Grounding The Flimsy In Beings' History

-

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 unbecoming, 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 it has got the entire trajectory of evolution as an anchor that is not only backing it, but is (contained within) it, having emerged through the gloriously both/and unfolding of "Being," no longer unbecoming or unraveling its' manifold forms, but becoming all of this!

Savoring with wonder, how this moment, and everything I'm perceiving with my 5 senses in every here and now,  is both the culmination and leading edge of the creative process of a universe expressing itself in ways that are equally unfathomable now as they were before they existed! Hydrogen evolving itself into potted plants and my balcony they bring luscious life to, the dust from exploded stars crystalizing somehow into every level of evolution that gave rise to US living, breathing, laughing, crying fleshly human beings. Astonishingly, even the surface of and typically "superficial" things, from plastic spoons, to TV commercials and simple small-talk have a palpable, mind-blowing depth, when what feels like a new kind of depth-perception - an evolutionary or historical depth-perception opens up, and surprisingly, bitterness seems to soften into a curious sort of brightness (that doesn't negate shadows!), and tender-hearted celebration of reality, reverence for the fact that anything, any of us exist at all, that propels me into awe-inspired participation.


What a journey it has been. It's was so easy and seemingly obvious from a reductionist non-dual worldview to make the physical and psychic arisings a flimsy illusion, but it’s much harder to do that with 14 billion years of evolution, but 14 billion years of evolution withstands the promptings of reductionist nonduality and the scene before me, including me as a co-arising part of it, continue to shine with our reality, that from the emergent perspective of "Being" becoming cannot and will not be raized and reduced down our formless foundation, and no longer is the essence of things more real, valuable, "spiritual" or divine, than what that essence, like a seed, has flowered into!

This scene isn’t just floating isolated, as in my new perspective, I feel it sprout roots that reach backwards, downwards through all of evolutionary to the intangible, fertile soil of that "ground," that numinous womb that before giving birth to its' own potential, carried it for all of timelessness. These roots of course have always been there, and these evolutionary threads weaving the universe together, the thread of interdependence that tethers every/thing to every/thing ( presently and all the way back through all of time!) but they're new for me to sense viscerally, a solidarity between all things, the fortification of the once only illusory content on a screen that contemplative inquiries could strip reality from faster than I could say "I am THAT."

But this is not reverting to the same old way of perceiving reality before my non-dual deconstruction-only path - it's so different because now evolution is not just a material process, but the process of that immaterial "ground," of Being itself, blossoming into and as all of this, including both matter and the imaginal, or psychic realms of reality.

So it's a shock, looking back at how I once had to dissolve and vanish into my own absence, had to lose myself to/in the "ground of Being" - only now to have discovered that yes, it's still true "I am that" - but what's not true is the "...and not this" - since today not only am I that, but most significantly, I am that as this! Individually, personally, physically - mine and yours is now timeless spirits' time-bound physicality. Perhaps I never had to radically strip myself or any thing away to experience this, but of course I'll never know, perhaps only that path would have led me to this, and for others it's not necessary to go through the pitfall-laden dissolution path to back and infuse the moment, including all of material and immaterial reality with this special kind of profound mystery that is supercharged by it's monumentally awe-some history 🌌


Here are some inspirations!

Journey of the Universe - Brian Swimme
Beyond Essence - Full essay from Essays on the Heart of Enlightenment - Jason Shulman

















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spiritualizing Trauma Responses - Rupert Spira - Total Dis-embodiment

-
Image
"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
Read more

Dangerous Side of De-Activating the Default Mode Network

-
Image
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
Read more

Non-dualism Cult Dynamics - The "Sleepers Awake!" Belief System

-
Image
Neo-Advaita 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 what makes it so cult-like is b
Read more

The Universe's Past: A Portal to Presence!

-
Image
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
Read more