Repost with an Update: The Case for Rational Awakening

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The Case for Rational Awakening

“It seems that, in order to enlighten an Occidental, dissertations are,
within a certain measure that is strictly limited, necessary.
Doubtless the ultimate, the real point of view, cannot be expressed in words,
and the master would injure the pupil if he allowed him
to forget that the whole problem lies precisely in jumping the ditch
which separates truth which can be expressed from real knowledge.
But the Occidental needs a discursive explanation
to lead him by the hand to the edge of the ditch.”

Hubert Benoit
French Psychiatrist & Eastern Philosopher
1904-1992

May 9, 2017 Update

This afternoon I had a second session with someone who can’t seem to wake up. This is because she’s trying to wake up again, although she can’t accept that. I don’t know when she woke up, or how she woke up, but I know for sure that she was already awake when she got to me. This situation is actually pretty common.

Normally, I can take an already awake being through a few exercise to help them see/be True Nature more clearly, and Conscious Awakeness will make itself known in a far more obvious way. The issue here is that this woman is already seeing/being pretty sharply, but she won’t accept her own direct experience as being valid. It’s uncanny. 

In other words, she is presently unable/unwilling to tell herself the truth when it’s presented to her. That just happens to be the single criteria a client has to have if I’m going to help them wake up. By the time they get to me, most are ready. A few are not. But this is different. The client is already wide awake, but is waiting for “something else” that she thinks would somehow convince her that she is awake when her direct experience won’t. Good luck with that.

Today I took her through a whole bunch of Rational Awakening exercises. I used logic to help her see that her brain is feeding her bad information. It’s lying to her. Once they see that, it’s very hard to unsee. We did not have an unqualified success today, but at the end of the session she was very upbeat because she could feel herself being affected by our investigation. When we closed she said, “This is working, Fred!”

We have another session left. If she can be as open that day as she was this day, then we can simply recap today and move forward. This client will come to accept True Nature. When, I can’t promise, but probably soon, perhaps in the next session. Not because I’m so good, but because Conscious Awakeness simply doesn’t flirt with danger indefinitely. It knows this is the last house on the block and it comes here when it’s exhausted all other avenues.

This is where not the client, but Conscious Awakeness itself comes to tell itself the truth.

All love,

Fred

The reason that I don’t direct this teaching more toward “how to awaken” is that it’s simply not an efficient way for us to spend our time together. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing that we need to do, learn, or know in order for us to wake up. That’s because we are already awake. This “we” I refer to as being already awake includes you, the present consciousness reading this post, the same consciousness which will almost surely and erroneously also be thinking that it is the unit it is wearing–some mythical individual “you” which doesn’t really exist.

Strangely, everything we, as apparently individual units, need to undo and unknow in order to consciously recognize our True Nature can take place in about an hour. I know this to be a fact because I watch it happen several times a week, and have been doing so for the better part of five years. I call this process The Living Method of Spiritual Awakening, but I could just as easily call it The Living Method of Rational Spiritual Awakening. While awakening itself may not be what we call rational, the deconditioning typically necessary for awakening to happen through a given unit can be.

Given that it’s now possible to bring about initial awakening so swiftly, a higher, truer, simpler, more efficient and enjoyable way of seeing and being is suddenly available to large crowds of people. And it will continue to be available. Even this unit is not so self-centered and stupid as to think itself the end of the line. More is coming, or more probably is already here, if as yet unannounced.

This does not mean the host unit is going to pick up where Buddha left off, but the event we usually term “initial awakening” is still the most important shift you’ll ever experience. Nothing much happens until that happens.

If people really want to wake up, and have left some room for precious doubt in their current belief system, it’s actually hard for them not to wake up. Not waking up is the new exception. Rational Awakening is both reliable and predictable, which flies full in the face of nearly everything we’ve heretofore known.

By the way, the final step in moving into the truth of unity from the dream of separation, what we might presently call “an irrational jump,” is actually just the turnaround of finally telling ourselves the truth about the truth. It’s more like addiction recovery than anything else I know. I had a woman wake up last week in the first three minutes of our session–a new record, ego tells me. Within a week I had another woman wake up in the first twenty minutes–after starting out cheerful, but genuinely resistant. In the process of turning around her attitude, I accidentally woke her up a bit early–except that there are no accidents.

Of course, when I say, “I need for someone to be willing to tell themselves the truth,” I say it knowing full well that there’s no one there to actually do that. It’s not an actual doing. It’s more of an attitude than anything else, an openness and willingness, and its presence or absence depends solely upon whether Oneness is ready to give up the story of being a particular character yet or not. There’s absolutely nothing personal about it, but it may be experienced by a make-believe character as being personal.

If you’re ready, good for you; that’s just as things should be, but there’s nothing for you to be proud about. If you’re not ready, good for you; you want to sleep a little longer, but you’re using this teaching as a snooze alarm, as in, “Not right now, but soon!” This teaching, however, is not a perpetual snooze alarm. Hang around and it will get under your skin. That, too, is just as it should be.

