The Awakening Process

Perhaps you have had a spontaneous spiritual awakening, either of energy or consciousness, of sound or vision, of wisdom or heart? There are many ways we are cracked open to face the truth that we are not the limited identity we were taught to believe we were. The role of a spiritual teacher is to facilitate this cracking, this releasing of the imagined self, and support the embodiment of identification with our True Nature or Self, which is felt at first to be a potent and limitless emptiness or nothing – a condition that is confusing for most uninitiated minds. We must fully enter this emptiness alone to know it.

Awakening can happen in an instant, to someone willing to stop, be silent, and suspend for a moment his or her mental and emotional positions and conceptual frameworks. Embodiment is the psychological/emotional movement (either suddenly or over a period of time) that releases all of these frameworks permanently, allowing life to be lived as one who is paradoxically empty and completely whole, impersonal and completely intimate with all existence, detached but flowing love and compassion.

Liberation, more rare than awakening, is stabilization in the embodied condition, seeing only the One, the Source, in every apparent form and movement of existence. It is a condition that already exists, for the source always knows Itself, but individuals do not recognize this before awakening and embodiment occur, because we are clouded by our mental concepts, memories and sense impressions. We are deluded by our egosense of separateness.

This perspective of awakening to Oneness, rooted in the unspeakable direct experience of eastern and western mysticism, as well as the wisdom teachings of every tradition, has been treasured as a secret for millenniums. Methods to attain realization were considered too advanced for the ordinary person, who would not be able to deal with the dramatic changes in consciousness it would bring. Yet the experience of realization has occurred many times in ashrams and monasteries, zendos and temples, and even in the silent and unexpected moments of isolated loneliness or grief in an ordinary life. Today people are awakening spontaneously, or seek the Truth after recognizing the total inadequacy of religious and cultural institutions to speak directly to the questions that most trouble them – What are we really? Why do we cause such harm to one another? How can I break free of a troubling mind and discover if there is something more essential that my life is all about? As Eckhart Tolle has spoken so beautifully in his book “A New Earth” it is time for all who are drawn to it to move toward the direct realization of Self. The teachings and the transmission are directly available Now.

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