“The gap is your connection to the field of pure potentiality. It is that state of pure awareness, that silent space between thoughts, that inner stillness that connects you to (your) true power.” ~ Deepak Chopra Give Up. Let Go. Repent. Stop fighting. Just Be. There are many teachings; religious or otherwise that we may have some connection with in our lives for the simple reason that – at some time or another – we have had a charged experience in relation to that set of teachings. In relation to them, we have had an ‘aha!’ moment where our perception finally melted and we experienced true being. Sogyal Rinpoche calls it the true nature of mind, Eckhart Tolle the ‘Now’. In a new teaching (to me anyway) the notion of non-duality can help us, in a few simple steps, to remember that perfection is an illusion, and that we are simply ‘reality’ experiencing or exploring itself. As Eckhart Tolle says in his short autobiography in the Power of Now, the first trickles or gaps in his perception, were when he thought a thought along the lines of, ‘I just can’t live with myself any longer.’ The idea that there is a separate ‘I’ to ‘my-self’ brings about the realization that we live within this world of separation, and that actually, we are not separate from our experience at all. This is why meditation or being in the moment is the only way to practice this universal and persistently present truth; now, and only now, I am watching a bee hover over some flowers while I hear the children playing in the park and have the scent of lavender in my nostrils. The sensation of sadness is rising in me (for some conscious or unconscious reason in association to that experience), and I will enjoy it. Not suppress it with distraction, or food, or reason with myself (telling oneself that you feel sad because…. Something to do with your history that tantamount to theories you have come up with about yourself… basically, the ego.) But enjoy it. Let it peak and pass over me. As with Buddhism, grasping or becoming attached to any desire, projected goal or vision of yourself, suppressing these emotions distract us from the now and divert the point of being. For existence to experience and explore itself, it needs to not struggle against that experience, but let it flow through it. Accepting this moment for what it is usually brings with it a sense of pure joy, or at least an enjoyment of whatever pleasant (or unpleasant!) sensation you are experiencing. Acceptance of the present moment both compliments the law of attraction, for it means that to not have goals we may feel lost and floating, and unable to ‘achieve’ the life we are trying to ‘achieve’. However, whilst being in this state of presence, all sorts of positive and effortless luck and good fortune will be attracted to us. We become like children; innocently exploring our reality yet still being drawn to those lessons and specific experiences we are wanting to experience in this lifetime. Not only that, but another paradoxical realization being present brings about is that, though we let go of the memories that attach our egos so rootedly to the past therefore dissolving time and bringing truth to Einstein’s theory of bending time. We also may ‘access the Akashic records’, if such a thing exists, and are able to draw from all of our past lives, and those present, past and future ones of everyone in existence in order to add to our experience of the now. If time is an illusion, and the void really exists, we have only to come into the moment in order to realize the ‘pure potentiality’ (a Deepak Chopra phrase I do believe) of that void. ‘No’-thingness is exactly the same as ‘some’-thing, and yet, to desire ‘some’-thing we need to first accept ‘no’-thing. In this way then, truisms that depend on the simplified and limited uses of language like ‘we are One’, actually become true! Just think, (excuse the cliché) if everything is existence experiencing and exploring itself, then we are everything in existence. This video with James Eaton includes everything covered in the article and offers a good quick exercise which enables us to experience this truth. If we close our eyes and explore, first what is inside our head, behind our eyes, in our chests, then down to our left foot – then we can experiment to see where we end and everything else begins. The more we explore and experiment, we may discover that we never really end, or at least go on for a few feet more than we imagined we did. Rather than becoming the watcher, and trying to be ‘higher’ or more than our own experience, in non-duality we are our experience, just experiencing it with awareness. The more we can practice this realization, we might also transcend this idea (that proliferates itself in the spiritual community as well as supposedly lower states of consciousness such as earthly politics and gossip columns), that as different expressions of the same existence wanting to experience itself, we are neither higher or lower than anything else. Transcending this hard-to-shift idea that we are evolving or moving up in a linear fashion towards enlightenment, and that therefore some are closer to it than others, can be dissolved and rewritten that we are circling inwards until we will be left with nothingness. Perhaps we are ‘dissolving’ as we speak. Even the image of the spiral can give a sense of spiritual superiority, (meaning we have, if only for a millisecond, come out of our presence and into a state of grasping), and give us the illusion that we are trying to move towards something external to ourselves. Be in a non-dualistic state. Use all of your knowledge of being in the now to truly practice it. Dissolve comparison and uncover that state of joy already radiating from within. Release those buried emotions and nurture yourself. Plunge into awareness and see this as the beginning to it all. Image Source: Quote Child Presence Non-Duality
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