The Experience of Awakening

Question: "Ishvara, could you say something about your experience of awakening?"

Ishvara: The experience of awakening has involved a deepening of what I call "feeling-knowing." Feeling-knowing is not intuition. It is not conceptual. It is something deeper, and it is very exact. Feeling-knowing is so apparent that it just is, and there is no doubt. It's not static, though. Feeling-knowing keeps adding to itself, continually becoming more expansive.

Feeling-knowing is an awareness of The Consciousness. The Consciousness is my term for "God" or "the Absolute." These latter terms have parameters to them. Yet my experience of The Consciousness is that it has no parameter. It is the all-that-is, and it is also nothingness. It is everything. Each individual is a unique experience and expression of The Consciousness. So, in essence you are The Consciousness experiencing itself as you. Each individual is an expression of The Consciousness, but not separate. Each is a unique expression of The Consciousness that is all of Life. So now I try to communicate this experience from a place of no intellectual separation.

The awakening is continuing, and my feeling-knowing is that there is no stopping place. We are limited only by our concepts and beliefs. And so the fewer concepts and beliefs one holds, the more liberated one becomes.

Concepts and beliefs are usually about some "other". They are about some other time, some other place, some other state than the one I'm in now, some other way of being than the way I am now. There are all these limitations. At the awakening I saw that there are no limitations. I saw that the only limitations were those ideas that I had accepted as true. In the awakening, it became very apparent that they weren't true; they were just beliefs. So in the awakening, there has been this deepening sense of desireless-ness, allowing-ness, all right-ness with everything that is. This allowing has led to an abandonment of all belief in cause and effect. Cause-and-effect thinking is an attempt to analyze and control life by saying, "This is so today because that happened yesterday." The awakening, however, has involved the realization that we cannot dissect The Consciousness into cause and effect. Things simply are the way they are, and I am the way I am now, and everything is always changing. We are simply here, and we are happening. As you become free of concepts and beliefs, you cease altering this flow, and things happen more naturally. Then the highest good is always taking place. Actually, at more expanded levels of awareness, even the term "highest good" loses all meaning. There is just the continuous flow.

As the awakening continues, one is constantly attaining more expanded levels of awareness, and more liberation. In this awareness, you see how everything is connected. Things just are, but they are not separate. The conditional mind experiences things as separate because of convenience. It is convenient to have a "you" and a "me," so that we can speak to each other. If there is no "you" or "me" here, there is nothing to say. But as one deepens in awareness, these concepts of convenience become less and less important, and being becomes paramount. Just being. Being this Life. In that awareness, there is an unlimited realization of how everything is connected. In that experience, there is no doubt.

The conditional mind is the intellect, which accepts programs and conditioning from the outside, all the while not knowing what these are about. We just accept these things. Yet the experience of the awakening has been that I am a walking question mark of Life itself. I am always looking at these accepted beliefs and questioning, "Who says?"

Beliefs and concepts are things we would like to be true. The whole of humanity has been enslaved by concepts and beliefs, with this vague promise of something better which will occur at some other time. And so we keep putting off to another time what we can be right now. My realization is that it is now, it is happening now, it is here now, and there is no waiting for it. It is just being and doing right now.

This is not complacency or idleness. Awareness involves taking whatever step is in front of you, doing whatever is there to do. There is no questioning, no doubt, no cause-and-effect thinking to it. You see the step and you take it, simply because it is there. And Life unfolds in a harmonious, natural state. It only becomes chaotic or disturbing when we've inserted a concept or belief which has blocked the flow.

Life is a no-fault process. There is no blame or guilt. Everyone is doing whatever they do because they think it is the best thing to do.

The feeling-knowing is that Life works. My experience is that Life is amazing; it always works far better and more expansively than I ever could have imagined. All that's required is willingness: willingness to be in the moment and to take the step that appears. And trust: trust that the flow is taking place. It can be hard for people caught in concepts and beliefs to see beyond these, but you can do it. I do it all the time, and I inspire other people to do it too. So I am here as an inspiration to the Real Person that each of you is: The Consciousness that is experiencing itself in every dimension and every possibility. We are so unlimited. We have so many possibilities, moment by moment. We tend to settle for something far less because of our concepts and beliefs. We think that's all we deserve. We think that is all that's possible. My experience has been to push the envelope, to keep going to the edge and pushing it. If you fall over the edge, so what? Where are you going to fall? You just fall into more of the flow.

I've mentioned how concepts and beliefs get in the way of liberation. Of course, if we completely abandon all concepts, we won't be able to say anything. Every time we speak, we are using concepts. I'm using concepts in conveying this message. I have found, however, that it is possible to use open-ended concepts, that is, concepts which help us to let go of clinging to other concepts. When we let go of our attachment to all concepts, then we have no barrier to ongoing awakening.

Do you have a question? Ask Ishvara.