INVISIBLE GURU FORUM

I approach this forum with trepidation. Yet I am here. From the perspective of The Great Stillness, there is nothing to say, nothing mandatory to do, and nothing to explain or defend. Awake is Awake. Yet, the insecurities and doubt and uneasiness rooted in my personality structure remain. The thinking/feeling/dream part of me fears I must face more grueling ordeals, more turmoil, more time in the desert facing down Maya. I can conveniently label this voice as my inner critic, telling me I haven't made the grade and I have to really do it this time. Another part of me is simply receptive, curious. Tail chasing is tail chasing.

Do I have a question? I wish I did. A burning spear of a question. But there's just a quiet pull towards this moment, however it is, and opening to that rather than spinning off into fantasy land.

In today's meditation, I opened up to this kind of emptiness I've been feeling. The emptiness isn't a sparkling, alive, and alluring presence. It seems more like grey dishwater. After some journaling, the subtle feeling of dread lightened up and now is more like uncolored openness.  Snippet from my journal:

A Course in Miracles says “I loose the world from my thoughts.” Then what? Is it true that I'm at a threshold of No Thing, No Self, and the feeling of oblivion? What if I dive into the middle of this? Is Oblivion all there is, and life is simply clinging to fragments of memories and charged impulses that arise? Or is Oblivion a false flag, a bullshit warning, a fake cliff that hides beauty and immediacy and richness? And if I did step off, who's stepping? Who remains? Step with what, if this foot is also an illusion? And if the part of me that makes meaning out of thin air, based on nothing, is what is being left behind, then what the hell is doing anything? What is realization? I have no earthly **** idea.

On the other side of the wall was grief. I am fortunate to have two people with whom I can work things out. I expressed, explored and opened up to that place from which I was feeling walled off. One of my friends said something about going to the place in my life just before I started experiencing the blocked feeling. It was very deep. The phrase "loss of innocence" captured the essence. There was no need to get trapped in a quagmire requiring hours of processing. It was heavy, dark, present, and very much felt in the body.  This particular movement, this fragment of healing, is part of Growing Up into a mature adult human.

This particular movement, this fragment of healing, is part of Growing Up into a mature adult human.  Were you asking, or telling.

Telling.

As I'm drying dishes, or just sitting here, I can feel the silent witnessing part. Sometimes it's like something stops, and there's just an awareness watching what I'm doing. This presence has a quality to it, a clarity. I'm starting to think that awakening has more to do with getting used to being in the world with this presence looking through me, as compared with some sort of dramatic collapse of egoic walls followed by something astounding. If that comes, so be it. But right now, it feels like what's open to me is a subtle noticing, just turning my attention to this Witness.

I also saw that frameworks and tools and models, e.g. wake up, grow up, clean up, and show up as distinctive facets---are helpful for the continuing process of evolving. And, from the perspective of the silent, intelligent awareness there is nothing to do and nobody to fix. But there doesn't have to be a struggle around this paradox.

Yesterday I was in a foreign land, where few speak English. I was in the middle of intimate family gatherings. Some people I didn't know. I found myself comfortable in my own skin. I was very aware of the dream-like nature of life. Nothing special, just here and life is happening. I wasn't manic or psychotic. Life didn't dissolve into a pulsing sea of golden threads and geometric shapes. But feelings of self-consciousness and alienation and constant negative judging was just not happening.

My identification with my Dream Body--which I describe as an energetic bundle of habits and learned responses and patterns--waxes and wanes. My Dream Body has a baseline assumption that something is amiss and I need to beware. I must do something, or fix, change, acquire, alter, or get rid of some condition in me or in my environment in order to be happy.

When my fused identity with my Dream Body is weak, and I'm allowing life to just flow through me, answers and questions seem to reside in the same space. When I feel disturbed or worried, I have plenty of questions. The questions may be bullshit, and ego-ploy to make itself real generated by a mind that only knows problem-solving, but when the questions are there they seem to be like this:  Does the Dream Self evolve forever? Lets say I were to experience an unmistakable awakening in which the dream can never again be mistaken for reality and my Dream Self is picked up like a pile of clothes in order to give myself a vehicle in the dream. Would my Dream Self be felt and seen as stiff, angst-ridden, hung up on insecurities, self-referencing, separate from others, prone to emotional reactions and flare-ups? Would the process of unlearning fear and trusting and growing into joyous and empathetic presence go on eternally, even as the True Self is unbounded by time and thus outside of the collective hypnosis of the dream and of the karmic patterns of the Dream Self?

What you are talking about is stages where there are no stages. You are already fully realized as that is you onre and only true nature. If you need to be told where you are it might prove useful to you but sounds a little silly. You are already there and there is nothing to do to get where you already are. I suggest you let go of your need to understand and just letting every thing be as it ''appears'' to be. The only stage you require is called ''Further'' although that too is obviously quite silly. There is no where to go and nothing to do. Everything points to you regardless of where the finger might appear to be pointing. There is no ''out there'' out there.

Love ya, Jed.

I have done nothing, other than perhaps wished you the best on you journey.

Love ya, Jed.

It's all vapor until it isn't...

Love ya, Jed.