“I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not;
I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is.
So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.
I think it worked.”
Joseph Campbell
This article includes a list of inconclusive observations and personal experiences that didn’t fit in the Consciousness Sutras. Many of these ideas are partial understandings, yet, they may be helpful for future researchers and explorers. My internal process, while I was doing the research, was very intense, as, for many years, I allowed Life to flow through me almost freely, so that I could observe the ‘unconscious’ mechanisms/drives (pulsions) and adjust myself later on, while I was in connection with that specific flow, so that I could watch if these natural flows could be influenced, modified or changed through conscious interventions.
I have done hundreds of ‘trial and error’ experiments with myself, some with outstanding results and some with temporary catastrophic consequences for my balance (and my social image). In the end, it all went well (or, as well as possible).
I know some explorations are a bit ‘politically-spiritually incorrect’, as I have tried to look with new eyes at ‘taboo topics’, to understand what is happening and how. My quest was to decrypt their mechanisms, identify the natural-psychological processes, and offer a fresh perspective on these topics.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Interpersonal/Relational Topics
Interpersonal empathy, degrees of exchanges, and my research methodology.
Bacterial exchanges and interpersonal influences.
‘All is welcome’.
‘Normalization’ of emotions and social perception of fast-growth mindset.
Misconceptions about cognitive biases and their evolutionary purpose.
If I did only one therapeutic ‘intervention’, what would that be?
II. Toward a Therapy that Facilitates Awakenings
Is it possible to invite an awakening?
– ‘Transmissions’
– ‘Join my awakened presence’
– ‘Let’s try something new’
– ‘Let me show you something new’
– ‘Identify this in yourself’
– ‘Soul-mate love channel’
Analytic solutions (talk therapy) vs. awakening paths.
How to deal with fears?
Safety vs. freedom. The myth of ‘every flower blooms in its own time’.
Connecting with the core/source, and why knowing that ‘thinking is a post-event reflection’ is essential.
Flow states vs. awakened aliveness.
Awakening is not a one-time action; it’s a process.
III. Vasanas and Desires
Can we really ‘liberate’ ourselves from desires?
Is ‘desire’ rooted in our body? Sexuality and sex/polar principle in the Universe.
‘We become karma-eating machines, offering cellular forgiveness’.
The harmonically-integrated ‘desires’.
I. Interpersonal/Relational Topics
Interpersonal empathy, degrees of exchanges, and my research methodology.
Is there such a thing as complete empathy? If the ‘target’ of attention is another human being, what can we perceive from that person? In Yoga Sutras, Patanjali mentions that one mind cannot know another mind, because this will generate an intermixing of memories; but, through witnessing awareness (‘the seer’), we can participate in some parts of other people’s minds and patterns. I can testify that this is valid; I have done some experiments where I allow my spatial awareness to expand and include other persons’ fields, using various attunement channels. For me, this process was not about feeling the other person’s feelings, but rather a journey through their patterns, configurations, and attentional mechanisms, while I allowed myself to take the shape of that person (I described some mechanisms in the case study on depth perception, included in the Consciousness Sutras book, also available online https://www.consciousness-quotient.com/depth-perception-space-awareness-and-other-visual-explorations).
So, let’s take two individuals, and consider the three body layers: physical, energy, and information. When two people interact, to exchange something, there must be an energy resonance channel active, so that that information can flow. In my view, this is the main exchange process between two humans: when there is an energy resonance, information about the patterns can be exchanged easily, if the receiver allows the exchange (consciously or unconsciously).
But also, we need to think about information-to-information layer exchanges, without any specific energy synchrony, because “Energy and information are related but independent, so the dynamical restrictions for one cannot be derived from those for the other […]. When energy and information are exchanged between two systems, the dynamics of energy exchange does not uniquely determine the information exchanged.” (from ‘The Deep Physics Behind the Second Law: Information and Energy As Independent Forms of Bookkeeping’, https://arxiv.org/ftp/cond-mat/papers/0501/0501014.pdf). I haven’t explored too much this type of connectivity; all I can say from my observations is that, usually, detecting a ‘pure’ information-to-information exchange is quite hard, as these exchanges tend to happen unconsciously, very deep, and outside our possibility to monitor it. At this level, we are talking about a collective information ecosystem, which for sure is here, unfolding in all of us, but ‘how’ and ‘what’ is transferred in an interpersonal connection, that is an enigma, for the moment.
