Category Archives: Spirituality

Finding the Presence Within

Posted on by under Oneness, presence, spiritual awakening, Spirituality

In the past two blogs, we looked at the nature of the presence within and explored the different ways people have experienced it. Let’s now look at ways to reach an awareness of the presence within.

I spent years wondering how to reach the presence inside. I believed it was real, even though I felt only a hint of it occasionally. The spirituality texts I read seemed intuitively true – the Upanishads, The Way of Life by Lao Tzu, The Bhagavad Gita, and many books by Alan Watts. Even mystical Christianity and the New Thought of Unity and Religious Science talked extensively about the presence of god or spirit within.

I believed it was real; I just couldn’t figure out how to experience it.

Interestingly, my first experiences in feeling the presence were through psychedelic drugs, including as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT. That’s a rough way to feel the presence. For one, these drugs don’t always bring a sense of comfort or wellbeing. Some of these drug experiences can be frightening. Looking back, it seems odd to experience a mixture of the presence and outright terror. But indeed, that can happen.

Yet I am convinced the presence I felt on these drugs was real, even if the feeling of the presence came with a disquieting pinch of self destruction.

Drugs are drugs. They can blast the doors of perception open – as Aldus Huxley observed – but they leave behind a ragged legacy that’s often accompanied by painful anxiety. A couple friends of mine turned to heroin to relieve the uncomfortable after-edge of psychedelics. As you can imagine, that didn’t turn out well.

There are certainly healthier ways to bring about the awareness of the presence within consistently. In the next blog we’ll look at how you can reach the presence through meditation and breathing exercises.

The Place of Peace Within

Posted on by under fear, Oneness, peace, presence, spiritual awakening, Spirituality

There is a place within where there is no fear and no worry. There is a place that sooths the ragged edge of sorrow and takes away loneliness. A place where pain cannot enter.

Our lives are so easily filled with hand-wringing concerns as we dash from one problem to another, never fully solving the underlying anxiety. The worry and fear just moves from one difficulty to the next.

Some of us try to calm these fears and worries with prescription pills or alcohol. Or we try to extinguish the dark discomfort through escape into TV, into food. Some use sex and emotional attachment to find relief. The respite from the pain feels real, but the rough emotions return as the chemicals wear off or the escape comes to an end. The then darkness comes back stronger.

Some try to face these difficulties straight on, believing that problems are for solving, and to some extent they are. But how can you solve regrets, resentments, or the gnawing feeling that something is not right, that some trouble is about to encompass you?

We were not created to live in endless pain and fear. We are created to live in the realm of happiness, joy and freedom. Deep on our bones we know this. And yet the pain persists, leaving us with the bitter conclusion that happiness us not possible in this broken world. We may come to believe that we are what’s wrong and broken in the world.

From this sad place, it can be hard to let go and find the presence within, that place of wellbeing that is not an escape from life’s tangles but rather a returning to the acceptance and peace that is available to all of us. It is the essence of who we really are.

In the next blog, we’ll look at ways to reach the presence.

What Is the Presence Within?

Posted on by under nonduality, Oneness, presence, spiritual awakening, Spirituality

What do we mean when we talk about the presence within? The oneness. What does it feel like? How do we reach it?

The poet, Rumi, believes we live with a deep secret that sometimes we know, and then not. That secret is our connection to the divine – the presence.

In “The Mirror of Intimacy,” Alexandra Katehakis said, “Everything you perceive is your presence. Look deeply into every moment and perceive divine presence. Recognize each circumstance as having a particular bearing on your soul. Over time, this practice will bring you presence of mind and make manifest your own catalytic presence.”

There are many names for the presence within, many descriptions of it.

  • Om – The Buddhist and Hindu name that evokes the concepts of the oneness of God and the universal omnipresence of the creator deity.
  • Brahman – Hinduism, the super-present properties of the creator deity, Brahma, understood to manifest itself as light within the human being.
  • Divine countenance or the face of God – a metaphor for a close encounter with God.
  • The Holy Spirit in Christianity.
  • Immanence – a term for the presence used in mysticism.
  • Inner light – a term used in various religions to refer to the presence of God within.
  • Numen – a Latin term for the divine presence within.
  • Psychedelics can produce the feeling of the presence of God.
  • Shekhinah – Judaism’s term for a presence in a holy place called a tabernacle. The tabernacle represents the human body or being, and also refers to the presence of God within.
  • Theophany – the overt appearance of God to a person.
  • The Kingdom of God within – In Luke 17:21, Christ says the Kingdom of God is within us.
  • Higher consciousness – the higher the level of one’s consciousness, the closer to God.

The next blog will explain how we can reach the presence within and what it feels like when we experience it.

