When I think to try and write “my story” it is a difficult task indeed; so much to say or so much that could be said. What to leave in, what to leave out. Where to start?
I write in case this may be of interest or some help to someone, somewhere, some day. And perhaps also out of a personal need to express myself. I wish people could read it and be blown away by the AWESOMENESS of our human reality here – but unfortunately I know only too well that that won’t necessarily be the case. Instead of embracing the truth that we are God, or the Divine is us, the human mind will just resist the telling of my and others’ stories until each one of us, perhaps, gets at least a “glimpse” (an experiential taste) of this truth. And so it should be – this is not to be believed but experienced. I know I would have been sceptical myself. Experience is all. Awakening has to be lived and experienced, not simply talked about.
One of the reasons the mind will resist (until the full Being has had an experiential glimpse) is because the statement “the Divine is us” is so far-fetched to our normal human reality (and the conditioning we have been fed since the day we arrived here). Also, our psyche has ideas about who or what “God” is - and the last thing that is accepted is that WE are God. Indeed it can’t truly be accepted until you have experienced the truth of that statement, as I’ve already indicated above.
No matter what you may or may not think your beliefs are, I found that deep in my (western, British) psyche was imbedded the notion of God as a father figure. (For others this may be a mother figure or some other deity). Either way, it’s usually a mind configuration or personification/projection. A sort of superego, human self-image. This is NOT what God, or the Divine, is. I mention this here, as many people believe that to discover you are the divine itself somehow means you have to become like that superego image: Perfect, Good or Loving and Compassionate all the time, perhaps even omnipotent! And that is not it. The most important thing to learn is that you do not have to perfect your body or mind. The Divine is us, in all our human imperfection, whoever we are and whatever state your body and mind are in.
Then there are those who do believe me, as they have had some glimpse or intuition of their own fundamental identity as Consciousness itself (which is closer to the Divine I’m talking about here). But then they in turn are mesmerised by the ancient or modern teachings which claim it’s a rare thing to happen to anyone; that you need to do a good 30 years sadhana, perfect your body, control your mind, etc. etc. etc. Well, that may have been the case in times gone by. But no longer.
Such teachings and/or traditions make “God Realisation” or “Self Realisation” seem an impossibility for all but a “privileged” few. They make you believe it will take you at least 20 or 30 years of hard work, disciplines and goodness knows what else to Realise your Divine identity. I was once devastated by these teachings – for from 1997 onwards God Realisation became my only goal in life, and yet it seemed impossible.
Those teachings taught me I wasn’t “good enough” or “spiritual enough”. According to them, I had too many faults and vices: I smoked cigarettes, enjoyed the company of what few friends I had, had endless problems in these friendships, not to mention relationships; I enjoyed sex; I didn’t know how to meditate; I hated hatha yoga. I’d tried all my life to be “good” but still it didn’t seem to get me anywhere. I still liked drinking alcohol and eating meat. I was a hardworking girl. I was a working-class person with little education in “spiritual” matters. I loved to party and liked all sorts of “unspiritual” music. And most of all, at 37, I was too exhausted and set in my ways to try to alter very much of that! Not out of disobedience. No, out of the sheer impossibility of it.
All I can say is that whatever you have been told or feel yourself disqualifies you from recovering your own identity as the Divine itself, you will hopefully one day see the folly of it all.
* * * * *
I was an unlikely candidate for “spiritual” life perhaps – and indeed, to this day, I sometimes wonder “why me?”. Why or how has this particular revelation and Realisation come to such a person as myself? I don’t know – and perhaps never will.
Born into a working class family in Gateshead in the north-east of England at the end of 1959, I spent the first 36 years of my life doing what a lot of people do: I went to school, university (dropped out), moved to London, got a job, worked hard, had various sexual relationships and friendships, went to the pub frequently, smoked cigarettes, enjoyed eating out, moved out of London from sheer fatigue and in 1993 found myself in Swansea, Wales. Nothing extraordinary. And as for God – when I ever did think about “Him” my vaguely Christian/Protestant/Church of England background and upbringing just summoned up the orthodox bearded gent “up there” in or beyond the clouds somewhere. However, as one partner pointed out to me, I did seem to get very angry if ever there was a discussion about “God”. Yes, I hated him. Hated him for creating all this suffering and unconsciously I was in fear of the judgement God made of me all the time.
