the nature of all experience is happiness

the nature and substance
of all experience
is Happiness
(sat-chit-ananda)

by going in towards the ‘substance’ of Consciousness
–  through the portal of What Am I? –
we find the irreducible essence of our Beingness,
…Inner Peace…

then, through a full embrace of life,
the avenues of sensation, thought, perception,
begin to express this beatitude –
they resonate with the light of joy, their source.

these mind-objects find their natural place when they are celebrated as secondary to the reality that perceives them:

concepts are helpful and can be beautiful for what they’re worth;
and yet they all are, eventually, grist for the mill…
never completely true, always immediately offering themselves to the Silence of the present.

body-sensations can be an expression of unknowable wonder,
and can present another path Home;
and yet, sensation is always supplementary to the raw being of consciousness.

sense perceptions offer us the beauty of witnessing the world from a locality in space-time,
and they too can be followed back to the infinite ground in a movement of Love;
and yet, just as we know that all ‘this’ will fade,
this world and our present perception of it is but a brief sojourn in the eye of Siva –

a blink and it’s —

~

so it is Happiness, our real nature,
that is our Eternal home-ground –
waiting to be rediscovered.

and, always, Happiness is our present play-ground,
in this world of form (even if we briefly seem to have forgotten),

Happiness is our Nature

Now, forever, and

moment
to moment

to moment.

what does consciousness ask

this infinite consciousness,
completely whole,
absolute,
imperturbable,
that wants and needs nothing beyond itself:

what does it ask of ‘me’?

well…
first of all,
it asks of this moment,
that it should be.

exactly as it is:
not one iota out of place.

the entire cosmos has aligned exactly for this, right now…
there are no independent entities that could have affected the circumstances…
this very experience, without exception, is the providence of a universal will.

there is only one reality,
and it flows as the freedom of life’s movement,
its natural intelligence.

…but of ‘me’ – this body and mind…?

it’s a good question.

I would suggest that first
life asks us all to open to a possibility
beyond ‘me as a separate entity’.

that doesn’t always come in the form of an explicit spiritual search –
though the spiritual search is, as I see it, the culmination of freedom from the belief in separation.

it can come in service, for instance:
doing something that lies beyond the fringes of self-interest..

it can come in creativity:
creating something new, which always come from outside-the-box of the ego…

it can come in simple ways:
a smile to a stranger, a good meal with friends, a moment of laughter…

ways and moments of freedom,
ultimately of happiness,
these are where we are all directed,
is it not?

so, what does consciousness ask of me?

it asks us to, first, discover the happiness of living impersonally…
and that is the destiny for everyone.

and then…who knows…there is no agenda…

this impersonality emerges in time and space through the form of each of us –
and we owe this opportunity of existence as individuals to the reality we are –

Life didn’t make a mistake in putting you here!

perhaps the question why am I here?
has no literal answer.

but the fact is, we are here…
and this moment is its own purpose…

so:
what does consciousness ask?

only consciousness could answer…
and it does, and will, through the way this
very life
moves through you
and your life –
an individual, beautiful expression
of cosmic creativity.

backdrop and foreground

consciousness is both the backdrop and the foreground player upon the stage of life…

however, experience can be subdivided into the phenomenal and the noumenal.

the phenomenal is that which dances, acts, plays, and moves,
that which is witnessed, that which is perceived as objective existence,
that which lives and is born and will die,
it is consciousness-in-motion.

ruled by the metres of time and space, the phenomenal is the realm of the body/mind.

the noumenal is that which perceives, the ultimate reality,
that which never comes and never goes,
that which is limitless, boundless, eternal and free,
the true, imperturbable self,
empty of concept, percept, or object;
it is the absolute, it is unshakability itself,
it is that which truly is and which will never cease to be,
it is consciousness-at-rest.

unruled by any limit or form, the noumenal is the realm of consciousness, Brahman.

~

yoga means to yoke, to tie together, to bind.

these two realms – objective phenomena and non-objective infinity, are yoked in our sadhana through the exercise of conscious yoga: the permeation of the non-dual understanding through the body…and into all other realms…

it is the body that is the bridge from the limitless into the time-bound.

so the true non-dual yoga (as I see it) is first to understand, and then to feel.

understand your reality as infinite Consciousness,
and feel the present sensation as the doorway into the unknowable.

…without agenda, give yourself to the felt-sense of Now…

in other words…

know yourself as infinity;
feel yourself as the expanse of this moment…

the rest lies in the hands of the unseen.

consciousness is non-conceptual

consciousness is not conceptual –
but concepts are not unhelpful…
in the discovery
and subsequent delivery
of peace and happiness
into the life of a jivan-mukta…

for instance:

‘pure Beingness’,
‘absolute wholeness’,
‘Love (capital L)’

these are concepts …
and yet they point the mind towards the heart of Awareness (reality itself).