What Does Love Got to Do with It

Posted on by under love, Oneness, peace, presence, spiritual awakening, Spiritual light, Spirituality

I watched a panel discussion on YouTube with Eckhart Tolle and Ram Das that was recorded in October 2011 on Maui. The discussion by was great, but a funny thing happened at the beginning – the first question posed to these NOW gurus was about love.
The response was awkward. You can’t answer a question about love until you define the term, and that’s not easy. Tolle and Ram Das managed to get through the question, but it was not an easy navigation.
Love is such a troublesome word in spirituality – it comes with so much baggage. The notion, “all you need is love,” is fraught with misunderstandings about what love actually is.
So many times I’ve heard this statement by spiritual teachers: “When you strip away everything and get to the core of our true being, what you have is love.” What the heck does that mean?
Spirituality discussions work best with words like acceptance, presence, peace, well-being, or contentment. We have a general notion of what these words mean. Not so with “love.” Part of the problem is that love is commonly used as an action, such as “I love you” or “I feel loved.” Probably the closest synonym for love in spirituality is acceptance.
When you experience oneness, it is often described a feeling of acceptance. There are aspects of “love” that include acceptance, but a mother’s love or a father’s love is not necessarily acceptance. Romantic love with all its varieties, its passion, its insecurities, is rarely experienced as unconditional acceptance. Romantic love nearly always comes with a list of conditions.
When spiritual teachers use the word, love, they usually mean acceptance, for acceptance is a large part of our experience of the presence within.

Who Is Here You Are Now

Posted on by under nonduality, Oneness, spiritual awakening, Spirituality

I know that title here looks like it has a typo in it. Yet the awkward wording is intentional. What does it mean? I’m not sure. But I know one thing: our language does not lend itself to easily speaking or writing about deep spirituality, or what is referred to as nonduality.

Nonduality essentially means oneness. If there is oneness, there is not a subject and an object.

Alan Watts was the first teacher I read who questioned whether you can discuss nonduality in written or spoken English. Toward the end of the “The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are,” Watts concedes he can’t adequately describe nonduality because our object/subject language will not accommodate it. Many poets have tried to wrestle deeper meaning from English by defying conventional syntax.

The idea is to break syntax to open a hole in the language large enough for spirit to enter. Gertrude Stein said, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Robert Duncan also said it with the line: “There’s nothing inside but the inside inside.” Or anything by John Ashbery, such as this: “The music brought us what it seemed we had long desired, but in a form so rarefied there was no emptiness of sensation.”

Perhaps you could defy our language this way:

You not you who you are not here where you are not now.

Or this question:

We not I who we are not here – are we you not now as we are you here?

Maybe it’s nonsense. Maybe it’s an opening to nonduality speech.

You can sound it out, and it makes as much sense as looking at a photo of yourself and saying, “This is not me” and being correct (thanks Zak).

To crack open the language is to crack open the thinking. And if thought is the barrier to true vision, then the language needs to be cracked open.

 

The Presence Who You Are

Posted on by under Oneness, peace, presence, spiritual awakening, Spirituality, True self

What is the presence that we feel during spiritual moments? I’ve experienced this presence while using hallucinogens, while meditating, during spiritual meetings, out in the mountains, during marathon runs.

While it’s hard to explain the feeling of a presence, I’ll try. It can feel like a hum that is both inside and outside. A warmth. A sense of well being. Connectedness with – I don’t know – spirit, the divine, whatever you call the ethereal that seems more real than real. Connectedness with everything. Calm. The absence of anxiety. The absence of emotional pain. The absence of fear. Peace.

For many years I only experienced the presence in rare moments. Then, I reached the point when I could feel it pretty much whenever I meditated for more than five or ten minutes. My breathing would reach that place where it didn’t feel like breathing. My thoughts would grow quiet or go away altogether. And I would feel the presence.

For a very long time, I believed I was connecting to spirit (God, higher power, the angels, whatever). For a very long time, the feeling of the presence was proof to myself that the divine is here on earth, at hand, with us, available.

What I came to realize much, much later is that the presence was me. The real me. Not the little me walking around in the world bumping into stuff, hurting and getting hurt. The presence was who I was. Who I was was the presence. Going on and on and on and on.

That ended the intermittence. The presence elongated into everything. You are the presence, and I am the presence, and my dog is the presence, and this laptop is the presence. When I think that something is not the presence, my thoughts are mistaken. And on and on and on and on and on.

Who Needs Secret Knowledge?

Posted on by under Oneness, peace, presence, spiritual awakening, Spirituality

Making things simple can take a long time. We have pored over books, attended metaphysical services, classes, and workshops, met with advanced leaders only to discover that we are one with spirit and that spirit is here right now. The only special knowledge we need for that realization is the simple awareness that it’s true.

Be still and know that I am God. Or, be still and know you are one with the presence, and that presence is here now, always, and you cannot help but be one with the presence. There. No more books, no more services. No more classes, no more workshops.

