Awakening
is the next natural stage of human development.
So awakening is simply to recognize the nature of our essential being.
Is not some weird, mystical religious experience
that's only available to the few.
It's available to everyone.
What we essentially are is already fully awake, fully aware.
And it's totally unlimited.
Your true nature is closer
than the you that you think you are.
Consciousness is the ultimate reality of the universe.
The next step in science is to say that consciousness is fundamental.
What is awakening anyway?
Somebody explain that to me.
What is awakening?
Whether you call it the true self, the imminent self or "no self",
or Buddha nature, Tao or Christ Consciousness,
it really doesn't matter.
In this film, we're going to refer to it as awareness.
Awareness
is not the property of any religion.
Awakening or realizing awareness
is like waking from a dream.
The dream of your character
in the play of life.
Through our characters,
we experience the world
in all of its beauty and its ugliness.
We can call this experience of life and death duality.
Around and around we go, fixated on the characters,
thoughts and sensations.
Good and bad.
War and peace.
Light and darkness.
Birth and death.
Until we wake up and find out
we are not the character.
The Invitation
In this film, we are extending an invitation
for you to directly experience your true nature.
To find out directly, not intellectually...
Who are you?
We will repeat this
invitation in different ways.
When inquiring into who you are,
let everything be exactly as it is.
Don't move the mind to make something happen
or to find some answer on the level of mind.
And yet, don't try to push away the mind.
Simply intend to directly experience who you are.
Letting the mind be a "don't know mind"
Awakening is the answer to all of the world's problems on every level.
All of the world's problems stem from a delusion.
The fundamental delusion of the mind.
And that delusion is that I am this limited character.
When we're living from a small, separate self,
there's always some kind of perpetual dissatisfaction.
So this can be big dissatisfaction like trauma,
or it can be just this background feeling...
"something's not right.
Something's wrong. I'm missing something."
Even when I have some pleasure, even when I achieve something in world,
even when I have a good relationship,
if I just have a pause or a moment,
there's this dissatisfied feeling like
I'm isolated or cut off from something.
So this feeling, which it seems like
most people have, can motivate us
to awaken from that small, separate self
whose nature is a kind of separation anxiety.
This limited character has a tendency to grasp for what it wants.
It's just a collection of conditioned patterns
of of craving what it wants or trying to push away what it doesn't want.
It's this endless process of you can say a pleasure
principle, you know, going after pleasure, avoiding pain.
And if we believe we are this
character, this conditioned pattern,
then we suffer and we create suffering in the world.
The world becomes a reflection of that egoic consciousness.
The benefit of awakening
is that you suffer less
and the people around you suffer less.
There's no doubt in my mind that my initial connection with
my understanding of God was an awakening
for me in my life, the biggest awakening that I've ever experienced.
It was very much as if I had been asleep really for 50 years.
Walking around like a robot, just doing the things that I was taught to do
from the time I was a young man, you know, I had a formula down,
get the girl, get the car, get a job, get the house, get a spouse.
A formula that I thought was how Iife was supposed to work
until I got to be around 53 years old.
And I realized that while I had done most of those things and had become
professionally successful to a degree, then I realized that none of
that matters. I who woke up somewhere around the age of 53, realizing
none of this matters,
none of this means anything.
I was shocked to find how this literally meant,
how pointless it all was.
Who are you?
When you stop following the script
that has been laid out for your character.
The one inherited from parents, society
and biological conditioning,
then new dimensions open up within the game.
The path opens up,
but it is not a path to reach some destination.
It is a pathless path,
a stripping away of illusion to arrive
exactly where you are in the now.
My name is Rupert Spira.
I speak about the essential
non-dual understanding that underlies
all the great religious and spiritual traditions.
And I write and lead guided meditations
and have conversations whose purpose is to lead
to an experiential recognition
of this understanding.
Understand that
the peace and the happiness
for which we all long
above all else, can never,
by definition be found in objective experience.
It can never be provided by objects, substances,
activities and relationships.
I would suggest
understanding that
clearly and not spending the rest of one's life
seeking fulfillment where it cannot be found.
Anyone who is watching this movie is doing so precisely because they have
either understood or at least intuited
that the peace and happiness for which they long cannot be found
in objective experience and have begun
this investigation into their true nature.
That is the most important investigation
one can make, and it is the investigation upon
which the depends our happiness.
