Open-Secrets

Tag: consciousness

  • Why Inquire?

    Why Inquire?

    What is Inquiry as a Spiritual Practice?

    Money Spirituality Consciousness InquiryMy friend Mayuri has just published her first book – Money, Spirituality, Consciousness: a guided inquiry into our personal relationship to money.

    Reading the first chapter, Why Inquiry? – resulted in a personal epiphany for me on an issue and exploration that has been going on for over 6 years around brilliancy and intelligence. It was a very cool experience.

    I was reading the book on flight from Detroit to San Francisco – probably somewhere over Nebraska (though I don’t think that was a influence). It was like the heavens opened up or the Red Sea parted and there was a vision, an understanding of a question that I had spent many hours delving into. As I was drawn deeper into the vision/understanding, I very deep, deep space opened in my belly – an immense, endless space and I was at peace with myself in a way for the first time in my life. Everything, including me was simply fine as it is.

    It was not anything specific in what Mayuri was saying in the book, but more a way that her simple explanation of inquiry as a spiritual practice landed in my mind that seemed to trigger the epiphany – a simple change in orientation or perspective that opened things up. In a way, a remembering of the simplicity and a letting go of the complexity that had built up over time.

    Here is a small excerpt from the chapter on inquiry:

    By watching any very young child, we can recognize how fundamental inquiry is to being human. And just as it is for that little one, our inquiry needs to be experiential. We make contact with what is happening inside ourselves, right where we are, as we are, by being present moment to moment with our experience. Doing inquiry—which we can define simply as an open and open-ended questioning of our experience that leads us to a living understanding of ourselves—is the most natural and simple thing in the world.

    Inquiry will lead us to recognize that all of our reactions and negative emotions contain elements of unresolved past experiences, which color and even obscure our perception and don’t allow us to clearly see the world as it is. Until we can resolve those experiences through inquiry, we aren’t free to be an objective human being—that is, one who can appropriately respond rather than merely react. Thus, our journey is a matter of applying those same natural attributes of curiosity and openness that we had as children in order to see ourselves with more clarity now, so that we can wake up to what we are doing and how we are living. In moments of clarity, our consciousness is actually transformed. Over time, as more of those moments of awareness accumulate, we are transformed and become more of who we are. Ultimately, we have full access to our total potential, and we recognize directly the essence of who we are—which is the truth of our very Being.

    Money, Spirituality, Consciousness is a must read for anyone who wrestles with the huge divide that seems to exist between money and spirituality.

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  • The Neuroscience of Enlightenment

    Is Neuroscience Unlocking the Doors to the Kingdom?

    neuroscience enlightenmentIs this a great time to be alive or what? Who is thinking this question? How is this sense of self generated? Are the thoughts of this self simply habits triggered by cues? How does the brain and all of those synaptic processes create an external and internal reality?

    Ah, questions! Are there really any answers? Have you read these four books?

    Each of these books use information and insight from neuroscience and what we are learning about the brain, cognition and perception to open our eyes to who/what/when we/reality really is – or they at least give us a very interesting lens to look at enlightenment & awareness through.

    Reading these books and the accumulated affect of them on my consciousness reminds me of “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson.

    Here’s a quote from The Ego Tunnel:

    Presence is a necessary condition for the conscious experience. If the brain could solve the One-World Problem but not the Now Problem, a world could not appear to you. In a deep sense, appearance is simply presence, and the subjective sense of temporal immediacy is the definition of an internal space of time.

    Is it possible to transcend this subjective Now-ness, to escape the tunnel of presence?

    Is that great, or what?

    The debate over whether we are just a bunch of chemical & electrical reactions in the brain vs. are we something more subtle and eternal outside of space and time continues. For me, these books have just made things more exciting and mysterious – and that book on habit is actually a great owner’s manual on how to make those changes you always wished you could.