For practical reasons, I would consider these degrees of interpersonal empathy (including emotional, cognitive, and exchanges related to perspective-taking and self-identity patterns):
– empathetic resonance (some ability to mimic/intuit/imagine other person’s experiences, to put in others’ shoes, using what we know about their personality and human psychology).
– empathic resonance (the ability to resonate partially with what the other person is experiencing, not just ‘imagine’ what the other person feels/thinks/experiences).
– ‘samyama/absorption’ (complete non-discriminative fusion, the ability to allow a full connection); full samyama implies that the person has a high ability to allow themselves to resonate (a high entrainment quotient), and also the ability to take the shape of the other person and allow everything that comes from the connection.
But how aware can we be, and how much can we decrypt from other people’s content? It’s pretty easy to ‘detect’ what is ‘mine’ and what is ‘not mine’. To understand ‘what is not mine’ is not so easy, but it’s possible, partially.
I have used visual dream-states to explore how deep I can go. During the research, I noticed that to use this method, I have to be close to the pre-conscious/automatic H-band processing, or partially immersed in it.
From Consciousness Sutras:
143. In dream-like visual configurations, it is possible to access the H-band, the pre-conscious adaptive processing. The H-layer contains information at the brink of associations that may further develop (or not) as patterns, which later enter the conscious experience. The attentional configuration that is useful for attending to the H-band is the global-objective style.
In this layer, the information from that person is mixed with other pieces of information, and discrimination is based on practice, not on some rules that can apply every time. To keep my attention connected to the person I wanted to understand, while I was immersed in this sea of information, sometimes I used any energy ‘attraction’ I had to that person as clues. The flavor of that person, in other words, or rather, what flavor that person generated in me. It’s quite synesthetic, but it works in many cases. As the information is visual in dream-like states, I need a flowing pattern to ‘tune into’ the information that belongs to the other person.
But this doesn’t work all the time. My receptivity depends on many other things, such as how dense was the day, how dense my transformative flows were at that moment, how connected with Nature I was at that time vs. how social I was, and how biased I was by other people and their unconscious assumptions about me, at the time I was doing the introspection. This was the side effect I had to take care of: getting lost in other people’s unconscious.
Fortunately, I had an active witnessing awareness while I was doing the investigations, and this allowed me to reflect and examine the effects of the interactions later, as the information was available as memories in my inner art sessions.
Exploring people’s unconscious processing was highly relevant to my research on conscious experience; it was one of the primary tools I used while I tried to differentiate between collective and personal patterns, and observe how the collective patterns influence the personal subjective experience. Still, the only way that seemed to have the least amount of biases appeared to be this two-stage process:
– first, I had to immerse myself in the unconscious processing of the people I was interacting with, and allow myself to react naturally to their inputs;
– second, I self-reflected on what happened and modified some parts of my future interaction style (adding a ‘variable’), so that in the next interaction with that person, I could isolate the effects of the ‘variable’ on their psyche and watch how this ‘variable’ influences the conscious-unconscious dynamics in them and me.
In this way, I could experience in myself most of the topics I wrote about in the Consciousness Sutras, and only after I repeated a few times the same experiments with the same variable I considered the conclusion about collective mechanisms to be relevant, and I wrote them down as field notes. Also, I checked my observations with other researchers’ insights, multiple times, to see their perspectives on that specific topic.
Usually, I tested the same variable with various people to verify that it was a collective pattern, not a subjective configuration. After a while, I could see these collective conscious-unconscious dynamics in everyone. Through this process, I could confirm some well-known psychological facts about inner evolution and developmental stages, and detect nuances in some patterns and processes. Later, while compiling my field notes, I tried to do my best to describe the new patterns/nuances I encountered (that were not mentioned by previous psychological research), and assign labels to these patterns. The Consciousness Sutras include the result of these explorations.
