Transformations of consciousness towards wisdom and compassion

Pain.

It is overwhelming.

We constantly live lives of others, holographically dreaming collective dreams, and sometimes attempting to make our dreams dominate over those of others or submitting ourselves to others' dreams. When a client visits a therapist or a healer or a shaman, two life stories meet, and these stories are shared both in gross and subtler dimensions of being-in-the-world; and the shaman's job is to emphatically embrace the totality of suffering in the other, virtually live it through in some translocal and transtemporal realm of one's own embodied universal consciousness as a sum of perspectives that are available so as to look and feel into the being of the individual, not get convinced in a false idea of the person that his or her life story story is absolute truth of what the world is (the myth of the given), offer in exchange one's own story of truth and liberation that at some point must be wide enough so as to embrace the entire Kosmos, and to be completely liberated from the story itself while fully embodying it as profoundly as one can. You need to be liberated in order to give space for the story's healthy development and evolution; and you need to be fully present as an embodiment of this story in order to support creation of the morphic field of such an altitude of consciousness (and actually have fun). And if you are good and honest with yourself, you can offer nothing nothing else than the story of integrally liberated universal being.

Even though I am in the initial phase of the practice in some ways, as I increasingly get in touch with subtle dynamics I start to feel the totality of blockages and pains and sufferings of sentient beings around. I feel how we virtually strangulate each other, inserting one another into one's own partial and limited life story of who we are as human beings and what life is about. All I can do is giving space to these sufferings in my own consciousness because there is ultimately no separation, we are all intertwined. And often it is overwhelming; and there is nowhere to hide from the fiery light of truthful seeing, hearing, feeling, and being.

I offer my Soul to the path of liberation of the Kosmos as a living total-unity; and I silently pray to the Divine for the grace and grit. I need to embody courage, strength and will as well as compassion and wisdom to manifest the deepest potentials of consciousness that offer treasures beyond any price.

I conclude with my favorite quotation from the splendid American Beauty movie that one is ought to watch at some point in life.

Ricky Fitts: It was one of those days when it's a minute away from snowing and there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. And this bag was, like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and... this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember... and I need to remember... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in.

Nothingness

Last night as I was falling asleep I had an interesting experience. I was lying on my back, with awareness being expanded to embrace my entire body and vision and hearing and thoughts. I was giving space to whatever was arising. At some point I crossed the unseen border between waking and sleeping; and I appeared as some kind of enormously light space with no boundaries. For a few moments it was as if I as pure consciousness-awareness was floating in a dark room of nothingness; and there was infinite release and expansion all graspable at the same moment as pure space. There was nothing but a total freedom from anything; as if it was this empty freedom that experienced anything else; and yet at the same time there was nothing else that could be spoken. Last thoughts dissolved. And then the dreaming caught me into its visions; and out of nothing there was manifestation again in which I became involved.

William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence"

William Blake's famous poem.

Auguries of Innocence
by William Blake

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.

A dove-house fill'd with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell thro' all its regions.
A dog starv'd at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.

A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.

A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipt and arm'd for fight
Does the rising sun affright.

Every wolf's and lion's howl
Raises from hell a human soul.

The wild deer, wand'ring here and there,
Keeps the human soul from care.
The lamb misus'd breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher's knife.

The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won't believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever's fright.

He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be belov'd by men.
He who the ox to wrath has mov'd
Shall never be by woman lov'd.

The wanton boy that kills the fly
Shall feel the spider's enmity.
He who torments the chafer's sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.

The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother's grief.
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the last judgement draweth nigh.

He who shall train the horse to war
Shall never pass the polar bar.
The beggar's dog and widow's cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.

The gnat that sings his summer's song
Poison gets from slander's tongue.
The poison of the snake and newt
Is the sweat of envy's foot.

The poison of the honey bee
Is the artist's jealousy.

The prince's robes and beggar's rags
Are toadstools on the miser's bags.
A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

The babe is more than swaddling bands;
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;

This is caught by females bright,
And return'd to its own delight.
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,
Are waves that beat on heaven's shore.