The biggest question of my life, of course,
which I believe is the question most people look at sooner or later, is
"What is the point, actually?"
"What is the point of life?"
That, much to my surprise, I was told that the point of life
had nothing to do with anything that I was doing.
It wasn't about my job.
It wasn't about my career.
It wasn't about hardly anything in my physical life.
Those were aspects of my life were not the point of life.
The point of my life, as I have come to understand
it was for me to experience,
express, demonstrate and fulfill
my true identity, who I really am.
I think that the biggest question
that most people face is a question that hardly
anyone ever asks themselves or ever answers.
The biggest question of life,
in my understanding, is "who am I?"
Who am I?
Am I simply a physical entity
like a bird in the sky or fish in the sea?
You know, perhaps more sophisticated, but just a physical entity.
I'm born, I live, I die.
That's the beginning and the end of it.
Or is it possible, just possible
that I'm more than that?
Is it possible that I'm a spiritual entity
simply having a physical experience?
Every experience in your life
has brought you to this one universal question.
Who are you?
Don't look for an answer with the mind.
Let everything be exactly as it is.
Who is aware of the mind?
Feel everything that comes up.
Who is aware of those feelings?
Have a complete experience of everything that comes up
as a result of your inquiry.
I'm Donald Hoffman and I'm a professor
emeritus of cognitive sciences at the University of California at Irvine.
My work has been teaching students, although now I'm emeritus for
I don't teach. And now I do research.
I do research right now on consciousness, mathematical models
of consciousness, and how physics and spacetime might arise
from a theory of consciousness that's completely mathematically precise.
My own journey has been
both from the spiritual side and from the science side.
So my my father was a minister, fundamentalist Christian minister.
So I got that on Sundays
and I got science at school and they conflicted, right?
The stories I was getting were, contradictory.
And so as a teenager, I realized I needed to figure things out for myself.
And I decided the question I
wanted to answer was, are we machines?
Are people just machines or not?
I mean, from the physical point of view, are we just be machines
From a spiritual point of view, we wouldn't be machines.
It wasn't precise enough to say what we would be.
And so so I decided to ask the question
scientifically, are we just machines?
And the best way I thought to do that would be to study artificial intelligence.
And so so I went to MIT
and was in the artificial intelligence lab studying artificial intelligence
and also in what's now the brain and cognitive science department, studying
the human side of things. Because I wanted to do both.
I wanted to see what can machines do and what is special, if anything,
about humans and human neuroscience. To answer that,
that very question ar the spiritual traditions right?
Or are we more than just machines
or is the physical, scientific point of view right?
And we are just machines,
and consciousness is just an artifact
of brain activity.
The scientific materialist paradigm that has been predominant in the last century
denies the existence of anything beyond the physical,
anything that cannot be
verified by the scientific method.
Science is an impasse.
It cannot move beyond the paradox that is fundamental to quantum physics,
which brought it face to face with the observer,
with consciousness itself.
Likewise, religions are, for the most part, functioning
only on the level of belief.
They've lost their original purpose, which was to lead to direct experience,
to the truth of who and what we are.
The split between science and spirituality
has rendered both impoverished.
Religions and spiritual systems desperately need rigorous methods,
which can be shown to create conditions for awakening to happen.
And science desperately needs an openness
to the possibility of something beyond the physical.
It is not about giving up religion or science,
but about going deeper, being willing to change ourselves
so that we become a better tool for investigation.
We are the ones doing the experiment,
and the experiment itself.
Religion has been the language and the container
of these traditions of meditation, spirituality
that have been written down and passed
on through the generations.
Certainly there is some language that is very literal,
which divides religions and divides
cultures when things are taken literally.
But if you feel the spirit of religion,
you can follow the
thread back to authentic awakening.
Anyone has the potential, whether they have belief or no belief,
because awakening is inherent
within our human consciousness, just by our human birth.
So whatever you call it, and whenever language is used,
there's certain principles that seem to be the same
throughout these different religions
and spiritualities and meditation traditions.
When I was younger, this understanding
was mainly available in the Eastern spiritual traditions.
It was available in the Western
traditions, but it was so disguised and codified
in those traditions as to be almost inaccessible.
So many people of my generation went physically
or at least intellectually, to the East to find this understanding
and Eastern culture by comparison with
Western culture is exotic.