I was sitting in my living room this morning reading and pondering, and it struck me how Plotinus, the Roman philosopher-mystic who lived nearly two millennia ago, St. John of the Cross, the 16th century Christian mystic, and Sri Ramana Maharshi, the 20th century Hindu saint all recommended the use of negative inquiry in order to discover your True Nature. Lots of others did as well, but this just happened to be the three I was thinking about this morning.

It was great advice that they handed down to us; I heartily recommend it as well, and strangely, it’s turned out to be a big part of this teaching. What I have to offer is stories and questions. If you want answers, turn only to yourself. There’s nothing especially mystical about what I do. It’s as rational as arithmetic, but it’s counter-intuitive, which generally leads to some client confusion along the way. But since that confusion is the calling card of  clarity, it all comes up sunny in the end.

Let me tell you a secret. This is an open secret. No one’s been hiding it from us, but very few humans have actually discovered it. Most who have made the discovery have simply stumbled upon it, but that doesn’t have to be the case for you. The secret?

It’s not hard to recognize your True Nature, and it doesn’t require a lot of time. I’ve helped tons of long-term seekers, people who’ve flown all over the world for retreats and spent crazy money for decades in a failed attempt to wake up, sit there in front of me on Skype or Zoom amazed and dumbstruck. I can’t know what the future may bring, but I think at least one branch of it is going to be powerfully influenced by a new wave of different forms of Rational Awakening.

There are, however, two flies in this wonderful ointment. The first is that very few people will put aside what they think they know long enough to discover what they don’t know. My working hypothesis is that this is not a mistake. I’m not saying it’s a plan, but I’m saying it’s not a mistake. The chief reason I hold this hypothesis is that I can’t actually find any mistakes around here, and whenever I have a hypothesis that lines up with What Is, though I know that there can be contrary opinions, I also know that no actual evidence can be presented against my claim.

What Is rules. It’s simple and it’s a comfort.

However, the second fly in the ointment is that while recognizing our True Nature is relatively easy, it is extremely difficult for us to accept what we see when we see the truth. It is nigh onto impossible to move from recognition into acceptance by our lonesomes. People do it, but not many. I couldn’t. As a teacher, my interest has always been in Big Numbers Spirituality: what works for the highest percentage of the people the highest percentage of the time.

Here’s a big number for you: 100% of the people I talk with privately who are willing to tell themselves the truth will wake up. Success is something above 90%. This is not a mainstream teaching, at least not yet, so it turns out that better than 90% of the people who talk to me are indeed willing, and do indeed wake up. My students are starting to help folks wake up as well.

Truly, in an attempt to be accurate, if not not modest, I can say that this is a quite ordinary, everyday, garden variety unit that, contrary to common sense, is presently inhabited and consciously utilized by the extraordinary truth of our Being. It has been “drawn”–meaning pushed, pulled, and prodded–to sit down and type this whether it wants to or not. It had other plans, but out the window they went.

These units do what they do until they do something else, for the simple reason that they cannot not do it. There is no such thing as “why.” Pursuing that question will drive you crazy, but once again you are invited to find that out for yourself. I did.

We are not actually mystically separated from our True Nature. That is, in fact, a literal impossibility. People tell me they can’t find their True Nature, and I have to tell them that I can’t find anything else. If they are “drawn” to spend a bit of time talking to what’s coming through this nifty body puppet, they will almost inevitably come to agree with me. They will have seen and accepted on quite a broad sliding scale the overwhelming fact of their obviousness. Poof.

Clearing is always a challenge, no matter how we wake up. Many of us spend decades clearing prior to awakening, only to find out that we will have to clear up a second time in post-awakening, primarily to wipe the slate clean of what we thought was clearing us in pre-awakening. The whole business is frustrating on one hand but incredibly rewarding on the other. Of course it’s not actually about progress. We all have to do what we have to do, but if we’re open and alert, we may not have to keep on doing what we’ve had to do in the past.

Three years ago I had a biblical-style vision where I saw an endless line of spiritual pilgrims being directed up my apartment’s stairwell via conventional spiritual strategies. The idea was to reach “the landing,” which was where enlightenment was hiding out. In a flash I saw that nearly all of the pilgrims were dying on the steps. Very few made it to the top. Everyone was dying “on the way to God.”

A nearly blinding pair of questions arrived in this brain.

“What if we could wake them up first?”

“What if we could start them out on the landing, and then lead them down the steps to clear?”

I could see that it could be a total revolution. It had the ability to turn everything on its head. And because it was fast, it would be able to reach vast numbers, regardless of their age or background. All that was required was an open mind and a willingness to tell ourselves the truth. Familiarity with nondual spirituality could be a plus, but it wasn’t a necessity. Nothing extra was necessary.

At that time I had no means of doing that, but the means quickly arrived as I wrote my first book, The Book of Undoing. It wasn’t about information, it was about presentation. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. Rational Awakening, which employs The Living Method to bring it about, is a remarkable singularity. Just to keep it from being too easy for Itself to tell Itself the truth, Oneness hid this vehicle inside of one of the most tarnished things It had lying about, and that’s been wonderfully successful at slowing this thing down.

I refer here, of course, to this unit.

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All love,

Fredness
5.11.15