Light, love, and awareness are names for three divine qualities as we experience them from our vantage point.
Viewed from the One’s natural state, I have no doubt that things appear entirely different. But we’re not there at this moment. We’re here, down in Fourth Dimensionality, where the living is dense. We see Light, feel Love, and are aware.
I was trained in the awareness game at Cold Mountain Institute, on a three-month resident fellowship, and in the est Training.
I found that awareness dissolved unwanted conditions and allowed one to realize the truth. That truth might be the truth of a situation or a deep truth of Self-Realization. Realizations can be minor and major.
I enjoyed the awareness path the most. Others who follow it are Zen practitioners, Vedantists. western neo-advaitins, Enlightenment Intensive participants, etc.
What is the awareness game?
A game is about obtaining something that is felt to be or represented as being more important or valuable than something we already have. In our case, we make it better to be aware than to be unaware, to be more aware than we are rather than to rest in our relative unawareness, etc.
What the primary agreement of those who play the awareness game is is to remain aware, at all times, of ourselves and to be honest in owning or acknowledging what we’re thinking, feeling, and doing.
It doesn’t take long to see that there are levels of awareness, which I’ve written about on other occasions: the intellectual, experiential, and realizational. The awareness student wishes to be Self-Realized and so pushes awareness up the ladder from ideas to experiences to realizations.
The student of awareness labors to expand their awareness outwards and inwards. Whatever enters their field of awareness is observed. Distinctions become clear from the simple act of observing. The awareness student doesn’t force that process but simply takes what awareness gives them.
The awareness student knows especially the dissolving power of awareness. Paint one’s issues with it (that is, bestow one’s aware attention on it), allow awareness to do its dissolving work, and the issues disappear. (They may return but they disappear in the moment.)
As all one’s issues settle down, the need to be vigilant, to defend one’s self, to have a comeback, a strategy, or a winning number disappear. The ego finds less and less work and may be found nodding off in the corner for lack of tasks to accomplish.
Finally our awareness becomes like a monk in deep meditation – one-pointed, totally open, and receptive.
Awareness has its tools. Here are two.
I use my in-breath to tell me how I’m doing. If my breath is easy, I’m happy. If my breath is labored, I have issues that I haven’t cleared.
Here’s another tool. I listen to myself for short sentences that are actually commands to myself. If I hear one, I make a note of it and ask the mind where it originated. I raise to awareness everything I can about the command, the vasana it relates to, the decisions I’ve made out of it, etc.
What’s my reward?
I’m experiencing it right now. I just took a breath and a wave of bliss came up from what I believe to be my heart (I don’t actually know. It comes from inside me).
Here I am now, in bliss, and I can tell you, there’s nothing additional I want at this moment. Living life eternally in bliss or love, peace or joy is our destination, is it not? Is that not what Ascension is?