Andrew's
Awareness Diary

Friday, 4th December 2007

Been feeling out field awareness. Just going about my day feeling
myself as the space and light around me. Last night I woke up and
could feel my awareness as ‘transcendent’ in a way I never have
before. I could actually feel ‘non local effects’ is the best way to
put it. That is, I had a feeling cognition of being here and there and
that when I felt myself over there, I felt that it was a short step to
materialising over there if I wanted to. Something like that. Anyway
the feeling has lasted beyond sleeptime. Very strongly I am feeling
like I stretch to the horizon, AND I surround everything from the
horizon inwards. Also had some urges to read Heidegger and Scientific
Method while asleep. Also woke up from some very confusing but
important dream — this dream was about the whole of the history of
quantum mechanics as if it was a dream! That is, if the history of
quantum mechanics was a dream, how would we interpret it? Now I can
feel how important again the metaphor of dreaming is.

Now it is the afternoon and having read the first chapter in Heidegger
and Scientific Method, something occurred to me. When science (and
people in general) believes that awareness is the private property of
individuals and thus, purely subjective, it is obviously going to
exclude it from any scientific study. Anyone would agree that if
something is ‘purely subjective’in the way they mean it, of course it can’t be studied
scientifically. Thus science must reduce the study of the human being
to what is measurable. But the evil of that is due to the prior evil
of the belief in awareness as private property. It then occurred to me
that once this step is taken, then problems arise when we consider the
nature of what lies behind the world we encounter directly. For
something does lie behind it. And it seems that science can see that a
‘field’ reality must lie behind the everyday world of things. But
having eliminated awareness because IT IS THE PROPERTY OF THINGS and
thus cannot be a general field state behind things, it is left with
‘energies, forces and other supernatural forces’. So rather than
awareness being behind everyday experience, its qualities manifesting
as all the sensory qualities we experience, science is left with
energies and forces, purely measurable quantitative things. They are
then forced through the logic of that choice to construct the whole
primary secondary thing, because what else can they do. Colour, taste,
etc, like grief and pain are not quantitatively measurable and so must
be purely subjective ‘effects’. The idea of awareness as private property has a
lot to answer for!


Thursday, 31st December 2007

What a fantastic year it has been for me! I feel like I have been
peeling away layers of The Myth of Objectivity. It is so deeply
ingrained in us that it takes years to divest ourselves of it. I feel
on this last day of 2007 that I have taken a final step in that long
process. Very symbolic to be entering a new year as if it is the
gateway to something. When I had my dream about quantum mechanics, I
woke up knowing that its message was that only metaphysics and
philosophy can take us to the next step. Why, because it was
metaphysics and philosophy that got us to where we are now and it has
always been this way. It was philosophers not scientists who pointed
the way towards ‘materialism’ if you want. The history of quantum
mechanics shows us, if it shows us anything, that it is our very
deeply ingrained ‘instincts’ about what reality ‘must be’ that are in
question. Well, that is how I put it to myself on awakening after that
dream. I also knew from that dream I was to read your book on
Heidegger and scientific method. I read it 3 times very slowly and
lingered over every word. It took me 7 days and those ‘7 days shook my
world!’

What did I get from Heidegger? That’s easy now to answer. What it
meant for me was that there are no ‘objects in empty space’. It is as
simple as that and as radical as that. There are only ‘phenomena in
awareness space’. Objects in empty space are abstractions from
phenomena in awareness space. If you suck the life out of phenomena in
awareness space, you get objects in empty space. I think before I
struggled under the last vestiges of a certain ‘dualism’. That is,
without knowing it, I was thinking in terms of that there WERE objects
in empty space and consciousness somehow ‘converted’ them into
phenomena in awareness space. In a way my own version of the quantum
paradox — according to the Copenhagen Interpretation, before we look
there is an abstract quantum field and when we look, it becomes
particles or waves etc. Somehow I was labouring, without knowing it,
under the delusion that there was an object ‘out there’, that thing
over there on my mantelpiece, and that when I looked it ‘became a
‘cricket ball’. Something like that, not quite, but close to it. I
kept on getting tangled up in silly complicated ‘equations’ like,
physical light brings information about the object thing over there to
my eye and inside, the light of awareness brings the essence of the
cricket ball to me. But whatever it was that was deluding me has gone
now. There are only phenomena in awareness space. And I understood
from the Heidegger book, about embodied ways of relating. If you
solidly believe in objects in empty space, that becomes an embodied
way of relating to the world. That was what I referred to as
‘instinct’ before in my email. It is as if all those layers of belief
are condensed in our flesh, as our flesh, an awareness in itself and
we EXPERIENCE the world that way. For scientists it is a truth that we
live in an Objective reality. They make it so! The number of times I
would stop and swear at reality, quite literally, ‘you dumb, stupid
piece of matter, why don’t you have the sense to do what I want with
you’ etc.

Time and time again reading your book, I stopped and said to myself,
How would scientists design an experiment to prove that there are
objects in empty space? And then I realised another meaning of quantum
mechanics that they don’t get. This is the whole Schrodinger cat in
the box paradox. According to quantum mechanics, nothing is actualised
until the observer looks. Reality remains in a sort of limbo state
until the observer collapses the wave function. Take a photograph of
the cat in the box. No good. You still need an observer to look at the
photograph. There is no way to prove that there are ‘objects in empty
space’ because a scientist must be involved, the scientist is a human
being (that is probably debateable!) and …. Every scientist that looks
at any ‘thing’ will see a ‘phenomenon’. Even if we put an ‘unknown’
object ‘out there’ (a completely made up nonsense thing) when a human
being looks it will still be a phenomenon — at the very least we might
see something that we-have-no-idea-about, but that is a context, a
field of emergence! There simply are no such things as what Hume said
is really out there — colourless, odourless, tasteless, measurable
things etc.

And now I want to connect what I have written to your piece on ‘What is Meditation?”
I found that reading that piece this morning I had no internal ‘objections’ to this sliver when I read it.
“There is what is ‘going on’ right now … whatever it is you are doing,
thinking, feeling, saying etc. And there is the awareness of what is
going on – the awareness of whatever it is you are doing, thinking,
feeling, saying etc”. Had I still been the same Self as I was when I
wrote my email on ‘how we get over to people about field awareness’ I
would have found that sentence ‘problematic’. But not anymore. And I
also have my own direction forward because now I both know what was
problematic for me about understanding the field nature of awareness,
and how to make it clearer for others. (They will certainly never get
it without meditating, but maybe it can be made clearer why they need
to meditate!). Interestingly what has made a difference to me after
reading Heidegger and meditating over it a lot, what enables me to
read that sentence above without any ‘flinching’ is precisely the
understanding that I have which is summarised in the next sentence you
wrote! “This awareness embraces not just what is happening in the here
and now but its larger where and larger when – the overall situation
and larger life context within which it is going on, goes on, and out
of which it is emerging. Ultimately it is an awareness that embraces
all of space and time.” Have you yourself made a shift or a slight
change or something because I don’t believe you have put it in quite
that way before as if there is an extra element in your own ‘feeling’
for this issue?

 From my workbook this morning: What is the meaning of a word? It is
in the context. That is ‘where’ the meaning is. What is the reality of
an object? In the context, the field of awareness, of meaning itself.
What is that round, red thing on my mantelpiece over there? It is the
cricket ball from the last game of competitive cricket that I played
25 years ago. It is the ball from the game in which I played together
with my three brothers. The reality of that thing over there lies not inside its ‘matter’ but completely within all this meaning and a host of other meanings that cling to it and spread out in ever widening waves. That meaning is a larger when and a larger where. The reality of the object lies within this context, which is a field of awareness. This field is transcendent and it is also blindingly obvious! And every single ‘thing’ is actually a phenomenon emerging from its own field of emergence just like the cricket ball. When I am walking around the streets, and I look at a tree, there is a whole vast context ‘that is looking at the tree’, me having read your email, me having read Heidegger, me having watched Australia thrash India in the Test match etc etc. The tree is also ‘that tree that is on the corner of the road that I turn at to go down my favourite walk’ etc. I guess what I am saying, Peter, is that I am connecting together in a way I have never done before, phenomenology al la Heidegger/Wilberg with the real essence of NY meditation. Before they were slightly separate, the field of awareness more sort of abstract but not really connected with the field as I now understand it — that living web of relatedness that is the cricket ball, that is the tree, that is … any ‘thing’ that we see. I must also report that over the past two weeks, as I wrote to you about my experience with transcendence that third stage of meditation is with me always now. Pure joy! I feel blessed at the moment and genuinely sad for all the people who haven’t spent 40 years of their life searching for truth. Oh yes, and by the way, I got the difference between science (the search for truth) and scientific method (to be able to control things by making them fit with a purely idealist version of reality). At least children who believe in Santa Claus also know that he isn’t real. Scientists actually are so dumb that they believe in their Santa Claus literally.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

MEDITATING SHIVA MEDITATING

I was writing and allowing awareness to ‘dictate’ through me one morning. I ended up writing, “As I let go and become unbounded, what is undifferentiated within me becomes a bounded being. The act of meditation — taking time to be aware — becoming part of a larger awareness that contains me, that is what releases potentialities into actuality.” Then I wrote something which ‘shocked me’ with its simplicity. “Shiva meditating — sitting in meditation — is what is releasing everything into actuality. It is Shiva becoming part of Anuttara that frees potentiality into actuality. Shiva meditating is creating reality RIGHT NOW!” I had always wondered why there were so many images of Shiva meditating. I had always assumed that it was because meditation was such an important part of Hinduism, so Shiva meditating was a symbol of the essence of Hinduism. Now I could understand it as something else. I wrote, “Why would Shiva meditate unless he grasped that he was part of something bigger? Shiva meditating means that the boundary state can be activated, because he is simply being aware of vast potentiality. In other words he takes his focus away from his creations to himself and his own freedom, freeing himself and thus his creations can go their own way.” It is Shiva sitting in meditation to achieve liberation that creates reality. The question is, “How would a Vedantist or Buddhist or … answer the simple question - Why does Shiva meditate? Why are there so many images of Shiva meditating?

Then just this morning some more stuff came to me triggered by another part of the quote from Seth on the beginning. “It was a state of agony in which the powers of creativity and existence were known, but the ways to produce them were not. This is the lesson that All That Is had to learn, and that could not be taught”. It is amazing that I have read this quote countless times in the last 30 years and basically passed over it. I have merely assumed that Seth meant that All That Is had to learn something and could not be taught it because there was no one to teach him, he was, after all, All That Is. I guess it was in the light of what I have written about above that lay the foundation for this bringing out what was previously unthought for me. The powers were known but the ways to produce them were not. And this is the lesson that All That Is HAD TO LEARN, that COULD NOT BE TAUGHT. Suddenly I questioned what it was that All That Is had to learn, and more importantly ‘what could not be taught’. Over the past few days I have been questioning, silently, ‘what I have learnt and what could not be taught’. On returning from my walk this morning I wrote, “You can’t teach someone how to have a blinding revelation, that they are contained as well as containing; you can only learn this through experiencing it, through opening oneself up to that very higher awareness within which these revelations exist’. I could have summarised it by saying that you can’t teach someone ‘how to get it’. Shiva had to learn himself through meditation that he was contained as much as contained his creations! That could not be taught to him. And if meditation is actually the way that one frees oneself, Shiva had to learn this too.

Monday, November 12, 2007

Some things have become clearer to me in meditating 'The Myth of Objective Science - Humanity on the Threshold of the Subjective Universe'.

Evolution is not a property of animals. They no more evolve than trees grow! Language is not a property of words, subjectivity is not a property of subjects. It is the other way around, Animals are immersed within evolution, words are immersed in language and subjects are immersed within subjectivity.

Depresssion is a manifestation of a downward pull within awareness, something felt. But when we feel that awareness is the property of bodies, depression must then be understood as 'caused' by some 'thing' in the body.

A belief in objects and in truth as objectivity is a belief that the fundamental make up of reality can be contained in particles, objects, things. This belief is accompanied by or assumes that consciousness is itself the private property or function of certain things. Consciousness is thought of as being used to create an inner equivalent 'in here' in words and pictures to what is 'out there'. We think we create an exact copy in our minds of what is 'out there' — a ‘one to one’ correspondence. Thus we think we use language as a tool to mirror 'things' in words.