And so this understanding acquired a flavor of the exotic
from the cultures in which it was expressed.
And many people, myself included
thought as a result of this
that there was something exotic about the non dual
understanding; that it required some extra ordinary way of life,
that you had to give up family life
or grow your hair or get a special name or subscribe
to some kind of teacher or or tradition or engage in strange practices.
All these kind of things which had nothing to do
with the core understanding. They were to do with the culture
in which the understanding was expressed at a particular time.
So now the understanding has been completely divested
of the traditional cultural packaging in which many of us first heard about it.
And now just the essential understanding is available
in a way that enables us to carry on leading our lives
exactly as they are. Family life, work life...
it's not necessary to make any external changes in one's life.
The challenge we have on this planet
is that we think there's more than one
essence.
So we live in a
world of what I would call duality.
There's male and female, black and white,
big and small, fast and slow, up and down, here and there, before
and after, but in fact, there's only one thing.
All things are one thing.
There is only one thing.
So it turns out that when we look deeply at everything
we see that here and there, big and small, fast and slow, up and down, left and right,
male and female, are all the same thing, simply expressing
different characteristics but in no way separate from each other.
I believe that all of us
are individuations
of God.
I believe that God exists in, as, and
through every human being and for that matter, every sentient
being in the cosmos.
So I see then that I am in relationship to God
as a wave is to the ocean.
A wave is no different from the ocean; it's
simply an arising of the ocean in individual form.
And when that individuation is complete,
the wave recedes back into the ocean whence it came.
To arise again on another day.
So I believe that we are all individuations of divinity,
and when we see everything as divine,
we change our relationship with everything.
And everything becomes
different in our experience.
That's how the world changes.
Consciousness is the ultimate reality of the universe,
so we might well ask if consciousness is the ultimate reality of the universe
and everything, and everyone is obviously that, then how come
the world appears to us as a multiplicity and diversity
of discrete and independently existing people
and animals and things all made out of stuff called matter.
How can we reconcile this statement that consciousness
is the ultimate reality of the universe when it appears
as a multiplicity and diversity of objects made out of matter?
So the the evidence that I'm using to suggest that consciousness
is fundamental has many aspects to it.
One is that physics itself
says that space time isn't fundamental
and evolutionary theory also agrees that spacetime
and physical objects are not fundamental reality.
Now, both of those theories tell us only that, that spacetime is not fundamental.
They don't tell us what is beyond spacetime.
And so my argument is that what the physicists are finding
beyond spacetime, they're finding mathematical structures,
but what those are about
is not really clear. What is this realm beyond space time about?
And so I'm proposing that the realm beyond space time is about consciousness.
And I would suggest that infinite consciousness has the ability
to localize itself as numerous separate subjects of experience,
that is, all sentient beings, all people or animals.
Each of us are localizations of infinite consciousness,
in infinite consciousness made only of infinite consciousness
from whose perspective it views
its own activity as the outside world.
So what appears to us as a world made out of matter
from our localized perspectives, is from the point of view of reality,
simply the activity of the one infinite consciousness.
In other words, in the ultimate analysis, there are no discrete
or independently existing things or people.
There is one infinite, indivisible, whole.
The unity of being that is only refracted
into an apparent multiplicity and diversity of objects and things,
when The One looks at its own activity
through the perceiving faculties
of the finite mind.
If we are awake,
we realize that there's one awareness
that is disguised as all of these different beings on the planet,
one awareness shining through everyone's eyes.
Then we literally see ourselves in others.
And that tendency to operate as an ego,
the tendency to take for oneself
falls away because we directly realize the truth.
The truth is that we're all one consciousness.
The experience of my spiritual self
was only possible in the realm
of the physical for a very good reason,
because only in the realm of the physical was the opposite available.
In other words, just use a simple example,
if I wanted to experience myself, if I could speak
metaphorically, as the light,
I couldn't experience being the light if I was amidst the light,
nothing else around me but the light,
which is a perfect definition of the realm of the spiritual.
So I would come to a realm which I call the realm of the physical,
where there is something other than the light.
Because if I want to experience myself as the light,
not just know myself as that, but experience it,
I could only do that where there was
the opposite of the light, in this case, the darkness.
