Tag: enlightenment

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

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

infinitelovegates

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

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

infinitelovegates

 

 

(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.

 

 

 

Openness To Feeling Our Feelings As An Awakening Process

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

By Jelelle Awen

tearsarethelanguage

The SoulFullHeart definition of awakening is not about being liberated from feeling anything negative. It is about having the consciousness and heart capacity to hold the reactions, move through them, and gain invaluable healing and understanding in the process.

This afternoon, I experienced a sense of feeling unhappy, which is admittedly rare for me most of the time. It was a vague feeling of unhappiness without a strong charge, but really felt more like a restlessness. I couldn’t feel specific content which created this feeling, but I sensed it has something to do with changes that are coming, both personally and for our community here at the Sanctuary. Changes that will provide a crucible for growth and self understanding, as change always does. It felt like part of me was tense about these changes and how they will impact us and what they will push up to be felt.

There was a rare breeze moving through this afternoon and it seemed to reflect my impatience back to me. As has been my spiritual and emotional healing practice for many years, I asked myself: “Which part of me is agitated?’ and ‘What is going on in my life right now or what has been previously subconscious to me that is now coming up?’ Finally: ‘What do I need to be open to feeling?’

This openness to feeling the source of my reactions has led me to the place I am now most of the time….can it be called, ‘awakened’? Or, even, enlightened? I suppose it could be, seen through a certain filter. Or, at least that I have had tastes of being awakened based on the experiences I have had and continue to have. Why, then, if this is true, am I feeling restless and, even, agitated? Isn’t all that supposed to be ‘behind me’?

I feel that these questions are at the heart of the distortion about being awakened or enlightened. As if, suddenly, like receiving a bolt from the sky, we are free of our feelings and reactions. As if, we are released from our humanity and no longer ‘plagued’ by shifting moods and emotional tides. Maybe for some souls this is true….maybe it was true for Buddha as he was described by others. And for Yeshua and for Krishnamurti perhaps. But, it seems to me that these saints and sages must have had passing moods and feelings too. They were human after all, even if they had ascended to a place of consciousness that is well beyond what most of us experience every day. While I admire deeply the great saints and sages, I don’t look to them for a model of being without feelings but rather as templates of how to hold higher states of consciousness and our humanity in one individual expression of Infinite Awareness and Infinite Love.

For those of us interested in personal and spiritual growth, I feel that what we are after is understanding and awareness about our reactions and moods. We want to understand and, therefore, ultimately heal our pain and suffering to experience more joy and wonder about our lives. And through this understanding, be able to make choices that feel more in alignment with who we authentically are and our soul purpose reason for being here. Perhaps some of us want to experience our nondual nature in magical moments freed from the tight constraints and filtering of our minds. Or, we want to feel the arms of the Divine around us, guiding and holding us, even as in moments It sets us free to fly our own routes, sovereignly following our passions and our desires.

The SoulFullHeart definition of awakening is not about being liberated from feeling anything negative. It is about having the consciousness and heart capacity to hold the reactions, move through them, and gain invaluable healing and understanding in the process. Being with my feelings in this way for over ten years is what has opened my heart and soul to let in the altered states of consciousness that I have experienced and the overall joyful and magical way that I relate to my life. Yes, ‘bad’ moods still occur for me, but they are held with sacredness and honor. And, they move quite quickly rather than sticking to a deeper, unconscious depression and suffering place inside of me as they did before I began my growth process.

Within the SoulFullHeart community, we invite everyone to share reactions and feelings that come up – as I will do at dinner tonight with my mate Raphael and others after checking in with myself and my guides to feel into the source of my feelings. Being able to share our vulnerable feelings with others who can feel us and love us is another key to awakening to our essence as Infinite Love. Without a support for our inner world to come out, our false self suppresses it and part of us pretends everything is fine. This suppression comes from a sense of feeling separate from each other, which then makes it necessary to hide what we really feel. When we are invited to be authentic with ourselves, with others, and with the Divine from a place of connection and Oneness about what we are feeling, we experience the reactions move and heal. We experience that everything about us can be held with love and sacredness, even what we would have previously judged as ‘negative’ or ‘unenlightened.’

Now that I am finished writing this blog, I feel better and lighter. My heart is filled with the truth of what I am offering and my desire to share this with others who are tired of suppressing their feelings and pretending to be what they are not. The agitated mood is moving along like the breeze, not gone for good but ebbing and flowing until I need it again.

Jelelle Awen is co-creator and a facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Please visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about sessions.