In psychology, in this 'lost age' then, feelings within awareness are put down to labelled 'things' in the body/mind (like depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, etc). Language becomes a tool to point to or refer to supposedly 'objective' things in the body/mind that cause feelings we experience. So if I feel 'addressed' by thoughts, I can put them down to alien voices within or brain chemistry gone wrong. Every feeling and thought can be traced back to the brain. Since meaning is understood as a property of words, naturally enough then this leads to us believing that we can completely express ourselves IN words. The extreme manifestation of this is psychosis a la Lacan.

Thinking of language as a private means of expression we lose sense of how our words are heard by others (which we would be sensitive to if we knew language was shared by all), and we begin to become very literal and fundamentalist — that is, I feel explosive deep within, and what is wrong with me saying, “I have a bomb in my stomach”?

The belief in objects and truth as objectivity leads inexorably to quantum mechanics which ultimately says that there is only the observer and everything else is the observer’s creation. That is a new religion with its God being the human observer who controls and constructs everything.

So having got rid of a God that created everything in the beginning, quantum mechanics is forced to postulate the human observer who creates everything from the future backwards — an entity far more omnipotent than the old God, for this new God can reach back into the past and create the very conditions that will lead to it in the present! So the belief in objects and objectivity requires a supreme subject (an object that possess consciousness) to create everything. Sartre never said a truer word that when he wrote (or was it Dosteovosky?) 'If God [in the old sense] didn’t exist, we would have to create Him'!

As I went about my day while things bubbled within, something utterly simple then occurred to me. The nature of Objectivity. I realised that this belief in objectivity runs so deep within all of us. I continually discover just how much I believe in it! Or how deeply it is buried within me. Or on how many levels it exist. I suppose that this is only to be expected. But I realised that in my whole book on relativity theory and quantum mechanics I took for granted that there was a quantum field of matter, that space itself had a physical substantiality. That, for example, Rado’s aether was a 'subtle energy'.

That is how deep that belief was in me. Underneath those matter fields I believed consciousness somehow existed. Now I can see that there are no quantum fields of matter, no subtle matter field, no aether, just awareness. I discovered the belief in objectivity in me. Wheeler thought of Space as a quantum foam, with matter being ripples on the surface. Einstein conceived it as a physical something with matter being knots in this continuum. Bohm’s holomovement is conceived of as 'subtle matter'.

All are examples of 'Objectivism'. For in the long run, even these 'advanced thinkers', who got beyond 'things' to space and relativity as the 'final frontier', still conceived of it objectively, physically -The Myth of 'Objectivive' Science!

Lastly I wanted to share a little gem with you. In meditating the mad phrase 'a particle’s reality cannot be contained within the particle', what I realised was unthought in that was the following: 'Objectivity is not the private property of objects! That is what quantum mechanics is actually all about. So they created and then discovered waves or fields of matter ... 'fields of objectivity'. This offers a way of getting to subjectivity not being the private property of subjects - understanding subjects themselves as fields or waves of subjectivity ...

Tuesday, 1st December, 2007

Awareness is personifying itself as Andrew Gara in a ‘continuous manner’. Continually speaking and sounding ‘words’ which I can feel in a delusional way as a solid pre-existing identity that is me. This then leads to all the familiar delusions that I have thoughts, that I am depressed, that I am ...

However, I am a continuous creation being born and dying in each moment. I am not a thing which moves through time but a continual presencing in awareness. It is not that I have thoughts or feelings, that I possess awareness. Awareness personifies itself as me, thinks thoughts feels feelings. Just as what causes people to smoke causes them to get cancer, so awareness is what personifies, thinks, feels.

So what is this sense then that I am a thing moving through time? It certainly feels that way. It certainly appears to be the case that I think, I feel etc. If we have a row of light globes and they are switched on and off in sequence, it will appear to me as the observer that there is a light moving across or through space. Within my field of vision I will see a light moving through space. Thus if I am being personified and materialised moment by moment and dying back into Awareness moment by moment, then it is TO AWARENESS (as the ‘observer’) that the sense of a me moving through time is down to!!!!! So as I go about my life feeling that the me that did this is the same me that did that, that there is a me that persists and is a pre-existing thing that moves through time is simply one way of constructing things. On my walk this morning I vividly felt that it was Awareness that was walking around, not me, Awareness that was thinking. If I am Shiva, then of course it will feel that I am a continuous pre-existing thing, but that same feeling is explained by Shiva being me, just as me, the observer, would feel that there is a light moving through space, when there isn’t. There is no separate little I, just as there is no light moving through space. There are only momentary ‘lights of consciousness lighting up’ or presencing within the AWARENESS that is Shiva, and Shiva feeling all this as me is Me feeling that sense of continuity! In the same way as I speak a sentence, there is a wholeness being expressed - something that flows through and holds the sentence together. It is Shiva that flows through and holds together the sense of Iness, that IS the sense of I-ness that I feel.

Space gives large scale matter ‘its marching orders’. The quantum wave function gives small scale matter its marching orders. It is awareness that guides consciousness ‘through’ time. The information contained in the wave function (in a purely physical sense, information about the environment of the particle stretching away to infinity) guides the particle and that is why its movement appears to be so complicated (random). The information contained within the ‘wave function’ of awareness (information about the past, the future and all the probable presents) guides consciousness. If consciousness chooses to guide itself based on narrow ego concerns (not taking time to be aware and being narrowly focused on each task that it is doing or going to do) a paradox is set up. Awareness guides consciousness whether it believes it or not, just as Seth said about reincarnation (“You will reincarnate whether or not you believe that you will. It is much easier if your theories fit reality, but if they do not you will not change the nature of reincarnation one iota” - the Seth Material p 146). If awareness is guiding consciousness, like space, awareness is shaping (bending or curving?) the whole physical, mental and spiritual environment of consciousness. Awareness shapes events so that consciousness follows certain pathways in time. So if awareness contains information that consciousness ignores, then those ignored things still guide and shape consciousness. How? If consciousness does not listen to awareness and allow itself to be ‘shaped’ by all it hears, awareness guides it ANYWAY by guiding the CONSCIOUSNESS that the BODY IS. So if I, for example, ignore the ‘stress’ of a meeting at work which I felt, awareness, the wave function which contains that information ‘guides’ or ‘shapes’ the consciousness that IS the Body ‘in a certain direction’ - I get a headache. It is what I do as a result of the headache that awareness is guiding me towards - hopefully the same place as if I had listened to awareness in the first place, embodied it at the time and done something about it. But if I don’t awareness will simply find another way to guide me via the consciousness that IS the body.

So in every moment it is ‘much better if our theories fit reality’ and we stay in touch with awareness, the wave function, listening carefully to all the echoes of past and future. We may as well do this since it is going to happen anyway! Awareness is guiding me and will guide me directly or indirectly whether I like it or not.

These are my initial meditations on your email! Goodness knows what will come. Every element of modern physics is a perfect metaphor of AWARENESS. It is quite fascinating how going back and forth from one to the other is itself a process of morphic resonance, physics giving form to ‘concepts’ of awareness etc. No wonder Paul Davies felt that quantum mechanics was the Mind of God. Yet this is conceived almost as if God is a Being whoe thoughts are mathematics or something and the whole universe is held together by the quantum laws that are God’s mind. So near and yet so far!!!

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

INNER SPACE, OUTER SPACE AND HEADACHES

The other day I felt a truth about space. The space around my body ‘encloses’ my head and thus the ‘space’ in my head, so the space around me is actually the space around both my body and the thoughts in my head.

Or what I felt was, the space around my body and the space in my head are the same space! The body does not enclose an ‘inner space’ which is different than the outer space around my body. I knew that while I was feeling this new truth, that ‘before’ I had taken for granted without knowing that I was, that there were two different sorts of spaces. Now I could feel that there is only one space and along with this felt sense came a picture which is extremely hard to put into words. But the picture was of beads on a string. The space on the upper side of the string is the same space as that on the underside of the string, OBVIOUSLY! I could feel the reality of the body as a porous membrane (like the beads) with the space ‘outside’ and the space ‘inside’ all part of the same surrounding space. (I am wondering as I write this was this what Seth was talking about way back in The Seth Material about the infinite webwork and the threads and...is this what Tantra is — the loom? Duhh!).

Following on the heels of this insight it became a whole lot easier to feel ‘my’ self, ‘my’ awareness, as out there simply because there was no longer any separation between ‘in here’ and ‘out there’. Being all the same space, of course my awareness didn’t end at my skin, or abut another awareness, but there was a total awareness of which ‘mine’ was a portion (the physical body merely being a sort of illusory boundary that allowed me to be distinct, only to be dissolved in the next instant so that I was inseparable). So I started to feel my awareness as simply all of space on ‘either side’ of my body. I could feel myself shifting my sense of identification away from the physical body to this other translucent and spacious light and air of awareness. It was as if I was expanding outwards beyond boundaries that I didn’t even know were there. With this insight I could feel how I have ‘unconsciously’ regarded my inner head space as contained by the skull. Just as I put my shoulder and back pain down to a reorganisation of the assemblage point, so I feel strongly that the headaches are a manifestation of this belief in the contraction of my awareness to that of the space inside my head. The back pain has disappeared, now for the headaches.

The next development in this expansion of awareness was a vivid experiencing of the concept of the awareness body. My physical body looks out through the ‘5 peepholes of perception’. The awareness body ‘looks inwards’ via the whole physical body as its organ of perception, as all eye, all ear, all skin, all taste etc. And what is this looking inwards, and what is it looking at? Awareness is a mirror, but what is reflected in the mirror is the very hidden potentialities of awareness made manifest as all the beings of the universe. I am one way of Shiva seeing what is within himself. A tree is another way, and an ant and Mars and ... are other ways. When I point at a window sill (to quote a friend of ours), the whole physical body points with the finger. When I feel a surface with my hand, the whole body feels with the hand. Awareness feels with the whole physical body as its ‘finger’ or ‘hand’. So when I am perceiving that tree over there, Awareness feels that tree with the physical body ‘in here’. It is a bodily feeling because the whole body is the organ of feeling, the ‘hand’ if you want. If I was to burn my hand, all of me would feel ‘discomfort’, but it would be the hand where the discomfort was localised and felt.

Along with the expansion of awareness that I was feeling came a simultaneous knowing that this awareness was also the ‘agent’ of action not me. Rather than have two knowings — expansion of awareness and delusion of agency — they became united in me. While proofing Tantric Wisdom I could feel at any time that it was Shiva proofing, indeed, walking around my room at work, it wasn’t me but Shiva walking, Shiva speaking through me etc. But that whole enormous volume of space was actioning all that ‘I’ was ‘doing’. I also became aware of my tongue again, which I had forgotten about for quite some time. When I am centred ‘out there’, my tongue is still even if I am reading. When I am lost ‘in here’ reading, my tongue moves. In here the agent of action is the ego and it moves the physical tongue while reading. Out there, the agent is spatial awareness and it moves the inner tongue.

In meditating the relationship between agency and action I was reminded of the new addition to Tantric Wisdom that I stalked while proofing.

“Creation is not the activity of Shiva as divine being, agent or creator god. Nor is Shiva a divine being or ‘I’ endowed with independent will (‘Iccha’) or action (‘Kriya’) in the same way that the ego believes itself to be. Instead Shiva is that pure quiescent non-active awareness which, by its very nature, lets all potential beings be and sets them free – releasing them into their own free, autonomous self-actualisation, through their own innate power of action (‘Shakti’). ‘Iccha’ is not Shiva’s ‘own’ willed activity as divine ego, ‘I’ or agent. Instead it is the absolutely free, spontaneous creativity (‘Kriya’) latent in, and arising from pure awareness (Shiva) as its innate power of action (Shakti). ‘Shakti’ is not the power ‘of’ Shiva, in the sense of belonging to him. Instead Shakti is ‘the power of Shiva’ - without which he would be a mere corpse (‘Shava’), and as the divine awareness would be incapable of manifesting all realities.”

