The Glorious Both/And

"Evolutionary" spirituality, as I relate to it,  invites us to wake up to being an evolved expression of the universe, waking up to itself - an increasingly  self-realizin g universe, that after billions of years of evolving unconsciously, can start to evolve  consciously as human    👏🏽 When the universe becomes  self-conscious  - in moments when a person wakes up to being the universe as a person - that person has a unique opportunity to evolve consciously on a personal level, and through their (inter) actions participate in the evolution of the collective, of the universe itself!  The One, a single universe communing with itself as human Perceiving this world of multiplicity as the "One in relationship with itself" (Tim Freke), a single universe manifesting as the many, gives back significance and reality to the relational dimension that reductionist non-dual teachings negate, and gives back that significance 1000x fold! How profound when I perceive everything a

"Clearing away the relative plane—cultural conditionings for example—is very important at a certain point in the spiritual path. But unless the relative world is seen on an equal plane with the absolute, unless the many are seen as holy as the one, then we never arrive at the great secret: that the many and the one are a single thing! " - Jason Shulman ...... ​ A conversation on youtube between  a famous neo-advaita teacher and Swami Sarvapriyananda (of Vedanta New York) in which they discuss  non-dual consciousness randomly starting playing on my laptop today. On Vedanta New York's website I skimmed an article written by Swami  Sarvapriyananda called  "The Concept of Soul or Self in Vedanta."  A quote from the article " Behind the world of multiplicity there is essential unity and interconnectedness." What flabbergasts me now that I've come to understand that the one and the many are a single thing - that reality is a oneness of multiplicity -  is

     One day I realized with a shock that when I de-realized  the existence of something in the name of god (or whatever word you like), for example the ego/personal self, individuation, I was turning  away  from   god/the "absolute" by rejecting its' manifestations, because the manifest world is  formlessness enformed!  God reveals itself AS this world of form!      After this, I had to accept that that god/the divine is not purely peaceful, bright and blissful, joyful, or even  likeable  and that it cannot be relegated to or sanctified in a dimension that is cut off from anything else.  This can be disillusioning to us when we're clinging to a vision/experience of the formless as the untarnished, transcendent/absolute  only,  separate from suffering. To recognize this is to admit that it is  not  entirely perfect, at least not in the way that we tend to see perfection as something that can only exist in isolation from the blemishes, flaws, and stains of imperfection

  Video Topics - Showing Target Audiences' Vulnerability  Video Topics - Giving Unqualified, Dangerous Advice on Trauma Video Topics - Spiritualizing Trauma Responses   DP/DR/Dis-embodiment/Disassociation Video Topics - Cult Dynamics Video Topics - Spiritual But Not Religious? Video Topics - Addressing Known Dangerous Pitfalls / Adverse Effects Video Topics - Renouncing Ethics & Responsibility

You  climbed a ladder to the sky and for a long time, you marveled while gazing down at the world from so high up.  Now that you're ready to come back to the ground, you discover that the ladder beneath you is gone. You're suspended in the air, so you can't even fall. Now you're stuck up here, looking down from the great heights that afforded you a view you'd like to take with you but not be limited to.  I reached out to Stephen, a well-known psychotherapist and esteemed self-negating nonduality teacher, when I was in the throes of a spiritual emergency catalyzed by my ego dissolution path.  I was dis-oriented, disassociated and de-personalized, struggling to shore up a sense of personal agency, embodiment, and most importantly,  to get back a sense of solid ground beneath my feet.  I was especially terrified by what became a harrowing sense of dis-reality both of my own personal identity and in-solidity of the world, because while I'd experienced depersonalizat

Neo-Advaita and the modern non-dual scene is not your typical cult with a central physical location/in-person community, with one leader. Yet the system of it is extremely cult-like, including the authoritarian nature of the belief system/ideology, and in so many cases, the patterns of teachers' behavior and the teacher-follower dynamic very clearly fits many of the tell-tale signs of cult-like, authoritarian leadership, and the community of followers that they gain influence over. Recognizing this doesn't mean there's nothing positive people gain from it. It's because there is, that cults are able to attract people in the first place! Cult-like groups provide many things that are helpful and positively transformative for people, especially in the short-term, but to a large degree, the healthy elements are outweighed or overshadowed by the toxic ones. As one person described, it's like nectar mixed with poison. If it was only poison, no one would drink it. Part of w

"I s there something we can do to dissolve the belief that ‘I am a body’? A woman says that during meditation she can sense old beliefs and feelings associated with the body start to dissolve, but the old conditioning of believing and feeling solid, dense and limited quickly comes back. Rupert explains that having recognised the felt sense of the body as just a cloud of sensing, once or twice is not enough. It takes time to erode this very well-born habit. These old habits are deeply conditioned in us — we've been practising them for so long. But every time we do go back there we weaken that habit. So keep questioning it by asking yourself, "Is that true? What is my actual experience?" Every time you go back to your actual experience you erode the power of your old beliefs." -Video description from Dissolving the Belief That "I Am a Body" You could actually say that the core messages of modern non-duality which split the non-physical self from the

I don't align with much of Paul Bruntons' perspective on things but these insights are very well articulated: -Because a man has had some kind of inner revelation it does not follow that everything in life and the universe has become plain to him and that he has become a kind of human encyclopedia. [Youtube playlist of influential non-dualists acting as a human encyclopedia for sensitive topics that they are unqualified to give guidance on: https://bit.ly/3l6U0ZX ] -It is the  thinking  mystic who can best explain mysticism to others and even to himself. And it is the  active  mystic who can best demonstrate its worth. -The mystic who claims that his knowledge is verbally incommunicable and that it is useless trying to explain it intellectually, is stretching a difficulty into an impossibility. -One way to test a mystical claim is to push it out farther & farther until it reaches its (potentially) ridiculous ultimate! -Those who provide quick and facile answers to such hard