In 1996, when yet another intimate relationship broke down, I moved into a rented house to finally face living alone. That’s when it all began to happen for me. No-one could have “planned” my choice of house or the “coincidence” of my moving next door to a family who were about to change my life forever. I don’t have their permission to talk about or name them, so I shall just make this brief. Suffice it to say that somehow, in meeting them, I experienced what I can only call a “conversion” experience. From having no interest whatsoever in “God”, I suddenly and totally unexpectedly found myself knowing that “God” was the most important thing in my life and that that was what I’d been searching for my whole life. I was so excited, I could burst. However, it was also extremely difficult to explain to friends, and indeed most of the time I kept my new-found interest hidden from them.
And I was intrigued by the phrase that sprang to my mind at the time – that “God was what I’d been searching for all my life”. Intrigued because I hadn’t even realised I was searching. [There is a footnote to this, which I can only say now I’ve found my Divine Identity. And that is, actually, even the Divine is not sufficient! But read on…]
Over the following year, with the help of my neighbours, I plunged myself wholeheartedly into an exploration of : Jung and individuation; dreams and their symbols; Sufism; Buddhism; I-Ching; Tarot Cards; Aleister Crowley; Rune Stones; Mythology; Gurdjieff and J G Bennett; Zen; various Indian “mystics”; and a touch of Ramana Maharshi. Possibly more, I can’t remember it all, and obviously in many ways I only “scratched the surface” of each of these. And most of what I did was not experiential, just reading, although I did enter therapy for the first time in my life, said Sufi zikrs, said a few prayers, and attended a handful of public teaching evenings at the local Buddhist centre. Nonetheless, it was an amazing time of self-exploration and some quite amazing happenings, including a powerful “psychic” opening (as I now see it) into the interconnectedness of everything and the real phenomenon of synchronicity. It was also a very, very tough year, with a lot of confusion and dichotomies, and working full-time at a job I was coming to hate, yet needed in order to survive.
And then, after only a year of this kind of seeking, one day my neighbours said they had a surprise for me. They’d invited down from London some devotees of some guru or other and we arranged to watch a video they’d brought with them in my house the following evening.
The next evening arrived and my neighbour duly came in with one of the devotees and we sat down to watch this video. It was called "The Way of the Heart" and was all about the life and teachings of a guru called Adi Da, formerly known as Da Free John. I’d never heard of the guy, so sat quite open-mindedly to watch what came.
I found the video captivating and enthralling: here was a real, currently alive man talking about God Realisation. I wasn’t that captivated by his community however (!) and even then felt quite alienated from it, especially culturally. But Adi Da himself was wonderful : entertaining, down-to-earth, humorous and so compassionate as he read out excerpts from one of his books “The Lion Sutra”. The phrase I loved most of all was “Come to Rest”. He kept repeating that. I didn’t understand it and, again in retrospect, my reaction to it was not probably to do with what he was meaning. For me it was more a tired, tired, tired and exhausted longing to Rest forever from this crazy life.
And then, as they say, it happened. At a certain point in the video he turned to the camera and said, forcefully, in explanation to some of his assembled devotees, “I AM
YOU”. At that precise moment, I felt this huge surge in my body and a physical sensation of a flap opening at the right side of my heart. I was blasted away to a place of Reality which revealed that none of this life had ever happened; that I had literally never existed. Then, as I came back into space/time, it revealed the Divine itself, holiness, God, salvation. My whole life had been wiped away in an instant: I was left with this totally clean slate. “I” was saved, because “I” had never even existed so “I” had never done anything wrong in my entire life. What is more, the feeling of Reality, the Divine and freedom were so – well, indescibable.
What can I say? I had never experienced anything so real in my life before. The “Reality” I experienced in that glimpse was at once totally familiar and yet thoroughly unexpected. And, what really blew me away, was that I had experienced God. Very soon after this event I saw that “God” had always been a concept or belief up until that point; I hadn’t really known if “he” existed. But now I did know. What a bloody shock!!!!!!!