A Drip Line Of Non-Dual

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

IMG_2658

By Jelelle Awen

A couple of months ago during an intense initiatory phase, I asked my guides for a strong infusion of energy while I was in a meditative state. My primary guide Morgaine, who is a high priestess who lives in the parallel dimension of Avalon, provided me with surges and pulses of energy, which ran up and down my chakras and slithered along my spine. It was familiar and yet, also, powerful. I didn’t realize how altered I was until later in the day when I was planting seeds in my garden.

I felt relaxed and yet, also, I was struggling to track anything mentally. At one point, I ‘lost’ my sun hat, which I had placed in the garden somewhere. I had to go up and around the paths many times to find it. This struck me as funny since I designed this garden; I know every path like the back of my hand, and it is not big at all! Then, I misplaced other things as well and it became difficult to even concentrate on the act of putting seeds in the ground. I got distracted by the wonder of a seed: how it holds all of the DNA for the plant to create itself in all of its form. A seed is in hibernation, just waiting for soil, water, and sun to burst free of its dormant shape and arise into its potential. Much like human beings, actually.

I finally decided that I couldn’t ‘do’ gardening anymore and needed to head back home. It felt like it was going to be a long walk, with my altered state of consciousness, yet I also felt a bit giddy with how different things felt. On my way out of the garden, I kept getting distracted by the leaves on the trees. Every leaf seemed to flash its molecular structure at me, a glittery burst of its real essence. There seemed to be a shimmer to everything. I was reminded of how tiny a spectrum of what is actually going on can we see through the narrow bandwidth of visible light.

Although it is normally only about a ten minute walk, it felt like it took much longer to get home. I didn’t have many words to share with my mate Raphael about what I was experiencing, but he could feel I was altered. I didn’t want to try to explain it too much as it felt like it would dampen the experience if my mind tried to understand it. And I couldn’t seem to do that anyway! When I helped him to get lunch ready, I struggled to get my body to do what my mind wanted it to do. And I couldn’t do anything at my usually brisk pace, even in the kitchen. I kept getting distracted by the ‘truer’ essence of things that seemed to have no relationship to anything else as I would walk by them or go to use them. For many moments, I held an arising wonder of black plastic in my hands before being able to remember that it was a ‘spatula’. This ‘state’ continued on until in the late afternoon when finally I could write again and think somewhat normally.

I feel that this condition was, to some extent, what I call a ‘drip line of the non-dual.’ The non-dual being a state of consciousness (even though it is not a state) where there are no contrasts, no opposites, and only essence or Arising Isness. The seeds, the leaves, even a common kitchen utensil all took on magical qualities when experienced through the lens of no-thing-ness. Before we were trained to use our minds to dualistically label everything with names and filter reality through comparisons, it feels like this is how we could have naturally experienced life.

In SoulFullHeart, we feel that it isn’t about the supremacy of the non-dual over the dual or that the ultimate attainment of the non-dual is the goal. Rather, it is bringing them into balance again so that our experience of reality flows between the two in a beautiful stream of ebb and flow. Raphael feels that we are 100% of both and have just overly focused on the dualistic side. To bring our consciousness back into balance and awaken to our essence of Infinite Love, we feel that opening the drip line (which could turn into a gushing flow over time) to the non-dual is a critical aspect.

For me, the best way I have found to open up my non-dualistic nature is during meditative journeys called immrams and energy transfusions which transcend the mind, engage with our true nature as energy, and bypass our defenses and false self to some extent. I have also had drip line tastes of non-duality through a dualistic relationship with Kuan Yin, an ascended teacher. Through my connection with Kuan Yin, I am able to receive transmissions of non-duality even as it is coming through a dualistic channel. I don’t feel that one cancels out the other and both can be used to experience the other. In this embracement of both, we aren’t making one ‘bad’, which is actually a dualistic way to see it.

It seems that when we resist one side of our nature in order to embrace the other that we become in fundamental struggle with ourselves. This struggle locks down our access to Arising Isness because the false self feels that we need to be ‘enlightened’ or ‘attained’ or spend hours and hours in meditation in order to transcend our dualistic nature. Maybe some souls do need hours of meditation every day, yet, my sense is that our false selves have made all of this much harder and more ‘exclusive’ than it actually is. In my drip line state of arising wonder that day, it felt as natural and easy as breathing. Because my mind was loosened and relaxed, it couldn’t evaluate or compare what was going on. It just ‘was.’

I look forward to more drip-line experiences (with maybe some gushers in the future) and bringing my nature back into balance between the dual and non-dual. And I look forward to experiencing and facilitating students here at the school in this exploration for which I am hoping that we will discover even more naturally arising ways to experience our essence as Infinite Love in both dualistic and non-dualistic forms.

Jelelle Awen is co-creator and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Please visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life