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Living Life as What You Have Realized Yourself to Be

For the first time since starting this blog, I feel a sense of completion in terms of writing about spirituality, consciousness, nonduality, and the nature of the egoic mind. The recent post Want to Wake Up? Focus Upon the “I Am” sealed the deal. There are so many fun things to explore in the spiritual arena including chakras, past lives, the law of attraction, and all that jazz, but when it comes to waking up from the dream of separation, that post goes right to the heart of enlightenment. It is what I had heard many times while passionately seeking and yet continually overlooked and what what shines clearly today as the seeking energy is seen through. The sheer simplicity of the I AM, the I AM that’s ALWAYS here.

How then shall I live?

Something that Adyashanti once said has really left an impression upon me. He said that the first and primary question of the spiritual journey is Who Am I? Once that is discovered, the next question is How then shall I live? It is this second question that takes an internal realization and expresses it as an external manifestation. It is this second question which helps our internal transformation permeate all aspects of our being. It is this second question that allows you to come back and be in this world, but not of it. It is this second question that shifts us from simply knowing and being the Truth to LIVING the Truth, from realizing to experiencing, and to letting go of all that is not in harmony with the infinite being that we have realized ourselves to be. This is what this physical experience, from my perspective, is all about: experiencing more and more of who you really are. Since you are All That Is, what else is there to experience?

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The Namaste Project 2010

There is a special event that will be taking place on New Years Day, 2010. It is called “The Namaste Project” and it is a vision that came through my good friend Ash Ruiz, lead singer for the band Here II Here. The following is what he posted on Facebook and I’d like to pass the word on to you.

The Namaste Project

Namaste ~ The Light in me recognizes and greets the Light in you.

Come be a part of History in the Making!

The Intention

The Namaste Project…the end of separation is: A Flash Mob that Lights Up the World.

The Namaste Project will debut in L.A., Miami, Asheville, Atlanta, Orlando, and New York City on 01/01/10 at 1 pm. (Ariel’s note: Feel free to organize an event in your city too!!) The intention is that at 1:00 pm hundreds of people in all 6 cities will stand in silence connecting with one another in the Namaste pose as the world keeping going around them for 30 minutes…and then walk away as if nothing ever happened!

Although I see it happening in Silence I’m also aware that spirit always knows what’s best so maybe toning will arise or some om(ing) or the Holy chant!! All is possible when one allows themselves to be where they always are.

The Vision

On Thanksgiving morning I woke up with the most delicious visions dancing through my awareness echoing the dream I had just had. I was sitting on an etheric blue grid bench in the middle of Times Square with an all-consuming sense of well being and peace, enjoying the harmonious orchestra of the way of it. The hustle and bustle, the sounds, the horns, the lights, the pretzels and yes… even the hotdogs were all aspects of the dance of God, pure and utter Leela. In that moment I noticed my mouth whispered Namaste and I somehow knew that all beings everywhere could hear this greeting of the spacious heart to the spacious heart and then I received the sweetest confirmation. A little girl with the cutest little fro met my gaze and with her palms together placed restfully over her heart, she bowed her head in a Namaste… and then an older gentleman walking his dog, a woman in a power suit gliding to work, construction workers, drag queens, tourists, celebrities, the homeless, the wealthy, Twilight Fans, You name it! Everybody everywhere did the same! I was witnessing Planetary Awakening in the most radiantly ordinary way!

People started to slow down till eventually everyone stood still. And people everywhere where looking into each other’s eyes whispering Namaste with tears of joy streaming down their glowing faces while instinctively knowing the truth of all being everywhere. This was a moment so powerful that all was healed in the knowing that there was nothing ever sick to begin with. It truly only takes one because in reality that’s all there is. We all share the same light of awareness and as this ever-present awareness we all have full capacity to recognize and greet our infinite self in infinite ways.

So as I lay there completely buzzed as the love of now, it occurred to me that this could begin in small ways with all the beloved beings I know throughout the world with no end in it’s capacity to grow and blossom. Fun! Wouldn’t it be fun to participate in a public display of fearless light and love? Wouldn’t it be fun to set the tone for the New Year with the power of the open heart and mind?

I would love your feedback and any ideas, help or suggestions about this unfolding vision.