To put it mildly.
I also felt completely betrayed, as everything I’d thought my life was about was revealed not to be the case.
That was on 17th July 1997. A date I’ll never forget…
* * * * *
FALLOUT, INTEGRATION AND COMMITMENT TO GOD REALISATION
Yes, mmm, well. All very well to talk of integration now, years down the line, but at the time it was difficult, to say the least. How do you integrate the fact you’ve never existed with the indisputable fact that you’re still sitting right there on the sofa in your own living room?!
I don’t know how much time to spend on this next part of the story. Either way I won’t do it justice. Either way I don’t think I’ll ever be able to portray the utter anguish, devastation and desolation that followed the “event” of 17th July 1997, not to mention the explosion of anger, hatred and boredom (yes) that soon erupted. And my total disorientation from all I had thought life to be about. My mind felt so utterly betrayed, duped. I literally experienced the “primal scream” of phenomena, the anger, so it seemed, of the Goddess: “what do you mean none of this has ever existed? ALL this suffering – for NOTHING??”.
I was inconsolable. I became so utterly conscious of the horror of manifest life. There seemed only one logical thing to do : if I wanted to “get back” to the beauty of non-existence, to God, as I’d experienced it in that glimpse, then Adi Da was obviously my guru and the person who could show me how to do it.
So, I set about reading his “wisdom teaching” and enrolled at the nearest class, which was some way away in Bristol, England. My enthusiasm and intentions were forever thwarted however, as I really didn’t feel at home with these people; indeed I’d go so far as to say I disliked many of them, or at least they irritated the hell out of me. I began to get more depressed than ever. I met and read about devotees who had been with Adi Da for twenty or thirty years and were “no closer” to the Great Escape (as I then understood it). The “wisdom teaching” was pointing out that I would have to give up all sorts of addictive substances (cigarettes and caffeine, to name but two) and probably have to engage a raw fruit-and-veg diet, or at least become vegetarian. Then there were all those hatha yoga and other physical exercises, not to mention “right living” and “right” ways to practice sexual intimacy. Well, reader, I tried. And failed miserably. It’s pretty hard to change the habits of a lifetime when you’re 37 years old, as I said above.
So my confusion and desolation mounted. I also couldn’t really understand all the paradoxes and confusions of the “wisdom teaching”. I was a loser. I thought I was committed to God Realisation (and I was) but, it seemed to me, I obviously didn’t have what it takes. And to turn away from Adi Da felt like turning away from God himself – an unforgivable and heinous act. For in those days, I guess, Adi Da was God to me.
And somehow, throughout all of this, I still went to work 5-days-a-week, fed myself, paid my bills, did all the usual routine chores etc. My life lay in ruins, and no-one knew but myself.
And then, at last, things changed.
In the autumn of 1998 a friend of mine gave me an article he’d found on the internet written by Saniel Bonder, saying that he had left Adi Da, had then Awoken, and was now teaching on his own. This astounded me – and gave me hope. For I knew Saniel Bonder to be the author of a hagiography of Adi Da – in other words, a long-time devoted devotee (so far as I could see) who had left. Not only left, but who had then Awoken.
The same friend also introduced me to Georg Feuerstein’s HOLY MADNESS and pointed out that Feuerstein had also left Adi Da’s community.
This was getting good.
Then came more. There were other internet postings from disaffected devotees on a Forum entitled “The Knee of Daism”.
Then I discovered WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT magazine and started reading some Andrew Cohen, who also dared to criticise Adi Da. There was also an edition of that magazine on Advaita which proved crucial to my development.
I was free again at last, it seemed, to explore this whole “God” matter. I still in my heart felt a failure, but in the light of that I guess I took the attitude of “nothing to lose”. It seemed absolutely impossible, but I knew I was still wholeheartedly committed to “God Realisation” (whatever that was) and knew that, for me, this was the most important thing in the world. And I would spend the rest of my life trying, if that was what it took, for really, nothing else interested me. You could also say that desperation was my key motivator. I hated this manifest life so much, I’d do anything to escape it.