The babe that weeps the rod beneath
Writes revenge in realms of death.
The beggar's rags, fluttering in air,
Does to rags the heavens tear.

The soldier, arm'd with sword and gun,
Palsied strikes the summer's sun.
The poor man's farthing is worth more
Than all the gold on Afric's shore.

One mite wrung from the lab'rer's hands
Shall buy and sell the miser's lands;
Or, if protected from on high,
Does that whole nation sell and buy.

He who mocks the infant's faith
Shall be mock'd in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne'er get out.

He who respects the infant's faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child's toys and the old man's reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.

The questioner, who sits so sly,
Shall never know how to reply.
He who replies to words of doubt
Doth put the light of knowledge out.

The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar's laurel crown.
Nought can deform the human race
Like to the armour's iron brace.

When gold and gems adorn the plow,
To peaceful arts shall envy bow.
A riddle, or the cricket's cry,
Is to doubt a fit reply.

The emmet's inch and eagle's mile
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne'er believe, do what you please.

If the sun and moon should doubt,
They'd immediately go out.
To be in a passion you good may do,
But no good if a passion is in you.

The whore and gambler, by the state
Licensed, build that nation's fate.
The harlot's cry from street to street
Shall weave old England's winding-sheet.

The winner's shout, the loser's curse,
Dance before dead England's hearse.

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro' the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.

The ground for conscious being

It is both fascinating and frightening how lost we can be in the world of apparitions due to subtle contractions and attachments of our psyche—the phenomena of which we tend to be unaware. We get used to a limited perspective on ourselves and on others; we develop some basic agreements with the world during the process of growth and interaction with the other, we co-create the worldspace where we live that includes our thoughts, things that we say, things how we say, our memories, visions, sensations, body movements, chronic energy fixations, and the totality of it all is our self which we present to the loved ones and the hated ones and the world at large.

It is dramatic that our self, as it constantly grows towards more maturity and embrace and experience and becoming more aware of itself by including more and more entities into its space of being-in-the-world, at earlier stages can learn and adapt to the world, construct the basic sets of its elements in a way that in the future would become self-evident as self-contractions and subtle attachments that hinder liberation and hide essential qualities of one's own human being, of one's own profound truth under limited adaptive masks or personae of which we are not aware for initially and genealogically these masks were developed in order to comply with the requirements and agreements that the other and the environment told us, showed us in the days when we were just starting to make first steps towards self-consciousness and conscious liberation. And these masks of which we are not yet aware, the shadow patterns of our co-existence contaminate our whole life and communion with the ones we love and prevent us from being fully and self-recognizably who we are, radiant blissful fluctuations of the Spirit's meaningful, passionate, unlimited unfolding, the unfolding that is personally embodied in the Soul, the ego, and the bodymind.

The Spirit is always present in our life as the very fact that we are aware. In fact it is the space of awareness, of consciousness that is aware of us and all our life right now. In this space the wisdom and compassion grow and stabilize as structures, as fractals, as flowers. Giving space to yourself the way you fully and deeply are in your true embodied nature means grounding yourself in awareness and putting everything that exists in life into this ground, washing with its liberating rain the basics presets of your tetra-constructed¹ being and knowledge of the world and how to engage with it. In the space of awareness the spontaneity occurs that breaks ice of the old and allows novelty to emerge, and the novelty brings new excitements and flow of life and the conscious awareness always liberates them from attachment, for the attachment per se is something of which we can become conscious in the space of awareness.

The names of attachments, fixations and repressions are Legion. They hide everywhere in your private and public worldspace and they cause you to develop a false concept of the self, a false self. You get used to move in a certain way and not the other; and you unconsciously consider these movements to be the boundaries that divide the territory of your self from the foreign land of not-self, the unknowing land that brings anxiety by its very existence. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in movements. You get used to have certain sensations and feelings in the body; and you may not even be aware of the fact that these are only sensations and feelings that emerged in the process of growth; and you just take them for granted. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in how you feel your body. You get used to have certain thoughts and preconceived ideas in your mind; and these ideas are always more limited than the mystery of the world and your self. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in how you think about yourself and existence.

