Clarity Quartet: More Notes from an English Path by Julee Bergstrom

This is a collection of the last four posts Julee Bergstrom has posted on the regular-students-only Living Method Forum. Julee has found  clarity over the last few years, and has a natural gift for excellent writing. Julee is a member of the Continuing Students Program. She lives in England and contributes to ACN on a regular basis. 

How wonderful is it that we have a community of folks waking up to the reality of Truth. I have spent my life being afraid of people. The more I see the real reality of Truth, the more I see it is the ground of everything. I see it in all of you. The experience of life is super-enhanced by living a life rooted in Truth first.

As a kid, I was a gospel singer and preacher. So much of that is still available to me, but with a clearer understanding of what Jesus was about.

What keeps being replayed in this apparent mind, at the moment, is “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and ALL will be added unto you!”

Walking the dog along the river a few days ago, this seemed to descend on me  in a new way, and I saw the TRUTH of this. All comes from TRUTH. All of my life is changed when my devotion to Truth comes first. Nothing supersedes it, as all life springs from it.

How gorgeous to be in a community of Love. Love in its purest sense, not that icky, plastic twee kind of love. The deepest Love that says, “You ARE! See it! Nothing can harm you! You are ALWAYS. You are PRECIOUS. See the glory of your being! You are always and ever whole. Nothing can be added or taken from who you are. Live this life from THIS. Live and be who you are! Where you are is your ground of interaction. See those around you for the pure beings they are. Show them this by being your purest true Self! Nothing to do! Nothing to say! Just be WHO you ARE, and everything else will be taken care of.”

Like moths to a flame, they will find you. They cannot not. This is food for a hungry soul. Real food for the first time. Food that sustains and energizes.

Much love to all.

Clearing never stops. You don’t ever get there. You’re always getting it and getting it and getting it. The beauty, the joy, is the apparent coming home to what you already are.

Form is intended to be immersive, to lose oneself in order to be found again. I have no idea why, but the joy and excitement of finding is the most exciting thing one can do with a life, certainly from over here.

Moving out onto an apparent limb that says only THIS is true. All springs from THIS! Can I move to the place that says I rely on nothing but THIS? THAT is total joy, total realization. There is really absolutely nothing that can harm you.

I think we are so blessed! We live in an age where sitting in a cave or monastery is unusual. We’re waking up where we are: immersed in busy lives, raising children, working long hours, sitting in front of computers, watching an ever evolving reality. We are being challenged to live centered within all this busy-ness. Life is demanding that we learn to grow muscle. That we learn to live as joy no matter the traffic, the pressure, the stress, the overwhelm of life. The question is there. Can you still see ONEness? Can you still live as ONEness? Can you see the expression of joy and love in the middle of working out a convoluted technical solution or problem? Can you see my face everywhere?

There are no limits. There is nothing that can overwhelm IT. IT asks you to find this as yourSelf, to see that you are truly anchored, stable, unchanging, massive, powerful.

It is the most practical seeing! I can tell that the body is in dire need of rest right now. A gap has opened in my schedule for a few weeks, and if I don’t get in the way of that, I have the room to sit and enjoy listening to satsangs, lounging around, going for walks, and maybe checking in on the odd email for a few days. Just enough rest to then do a last big task before the Christmas holiday is upon me.

How grateful am I to live this life. To continue the discovering. To wonder and live as This, Here.

This is Julee introducing herself to new forum members: 

I’m Julee Bergstrom. I’m South African by birth, and currently live in the UK, in Maidenhead which is a 45-minute train ride to London.

As a teenager I was a musician, hopeful that I could make my way in the world with my guitar. I got deeply involved in what I call the happy-clappy Christian community, and absolutely loved singing gospel and doing some lay preaching. I quickly learned that Spirit was alive and well, and that I could engage with it deeply. Of course, I never saw that I was IT, and there is no inference in the community that one IS IT. One is a sinner! And I just didn’t get that part. I took my leave from the Christians after spending time with missionaries shipping food into Poland from the UK, and then from Seattle, Washington, USA. Behavior was incongruent with the beliefs of the community. And of course, to figure that I was homosexual put rest to any idea that I would stay and hang out. Sodom and Gomorrah were alive and well in the mind of the community, so that cleanly evicted me. It hurt at the time, but is still a great blessing. The God I was coming to know didn’t understand homosexuality as different from anything else….

What I did learn is that God answers. Now. All the time. And loudly – if asked to do so. So ONWARD!

Somehow I landed up in business. I did a commerce degree and have finally found my place in technology solutions. My growing up years were in fashion and furniture retail, and I now design systems to enable purchasing and managing stock. I travel the world from my base in the UK to analyze and design, then install these solutions for various retail businesses. I love the work, and the engagement with my customers and colleagues.

My driving force has always been to figure what is going on here. Nothing has ever made sense, until I found the question I’d been looking for, for decades. What/who/when/how/why is God? The journey has taken me through Buddhism, the Work of Byron Katie, reading Jed McKenna dozens of times, the Three Principles community and finally, from my insatiable reading habit, to finding FRED!! and signing up for an Awakening session. I was so scared to “get there” after all the searching.

I SO look forward to my wisdom years. They are upon me! To be a contributing member of society, spending my time talking about THIS is ever engaging and fulfilling. What a gift to give to others that are looking, if the opportunity is afforded. I may have started out as a gospel singer, so who knows how it will end? So glad to be part of this community.

Oh the subtlety of the thinking mind……

Last week I had an opening to love in a new way, a realization that acceptance and judgment-free existence create the spaciousness to be awash with the natural and inherent Love of Truth. It poured over me and I cried for hours, never having felt Love like this before. The opening is here and has stayed. Juleeness continues to thin out.

The subtlety is that Julee is still looking for the big whammy, that seems it must come from elsewhere. Outside. Something other that will enable her (WHO??) to combust into flames and to disappear into the voidness. The identification with Juleeness is magnetic still…the apparent Juleeness keeps searching for the fulfilment of an inner dream of blissness.

Here is the job: Awareness(ing) stares from “Julee’s” apparent eyes, looking, but forgetting its nature. There is nowhere to look other than to confirm its nature, over and over, to see that it is IT, formless, foreverness, unchanging, completeness, the ground from which everything arises. Habit has it forgetting that. But it forgets less now. And the question of WHO is seeing/thinking/watching/looking brings it back to the aha!, the right now awareness of itSelf.

It feels as if it’s an other. The sense of self seems to have it equate to a body. But is that to be believed? What is that really? What is the truth of that? All sensing, when looked at carefully, happens in the same place – somewhere within itSelf. It can’t be pointed at or to specifically. It just knows that it is feeling that sense of “self,” or is moving a hand or arm, or is hearing and doing the typing of a keyboard. All of these things are sensed through consciousness’ awareness. Whether inside the body or outside the body, the experiencing is actually somehow the same. It truly cannot be said to be anything other than consciousness experiencing. Only One thing going on. No inside. No outside.

The state of littleness, of less-ness is slowly unbelieved as it’s seen. It is cast off in favor of its real nature, which  is unbound, expansive, everythingness. Each aspect relinquished, seen as another concept held tightly to offer itself an apparent safety, in its illusion of smallness, otherness and separateness.