I had also “accidentally” seen the book WAKING DOWN by Saniel Bonder in a bookshop in London, and bought it. I say “accidentally” since I certainly wasn’t looking for the book at the time and had gone into the bookstore to buy something else. However, one thing I seem to have been graced with for most of my life is an intuitive, rather magical, relationship with books. They have often been by main teachers (and friends) in life and so often the right book used to come to me at the right time. I loved the book immediately, although didn’t understand it completely by any stretch of the imagination. My friend also got me some excerpts of another of Saniel’s books, HEALING THE CORE WOUND (now entitled THE GREAT RELIEF) from the Internet.
But Saniel Bonder was thousands of miles away in California and I was stuck here in Wales. So I continued to read and search.
In 1999 I discovered Advaita and began to devour books by Nisargadatta Maharaj (whom I love dearly for his help – and for the fact that he smoked cigarettes!); Andrew Cohen (as already mentioned), Gangaji, Satyam Nadeen, Ramesh Balsekar etc. I attended my first ever Satsang in May 1999 with Satyam Nadeen, who was visiting London, and that was amazing for me – not least because, for the first time, I met other genuine “spiritual seekers” and was able to speak openly about some of my experiences. I began to feel less abnormal and isolated.
Whatever its limits, Advaita was a great gift to me at the time. From thinking it was going to take me forever to find Realisation, here were people telling me I was already free; that I was what I was looking for. I didn’t quite get what they meant (not surprisingly!) but suddenly Realisation seemed close, near, possible once again.
My next real breakthrough came in July 1999 when I attended a meeting in London given by an English teacher called Tony Parsons. That was a wonderful meeting - firstly because again there was a group of people all interested in the same thing; secondly because here was a very unassuming English man quite obviously awake; and thirdly because I got my next glimpse of what I’d been looking for: at one point in the meeting my mind stopped and there was just pure Emptiness.
I went to quite a few meetings with Tony and a couple of retreats. He was very good at removing illusions about Awakening and had a wonderful, irreverent sense of humour. And he taught me that one of the “enemies” of Realisation is abstract thinking and thoughts – the distractions of the mind – and that a good practice is to constantly tear your attention away from abstractions and bring it back into your body. I practised this assiduously. It’s a great practice.
This may sound silly but it’s not: it was important to me that Tony was English. Just as it had been important to me that Nisargadatta smoked cigarettes, and also, equally so, that Gangaji was female. For, like many people, I had come to think (even unconsciously, perhaps) that one had to be a certain way to Awaken: usually male or Eastern or Indian or at least purified! Somehow meeting people from within one’s own culture again makes Awakening seem possible. Makes you realise it can happen to YOU.
I stayed with Tony Parsons for about nine months in all, seeing a couple of other Advaita teachers when they passed through – Wayne Liquorman and Eckhart Tolle – but still, somehow, I wasn’t “getting it”. I was told there was no-one here and that there was nothing I could do; I was told to be with what is; I was told I was surrounded by unconditional love (but sure couldn’t feel it!); I was told I was not my body and not my mind; I’d read that when I “got” it I would be free, feel joy, bliss, we were all the one same Self: and the implication was that then all my problems would be over and done with. Things were going to be just so super-duper, and I obviously couldn’t wait…
One day at home I did the “neti neti” process on myself and Consciousness awoke on my left shoulder.
In April 2000 I had a most wonderful experience on retreat with Tony, where “I” disappeared and, on going to my bedroom that evening, I found myself enveloped in the most delicious blackness: it was like velvet surrounding me, like the lining of the womb of the Cosmos. I went to bed and at some point in the morning I awoke and all there was was this magnificent Vastness of pure Consciousness. It was incredible, beautiful, wonderful and breathtaking. Then, slowly, I became aware of my mind and body again. And over the next few days and weeks all my problems came back – worse than ever, it seemed.
