PRIME POST: The Consciousness Explosion and What It Means for You

The Consciousness Explosion
and
What It Means for You

Most of you will know by now that this teaching does not in any way dismiss, bypass, or otherwise minimize everyday life. Regardless of what may ultimately prove to be real or true, this is nonetheless our experience. And as such, it counts.

Consider the game of chess for a moment. The rules of chess are rigid and all-important—within the game. Without the rules there is no game. Yet outside of the game, the rules mean nothing. Within context, they count. We abide by them if we want to have any fun.

Yet if you and I take a turn at chess, what happens in our game doesn’t genuinely matter. Either way, the sun will come up in the morning, clouds will form in the pristine sky, and millions of pink flamingos in Kenya will fly from their roosts without knowing, caring, or being affected by our pastime. Context is a big deal, like the outline of a picture in a coloring book. You don’t have to color within the outline, but if you do, the picture is likely to please more than just the person who colored it.

I’ve said all that as a set-up to telling you about what does matter. Waking up matters. At the end of the day, in a human life that includes waking up, it is the only thing that matters. A human life that doesn’t include it, in the end, is effectively incidental. It’s neither here nor there. Mind you, they all count; please recall our context—I’m not talking trash about your dear mother.

But please, let’s at least start to tell ourselves the truth here. It’s estimated that approximately 100,000,000,000 people inhabited this planet prior to us coming along. Yes, that’s nine trailing zeroes, so we are talking a hundred billion. Add in our current cranky crop of seven billion more, and you’ve got yourself a pretty big number.

That’s 107,000,000,000 human being thingies who from papoose to grave have believed they were the center of the universe. Which one do you think is right about that claim? Ah yes, just one, of course. You. And here I was thinking it was me. How silly of me.

Wikipedia bothers to offer a line, paragraph, or page of record for somewhere around two million out of all those billions. It’s a tiny, tiny percentage, but it’s still a big number, and I admire Wikipedia for keeping up with even that many heroes and villains.

However, I notice that I am not among them. And unless you are Julius Caesar or Barack Obama, you probably are not either. So much for our claims to greatness, I guess. We are geologically insignificant, like a gnat on a dinosaur. As philosopher Greg Goode once told me, “People come, people go—that’s show-biz!”

And for the sake of that single errant belief that we are the center of the universe, we gnats are home wreckers, a denotation made even worse when you notice that we are wrecking our own home.

Love, power, sex, money and war all count, as do families, tribes, political borders, and mineral rights. We know they count, because we have effectively destroyed a planet over them. We have wiped out entire species of flora and fauna, turned forest, jungle, ocean, and mountains into vast wastelands of blight in order that we might get our scarce and sacred “piece of the rock.”

It’s all about me and mine: what I want, need, and even “deserve” in order to be safe, secure, and sexy—in order to be dominant-by-comparison, no matter what the arena or cost to others, or to the earth. We are slaughtering all of our generations of babies to come in the name of sparkles, bells, and meaningless pissing contests. We are, as a species, insane.

Not just insane, but dangerously insane. Strangely insane. Madly, wildly, incurably insane.

And this, my friends, is why waking up matters. I may sound like Chicken Little, but so be it. We are in the midst of a global emergency. Right now. What we do now counts. What we do now matters. It simply isn’t all about us and ours. Will we realize that every species on the planet, including ours, is contingent upon what we do in the coming few years?

Despite what some may say, and I bless them for paying attention where we have not, it’s not yet too late for planet Earth. We’re in overtime, but the game ain’t over just yet. Do you know how I know that? Because the cure is already here.

You are it. I am it. The enlightenment-centered spiritual community as a whole is it. We did it. Now we have to start undoing it. Which leaves us with the question of how we start undoing it.

First things first. Albert Einstein sagely said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” This is our issue. The bottom line is that we are ruining this beautiful, blue-green ball of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon because of our belief in separation. It’s as simple as that: it really is.

Just as in the quest for enlightenment, we can’t see the truth because we won’t tell ourselves the truth. Won’t, not can’t. Won’t. The problem and the solution share the same address: ours. It’s staring us in the face and we’re looking everywhere but here, in our own mirrors.

I’m not saying the solution is as easy and chummy as everyone holding hands and singing Kumbaya, but I am suggesting that in the absence of a significant number of awakened leaders and citizens there will be precious little to sing about. It starts with calling a spade a spade, with telling ourselves the truth about Oneness.

There’s just One no-thing going on here. That truth is what this entire community is built around. So here’s the good part. Here’s where you come in.

Given that you’re reading this line, the odds range from good to wonderful that if you are not already awake, then you will wake up to one level of clarity or another, and that you’ll do it relatively soon. And therein lies the rub. What does “relatively soon” mean? I don’t know, but it better be pretty quick if it’s going to happen in time for you to aid Mother Nature, I know that much.