I have to say, there were many moments where I got partially lost in people’s unconscious, and I had to dedicate many inner art sessions to clean up my psyche and align myself with the dis-harmonic configurations I encountered.
Especially challenging were the researches on delusions, paranoia, psychosis, spiritual emergencies, traumas, and the explorations of feminine/masculine polarity (and the unconscious ‘sexuality’ embedded in these connections).
For example, the last trauma I studied, while being in a personal relationship with a woman, was a childhood trauma known as ‘intermittent reinforcement’, which creates a ‘performative interface’ in people, as a coping mechanism. This configuration seemed so unreal and unbelievable that I almost lost my self-identity in the H-band, while trying to understand its mechanisms. Fortunately, one of my friends dedicated a few months of discussions, and we had approx. 100 email exchanges, that supported me while I was going through the process.
A resource that has proven helpful was a blog post titled ‘Intermittent Reinforcement And Toxic Gratitude – Being grateful for crumbs thrown at us in a relationship damages our mental well-being’.
https://www.mindkindmom.com/intermittent-reinforcement-toxic-gratitude.
Also, this article was relevant to me:
‘Trauma Is Not an Excuse – It may be an explanation. But it’s not a free pass to harm others.’
https://pcadelaware.org/news/2022/5/2/trauma-is-not-an-excuse.
This study’s beauty was discovering the pure core of this person’s being, below the ‘performative interface’, so pure that it reorganized my entire inner configuration in an amazing way. And, as a ‘thank you’ gift for the experience, I compiled this article for the trauma researchers: https://www.consciousness-quotient.com/experiential-methods-to-release-psychosomatic-traumatic-imprints-and-generate-instant-reconsolidation-of-memory.
I know it’s a lot of psychological work to align the effects of the traumas. Still, I hope in the future, the ‘awakening-like’ methods I described in the paper, inspired by my journeys with Ayahuasca, will be used to shorten the therapy and reduce the suffering of people who have experienced traumas.
Bacterial exchanges and interpersonal influences.
Through the years, I have observed how the microbiome (bacteria) from my intimate partner changed my energy body layer, and my mind, for some time. Initially, I thought I was hallucinating, but it turned out that there was some influence from this external microbiome. This topic was also fascinating to explore; for some time, I had recurrent urinary tract infections, caused either by my low immunity, or a few times by the bacteria taken from my new intimate partner. I noticed that during those weeks, my mind was more creative and prone to consider new possibilities. Then, after the antibiotic treatment reduced the number of bacteria, my mind would have a reduced creativity (and less chaos).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28221900
“Observational studies demonstrated that acute episodes of psychosis could be linked to infections due to bacteria, viruses and protozoa among other pathogens, with improvement of the psychiatric symptoms when the intercurrent infection was resolved.”
Because the DNA of bacteria is far more complex than human DNA, and they mutate inside the individual bodies (creating a highly particular microbiome for each person), we need to consider how these bacterial exchanges influence interpersonal exchanges.
I observed that the bacteria from the intimate partner felt like an ‘intrusion’ in my psyche, and my mind (information processing) tends to form new styles of associations, that were not active when I was in hermit mode. I only explored this phenomenon through the infection with Ureaplasma urealyticum. But I am not sure that the new information-association style was related to my partner’s bacteria. It may be that her microbiome influenced my microbiome and destabilized it temporarily. So, I cannot say for sure what caused what; perhaps it’s a ‘both/and’ situation, and this is the point where I stopped with my observations and explorations.
‘All is welcome’.
Say, I have 100 conscious channels open; how to interact with a person with 70 conscious channels available? Or vice-versa? This question arose in me many times. The main issue is that the remaining 30 channels are unconscious in someone who hasn’t done personal development.
From my research, it seems that any attempt to interact consciously using any of these 30 channels (that are non-conscious in the other person) would activate some form of ego defense mechanisms in the other person, followed by emotional reactions. They can be positive if the person is interested in exploring their unconscious, or adverse reactions if they don’t want to go there.
Here is an exercise if you are curious: love someone from inside their shadow, do something they are afraid to do, or touch-love a part of their body they reject or don’t like/love, and you will see what I mean when I talk about ego defense mechanisms.