    The Evolution of Consciousness & Enlightenment

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  • More on Sensing, Looking & Listening

    Moving Beyond 6 Senses – Awareness & Consciousness

    As a continuation of my thoughts on Sensing, Looking & Listening, I must consider the senses. Seems obvious, but Sensing, Looking & Listening, if practiced and explored with sincerity, quickly leads beyond the senses.

    awareness practicsThe beginning practice of Sensing, Looking & Listening is associated with sight, sound & touch. As a first step, it is often suggested that one begin with the toes of one foot and move up the leg to the hip – slowly sensing each segment of the foot and leg. The sensing then moves to the fingers of the hand on the same side of the body and proceeds up the arm to the shoulder – again, sensing each segment as the awareness moves up the body. The practice then proceeds to the opposite shoulder moving down the arm to the leg and terminating at the toes on the opposite foot.

    As one gains proficiency sensing the body, looking and listening are added. When adding looking and listening, the practice is to not “go out” to see and hear, but to allow perception to come in – think receptivity.

    The art of sensing often carries a bit more emphasis as it is said that sensing is closer to how the soul perceives. So let’s look at this – what are we really exploring and developing? Our sensitivity for sure, but what does that imply? Ultimately, we are nurturing our capacity for awareness and consciousness.

    The soul is the field of consciousness, the medium of experience. More basic than consciousness is awareness, so what we are is fundamentally a self-aware field of experience. It shouldn’t be too much of a leap to understand how sensing is closer to how the soul perceives.

    If we are the medium of experience, then experience arises within the medium. This (us) self-aware medium perceives and knows by being “in touch” with what is forming within it – sensitive to the arising. The sensitivity is basic perception.

    One really cool thing is that the forms arising in the medium are also “of the medium. In this world, what we perceive of as physical forms, thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations are all forms of, and within, the soul. One can experience this as a telescoping of perception – think about the endless reflections you see when you stand between two mirrors – forms within forms within forms. Not only this, but dimensions sensory deprivationwithin dimensions within dimensions.

    An Evolution of the Practice – Sensing, Looking & Listening Beyond the 6 Senses

    Imagine you are in a sensory deprivation chamber – what is sensing, looking & listening?

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    Ponder, wonder, contemplate…

  • The Unified Field

    John Hagelin on the Unified Field

    There is but one consciouness, one unified field of consciousness

    Items of Interest

    Links of Interest

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  • Non-Doing is Brewing

    Non-doing-brewingHow often do events and daily drama trap us in reactivity?

    Reactivity seems to always engage us in some kind of doing response. In fact, the reactivity itself is a doing. When we react, we’re always taking the world and ourselves to be something other than they are – and this is a subtle form of doing. Of course, I am defining reactivity here as mental and emotional response.

    This type of reactive state results in a form of mental grinding and emotional juicing that is fundamentally a form of suffering.

    In contrast to all of this doing drama is a way of being that centers around non-doing. Grokking the concept of non-doing can be difficult as conceptualizing is a form of doing and our whole lives have engaged us in doing. Doing to understand, doing to experience, doing to get, doing to survive – the doing list is endless.

    In approaching the practices of non-doing, we usually begin by making the non-doing practice a doing – it’s difficult and challenging to not do.

    Non-doing is like a form of brewing – we sit and don’t follow any thought, feeling or sensation. We rest in presence and awareness.

    Making tea involves brewing and it’s easy to apply an analogy here. When we sit in non-doing, abiding in presence and awareness, our consciousness begins to naturally move more into the foreground. Our presence deepens. Our awareness sharpens. Consciousness strengthens.

    Perhaps our souls are really tea bags looking for a good pot of hot water!

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  • Suchness – Suchness of Being

    What is suchness?

    Suchness – as it is. The flower as a flower.

    Almost everyone believes they see the flower as it is, but in fact there is very little perceived by the normal mind that is appearing in suchness. This is due to all the filters, projections and reification happening from the normal everyday mind.

    Suchness is seeing things free from all of this. Perceiving from this place of freedom – everything radiates light and being. Living presence pervades the perceiving consciousness.

    Suchness is simplicity itself – nothing added. It is very difficult to imagine the radical shift sihft in perception required to experience suchness.

    Who we take ourselves to be is far from suchness. Our normal experience of self is similar to a sticky piece of candy that has been rolled around a carpet for a couple of years – so covered with obscurring material we can’t even recognize it as candy. But this is not what we belive – of course I see you, know you – you’re…

    And that you that we see is lightyears from suchness.

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