mandyjw

This quote from Rupert Spira here struck me, "We have the freedom to choose either to be the presence of awareness, in which case peace is continuous, or to be a separate self in which case it is intermittent. We are free to be whichever we want." Does this mean there are (just in theory, not in actuality) two ways of approaching non duality, one, you stay just as awareness not daring to venture out into emotions and feeling, and the other, you leave yourself free to experience the highs and variables on the emotional scale, to the feel the depths of feeling the aliveness in sorrow and loss, without losing the peace that is there? In other words, you get the best of both worlds, you combine, integrate the two. Abraham Hicks has been a key piece of the puzzle for me, as before my mind's interpretations of spirituality and presence were about killing passion and staying "safe" in a way. "Pay attention to how you feel" has so many depths and so much meaning in experience. Are the highs actually a separate "self"? I doubt this. Just like the cliche "time flies when you're having a good time" is there a really an ego experiencing those positive emotions? I think it only tries to own them after the fact.

Self judgement. Or just judgement. I'm in a similar transitional period, but have had to accept that for now, that doing much less is ok because alignment comes first. And that takes self love to accept and it also takes self love to accept that I still have to do things I'm not initially passionate about to survive, but once I accept them, they are just opportunities to be present anyway. My mind was just prejudging them by creating needless resistance and fear. It wastes more energy in resisting than it would take to do the task without thought. It also wastes a lot of energy wondering which it should do instead of aligning with what it is doing and giving it full focus. Who is killing who? I think you'd really appreciate Rupert's perspective here, @LfcCharlie4 just shared this in another thread. https://non-duality.rupertspira.com/watch/what-is-the-right-job-to-do

@LfcCharlie4 It's impossible not to love him. I was recently very interested to learn that he was a potter, because I'm also an artist/craftsman which was my ultimate dream at one point, but I'm losing my passion for it and feeling pulled in another direction. So the video you shared from his website really hit home for me.

@LfcCharlie4 SO good. Thank you.

@Nahm Thanks! It turned out to be a really good conversation. He said that he didn't like how nonduality and spiritual teachers use their own language to speak about this stuff, and how you have to learn it before you know what they are speaking about. My first mistake is that day in, day out I read and immerse myself in this stuff and discuss it with him very little. Then I expect him to just come along with me only when I want his help with something. I compared the language to our understanding of Christianity and the Bible when were kids, specifically terms such as the "Holy Spirit". Then I tried to explain how communion was really a powerful nondual pointer, which he didn't get, but then told me that he was taught several different things about communion in church, including that if your heart wasn't quite right and you still took it, that God would strike you dead. And then I remembered that his upbringing was far, far different from mine, and how fear and control were so front and center for him. Then I realized that I've been a selfish jerk overlooking and under appreciating a lot of things.

Had a long conversation about spirituality, psychedelics and awakening with my husband. I decided to read this above to him. He said nothing, so I asked what he thought. "Especially the part about the balance, it sounds like an infomercial ,"it slices, it dices!" He said some awfully judgmental things about psychedelics and made a comparison that particularity hurt. There were jokes, connection and good communication throughout. Towards the end the conversation went to Christianity, and eventually I realized I am a complete jerk, because I tried to tell him what communion means as a pointer to nonduality and he wasn't coming along with me. Then he told how it was described to him in various ways in church and that he was told that if your heart wasn't in the right place and you still took communion, that you'd be struck dead. And I realized and remembered the amount of fear instilled in him. He was dragged to church every single Sunday, to some of the most fundamentalist churches. I read my Bible on my own free will, with a few lose expectations and morality that was set in my family. To tie it to Leo's most recent video which I loved, you can't expect people to hold liberal "woke" values if they are living in a threatened environment. Yet this is exactly what I've done. I'm a selfish jerk. Spiritually, I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth in comparison. We've both made incredible spiritual progress over the course of our lives, and likely he's traversed more "ground" than I have. Partially because he got seduced by the daughter of Satan but whatever, God works in mysterious ways!

When I would scroll through dating sites with friends, the first thing we screened for was the "creepiness factor." Women intuitively know, (and a picture speaks a thousand words), if someone's intentions are off or things don't line up quite right. Then we would judge honesty, intelligence and depth of character based on how and what he wrote and his interests. We carefully combed through everything he wrote. If you want success with online dating, ask a female friend to look over your profile. And be honest first and foremost. Women see things differently than you think.