Lots of people are waking up. In 2001, a few years prior to its rolling across the planet like a tsunami, I got my first copy of The Power of Now. Someone on the Internet had told me about it. You couldn’t buy a copy of it in Columbia, SC, and I didn’t have a credit card in those rough old days, so Betsy bought it for me in Asheville, NC.

If you go Barnes & Noble now, you’ll see an Eckhart shelf. Byron Katie in traveling in disguise in the self-help section. They are never without a copy of A Course in Miracles, which is a good and useful nondual book, I don’t care what you say. The basic Buddha-books are all there and of course some books on Christian mysticism.

To my shock, I once discovered a copy of one of Ramesh Balsekar’s books in Barnes & Noble! Talk about a lost child. I’m not fooling myself: it was a special order gone without pickup and put out for sale with a prayer, I guarantee it. Still, it made for a bright day for me, and that store is a whole other world than what it was fifteen years ago.

Now, from this seat, in what is still the buckle of the Bible belt, where my potential victims are painfully short, I have nonetheless woken up a large handful, and have a couple of folks who regularly come to see me.

And of course, from this same seat I get to watch people elsewhere wake up several times a week. I’m no longer reading about it or dreaming about it, I’m living it, day in and day out, and even making my living at it. This is a full blown, Jesus-class miracle.

And everywhere I turn on the Internet there’s a new book, website, or budding teacher. The world really is changing, and it’s changing fast. Awakening is sort of like an international epidemic, only instead of people trying to avoid the carriers, everyone’s trying to squeeze in close to them. “Me too! Me too!”

But up until now evidence for The Translucent Revolution that Arjuna Ardagh wrote about in 2010, and which I spoke of in the introduction to Beyond Recovery in 2012, has been chiefly anecdotal instead of scientific.

Right after the close of this year’s Science and Nonduality Conference, I got an email from The Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness. The center is headed up by a guy who’s very well-known and respected in our community, Dr. Jeffery A. Martin, and the email was from one of his colleagues.

Dr. Martin has been at the forefront of what I call “academic Nonduality” for years, having worked with former seekers, spiritual teachers, and universities around the world, establishing something of a protocol for researching persistent non-symbolic experiences (PNSE)—what you and I would call enlightenment.

For more than eight years, Jeffery has traveled the world working with universities on establishing protocols for studying consciousness as an academic discipline, as well as interviewing hundreds of awakened beings, while meeting thousands of others, along with a host of spiritual teachers, many of whom you’d recognize. He’s about to publish a book on his findings; I imagine I’ll run an excerpt on Awakening Clarity Now.

Last month, while attending and participating in this year’s Science and Nonduality Conference (SAND), Dr. Martin happened to hear about my track record in waking people up in a single session. He was intrigued, hence the email I received a few days later from his team. They spoke of this teaching (and six others) finding a potential audience of tens of thousands through something they called “The Finders Course,” which is based on the knowledge gained in his massive research. That “tens of thousands” number got my attention in a big way, and I let them know that by return mail.

The following day, Dr. Martin, one of his colleagues—Nichol Bradford—and I got together in a Google Hangout video session and talked for more than two hours. There was instant chemistry and immediate understanding among us. The three of us left that meeting as friends. I was sold, and essentially they were too, but they needed to see samples of my work. No problem.

A few days later I was hosting a group Clarity Session via Zoom, and they attended it. It was the first video session I’d ever hosted where there were more than two people in attendance. There were some kind of funny little technical problems at the beginning (and damn it, I forgot to record it), but all that got ironed out quite quickly, and so far as I know, we all had a terrific experience for ninety minutes instead of the scheduled hour.

I love working live—nothing keeps one alert and on one’s toes quite the way a microphone does. Plus, of course, I’m a ham. It’s not my unit—don’t blame me.

Half an hour after that meeting was over I met with a friend of Dr. Martin’s who was not yet awake. She and I met for three hours, and when we parted, she was awake. And I was in. Rather than go into details, let me say that our discussion has, in short, been about taking enlightenment teachings to the masses. We are talking about preaching to those who, unlike yourself, are not already in the “nondual choir.”

I will be helping the Center with that mission in a teaching capacity, but we don’t have the first detail ironed out. On November 9, Dr. Martin gave a two-hour seminar on what he’s found out, and how he’s hoping to utilize his findings to…well, change the world. I’ve said since the beginning that The Living Method of Awakening had the potential to turn the world on its head. I’m happy to now be involved in a project that may speed that along.

And you? Save your planet. Save your descendants. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Now.

Last month I had an email from a nice, artist sort of guy who was headed out of the country, and he was hoping I might be able to squeeze him in for an Awakening Session before he left in just a few days. I made arrangements to do that, but then he back-pedaled, citing practical problems that might arise if he woke up. He promised to call me upon his return to the US. Just as soon as he took care of the important stuff, he was sure he’d have time to pursue awakening.

Fred Davis
November 11, 2014