The Glorious Both/And

Yes, there are narrative elements to our sense of self, but in a real dimension of reality. Narrativity is simply part of the nature of what being a person is, and saying  just a story is used as a means of belittling, trivializing it, and of course having a negative attitude towards it, more accurately this language is used to de-realize it. Taking on this reductionist connotation to "story," and applying it to the entirety of what oneself and others are, is a powerful way to shift your perception and experience, to suddenly experience ontological dis-reality in a radically jarring way that can have lasting consequences, some positive and others extremely negative. A key to my own unbecoming of “just a story” has been understanding the nature of what is meant by "story," and its synonyms (narrative, language, ideas, concepts, constructs, etc.) in a new way, in which I no longer view any of these as ontologically “false” constructs, but real  ones that exist on the

       I want to suggest to people who have gone deeply/dissolved into the experience of a formless, primordial, "absolute" pure Beingness, and taken that as their realest, truest self, with everything else being false or less real, that this will always be a partial experience of reality, not the whole of it, and never a beholding of  all  of what Being is. And I want to support people who would like to end this true nature/false nature split inside and outside of them that either/or nonduality inevitably creates. Who no longer want to feel like a split being with a "true self" (good, or better self) and a "false self" (bad, or lesser self) that are fundamentally at odds with one another. We can only do this by healing a hidden fundamental  dualistic  rift carved between seeming opposites like spirit and matter, universal and personal, oneness and separateness, the transcendent and the immanent, Being and becoming, etc. The "non-separation" to b

It was a real difficult conundrum when I no longer wanted the world to seem unreal or just a dream or appearance, when this was becoming more limiting to my life than freeing overall, and as I was starting to explore other spiritual perspectives that didn’t negate nor insubstantiate the outer and inner human world, or reduce all phenomena to mere illusion, dream, or false reality. One of the common ways people describe what happens to their experience of personhood, when they go deep into either/or self-negating spirituality, is that their sense of self, as well even their physicality and world around them becomes increasingly flimsy, and difficult to hold up. While that was my experience when my spiritual path was one of un becoming, a deconstruction project (which started out positively transformative, then thrust me into its' unforeseen shadow side) I've been reveling in, and grateful for how reality is so far from flimsy, now that years later, this moment and everything in

In this excerpt from Tim Freke, who I'm ever-grateful for because of how he’s helped me evolve beyond radical self-negation and a non-relational and humanity-trivializing either/or non-dual worldview into a profoundly humanistic, both/and view (and experience) in which we don't disappear into oneness, and every individual person is a precious and really real evolving expressions of the entire universe, of the ground of Beings' becoming, whereby we get to be in relationship with what & who we're one with, which is an experience of being what Tim calls, uni viduals. I hope others will be inspired to make a similar journey! "I started off with a spontaneous awakening when I was 12, in the West Country of England, while sitting on this hill, and my sense of it is now is that I was always profoundly struck with how mysterious life is - I still am every day, just this profound sense of how enormous and breathtaking the mystery of existence is -  I grew up feeling ve

Self-referential thought (and the Default Mode Network activity it's tied to) can be a source of suffering, but it also plays an essential role in empathy, memory, and moral decision-making!      You may have heard people in the spiritual world glorify diminished activity or even deactivation of the the DMN, since it diminishes our self-referential thought, and this is seen as the holy grail in much of nondual spirituality for example where the goal is a permanent loss of self and self referencing. You may not have heard however that research (see below) shows that DMN inactivity also can lead to decreased empathy, memory impairment, capacity for moral decision-making, and is even implicated in conditions like psychopathy.      This highlights the importance of not glorifying the loss of self-referential thought as the holy grail of spiritual attainment, a panacea for freedom from suffering, the most advanced level of evolution, or the pinnacle of human well-being. While there are

One of my favorite spiritual practices now, portals to presence and wonder actually involves tuning into the past! looking back to experience the now more deeply, in the light of Beings' journey of  becoming, (be)coming all the way to THIS nowness and right hereness  😱 the ground of Being has a past, and a quite extraordinarily EPIC one at that! S hining a light on it reveals the splendor of this moment it has become... can bring you to feeling astonished and deeply moved by the present... looking back to the beginning of the universe, feeling into, visualizing what it ONCE WAS, those early days of the ground of Being beginning its' journey of becoming... becoming cells, atoms, molecules, water and earth, chickens and eggs, mountains and lakes, becoming....HUMAN...becoming ME...my god, the o ne becoming MANY to see what it has become, what it is right NOW, a dimly lit room, dancing and drumming, strangers drawn together to celebrate the staggering mystery of our coinciding liv