So I’ve been on the road about 5 weeks now, driven over 4600 miles, and have been living life in experimentation mode by applying various principles I’ve come to know and seeing how well they really work in this whole “real life” thing. I’ve made amazing friends partying at Mardi Gras, photographed a cheer and dance competition in Texas, skied in New Mexico, camped along the Rio Grande, hiked down into the Grand Canyon, had an ostrich bite my camera, been homeless in Colorado, discovered how every state has is very own distinct vibe, experienced the most ridiculous and consistent degrees of synchronicity, met amazing friends all over the country, had the universe repeatedly bring me all that I want including exactly the type of weather I want when I want it, been given free food and lodging all over the country… Quite honestly this is the most exciting and simultaneously the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done.

I’m learning SO much. There’s lots of things I’m learning that I didn’t know before and many things that I’m finally actually GETTING. To use an analogy, let’s say you’ve done martial arts for a while and your instructor keeps telling you, “Hands up! Keep your hands up!” and so you know that your hands need to be up but when you’re practicing, your hands subconsciously keep coming down. It isn’t until you actually spar against an opponent and get clocked in the head that you finally GET IT that your hands need to be UP!  This is a lot like that. As is often said, life is our greatest teacher… There’s a lot of things that I “knew” didn’t work, and if you were to ask me before, I’d tell you that no, such-and-such doesn’t work. If you asked me now, I’d be like “nah dude, really, that shit DOES NOT WORK!!” It’s that transition from mental understanding to gut-level understanding.

This has also been a very emotional experience in that it’s forcing me to really look at myself. I’m basically free to go where I want and do what I want (within reason… a 4 wheel drive or all wheel drive vehicle would be super handy for going up into the snowy mountain peaks and camping in the backcountry, for example, buy I digress…). One thing I wanted from this trip was to really shed light onto the remaining unconscious portions of myself. See, I remember Adyashanti talking about when his awakenings first started, and they also began in the nonabiding form as I am experiencing, when he was going through his process he’d sit down in a coffee shop for hours writing and writing about his beliefs and exploring any area within him that would still go into division. This has been a big part of my journey here. It’s really taking what I’ve learned and applying it all. Jump in with both feet and apply the law of attraction, for example. Apply the ability to surrender and let go when your ego gets bruised and you face your inner darkness head on. Do all the stuff you need to do because now it really matters. It’s crunch time and the pressure’s on.

Freedom of Experience

To what degree do I want to experience freedom? I’ve thrown up a tent and camped in state parks and enjoyed being out in nature. I’ve slept in my car and enjoyed waking up in new places and not having to tear down a tent in the cold mornings. I’ve stayed in hotels and loved the big comfy bed and the little kitchenettes that allow me to cook. I’ve stayed on friends’ futons and enjoyed the free lodging and social life. What is the most harmonious expression of freedom that I’d like to experience? Let’s go out and try a lot of different things and see what they’re like!

Now I’m looking for a more permanent home to throw down some roots. It seems that this country really caters to those with a home and address. Where do I want to live? I can live in Denver, a big city with lots of different regions all over. I can live in Boulder which is a smaller town with a great spiritual vibe and amazing outdoorsy people. I can live up in a small mountain town like Nederland which gets a lot more snow and has more unplowed roads. Heck, I can even go live in a tipi on a sustainable farm! So many options! What do I want? What does my heart say?

Go dive into the unknown and follow that intuition… Let’s see where it takes me.

Spontaneity vs. Planning

What degree of structure do I want in my life? What works best? What feels best? What is most enjoyable? You can try going out somewhere in the world where you literally have NOTHING that you need to do. No plans. No nothing. Just show up and here you are. Where does your intuition lead you next? Completely and utterly spontaneous, allowing synchronicity to be everything.

Do you want a full schedule with lots of things to do and times to be at certain places?

Do you want to be generally open with only a few things scheduled to give your life some sense of  structure and direction while simultaneously being open to change direction on a dime?

I’m finding the last option to be most enjoyable for me. Complete and utter no plans doesn’t feel so good. I like having a next step to head towards in life and a few things on my to-do list. I like having an overall purpose for my life within which I allow the flow to occur. What do you like?

This is something that has been really valuable, to really let go and actually try out lots of different ways of being in the world and find what feels and works best for YOU. This is probably something that each person needs to find out for themselves…

Intuition

Intuition is SO bang on. It’s been my go-to option whenever it comes down to make a decision. Virtually every decision now is simply a matter of asking my intuition. What does this feel like? How does that option feel? Eventually you really start to develop the ability to discern between the feelings of expansiveness, openness, joy, excitement, and subtleness that usually comes with the intuition’s yes versus the sense of closure, downness, no, stopping, almost shut down that comes with the intuition’s no. Honestly one of the main challenges is getting the mind to align with the intuition. That’s really where the main challenge seems to lie, in getting the mind with all its logic and reasoning to surrender to a simple feeling that doesn’t explain itself.

Law of Attraction

The Law of Attraction really works. I mean it REALLY works. I experience so consistently whatever it is that I most strongly think and believe deep down. It’s SO clear…

You are the light, mind is the prism, the world is your rainbow.
-Ash Ruiz

One thing I found amusing was to over and over hear people say “but this never happens!” It’s like everywhere I’d go, restaurants would hand me free food and beer, the weather would be perfect and just as I’d asked, things would just work out for me, and I’d just smile knowing that this has all been created within me and is being experienced due to my own inner alignment. At the same time, I only experience it to the degree that the alignment with inner being is maintained. It’s like a direct 1:1 relationship. Alignment with inner being, loving what is, non-resistance to the present moment, being in the vortex, being in a state of allowing, flowing the energy of Source through you, whatever you wanna call it… this one singular thing is what leads to the unfoldment of all that I desire in ways that are more amazing that I could have ever imagined had I been trying to micromanage or control any of this. It’s like having full creative power of choosing my vibrational state of being and simultaneously having no control over the physical world. The more I surrender control of the world and focus on inner alignment, the more the apparently outer world shows up in ways that reflect my inner alignment. This is really what the LoA is all about.