Throughout all this, I had continually found myself going back to Saniel’s teachings. Loving them, putting them away, bringing them out again – always ending in a lot of frustration because of the geographical distance factor, and I was aware that he didn’t come to Britain to teach. I didn’t know what it was that kept drawing me back to him: there was the obvious link with himself and Adi Da (to whom I still had ambiguous feelings) but what else, I wasn’t altogether sure. The teachings were just somehow different and I felt increasingly linked to them : Saniel would often express thoughts and feelings I’d had for a long time.
I ordered the cassette version of WAKING DOWN and got some other tapes available and a booklet entitled THE CONSCIOUS PRINCIPLE. These teachings just really spoke to me somewhere where Advaita did not. As I increasingly lost interest in the latter, so that summer of 2000, Saniel’s teachings started to “take over” as it were. I still didn’t understand them all, but I just knew this was where I belonged. It is impossible to explain, except I will say one thing : these teachings were telling me some things I really didn’t want to hear. They weren’t selling me joy, bliss and a problem-free existence. No, they were telling me, so far as I could see, that life was still going to be problematical and indeed even an ordeal. As I've just said, these were things I really didn’t want to hear of course; however ironically, perhaps, it was part of what gained my trust. Also, here was a teaching that was really telling it as it is and speaking to me as an adult and not a loser. I got various friends to get me all they could from the Internet on Saniel’s teachings and all the other Adepts in his school. One senior Adept of the school is Ted Strauss. I read Ted Strauss’s essays and loved them – even though, yet again, I would have rather not believed what he was saying. Yet I knew they were true.
Saniel often talks about daring. And indeed daring is, I have found, crucial to this whole process. I had dared to question Adi Da; I had dared to question Advaita; and now I found myself daring to send a letter to Saniel Bonder to request a copy of his privately published book WHITE HOT YOGA OF THE HEART. I then also found myself daring to send an e-mail to Ted Strauss to ask him whether we could have some telephone sessions.
Now, this may not sound that daring, but it certainly was for me at the time. It felt audacious because after all, who was I, a spiritual seeker of only some two or three years, being impudent enough to request a sacred piece of teaching from someone I revered highly and also asking to speak to an Awakened Adept? I felt I was really putting my head on the block and perhaps trying to run before I could walk. But I had to. Desperation is a great impulse to dare, as I have mentioned, and I certainly was feeling pretty desperate at the time.
Lo and behold, WHITE HOT YOGA landed through my letter box like a neutron bomb exploding and all sorts of mayhem broke loose in my life. Then came my first appointment to speak with Ted on the ‘phone. It was strange : I was anxious all day and even minutes before the call. Then, as I sat down, just before I picked up the ‘phone, a whole weight just dropped from me. I felt completely calm and at ease. I picked up the ‘phone and dialled. Ted answered. Within minutes (or was it seconds) I felt totally at home with this man, totally embraced, totally understood, totally held.
I continued my sessions with Ted and we also did the Human Sun Seminar by ‘phone. Then incredible (but also rather terrifying circumstances) seemed to conspire to have me, as much to my own amazement as anyone else’s, sitting on a plane bound for San Francisco to attend a retreat. That was in November 2000.
On my return, I continued my sessions with Ted for the next few months and also started speaking with two Mentors in this process, as well as communicating with a few others I’d met in this work via an internet forum we’d set up.
The combination of Transmission and interaction with these various teachers from the Waking Down school, plus their dharma(s), and especially, I think, Saniel’s teaching in White Hot Yoga of the Heart - all of these were having their effect on me. There were all sorts of things that helped, but I remember for me the greenlighting of the separate bodymind as a place of confusion, dilemma in action and choice, and physical vulnerability were crucial. As was Saniel pointing out that the Witness was a feeling Witness, not just some abstract cold observing thing.
As I understood it, I had awoken into Consciousness itself as part of who I was, and the background of my existence so to speak, but this then had to come "down and through" my separate bodymind into the embodied, feeling Witness to begin with and then onto the Divinely Human Realisation of Conscious Embodiment.