A path that worked was a personal relationship, where we agreed to a complete reciprocal trust, which facilitated a fast co-evolution within both, my partner and me. It happened that we had some complementarity: she had a set of conscious channels open that were not conscious in me, and I had another set of channels that were not conscious in her.
‘All is welcome’ also works well in a master/guru-disciple relation, sometimes in a soul-mate connection (where the other is felt as me), or in various ‘adoration’ relational styles, when there is this high acceptance, and the need for freedom is more important than the need for safety.
These discussions on Quora seemed interesting:
https://www.quora.com/When-youre-enlightened-what-effect-does-your-presence-have-on-other-people
https://www.quora.com/It-is-said-that-an-enlightened-person-can-identify-another-enlightened-person-easily-is-this-true
The biases I identified in these discussions are related to the misunderstanding of ‘enlightenment’ (sometimes, it is considered a static one-time experience). To remove this bias from the conceptual analyses, I prefer to use the framework ‘awakening journeys’ instead of ‘enlightenment’ and explore awakenings as fluid experiences. This conceptual choice is based on experiential observations, confirmed by almost all the people that went through awakening experiences: becoming awake doesn’t change anything in the habituated self-identity patterns; people need to do the psychological work to integrate the new awakeness skills into a functional personality/structure and become a harmonic human being.
From Consciousness Sutras:
169. It may be that conscious experience itself is just a layer of Life’s intelligence, which uses sophisticated feedback loops and adds an additional layer of processing to the adaptive processing already taking place in all Life on Earth. Conscious intelligence is evolving throughout all species, at various rates.
175. In our collective evolution, the next global shift, after conscious intelligence, may be the expansion of harmonic intelligence, which includes ‘harmonic resonance’ and ‘synchronization’ as essential skills. Conscious harmonic resonance skills are already emerging in humans.
176. What will happen when conscious harmonic resonance evolves to its full potential, in all three layers of our body: physical, energy, and information? There may already be a word for this vibrational harmony: satcitānanda—harmonic existence and truth, harmonic conscious awareness, and harmonic enstatic bliss. And maybe the path is spanda—harmonic synchrony with the primordial vibration of the universe.
‘Normalization’ of emotions and social perception of fast-growth mindset.
This was one of the issues that I encountered in my social interactions. As I don’t ‘normalize’ my emotional reactions, each interaction with me seemed different, and people could not ‘fixate’ on a static image of me (n.b.. a few people I interacted with thought I am bipolar or I have some emotional issues because of this emotional ‘spontaneity’; this also occurred because I alternated ‘hermit mode’ with ‘social mode’ many times, and when I was entering the social world after a social break, I had an ‘unusual’ enthusiasm when meeting people).
I tried to ‘normalize’ myself when I had some ‘professional-business’ encounters, but my ‘fake-ness’ was detected many times. This remains a problem in social contexts: I can’t be authentic (because I look weird), and I can’t fake it. It’s like, dodge this, Neo. There are no solutions, except accepting the situation and moving on. Still, the no-option situation is disturbing
Nb., besides ‘weird’, I used to get various other labels, sometimes contradictory, depending on what people I interacted with saw in me; e.g., narcissist, modest, superiority complex, inferiority complex, impostor syndrome, no empathy, genius, bipolar, borderline, highly sensitive, possessed by various bad/good deities from symbolic worlds, crazy, enlightened, normal, liar, straightforward, awake, not awake, hidden, truthful, PTSD, shapeshifting reptilian, etc. I suppose this happened because my self-identity is quite fluid, and people tend to ‘fixate’ on some streams flowing through me. And, because I have many unusual or rare streams, these tend to attract their attention, and then these pieces of information coagulate in their mind, based on their expectations, fears, awareness ‘lenses’, or other conscious/unconscious patterns. Also, as I studied many of these ‘rare’ flows/configurations through samyama, I do have information in me related to all these streams.
The beauty, though, is that in personal/intimate connections, my life partners never felt bored with me, each interaction was based on present-moment stuff, and each day was new. Eventually, after they figured out that I flow and have some patterns of flowing through Life, they could grasp my being and see that everything was ok.