Happiness

This has been a pretty hard-hitting one for me. I really thought on some level that going out and jumping in to what I perceived to be a life of freedom and travel would bring happiness. It was subtle, but it was definitely here. This has been one false notion that’s been crashing down the past few days, and it’s been a tough pill to swallow. How many times have I thought that going out and “living the life of my dreams” would be what I was looking for? Wasn’t that what life was supposed to be about? It’s the idea that a certain lifestyle = happiness. Nope. Being out here in Colorado doesn’t make me happy. Heck, even manifesting all the stuff that I want doesn’t make me happy. Experiencing synchronicity and being in the flow itself doesn’t make me happy. It really doesn’t. I’m finding I keep placing conditions on my happiness and joy, as if something in life needs to be a certain way so that I can experience happiness and so I go about trying to structure my life a certain way. I keep placing these conditions on myself and finding that they keep come crashing down. They don’t work.

What I keep coming to find is that happiness DOES NOT lie outside of myself, as cliche as that may be. Happiness isn’t found in being loved. It isn’t found in living a certain lifestyle. It isn’t found in finally getting something you’ve always wanted. It doesn’t lie in mastery of a certain skill or achievement in a particular ability, including manifesting everything you want. Not at all…

The way it seems that it works is that happiness is found within, as if we ARE it. Literally. We find that we ARE it when we quit looking to FIND it. This inner being that is along for the journey every step of the way, this awareness that is ALWAYS present no matter how epic or traumatic the experience of life is, this presence that is always always always here, it’s so easy to get distracted from that and get lost in thought or lost in the world or lost in experiences, and yet this beingness is always here. When there’s a turning within, Love is found here. Joy is found here. Happiness is found here. Peace is found here.  Well-being is found here. It doesn’t matter where in the world I am or what is happening around me. It’s like this ground of being is becoming my home, silence is becoming my home, even if I don’t have a physical place to call home.

I wanted to write a book about the Law of Attraction, put together a workshop, collect videos that were especially helpful and so on, and yet what I’m starting to find is that mastery of manifesting DOES NOT BRING HAPPINESS. If I ever do come out with a product on the LoA, manifesting is going to be seen as sooooo secondary to being joyous, to being joy itself.

Byron Katie

The other day I was listening to Byron Katie and she said a number of things that completely blew me away…

Her whole thing is about questioning your thoughts and no longer believing in thought whatsoever, thereby ending your suffering. Her process to help us accomplish this she calls The Work and it’s repeatedly proving itself to be so effective and powerful…

She says that all suffering is a result of believing in thought. Period.  She mentioned that one thing she loves about life is that when someone else experiences pain, she doesn’t. When she experiences pain, the other doesn’t. We *think* that we suffer because of what another says or does, but the reality is we suffer because we believe thoughts that arise within us about what another said or did. If we didn’t believe any of our thoughts, experiences would simply happen and we wouldn’t suffer as a result of them. When you no longer believe in your thoughts, you are in heaven. When asked if she still feels like she’s in heaven even when bad things happen to her, she said she no longer perceives them as bad because she’s done the inquiry and doesn’t believe the thoughts that arise that suggest something is bad. She then went so far as to suggest that what if you went to heaven and took all your current thoughts with you. Would you then even experience heaven at all? The thing is you wouldn’t, and this is the condition most people are in. We all are in heaven right now, and yet we don’t experience it because we believe in our thoughts.

This is something that Adya has mentioned before as well, that he has literally lost the ability to believe in his own thoughts… I’ve wondered how this plays out in terms of the LoA which says that what you believe you experience… The two perspectives kinda seem at odds and this is a paradox that I have still only partially resolved for myself.

In any event, questioning my own thoughts repeatedly is bringing SO much valuable insight to me, so much clarity, and so much understanding. It’s a very useful technique…

So What Now?

There is SO much I don’t know. Everytime I think I know something, life gently and lovingly shows me how completely utterly wrong I am. There’s just so much more surrender to experience, a continual opening up to even deeper love (especially the scarier places), finding more areas of darkness and bringing the light into them, being happy and joyous for its own sake without any reason necessary, letting go of those fears and resistances and doubts and worries, and really just BEING. Being, loving, enjoying, surrendering…

Really I don’t know anything. Geez…

All I know is that here I am, sitting in a coffee shop, reflecting on the past few weeks of… good god… I don’t know how to describe it…

Whew… So yeah… If you’ve made it this far along and enjoyed what was shared, If you wanna read more from a wandering guy who has no idea what he’s doing half the time  :lol  feel free to donate some cash and help me pay for food and gas. It’s certainly appreciated!

Until next time, happy living!!

-Ariel

I Am.

It’s so simple. The mind loves seeking, learning, exploring, understanding, and this is all just the beautiful play of the mind. It’s all “food for thought.” It seems that all our reading and learning is great for academia. It makes us excellent students who can say the right words and come up with the right answers when it’s time to take the test. However, it may not be the best strategy when it comes to Self-realization. We need not gain more understanding to go beyond the mind.

“You are too full of gibberish, you know too much. Because of your borrowed knowledge and too many words moving inside you, you cannot see the wordless beauty that can only be experienced in silence.”

-Osho

I Am. Focus on that. It’s simple. So simple. That brings awareness back to its Source, rather than focusing it upon its infinite manifestations.

When your consciousness is directed outward, mind and world arise. When it is directed inward, it realizes its own Source and returns home into the Unmanifested.

-Eckhart Tolle

Make a friend with the I Am. Spend time with it. Nothing need be created. You don’t need to become anything new. Just be. The inner guru will awaken on its own and you will intuitively begin knowing all that prolific spiritual wisdom we previously sought answers for from books, teachers, and gurus.

“When you stop searching and you calm down and you put your books away, and you confront yourself and see what you are all about, that will bring about bliss faster than anything you can ever imagine or ever do.”

-Robert Adams

I Am.

The “I Am” literally is what you ARE. I Am That I Am, and so are you.

Just Be.

Let’s look at several explanations by different teachers who all point to basically the same thing, being with the “I Am.” This takes us right to the heart of spiritual practice.

Nirmala describes Self-inquiry

It does not need to be complicated. Just simply sense your self and do not worry about inside or outside or going deeper. Sense that you exist right now, and then stay with that sense of “I” or “me”. But do not worry about whether it is the right way of sensing your self. Simply sense your self just as you are right now.

Once you sense your self just as you are right now, simply stay with that sense of your self. If a thought or feeling arises, notice who is having the thought or feeling. Obviously “I” am having the thought or feeling. And so then you just return to staying with that sense of “I.”

That is all you need to do. Just rest while sensing your self. Everything else is up to divine grace, and it is taking good care of you.