So I brought
this opportunity to the physical realm where the light and the dark exist
simultaneously, and then in that outward
expression of myself as the light, I could be who I really am.
And this understanding suggests
that behind our differences we are all the same being,
not a similar being, but we are all literally one... the same being.
And love is the felt experience
of this oneness or shared being.
It's a theorem of our theory that there is ultimately one consciousness.
So we have this dynamics of many, many conscious agents.
But the theory tells us that ultimately all those conscious agents
are really just projections of a single one consciousness.
The current paradigm in science
has, and it has been for for centuries,
is that space and time are the fundamental nature of reality.
They're irreducible and they are the foundation of everything.
And prior to Einstein, space and time were viewed as separate.
Now, space and time together, a unified into spacetime are viewed
as the fundamental nature of reality.
And science has then assumed that
spacetime and objects in spacetime are the foundational reality.
And so, for example, when we talk about consciousness,
consciousness itself then must be somehow a product of objects in space and time.
In that physicalist framework space and time and physical objects
without any consciousness are the fundamental reality.
And consciousness comes later on in the evolution of the universe, right?
So that the big bang, there was no consciousness,
there was just spacetime and energy.
The energy coalesced into massive particles
and eventually life emerged after who knows how many millions
or hundreds of millions or billions of years.
Then after that consciousness came, even later.
From that point of view, when you die, the physical complexity that gave
rise to consciousness dissolves and so your consciousness dissolves.
And so the physicalist framework really does eliminate consciousness
as a fundamental thing, altogether and says that
when your body dies, your consciousness goes with it.
From this other point of view...
what I've done with my colleagues, we have we used evolutionary theory
to point out that it's an implication
of evolutionary theory, that space and time is not fundamental,
so the physicalist interpretation of evolution is wrong.
The idea that that space and time and particles
somehow have evolved due to human organisms
is is the wrong framework, because spacetime itself is not fundamental.
We're positing a dynamics beyond spacetime that's much richer.
The dynamics of consciousness.
What we do not do is throw away our old theories.
When physicists say spacetime is doomed,
that doesn't mean we no longer pay attention to Einstein.
Absolutely not. We pay attention to Einstein.
Any new theory beyond spacetime that the physicists come up with better project
into space time and give us back Einstein and it better give us back quantum theory
or you're wrong.
All of our old theories
are wonderful, wonderful friends and we're going to keep them
as special cases of a deeper theory.
So in our theory of consciousness, we have to do the same thing.
We can't just propose anything we want.
We have to have a theory of consciousness that projects
and gives us back space time,
and gives us back quantum theory, and gives us back special and general
relativity, and gives us back evolution by natural selection.
If we cannot do that in precise mathematical detail, then there's
no reason for scientists to take our theory of consciousness seriously.
It's as if infinite consciousness puts on a virtual reality headset. Infinite
consciousness puts on a a VR headset made of thinking and perceiving.
And in doing so, the moment it puts on the VR headset,
it localizes itself within its own activity.
And through that headset it looks out through the perceiving
faculties of a finite mind; seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling.
And it fragments the unity of its own being
and makes it appear as 10,000 things.
What I'm suggesting is that
there is very much more to to the universe than the finite mind.
I'm not suggesting that the universe only appears in each of our finite minds.
The universe exists outside of our finite mind, but inside consciousness.
But it is the limitations of our finite mind
that give the universe its appearance.
So when we look out at the universe, we're seeing the reality
that exists prior to its being perceived.
But we are seeing it through the lens of our perceiving faculties,
which gives it its appearance.
So the idea of awakening in many spiritual traditions has been the idea
that what we have taken as reality
objects in space and time, our physical bodies and so forth
is not the final reality, that there is a much deeper reality,
a reality of consciousness that transcends space and time and physical objects,
and that we're not divorced from that reality.
That reality is, in some sense, the essence of what we are.
And so awakening is awakening from the illusion
that I'm just a little body in space and time to the fact that I am
in fact the author of everything I see inside of space and time.
I create it on the fly as I look and perceive.
How do I awaken?
One becomes awakened by recognizing that
what we essentially are is already
fully awake, fully aware,
complete, whole, fulfilled at peace.
It's like asking how does the
sun become illuminated?
Its nature is light.
It is already fully illuminated.
The nature of our essential being is already peace and happiness.