Perhaps not quite so fast. In our daily lives, we can fall into the great forgetfulness. But lucky us, we can wake ourselves up again and again. A friend asked me, “How do you wake up? What’s the process?” We can use whatever brings up to awareness: meditation, prayer, chanting, stopping what we’re doing and paying attention to our surroundings, taking a walk, altering the pace of our breathing.

We experience peace in the wakefulness. I don’t know if our walking-around life gets better as we move to more wakefulness. I like to think it does, but that doesn’t really matter.

We can be of more use to others if we’re more conscious of the presence. In awareness, we can be of more use to ourselves in the world. Thankfully, drama dissipates – both the drama stirred up by our own little selves, and the drama of the world around us.

As we awaken, the world around us calms down. That makes it easier to be still and know that only the presence is real and I am one with the presence.

Is Faith Required for Peace?

Posted on by under peace, presence, spiritual awakening, Spirituality, True self

What do you need to believe in order to experience peace? Does faith take you there? Many use faith to find peace. They experience peace through faith. Have faith in God, and God will take away your troubles and calm your mind.

For many faith becomes a blanket of divine substance and calming protection.

Yet faith in things unseen is not required for peace. Peace is at hand, in all of us at all times. In your true essence, you are peace. When you let go of the world, peace is what remains.

You do not need a belief system to find peace.

We can experience peace in meditation. In the breathing. In the exhale and the pause before the inhale. Peace becomes a presence.

For a long time, I thought that presence was something outside myself. Something I was reaching. Or something that was reaching me. Spirit. God. The divine consciousness.

No. The presence is not something outside yourself that comes to visit, then goes away.

You are the presence. The presence is your true existence. Your essence. Connected to everything.

We don’t have to struggle to connect. We are connected. We don’t have to work to find peace. We are peace. All that is required is awareness. Not religion. Not a set of beliefs. Not faith.

Over time, the connectedness becomes easy to experience outside of meditation. For it is you in your essence, as close as anything you can experience. Intimate. Essential. Here now. In every breath.

You cannot get this peace wrong, for it is you, and it is always with you. The peace is you. Your troubles are not real. Your thoughts are not real. And yet, you don’t need to let go of your troubles or your thoughts to experience your essential peace. For it is you, here, now, and it cannot be otherwise.

Peace of Mind Is Not Peace

Posted on by under peace, spiritual awakening, Spirituality, True self

Most people believe calming the mind is the path to peace. Per the quotation by Mahatma Gandhi in my last post: “There is no ‘way to peace,’ there is only peace.” And peace is not in the mind.

Peace is all around us. Peace is our natural state. The mind is naturally busy with all of its worldly worries, excitements, and plans. Deeper inside each one of us is true peace, the eternal peace that goes on regardless of the comings and goings of the world.

In time we can begin to see that peace really isn’t inside us. It’s all around us, everywhere. It only seems deep inside because at times it can be so hard to find. In the past, I have gone years with no awareness of the natural peace within and without.

We can work on calming the mind and not find peace. We can have a very busy mind and still experience peace. The mind has nothing to do with peace. It doesn’t matter if we feel good, bad, or indifferent. We are in peace at all times. If we just realize it.

This is what Jesus meant when he said “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” and “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”

That’s peace, and it is always with you. It has nothing to do with your mind. Many of those in spirituality work to calm the mind in order to feel peace more fully. For many, working with meditation and breathing helps.

But the mind doesn’t have to be calm in order for you to experience peace. Peace is simply not of the mind. Calming the mind does not necessarily bring peace, and a noisy mind does not necessarily disturb peace. The mind is temporary, while peace is eternal.

What Is Peace?

Posted on by under peace, spiritual awakening, Spirituality

Definitions vary, but generally, peace of mind, serenity, and calmness are descriptions of a disposition free from the effects of stress or conflict. Many believe that inner peace is a state of consciousness or enlightenment that may be cultivated by various forms of training, such as prayer and meditation. Similarly, the state may be achieved through calming movement such as Tai Chi or yoga.

Buddhists believe that peace will be attained when all suffering ends. The idea is that suffering stems from cravings, aversions, or delusions. Leave these behind and you will experience peace.

Some call peace the absence of war or violence. Yet intuitively we know that peace more than the absence of something. Peace is a substance of its own.

Some believe peace comes through total involvement. Involvement distracts from the self. If you can let go of the self, you’ll experience peace. Yet you can’t find peace by simply distracting yourself from life. Virginia Woolf said, “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

The novelist Milan Kundera noted that “Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.”
Gautama Buddha put is most simply – and probably most correctly: “Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.”
As for seeking peace, Mahatma Gandhi said, “There is no ‘way to peace,’ there is only peace.”

I believe all of creation is peace. When we see creation as something other than peace, we experience something other than peace. If we let go of that misperception, we create space. Peace will fill that space unless we fill that space with something else.