Synopsis of Teaching

Many teachings indicate that there is something to achieve. This may include the belief that there is some better condition for yourself, possibly a more secure, safe state, some assurance. While this can serve in various ways, such as to instill hope, the down side is that it creates expectations.

Expectations become your downfall, because while you are expecting something, you are also missing something. The expectation takes you out of now, of being, and puts you into some future possibility. So you become conditioned.

Everyone has heard about "enlightenment" in some way or other. Supposedly there are means to attain enlightenment, and there are expectations about the consequences of enlightenment.

Awakening, awareness, enlightenment, transformation, transcendence-- those are nice words, words that indicate a different condition, a different space of being, a different possibility.

Awakening, in its actuality, is becoming aware of Is-ness, not was- ness or might-be-ness, but Is-ness. A true awakening simply reveals what is there. Awakening isn't a process of getting something; awakening is the awareness of knowing, being This.

Of course, immediately there are problems. The intellect says, "But, it is written..." You can always find some argument that will facilitate your belief or concept, that will fortify your condition, but that dulls you to Life. It keeps you in a separate arena of"things happening to you." As a result, you must seek to survive, and in your survival-seeking, you cling to many beliefs and concepts"about" Life. There is no guilt in that. What else could you do? No one ever told you the truth of your being; everything came to you in the form of control and manipulation.

Systems, teachings and structures are afraid of liberation, because a liberated being cannot be controlled. The mechanisms of fear and control, even the fear of death, no longer work on a liberated being. Such individuals are perceived as very dangerous, because they might suddenly see what is going on; they might recognize the ignorance and foolishness of systems, structures, beliefs and religions.

True awakening is realizing that you are Life, and Life is free of those limitations, those beliefs, those concepts. There is nothing to resist in Life, there is nothing to attach to in Life.

Many practices try to approach this, try to stop the intellect. You can spend long hours in meditation, sort of dulling the senses, hypnotizing the intellect, but unfortunately you are no closer to true awareness than you were before you started. You might become very familiar with how much is in the intellect.

If you try to stop the intellect, you will be defeated. The intellect is always there. I have found, however, that you don't necessarily have to pay attention to the intellect. You don't need to try to stop it; you just don't pay attention to it. You don't take it seriously when it is running its programs.

The solution to your Life is making everything a part of it. That is total openness. Awareness follows openness and allowing. You allow Is-ness and you begin to understand The Consciousness. You begin to recognize the patterns that keep emerging from the past, the old behaviors that were a way of side-stepping the situation.

Perhaps when you were a child, you learned that you could stay home from school if you were sick. That became a kind of excuse; now, whenever something happens that you don't like, you get sick. I have seen that, when something unpleasant happens, you tend to employ myriad avoidance techniques. But you don't see them as avoidance techniques, because you don't remember how you first learned them.

Those techniques are learned very, very early. As a baby, when you cry, someone comes and takes care of you. That becomes tied into your idea of love. If somebody takes care of you, you are loved. If you are having your needs met, you are being loved. So you spend the rest of your life looking for someone who will meet your needs, so that you can be "loved." The brain gets tied up in these neural pathways of erroneous behaviors, disconnected neural pathways that prevent you from realizing Is-ness.

Your True Nature is Life, The Consciousness. There is that aspect of you that knows, and is waiting. There is no way to make you become aware of that. I can nudge you in that direction, but I can't make you become aware of it. That aspect awakens when the time is right for you.

The marketing of programs and methods, practicing systems and teachings, are of no avail other than being entertainment. You are entertained with the concept of "enlightenment" while you are waiting to become who you are. That is such a con game: that somebody can"sell" you something that is essentially You. You didn't know you were for sale, did you? You didn't know you needed to purchase You
There is no blame here. The sellers and marketers mostly don't know they are doing it either. Most people are sincere about the processes and methods they practice, though they often do seem to want to get rich from them.