It's not clear to us all, because our essential being is so
thoroughly mixed with the content of experience that its innate
Peace and happiness is dimmed by experience.
And for that reason we think that our essential being needs to be enlightened.
No, our essential being doesn't need to be enlightened
any more than the sun needs to be lit up in the early morning.
The sun's always shining with the same brightness.
Our essential being is always shining with the same peace and joy.
But that peace and joy are dimmed by the agitation
and lack that characterizes our thoughts and feelings.
There's no person that awakens.
So the I that awakened
I awakened from this Dan
structure at a meditation center.
It was a Zen center.
We were doing a Zen sesshin
which is a long period of intensive practice.
So Zen is amazing for creating this container
where there are these conditions of no escape.
So the Dan character that had learned meditation,
the Dan character had been doing all this meditation,
this doer of meditation,
realized that it couldn't awaken.
It's like all the meditation tricks,
all the practices that had been learned were of no use.
It got to the point where that character
who was trying to awaken, failed
to awaken and had to fail.
That the character that I had been living, the character that I've been playing
all my life, had to let go or die and
what was left?
What was left when there was no doer
when there was no meditator
meditating or doing something called, meditation,
what was left was my true nature
or me... just me.
When we awaken from this small, separate sense of self, it's
not that we're killing the ego
or we're fighting it.
It's actually we're allowing it to semi retire
from its job of ego identity
and then relax to be part
of our team, part of our consciousness.
And this gives us a sense of freedom immediately
that we're not looking at the world through a small lens,
that we're we're open hearted and open minded in a way that's
expansive and yet at the same time, more intimately connected.
Enlightenment is not about becoming awakened.
Nobody becomes awakened or enlightened.
It's a recognition of the light, the light of pure knowing
whose nature is peace and happiness
that we always and already are.
My name is Lisa Natoli, and I'm known as a spiritual teacher.
I teach about healing and awakening and transformation.
Awakening is the recognition of your true nature,
and it's the realization of what you really are, which is consciousness.
And consciousness is just one word for many words that people use
for awareness, life, love, God,
light.
So waking up to the recognition that I'm not this body
that I am, that which never dies and that which is never born,
and that was a very difficult idea for me.
I've been on a spiritual path since 1992.
I started with A Course in Miracles.
I always studied it religiously.
I mean, I was someone who was so committed to knowing the
Self, knowing God, waking up. ... I couldn't get it,
because I was under the belief
that awakening was something mystical,
that something would happen, that something would occur,
and it would be like Jesus
or Buddha or all of these enlightened masters
and it wasn't happening for me.
I couldn't understand why.
Why am I so committed
and I'm having deep moments of peace and happiness and joy... and still struggling.
I started to realize the simplicity
of our true nature, which is awareness.
So for someone who's listening to me right now,
the awareness that's hearing this voice, that's what we are.
And it doesn't have a location, it doesn't have a gender,
it doesn't have a color, it doesn't have a body,
and it's totally unlimited.
So awakening is where we wake up
to our true nature.
We wake up to the realization that I am the awareness
of this experience right now as I'm here.
And it's so ordinary
we miss it.
We think it can't be that simple.
The recognition of our true nature,
it doesn't lead to happiness.
It is happiness... the nature of being
is happiness itself.
So the recognition of our true nature is the experience of happiness.
Who is aware in this moment?
The mind will
look for something, or try to complicate it.
You already are
that which the mind is looking for.
The mind will always miss it.
So don't look to the mind for an answer.
Don't push away your thoughts
and don't get caught in the thoughts.
Simply let go of the interest or attachment to thoughts, ideas
and beliefs.
Intend to directly experience
who you are.
Don't try to negate the mind or to achieve some state.
All doing, all manipulation,
all movement is more controlling by the mind.
Allow the mind to be as it is.
Sometimes people can awaken just in day to day life.
They don't necessarily need practice.
So sometimes things will happen in life where there's an interrupt
in the pattern of you. And there can be a spontaneous awakening.
But if someone's life is just going on in a kind of robotic pattern
or repetitive pattern, then
some sort of intervention is necessary.
if one is called to awakening and that interrupt in the pattern of you
is sometimes called sadhana or spiritual practice.
And these practices are always
conditioned.
Thet are something that we learn with the conditioned mind.
So they can make it more likely for awakening to happen,
sort of by loosening the bonds within the self structure.