What did I realize from my awakening? I'm thinking I should write this out, as it's bastardized and solidified in my memory. At the time it seemed too sacred to communicate. I realize that my perception will change as I write the memory down, that everything is fluid, the profane is sacred, nothing ever happened. Love is alive. 1. Visual changes. My perception of light changed. It felt like certain scenes in movies, where everything is bathed in light. 2. Scrolling facebook, and instead of boredom and judgment, every single face I saw looked beautiful, perfect, bathed in light. See 1. 3. My heart physically felt incredibly light and open. It was very strange to me to have this center in my chest where love emanated from, a part of body I never liked at all. Had a short lived sensation of levitating while asleep/awake. 4. Complete self love. See 3. 5. Channeling, and people around me channeling. Waking up in the night with realizations and insights that I was compelled to write down. 6. Seeing intense connection between things. See 5. Noticing for the first time that song lyrics are mostly channeled. 7. Perfect almost infallible balance, I noticed it hiking so I tried to balance along some wood logs to test it out. 8. Impulses and intuition. I went to an area where I've spent hours looking for fossils. I was far from the place I like to go and had an impulse to turn over a rock. it was completely covered in fossils, probably the nicest I've ever found. 9. Complete love for everyone and lack of judgement. Maniacally posting on the forum. How I never got a warning, I don't know. There was a particularly embarrassing post about the lion connection with Leo's name. Was I embarrassed at the time? NOPE. 10. A willingness to give everything away. Bought things without a second thought. Bought my tarot cards during this time. 11. A realization that I couldn't die, that worrying about death was silly. I drove in a snowstorm and even though I still drove carefully I was thrilled by the fact that there was no fear AT ALL. 12. Intense energy, not able to sleep or eat normally. The night after I got up in the middle of the night and filmed this. 13. Attention and awareness skipping out. If someone started saying something that I wasn't resonating with, I literally couldn't follow it. Likewise I would scroll the forum and just intuitively know what to read and what to skip. 14. Nothing is wasted. I remember visiting my parents and watching them dump some homemade kefir they thought was old and exclaim over what a waste it was. And it struck me how incredibly silly that was, and I knew in my heart that nothing could ever be wasted. 15. The beginning of sensations between the eyes that didn't stop since. When I get into the vortex, of in a high flying mood, I see signs, connections and have impulses and intuition. Before the awakening I became somewhat increasingly obsessed with light and sunlight overtime and would purposefully run or look off into light, not directly. For some reason I'd really love to have the facebook scrolling power back. Judgement of other people, even visually persists and I want it gone. Enlightenment isn't an ideal to hold oneself to. But it is an inspiring as fuck vision to have for one's life.

How did I MISS that one??? The last time I brought it up, it really touched a nerve. He implied that he might call the cops on me himself if I dared, and wouldn't talk to me for days. I've been avoiding the discussion since, without giving that avoidance much thought, until now. I also got the sense from it at the time that things weren't what they seemed and maybe my motive was different than what I had first thought. When he asked me "why" I couldn't even give him a good answer. I eventually answered depression and anxiety because I thought he'd understand that but then he made suggestions to fix a problem that I was suffering from less at that time than ever before in my adult life. I'll try to discuss it again more sensibly and "presently". I do see that, but the control implied in my own making is not as it seems either.

@tsuki It does not feel good when I seek something outside me, not because it would be nice to have and for fun, but because I NEED it and am unfulfilled without it. It feels good to connect with others, to feel supported from others, but only when there is no need to do so. It's like if I have candy in the house, if my kids are happy when they sometimes get a piece of candy as a reward, that's great. But if more times than not they throw a fit because I say they can't have it then, if they have that sense of entitlement and everyone suffers for it, the candy goes in the trash. If you apply this metaphor to spirituality and relationships, there is great potential to learn, grow and work together. But if there's a whiny inner child who needs that connection, who projects all kinds of meanings and attachments onto it, the candy goes in the trash.

Every realization clears the way for meditation, for thoughtless awareness (if you just say thoughtlessness, it just doesn't have the same ring to it), for "channeled" inspired action. Monkey mind, says "cool, but I got better shit to do, like throw shit at people." I don't know how to reconcile vulnerability and power, but I want to, oh I want to. It is love and truth itself, and cannot be thought.

