Twelve Principles of Awakening by Julee Bergstrom
1. It’s a journey of seeing, or hearing.
2. It’s a journey of reducing the contamination of personal understanding. No thought is true and no concept is real. I’m paraphrasing Jed McKenna. My experience says this is true.
3. It’s not a journey of perfecting the self. Perfection is already who you are. The journey is to see how that is so. Throw out the self-help books; you aren’t broken.
4. The journey is not to join oneself to God/life/the universe. This “you” does not exist, but you don’t know that yet.
5. It’s a journey of learning by implication. It’s a shift in paradigms. All technique is ultimately useless.
6. The journey requires that you see One. If you do, you see Truth. Anything else is false. Your experience matters, not your thoughts. Thinking, however, is useful in gaining understanding.
7. Awakeness is available now. And now. And now. Not tomorrow, or soon, or sometime in the future. And it is available to you.
8. You’ll only ever be getting it. You won’t get it, and be done. There is no finish line.
9. You will continue to think! You can’t stop thinking. Give up trying now.
10. You don’t know what awakening looks like nor how it will present. This particular battle you will fight until you don’t.
11. Being awake will not change your life, make it better or worse, or turn you into a divine being. You will not hang out on a sofa or park bench catatonic with bliss. You will not be permanently happy or sad or mad or joyful. You’ll be awake! And sometimes that does mean being joyful or blissed out and particularly peaceful and loving. It does mean that you’ll see that everyone is insane. And walking around in a world of insanity is a particularly odd experience when you’re one of the very few sane ones and you know it.
12. The prize for waking up is nothing. But if you want to know the Truth, then the conversation is worth having. This is the best nothing available to anyone. I can vouch for it.
Julee Bergstrom is enrolled in The Living Method Continuing Student Program. She lives in the UK.
May 14, 2017 @ 5:01 pm
You expressed in words for all who have difficulty expressing with words, language….thank you! I resonated with all 12.
May 14, 2017 @ 5:24 pm
I’m vouching for it too, and am sending this on as part of my doing so! Thanks Julee for helping to recognize (ie not deny!) that sanity is sanity. And to have that initial experience of it being like my hair suddenly blown back, transform into an ongoing beautiful feeling of my head out the car window, and my hair being blown back … luxuriantly!
I added this preface to what I sent out, which I think can make a big difference for “flat earthers”.
I would just preface with something Fred said. There isn’t the need or intention to take away the story of a future, but a pointing to Now. The former would be reinforcing the premise of sacrifice/suffering being required. The latter is Love’s kindness and patience to repeatedly use our ever morphing story of past/future to continually re-point them back to Now. The direction of the pointing is what’s important, not the pointing.
(In rereading your post this occurred to me. I hold up 2 fingers, what do I see (think!)? 2 fingers, a hand, a “camera” shot of the visuals? Or One? It’s the one free will to choose that “before” the others. And in so doing, it’s (starkly!) simply always been so!
Oneness back at you (love!), Mike