Credit: carpentersmith.com
What to do during lockdown, quarantine, social isolation, etc.?
I’d highly recommend meditation. But I have no depth of background in meditation so I can’t speak to it. I do plan to meditate more myself, given the isolating conditions.
But what about during the time when we’re not meditating? How to “make best use of the time,” as meditation master S.N. Goenka would say?
I recommend self-awareness. And I do feel I have a background here.
What’s so special about self-awareness, self-consciousness, self-knowledge, self-realization?
Longtime readers will know that it relates to the purpose of life. (1)
The purpose of life for us, as I was shown in a 1987 vision, is to realize our true identity. (2) Our true identity is God.
Each time one of us realizes her or himself, God meets God. For this meeting God created this whole world of form, this reincarnational school of spiritual evolution and Self-Realization.
Pursuing the path of self-awareness, we make ourselves the laboratory, the experiment, the experimental subject, and so on.
We make hypotheses about our own behavior and test them out. What happens when you smile at people? What happens when you ask people something warmly? Nicely?
The theory behind raising our awareness of ourselves is, first of all, the truth will set us free from our upsets, from bondage to the Third Dimension, and finally from individuality/separation itself.
Second of all, the theory is that when certain troublesome behavior patterns, like my anger through most of my early-adult … alright, alright … most of my life are raised to awareness, it becomes impossible to “run them” thereafter.
It’s comparable to a centipede who becomes aware of its 100 feet. Thereafter, being aware of them, it can no longer synchronize them and ends up in a ball.
When I’m aware of one of my trips, numbers, rackets, and so on, and I presume to run it, I sometimes burst out laughing watching myself. I now know what I’m doing. That alone has a self-correcting effect.
For me, there’s only the natural, innocent Self and all the insincerities, projected self-images, acts, looks, and other human constructions that we pile on top of it. If I want to get back to my natural, innocent Self, I need to raise these constructions to awareness and let them go.
And it becomes fun. I’ve watched myself be gruff for the last few days, for instance. I observe myself run my number whenever challenged about something to do with Covid.
At the same time I also notice I like wearing a mask. It increases my anonymity, which means more time for thinking and self-observing when I walk. Suddenly everyone’s become a hermit, just like me. I’m left alone to contemplate and reflect.
The agreement to remain aware of oneself is the basic agreement of the awareness path. But self-observation is not all there is to it.
There’s also sharing – comparing notes, sharing our experiences, how we feel, what racket we ran on whom today, etc.
I’ve shared before that the three-month encounter group I did in 1976 reached a point towards the end where no one had anything more to share and we just sat together in silence or in quiet pairs, brimming with love.
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The awareness game can not only be fun but can quickly become a preferred way of life. And of course it’s the preferred instrument of many spiritual paths.
I often quote one of Jesus’s articles called “The Third Way.” The third way is awareness. One of the things he said in that article was:
“You have to realize that consciousness is something very powerful. It is much more than a passive registering of an emotion – consciousness is an intense creative force.” (3)
Awareness or thought on the higher dimensions is creative.
I would go a step farther and point at the dissolutive power (my word) of love as well. Become aware of how you’re feeling and rest in that awareness and the feeling should lift or disappear.
Simple, bare awareness was Lao-Tzu’s “watercourse way.” The Buddha used awareness, which lies at the heart of Vipassana meditation, to ascend. And I could go on to point to Sufis, Ch’an/Zen masters, western growth movement, enlightenment intensives, etc.
Awareness precedes and leads to realization. Realization of Self/All Self is the purpose of life.
It’s been my experience that, when I’m aligned with the purpose of life, I feel happier than otherwise. And I know when I’m sweeping my field of experience with my inner vision, taking myself into account, being aware of myself, feeling my feelings, I know I’m directly on purpose with life’s design.
If you ever wondered if an activity was in fact divinely inspired, awareness is such an activity. God wants us to find her. She hides in plain sight. Allow God to meet God in a moment of your enlightenment and you fulfill the reason for which you were created.
For me awareness is the path I follow to that consummation, where the last blindfold is removed, the last veil called “I.”
Footnotes
(1) See The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Purpose-of-Life-is-Enlightenment.pdf
(2) For a description see “The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment – Ch. 13 – Epilogue,” August 13, 2011, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2011/08/13/the-purpose-of-life-is-enlightenment-ch-13-epilogue/
(3) “Jeshua: The Third Way,” by Pamela Kribbe, July 4, 2012, at http://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/the-path-of-awareness/jeshua-the-third-way/.