-Nirmala

Nisargadatta on Focusing upon the ‘I Am’

When I met my Guru, he told me: “You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense ‘I am’, find your real Self.” I obeyed him, because I trusted him. I did as he told me. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. And what a difference it made, and how soon!

My teacher told me to hold on to the sense ‘I am’ tenaciously and not to swerve from it even for a moment. I did my best to follow his advice and in a comparatively short time I realized within myself the truth of his teaching. All I did was to remember his teaching, his face, his words constantly. This brought an end to the mind; in the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am — unbound.

I simply followed (my teacher’s) instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being ‘I am’, and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the ‘I am’ in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared — myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence.

-Nisargadatta Maharaj

Mooji on Focusing up the Self

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4MtmRkiW_U

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jl5op2g1zw

If you want a practice, if you want a meditation, if you want something to do, there ya go. Just be.

So when you heard about spiritual awakening or enlightenment, what was the prize that you wanted in the end? What was the story that got you hooked?

Perhaps it was something about experiencing endless bliss and joy, or maybe it was the end of suffering, or perhaps it was about experiencing constant Oneness with the Divine. Maybe it was the answer to all your life’s questions.

It may be something else entirely, but whatever the case may be, I’m sure the bait was very shiny and attractive, yes?

It turns out that they don’t give you the full story when you start playing the game. What I’m about to share isn’t meant to discourage people on the path, but simply to help them be conscious if and when these things start occurring. These things don’t necessarily mean that something has gone wrong, although it may certainly seem that way. A helpful book to those who are experiencing the following symptoms is You’re Not Going Crazy… You’re Just Waking Up!

Now, if spiritual awakening was to come with a series of warning labels, what would be printed on those labels?

Warning: All your beloved attachments are going to be taken away from you. Everything you hold near and dear to your heart you must be completely and utterly willing to lose them. The more you hold onto them, the more you’ll suffer. It is only in the willingness to let go that find your freedom. By the way, letting go as a technique to trick the universe into granting your freedom, as in saying that you let go while peeking over your shoulder to see what’s to come, that doesn’t cut it. You can’t B.S. your way there. Believe me, I’ve tried… No one else has been able to pull that one off either.

Warning: You will experience dark nights of the soul. You will experience your entire world crumbling down. You will experience intense emotional roller coasters, to the point where you literally may feel like you’re going crazy.

Warning: You must let go of all of your judgments and false sense of worth. You know all those accomplishments you’ve achieved in this lifetime? What do you brag about? You must let go of holding onto any of them as a way to enhance your self-worth and boost your sense of self. Your trophies and medals, while certainly valuable in their own right, they must lose their importance as something that makes you feel better or worthy. You are not valuable because of anything you have ever done or ever will do. You are valuable simply because you are. Because you exist. All the blows to your pride and are ways to help you let go of your false sense of worth and open up to the realization of your true worth.

Warning: You must let go of all your ideas about God. In order to find God, you must quit telling yourself you already know God. All the ideas that you’ve grown up hearing, being taught, holding onto, or rejecting, all of them have to be let go of in order to be seen through.

Warning: You will find yourself entering a place with no rules, no shoulds and shouldn’ts, no technique, no strategies, and no room for all of your egoic stuff and the energy of division.

Warning: Your ego will throw fits. Your painbody will go crazy. Your buttons will get pushed. Your ego will throw out every trick in its book. When you start learning how to get past its tricks, it’ll become more sneaky and subtle. As you advance, your ego advances. It all happens to bring more awareness to the energies within, to help you let go of that which you previously have been unconscious to.

Warning: The egoic dangers don’t end after awakening. In fact, as Adyashanti points out, the dangers after awakening get more dangerous and there’s much more of them. For example, one can settle in to seeing the Absolute as the only valid perspective and disregarding the world of the relative because it’s all “illusion.” This can lead to some very unconscious behavior and a letting go of changing that because “it doesn’t matter” and “there’s no one to change it.” Remember, the world is illusion, yes. Brahman alone is real, yes. BUT, the world IS Brahman. This is true non-duality: seeing the Reality in the so-called illusion as one.

Warning: Just because you wake up, that doesn’t mean that everyone will love you and you’ll never have any struggles in life again. Just look at Jesus if you have any doubts about that one.

Warning: You must come out of hiding. All the dark stuff within you that you haven’t been wanting to look at and be truthful about, it’ll all come up to the surface. All that stuff you hide from other people, the things you don’t want to show to others or to yourself, your inside will become your outside. There’s no hiding ANYTHING from anyone. It’s a deep deep level of vulnerability, sincerity, and self-honesty.

Warning: All your life lessons will come to the surface. You’ll have to look at and accept everything. There’s nowhere to run and nowhere to go. You can only be here, now. There’s no one to become. Waking up isn’t a self-improvement course. Although it may appear this way on the surface, the point of waking up isn’t to become more spiritual, more loving, more enlightened, or more acceptable in the eyes of God. It’s about Self-realization, about realizing who and what you really are. You return back to your natural state and be who you really ARE, that which doesn’t have to be created, manifested, or maintained.

Warning: The farther you go, the more painful it becomes to deviate from the Truth of your being. Think of it this way: If you walk into a tree at 2 mph, it’s no big deal. If you whack a tree while running as fast as you can, it’s gonna hurt. The deeper you go into Being, the more painful it is when you lie even just a little bit, hold back your Truth, don’t allow yourself to be who you are, resist what is, judge another, or in any way violate natural laws. You get a lot less slack. In Zen they call it walking the Razor’s Edge. Deviate even a little bit and you quickly get cut.

Warning: You have to take complete and total responsibility for everything and everyone that shows up in your life. As your consciousness begins returning back to its natural state of timelessness, manifestation starts happening much more clearly and the link between inner thoughts and vibrations and outer manifestation becomes REALLY clear. No longer do you get the luxury of blaming others or judging others. Everything you see as a problem in others instantly gets turned around and becomes your problem. You’ll begin taking on a lot more pressure once everyone’s problems start to become yours. The world truly is your mirror. All the problems you really have with others really are problems you have within yourself. Get to work on surrender. It becomes a much more necessary skill later on.

Warning: You must accept that you’ll never “get there,” that you’ll never “arrive.” You could spend an entire lifetime on this journey and never wake up. Indeed that has happened to many people. In fact, so long as you cling to your desire to get somewhere, you’ll never actually wake up to what’s already here. You must surrender completely your desire to succeed in your path of awakening. You must accept the fact that you may embark on the journey, never to actually get enlightened.