Sometimes they say that awakening happens by accident,
but the practice makes you more accident prone.
The techniques, the practices can be very useful
to make you more accident prone.
But then at a certain point have to be let go.
Because if the mind is continuously doing some practice
or some thing, then the mind has
the reins, mind is in the driver's seat.
So the practices are useful, very useful
as steppingstones for making the self structure,
you can say less dense or enlightening up the self structure
so that it becomes more permeable
to our true nature.
The paradox with practice is that when you finally awaken,
you realize that all of the practices
were being done by the false self,
the character in the VR game, and that YOU,
the true self, was never bound.
All you have to do is give up the preferences of the ego,
to give up the fixation on things.
Anything within the field of changing phenomena is not the true self,
the you that you think you are, the you that you've always been
identified with will never awaken
you awaken from that character.
You awaken from the delusion that you were this conditioned character.
So when people come to these retreats, they think this
"I" this little "me" is going to awaken, some great thing is going to happen.
But at a certain point, that little me will never do it.
It has to give up, it has to fail.
And it's only in that failure
we realize who we are, that we've always been aware, we've always been present.
We just got hooked into this character and we believed
we were that.
I started my spiritual search in the classical Advaita Vedanta
tradition, which was a devotional path
that involved mantra meditation,
which I practiced very diligently for 20 years.
And mantra meditation involves
focusing your attention on a sound
and then gradually the sound fades.
However, it was really when I came in touch
with the direct path that
my spiritual search really reached its culmination.
Because in this direct approach,
we don't give our attention to any object, however subtle,
for instance, a mantra, a sound, the breath,
we allow our attention to sink inwards
or backwards into its source.
Let's use an analogy.
Imagine that you are watching your life on a television screen.
You are identified with the character on the screen.
Day after day,
year after year you are involved with the story of the character
when suddenly you wake up out of the story
to notice the screen on which the character appears
and you realize you are not the character you've been watching.
Objects can come and go on the screen.
Characters come and go,
but the screen remains unchanged.
The character can get wet,
but the screen does not get wet. The character can be disturbed,
but the screen is not disturbed.
Without the screen, the characters would not exist,
yet screen goes unnoticed.
The characters go about their scripted lives.
Awareness is like the screen.
It is like the space in which all thoughts,
motions, all states of consciousness come and go.
Thoughts, sensations
and the entire outside world appear on the screen, constantly changing.
But the screen does not change.
It's the mind that changes states through the human experience.
But there's something, that what you are, that remains.
Something that is ever present,
that is aware of those changing states
and that is consciousness or our true nature.
As long as there is attachment to a character on the screen,
a sense that I am that character, then there will be suffering;
maya the illusion of the self.
Nothing you can do as the dream
character will help to free you. Whether you follow the script
in the drama of your life or rebel against the script,
if you act from the point of view of the character,
then you're caught in the illusion.
To awaken,
stop identifying with what appears on the screen.
Recognize that it is all impermanent.
Stop reacting to thoughts and treating the program as real.
If I withdraw attention from the screen, turning awareness
towards itself, an unfathomable thing happens.
Awareness itself wakes up.
This is not a happening.
Happening is what happens on the screen.
Awakening is just recognizing the screen
that was always already there.
Do not believe your next thought
instead, turn awareness towards awareness itself.
I have always been myself.
My sense of my self runs throughout my life.
It remains consistently present throughout my life.
What is present in me now,
that was present yesterday, last year, ten years ago,
and when I was a two year old child?
What is this essential "I" or self
to whom all my experience happens?
The recognition
of the nature of that one is the great secret to life.
It is the direct path to peace
and happiness. It is not something that a person initiates.
It's something that a person recognizes.
To re-cognize.
That is to know, again.
What we've known from the beginning
but is simply forgotten, or denied or failed to believe.
So we cannot initiate closeness to God.
We can simply recognize, to recognize that it's always been there
and will always be there.
It was only this direct pointing to awakening,
this opening to what's already here that allowed me to find
a new way of
being- a new stage of development.
Many people think it's a very impossible or out of reach goal
to know the self, and my own
sort of purpose as a teacher, just because of my own awakening,
has really been wanting to make it very practical, very down to Earth.
I love to teach people, it's available to everyone.
If we believe and feel
that we are a temporary, finite, separate self,
we are, whether we know it or not,
searching for peace and happiness.