You get used to hearing a limited spectrum of sounds, seeing limited things, enjoying limited moves, experiencing limited emotions, playing limited roles, having a limited diapason of dreams, and living a limited range of possibilities of life. And all of it in the totality of who you are you present as a total message of your existence to others. And others respond, both consciously and unconsciously, to this message as a whole with their being. Of course, you are responding to their message as well.

If I am so attached to these things that I don't even let them into my awareness so as to let go of them, how not to get lost in this vortex of apparitions and how to finally arise above the process of recreating the suffering, the suffering that is constantly shared with others? If there is nothing in my self that I can ground myself in, for it all is essentially a fleeting and constructed experience, what is the way to freedom? How can I free myself to being fully embodied and yet unattached? The ultimate way is to ground yourself in something that has no content and yet is always already present, in a presence that constitutes the basic undeniable dimension of the being-in-the-world that is closer to you than your self.

That which is always already present and yet has no content is the silent awareness, the very framework of attention, the very space of consciousness in which everything you are reading right now as you are sitting in a certain posture, feeling certain sensations and thinking ideas and making various micro- and macro-movements is arising moment to moment. This awareness is your best fucking friend forever. Ground yourself in awareness and allow yourself making new moves, approaching people in new ways, playing new roles, having a fresh taste of feelings in the body, no matter how silly you think those are, for these very thoughts of silliness are just temporary clouds in the sky of your awareness that come and go, come and go like flowing waves in the ocean cradled by the wind which is the Spirit whispering.

Ground yourself and help your beloved to ground themselves in awareness and then look into their eyes and make funny faces, scream and cry and move and liberate and dance together and give the full space to feelings in the body and suffering in the life for this is the path to healing and redemption and underneath suffering you can find profound happiness if you actually follow this advice, this practical injunction. Constantly remind yourself and others of this translucent awareness and the power of the present moment and the glory of all-pervading silence by being a living example.

The quietude is the Spirit smiling to you.

¹ Tetra-construction is the term that points to biological, psychological, cultural, and social factors of development and evolution. See, e.g., Wilber, Integral Spirituality, 2006.

The all-pervading duḥkha

The following is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to my dearest friend a few days ago. I thought it's precious enough to share with the world:

Last night, when I was going to sleep I had that time when everything in life seems... feels sore. All the dreams, actions, responses, goals, memories, the entire manifested realm seemed impermanent and sore. This feeling was reminiscent of duhkha; and, indeed, it probably is exactly what it was. I felt duhkha in my body, its movements, in my mind's thoughts, ideas, concepts, in the world around, the world that strives for something. I felt duhkha in the dreams we share and in the moments we try to stop. I felt duhkha in my research paper that I write and in the hundreds of books that I read or will have to read so as to make the research more or less accomplished. I felt duhkha in my desire to be richer financially. I felt duhkha in my desire to be richer spiritually. I felt duhkha in the way the world was presented to my awareness at the moment. I felt duhkha and a desire to die and to arise liberated and reshaped in a different form. These were the precious moments of realizing at least for that period that there is virtually nothing to personally cling to, to want, to desire, to force oneself into. I fell asleep and had dreams and as I woke up the duhkha unveiled something beneath its sheath, something mysterious and yet blissful, something ultimately joyful and knowing. 

While there is always duhkha in the relative world of living, beneath it there is ultimate joy of participation in the constant co-creation of the manifested realm. And I realized that the thing I want the most at this moment, even though wanting itself is duhkha, is transforming myself to be able to always already be connected with the vast universe of different magnitudes of experiencing- and being-in-the-world. Life as it is in its unknowingness is nothing compared to life that is enriched with knowingness, jnana, and energies of the Kosmic creativity. I humbly pray to my innermost being to realize my deepest potential and to transform the utterly familiar into a completely different world of the mysterious. To realize my supreme identity and liberate that of others is what my living is for. To have fun surfing the waves of the ocean of primordial awareness. No amount of gold in the world, no amount of traveling, no amount of lesser experiences can overbuy this awareness which turns everything into gold and the most profound experience of being by leaving it perfectly the way it is now—a changing manifestation of the Unborn.