Warning: You may feel very connected and One with Source/All That Is at times, and you will also experience yourself feeling totally disconnected, lost, confused, and cut off. It’s a horrible feeling. It’s the experience of pure separation, they very illusion we are trying to see beyond.

Warning: Even if you get a glimpse of the Truth of your Being once or twice or a hundred times, the egoic structure may rebuild itself, leading to the experience of being unenlightened, or what we call a non-abiding awakening. Adyashanti reports that it usually takes people anywhere from 3-15 years for the momentum of awakening to settle in. Although it doesn’t happen in the future and can only happen in the now, don’t expect an overnight insta-fix.

Warning: Just because you have a clear seeing of who you really are, that’s not the end of the journey. The first question is “Who Am I?” Once that’s discovered, it now becomes a matter of how what I AM manifests itself in this world. The second question upon realization is, “How then shall I live?” It’s not enough to have the inner realization. That realization must express itself out through the totality of your being for it to become a living realization.

Warning: You must completely and utterly let go of control, of even controlling your survival, much less your destiny. You must be willing to die, to face the fear of death and surrender into it without attempting to stop it or control it in any way. The fear of death and the unknown become your friends. No longer will you be running from them.

Warning: The more you begin living in the moment and letting go of the domination of your consciousness by your mind, you may begin experiencing memory loss. Whole blocks of memory will begin falling away. It’s not exactly like Alzehimer’s, but there very well may be some significant loss of short-term and/or long-term memory as you begin relying less upon memory and more upon a deeper intuitive knowingness.

Warning: You may have intense kundalini awakenings to where it will feel like your entire nervous system is being overloaded. Many people have literally gone insane from this. It can be helpful to seek out some helpful resources including other people who have experienced similar symptoms, various practices you can do to work with the energies, and even a guru to help guide you safely through the process.

Warning: You may experience cycles of confusion and clarity. In one moment you may be very wise, deep, loving, and compassionate, and in the next moment the cloudiness of the veil will return and you will no longer have a clue as to what’s going on. You may become sucked right back into your ego, experiencing your deepest and darkest fears.

Warning: There is tremendous value in working with others, but you must learn to stand in your aloneness. Many of your relationships may change. Friends and family that have been close to you your whole life may be let go of. Some people will come, others will go. Some stay for the long haul. Which ones will stay and which ones will go? Who knows? The flow of the river will determine that more than any conscious decision. You can try to make it a conscious decision, but that will actually be more of a resistance to the flow and a desire to control than anything else. You don’t get to control the process. It happens. The you you think you are doesn’t make it happen.

Warning: You don’t get anything as a result of awakening. There’s no thing you get as a prize such as a good feeling such as a constant never-ending wonderful enlightened experience or a boost to your self-esteem. (What self would we be talking about anyways who has a self-esteem?) You get nothing, but BOY what a nothing it is. By seeing that you ARE that nothingness, and that you ARE the entire universe arising from that nothingness, you realize that what you ARE is already more than anything that could ever be wanted, as Gangaji so beautifully puts it.

Whew!!

Now as I say all of this I’m laughing. In certain moments it can be a crazy, wild, intense, OMG-I’m-gonna-die experience, yes, particularly when you’re in the heat of the moment, but it’s like waking up from a dream at night… You recognize that it was all just a dream and it doesn’t feel like it was actually all that real. What you ARE is infinitely more real than anything that appears in this world. Those experiences will begin to feel so distant and faded, like a memory that you can only partially and vaguely remember, as if it happened to another person entirely in another far-off world.

That said, it’s worth it. It’s all SO worth it. The direct realization of who and what you really are is SO worth all of the bumps and jolts that we experience along the way. Things to lighten up as you do.

Note: All of the above pictures were created by my dear friend Patty LaPlante. The quotes come from the book Oneness by Rasha.

Not everyone will necessarily experience every single thing listed above. For some people, some experiences may be more profound than others. In fact, there are many other things that one may experience that haven’t been listed in this post.

Either way, there is a book I’d HIGHLY recommend that people check out titled You’re Not Going Crazy… You’re Just Waking Up! by Michael Mirdad. You can read my full review of it here.

For those of you who’ve also been walking the path for a little while now, what “warnings” would you give someone who’s getting started and doesn’t know what to expect?

When we take a look at the experience of life, we can see that many many different things happen all around us.

If you were the original Creator of Life, what would be the point of creating it? You already are All That Is. What more would you want?

Well, if there was just you, all alone as the infinite, there would be a lack of experiencing yourself in relationship to anything else, for there is nothing else but you.

As so *BOOM!* You create an infinite number of expressions of yourself, many unique perspectives of yourself, and give yourself the ability to experience yourself in relationship to “something else.”

Now you can experience yourself as a person who is single, has a girlfriend, a boyfriend, multiple boyfriends and/or girlfriends, a wife, a husband, a daughter, a son, a pet, or any other of the many possibilities of relationship with an other or others.

All of the people who come into your life create the possibility for the being that you are to experience yourself in relationship to another.

Everything that happens in life is a doorway for you to experience yourself as anything that you wish in response to what happens.

Many Different Responses

Say you’re walking down the street and someone makes a silly face at you. Thanks to this trigger, you have the ability to experience yourself as someone who laughs in response to it, who gets angry because of it, who has no response in relation to it, or anything else. Thanks to this gift of someone making a face at you, you have the opportunity to experience yourself in many different ways.

Everything that happens “to you” in life is simply an opportunity for you to experience another facet of yourself. On the level of form, you can be the “same you” over and over, or you can change and be a “new you” altogether. Our lives afford us this tremendous opportunity, and what a gift that is.

You are not the victim to your life.. unless you choose to experience yourself in that way. Yet ultimately you are not in any way a victim.

You and Them

What anyone says or does has nothing to do with you. It’s entirely them and “their stuff.” It’s a reflection of who they’re choosing to experience themselves as.

On the flipside, your response has nothing to do with them. It is entirely you and “your stuff.” Who you’re being is completely an expression of who you’re choosing to experience yourself as.

Recognizing this, we can allow others to be the way they choose, for it’s all them anyways. We can even allow all of life to be as it is.

You and I are independent, and yet because we require one another in order to experience ourselves in relationship to each other, we are intimately connected and completely intertwined.

Deeper than this, there is only one of us. Really.

Absolute and Relative

In the domain of the absolute, everything just is.