Then there were other obstacles in my mind, which Ted and the mentors helped me with. Ted in particular made great use of the Enneagram and one of the Mentors I was speaking with, Ben Hursh, gave me great reassurance that smoking cigarettes was not going to stop the 2nd birth from happening! Then there was Ted’s dharma (which, over time, I took to more than Saniel’s), especially essays such as The Self You Didn’t Want to Realise and You are God, Trapped in Hell.
It was all heating up, but still, frustratingly, the 2nd birth wouldn’t happen.
One Saturday in late March 2001, I accidentally bumped into a friend of mine at our local corner shop and we went back to his flat for coffee. This person was my only “spiritual” friend in Swansea at the time, but we had very different approaches and disagreed a lot about many things. He was very much into the traditional, devotional approach and was very suspect about my “fast track” approach! That afternoon, he put on one of his “spiritual” tapes and started on again about Hatha Yoga (which I hated). He was insistent, however, that he was going to teach me this particular breathing technique – something about the hara centre, as I recall. Stifling a yawn, I went along with it, just to be courteous. The rest of the afternoon passed pleasantly and I returned home.
A few days later on 27th March I had another telephone session with Ted. This time he kept saying “what more can we do to bring about your 2nd birth?” – as if it were imminent. (I had sort of resigned myself to thinking it might take years). He had a sense of urgency in his voice as we went through certain mind-obstacles again that I may have. Then at one point I started ranting about something – bloody Advaita, or some such thing! – and he gently but cautiously said something like “Well, Gill, that’s just you being defended”. I could have reacted badly to that with more anger – but luckily I saw/felt immediately what he meant; I dropped beneath my anger and was able to feel under it to a very scary and vulnerable place in my body. It was a little stroke of genius on Ted’s part, I have to say. As we ended the call, he asked me to try and spend the remainder of the evening just sitting with those feelings, feeling more and more into that fear and vulnerable place in my body if I could.
I think our call ended about 8pm. But instead of remaining sitting and feeling what I’d been asked to feel, I noticed myself pacing around, getting very restless, rather agitated and reluctant to sit and feel the enormous discomfort that was now my body. Some time passed before I thought oh well, can’t put it off much longer, and sat on my lounge floor to do the exercise. I realised suddenly that I was terrified. The Witness then became very apparent, and it was as if it started moving forward…at that moment, in my fear, I spontaneously started doing the breathing exercises my friend had shown me only a couple of days earlier. The breathing became very heavy (the analogy of a pregnant woman giving birth wasn’t lost on me). My mind was going nuts, raising all sorts of objections, but then the Witness engulfed me, body and mind. My body and mind had become like and ascending and descending piston or sort of pump, the Witness like the Mother Universe herself quite literally giving birth to me (again). And then suddenly there was a complete “flip” in perception. Instead of being bodymind Gill with Consciousness on the outside of me, I was now identified with the broad expanse of Consciousness inside of which was this contraction called Gill. The whole illusion of separation was gone forever – and I almost laughed at the Obviousness of it all. So simple – yet so, so profound a discovery.
I am the contraction inside my own Being, as I wrote to friends shortly after, and you are also a contraction inside my Being!
Ex-students or readers of Adi Da’s dharma will be no strangers to the term “contraction”, and indeed upon this event of my 2nd Birth on 27th March 2001 I immediately thought of him (and wondered at the nature of my 2nd birth, given my history with Da and Saniel’s history with him. Not all 2nd births take this form at all). My 2nd birth had indeed coincided with some of Da’s teaching (about the ego being a contraction) but to this day I can’t for the life of me understand how he can suggest that you are going it, or that it can even be undone. It is the Universe that is contracting (and expanding).
*
The “Second Birth” is the event of Realisation of your total non-separateness from all that is. Yes, there are the awakenings into your identity as pure, free Consciousness which are possible (and such as I’d had on retreat with Tony), but that sort of awakening somehow still leaves you feeling a separate individual and has little to teach you about what to do with phenomena and your own body and mind. Whereas the “Second Birth” launches you right into All of it, and especially includes your BODY and your mind. It brings your identity as the ultimately Divine Consciousness right down and through your own body, mind, personality – and into the whole world. And the transformational process that this event automatically triggers off is profound.
