The Glorious Both/And

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