In this episode I describe unitive awareness by using analogies from everyday experience and awareness.
In this episode I describe unitive awareness by using analogies from everyday experience and awareness.
Sometimes I want to cut through all the words and communicate directly the unitive awareness which is our true nature and the Divine nature. I wish there were an easy way to do that. Unfortunately there are no words to communicate it. Yet I am a preacher and words are what I do. As the apostle Paul says, “How shall they hear without a preacher?” So I preach or teach or witness or speak or whatever you want to call what I am doing now.
I want to start by describing what unitive awareness feels like. I need to immediately qualify those words by saying that this is not a feeling. Even the word awareness is misleading. It is not awareness of anything. It is not an experience. This is what all things and feelings and experience appear within. Yet there is an intuitive sense that accompanies this that kind of like a feeling. That is as good as I can express it.
It is this. It is a sense of backing up into the source of everything. It is like backing up your car without looking in the rear view mirror but trusting that you are not going to collide with anything, if that makes any sense. It is like leaning back into what we are, but not your personal self. This is not personal. This is difficult for people to get because people are used to thinking of themselves as people. But we are not people. We are that sense of awareness that comes before thinking anything, including thinking we are people.
This is always here. It is always what we are. It is what we know ourselves to be when we are not thinking. I am not trying to get you to not think. That is futile. I am pointing you to what does not think, even while all the thinking is going on. Deeper than mind. Wider than mind. There is always a peaceful center, the eye of the storm of conscious thought. That is it.
We rest back into this. It is almost like when you are in bed and falling asleep. Sometimes when you are falling asleep you are aware of it happening. You are aware that your conscious self is disappearing. The world dims and you become peaceful and then you are not. This is similar except instead of falling asleep you fall awake and you are not.
You wake up. This is not a one time event. That is the misunderstanding that a lot of people have about spiritual awakening. It does not occur in time. It is constant – always present. It is the eternal that is at the heart of time. It is clear that there is really no such thing as time. And you know that. You know that at your center you are the same timeless self that you were when you were a child. It is the same you, even though the body you see in the mirror is clearly not the same body. Your body ages but you forever young, as Bob Dylan sang. You are the eternal beyond time.
This awareness is always fresh and new. That is why Zen calls it beginner’s mind. It is new every moment. It is never boring. It is always surprising. During the day I get caught up in doing things, immersed in the phenomenal world. Then I stop and be who I am again. I make the shift from personal self to Absolute. When that happens it is always surprising. It is always an aha moment. It always brings a smile to me face.
Let me come at this another way. What does this feel like? It feels like nostalgia. You know what I am talking about. I notice that a lot of people my age like to talk about the past. I am in Florida visiting with family now – my wife’s family. In fact all her siblings got together at our place just the other day. Whenever they get together they talk about the past. They get sentimental and talk about the “good old days” when they were children. They tell stories and laugh and smile. I do the same thing with my family when we get together. I would not be surprised if this is universal. That is why we go to school reunions and return to visit our old neighborhoods or connect with old friends.
That feeling of nostalgia is what it feels like to be what we really are. It is the feeling of being home. We are home. It is a sense of joy and peace and security. This is the origin of all the myths in spiritual traditions about a golden age, a Garden of Eden, a primordial paradise. They all are memories of the times in our lives when we have touched our true nature, when we have touched God, when we have walked with God in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day.
This divinity is home. It is our eternal home. Every time we return to this space we are coming home. I am using phrases like returning and coming, but the reality is that there is no movement. There is no place to go because we are always here. It is a matter of noticing it and paying attention to it. We are always in Eden. We live in Eden and Eden lives in us. It is just a matter of whether we are conscious of this reality.
Conscious or not, this is still true. This is still true whether or not anyone is conscious of it or believes in it. As Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” This is reality whether or not you believe it or know it or see it or feel it. This is reality. And really whether we believe it or experience it really doesn’t matter.
That is an aspect of this awareness. It is self-authenticating. You recognize it immediately as true. You know this is what you really are. You know this is what God really is. You know this is reality. It is perfectly clear and obvious. It is not a mystical experience. It is normal everyday awareness. It is normal everyday awareness seen for what it really is. With the recognition comes joy and peace and compassion for everyone who is not aware that they are joy and peace and compassion.
This is not religion, even though I tend to use religious language to describe it. It is not even spirituality. Spirituality these days has its own elaborate vocabulary and is filled with esoteric terms and description of spiritual experiences. I hear people talk about their spiritual experiences and it sounds like they are speaking a foreign language. And oftentimes they are – using Hindu or Buddhist or Taoist or Christian terms that sound very spiritual. All such terms take you away from the immediacy of this Reality and the ordinariness of this Reality. It is extraordinarily ordinary. No special language is needed.
What else is this? What else does it feel like? It feels like fresh air. Mountain air or ocean air. Like the feeling you get when you are out in nature. You know what I am talking about. That is why people love camping and hiking and outdoor activities so much. It connects us with what we are. It brings back an ancestral memory of who our race was before we were human, before human civilization, when nature was our home. We instinctively long for that time. That is the Garden of Eden. That sense of the divine that you feel at such times is this unitive awareness – oneness with God and nature and the universe. This feeling is not in nature; it is in us. It is us.
This Ultimate Reality also feels like love. You know what it feels like to love and to be loved. There is nothing like us. That is also instinctual. That is this Reality. That is why Jesus said that love summed up all the teachings of the Scriptures. That is why he summed up biblical instruction – which is what torah means – in two statements. Loving God and loving others. Loving God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength and living our neighbor as ourselves.
Spiritual awakening feels like love. It is love. That is why devotional love for a personal God is such an important part of so many spiritual traditions. But God is not a Person; God is Love. That is the heart of Reality. God is not a being; God is Being Itself and that Being is love. God is Love, the Bible says. God is a verb, not a noun. This is the truth behind the idea of eternal life as reunion with our loved ones in heaven. We know that our nature and destiny is love. Eternal love. The love that we feel for family and friends is not just biological; it is divine. It is eternal. It is our true nature. It is God.
This Eternal Reality is present here now. We project it into the future and into the past, and yearn for it and seek for it, but those are just concepts. We are it. Noticing the presence of this love here now is eternal life. It is salvation. It is liberation. It is redemption. It is heaven. It is God. It is awakening. Awakening is not something that happens to us. It is what we are. We are awake.