know yourself.

You are Infinite Love’s wild and untamed frontier.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can track him on twitter @raphaelawen. Subscribe to this blog to receive each new posting from Soulfullheart Sanctuary directly in your email.