MEETING YOUR SELF: breaking the spell of identification

MEETING YOUR SELF: breaking the spell of identification

by | | Awakening, Awareness, Healing

There will be times when you’re consumed by your own reactivity. The cacophony of voices in your head will cloud your vision and the tsunami of emotion will flood your heart. Lost and disoriented, you may reach for the nearest quick fix or withdraw beyond sight, opting for distraction and absence over braving the storms of your fragmented inner life.

Then there will be times when you’re able to hold it all. Amidst the chaos and confusion your seeing will penetrate the clouds and your presence will part the waves. No longer blinded by your own tempest, you’ll look gently into that dark night and your gaze will cast the first rays of light.

Through attention and devotion, you make contact with your true nature. Your attention relaxes. No longer fixated on thought and external stimuli, it comes to rest in its Source, which is Awareness itself. This peace of mind is reflected in the body as Loving Presence. As the body relaxes and lets Life in, the peace of Being floods the system. The breath deepens, the heart opens and your capacity to feel heightens. Slowly but surely you become the space – the container and the field – where healing takes place.

In moments of overwhelm, collapse and full blown reaction, there’s an invitation: 

You’re invited to notice that You are the Seer and not the seen.

 

In hindsight you’ll see that even though it felt as if you lost yourself, you were still there watching it all. So who (I might ask!) is this one who got lost? If you were the one watching it, who was the one kicking and screaming?

To notice that You Are Aware is to begin to carve out the space that’s needed for weathering such storms. At times it might feel as if awareness is all you have. As the waves crash against the shore of your inner world, you can hold fast to this life-raft: I Am Aware. Like the eye of the storm, you can rest as this silent centre as chaos erupts around you.

At other times, even this may seem like a tall order. Your attention will merge with the experience and it will seem as though you’re one with it. In those moments, you can inquire Who Is Aware? This inquiry serves to re-direct your attention from the experience to your awareness of it. This may forge just enough distance (between you and your experience) to break the spell of identification. This subtle inquiry (which is really just a catalyst to re-direct the attention) is essential and foundational for all inner work. 

Once your attention has sufficiently broken free from the content of experience:

You’re invited to notice that You are not separate from that which you see.

As the wind picks up and the rain falls, a sun appears on the horizon. Light filters through the dark clouds, illuminating the waves on the ocean. This sun is your inner eye – your capacity to witness this inner landscape. As your attention comes to rest as awareness, you notice the distance between You and that which you look upon. It’s this recognition of distance, which in truth is simply space, that allows you to turn towards your experience rather than being merged with it. In this direct meeting, you can notice how intimate you are with it. Not only do you see it but you also deeply feel it. In truth, there’s no actual distance between the one seeing and feeling and that which is seen and felt. They’re simply different aspects of the same fundamental reality. Even the space between you and everything you see is not empty. Rather than creating distance and division, space actually connects you to what you see. It’s almost as if your seeing is the space itself, gently reaching out to touch what it sees.

In this intimacy of seeing, where everything is recognised to be intimately connected to the one seeing it:

You’re invited to notice that You are the Holding Space for everything you see.

 

In this recognition of non-separation, there’s a natural impulse to make contact with what arises. When you’re intimate with your experience you can’t help but hold it with compassion, for you recognise that it’s inseparable from who you are. You discover that your very awareness can touch your experience in ways that transform it. Like a Mother with a child, even the softness of your gaze can soothe and revive.

When you turn towards the content of your experience – the physical, emotional, and mental layers – you can notice how all of these layers comprise a sense of someone, the identity itself. As you rest in the intimacy of your own Loving Presence, you can turn towards this ‘someone’. From the wholeness of your Being, you can see that this part of you is rooted in a misperception of separation. Caught in a fear-based narrative, it churns out physiological and emotional alarms, designed to defend the organism from threat or harm.

As Awareness infuses the body space and realises its intimacy with all of Life it becomes more than simply ‘aware’, it becomes Presence itself. We might describe Presence as embodied awareness – awareness that loves. Without Love, we are like flowers without sunlight. It’s this nectar that all pain cries out for, a nectar that’s freely given through your undivided attention and attuned presence. In this way, you can resolve all misunderstanding and dissolve all fear. In this way, you can bridge the gap of perceived separation between the false identity and who you truly are. In this way, you can come to know the Truth of your Being, and everything that lost its way can be touched, included and absorbed by this endless embrace.