(and, too, they each bring with them distinguishable ‘spiritual perfumes’ that can bridge this realm and the unknowable beyond (the non-phenomenal)).

grace’s messenger

life, reality, being, consciousness, the Absolute – all these words are simply pointers which move the mind towards a contemplative dissolution into peace, its home-ground…and eventually into the nameless splendour of What We Really Are.

don’t get hung up on the words! the intellectual use of higher reasoning in non-duality can be important and helpful – to bring the mind to its edge so to speak, from where grace takes it beyond; and we find ourselves open to the unknown realms of infinity.

but what’s more important is this moment, life, is You, is this beatific opportunity we have to celebrate the human form…for a little while, as we choose to…

every moment is an opportunity to connect to a deeper Intelligence, seemingly, for every moment is a messenger brought from the hand of the unseen, the mother of all grace.

dissolution into being

when this moment of perception is allowed to be exactly as it is,
when all resistance to this experience, right now, is surrendered,
there is a dissolution into Being.

in open listening, an object becomes fully expressed and resolves itself back into the Heart, where time and timelessness are indistinguishable…

any perception can be fully welcomed,
but it seems to often be the perception of the body
that is most available for this resolution.

the felt-sensation expands, intensifies, dissolves, and finally points back to the Silence from which it came. it’s a non-conceptual exploration and it happens in the genuine and total openness to the perceived element.

eventually,
without preconceived notions,
without conceptualizing,
without putting life into a mental framework,
and without assumptions about the way it should be,
there is only ‘naked’ perception,
resolved of duality.

is there even perception at all?

the doorway is always open to this allowing of consciousness;
and any perception is a vehicle to the Presence of its reality.
Presence-as-itself is, by nature, always here and now.

in reality, there is no change; any duality between consciousness and its elements is only implied and never directly experienced. however, in the deciphering of experience through a tool of limitation (e.g. a human mind), the Silence of Awareness seems to be divisible into multiplicity…and it is through this apparent expression of an object perceived (e.g. present moment sensation) that the doorway opens towards the resolution of appearances back into the unknowable.

befriending the mind

a transcript from another video…

befriending the mind

your thoughts appear to you.
in fact they appear within you,
they appear within your presence, your consciousness, your Self.

in fact they are made of that same consciousness,
because whatever arises in consciousness is made of it.

so theres no friction or conflict possible between a thought and consciousness,
because consciousness is like this welcoming space,
and all the thoughts that come are welcomed within it, there’s no…resistance.

the thoughts appear and they dissolve within your self,
they’re like balloons in the sky –
here one minute gone the next…

and often thinking is very joyful,
it’s very fun to think,
it’s celebratory to think of what you are or something practical –
so those thoughts are fine;

the only challenging thoughts are the ones that make us suffer.
ultimately the way to uproot those thoughts is to investigate what you really are,
because if you remove your beliefs about what it is your thoughts are talking about,
if you are not that to which your thoughts are aggressing,
then you’re free.

so to be free from the suffering thoughts
is to be free from the beliefs that they are based upon.
and of course the root belief there is the belief to be a limited consciousness or a limited being.

you don’t choose your thoughts,
you can notice that –
they come to you and there’s even a big freedom in fact in just noticing that you don’t choose your thoughts,
even though often it feels like you do – but,
to know that you never chose your thoughts…
it frees you from the belief that you’re guilty of anything problematic.

your thoughts are life acting through you,
and your actions and relationships are all spun from there –
so it’s really life living through you.

in terms of befriending the mind, I think we should think of befriending the body,
because if the body’s happy the mind has a home.
and that includes all kinds of areas,
including the relationship to the sensation of the moment –
to welcome it in that same space that welcomes all the thoughts.

consciousness is this welcoming space.

so perhaps the key to befriending the mind is welcoming the mind,
and in fact welcoming all the elements of our experience because
that, whether we know it or not, is the position of consciousness
towards all the things that arise.

movement of life

this is the transcript from a video I made today…

this reality has an element of knowing to it.

we may not know what life is,
and far be it for any person to say they do –
but, nevertheless, there is this knowing element of experience:
experience is known.

what is it that knows life?

sometimes it’s called consciousness.
but consciousness just means ‘whatever’s conscious’; which means ‘whatever knows’.
so, consciousness isn’t really a word that tells us a lot,
other than the fact that there is the presence of something that’s conscious.

but we could say that Life is, reality is;
that’s true, because there is Being,
there is Life, there is Reality,
if only in the fact that we are aware of it…

~

there’s this movement:
the movement of Life held within the infinite silence of its own Being,
you could say that poetically.

really, it’s a mystery.
there’s lots we don’t know.
I mean, what do we really know?

consciousness consciousness consciousness
that’s very effective at deconstructing beliefs that obstruct Peace,
but what do we really know?

we know that we are aware, for sure.
we know that awareness is real.
experientially there is one reality (and logically too),
but apart from that, look there’s just…

this moment, this expanse of the texture of life,
this is all just kind of painting a picture because we don’t know,
I mean, look –
~

so what’s the balance between knowing and not-knowing?

we can’t deny that we know consciousness, to do so would be madness.
but we can know that we don’t know anything else, in a matter of speaking.

all we can know is our consciousness, and even that…isn’t for the mind,
it’s: consciousness knows consciousness,
the rest is –
dynamic, it’s incredible, it’s a wonderful mystery that there is anything.

look, there’s something!