Not happy or sad. Not male or female. Not big or small. Not perfect or imperfect. Everything just is.

There is no opportunity for uniqueness or relationship, because it’s all one.

As the one expresses itself in the world of the relative, we are given the gift of experiencing ourselves as anything we wish.

Nothing happens “to you” in life, unless you want to experience yourself as someone who has stuff happen to them.

Nothing happens “for you” in life, unless you want to experience yourself as someone who has stuff happen for them.

Life is a meaningless blank slate, on top of which the mind can paste any meaningful experience it so chooses.

We are that free, as the empty nothingness that we are, to create ourselves as a unique expression of the infinite everything that we are.

Choose

And so in this lifetime, who do you wish to be? Choose.

Like it? Choose again.

Don’t like it? Choose again.

Want to use your free will to push against life? Do it.

Want to use your free will to surrender to the flow of life? Do it.

It is all up to you.

(Photo by =LimpidD on deviantART)

Let’s explore the idea of being more or less loving. We could say that one of the common goals of the spiritual aspirant is to become a more loving person, correct?

For sure.

Let’s look at how this evolution works from both the relative and the absolute perspective, as well as how those two interact.

Love, from the Relative Perspective

On the relative level, the level of appearance, form, and humanness, we can and often do become more loving.

Along our journey, we may discover that there really is no such thing as an opposite to anything. This is an illusion in duality. Everything is Love.

Instead of the idea of opposites, we upgrade to the idea of gradations. For example, rather than looking at a spectrum of distinct polar opposites such as hot and cold, we simply notice that there’s a gradation of molecular movement from infinitely slow (without ever actually stopping) to infinitely fast (without ever reaching any maximum). Hot and cold are simply arbitrary relative markers we make up and place upon a linear scale. Instead of polar hot and cold, we simply have one term called temperature.

Bringing this idea back to Love, being less loving, to the point of resisting love, we call this fear. On the flip side, being more loving, in the form of allowing love to flow through us, we call this love. There is resistance to love and surrender to love, but not actually fear.

Okay cool, but there’s still a breaking up of the whole into many little pieces, which is what happens when the absolute moves into the relative.

Love, from the Absolute Perspective

The True Self, Source, whatever you want to call it, it is infinite unconditional Love. It is whole, complete, total, and beyond measure. It can not be diminished in any way whatsoever and is not subject to any scale.

While the subjective experience of the totality may be limited, the totality itself never is.

In this way, not only is there no opposite to Love, there is also nothing less than pure Love.

No gradations. No scales. No more or less. No measurement system whatsoever. Just pure Love completely as it is.

What is just is. That’s it.

(It’s incredibly simple when there’s no mind involved…)

Uniting the Relative and the Absolute

When we talk about raising our level of consciousness or raising our vibration, what we’re really doing is bringing the relative human aspect of ourselves into alignment with the core essence of our absolute Self.

In the state of surrender, your form identity softens and becomes somewhat “transparent,” as it were, so the Unmanifested can shine through you.

-Eckhart Tolle

You know Jesus Christ? What does his name mean?

(Hint: Christ is not Jesus’ last name!)

Jesus is the name of the very human man, the fleshy meat suit that walked the earth.

Christ is a universal name that points to the infinite consciousness that is everyone’s true nature. Christ Consciousness, Buddha Nature, Krishna Spirit… these terms all point to the one infinite true self.

Jesus Christ (Relative Absolute) united his relative and absolute selves and consciously brought them into vibrational harmony while living here on earth.

Gautama Buddha (Relative Absolute), same thing. Siddhārtha Gautama united his physical presence with the Buddha nature.

In this dream called physical reality, the characters such as Jesus and Gautama woke up within it, like lucid dreamers, and allowed their dream characters to be connected back to the Source/Christ/Buddha so that that light could shine through into the dream.

This experience they called Heaven or Nirvana.

Simultaneous Coexistence of the Relative and the Absolute

Remember, the idea is not to escape earthly existence and go to heaven (or some other enlightened state of consciousness) somewhere else. We could call this hiding in the absolute which arises from the idea that there’s something wrong with the relative or the illusion.

So rather than trying to flee the relative and abide in only the absolute, we can unite heaven and earth, by bringing heaven down to earth. (Vibrationally speaking though, perhaps a more accurate description would be “bringing earth up to heaven.” Source never comes down to match the relative.) Either way, this unification is just another way of pointing to the integration of the relative and the absolute.

From Connection to Integration

Again, there is only Here. There is ONLY Here. There is no escaping Here. On the level of form, there is only the transformation of what arises Here. That’s it. This is Creation.

While you are Here, you can awaken to the presence of the nameless, formless, silent presence that can be called Tao or Source. This Absolute being (being, not like a cat or a dog or a human being or a big bearded guy in the clouds, but just isness itself) is infinite Love. You can connect to this and feel it “flowing through you.”

“It is not I, but the Father within me who does these works.”

The relative you continues to raise in vibration as it progressively comes closer to matching the vibration of the absolute you, through this connection to Love.

Then from being “connected” to Love, unification with Love happens and the two become the One they always were.

“The Father and I are one.” (Father isn’t a male parent as some religions imagine, but rather the Source of Creation that gives rise to all form.)

So while there is always infinite Love on the level of formlessness, there is also the dance of infinite gradations of love and fear in the illusory dream world of duality.

You are BOTH… and neither.

Enlightenment

Enlightenment is about remembering who we really are and then allowing the story of you and me to fall away and come into full alignment with that which we truly are.

Full alignment in the physical plane is total enlightenment, the complete end of the idea of separation, the maximum vibrational limit of physicality before the physical vibrates its way into a higher plane of existence, beyond the perception of physicality. In the same way that sound can vibrate faster and faster to the point where our ears can no longer detect it due to their limited spectrum, the physical us can vibrate our way right out of physicality, into a higher non-physical realm… but we’ll explore that later.

Let’s just say that full enlightenment is not the end of our evolution by any means. It’s simply the end of forgetting who we really are which allows for the Oneness of the absolute and the relative to come together that much more.

The Sun’s Fortress by Marc Adamus

Alright, let’s get straight to the point. How do you actually do this? How do you get enlightened?

There’s so many gurus we can follow, all of whom give similar instructions, but they’re all variations on a theme. What’s the best path? The fastest path? The path that’s most appropriate for me? Is there even a best/fastest/right path at all?