Thank you, I love you,
Ash Ruiz
www.welcometothismoment.com

P.S. I’m excited to see how it unfolds and in no way do I expect it to be or not be “exactly” like the beautiful vision I had, for I’ve come to notice that reality is always brighter and more beautiful than every possible attempt to imagine or describe it.

(Ariel’s note: and here’s a quick video of Ash so you can meet the person through whom this inspired message has come)

Want to Wake Up? Focus Upon the “I Am”

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

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

Getting Upset at Other People’s Behavior

Often times other people can be the source of so much of our suffering. This can include friends, family members, celebrities, or even just random strangers. Like many other things in the world, sometimes people just really piss us off. This is a common experience for many people in life.

Making Your Happiness Unconditional

We have this idea that if someone else were to only change their behavior then we’d finally be happy, and this is true given that we’d then be focusing our attention upon something we do like and thus no longer offering resistance to what we see (and therefore not suffering), but this is actually tremendously giving your power away because it’s saying that your happiness and well-being is completely dependent upon another person’s behavior. You basically give someone else the keys to your happiness. Yikes! When we do this, it only makes us want to try and control the other because, well, our happiness quite literally depends on it!

We may try to play this game with a few people around us and it may work to a limited extent, but if we make this a way of life, this is really just not a healthy way to live, you know? It’s just not realistic or healthy to think that the whole world is going to do what you want.

Now this isn’t meant to excuse other people’s behaviors. Not at all. There are so many examples of unconscious behavior out there we can point out. Of course that’s there. What we’re talking about here is releasing ourselves from the suffering that we create for ourselves as a result of the unconscious behavior that occurs all around us. We want to release ourselves from our own self-imposed prison, regardless of what’s happening in the world.

This is about making our happiness and well-being unconditional. Literally. It’s taking down the conditions we have imposed upon ourselves for whatever reason and finding that freedom we so desperately seek.

It’s about changing ourselves and allowing others to change (or not) out of our/their own volition, not because of attacking or being attacked.

Let’s listen to a wonderful Abraham-Hicks talk that gives a hilarious example of this and takes a look at how we can allow ourselves to be in this world and have healthy experiences in our relationships without letting the little things in life tear us apart.

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Interview with Michael Mirdad

Recently we took a look at the excellent book You’re Not Going Crazy… You’re Just Waking Up! – The Five Stages of the Soul Transformation Process by Michael Mirdad, a book geared towards, well, basically any human living being on earth really.

Today we have an audio interview with Michael to share with you. I recently had the opportunity to ask him a series of questions about his book and boy did he ever share a wealth of information! He has worked as a healer and a counselor for nearly 30 years now and it really shows when he speaks about this soul transformation process.

In this 53 minute interview, Michael shares with us an in-depth look into the nature of the soul transformation process including such topics as:

• How when your life seems to be falling apart, that’s a sign that a dysfunctional (less than fully conscious) part of your life is actually falling away as it should.
• The experience of depression and loss that is often experienced when we lose something we had.
• The trying to figure out “what now” after we lose something and how to figure it out in a positive way.
• The difference between reconstructing a new dysfunctional life (ie. repeating the same old problems in relationships) and learning to rebuild a new life for yourself in a more conscious way, as if refilled by spirit now that you’ve emptied yourself of the old energies.
• How dark nights of the soul are your soul’s way of taking down multiple old parts of your life simultaneously.
• Learning to make the transition between being dragged through this process as a victim, to learning to experience it as a spiritual student, to finally initiating this process yourself as a master.

To listen to this interview in its entirety simply click on the link (MP3 download) below and enjoy!

YouAreTrulyLoved.com – Michael Mirdad interview

(As a fun little treat, rather than cutting the interview off once we finished the official interview questions, I left the last little bit on and you can tell how much he blew my mind will all that info.)

Two Must-Read Articles with Adyashanti and Lester Levenson

Today I’ve got two special treats in store for you.

Interview with Adyashanti

The first is an excellent interview with Adyashanti entitled Who Hears This Sound? on the topic of Waking Up From The Dream of “Me”. In this article you’ll hear Adya share about his actual awakenings (something he doesn’t often talk about), about sustaining an awakening into full-fledged enlightenment, how life is lived from a place of undivided wholeness, about if he still experiences emotions such as anger now that he’s enlightened, the abuse of power that is possible as a spiritual teacher, differentiating between awakening itself and the by-products of awakening such as a sense of well-being, and more.