I began to appreciate the power of awareness as much as I appreciated Shiva. Shiva is purely a non- active quiescent awareness. It is a light which shines and illuminates things hidden. This illumination ‘brings them to light, endows them with being’ but it does not ‘do them’. Shiva does not make the universe, but he doesn’t even create it if this is thought of in the sense of him doing it, or even willing it to be. He allows it to be released from potentiality to actuality. It desires to be born, he may desire to give it birth, but it freely and autonomously self actualises as his light illuminates it. The light of awareness may as well be thought of as a ‘desiring to give birth’ light and the power of awareness is a ‘desiring to be born’ potentiality and as the light shines more and more on what it shines on, the charge is built up until… But all this got me thinking. If Shiva is not the agent of action, then Shiva is like the ego or, better, it makes it easier to understand how the ego is actually like Shiva.

Then I realised that the ego itself IS AN AWARENESS. Neither God nor the ego are agents of action.

Both are non-active quiescent awareness. Both feel around for what is latent within the space of awareness and free it into autonomous self actualisation. Which then reminded me of Seth’s primary dilemma. While the ego believes that it is separate from awareness, it believes itself to be an agent or doer of action. But in the beginning, it was All That Is ‘himself’ who believed that his dreams were ‘his’, that he possessed or ‘did’ them. It was this delusion that All That Is had to overcome or there would have been ‘a universe run wild and a world without reason’. So I can now see a delicious parallel between Shiva and the simple ego. When the ego can realise that it is not the agent of change and simply ‘let go, let God’ it is perfectly mirroring Shiva. Resonating with Shiva. Becoming Shiva. As long as we believe that Shiva is the ultimate agent of action, and the ego is trying to not be the agent of action, how can we become Shiva?

As I mentioned on the phone, in becoming that larger self, centering myself in that larger spatial awareness, am I becominga God? Am I giving birth to a God? Is that God coming to light, to self awareness, calling itself and knowing itself as an I, through me, is that lucid awakening, illumination? Did All That Is once give birth to me as I am giving birth to this God? I had a feeling, very Kosokian, of ‘Behold! I (awareness) am wakING, I am bodyING as a way to ‘manipulate’ within three dimensionality’. And it is THAT I that is walking, that is speaking, that is proofing through me not the ego.

There is something in Tantric Wisdom that I wanted to ask you about. You say: “Question: How can I learn The New Yoga?” “Answer: Principally through regular one-to-one sessions or longer intensive courses with its originator and Teacher or ‘Guru’, Peter Wilberg. For as in traditional yogas, it is the direct, one-to-one relationship with the teacher that is central to the learning process – allowing the latter to impart knowledge and awareness to the student directly, through ‘initiation’...” I wanted to ask you about ‘spontaneous initiation’ (initaition by the goddess within) of the sort seemingly favoured by Abhinava according to Muller-Ortega in the Triadic Heart p 164. Your own illumination is of this type and while I treasure all personal contact with you, my own ‘illuminating’ is also of the spontaneous variety. I’m wondering why you don’t explicitly mention that method by which both you and I (amongst other methods of course) have achieved what we have. That is, through the experiencing of concepts just as you wrote: “It never ceases to astonish me in the books I read, how within all the academic or philosophical intellectualising that goes on ‘about’ mysticism, gnosis, psychology, religion, yoga, tantra etc. there seems to be an almost total unawareness of the distinction between conceptualising experiences through intellectual reflection and experiencing concepts - through feeling awareness.” If I can feel my way into your writings and experience the concepts then surely so could others. You seem to be saying that there is only the ONE way of achieving enlightenment, paradoxically not the way you did! I am wondering whether enlightenment today is more along the lines of the ‘spontaneous variety’. Seth certainly seems to be favouring this way. I would think that anyone who does feel their way into your writing will quite naturally want to meet you, will write to you regularly, go and see you and become a lifelong friend and associate.

Lastly, this morning on my walk I began to actively feel the whole space around me and the beings within this space in an analogous way to how I felt my way into my shoulder pain. That is, in a way which I haven’t done before, I actively chose to attach myself to everything around me that there was to be aware of. I became aware of every sound in an active aware way, of as many sights as possible, moving my head in a sweeping arc, up and down, side to side.

‘Before’ I was more just being aware of the space. Now I was being aware of the space AND everything it it. I think I had deliberately stayed away from this before for fear of getting lost in things, but this turned out to be the opposite. When I got back home I had a new sense of the meaning of ‘without awareness there would be nothing for us to be aware of in the first place’. Let me explain how this came about. When I wrote my tome on Mental Physics many years ago, I remember trying to get to the bottom of Einstein’s intuition about the speed of light. I knew there was something unthought in all the physics about light and I kept at it until this came to light. And what came to light for me was the blindingly obvious of course, but it proved to be a massive revelation to me. Just because we have eyes and there are things out there to be seen does not explain how we see them! In physics terms, light carries or brings visual information about the object to the eye. It is from that implicit assumption that Einstein intuited what he did. On returning from my walk, after actively being aware of everything there was to be aware of, I realised that I may have been conscious before on my walks but I certainly wasn’t aware in the way I was this morning. And what came to me was the phrase, “Just because we are conscious beings and there are things out there to be conscious of, doesn’t explain how we are aware of them!” I could vividly feel how there just had to be a field or volume or space of awareness filled with the light of awareness in order for conscious beings to be AWARE in the first place!

Edited by author 08-16-2007 06:54 PM
Monday, 6th August, 2007

Don’t mention Awareness!

I was meditating something Peter wrote to me: “It never ceases to astonish me in the books I read, how within all the academic or philosophical intellectualising that goes on ‘about’ mysticism, gnosis, psychology, religion, religion, yoga, tantra etc. there seems to be an almost total unawareness of the distinction between conceptualising experiences through intellectual reflection and experiencing concepts - through feeling awareness.” The word that kept coming up was ‘DENIAL’.

Denial is connected with another incident. The previous day I had seen someone who was ‘depressed’ and ‘anxious’. He said he was worried because his blood pressure was very high and he was having panic attacks. He is a school teacher and had a sort of ‘nervous breakdown’ some years ago because of teaching and ‘retired’. Then he slowly started again relief teaching until it became a ‘habit’ and now he is suffering again. I was talking to him and was surprised at how unaware he was of his own life and of things in general to do with depression and anxiety. He had literally no idea. He also was adamant that he isn’t worried about anything in his life. When I asked him was he a little apprehensive about stopping work and ‘having nothing to do’, he said no. In other words all the anxieties that I am completely aware of in me, he denies having. If ever I needed a living example, of the idea that what we are unaware of rears its head in symptoms, here it was. Interesting sidelight — I am aware of all these anxieties but they don’t stop me from doing what I want; he is unaware of any anxieties, and is unable to do what he wants!!!

Anyway the point of my story was that I went to bed with ‘denial’ on my mind. This is what I wrote in my workbook this morning about this person, academics, society, denial and the New Yoga:

Any work that speaks of awareness rather than what awareness is aware of is ‘unconsciously’ resisted. The anxious person was unaware of ‘things’ he ‘should’ be aware of. There are issues he is not attending to or awarING. So they are making themselves felt in his body as anxiety symptoms. He resists being aware — he keeps it at arm’s length. As a society we do so as well. Academics as individual people, are like this person. So as individuals, they deny awareness of certain issues. Professionally it manifests as the denial of AWARENESS itself. Society simply denies that any such thing exists. Anything that speaks of awareness is to be kept at arm’s length, not mentioned, hidden.

Many people genuinely committed to their own growth, even spiritually, share this denial. They deny awareness but are committed to therapy, change and growth. Problem is that if you deny awareness, then your therapy will always revolve around things you are aware of, my sexuality, my fears, my depression, my this or that. Thus, they are wedded to these things, for in order to change and grow they must continue to have issues with such things. I am aware in myself, by contrast, that all I am working on now is being aware! In doing so, insights come to me about personal issues that are being resolved without me even focusing on them.

There is often talk of society as ‘death denying’ etc. And of course this is correct. We also as a society deny our effect on the environment and many other things. But I realise that when we say denial what we should be saying is denial (of awareness of....) We do not deny death, we deny awareness of death. We do not deny global warming, but our awareness of global warming. Sartre expressed this really well with his concept of good and bad faith. He said that we always know when we have done something ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ according to our own values because there is something inside that tells us. Awareness he might have said but didn’t.

I can see how this connects with Christianity and all the other Abrahamic faiths (Judaism and Islam). They are all wedded to the Being principle. They all deny the Awareness Principle. They resist it ‘unconsciously’. It must be kept at arm’s length. Anyone who mentions it is crucified. Jesus was crucified because he blasphemed, he said I am God (the Awareness Principle). The Abrahamic faiths cannot believe that we actually ARE God in the way the way the Vedas and Tantra meant it. Christians and Muslims and Jews MAY get to believe that God is within them but not that they ARE God. I can see even more why the New Yoga is ignored, because it speaks of something that is completely denied — Awareness. For them it just doesn’t exist, like Velikovsky’s hollow earth.

“The being of all things that exist in awareness in turn depends on awareness.”

Abhinavagupta

Andrew 30th July, 2007

Since I began to grant awareness to the pain in my back that develops while walking, it has gone away. Not without ‘work’ from me, and that is what I want to write about. I can remember in Bali in 1990 I walked everywhere and the pain sometimes got quite distracting. I would stop and stretch and arch my back etc to try and make it ‘go away’. About three weeks ago, after a phone call with Peter, I decided to FEEL THIS PAIN MORE. And so I have felt it more and more when it arose. Strangely enough it stopped as soon as I felt it more. And also what came to me was the phrase from The Awareness Principle, ‘when we are watching TV, or playing on the computer or washing dishes, if we are too focused on those activities we may be conscious but we are not aware.’ This came to me in the context of marvelling on the absence of pain in my back through feeling the very pain that was there more and more. In walking along it was as if I was filling the insideness of my back with awareness, surrounding and permeating the pain with awareness, feeling it as much as I could inwardly and it went away. So I asked myself, so what was happening before when I was certainly conscious of the pain? What is the difference between the two states I was in, 1) when I was conscious of the pain which was very discomforting and 2) when I was feeling the pain more inwardly. Being conscious of the pain, I tried to deal with it physically through stretching and arching which would ‘work’ for about 2 minutes. I also tried to not focus on it, ignore it, tough it out, walk slower etc etc.

When we are too focused on any activity we may be conscious but we are not aware. And this includes thinking and feeling. If we are too focused on what is going on in our thoughts (lost in thought) we also may be conscious but we are not aware. Now when we are in pain, whether this be mental or physical, we may be conscious of the pain, but we are not aware of it. We are not feeling it, it is almost feeling us. That was my sense of the pain in the back. That it had me or I was reacting to it. And in fact, often I would deliberately try and be lost in thought to distract myself from the pain. Which of course would do nothing to get rid of it. Feeling the pain more is a whole new way of approaching it. Being conscious of the pain is feeling it essentially from the outside. Feeling it more is feeling it from the inside. I believe that when I felt it from the inside, what came to me was that this pain has been a call from my body, an address in Martin Buber‘s terms. Now that I have made this shift to Now that I have made this shift to Awareness and away from what Awareness is aware of – in this case the body and its pain - it seems to have gone, its purpose satisfied.

But I am struck by this insight that pain is almost the result of being conscious but not aware!


Andrew, 1st August, 2007

I’ve had some insights recently triggered by Peter’s comments to me on ‘attachments’. I guess the main thrust of what I have to say could be paraphrased as “I may not be able to have the life I want, but I can always have the life I am having.” The other day I was out walking and as is my want trying to maintain whole body awareness. And as is also my want, feeling disappointed or slightly frustrated with myself for losing myself in thought or whatever and having to ‘drag myself back into full presence’. Then I remembered my own understanding that pain and discomfort are the way we are returned to the body, therefore THEY ARE NOT MISTAKES OR A WRONG WAY OF GOING ABOUT THINGS. Suddenly it came to me strongly in relation to the delusion of agency, that ‘mistakes’ also fall into this category! I realised with delight that not only are there no such things as mistakes, they are not ‘mine’ whatever they are! They are simply patterns of action. If ‘my’ thoughts aren’t ‘mine’, and my insights aren’t ‘mine’, then neither are so called mistakes or wrong ways of thinking or ‘bad’ ways of meditating! For so long now I have been identifying with wrong or ‘bad’ ways of meditating, breathing, being aware, slightly castigating myself to back onto the right or ‘good’ way to be. Then another realisation came all at once. Closet Christianity! Good and Bad. There was a delicious sense of freedom that I felt when I realised that I don’t have to look out for mistakes and correct them. It is Shiva insighting through me and it is Shiva mistaking through me. It is all Shiva. There is this action, then that action, then this action etc. Something is happening and coming to be through me. I don’t have to make it happen, and the ‘mistakes’ are part of that process of not having to make anything happen.