How do you get enlightened? Let’s strip away the fluff and look at the core instructions on exactly HOW to do it as instructed from a variety of teachers:

Ramana Maharshi

Repeatedly perform self-inquiry by asking the question “Who am I?” over and over until the ‘I’ falls away. The thought “Who am I?” is not meant to come up with an ultimate answer the mind can accept. Rather, it will destroy all other thoughts, and like the stick used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end get destroyed. Then, there will arise Self-realization.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Hold on to the sense ‘I am’ tenaciously and do not swerve from it even for a moment.

Michael Langford

Turn awareness back upon itself so that awareness is watching awareness. Add nothing else to the process. Expect nothing. Just be aware of awareness.

Adyashanti

Allow everything to be as it is and then perform meditative self-inquiry, asking the question “Who am I?”

David Hawkins

Surrender the ego’s desires, proclivities, and positionalities to God. Surrender your very life, all fears, and sense of self to God. Allow God to do with you what he will.

Buddha

Meditate. Know and practice the four noble truths. Follow the noble eightfold path.

Gangaji

Stop everything. Just be. Drop all activities, all attempts to get something or achieve something that’s not already here. See what’s always here. Just stop.

Eckhart Tolle

Be in the Now. Listen to the silence.

It’s interesting to note that he didn’t awaken by constantly being present. His ego just kinda collapsed overnight spontaneously.

Neale Donald Walsch

The reason people are enlightened is because they say they are.

(Note: Neale isn’t actually enlightened. He’s simply sharing his understandings as received from God while writing his books, Conversations with God.)

T. Harv Eker

If you want instant enlightenment, don’t believe a thought you think.

(Note: Harv isn’t enlightened either, but his suggestion nevertheless ties in well.)

Bashar

If you want to be enlightened, just lighten up! Follow your highest excitement to continue finding more and more of yourself. Know that you are the One and the All.

Neo-Advaita

There’s nothing to do and no one to do anything. Just be still and allow the Self to realize itSelf.

Jesus Christ

You reach Salvation by reaching for the Christ Consciousness and Unconditional Love, following the path modeled by Jesus. Like Bhakti Yoga, it involves devotion to God.

Karma Yoga

You can reach moksha by doing God’s work instead of your own, by performing good deeds and tasks.

Jnana Yoga

Explore the sacred Hindu scriptures, typically with the aid of a guru.

Raja Yoga

Contemplation and meditation.

Paramahansa Yogananda

Meditate with a straight posture while looking up at the third eye, the center of Christ Consciousness, without straining your eyes. Be still and know.

_____________________________________________________

As you can see, there are a multitude of paths, yet even this is not by any means an all-inclusive list. There are many more recommended ways such as by receiving the grace of a guru as a form of energy transmission, by repeatedly chanting mantras, by performing various physical activities to activate certain energies within the body, by overcoming the enemy (ego) through a holy war (jihad), and more.

Spiritual Practices

What is the value of spiritual practices?

Freedom can only be realized when you don’t do anything to realize it. It must happen on its own.

Practices to help you hone your mind, to learn how to better focus or surrender are of value in that they can help you focus on the Self and withdraw attention from the pull of egoic thoughts.

If a practice serves the purpose of quieting the mind, it is of great help.

The Truth of who we are is Here and Now. All our practices are ways of searching for what is already here. They are designed to help us come back home to who we truly are.

Any practice which is based on the idea that you are someone in particular who does something in particular to achieve something in particular, any such practice is an obstruction because it is based upon the false belief that you are not already there. It’s an ego game. Don’t strive to achieve enlightenment. Just be. The ego achieves. The Self is.

Rather than trying to make yourself enlightened, look to how you are unenlightening yourself and stop doing that.

Enlightenment is like revealing the light of the sun. It’s not something to search for. Rather, you dissolve the clouds (egoic identification) preventing you from seeing the light that’s already present and has been the whole time.

Look for what does not need to be practiced to exist. Look for what is always here, eternally present. Focus attention there. Allow beingness to be. Let go of the “me” and all the stories involving it.

Boiling It Down

In a nutshell, what’s ultimately necessary is to quiet the mind and let go of identification with anything. Instead, we look at what’s always here, underneath mental chatter, prior to and during all thought. Enlightenment is found in the stillness. You can’t take Heaven (aka Enlightenment/Nirvana) by force. You must surrender into the silence and allow it to happen on its own.

“Be still and know that I am” points directly to it. Simply be still, drop all egoic movement, and be who you truly are, without anything else added.

Be Still and Know That I Am.

The Beginning by Marc Adamus

One of the main aspects of spiritual growth is the realization that you actually ARE the reality you previously thought you lived IN.

For example, at first, we feel that we find love by getting it from other people. When we feel loved by others, that is when we experience love.

Then we can move to a state where we are literally “in love” with someone. It’s literally like you and I are bathing within the warm glow of love itself.

And then we find that this Love can actually be experienced with everyone and everything. This Love then becomes unconditional. We become “in love” with it All!

Yet once we start inquiring as to where this Love actually comes from in the first place, we realize that it’s not coming from outside of us at all! It’s actually coming from within. The Source of Love is within.

Dive down even further and you’ll realize that not only is the Source within you, but you actually ARE this Source. You ARE Love itself. Everything you say, everything you do, and everything you are is simply a physical expression of the Love that you are.

Ascension is realizing that you actually ARE the reality you previously thought you lived IN.

You don’t exist in physical reality. Physical reality exists WITHIN YOU! You ARE physical reality!

There really is no reality outside of you. You actually ARE All That Is. It is all you. You are that.

What we perceive in physical reality is nothing more than a collection of props, a projection of the mind, a big illusion.

What is real is the EXPERIENCE you’re having, not the props that appear within the experience.

You are consciousness experiencing consciousness, awareness becoming aware of awareness, the Self realizing the Self.

The one who seeks enlightenment is the enlightened one seeking itself.

The experience we call Life is God experiencing God.

You actually ARE everything you think you live IN.

This realization is so profound that one of Nisargadatta’s excellent books is titled I Am That. (You can find excerpts and highlights from the book here.)

You are not within anything, including physical reality. You ARE physical reality.

You are not IN love. You ARE Love.

You are not IN God. You ARE God.

You ARE All That Is.

I AM That, I AM.

There is no physical reality outside of you.

The outer world is TOTALLY an illusion. It’s not real. What’s real is the EXPERIENCE you’re having and the experience you have in physical reality is directly related to your thoughts, beliefs, and frequency of vibration.