Here is an example related to social perception: when I discussed with some people and tried to explain that there is more in their being than just mind, ego, or self-identity patterns… sometimes I got the label ‘gas-lighting’. And for some time, I wondered, I am really gaslighting people? But after a while, I realized that the entire nondual-neoAdvaita movement is doing the same thing to their followers. The phrase ‘You are living in a dream world’ is inescapable if we are to be straightforward to people who are on automatic pilot.
Another relational issue: describing ‘5D objects/perspectives’ using ‘linear’ 4D/3D/2D sentences and meanings, when talking about my ideas. Every time I tried to describe multidimensional psychological realities to people who don’t have the same level of multidimensionality, I needed to unfold the meaning/perspective to a version that could be seen, and the unfolding was in tune with the listener. And this was perceived by some people as a weird communication stuff, or as if I was a compulsive liar. In other words, the issue was not having the same perspective on a topic, in subsequent discussions with the same person. And also, while for some years I had a high inner evolution rate, it happened that in a discussion I had a perspective on a topic, and in the next interaction, maybe a few months later, I had a different one. Imagine the effects on a person with a ‘static’ mindset…
The only socially-reasonable choice here is not to talk about ‘something’ that people haven’t experienced yet. Still, this would mean denying my evolutionary tendency to support people. In Consciousness Sutras book, I tried to incorporate this multidimensionality through various methods, e.g., sometimes providing a part of the perspective in a chapter and the other part in another chapter, so that the readers could get the information at a pre-conscious level at the first reading. Later on, if needed, their mind would assemble the perspective and provide the required experiential understanding.
Misconceptions about cognitive biases and their evolutionary purpose.
Assumption, projection, confirmation bias, jumping to conclusions… and the list of ‘irrational’ things we do continues indefinitely.
In my research on intuition and insights, I have observed that these cognitive biases are ‘knowing’ mechanisms, they are healthy and valuable when I am in Nature, and Nature provides the missing parts so that we can get an as-correct-as-possible view or opinion about something, or someone. If I am in hermit mode, these mechanisms are beneficial and provide perfect fill-in-the-whole information. When I am in social contexts, these mechanisms become unbalanced by people’s projection onto me, and the insight mechanisms become unbalanced, providing wrong outputs.
From a larger perspective, adding the evolution of Life on Earth in the overall perspective, these irrational parts of us have a useful purpose. They provide fast conclusions to various situations we are in, based on our root tendencies.
If we look at this topic from a non-dual perspective, when interacting with someone, can we say that this is mine and this is theirs, or this is ours? In my research, exploring cognitive biases was helpful, as I could detect and adjust some of the tendencies that were not ok. But overall, these cognitive biases are just an effect of Life flowing through us. As we, as a species, as very primitive, these fast-thinking mechanisms are highly biased. And, because they are deeply rooted in our psyche and embedded in psychosomatic resonance patterns, we cannot do much about them. In my view, as our species evolves and the noosphere becomes more and more harmonic, the biases will become less and less active, until, at one point in our evolution, they will disappear completely.
When will that happen, or will it ever happen? Who knows. But I can see this trend: as conscious intelligence evolves, harmonic intelligence will also evolve, and root tendencies, running now as ‘irrational’ flows inside us, will become more in-tune with Life.
If I did only one therapeutic ‘intervention’, what would that be?
Years ago, while I was a teacher at university, I did an experiment that later shifted my counseling style and my explorations. I wondered, if I could do only one intervention in a counseling/mentoring session, what would that intervention be, what would that ‘one advice’ be?
To test this, I organized a one-hour individual session with all the students who wanted to enroll in the experiment. I had around 10 people when I started. During our conversation, I tried to empathize with them, and observe what the misalignments were. Then, by replicating their psyche inside me, I tried to figure out one ‘modification’ in their attitude and behavior, looking for a modification in their psyche that could be accepted, and if put in practice, it would create a ripple effect, generating the most substantial changes and a better harmonic structure. The challenge was finding an ‘advice’ that wouldn’t activate their ego defense mechanisms.
In the initial experiment, only one person did what I suggested: “say I love you to your father”. And the results were as expected. When we met after a while, she mentioned that the action I suggested worked well.