This morning when I was out walking, I was delighted to find a new sense of continuity that I hadn’t had before. The only way to write about it is to say that it is the same as before minus the castigating, frustration with self or ‘being on the lookout for possible wrongdoing’ (now isn’t that redolent of closet Christianity!). What I noticed was that my awareness flowed smoothly from whole body awareness to being less whole body aware to back to full presence etc, all without me having to watch over myself or be critical of myself when I slipped up or even having to remind myself of any particular way that I should be doing anything. Then, as I was walking along in this new found freedom, a unifying insight presented itself to me. What came to me was that only through awareness of the body as a whole, can we be aware of the Self as a whole — that is, Awareness. The Recognition that came with this ‘insight’ was how mistakes are a necessary part of this. How absurd it would be to expect to be able to avoid mistakes. It came to me in the following way. In reading what you wrote about ‘attachments’ several times, I was of course CONSCIOUS of everything in it, but I was not AWARE of a certain part. You wrote, “Without this feelING awareness, feelingS like pain, or 'difficult behaviours' are the way things and people are forced to get us to feel them.” It was only on a fourth reading that the significance of the capitalisation got to me. That is, only through the most closest and appreciative attention to the words can I grasp new dimensions of meaning! Then I felt a new connection between how important it is to have ‘the closest and most appreciative attention’ of the body in order for new dimensions of awareness to unfold. It became utterly obvious to me that I WANT to have an ongoing feelING for the body just BECAUSE I want to unfold new dimensions of awareness. Rather than I should do this or that, because it is the right way to do things. Then a connection came to me between the way I read and the way most people read. I savour and taste every word from every possible direction, trying it in this way or that way etc. Others give a surface reading to things AT THE BEST OF TIMES. And this way of reading demands the most painstaking effort, the most honouring of the author, it is real work, though pleasurable. I realised that in reading your email four times, I am actually ‘glad’ that I missed things the first time etc, because then I could enjoy the whole meal over again. Well, if I missed things you could say that I made ‘mistakes’ if I missed things. But thank Shiva for mistakes, for they are the very way I plunge deeper into words and grasp new dimensions of meaning. While walking all this came to me in a flash and I could see that losing whole body awareness, was like missing the meaning of soemthing you wrote on first reading a piece of yours. Simply part of the process! So it seemed to me that we quite smoothly move between feelING the body continuously and having feelingS which are there to call us back to the body. Feelings in the sense of losing the sense of an insight all the way up to outright pain. Discomfort and pain are not mistakes or things done wrong.

It is in this sense that I now understand ‘create your own reality’. If there are no such things as mistakes, AND even if there were, they wouldn’t be MINE, what possible objection could there be to create your own reality? Closet Christians have a big problem with CYOR because it clashes with the delusion of agency. They continually ask, Yes, but why would I want to create such a reality for myself. Me, me me! Even most followers of the Seth books only accept CYOR when it comes to their successes. When it comes to their aches and pains and failures they have a very subtle way of explaining it to themselves. They say that they got sick because they have negative beliefs about themselves. Big deal. What they are avoiding is asking in a particular sense why this illness at this time, which of course would mean that they would have to look at how they created this particular cancer, in the form that this cancer took — the whole metaphorical symbolic thing. They wouldn’t have a clue about seeing illness as a way to return ourselves to the Body, the Self, AWARENESS.

Andrew 3rd August, 2007

In meditating Left Hand Path and the feedback Peter gave me about my ‘there are no such things as mistakes’, I began to see the Blindingly Obvious much more clearly. ‘To err is human, to forgive, divine’. (Alexander Pope). Of course the Divine Awareness can forgive us our trespasses, or mistakes when we err, because 1) they aren’t even wrong in the first place, and 2) WE didn’t even ‘do’ them. Forgiveness is no big deal for Awareness in such a context.

The Blindingly Obvious that I was referring to was the commentaries on sacred texts. What else are they than men and women seeing what is unthought and unfelt in the original texts? I could go back and read anything Peter has written (indeed, anything I have written), and I could find new depths of meaning. There would be no end to this process. Only a fool would say that that means that I made ‘mistakes’ or erred in not discovering the extra depths of meaning the first time I read the piece, because later understandings are built precisely on the former. There seems to be an attitude today (which, of course, is at least, over 120 years old — Lord Kelvin in the 1880s saying that there was nothing new in science to discover?) that the meaning in any holy text (whether it be religion, science, psychology) has been exhausted. Of course there is new meaning to be unearthed in the Tantras, the Siva Sutras, Abhinava’s writings. Yet it seems that many people, academics and ‘thinkers’ believe that the truth has been exhausted and all that modern commentators can possible do is fiddle around the edges, so if anyone claims that they have made an ‘original contribution’ to any sort of ‘sacred text’, their claims are dismissed out of hand.

I have also had some thoughts about our old friend, Seth, and where I believe his teachings are ‘off the mark’ and where Tantra has it all over him. This was triggered by a comment of Peter’s in a recent email: “It has become increasingly clear to me that the whole essence of my work is about drawing on Seth, Mike and Tantra to formulate a fundamentally new Hindu-Tantric God-Concept.

Peter’s mention of ‘mental action’ nudged something in me as well. I was playing around with mental actions as acts of identification with certain thoughts and THAT MENTAL ACTION is what the ego ‘does’.
 
I was walking back from the shop having bought some milk when it came to me. The whole basis of ‘The Nature Of Personal Reality’ is that beliefs create reality. Thoughts create reality. WRONG! Beliefs or thoughts do NOT create reality. It is believING in them, on-goING acts of identification with them, that create our reality. Nietzsche was spot on: ‘Every belief is a considering-something true’, with the emphasis on considerING. It is awareness losing itself in thoughts, in identifying itself with thoughts (that it is aware of), believing them to be true as facts of reality that creates our reality. And it is awareness becoming aware of takING certain thoughts to be true, becoming aware of identifyING with certain thoughts, becoming aware of its own mental actionING, that enables us to create a new reality in an aware way.

My own meditating is making it real to me how important -ING is. It is quite literally holdING on the ‘light switch of awareness’. Only by constantly feelING my bodily reality from the inside out, by feelING it, do I maintain myself in awareness. As soon as I ‘err’ and lose myself in thingS like thoughts or feelingS or treeS or carS or..., I lose awareness, I lose touch with Self etc. This constant ING in terms of feelING awareness, is the key to freedom. To feel or have FeelingS — THAT is the question! To Think or have thoughtS. When people believe that it is thoughts that create reality, this provides a too strong focus or emphasis on thoughts. They forget that it is the very awareness of thoughts that enables us to know what thoughts we ‘have’! The ego cannot change its beliefs about reality by focusing on a new set of thoughts or beliefs, in the way Seth was advising. You cannot hypnotise yourself into new beliefs because the very self that is doing the self hypnosis is already the result of de-cided patterns of action as you put it. Only from Awareness (OF the eog) can we choose freely and in a conscious way. Egos are already frightened about reality, they already believe that THEY exist and are real. They are the result of a delusional belief PAR EXCELLENCE! Thus the already deluded ego cannot change any delusional belief about reality (for example, that one is fat, or poor, or evil etc.) just by itself alone.

Only by becoming God or Awareness can we change our beliefs about reality! Only by becoming God can we Forgive our ‘erring’.

Andrew, 27th July, 2007

SHIVA-SHAKTI and the CO-CREATION of GOD and MAN

Blissful experience while asleep, on awakening and it has lingered solidly as I write this several hours later.
 
I did my first sitting puja with my Shiva-Shakti murti before going to sleep last night. I had previously read the 15th July posting of The Co-Creation of God and Man on 'Peter's Bulletin' and found myself meditating the felt senses of that article that stayed with me as I meditated the murti.
 
During the night I awoke at some stage in the most blissful state. I had a felt understanding, a warm and embracing feeling, a glow that was simply bliss. Each time I awoke it was there again and I knew I would remember it on awakening, that I didn't have to write it down immediately. On awakening at 4 am in the bitter cold. I was still in that state and marvelling in it, luxuriating in it as I walked to my room and got dressed. In a way I was 'pinching myself', I felt so lucky and almost 'chosen'. I asked myself at one time, "Did this come to me while I was asleep, REALLY, or did I 'work it out' the night before, before falling alseep?" I knew that it came to me and that I was blessed to receive it.
 
I then walked to the kitchen to feed the cats and make my coffee, knowing that I could wait to start writing down the experience in my workbook, that I didn't have to hurry and get it down quick. When I got back to my room I wrote it down as best I could.
 
What came to me in the night was precisely that I (awareness) went to it (as it was 'reaching' for me)!!! (Almost as if Shiva is the desire to give birth and Shakti is the desire to be born). I felt how awareness bestowed its light on something hidden within me, that the light of awareness bestowed life and being to whatever it lighted on. But the most thrilling thing about this whole experience was that when I awoke in the night with this illumination, what I knew that the light of awareness had gone to, was the felt sense of just-what-I-am-now-writing-about. That is, I awoke knowing that ideas, insights don't just 'come to me', the light of awareness and a potentiality hidden in awareness meet in an embrace and the RESULT of that union is the 'insight that comes to us'. The self-reflexivity of this experience was not lost on me. Awareness releases insights into actuality, and the insight that it released to me was that awareness releases insights into actuality! It is this knowing of me by Shiva, knowing how this would make me feel that I feel blessed by.
 
I can now FEEL how every thing from a rock to a thought to an atom to a planet is the result of cosmic intercourse between Shiva and Shakti, and how the great womb of the Mahadevi underlies all.

I had been reading Chapter 4 of The Triadic Heart of Shiva by Muller-Ortega, when something I read triggered waves of feeling within. It was all to do with sound and silence. We hear sounds disappearing into silence and I remember Seth saying that from that point where they disappear, sound of a different sort grows into silence. When we speak we emit sounds on the outbreath. What came to me was the question is the speech of the psyche emitted on the outbreath of awareness? This insight filled me with something which I only wanted to feel more and more. It enabled me to go deeper within to a 'place' where I could identify with Shiva 'further back' than I had been before. I could feel that my body was being spoken on the outbreath of awareness, but also that when I silently spoke inwardly, I was 'listening' to what preceded that. That is the only way I can put it now. It was as if I was reaching towards something inner that manifested as inner sound. I then went to my room because I felt like I had to sit with the Shiva-Shakti murti and simply be in its presence. I went to bed meditating on inner sound, awareness, the Shiva-Shakti Trika and the God concept we spoke about on the phone. On awakening during the night I felt anew the reality of the delusion of 'ownership' in another way: Awareness is a light which is a shining and a knowing. It is not a something which gives off light, a torch shining a beam outwards but IS that whole, shining field of outwardness, of space and light, alive and aware. At the same time as that, it is an inward knowing and shining, not a torch shining a beam inwardly, but it is that whole shining and knowing Field of inwardness, alive and aware. In this sense awareness is a flame. It is not a thing that is burning. It is the essence of flameness. Awareness is a burning knowing that has a property of selfhood, that knows itself as it begins to sense itself as it becomes inwardly aware of ...felt sense. In our physical reality we suffer from the delusion that wood burns, that torches give off light, that walls are orange - it doesn't occur to us that it is Shiva that is torching, wooding, burning, lighting, oranging... etc. Awareness is not a thing or self that reflects on itself. It is an inwardly knowing light (self aware) at the same time as it is an outwardly knowing light (other aware). Awareness is like a light in that it shines, streams, expands, fills. Physical light illuminates, reveals what was hidden in the dark. But this has two meanings. The first is the purely physical, the second is the inner sense of revealing what is hidden - the sense of knowing what was previously unknown. Awareness is simultaneously an outward/inward field phenomena. It is a boundary phenomenon, an interaction. Awareness, in seeing inwardly is the outer looking inwards, and in seeing outwardly, it is the inner looking outwards. But another way of saying the inner looking outwards is saying that the inner portion 'takes in' what is outward - that is, breathes it in. There is a continuous two-way flow through the boundary surface that distinguishes and unites the inner and outer fields of awareness. Awareness reproduces itself. When we put meaning into words, we re-produce some thing inner in another form. Awareness in expressing itself outwardly, is reproducing itself so that it can see clearly what was formerly hidden. It reveals itself by creating a reflection of itself 'out there', shining the light of knowing on what it has created in order to reveal unthought dimensions. Awareness, aware of the felt sense of something hidden within the darkness, holds open a space so that its light (Shiva) can embrace and feel more the potentialities it senses (Shakti). This 'feeling more' is a loving. When we feel something more and more we are loving it. Shiva embraces its beloved more and more. They intertwine and the result is the world of actuality in which Shiva sees himself in recognition and Shakti is manifested. Awareness, in becoming aware of something stirring within and REPRODUCING itself through manifesting that within-ness comes ALIVE. Through intercourse, embracing, feeling more, LOVING.

