| When
one is lacking direct experience of Life, one has only intellectual
pursuit. You can be so bogged down in the intellectual pursuit that
you avoid the direct experience, which will always confound
the intellect. The direct experience will not fit your expectations,
your beliefs; it will not fit the past, because the direct experience
is absolutely, totally present, and it doesn't care about how it
is "supposed" to be or how you want it to be. It
is what it is. That can be hard for an ego-bound intellect
to accept, because you may have gone to countless seminars
and intensives, learned many systems and methods, invested
thousands of dollars in amassing information, and to give all
of that up is difficult.
Most spiritual systems validate people's beliefs, people's needs.
That is fine, because feeling OK in one's self is a step in the
right direction, but it can also cause one to become waylaid.
Life is like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Each piece fits in a certain
place. Usually a piece is only aware of itself, and perhaps
the pieces immediately around it, but it doesn't see the
big picture. As you begin to embrace the direct experience
of Life through the unique expressions of The Consciousness around
you, you catch a glimpse of the bigger picture. The picture
is multi-dimensional; it is not flat. Just knowing that there
is a bigger picture, that you cannot define Life from one part, is
important. You can see something from one part, but not all.
Trying to understand all of Life by looking only at one part is
like trying to define the whole body by looking only at the thumb.
Yet that is what most spiritual teachings do: trying to
define the whole thing by looking at one point--my "individual"
existence--and that ultimately creates so much superstitious belief,
so much "other," that Life becomes distorted and people
become lost.
As you gain awareness through the direct experience of
those around you, you see that each person is a unique
expression of The Consciousness that is on purpose, that each carries
a certain part of Life's intelligence, each has certain awareness,
and the more you can connect with that, the bigger the picture you
see. The more beliefs you can let go, the bigger the picture
you see. Now, you don't need to curse your beliefs; you can
bless them, because beliefs have been like rungs of a ladder that
you are ascending. These things of the past have served you,
but, like a rung of a ladder, if you stay on one
of them, you won't go anywhere. Many systems and structures
adhere to one rung and refuse to move on. So it is a matter
of being non-attached, without expectation, but having a willingness
to explore possibilities, to see bigger connections, and in that
kind of willingness you keep seeing a bigger picture, and consequently your
life is no longer about survival. Your life becomes
about exploration, exploring Life, exploring possibilities, exploring
connections, seeing where things go, not standing back in fear or
separation.
At a cellular level, there is the "personal," and the
necessity of relationship with the personal, because that gives
meaning, and that is a direct experience. However, you have
to be cautious about not becoming so bogged down in the
personal that you lose sight of the bigger picture. I can
treat people as friends and as students, because I have the capacity
to be both personal and impersonal. Sometimes an individual
needs a very personal relationship, a very personal look and connection,
and at other times one needs to be blown out totally, to have a
bigger picture emerge and to realize that it is not about "you"
or "me," it is not about a separate self. So both
the personal and the impersonal serve in the process of awareness.
Your brain is the focal point of the mind field that is personalized
because of your individual experiences, because of the unique
expression of Life that you are. As you accelerate, you extend
and include more; there are more connections, and it becomes more
and more impersonal. The more impersonal it becomes, the greater
access you have to information, because the large bulk of the information
has no personal relationship to you, you have no individual experience
of it, but there is a collective experience, a universal experience.
So as you become more impersonal, you begin to spread out and have
access to greater information. The only limit is that the
brain will only function with something it can implement--otherwise
it is useless information, like reading a physics textbook and not
being able to understand it.
As you become more impersonal, you begin to recognize the ongoing
Is-ness of Life, realizing that nothing can ever be lost, it
can only change. That doesn't satisfy the personal experience
of loss and separation, and so the brain has created beliefs and
concepts about death, based on the need for permanence, but
those are just beliefs.
In death, the energy-field-that-I-am can no longer maintain a physical
structure, and the structure begins to dissolve; what-I-am-as-The-Consciousness
moves back in to the whole and contributes what it has experienced.
It can be difficult when you have lost someone, because there is
an intellectual desire to continue to have that security, that support.
I have had many experiences with people dying. I even worked
in a nursing home for a time, and cared for dying people there.
The energy experience I have is consistent with what a friend of
mine, whose mother had died, once said to me: "It feels
like my mother is everywhere, that she is watching me from everywhere." I
said, "Well she is; she is part of The Consciousness and she
has become the whole thing."
If we can allow that there is no separation, that separation happens
only in systems and structures, then there is no need for grief,
because we realize that nothing is ever lost; it just changes, moves
on to a higher frequency. There are ways to attune to that,
to receive comfort from it, but you have to get out of the beliefs
and concepts about separation and an "end."
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