All your conditioning starts to unravel – especially perhaps (and not surprisingly) all your “shadow” stuff. Now that All is revealed as Divine, the split that the mind and countless religions and so-called “spiritual” teachings have made between, for example, good and evil, right and wrong, sacred and profane, all go down the drain. It is All “sacred”. And this is simultaneously the most liberating and the most depressing and horrific thing to realise.
Depressing? Isn’t Realisation supposed to be about Light and Joy and Freedom?!
Well, no. Be warned: you should not
enter this teaching lightly – for there is a descent into what Saniel calls your
“primal insanity”. I don't know if there's a text book definition of Primal
Insanity or if we all experience it in different ways [one of the astonishing
revelations of awakening is just how different we all are, awake or not, and how
we all experience things differently].
I've experienced it in a number of ways. Mostly, or firstly, was when I got that
I am the Divine and yet totally totally ignorant about what is going on here.
Helpless and powerless (not the omniscient and powerful God I'd been brought up
on!). Secondly, the insanity that this is all one Being, manifesting in
different ways, and that, as different persons, we hurt and kill and threaten
one another. That was always bad - but to experience the insanity of the One at
war with itself -mmmm. And the physical and mental pain of being here.
That the Divine, I myself, crucify myself into this limitation not just once,
but again and again and again. No way out - that is also insanity. Betrayal. How
I as Being have betrayed myself again and again manifesting here and yet hiding
my identity from my human manifestation. The Divine/human split - insanity
indeed. It took a long time for my human mind to come to terms with being
Divine. And all the suffering (yes, and joy). And all the confusion, the stupid
religions, how we have been DUPED. Primal Insanity for me was also in
seeing/intuiting that this is all for nothing, has no reason to it, no meaning.
Just trapped in an endless torture chamber. [I say for me because some
awake people claim to experience purpose and meaning]. And, yes, the personal
wounding is profound - and, for most of us largely irreparable. Another
“spiritual” concept – that of “healing” – goes out the window. Living with all
of that - difficult.
Consciousness includes
horror, terror, human torture and suffering, rape, cruelty, abuse, and so on.
Everything we traditionally DON’T think of as being God or the Divine. For
anyone to come to terms with all the lies and betrayal and the insanity of “what
is” is a total ordeal in itself. And, utterly transforming to the way you will
continue to live your life. But this "Shadow” has to be embraced – indeed it’s
the missing piece from most spiritual dharmas.
As is the BODY. Waking Down is a process of Divine Conscious Embodiment. It’s not that the mind is excluded but Awakening to your identity as Consciousness and then Consciousness embracing and awakening your body and the contents and workings of your mind is incredible indeed. For example, you get to experience why you’re frightened in certain situations – not because of some psychological concept, but because there is real, visceral, existential fear to be felt in our bodies about being alive on this planet. Every BODY knows it is going to die some day. There is real threat out there, real violence. We have every reason to be frequently frightened. There is no shame in this. The endless denials of the world are seen for what they are.
Indeed, psychology becomes increasingly annoying, as one sees how wrong it is (in the main). The mind trying to explain away all sorts of real PHYSICAL phenomena.
There is so much more to be said - but this is only a first draft, and it's been difficult for me to get this much down on paper.
And Consciousness (and sometimes the divine – they are two different things) keep revealing themselves to me, in and as me. It’s a constant presence as this process just goes on and on, deepening and revealing more and more. Some gurus used to teach “Be Here Now”. Well, I have no choice! I AM here now. All abstract thinking is seen as delusion and distraction and literally small in size compared to the enormity of the 360 degrees surround of the manifest world around one; my body is seen, felt and experienced now also in its smallness-in-size (and vulnerability). You are conscious of the world as it actually is rather than seen through the filter of the mind, which tries to see the world as it wants to (and which usually bears little relations to what actually is). I could go on…and will, some other essay.
This first draft was written in Swansea, Wales circa 2001/2, with a few minor additions since. If I wrote the whole thing from scratch today, it would be very different essay in tone, language and insight etc. But I offer it as it is, as for me it captures some of the essence of who I was back then.