In other words, it's not possible to be a separate self,
to feel oneself as a separate self and not be in search of happiness.
So what is required
in this case is to reorientate one's search for happiness,
instead of seeking for happiness in the objective content of experience,
to seek happiness in oneself.
So the spiritual practice that is required
is to direct one's attention or more accurately,
to relax one's attention into its source,
pure awareness, rather than directed towards
an object substance activity or relationship, and so on.
So the spiritual practice, if we can call it a practice,
would be this relaxing
of the attention, this subsidence of the attention
into the heart of awareness,
resting in being as being.
Love.
Pure love is my true self.
It's my true nature.
Pure love for everyone and everything,
for every aspect of life.
Even those things with which I disagree.
For one who has recognized the nature of their being, they know their being
as the the source of the peace
and happiness for which they long.
So the world no longer becomes the place
in which they seek happiness, seek fulfillment.
Doesn't mean to say that such a person no longer has desires,
but the desires are not there to fulfill the sense of lack
that is characteristic of the separate self.
As such, a person has found the source of happiness
within themselves and their desires come from that sense of happiness.
They do not go towards it.
For instance, in the realm of relationship,
it makes a big difference to our relationships.
We no longer seek an other
to fulfill the needs of our self.
We seek another to share
the experience of happiness that we already have.
And this relieves our our friends of the impossible burden
of providing happiness for a voracious,
unsatisfied self.
Nothing occurs in my life
that is has not brought me benefit or will not bring me benefit
in the sense that every moment, every activity, every outcome
moves me forward
in the process of the evolution of my soul.
And that's why I came here to the physical realm,
to evolve.
Remain open.
Feel your inner aliveness,
letting energy circulate freely.
Don't try to make anything happen.
Who is aware of that energy,
that inner aliveness?
Notice the mind's tendency to control and manipulate,
to get involved.
Without the use of your memory or language,
Who are you?
Beyond the mind and senses,
who are you?
Who is aware?
Changing the World
Many people who are hearing these ideas for the first time,
they've never even heard this idea of the self.
In my mind, there's two different camps of people.
There are those who are on a spiritual path and they have heard this idea.
They're trying to reach the self, they're trying to be the self.
They're seeking, they're searching.
And then there's other people who have just been living their life.
They've never heard of these ideas before.
They've never heard of Know Thyself.
Many people think know thyself means know the body,
know yourself, be yourself, be authentic.
What it really means, to know thyself is to know what you are,
to know what you are in truth and to really know your true nature.
The words know thySelf were carved
on the entrance of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, and as such
stand as an invitation that the dawn of Western civilization to humanity,
suggesting that to Know Thyself is really the foundation
of all civilization. Why?
Because our Self stands at the center of all our experience.
Whatever we are experiencing, it is we who are experiencing it.
Whatever we think and feel, our thoughts
and feelings arise on behalf of our Self.
Whatever activities and relationships we are engaged
in, we engage those activities and relationships in service of our Self.
So our Self stands at the center of our experience.
So what could be more important than to know the nature of our Self,
and would it be possible
to know the nature of anything else
if we do not first know the nature of that which knows it?
I think awakening is
about ending the nightmare
and stepping into the dream.
By that I mean
we desert or finally abandon the nightmare of what
we've been told about life, about God, and about ourselves.
And we step into the dream of our grandest notion.
I often ask, What do you think your life would be like
if you found yourself stepping into the highest
grandest, most wonderful thought you ever had about God, and about life
and about yourself.
So this recognition of our true nature is not only the recognition
that brings our desire for happiness in the world to an end.
It is also the recognition that enables us
to live in a way that is consistent with the understanding
that at the deepest level, everything and everyone, are one.
This understanding would bring
kindness, compassion, justice,
tolerance, understanding into our society.
Our society would be revolutionized
by this understanding.
As humanity lets go of ego based approaches,
then science, religion, politics
and economics start to reflect the perennial wisdom.
Whether it is the native traditions who realize
Great Spirit in all things,
or the Egyptian/Kemetic traditions who describe the human
evolutionary journey from the lowly scarab
to the one source,
or when we hear the words
of the mystics of the Christian, Hindu,
Muslim, or Buddhist traditions,
or the teachings of Plato and Plotinus we find that
those who have realized their true nature speak of groupings of conscious agents.