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

Blissful experience while asleep, on awakening and it has lingered solidly as I write this several hours later.
 
I did my first sitting puja with the Shiva-Shakti murti before going to sleep last night. I had previously read The Co-Creation of God and Man and found myself meditating the felt senses of that article that stayed with me as I meditated the murti.
 
During the night I awoke at some stage in the most blissful state. I had a felt understanding, a warm and embracing feeling, a glow that was simply bliss. Each time I awoke it was there again and I knew I would remember it on awakening, that I didn’t have to write it down immediately. On awakening at 4 am in the bitter cold. I was still in that state and marvelling in it, luxuriating in it as I walked to my room and got dressed. In a way I was ‘pinching myself’, I felt so lucky and almost ‘chosen’. I asked myself at one time, “Did this come to me while I was asleep, REALLY, or did I ‘work it out’ the night before, before falling alseep?” I knew that it came to me and that I was blessed to receive it.
 
I then walked to the kitchen to feed the cats and make my coffee, knowing that I could wait to start writing down the experience in my workbook, that I didn’t have to hurry and get it down quick. When I got back to my room I wrote it down as best I could.
 
What came to me in the night was precisely that I (awareness) went to it (as it was ‘reaching’ for me)!!! {Almost as if Shiva is the desire to give birth and Shakti is the desire to be born}. I felt how awareness bestowed its light on something hidden within me, that the light of awareness bestowed life and being to whatever it lighted on. But the most thrilling thing about this whole experience was that when I awoke in the night with this illumination, what I knew that the light of awareness had gone to, was the felt sense of just-what-I-am-now-writing-about. That is, I awoke knowing that ideas, insights don’t just ‘come to me’, the light of awareness and a potentiality hidden in awareness meet in an embrace and the RESULT of that union is the ‘insight that comes to us’. The self-reflexivity of this experience was not lost on me. Awareness releases insights into actuality, and the insight that it released to me was that awareness releases insights into actuality! It is this knowing of me by Shiva, knowing how this would make me feel that I feel blessed by.
 
I can now FEEL how every thing from a rock to a thought to an atom to a planet is the result of cosmic intercourse between Shiva and Shakti, and how the great womb of the Mahadevi underlies all.

Monday, 9th July, 2007

I had been reading Chapter 4 of The Triadic Heart of Shiva, when something I read triggered waves of feeling within. It was all to do with sound and silence. We hear sounds disappearing into silence and I remember Seth saying that from that point where they disappear, sound of a different sort grows into silence. When we speak we emit sounds on the outbreath. What came to me was the question is the speech of the psyche emitted on the outbreath of awareness? This insight filled me with something which I only wanted to feel more and more. It enabled me to go deeper within to a ‘place’ where I could identify with Shiva ‘further back’ than I had been before. I could feel that my body was being spoken on the outbreath of awareness, but also that when I silently spoke inwardly, I was ‘listening’ to what preceded that. That is the only way I can put it now. It was as if I was reaching towards something inner that manifested as inner sound.
I then went to my room because I felt like I had to sit with the Shiva-Shakti murti and simply be in its presence. I went to bed meditating on inner sound, awareness, the Shiva-Shakti Trika and the God concept we spoke about on the phone. On awakening during the night I felt anew the reality of the delusion of ‘ownership’ in another way:
Awareness is a light which is a shining and a knowing. It is not a something which gives off light, a torch shining a beam outwards but IS that whole, shining field of outwardness, of space and light, alive and aware. At the same time as that, it is an inward knowing and shining, not a torch shining a beam inwardly, but it is that whole shining and knowing Field of inwardness, alive and aware. In this sense awareness is a flame. It is not a thing that is burning. It is the essence of flameness. Awareness is a burning knowing that has a property of selfhood, that knows itself as it begins to sense itself as it becomes inwardly aware of ...felt sense. In our physical reality we suffer from the delusion that wood burns, that torches give off light, that walls are orange — it doesn’t occur to us that it is Shiva that is torching, wooding, burning, lighting, oranging......
Awareness is not a thing or self that reflects on itself. It Is an inwardly knowing light (self aware) at the same time as it is an outwardly knowing light (other aware).
Awareness is like a light in that it shines, streams, expands, fills. Physical light illuminates, reveals what was hidden in the dark. But this has two meanings. The first is the purely physical, the second is the inner sense of revealing what is hidden – the sense of knowing what was previously unknown.
Awareness is simultaneously an outward/inward field phenomena. It is a boundary phenomenon, an interaction. Awareness, in seeing inwardly is the outer looking inwards, and in seeing outwardly, it is the inner looking outwards. But another way of saying the inner looking outwards is saying that the inner portion ‘takes in’ what is outward — that is, breathes it in. There is a continuous 2 way flow through the boundary surface that distinguishes and unites the inner and outer fields of awareness.
Awareness reproduces itself. When we put meaning into words, we re-produce some thing inner in another form. Awareness in expressing itself outwardly, is reproducing itself so that it can see clearly what was formerly hidden. It reveals itself by creating a reflection of itself ‘out there’, shining the light of knowing on what it has created in order to reveal unthought dimensions.
Awareness, aware of the felt sense of something hidden within the darkness, holds open a space so that its light (Shiva) can embrace and feel more the potentialities it senses (Shakti). This ‘feeling more’ is a loving. When we feel something more and more we are loving it. Shiva embraces its beloved more and more. They intertwine and the result is the world of actuality in which Shiva sees himself in recognition and Shakti is manifested. Awareness, in becoming aware of something stirring within and REPRODUCING itself through manifesting that within-ness comes ALIVE. Through intercourse, embracing, feeling more, LOVING.

                                                  AWARENESS 101

AWARENESS AND WHAT AWARENESS IS AWARE OF

There is an essential paradox reading Peter’s work on awareness. For unless you already have a ‘feel’ for what he is writing about, the words can be very ‘slippery’ as a friend of mine said to me the other day. She was trying to understand what I meant when I suggested to her that she was attached to the events around her and to the thoughts and emotions within her and that real freedom was attained through centering ourselves in the AWARENESS of the events around her and the thoughts and emotions within rather than what awareness is aware of. She asked me what I meant and I said to myself, ‘Good question’, for I had also struggled with this when I first came across it in Peter’s work.

If Peter has written about the ‘distinction between awareness and what awareness is aware of’ once, he has done it a thousand times. I would say until you can grasp this in a deep feeling way, that is, know it ‘in your bones’, just about all of his writings in The New Yoga will be mainly inaccessible to you. Like my friend, you may grasp it in moments and then it slips through your fingers like water and you find that the phrase the ‘distinction between awareness and what awareness is aware of’ again eludes you.

Mind you, I don’t think there is anything intrinsically wrong with struggling with someone’s words, for if you intend to feel them from within and you don’t give up, it will eventually happen. I’ve known Peter for over 30 years and have ‘struggled’ for all that time to grasp what he is saying and have found that I eventually gained a felt understanding of things that at the time I would have sworn were beyond me. But there is also nothing wrong with a helping hand if it can enable someone to feel the essence of a concept.

LUCID DREAMING AND DREAMING

I was meditating the other day questing for a way to help myself (and therefore others) to FEEL the reality of the ‘distinction between awareness and what awareness is aware of’. On awakening one morning it came to me that ‘where I had just been’ (dreaming) was the answer. I am assuming that everyone reading this has had a lucid dream. That is, a dream in which you know that you are dreaming, a dream in which you don’t wake up FROM the dream but wake up WITHIN the dream. Sometimes in a dream, we become aware that the events are so outlandish that part of us ‘wakes up’ and says to ourselves something like, ‘This is crazy, this must be a dream!’ This ‘revelation’ usually leads to us waking up in the bed, but if we wake up inside the dream, then it becomes a lucid dream. (There are also ways to ‘stay awake’ while going to sleep – meaning that we can have an out of body experience from the waking state. I still remember vividly an out-of-body experience in 1976 in Peter’s house in London. I can still re-evoke the feeling of this experience now over thirty years later and it is this feeling that I am calling on people to re-evoke now. If you can you will follow what I am going to say. And of course some people have had ‘near death experiences’ and others ‘astral projections’ all of which put us in similar states.)

If you wake up inside the dream but not from the dream, you find yourself in a perfectly lucid state. You KNOW that you are dreaming and you know that, normally, you don’t know that you are dreaming until you wake up. You also know with absolute conviction that because you are dreaming, you are utterly free within the dream to do anything you want. (Whether philosophically true or not, in a lucid dream you know that the whole dream is happening ‘in your head’ or that ‘everything is imaginary’ or that it isn’t ‘real’). Death can’t stop you for you can’t die because ‘this is only a dream’. You know that walls can’t stop you, you just walk through them. Gravity can’t stop you, you just lift off the ground and fly. You know that you can direct the action of the dream with your intent. All you have to do is intend something and it happens. You intend to walk through solid matter and it happens.

MAINTAINING LUCIDITY

The only problem in a lucid dream is maintaining lucidity. It is so easy to lose yourself in whatever you are thinking or feeling or lose yourself in any events inside the dream. As soon as you do lose yourself in thoughts or events, you forget that you know you are dreaming and you just start ‘dreaming’ again, sometimes until you wake up in the bed and recall that you were lucidly dreaming but ‘lost it’. Maintaining lucidity is an interesting business for it isn’t anything one can do. It is a pure ‘not-doing’. It is as if in a lucid dream we have to keep one ‘eye’ on remembering that we are lucid and the other ‘eye’ on whatever is happening around or within us. A sort of ‘dual awareness’, though dual is entirely the wrong word because it suggests separation which is not the case. While lucidly dreaming we become aware that our awareness is actually like a coin. It has two sides, distinct but inseparable. One side is our consciousness-of-the-world-around-us (the events of the dream) and the world inside us (what we are thinking and feeling within the dream) and the other side is the awareness that we are dreaming all this – that is, that everything that is happening in the dream world is happening within the dreamer’s awareness (within a field of awareness). To maintain lucidity, we must keep that non-dual awareness uppermost. Non-dual in the sense of , like a coin, a boundary layer of awareness, with two sides that cannot be separated, but are, nevertheless distinct. So a lucid dream is a dream in which we keep ourselves centred in the AWARENESS of what we are CONSCIOUS OF. A normal dream is when we are only conscious of what is happening in the dream.

LUCID AWAKENING

You are awake now. What would it be like to be lucidly awake? How would you go about becoming lucid while awake? If you could become lucid while awake, wouldn’t you be ‘enlightened’? Surely to be ‘lucid’ means to be ‘enlightened’? If you could become lucid while awake, this would mean that you would centre yourself in your Awareness of what you are conscious of, rather than what you are conscious of. This is what Peter means. And it is essentially what Indian philosophy-religion is all about.

