I’ve just spent around six hours in what Werner Erhard in the late Seventies would have called “a transformed space.” During the experience, I was describing it to the person I was with as “my natural state.”
As it happens, Jesus through John Smallman gave this insight just yesterday into our natural state:
“To be fully alive, fully aware, fully conscious, and infinitely loving is your natural state, the state in which you were created and which can never be changed or altered.” (1)
Werner would draw the following distinction on a blackboard and then develop it:
Conscious Awareness
_______________
Unconscious Awareness
Above the line, in conscious awareness, is our natural state, the transformed space, experienced experience. In it is found spontaneity, authenticity, awareness, awakeness, aliveness, full self-expression, full personal responsibility, completion and satisfaction.
Below the line is our constructed self, the image we project, the mask we wear, the dead residue of our unexperienced experience. I was “above the line.”
I made as many notes as I could while going through the space. The strangest part about it is that it happened while I was having a conversation with a friend. I went up and up and finally blossomed forth in conscious awareness. My notes follow.
Sojourning in My Natural State
I’ve peeled away enough layers, primed the pump with love, had the help of many loving friends, and now here we are – where we wanted to be.
Bliss, as I see it at this moment and in this place where I am, whatever it is, has a special quality that I’m finding hard to put in words. It has mass like thick chocolate. It’s that mass that I’m aware of.
It doesn’t have that quality in the lower dimensions. There, it’s diaphanous and elevating.
I haven’t allowed this bliss inside me yet so I don’t know what its character is when welcomed in, assimilated, and integrated.
I let the bliss in.
OK, I’d call this space I end up in gravitas, substantiality, weight. I associate this space with the General. (2)
I also recognize this space from the experience I had in the three-day Vipassana weekend two or three years ago. I could only call that space “regal” at the time. It was a dimension of doing without doing, acting without acting.
Almost any topic I choose for myself to explore at this moment shows up for me like distracting small talk. The mind will use anything to distract the Self from noticing or being with Itself.
I almost vomit at the thought of small talk. I want to run from it. …
This whole event came out of the blue.
The interesting thing is it happened at a time when I should have been having a reading with AAM. But Linda called and asked for a postponement.
After the call, I asked a friend to go out for breakfast and this sequence of events – this sojourn in the native state – occurred as a result of a discussion I had with her in her car afterwards.
It occurred while she was there. How often does a spiritual experience happen while another is around?
It arose like a flower bud blossoming. I was only aware that something was happening, not what it was.
It’s the sheer neutrality of it that I first noticed when returning my attention to it. Still water is neutral. A windless place is neutral.
Neutrality is peaceful, calm, relaxing. You can call that place “balance” or “groundedness” if you like. For me it shows up as neither up nor down, left nor right. Right in the center, the balance point, the zero pont, if you like.
I’m sure it is the zero point when taken to its ultimate conclusion.
Sahaja is our native state. Sahaja must lie somewhere along this pathway I find myself on.
Perhaps deeper?
The Space is What’s Important
All along, it’s the space that’s important, not what we do or don’t do. We’d do best to forget about ourselves completely, which would then leave only the space; then, surrender everything to that space.
I’m truly not important to the experiencing of it, except to get out of the way.
The space is the default, what remains when everything I’ve put in the space is let go of.
We view things from our own vantage point in which case the space is out there and it’s something we get to.
Viewed from the standpoint of the space itself, the space is always here. It’s we who let go of that which impedes our awareness of it.
That’s it. Six hours after finding myself in this place, it’s beginning to gracefully and gradually subside. A very welcome, reassuring, and inviting glimpse of the path ahead.
Sosan: Trying to still the mind
inhibits the experience of oneness,
for the very action of trying
is the busy mind at work.
Live in the Great Way
where action is stillness and silence pervades. (3)
Footnotes
(1) Jesus through John Smallman, June 5, 2015. at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/06/05/jesus-via-john-smallman-why-would-you-wish-to-change-anything-that-is-already-eternally-perfect/.
(2) The General is the pseudonym for a past life as a military commander.
(3) Sosan, Hsin Hsin Ming: The Book of Nothing. Kansas City: 2002, 24.