And, perhaps, the most painful and joyful is to let go of these words as well as of their opposites for giving the space to actual reality beneath them.

For those interested, a very detailed and yet simply-written article on duḥkha can be found in Wikipedia.

Self distributed through space and time

When I think about what self means, I usually end up being lost in a vortex of images, smells, sensations, visions, memories. The self of a human being is something so huge, so enormous, so encompassing, so different that it requires an interstellar span of inquiry in order to get to the point where the space of vibrating wisdom appears to bring forth the light of elusive understanding. And yet the self can feel as something utterly familiar, unavoidably close, exclusively intimate. Something that connects both time and space in a singularity point of consciousness-awareness.

Here, in this short post, I would like to notice only the idea that the self is fundamentally historical in its nature. The history of humankind on the planet Earth reminds of a Plato's cave. This cave is the ecological homeland of the hypertextual human self. It is a little grotto in a forsaken corner of the galaxy. When you think about your life as your self, a human being with its identities, you can reach a place where all life is seen through the eyes of a transcendental witness. The witness observes your births, your lives, your deaths in the course of your being. And he weaves the story of your life into a web of individual existence. This individual web is interweaved with the vast networks of fates. The globality of these networks emerged through the process of historical unfolding that spans from the day one to eternity.

If you looked back into the history of humankind as a meta-observer, I guarantee that you would be surprised. Think of how long an average individual self, an individual human being lives. Perhaps 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years. Seventy one year ago, in 1939, the World War II began and brought horrors and terrors into lives of everyone in Europe. Ninety three years ago, in 1917, the Russian Revolution occurred that led to the beginning of a regime that destroyed entire cultures and murdered dozens of millions of men and women, families, nations. 93 years can easily be a lifespan of a modern person. One human life, one human self in its complexities and simplicities, ecstases and enthases, in its overall trajectory of space-time continuum.

If you looked even farther back in the history, and considered that a hypothetical average person lived at least 50 years, you would notice that ten human lives ago Europeans were just starting to explore America. You would shake your head in disbelief, if you realized that only forty human lives ago there was Jesus. Fifty lives ago there was Gautama Buddha. Fifty individual selves ago there was Plato speaking about the cave in which the human tragedy and comedy had been unfolding and continued its unfolding ever since. Only seventy people stretched in time connect me to the great Pharaohs of Egypt who built their pyramids as a symbol of wonder and awe in the face of the Mystery. Think of it, building one pyramid took thousands of lives stretched in space; and it takes only a journey of seventy lives stretched in time, seventy people, who passed their genes to the further generations, to get from Egypt to today's world.  

These seventy people were your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents and so on (of course, the number is always multiplying by two when we take into consideration, e.g., that it took a man and a woman converging in the same singularity point of space-and-time to produce a new self).

So don't you dare to ever say that a human self,  your human self, your personality in its totality means nothing in the face of history. It takes just one human life, your self stretched in time, to create a culture or to destroy one. Less than ten human lives are needed to make the leap from the mythic stake-burning consciousness to the rational one. And it would take just one life now to go further, to change the world. To destroy the old. To create novelty—or not to create. The choice is here, right in front of you; and the impersonal meta-observer will be witnessing the choices you are going to make. Perhaps, the only choice you don't have is that you are always bound to make a choice.

(Incidentally, in many ways I am anarchistic: the whole point of abusive power that belongs to the other is in preventing you from realizing the creative Power within. The genuine Power is to be present in the world, to be aware of the very being-in-the-world, to change the world, to co-create it in the commonwealth of strong liberated and at the same time caring interdependent individualities. It didn't take long before the self realized it can learn this power within.)

Happy New Year!