In the years after this initial experiment, I refined my techniques, so that the advice would not be just an action, but also a perspective. For some years, I inserted these two types of interventions in casual discussions; after they consented to the experiment, I invited them to do an action or take a new perspective. The results are partially included in the next chapter of this article.
But, after a while, this style became so embedded in my conversational style, that I had to do some personal work to remove it from my conversational structure.
II. Toward a Therapy that Facilitates Awakenings
Is it possible to invite an awakening?
First, take a look at chapter three from Consciousness Sutras:
https://www.consciousness-quotient.com/consciousness-sutras-principles-of-becoming-conscious/
These are the sutras that are relevant for this topic:
67. Awakenings are natural evolutionary processes, each one making a specific contribution to the collective self-reflection process. People all over the world have the same types of openings/awakenings, with a subjective flavor added by their preferred frames of reference.
68. There are various types of openings that can be described as awakenings. An awakening is an opening to new ways of functioning, providing new ways of being alive and connected with Life.
———
Here are some examples of awakening journeys: Awakening from the collective culture-civilization hypnosis; The ‘I am’ experience: activation of the witnessing awareness; Conscious embodiment – the reconnection with the body energy and body perceptions; Awakening to the energy flows and kundalini awakening; Vibrational awakenings: from erotic to ecstatic, enstatic and beyond; Interconnectedness awakening – the shift from individual to collective awareness; Awakening the heart and the experience of unconditional love as deep resonance; Awakening of the multidimensional awareness; Consciously using automatic perspective mechanisms to create a framework for conscious awareness content; Flow awareness and the modulation of life events; Inner eye vision: merging of the inner mental space with the real physical space; Entheogenic awakenings; Awakening the voice; The overview effect; Space awareness (spaciousness, spatial/depth perception); Awakening the passion of being (awakened aliveness); Spiritual awakening; Embracing the curiosity for Life; Information awakening; Harmonic resonance awakening.
The appendix describing the awakening journeys is available here:
https://www.consciousness-quotient.com/psychology-of-becoming-conscious-awakening-journeys/
69. In time, if this new opening is cultivated and consciously nurtured, it becomes an awakeness skill. In other words, it creates a habit (it habituates), supported by the neuroplasticity of the brain. After these neuroplasticity processes occur, the person can use the new awakeness skill without investing much attention. It becomes automated, thus creating the conditions for the next step in evolution.
70. Each person creates meaning from these natural openings based on their worldview. The individual’s interpretation of these natural evolutionary processes is biased by their meaning-making structures, due to the inherent limitations of the language used by each framework (e.g., spiritual, philosophical, religious, pseudoscientific, scientific, etc.).
71. Awakenings happen either sequentially or, sometimes, simultaneously. New awakenings can occur even if previous openings have not been habituated. Each opening has various depths, and it takes time to integrate it, anywhere between a few years to some decades. After integration, the new conscious awareness skills lead to lifestyle changes and new awakeness styles.
72. There is no ‘final’ awakening. Each awakening system triggers a deeper understanding of other systems, until multidimensional awakeness skills are acquired, and all the layers are harmonized and integrated into conscious experience. This process is species-wide, and it is a continuous process.
73. Awakenings can emerge within individuals at various developmental stages. Some awakenings are experienced in their essentiality at later stages, after the self-identity becomes more flexible.
74. Various opening experiences occur spontaneously during Life, lasting from a few seconds to a few hours. Most people lack the education to recognize and cultivate them. When they are very intense, the opening moments could be considered peak experiences or altered states of consciousness.
76. Awakenings can be learned, cultivated, and invited into our lives, and habituated through practice. We just need to allow ourselves to be transformed in new ways.
While exploring how we can facilitate awakenings, I had these questions: To awaken, do we need therapy? Could we create a therapeutic methodology for facilitating awakenings, inspired by centuries of spiritual practices, but without the cultural mindsets they are embedded in? Can usual methods used in psychotherapy, counseling, or life coaching invite or facilitate an awakening? From what I studied, the answer seems to be: partially yes. But it rarely happens, depending on whether the counselor/coach has gone through some awakenings.