There is no physical reality outside of you.

There is no physical reality outside of you.

THERE IS NO PHYSICAL REALITY OUTSIDE OF YOU.

Let this sink in. There is no physical reality outside of you!

At all!!

What you are seeing outside of you is a projection of your vibrational state, a reflection of your deepest thoughts and beliefs.

What happens out in the world DOES NOT MATTER. That is, it does not determine who you are, nor does it control your state of being. In fact, the reverse is true. It is your vibrational state, determined by your thoughts and beliefs, which determines how you experience physical reality. It is your state of being that determines what matters, what materializes for you in physical reality.

You can ONLY perceive that which you are a vibrational match to.

It’s a lot like the visible color spectrum. ROY G. BIV is the guy who invented the rainbow, as we all know.

Violet light vibrates faster than red light. It has a higher frequency of vibration. What you see “out there” is totally determined by who you’re being “in here.”

The amazing thing is that if you are vibrating at the frequency of violet light, you CAN NOT and WILL NOT experience red light. It’s physically impossible!

Is that person good or is that person evil? NEITHER! BOTH! That’s the paradox. They’re NEUTRAL.

Everything in physical reality “outside of you” is like a diamond with many facets. The facet you happen to look at and what you see “out there” is nothing more than a reflection of who you’re being “in here” because THERE IS NO OUT THERE!

How did Jesus heal the sick? He simply looked at people and saw them as already whole and complete, the way they actually are. He was simply demonstrating something that we all can do. It is that level of faith, that strong a belief, which is the guiding principle in this life.

People get so caught up in looking at the world and saying, “This is how the world really is.”

NO! This is the way you’re experiencing it based on your thoughts, beliefs, and vibrations! That’s ALL!

Your experience is valid, but the idea that this is how things “really are” is not.

Be The Change You Wish To See In The World

What does this mean for us in a practical sense? It means that to change the world in any way, you don’t actually change the world. You only have to change YOU.

THERE IS NOTHING BUT YOU!

You are it! It’s all you!

So be the change you wish to see in the world.

Parallel Realities

What we see right now as physical reality is simply one of the INFINITE parallel realities, one of the infinite earths that exist in time and space. You are not moving through time and space. Time and space moves through YOU in this moment, NOW.

As you change your frequency of vibration, you may notice that certain people happen to leave your life. They may even up and disappear and you will wonder where they went. What happened is that the vibration they represent is no longer a match to the vibration you are putting out. What you put out is what you get back. It’s that simple. You don’t experience anything you are not a vibrational match to.

It’s a lot like being in a video game. You are sitting right here, right now, guiding this character you call “yourself” by virtue of your thoughts and emotions. Your thoughts are the controllers to move your character, but there really is no world “out there.” It’s all virtual. It’s all made up, but the experience you’re having still happens nonetheless, just like it does when you’re asleep at night. When you’re dreaming at night, you’re only experiencing an active imagination, but your consciousness has the experience nonetheless. “Real life” is just like that.

So row row row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily merrily merrily merrily LIFE IS BUT A DREAM!

Merrily! Enjoy it! If you enjoy it, if you are IN JOY, that will be your EXPERIENCE of Life!

Joy!

We’ve all heard the famous statement in the Bible saying, “Judge not, lest ye not be judged.” (Matthew 7:1)

Great, but what does that really mean, especially to those of us who don’t speak Shakespearean? I recently listened to Bashar explain this statement and it was truly an eye-opening experience so I’d like to share this realization with you all now.

It seems that the above statement regarding judgment has been misinterpreted by people over time, something very common (and actually almost unavoidable) when people try to understand something that someone who’s coming from a much higher level of consciousness has said. In the process there’s been some information that was, shall we say, lost in translation.

A Judgmental God?

There’s the myth that God is basically a human ego, just a larger and more powerful one, an angry and jealous God who judges all others.

Chances are if you’re reading this site, the idea that God is a spiteful, angry, and jealous God feels a little off and you’re open to something else. With that, let’s take a look at the statement, “judge not, lest ye not be judged” from a higher perspective.

Judging “Others” Is Really Judging Yourself

First off, in this physical reality, YOU are the Creator of your reality. YOU.

(We can get into the discussion that from yet a higher perspective, there really is no individual doer, and really what’s going on is that while yes there is certainly creation happening, there actually is no separate individual to create, but that’s another topic entirely. Either way, you get the point.)

Secondly, there really is no external reality outside of your awareness. It’s all in your imagination. If you think about it, you can’t even prove than anything or anyone actually exists given that everything in physical reality could all just be in your imagination and part of some elaborate dream. Nevertheless, you can still have an exciting experience in this dream world.

See, our physical reality only exists when we focus our awareness upon it. It is through the principle of focused awareness that manifestation occurs.

Third, there is NOTHING other than YOU in the Universe. You are everything. You are the Infinite. You are All That Is, expressing itself as an individual, yet in your mind you perceive all these separate beings which really, truly, in essence are YOU.

The separateness “out there” is all a dream that you’re perceiving “in here.”

So whenever you are looking at something in the “external world” and create any sort of emotional response to it, it is truly YOU who is being affected.

When you judge another, it is YOU who is sitting in the vibration of that which you judge.

Experiencing The Energy of Your Own Judgment

Now, “Judge not, lest ye not be judged” has nothing to do with being judged by someone or something outside yourself, including God. That’s not the true meaning of this message.

You see, as you negatively judge something, as you devalue it, you yourself take on the vibration of that judgment, of that devaluation!

From a vibrational standpoint, you CAN NOT perceive that which you are not a vibration match to. It’s like trying to see white through rose-colored glasses. It is literally impossible. Your entire physical reality is simply an illusory perception and what you perceive is determined by your frequency of vibration.

So if you are perceiving something as valueless, you have to be in a place of valuelessness to declare something else as valueless, you see? You have to devalue yourself and bring yourself down to that same level in order to judge something else as valueless.

Do you recognize how that statement, “Judge not, lest ye not be judged” is not a threat or form of punishment? It’s a simple way to say that you will experience the energy of whatever you put out, something people like to refer to as The Law of Attraction, or even Karma.

What you put out is what you get back.

It’s as simple as that.

Unconditional Love

The great thing about this understanding is that it works from the other direction just as well!

Since “you” are at the direct experiential effect of your own states of being, you can choose to simply love everyone and everything UNCONDITIONALLY. No matter what. In every situation. At all times.

My beloved, Love and ye shall be Loved.

