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.
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?
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.