Letter from the Field: How Long Does Awakening Unfold?
This letter is from a very motivated young woman. There was a lot of Conscious Awakeness present at the beginning of our meeting, but there was confusion, and a lack of really keen clarity. The bandwidth in her house was too narrow for us to properly communicate. So she went outside. Onto her balcony. In Germany. In January. That, my friends, is what Nisargadatta was talking about when he said the most important thing in regard to awakening was “earnestness!”
Hi Fred,
Thank you very very much
Christine
Von meinem iPhone gesendet
Hey, Christine! You’re very welcome; I enjoyed our time together.
I’ve heard the spiritual histories of many hundreds of people, and one begins to notice patterns.
If we are observant, and look at “our unit’s” history, most of the time when awakening occurs we can look back and see nudges, pulls, and synchronicities throughout much or all of our lives that patiently led us toward the inevitability of our awakening. What looks like a series of unrelated events are seen to be waypoints in a single process. (I’m using the simplest provisional language here rather than a long-winded attempt to be “nondually correct.”)
From this strictly event-oriented point of view, we can easily get the feeling that we have now, at last, thank God, graduated from spirituality. That’s just ego coming back in to commend itself for something it had nothing to do with! Awakening is not the end of anything unless, perhaps, if our experience is both deep and somewhat durable, it may mark the end of seeking – but nothing more.
Spiritual awakening is an invitation from Conscious Awakeness to unconscious awakeness to come and live with the operational knowledge of who you really are through a given unit. It has nothing to do with our character patterns, and nothing to do with the unit. It is by, about, and for Awakeness itself. I’m in no way suggesting that everything is carved in stone; in fact manifestation is unfolding spontaneously, but in the only way it can. There’s a big difference between those two.
Come to satsang, whether it’s on Sundays or one-on-one. We clear up through association with our own clarity. Through the Fred unit, your seeing is quite clear. Through the Christine unit, it’s not yet either clear or stable. It’s okay to ask yourself for help. The call is yours – to dance out in the hall until the music fades, or to actually attend the dance where the music never stops.
All love,
January 28, 2017 @ 7:25 pm
There’s a synchronicity “over here”. My meeting of “the problem is the problem” yesterday had a flare up. One guy I already saw the self-reflecting bubble active in. And yesterday his “i know but …” got really defensive with me (or attacking by accusing me of attack, since they’re the same coin). It reinforces for me that “asking for help” is a much kinder story to tell myself. Communing, I was just reading on too, IS our nature (reflected as bodies in the dream coming together). It is NOT a fix for problems, but knowing that “first”, (maybe?) we can allow ourselves the dream story that problems are solved. Of course this view seems to have come after all that trying to solve “problem” first. It reminds me of Fred’s “stairs” vision again. I “surrender” to starting-at-the-top-of-the-stairs-first, but only “because of” enough falling down trying to crawl up the stairs with our separate-selves characters.
That this is/was always available, is most significant to me for the sake of the character’s humility. If it were not so, the “special” awakening moment(s) are separate from the One Moment, for the sake of hiding the “specialness” of the separate character – for the sake of hiding it is not there! And that is just Awakeness’ Humility to play THAT game (and it’s called hide-n-seek, making Itself a “child” to do so)
Thanks Christine, I hope to commune with you at satsang, as we already Are in truth.