Yes, but you've seen me in full force. Should I just let that go without judgment? There's definitely time in that thought. I'm perhaps projecting that what happened in the past might occur in the future. I rely on other people for emotional support and I believe that I should be independent, above this. The recent example of this was that I realized that I never stopped needing emotional support from my mother. When I awakened, that problem was fixed but I also consciously realized that I could never go to her again for emotional support for the real challenges I was facing, the ego backlash that came on the heels of a mystical experience or awakening. I was alone. I mourned my real life relationships, even though on the outside, they were great. I saw then that the connection I sought from them and always hoped to get would never be found. Out of the nonacceptance or that, or needing to integrate that over time I became reliant on other people here, projecting my need for emotional support on them. The need to be "seen" persisted, but now it was projected onto people who I thought of as awake, people here on the forum, teachers. It is hard to accept that no one will ever see me. No one will ever love me. I am not. I am already. I am love. The form, the programming wants to throw all the monkey wrenches it possibly can to avoid facing this. And yet, it's all it ever really wanted all along, actualized. @LastThursday

@LentoThat's the most beautiful, honest thing I've read in a while. That desire to feel IS desire. You already have it, you are it. Just feel, whatever it is that's here now, feel it with the core of your being. There's no voice to say that's not what I want. You're so close you're already there. Love is alive. Love is so magnificently, brilliantly alive that sometimes we even think it dull. If you can see it in the dullness and the gray, you'll see colors you've never seen before.

@Codrina @DrewNows @Keyhole Thank you, hope to get to watch them later today. @tsuki I gave up the hunt, but sometimes when I start feeling good, connections get made and they almost always lead to something about myself I wasn't seeing. It's all a very satisfying, except for sometimes when thoughts come in after and say, "you idiot, you should have known that already." It doesn't feel good to make some projections, but it does feel good to see through them. @Lento I agree, projections are part of seeing what we are creating. Because of a commitment to truth and love I want more than anything to see clearly, and the ironic thing is that that can quickly turn into a need to have an objective reality or ground to stand on. I guess it's as easy as watching the beauty unfold. It sure is.

I have young kids and because of that responsibility I still require the support of my husband to responsibly use psychedelics, which I currently do not have. It's not a convenient time in my life to be going through this but it's happening anyway.

@Haumea2018 I really want to be the .0000001% though!

My Mom dug up an old Chronicles of Narnia calendar and in it was an old scratch board piece of art work I did early in highschool. She gave it to me today along with the soup. It's a lion roaring at the moon.

I'm sick, with a bad cough and my thoughts just sucked today so I focused on connecting with belly breathing when I was driving to get my daughter. A thought came up about a comment I was considering and I thought of a connection to it. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." "CLOSE, but no cigar." Back to breathing. I thought about how good it felt to focus on my stomach and I thought of the accidental boob on the dream board and Ramana Mararshi's analogy of being like nursing babe. Then *CLICK*. I've been looking for my mother outside of myself. Soooo... many connections. Recently something about the "mother wound" came up and I was like, "I don't have that, my Mom is perfect!" She is though. That's the thing. I'm a spoiled brat. Where was I driving today? To get homemade turkey soup from Mom's because I'm sick. I'm 31. Last year, my Grandmother was dying and my Mom was not the perfect Mom anymore. She was distracted and wasn't there for me at all. I was having a horrible time for a lot of reasons and called her a lot looking for emotional support and it wasn't there. I ended up awakening shortly after Grammie died. My dependence on Mommy for all my emotional support was gone. I was empowered and when I wasn't, well...who could I talk to about this? Not my actual mother. I thought about this. I considered it and I mourned it. Some. I've been making projections about people on the forum since before I even awakened. It's an emotional attachment, a need. Looking outside for my connection with source.

@moon777light

It's not something you want to maintain on that level ALL the time. Feel good here and now, find ways to feel good, daydream, appreciate what is around you and bigger desires just come. There's really no difference between finding something tiny to appreciate now and having a huge dream for the future.

Because you create your reality, you get what you focus on. If you see a black cat and expect bad luck you attract it into your experience and when something happens to you that you don't like you say "bad luck! I knew it!". When you don't understand how you create your reality, how powerful thoughts are or how the law of attraction works you blame the cat. The person who calls it superstitious is just as oblivious. Someone who believes in brains calls it confirmation bias. It's much stranger than that.

@Sick Boy No. Sometimes you just have to step back from things for a while.

@Sick Boy Working on relationships, sex, and working out are all spiritual pursuits. There are no pursuits outside of spirituality. If you go too far in one direction, needing that direction to be the right one, or seeking yourself in it you'll cause yourself suffering. The entire purpose of spirituality, really if we're being honest is to move in the direction of feeling good. The catch is that feeling good isn't what the material world "thinks" and spirituality attempts to see through this. Here's the secret. Feeling good isn't what spiritual people "think" it is either. The trouble is that fulfillment can't come from outside us, and it doesn't come from slamming the door in the face of the outside world either. You have to balance carefully and listen to your intuition. Why can't you have both? Why the conflict?

What is the core fear or fears behind all of that? Is it fear of missing out? Are you afraid of missing out on spiritual rewards or "earthly" ones? Or both? What beliefs might you hold that would cause you to fear this?