Of course, they used the language of their culture
and times to express the one perennial truth.
Science is now starting to see not a world of unconscious particles
and fields, but a universe made of
conscious agents.
Something new is emerging in the world of science.
As Nikola Tesla said,
the day science begins to study nonphysical phenomena,
it will make more progress in one decade
than in all the previous centuries of its existence.
That day is today.
Every time that we've had a mathematically precise advance
in science, it has opened up new technologies
that look like magic compared to what we had before.
So my feeling is that this theory of conscious agents beyond spacetime
will give us technologies
that will be truly mind boggling.
For example, right now, most of the galaxies that we see,
I think 97% of the galaxies that we see,
we can never go to. They are receding from us faster than the speed of light.
So they're not moving through space faster than the speed of light.
Space itself is expanding, so quickly that their speed
moving away from us is greater than the speed of light.
So we could never travel through space
to go to 97% of the galaxies that we can see.
So there's all this real estate out there that's waving at us and saying, hi,
we're out here and you can never come to us.
That's if you go through spacetime.
But what if you realize that spacetime is just your headset?
It's just the format of a game
and you're not stuck inside the headset.
You can play with the software that's running the game.
So it's like someone who's like in Grand Theft Auto, you're a
Wizard of Grand Theft Auto,
so you know how to use the car
and drive the roads and you can beat everybody in the game.
But suppose you actually know the software that runs Grand Theft Auto.
So you step outside of the Grand Theft Auto headset
and you can play with the software.
Well, you can take the gasoline out of the tank of the wizard.
You can give them a flat tire.
You can change the geometry of the roads.
You can do whatever you want to.
So once we understand our space time headset,
we won't have to travel to the Andromeda Galaxy
through space time, which would take us 2.4 million years.
We can just go around space time.
I see the world around me as stepping into
a quieter expression and experience of what it means to be human
and what it means to be an aspect of divinity.
But I don't think that we have an endless amount of time.
I get a sense that time is
running out, that it's now or never time.
I think we're on the right path.
I have a sense of optimism that because of the kinds of opportunities
that we see today in the world to communicate
powerful and important ideas
ways that we didn't have even a few years ago
are creating the possibility that we can get to that place of critical
mass, that we can reach critical mass
before our time runs out.
But we would be mistaken if we think we have an endless amount of time
on this planet.
When each individual
disidentifies from their conditioned character,
then they're no longer acting as an egoic entity.
And that brings about a transformation on the planet.
This brings a new Earth.
Life as we know it right now on this planet,
I think we need to make some changes and make them quickly,
dramatically and radically
if we want to see the tomorrow for which we've all dreamt.
So, could this understanding become mainstream in our lifetime?
Why not? Yes.
The challenge we have right now is nothing is working,
and the time has come for us to stand up and say that's true.
Surely we can do better than this.
Surely,
We can expand our understanding of who we are
and our expression of our true nature.
We need to pay attention
to our environment,
to our politics, to our economics,
and to our spiritual process on this planet.
Because the problem in the world today is not a political problem.
It's not an economic problem.
It's not a social problem.
It's a spiritual problem.
It has to do with how committed we are
with stepping into the highest spiritual truths.
This is not New Age philosophy.
These ideas have been around
for thousands of years.
The perennial wisdom has been expressed through
countless traditions and cultures and like awareness
itself, has always been hidden in plain view.
In Christianity,
the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas contains
direct pointers to our true nature.
The disciples asked Jesus, When will the kingdom come?
Jesus said, It will not come by waiting for it.
It will not be a matter of saying, Here it is, or there it is.
Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out
upon the earth and people do not see it.
The Kingdom is not here or there. Awareness is not here or there.
It is not fixed in time and space.
If you are waiting for something to happen
for some outward event or some state, some ascension,
some healing or some energy, then
your conditioned mind is still seeking.
It is still mediating your experience
of the now.
in Buddhism they say samsara,
the world of suffering and nirvana,
the world of liberation are not two separate worlds.
They are one and the same.
We don't manipulate or change things
to arrive at some mystical reality.
When we awaken, the perfection of the world is revealed
directly, as it is.
Is it possible to simply be here and now in this moment,
unmediated by that seeking mind?
Is it possible to be okay with this moment as it is?
To simply be.