Let’s look at the possible state of ‘lucid awakening’ for what it can make explicit about Peter’s writing. Peter writes a lot about awareness and consciousness. He says that if we are lost in thought or playing on the computer we may be conscious but we are not aware. There is the use of the two terms, consciousness and awareness. Consciousness the way Peter talks about it is analogous to what it is in a normal dream. A normal dream is a dream in which we are, moment by moment, ‘lost’ in the events of the dream. A lucid dream is a dream in which we are no longer lost because we have realised that we are ‘dreaming all this’, that there is somewhere ‘surrounding’ or transcending all this that we really are. We have ‘found ourselves’ through the recognition that we are dreaming this.

While lucidly dreaming, just who are we? When we say, I am dreaming in a lucid dream, do we mean that I realise I am the dreamer not the dreamt self, or am I the dreamt self and do I realise that I am dreaming? Tricky one, this. For it is both and neither. Yes, I am the dreamer, but yes, I am also still dreaming, thus I am still the dreamt self. It depends on where you put the intonation. I am dreaming. If the emphasis is on the I, then it is the dreaming Self that I am. If the emphasis is on the dreaming, then it is I, the dreamt self who is dreaming. When the Shaivist Yogis said Shivoham (I am Shiva), this is essentially what this is about. If you became lucidly awake right now, you would KNOW that you were ‘WAKING’ this experience right now, that you were really ‘above’ or ‘surrounding’ this whole reality, that is, that you were in fact Shiva or God. While at the same time you would know that the you in the experience was God or Shiva. So what you might try to do as you go about your everyday reality is try and get a feel for everything that surrounds you as like a bubble of your awareness, that you actually enclose or surround everything. You would be expanding your awareness to the horizon of what you are aware of. You would maintain an ongoing awareness of being in the centre of an enormous volume of space, in front of you, behind you, below you, on either side while you go about your day. This ‘not-doing’ would ensure that you are constantly feeling your whole body and you wouldn’t be lost in any thoughts or feelings or any of the events around you.

The other day I woke up from a dream and felt really upset by it. In that moment, I realised that it is I, not the dreamt self, who is really ‘doing’ the experiencing of this dream. While dreaming, it is the dreamt self who thinks they ‘own’ the experience of dreaming. If in the dream I forget where I parked my car, and spend several frustrating ‘hours’ walking aimlessly around trying to find it, I take it for granted that me, the dreamt self, is the owner of the experience. It is only when I wake up, do I realise that of course the experience is mine (otherwise I wouldn’t be upset by it) and sometimes when the symbolism is so obvious, I again have further proof that what happens in a dream is my experience not the dreamt self’s. What I mean by all this is that on awakening I know that I, the waking self, act through, in and as the dreamt self. Now when Peter writes about ‘the delusion of agency’, about the delusion that we suffer from when we think that we own our experience, that these are my thoughts, this is my self, my awareness, this is what he is referring to. For if we could become lucidly awake, we would know with utter conviction that it is Shiva or God that is acting through, in and as us. That it is Shiva or God who is the experiencer, not us, we are the experienced self, just as when we dream, we are the dreamt self. That there is no such thing as my self or my awareness. There is only ONE self – Shiva or God, just as there is only one Dreamer, me, and I dream many dreams and many me’s.

AWARENESS IS FREEDOM

In an ordinary dream while we are dreaming it, we believe and so experience an ‘objective’ world outside us. Just like waking life, there is us ‘here’ and the world ‘over there’, separate and distinct from us. If we are confronted by a dog that snaps and barks at us and we start to get frightened, the dog may even grow in size and viciousness, until we wake up in a sweat. When lucidly dreaming we experience something entirely different. We know that in some way WE are everything. That everything in this world is us. If we feel ‘dark’ in a lucid dream, the atmosphere around may instantly darken and we can lighten it by brightening our mood. The scientific assumption that reality is ‘objective’ is turned on its head while lucidly dreaming. We know with certainty that reality is entirely subjective. In a lucid dream if we are confronted by a vicious dog snapping and barking at us we know that we are safely centred in the lucid awareness of the dog. We can simply turn our attention to something else or we can even make the dog disappear by ‘snapping our fingers’.

In Peter’s work you will read a lot about the distinction between awareness and what awareness is aware of, especially in its application to therapy and counselling. If a person is worrying about ‘what people think about them’, a cognitive behavioural therapist may try to help the person be ‘mindful’ of their thoughts, objectify them and through counselling analyse their ‘truth value’. Such a person may come to see that their thoughts aren’t ‘rational’ and may indeed gain some relief from them. But invariably, the problem returns in another guise sooner or later. In Peter’s New Therapy, the approach is based on the mantra that ‘the awareness of a thought is not a thought’. If you are worrying about things, the awareness of worrying is not itself worrying. It is completely free of worrying. Just as in a lucid dream, you can centre yourself in the lucid awareness of dreaming rather than what you are dreaming of and solve problems confronting you (you can make a vicious dog disappear with a snap of your fingers for example) so while awake, you can centre yourself in awareness rather than what you are aware of.

The feeling in a lucid dream is almost one of ecstasy. In fact, ecstasy means ex-stasis – out of the body. In a lucid dream we feel absolutely free, almost drunk with freedom. Nothing can hold us down or back, we are unbounded. Indian religious philosophy called this state ‘moksha’. It is the aim of all meditation and the aim of Peter’s New Yoga. If we can become lucidly awake, become Awareness itself, rather than what we are aware of, we attain true freedom.

Meditations on Peter’s ‘What is Liberation?’

I loved 'What is Liberation?' and am far from finished with meditating it, if ever. What I most got from it so far is “Liberation is a sacrifice of this self and a surrender to the Divine, Not a surrender of our sense of self but of self-possession, disowning and restoring Ownership of our sense of self to God - that Divine Awareness to which alone all Experiencing and all experiences of self ultimately belong”. That is, it came over to me quite vividly that it is not about sacrificing the sense of self we have but ownership of that sense of self. A subtle but very important distinction. I think the mantra you have ‘Disown’ is quite powerful and meaningful and I am playing with it a lot. I had a feeling of being a ‘hand of God’ (isn’t that Hamas or one of those other terrorist organisations?). My hand does not own itself, I own it. I and everyone else are ‘hands or organs of God’, we do not own ourselves, Awareness owns us. I also visited lucid dreaming again. In a lucid dream, there is the realisation that there is only the awareness self and that the dream self is a delusion. But what a delusion. In ordinary dreams, one can wake up in a sweat at almost being killed or… This is where I found your reference to Bhairav so important and clear to me. We are terrified of dying for precisely the reasons you said in the verse. “The ego identifies surrender of self possession with loss of self and ultimate non being”. We do have to face Bhairav the terrifying one if we are going to take the leap into Moksha. Maybe that is why most don’t honour your work? It demands that leap without actually stating it, yet people feel it?

Edited by author 02-13-2007 01:53 PM
'Meditations on Peter's 'What is Thinking?'

Thanks for ‘What is Thinking? ’I found (actually I still AM finding) it deeply profound. I have found myself taking in a couple of lines at a time and meditating them and they take me to extraordinary places. Just this morning it all gelled in me as to what was nagging away at the back of awareness. Since you sent me the first draft some time ago, every time I read it, there was something of significance in the words ‘have thoughts’. What was it about that phrase that was so significant to me? I kept meditating on this as I went about my day. I was also very well aware just how much of a giant shadow the thoughts that ‘I have’ cast on the things around me. I’ve written before of my own awareness of just how unaware I can be doing everyday things of life, like walking to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee etc, while being ‘lost in thought’.

I have always wanted to experience reality like I used to do on LSD. On acid, the experience of simply doing anything, filling a cup with water, looking at a piece of wood on the ground, the enormity of crossing a road with everything so fascinating, was almost overwhelming. Why? Impossible to put into words. Back then when I was taking it, I remember that ‘things’ were simply more than they were. That’s the only way I could put it. Reading ‘What is Thinking?’, the line, ‘See how things glisten and shine in that light’ jumped out at me and I knew that that was what it was about LSD. Somehow things did glisten and shine, to the extent that for me I wasn’t colour blind when tripping like I ‘was’ normally. Things glistened and shone to the extent that I could recognise ‘green’ as ‘green’, something which I could never have done when not tripping.

Reading the piece I began to realise that ‘having’ thoughts meant that I wasn’t able to directly face reality, and that was the reason why it wasn’t glistening and shining. That if the thoughts that I ‘had’ were, indeed, casting a shadow on the things around me, then they couldn’t glisten and shine in the pure Light of Awareness. But what did it mean to have thoughts?

And then while being in Awareness this morning, some wonderful thoughts came to me. ‘Having thoughts’ is not the same as being aware of thoughts. ‘Having thoughts’ is when you realise that you have just been thinking certain thoughts but you didn’t intend to and neither were you aware while you were thinking them that you were indeed thinking them. Being aware of thoughts is when you are aware of thoughts as they arise.

Saying that ‘I have thoughts’ is like saying ‘I have a cold’. When we say that ‘I have a cold’, we are implying that I didn’t choose to have a cold, I didn’t create it, that it happened to me. And that perfectly describes how I felt this morning when I knew what ‘having thoughts’ meant. All my life I ‘have had thoughts’ and upon realising that I am ‘lost in thought’ I sometimes curse myself for being lost in thought, wondering why these things just happen to me or I happen to think them and why can’t I control this? Why can’t I empty my mind?

Being aware of thoughts is actively or consciously choosing to be aware of thoughts as they arise. I am identifying with the awareness of thoughts. If I ‘have thoughts’ I am passively or not consciously choosing to be aware of thoughts as they arise. I am unconsciously identified with the thoughts that I have. In just the same way we say, “I have a cold’, meaning that we are unaware that we are actually ‘colding’, that is, aware of creating a cold, and instead we are identified with the cold, as we are identified with thoughts of anger when we quite literally say, ‘I am angry’.

Aware thinking is when you are aware of thoughts as they arise, and that you can consciously choose to follow them and think them. In this sense, we do not ‘have’ thoughts so much as actively think them. Aware feeling is the same thing. If you are listening to a piece of music and aware of what it feels like to listen, all sorts of subtle tones, textures and colours arise. There is a wealth of difference between this and telling someone that you ‘had a feeling’ of contentment while walking on the beach, or ‘had a feeling’ of anger while listening to John Howard on TV. Contentment and anger are as meaningless as describing the former listening to music as ‘good’. The direct ‘face to face‘ encounter with music is experienced in ‘technicolour’; ‘having a feeling’ of anger is like experiencing in monochrome. What colour was the anger? How did it feel?

Having thoughts or feelings reduces a technicolour reality into a monochrome, boring blah. Sometimes I have been out for a walk and I start thinking about a problem, I ‘have’ thoughts about a problem — for example, re-arranging my computer/scanner/printer/backup drive on my desk to maximise space. I can have the most ‘wonderful thoughts’, get slightly manic because I think I have solved a problem, I can’t wait to get back home and try it out. Then when I am home I walk into my room and I am confronted with its living reality. Suddenly, the great ideas that I had look so black and white that I feel deflated. Suddenly I am aware of all the aspects about my room, desk, telephone modem cable, position of the light, of the length of cables, of the positioning of power points etc that I couldn’t possibly have kept in awareness, so lost or locked in to what I was thinking about while on my walk. I stand still, breathing in the whole room, aware of myself in this living space and it comes to me what I have been searching for — the rearrangement. It comes to me fully formed from the very awareness space that I locked myself out of on my walk.

So this morning I became aware that ‘just having thoughts about things, we lose direct awareness of the things we are thinking about’. I decided to conduct some phenomenological research when having my shower this morning. Soon the water was falling on me and I was washing myself and was aware that I was ‘having thoughts‘. I became aware that ‘having thoughts’ while doing something is a ‘double distortion’ of reality. Having thoughts meant that I wasn’t directly aware of showering — feeling what it felt like to have a shower. And like the thinking about the computer problem while on my walk, the thoughts themselves are flat and colourless. So we lose all round.