It’s an fantastic interview and I highly recommend checking it out. Thank you to Tom Stine for recently featuring this article on his blog and bringing it to my attention. =)

Lester Levenson’s Story

Next is Lester Levenson’s Spiritual Journey (originally found here) from intense suffering to a full awakening and how he did it. This story details Lester’s personal journey from being in the verge of practically being a vegetable after a heart attack to the search for true happiness, how to create it, how to let go of all of his suffering, and the eventual realization into the Oneness of Beingness.

You’ll hear step-by-step exactly what he does (and man is it powerful!) as well as hear some of his examples of how he intuitively mastered the Law of Attraction, seeing that the ability to have what you desire (such as a million dollars) doesn’t have to conflict with experiencing lasting happiness. It’s the attachment to our desires that is the problem, not the actual desires or having of our desires themselves.

Lester’s understandings were later developed into more formal processes called The Sedona Method as well as The Release Technique, both of which I’ve found to be excellent transformational tools and are among my absolute favorites when it comes to releasing myself from suffering, allowing in more abundance and joy, and just relaxing into a state of peace and joy.

Enjoy!

Exploring the notion “Jesus Died for our Sins”

Reader Question:

Hey Ariel, how’s everything?

For a long time I pondered the meaning of the phrase “Jesus died for our sins”. In the past you made some very good interpretations of bible quotes, but if I remember correctly, you never talked about the christian concept of Jesus dying for our sins.

Do you have any explanation of this phrase?

Thanks a lot, and have a nice weekend,

F.

My Response:

Good question. You’re right that it’s not something I’ve ever talked about here.

So what’s the story taught in Christianity? Someone please correct me if I’m wrong because I really haven’t studied the Bible much, but from what I understand it seems that the idea was that basically the God of the Bible wanted to wipe out all of humanity as a result of them being such sinners. I’m not sure who thought up this plan, but Jesus came down to take the karmic burden upon himself. Instead of humans rising up beyond their egos to get into heaven (become enlightened/reach nirvana), humans now only have to believe in Jesus as being their lord and savior and they’re magically free of all that they have created, karmically speaking… It’s a much easier task, but people should still strive to be good people and live like Jesus did. They’ll never be able to fully do it though. After all, Jesus is more holy than they are. Jesus is perfect. Humans are mere mortals. They are “just human.” The Divine and the human are separate in this respect. We can only be one and not the other. (Oooh, separation.) Jesus must have been Divine. Afterall, he wasn’t born like a regular human. His mom was a virgin. The Divine doesn’t typically take the form of a human.

I dunno about you, but a bunch of pieces to this story feel way off. Let’s explore…

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We Often (Repeatedly) Experience Tremendous Darkness Before Finding The Light

Here’s a pattern I’ve noticed: Some of my greatest awakenings, realizations, and experiences in this life have been preceded by dramatic lows beforehand, emotionally, mentally, and otherwise. It’s almost like a lot of gunk comes up, is brought into awareness and experienced vividly, and once it is finally flushed out through giving up fighting against it anymore (acceptance and surrender), I am refilled with a tremendous degree of love and light.

There’s an old saying, “It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

Once we begin seeing this pattern unfold, we can begin to let go of our resistance to and pushing away of the painful and uncomfortable aspects of the process and begin trusting the process itself. There’s a method to the madness. It may be harder to trust and let go when you’re right in the midst of the depths, sure, but it is very much possible.

Gratitude

One thing that I’ve been receiving lately is the knowledge that gratitude helps reduce the extreme swings of the pendulum. (Thank you!!!) As has been shared with me, “gratitude is the glue” that holds things together when it feels like it’s all falling apart.

As I write this, I’m getting the sense that this is a different type of “holding together.” It’s not a sense of control and resistance to the crumbling of the old energies as a way of trying to limit one’s pain and stay in one’s comfort zone, but more of a way to help you move through the process and allow change to happen without so much of the previous struggle that has been associated with it.

Gratitude Gratitude Gratitude. We hear about it all the time and blessed is the day we finally listen.