~

but the Peace
the Peace that we seek
is in the heart of what we really are.

you can ‘unveil’ that through questioning your beliefs earnestly and uncompromisingly.

and then the rest,
there is no rest –
there’s just…
life continues to…
to do what life does.

but there is an end to suffering.

you could say that the most natural experience is that of Love.
it’s always natural because it’s about taking off the armour instead of putting on something.

resisting less, avoiding less,
Being.

a story of recovery and reality

The non-dual understanding can be the dawning of a new kind of health. It is a health that might not look the way we expect, or think, nor might it look the way our society projects that it should. It is, first and foremost, the health of true happiness – that is, a happiness that is not dependent upon the state of the body or of the mind. This health is a release from the habitual patterns that block our natural and harmonious relationship with our environment, freeing us from attachment to the ups and downs of the objective realm.

Any perspective on the past is relative – what we can say about it is never absolutely true nor entirely accurate. Stories are for the individual, and our experiences are always subject to the uniqueness of our body/minds. Nonetheless, a story can help us reframe our experiences, and it is in a simple effort to find a new relationship to the past that I write a little bit about my own here:

“It hit me like the flu – I can remember the exact moment I realized something was off. I was at a patio party in Montreal, I was 19, and all of a sudden, I was struck by some kind of psychic lightning bolt, and everything went dark. It’s hard to describe that…at the same time, I was dealing with the emotional intensity and the demands of an acting degree, and that shadow that I had been hit with at some point exploded into something of a whirlwind of aggressive energy. Soon, I believed I had to run barefoot to the airport to fly to South Africa and be reborn as a lion. I was put on some meds and I soon started to function better, and somehow I even managed to finish the degree. That was the first of several trials of that same kind over the next handful of years. I was being doggedly followed by a spectre of some kind, until, finally, I befriended the one who needed to be heard.”

That was my story – at least, part of it. Perhaps it doesn’t need to be a big deal anymore. Some people seem to find the resolution of their story in the world, or in their art, or in something else, somehow – to each their own. For me, it seems, ‘recovery’ was really in the dispelling of spiritual ignorance – and absolution was always going to be in the real knowing and being of infinite consciousness.

~

There is a primary element of experience, one that is independent from all illness and all health and all the rest. The spiritual possibility, as suggested by sages of all eras, is that what we are all really looking for – Happiness – belongs to another order, another dimension of reality than all the phenomena we perceive. That dimension is always present, for it is the dimension of the real Self. It is consciousness, and it is the guiding force of our lives…and we are in good hands…

sensation and consciousness

the reality of the body is consciousness.

whether we think of the body as the current, present-moment sensation,
or as the physical, biological body we have inherited as our vehicle through this realm of form, its reality is always consciousness – for consciousness is the one reality of all appearances, regardless of whatever ways we consider or subdivide the relative.

reclaiming the body as an expression of universal consciousness involves merging the two seemingly disparate realms of sensation and consciousness.

consciousness is the presence that perceives experience,
always unaffected by the appearances it displays within itself,
and is not a sensation nor is it limited by any sensation.

sensation is just the body-of-the-moment stripped of any psychological storyline,
it’s an ever-changing, raw, evolving expression of the mysterious intelligence of form.

the bridge between these two worlds (sensation and consciousness) is ultimately poetic and free from logic, but we could say this merging involves both:
knowing ourselves as the infinite presence and
unknowing our preconceptions about our expressive limits.

it is an offering of sensation to the altar of experience,
with the grace that allows and unfolds sensation moment-to-moment as the guide.

as the body becomes more integrated into the experience,
the sensory body becomes more and more consciousness-like.

it feels spacious, transparent, luminous, and free;
and in its natural expanse it is felt as undifferentiated from the consciousness that perceives it.

in the experience of the limitless sensory body,
yoga turns back into meditation,
and the body no longer obstructs or distracts from the experience of pure consciousness.
non-duality is known in both immanence and transcendence.

it’s not that sensation stops;
it continues to express deeper layers – and that journey never has to end.

if there is interest, the accent can always be placed on the body-sensation, the yoga of the moment. you can live through this yoga, and it remains an expression of non-duality, having understood the infinite reality of consciousness.