For it seems to me that when we just 'have' thoughts our awareness becomes so centred in them that we look out at the world purely through the eyes and 'in the light' of that thought - not seeing how it is colouring and shaping our awareness of things - and not being aware of that thought itself in the pure light of awareness that brings it to light. Conversely, when we are in Awareness, aware of everything there is to be aware of, both within and outside us, we are not contracted but in an expanded awareness state. In this state, everything around us is bathed or illuminated by the Pure Light of Awareness, thus things are able to glisten and shine in this light, reflecting it to me. (interesting isn’t it that LSD was said to ‘expand awareness’).

So getting out of the shower I found a mantra arising within me — aware drying. I picked up the towel and probably for the first time in my life actively and knowingly dried myself with the towel. I felt everything there was to feel as I dried myself, I intentionally kept awareness of all that I was aware of while drying myself and was aware of everything that I am writing now in a sort of ‘wrapped up’ form at the same time as feeling the towel on my skin, the bathroom, the walls, the sounds etc. It all came to me in that moment. As I walked out of the bathroom and switched off the light, a mantra started up, ‘aware switching off’. As I walked to my room to get dressed, a mantra started up, ‘aware walking’ etc etc. It wasn’t exactly like LSD, but it was close. It was an alive, aware experiencing and while my mind wasn’t empty, it also wasn’t full of foreign thoughts, just thoughts arising and passing through me with me letting them go, neither getting lost in them nor locked into any one of them.

On May 13th 2006, I posted something in my Awareness Diary about how I introduce the topic of awareness with my clients at work. I've rewritten it now so am posting it again with slight modifications and welcome any responses. So here it is:

LOST IN THOUGHT: How I introduce people to Awareness

People like to think that the difference between animals and humans is that we are aware and they aren't. I would like to challenge that. I want to suggest to you that we are just as if not even more unaware than any cat or dog. I have never seen a cat trip itself up or walk into something like I have done when I am pre-occupied with thought. I bet the same is true for you. I would like to suggest to you that when people say that we humans are aware what we are actually referring to is the ability to think about things. For me that is not what I now understand as AWARENESS. For though we may ‘consciously’ think about things or ‘know’ about them, that does not mean we are directly AWARE of experiencing them.

For example, if I ask you whether you are AWARE of hearing the hum of my computer as we are talking or aware of the pictures on my walls, I don't mean do you ‘know’ that the computer is humming or do you know that there are pictures on my walls? I mean quite literally are you aware of experiencing the hum and the pictures, experiencing the whole room - while at the same time experiencing your body, yourself, and how you are talking or listening to me? Before you say that you can only experience one thing at a time, let me say that ‘awareness’ in the sense that I am talking about it does not mean FOCUSING any ONE thing you are or could be aware of experiencing.That is the whole point. Let me give you an example. I want you to feel your feet resting on the ground while you continue to listen to me. Can you do that? The answer is obviously yes, you can, when you are asked. But the trick is to 'know' how you did that and maintain that awareness of your feet while being conscious of me. Why you ask? Because if you are aware of your feet, and your back and legs touching the chair, and your hands resting on your thighs and indeed, aware of everything there is to be aware of in this room, while continuing to be conscious of me, then you cannot be 'lost in thought'. THAT IS MEDITATION!

I suggest to you that if you are not lost in thought, then you cannot ever be anxious or 'depressed' or uptight or stressed out or anything like that for, while in that state, you will be FREE of all thoughts and emotions. As I said the trick is to maintain that awareness of the whole field around us. It's a bit like a batsman at the crease in cricket. The batsman has to maintain an awareness of where all the fieldsmen are even while being conscious of the bowler walking back to his mark, while he is running in etc. The batsman maintains an awareness of the whole field of play while fiercely concentrating on the ball in the bowler's hand and when it is actually coming through the air towards him down the pitch. The batsman allows his awareness to flow between that fierce focusing and a more laid back awareness of the whole field of play. Otherwise he would never be able to 'hit the ball between fielders'. It is not just a fluke that a good batsman does that - he 'knows' where all the fieldsman are all the time, but it is his ‘field awareness’ that is doing this ‘knowing’ not his ‘ego awareness’. Field awareness is basically unconscious or instinctive in us at the moment, but we can ‘train’ ourselves to make it conscious. All cricketers know that if they start thinking too much about the game, they are lost. They don't want to think, they don't want any interruptions to the flow of play, they just want it all to be 'instinctive'. Sledging is designed to interrupt that field awareness through the personal comments made to the batsman to try and make him REACT - that is, think about what has been said.

OK, back to you in this room. Over the coming weeks and months I hope that you will be able to become more aware of the whole field of play in which your life is happening. For if you do, then life will flow far more instinctively than it has for you in the past. You will not be so stuck in thought and drowned in your emotions as you told me you were. You also said that you were sick and tired of thinking all the time, of being unable to sleep because of the thoughts circling around inside you at night.

Which reminds me of something. I have had personal success with getting a good night's sleep through this awareness principle and thought you might like to try it. At night I simply lie in bed in my favourite sleeping position and I try to just be totally aware of just lying in the bed. I try as hard as I can to simply feel what it is like to be a body lying in bed in the way I am lying in bed. I feel my body lying on its side against the sheets, I feel the quilt touching the other side, I feel how my leg is bent, I feel how my face rests against one of my palms, I feel whatever bodily sensations that are present, I am aware of whatever sounds are in the room or I can hear from outside. But in the main, I have a 'mantra' which is 'what does it feel like to be my body lying in bed in the way I am lying?' Just that, nothing else. When I do this 'exercise', and I do it religiously whenever I get in bed until I fall asleep, whenever I awaken in the night, I find that my mind is FREE of thoughts, just as the batsman is as the ball is delivered. I soon go to sleep. I can now regularly lie in bed completely empty of thoughts, utterly still. A very unique experience, almost blissful.

I said before that the trick is to maintain awareness of the whole field of play. I am challenging you to 'have a go' at this. In the beginning I am sure you will find it hard to do. You will continually forget to be aware of the whole field and find yourself lost in particular thoughts or particular feelings or a particular TV programme you are watching, or a car going past, but mostly you will be lost in thought. Let me explain what I mean with a couple of most mundane examples. If you are at home and working at your computer or playing on the internet let's say that you decide to go to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. Now I bet that while walking to the kitchen, you will be lost in thought, thinking about what you have downloaded, or what you are going to cook that night or whatever. While filling the kettle, boiling the water, getting the cup, putting coffee in it, getting the milk from the fridge, I bet that you are thinking of something else while you are doing this. I challenge you to ask yourself why is it like that? Why is it that when we are walking to the kitchen we are completely unaware of 'walking to the kitchen'? I don't mean to imply that we don't know that we are walking to the kitchen, I mean that WE ARE NOT FEELING WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO WALK TO THE KITCHEN, feeling the space around us, aware of the walls, the floor, everything there is to be aware of. And I also don't mean that just because we are unaware of all that, we will automatically crash into things or forget what we are doing, although that CAN happen at times. No, we can go about our whole lives completely unaware of ourselves and still function. You might ask why would anyone want to be aware of what it feels like to walk to the kitchen while we are walking to the kitchen? I could say what is the point of thinking about what you are going to be cooking that night while you are walking to the kitchen? But in a way I think you have hit the nail on the head. You are implying that the normal mundane activities of daily life are 'boring' and thus we should escape from them into our real 'home' — our mind — and think about things to distract ourselves from that boring mundanity.

But my whole point is that our 'homes' are not our minds but our BODIES, and our whole bodies at that. And lastly, it is precisely because your whole upbringing, the culture around you, friends, family, society continually says that your real self is your mind, that you have all the problems that you do have! We are a society of people who are completely divorced from the reality of our bodies. No wonder we are so obsessed with them. We are desperately trying to get back in touch with them. The other example I want to mention is something you can try when you leave my office. I am going to suggest to you that you stay aware of your whole body as you leave my office. That as an experiment you simply feel what it is like to walk out the door, cross the landing and go down the stairs. That you try and maintain an awareness of what this feels like as any cat or dog would do. I am prepared to suggest that by the time you get to the stairs which will take you about 5 seconds, you will already be losing awareness. You will be lost in thought, reacting to the 'sledging' of your own mind, thinking about where the car is parked, or what you are going to be doing at work, or what you should buy on the way home etc. What I would like you to do is to become aware of just how unaware you are. Over the week before you come back to see me, I hope that you will take up this challenge. If you do, you should find that you will be FREE of thought at times. Good luck!"

I was reading the Paul thing you sent — Steiner on Vedanta. Something in the way Steiner was talking about in-breathing and out-breathing gave me that ‘familiar feeling’ as I felt hidden significances below the surface of his words almost wriggling. How true it is that you wrote, “That is the joy I get from Tantras such as the Shiva Sutras is this sense of non-difference between something known to me and something transmitted through the wording of a text that gives it a new and divine sensual flavour or Rasa, thus also working on me in a way that is both affirming and transforming.“ How divine it is to read something and know that in that moment, a new taste ‘sensation’ is about to unfold. Anyway, two things I felt. One I’m not sure about but I felt something so utterly simple that I felt this can’t be ‘right’. I still wonder at it. It was this. In breathing in awareness, am I breathing in a sense of I-ness, and then breathing out I-ness, breathing in a new sense of I-ness, breathing it out? That is, I-ness passes through me, circulates, and passes out. But for me, it appears to be always there, this the ‘continuity‘ of the I and its seeming sameness and thing-ness leading to ‘ego’ as agent?

But this wasn’t really what ‘grabbed’ me. In the next moment I was feeling the whole of space etc and then suddenly it all got ‘reversed‘. What I mean by this can best be put into words in this way. You once wrote that the felt body is the physical body as it is felt from within. But then later you wrote that the felt body is not just the physical body as it is felt from within — the physical body is the felt body as it is perceived from without. Up til this experience of mine, whenever I meditated on being Shiva, or there being no agent, or my ego is not the agent causing action, I was always coming at it from ‘my’ point of view, trying to feel myself as Shiva. Suddenly in this moment I felt myself from the other way around. I WAS Shiva as me. I guess this is the ocean’s awareness of itself as the fish? What bliss.

I played with this for a day and then your article on Paul arrived and I thoroughly digested that breakdown of the wall between incarnate self and discarnate self. My own Shiva experience metamorphosed into feeling myself as Shiva Andrewing. I could actually feel the unity of Shiva/Shakti and how obvious it was and how it could be nothing other than that. I could feel myself as Shiva bodying, writing, walking, breathing, talking, looking, silencing… I could feel the analogy between meaning expressing itself in words and Shiva expressing himself in flesh, and thoughts, and actions through me. Now I have a constant sense of this massiveness as if I am the whole of space vortexing its way around through me as centre. And sometimes I feel no particular connection to ‘my’ body, just as you wrote about your recent puja experience.

And this morning on my walk (which I would have to call my puja) I became aware of something else. I determined to slow down everything to such an extent that I wanted to become aware of the ‘rustle of even atoms’. It was as if I wanted to listen to the heartbeat of the space around me. I walked so silently and slowly (and it was early enough in the morning that there were no cars, no sounds except for the birds) and began to simply feel myself as Shiva. A continuation of what I wrote to you before about the delicate balancing act. But this time there was a new twist. I wanted to see what tiniest movement of the aether would nudge me in what direction and why? I can only call it the most exquisite phenomenological research I have ever conducted. What I noticed was that when I got down to that ‘fundamental’ level, I was able to ‘see’ that whatever it was I was aware of instantly coloured awareness moving me in a new ‘direction’. I could see how the blueness, say, of a car I perceived, ‘caused’ thoughts about something I might do later today (although of course they weren’t thoughts but ... What can I say - indications of a probable direction I might take). This direction in time-space became a mood which coloured how I perceived whatever it was I was perceiving, so that in listening to the cry of a wattle bird, that cry was coloured by ME. I experienced the ongoing dynamic interaction — what I felt changing the self feeling it and vice versa. This state of consciousness was quite hard to maintain but overall I can still feel the unbelievable ‘swooping’ of my awareness and how my ‘mind’ changed about what I was going to do that day almost every second. It is quite obvious to me now how whatever it is that the ego thinks it is deciding to do at any moment has been determined for it by the micro movements of awareness.