SEEING IS NOT BELIEVING: emerging from the story of Me

SEEING IS NOT BELIEVING: emerging from the story of Me

by | | Awareness, Clarity, Transcendence

The divine function of pure mind is that of Seeing.

Even amidst a chaotic mind, it’s possible to extract attention from total absorption in thought and to rest it in and as the observer of that chaos. The very fact that we can see and acknowledge these thought streams is already a big step. It’s the step from identification to witnessing, where we begin to disentangle attention from its tendency to merge with the objects in our field of perception. However, there’s a refinement of the observer, which could be described as a movement into a more subtle layer of consciousness, whereby the subject/object relationship that witnessing is dependent upon is transcended, so that consciousness comes to rest as pure subjectivity, aware only of itself.

It’s this awareness marinading in itself that begins the carving out of our busy minds, thus taking us into higher and more subtle states of consciousness. It becomes like a still pool or black hole in the centre of a frantic mind, pulling all noise into silence and all movement into stillness.

To rest as this formless awareness is to begin to extricate ourselves from the many thought patterns that govern our inner world and indeed define our self image. To extricate ourselves from the self image itself is the core movement of the purification of mind. To see the extent to which identification has interwoven itself into the very fabric of thought, like a seed from which all the branches of thought emerge, is the extent to which we are able to deconstruct this story of me.

The very fact that the story of me is so deeply believed in is what makes the clinging to this identity possible, because without “me”, who would we be? The insistence on our self image is fuelled by our drive to survive and is made possible by constantly watering (with our attention) the web of thought which confirms our me. Thought becomes a constant feedback loop to confirm and embellish the story of me and it’s this mental soup that the collective consciousness finds itself swimming in circles around.

However, through meditation and self inquiry there’s a direct invitation into the true nature of mind and indeed the true nature of Self. These tools are the gateways into that Reality, beyond the story of me, a story that has the potential to completely absorb attention and thus radically limit perception.

It’s like living underground your whole life and never realising that there’s a vast landscape filled with light overhead. As we begin to acknowledge that there are tunnels that lead beyond this cave-like existence, we can pluck up the courage to begin to crawl through them to see this landscape for ourselves. At first glimpse of the light, we may experience shock, fear and even confusion. Somehow our eyes need time to accustom to this light. It’s new and bright and our whole system has been trained to fear the unknown. We also meet up with the very real concern that life will never be the same again, for once we surface on this new layer of reality and realise that there’s more to the matrix we’ve been living in, we know that we won’t be able to turn back; and so begins the process of letting go of the safety of our underworld cave, in favour of a brighter reality.

We can begin this process now, simply by resolving to observe the patterns of mind, to become acquainted and to begin a process of self-honesty, whereby we admit and acknowledge the insubstantiality of our beliefs. As long as we identify with these beliefs there will always be an instinctual movement to protect, defend and therefore strengthen them, which is why it’s paramount to simultaneously familiarise ourselves with the reality beyond them. In fact, it can be said that it’s only the power that emanates from this landscape that can shine the light of awareness into every corner of our psyche. The mind itself can do nothing. Even witnessing, which is a function of mind, has its limitations when it’s not imbued with the power and light of pure awareness; and it’s the recognition of this awareness as our very Self, which further imbues it with the power of irrevocable discernment.

When you truly recognise that nothing that arises within your field of perception is who you are, its value is reduced to mere phenomena and the need to defend and protect it falls away. In the burning light of this clarity, so begins the process of discrimination, whereby we can easily reject any arising belief that points back to the story of me.

The purification of mind is a process of dissolution, of seeing what we are not, and has an entirely different flavour to the flowering of the Heart or the waking down into embodiment. Reality is multi-faceted and when it comes to the sharpness of clarity it’s the Seeing through the junk in our head which counts. Can you die to the silence? The empty nature of reality awaits …