Yet another great thing that happens is that when you choose to give up all of your judgments in the first place, you don’t actually have to force yourself to be Loving. You see, Love is your true nature, and when you stop buying into your own judgments (which are all lies anyways, good or bad), you’ll tap into a much deeper and more profound realization of your true nature. This is automatic and applies to everyone, including you!

Preference is Not Judgment

Judgment is essentially superimposing a sense of value onto what is, saying this is more worthy or valuable than that for whatever reason.

By letting go of judgment, everything becomes equally valuable, infinitely valuable.

You then have the option of choosing based upon preference. You can prefer vanilla over chocolate without devaluing chocolate, you see?

Instead of bringing your own frequency of vibration down by vibrating with that which you feel is of little to no value, you make the neutral observation that something is more harmoniously in vibration with your true, essential, core being, and thus you expand to become “more of yourself” in physical reality.

So, Love!

(Note: I had originally misquoted that “judge not” passage above saying “Judge not, lest ye be judged” instead of the accurate quote as “Judge not, let ye not be judged.” My shakespearean is a little rusty and I thought lest meant “or else,” rather than its true meaning which is closer to “for fear that.” I’ve edited this post to make the fix, but the message of the post remains the same. )

Last night I listened to an Adyashanti satsang called “The Three Phases of Awakening” and in his talk, he brought up some traps which really resonate with me, traps which I’ve found myself getting caught in.

The trap is that once you get a taste of the Absolute and realize that all is perfect, then who cares about the world of the Relative because it’s all perfect anyways. Who cares because it’s all an illusion? At this point, you even have the choice to sit back let the body waste away and not really engage the world because hey, it’s already perfect. What more could I do?

Let’s examine this together and see exactly what’s going on.

Fear of Life

Many of us have a fear of death, yet there’s another fear that’s not talked about as often: fear of life. For some people, fear of life is even more intense than fear of death.

It’s like when we’re born, there’s all these bright lights, people pulling us this way or pushing us that way, lots of commotion, and then we get slapped. What an entrance. Perhaps there’s a part of us that says, “Man, I don’t like life. It was better before I was born. All of the sudden I’m suffering.”

It’s almost like some people don’t like life right from the get-go and this never quite heals.

Escaping Life

This is a very common experience for people since life can be so unpleasant. Some people will try to escape life through drugs, alcohol, music, sex, food, sleeping, or whatever other distraction works for them.

Perhaps people get into spirituality with the hope that when they become enlightened, life will suddenly become magical and wonderful. It will be the solution to all my problems!

So they take this (inaccurate) idea with them, proceed down the spiritual path, and eventually they find themselves abiding in the Absolute reality.

Hiding in the Absolute

In the Absolute, everything is as it is. Perfection is. What we call “real life” is seen to be totally an illusion and nothing really happens. Everything just is. It’s pure beingness. There’s nothing we could do to make life better or worse. Even the Hitler’s and diseases of the world are seen to be part of the perfection.

Now it is true that the world we live in is illusion and ultimately unreal, but there is still an element of experiential reality to it, is there not? It’s like, no matter how enlightened you are, if you get hit in the head with a hammer, it’s still gonna hurt.

The understanding that this world is an illusion and not real is an excellent instructional understanding, but there’s still a sense of practicality that needs to be integrated alongside this understanding. This is the part where we become “in this world, but not of it.” Rather than abiding in the Absolute as a way to escape the life of suffering, we recognize that All That Is INCLUDES the world of the relative, illusion or not.

The Second Question

The primary question in spirituality is “Who am I?” in the many forms it takes.

Once you find an answer to the question, if an answer even can be found, great. Well done.

If a person realizes that they are Love, for example, but it’s never expressed in their life and they’re an arrogant, rude spiritual person, it’s clear that there’s still something missing. Not only do they give spirituality itself a bad name, but there is still something missing, as if they Love they now see themselves to be has not fully integrated within their entire being.

So the second question after “Who am I?” is “How then shall I live?”

The second question is tightly linked to the first, an expression of the first in physical manifestation.

Love is the Expression of the Absolute in the world of the Relative

Trees are consciousness. Rocks are consciousness. Animals are consciousness. Humans are consciousness too, but what’s so special about humans is that we have the capacity to be conscious about the fact that we’re conscious!

Big deal? What importance does this have?

Well, in the Absolute, everything is Love. I’m sure you’ve heard it said before that God is Love and yes, this is true.

Now what we have as physical human beings is basically the Absolute forgetting what it is and pretending to be something else in the world of the Relative.

It doesn’t take anything special to be loving, no tricks or techniques. It’s simply a connection to your true nature and an expression of that without resistance.

What we see in humans is basically the Absolute seeking to emerge through the mask of the Relative. It’s a lot like a determined weed seeking to push through a slab of concrete to reach the sun. It’s determined to punch its way through.

The Love that we all seek in life is the Love that we are. The God that we desire to experience Oneness with is the God that we are. The enlightened being that we are searching for is the enlightened being that we are. The seeker is the one being sought. Hence the call to “Look within.” This is the only place you will truly find what you are searching for. You are that.

So the question “How then shall I live?” is pointing us towards this understanding that here in the Relative, what we are experiencing is our own natural desire to be the Self, to experience the Absolute. If we recognize ourselves to be One, or Love, or Peace, or whatever else, how we live is our physicalized expression of that which we are.

Integrate the Relative with the Absolute

Even after awakening and after realization, there’s still places the ego can get stuck in. In fact, after awakening, the traps are even more dangerous, like this one we’re examining here.

So rather than attempting to escape the suffering of life by hiding out from it and continuously looking within to the Source, eventually awakening leads us to the realization that the Infinite includes even the world of the Relative. Rather than going purely within and experiencing the emptiness and nothingness, the Self expands outward to encompass the All.

What we call “real life” is meant to be a place for us to express who we really are. It’s not a place to obtain get approval or a sense of security. It’s truly a place of creative expression, a place for Creation itself to unfold, for you and I to experience ourselves as who we truly are, to come to know our true nature, to remember.

So play with life. Enjoy it. Jump in with both feet. I’m speaking also to my self here with these words.

Remember who you are.

Then experience it and express it in the relative.

This is the dance between the Relative and the Absolute.

Realization happens in the Absolute.

Expression and experience occurs in the Relative.

You are neither, yet you are both. You are nothing, yet simultaneously everything.

Thank you for being you. Now live it and BE it!