Yesterday I read something in Vol 6 of Seth's Personal Sessions that meant a lot to me:

“You have been taught for centuries in one way or another that repression, generally speaking, now, was all in all a natural, good, social and moral requirement, that expression was dangerous and must be harnessed and channeled because it was believed so thoroughly that man's natural capacities led him toward destructive rather than positive behaviour.

Energy was feared, expression suspicious unless it was directed and tempered in conventional fashions. Through all of man's religions and philosophies that line of thought has been most prominent; those who had the most energy suffered from it the most, of course. If you did not believe that energy was more naturally dangerous than beneficial, you would not have any difficulties at all concerning issues like nuclear bombs.

Instead, your natural creativity and your natural energies would some time ago have led you naturally (underlined) to a more productive use of nuclear force, to ways of rendering such use harmless in the short and long run, so that it could take its place in a loving technology. You take the opposite for granted, of course, and you consider psychological energy in the very same terms”

I had never thought of things in quite this way.
 
Two points. It gave me a new insight into just why we fear the spontaneous self. Fear of ‘energy’. Fear of AWARENESS. We fear our own awareness because we are afraid of a ‘chain reaction’ of thought. ‘If I do this, then that might happen, and then I will have to do that and then…’ Also just the sheer exuberance and ‘explosiveness’ of action that we sense will flow from freedom of expression (explosion’?) is alive in this metaphor. We are afraid of going past a point of no return, of the die being cast, etc. I now really grasp what Seth means when he says that spontaneity knows its own order. That is, yes, if we let go into free explosion of felt sense, things will get exuberant and there will be a vast outpouring but it isn’t out of control (like our fear of a nuclear explosion), and it may go off in a million different directions, but it has its own order and left alone will seek out our own best value fulfillment. I know this with clients and friends. A million times, someone has said to me, “But if I do that, this might happen and then eetc.” My response has always been, “Yes, that might happen, and if it does, I will ask you what you FEEL about that, and with my support, you can make tiny adjustments to your initial impulse to counter what you feel.” In other words, we only get panicked because we fear the ‘chain reaction’ of thought. We forget that any chain reaction of thought can be broken up through awareness.

And the second point is the way Seth uses the breaking up of a chain reaction to hint at the way we could use nuclear energy in a loving technology. I had always assumed, uncritically, that nuclear energy was ‘bad’, too dangerous, blah, blah blah. I don’t think Seth has mentioned the issue in this way before?

Also Seth in this volume says that Jane (and others) have incarnated in these times to challenge THIS belief in the SINFUL self — that is, in the fear of expression of our natural impulses. My own little mantra is “I trust the spontaneous self and its expression.“ While sensing this I know that it also carries the sense of “I CAN trust the spontaneous Self, for that Self is Shiva or God and of course, I, God, can be trusted”.
 
At the moment, I am basking in another new understanding. Sounds so obvious and yet means so much. Was reading Shaivism and the part about Nagas. Snakes shed their skin. We can shed the sense of being confined by the body. What I also saw was that at death, we shed the body. I?ve never thought of it that way before, shedding the body like a snake sheds its skin. I could almost feel the awareness body wriggling out of it, and the body lying there like the crumpled ?space-suit? of the soul that it is!

Also as I'm going about my daily life, I'm starting to FEEL that I am the space inside me extending downwards and the space outside me extending outwards. Strange feelings of "I'm not a thing travelling in that inner space, exploring it, I AM the inner space, stretching and breathing". Coupled with the realisation of the body as a skin or spacesuit, I am shifting my sense of identification over from what I am aware of to the light and space of awareness itself.
 
You wrote: "Thanks for sharing your experience of bodyhood as Nagahood. It fits in very much with the message of the very first page I wrote on this - 'Nagas The Naked Truth of Tantra'. To feel, as you described that you are the space you are travelling in is a major siddhi. It is the sort of experience what I sought to express in a page on Kundalini and gave me a insight into the way the Sumarians travelled - not 'leaping and bounding' (!) but a coiling and uncoiling like a snake - in and as cosmic space. I had a further experience of Kundalini Naga recently - during a 'Puja' session. I experienced very strongly the reality that pure quiescent awareness (Shiva) is also full of all the action going on everywhere the universe at all times - as well as in every leaf and tree in the garden, every flame and object in the shrine, and in my body. Yet I felt my physical body just couldn't contain the sense of all this action (Shakti). It started to jerk and shake as it does when I get someone to effectively affect my inner body through theirs. Except this time is was Shiva doing it! Later the same day, in tantric partner-meditation this almost uncontainable but very vitalising sense of infinite action unfolding within awareness exploded into a felt image of intertwined snakes rushing up from the base of my spine, through the inner space of my body and head - and beyond, metamorphosing into the single divine serpent (Ananta/Shesha) whose single cobra hood covered the entire vault of the night sky."
 
I love it when you connect my experience with your experiences and their written expression and exposition in TNY. I get a sense of ‘spiritual science’ when I can ‘reproduce’ your results ‘scientifically’. You connecting things up like that enables me to understand your writing in a deeper way as well. I hope you get a sense of satisfaction and validation when someone else, following your NY, is able to ‘verify’ discoveries. As for the experience of ‘nagahood’, I think it is crucial for me to have made the ‘leap’ from a punctilinear self ‘leaping and bounding’ in space to the the whole of space being the self, coiling and uncoiling. When I had the experience I literally felt a strange inner motion as a part of me ‘knew’ what to do to make a ‘ripple’ move up and down an inner ‘rod’ or ‘tube’, while there being no rod or tube, just inner expanse. I haven’t had time to repeat the effort but can still FEEL it.
 
On awakening during the night I found myself in another slightly altered state of awareness, in the sense of each day of my life now is qualitatively different than other days, and I can feel that. Last night on awakening I KNEW that my task now was to BE AWARE ALL the time — as if all I have been WANTING, to be aware all the time, finally is bearing fruit. In the morning I wrote (a synthesis of the languages of Seth and The New Yoga: “If I am aware of everything around me and within me — that is, connected with Unified Field Awareness, not in my head thinking about what is around or within me, then only that unified field can move me, not any reflective thoughts, obviously. And this ‘movement’ comes in the form of impulses (Seth) or embodied awareness from felt sense (TNY). What I mean by this is that if I am connected with UFA, then my experiencing is unmediated by any reflective thought. I am directly present to reality and that directness is manifested in an unfolding of awareness into direct bodily manifestation. (Lately I have been wondering while walking, when completely aware of what is around me, just what it is that determines the shifting of my gaze? Certainly not any ego decision making to look at this or that. I am realising that it is felt sense directly manifested. That is, if we are connected to the all embracing and embraced fields of awareness, then whatever we are moved by is awareness itself in the shape of felt sense.) If the body and events are constantly emerging from UFA then that awareness is as it were unfolding directly into bodily action. But only if we are AWARE. If we are ‘lost’ in thought, in contracted awareness, we cannot acknowledge an impulse and embody it in bodily action (albeit subconsciously). Its embodiment into action is BLOCKED. Instead, rather than embodied in bodily action and bodily language, it is embodied in the language and action that IS the body, in illness or dis-ease. We can either embody it subconsciously or it will be subconsciously embodied! And lastly what I am discovering is that the subconscious is disappearing!!!!! For if I am wondering about what is prompting me to shift my gaze from here to there, then I am making all ‘subconscious’ action, conscious!!!!! Strangely enough I have been able to put into words a feeling that I have felt at the edges of my awareness for quite some time while trying to BE AWARE. Almost like a ‘burden’ of awareness — in a sense, a sense of a frightening awakeness. To be aware all the time is to be super awake, almost a feeling of “Give me a rest” — hence the desire to be simply lost in thought, to have a rest. But on awakening, that burden seems to have dissolved.

I recently re-read Qualia Revolution and the first essay ‘Being in Listening’ in Peter’s book on Heidegger. What follows were some experiences of mine while reading this stuff over a period of about two weeks.

The world around me is the sounds of silence, three dimensional
sounds. Through those sounds, I can feel the music which is
awareness. Awareness and its tones is the Music which I grasp through
the things around me in the world, just as I grasp meaning through
words. The whole world around me is the sounds of an invisible
orchestra, the sounding of tones of awareness, the playing. The
quivering. All around me are the words, the sounds of awareness. By
listening to them, I can resonate with the tones of awareness that
they are the sounding of, digest these tones and expand my range of
tonal qualities. How do I listen to these three dimensional sounds,
like cars and trees, and skies, and books and desks? Whole body
awareness! My body as all ear and all eye etc. Feeling awareness is
listening awareness. The listening body is the awareness body. Being
aware of all that there is to be aware of IS listening to the three
dimensional sounds around me - 'reality' with my whole body." On the
phone I was saying something 'crazy' to you - that I had to have a reason for relating to the world. Now I feel it. When I go to a concert, of course I try to hear the whole orchestra, all of it as a gestalt, while being able to listen to individual instruments. Being aware of all that there is to be aware of means listening to the whole gestalt of whatever there is around me, the relationship between every element as a holy symphony.

Something truly awesome is happening with me. I can't even say
that it is now 'on my walk this morning', but 'all the time'
if I choose to re-member. I can look up from the computer, be aware
of the room around me, and feel inside me a feeling which I cannot
put into words but something like a 'religious fullness' which I
can only assume comes from breathing in qualities of awareness that
the things are manifestations of. (I even feel myself writing like
William James in his afterdeath journal). The whole world and
everything in it is simply holy. It is a religious mood that is
pervading everything. Everything has a new depth for me, quite
literally like a very mild LSD trip. The most over-riding memory of
LSD trips for me was a feeling of almost being 'drunk' with an
ecstatic joy of simply being, of being perfectly content, for
example, of looking at a piece of bitumen and marvelling at it just
because it WAS. That is what is happening now in my life. I can
understand when you say that your 'religious-aesthetic feeling
quality and God-concept of Kashmir Shaivism does not seem to be
naturally shared by anyone'. Just as you say that religion without Yoga is such and such and yoga without religion is etc, I think that
'philosophy' has to be in that holy triumvirate. I think that one
has to have a driving impulse to FEEL the essential nature of
reality, not just understand it, in order to encompass God within
modern life. And this feeling is a meditative feeling, and it is a
questing!! And this is a philosophical act, that I suspect has to be
cultivated from an early age. You mentioned in your previous email
young people asking what does the universe expand into. That was what
I asked as a child. That is the result of a philosophical act. People
around me are in the main not philosophical and so I can well understand how when they walk around they may feel the wonder of colours around them, the sea, sand and nature, but they don't go that extra step, and ask, yes but why and how are they there at all? When I walk around, whatever I am aware of is like hearing half of the opening chord? of Beethoven's Fifth - it is a question. It demands an answering response, the rest of the chord.

Thursday, May 26th, 2006

On my walk at about 6.30 am, a cold, bracing, 3 degrees, I was looking up at the morning sky— space, the moon, stars, and began to feel a delicious joyful safety. At the time I felt it was encompassed by the quote from the Shiva Sutras:
 
“Thus identifying individual awareness with universal awareness and attaining divine bliss, from where or from whom should one get scared?”
 
While feeling this I exaggerated my facial expression, the look in my eyes and face and held this posture - thus intensifying the feeling tone of ‘joyful safety’.
 
Most importantly I also knew that this feeling of joyful safety wasn’t anything that I could logically explain as if it was caused by anything. Nothing I could rationalise as a product of the world or anything I did. The whole gestalt of me taking in the world around me, especially being aware of the space around me, evoked in me that feeling. It was a ‘not doing’.

At the same time I knew that whenever I really take in any object whatsoever, whether a leaf or tree or car, through resonation my body can take on the shape and tone of awareness that the object is itself a manifestation of. That way I can intensify and feel those very tones of awareness.
 
I also knew that if I hold that bodily shape and posture it helps me to keep on feeling those tones and qualities of awareness.

And here is a quote from Peter’s work but I can’t remember where I got it from.
 
"The true purpose of regularly establishing oneself in a fixed bodily posture ('Asana') is not to repeatedly endure it as a (painful) bodily stretching exercise, but to use it tantrically - to re-evoke and sustain a newly experienced, expanded or blissful quality of bodily awareness."

To access or download my entire diary (Jan 2002- Apr 2006) click on the Testimonials button on the Homepage.