There is something that can happen to an individual, and it happens when you least expect it. It is not something that you can go after or make happen. The only thing you can do is allowing and being. At some moment in that allowing and being, you realize Who is being. You recognize, "Oh, of course, I've known this all along." There are no lights going off or sparks flying. It is just "Oh, of course." That is why individuals who are full of expectations miss the opportunity over and over again; they have tremendous expectation of what is supposed to occur, and so they miss what Is.

True awareness, true awakening, true enlightenment is the knowing of being. It is now. It is not concerned with the past, it is not concerned with the future. It is being now. It is responding to what Is now. It is not resisting or attaching or escaping. It is not the other. It is not outside or inside. It is truly Is. One doesn't know what to do with it, because it doesn't match the teachings or the guidebooks. It doesn't fit into the intellectual concept. It defies what "They say."

Many accounts of awakening seem to be "about" Life, about something that you supposedly don't yet have, a divine blessing that lifts you out of the world. After that, you supposedly live in a realm of silence and escape. Yet that is not awakening.

True awakening, true enlightenment throws you right into the heart of Life in the sense of acceptance of Is-ness, the ability to be with what-Is, without resistance or attachment. You don't stop experiencing Life. You actually become more sensitive, more present, more aware of the bigger picture. You begin to recognize this creative venture that Life is, unconditional Is-ness happening, moment by moment. You see it is as opportunity after opportunity to experience Existence itself.

As you stay with that, as you open more, you see your past as all right. You don't have to go back and fix anything.

On the eve of awakening, your whole life passes before you, and you suddenly realize it doesn't matter. You hear your brain say, "Yeah, I did that; so what?" You realize your Life is all right the way it has been. You may recognize you have lived far below your potential. It was not your fault. You didn't know you had that kind of potential. You didn't recognize that there was something in you that was far more powerful than anything you ever believed was outside, that your brain had access to something through awareness in presence that you couldn't even imagine.

In awakening, you recognize that you are utterly helpless; there is no way to get anywhere, no escape from this existence, no way out, but it is all right. That is true awakening. Once you awaken to "It is all right," the struggle stops, the resistance stops, the attachment stops. One is liberated. There may be very unique experiences that take place at that point, but they do not fit any teaching from the outside. At that point, you have become absolutely individualized as a unique expression of The Consciousness, and you don't care. You are not attached, you are not resistant. You don't care. It doesn't matter.

The more "it doesn't matter" to you, the more you become aware of, the more sensitive you become to what is going on. But you are always in the experience of "It is all right." Contrary to expectations, you do not become vacant or absent. You become very powerful as a force for change and transformation in the environment around you. You are a living dynamo. You have great fortitude, perseverance, patience and compassion, but all of that is simply because "It is all right." You can see solutions to situations that are happening; the solutions are just there because you see the bigger picture.

When you are in the place of "It is all right," with no resistance or attachment to things being different, you will always see a more harmonious way of operating. You will come up with insights, ways of doing that create more harmony in the situation. When you don't get caught in fear or separation or anticipation or resistance or attachment, you remain all right, you remain aware, connected, open, and Life just flows. This doesn't mean that Life will fit your criteria of what is "all right." Life will be what it is. When you are all right with it, you may see very creative solutions and possibilities. This opens up a whole new level of existence to you, and you remain totally functional and capable of dealing with what-Is.

True awakening is being absolute presence with what-Is, without belief, concept, condition. There are many who have some knowing of this, but the real test is being it. We can read "about" it, have knowledge and information about it. To actualize Life is a transcendence of information, a transcendence into being, to be it every breath, every moment. That may sound difficult to the intellect, but awakening to The Consciousness is a fact of existence. It is your destiny. We don't know when you will be blessed with that awareness. We just know you will be.

In the meantime, to nudge you forward, it is important to have a constant demonstration of The Consciousness as it is now, not as it was or might be, but as it is in actuality now. That is what is so important for humanity: the living presence and example of awareness, of allowing, of all rightness, of allowing Is-ness moment by moment. Presence and allowing facilitate humanity's letting go to this awareness. I have no agenda, no prescription; I have no way except to be. Being is the way, but it is no way. Being is doing, Is-ness, moment by moment.