Then, what is to be done? Awakening journeys relate to a deeper connection with our body layers and reality. Can a step-by-step methodology facilitate an awakening, or not? Is awakening a step-by-step reachable ‘target’? As the awakening journeys are usually a new style of connecting with reality (that already is, that already exists in us, as us), describing awakenings through words and perspective usually works, but only for people who are quite advanced and have gone through a few awakenings before.
So, what about people who haven’t experienced any awakening, ego death, or a loosening of control? For a few years, I have explored and tried (through trial-and-error) some methods, inspired by the ‘spiritual communities’ methodologies. What follows are some of my observations.
‘Transmissions’
In spiritual communities, the collective mindset is to invite people to resonate in synchrony with a ‘guru’, ‘master’, or a ‘channeler’; but do they work? It seems that sometimes ‘transmissions’ are helpful, meaning that the receiver could tune into the emitter’s configuration, and get some resonance patterns from the emitter.
But, what I don’t like so much about this method is the context – usually, the emitter-persons position themselves as some ‘divine’ channelers while they share their ‘presence’. This context unconsciously positions the receiver in a configuration of expecting something from outside, or expecting to have an opening from the emitter (or what flows through the channeler).
The results of my research on this topic were inconclusive; I couldn’t decide if this method could be extrapolated and used in a therapeutic context. It seems, though, that in the spiritual approach, when there is a deep master-disciple ‘adoration/relational’ style, the ‘transmission’ of awakeness produces effects.
Note 1: I also studied the ‘channeling’ phenomenon, and some of my observations are included in this research (see the chapter on ‘Spiritual teachers, channeling, and our inner master’ https://www.consciousness-quotient.com/psychology-of-becoming-conscious-inner-growth-journeys).
Note 2: What about ‘energy transmission’?
This is my view on this topic (excerpt from Consciousness Sutras – the commentary on principle 8):
Energy is not transmitted from one person to another. The energy patterns in one individual could generate similar patterns in the other individual, but each individual has his or her own energy body, locked to the physical body. In social and intimate interactions, each person modulates her or his own energy body, by non-consciously selecting various interconnectivity patterns from the persons nearby or the environment. There is a metaphor which says: ‘there is a collective ocean in which we are drops of water, and the ocean of life mediates this interpersonal transfer’. This metaphor is not so helpful. The ‘transfer’ is local, and each individual is fully responsible for what he or she allows inside and what is shared with other individuals.
Imagine the human body as a shape, filled with a million marbles that oscillate at a high frequency, as if statically. And the oscillations are also involved in collective oscillations of sub-groups, by allowing various streams of resonating flowing waves to happen. The marbles inside a person have patterns of waves, which can be picked up through resonance by another person’s energy body. Still, each person has her or his own set of marbles.
‘Join my awakened presence’
This method seems to work sometimes, in some spiritual communities. Although the explicit ‘presentation’ of this method in these communities is usually like ‘it’s a collective presence’, or ‘divine presence’, or ‘I have no ego, the presence is just Life flowing through me’, I named the method in this ego-like style to express what is hidden inside this approach – the fact that it is the master/guru who shares their own resonance patterns. If they are in tune with Life, in a harmonic way, it’s good. Still, we need to be aware that what is shared is not only the ‘positive’, but also the ‘negative’, the not-so-harmonic resonance patterns.
In my view, it works like this:
Step 1: the disciple mimics the resonance patterns of the master, creating a synchrony, resulting in a somewhat similar energy configuration in the disciple, through which the disciple can glimpse the master’s presence, and have a momentary peak experience of the awakening flow of the master.
Step 2: after the sync is active, information is exchanged, and the disciple would be able to get the ‘unconscious instructions’ for that flowing-in-the-present-moment configuration, and later on, this would enhance the possibility of accessing that flow configuration without the physical presence of the master.
I have tried this method a few times, while I was explaining what I was doing, step-by-step, providing both the experience and the understanding of the configuration. It worked a few times, but it was only temporary, usually lasting up to 10-30 minutes after I cut the resonatory sync. But I tend to consider that the ‘seeds’ of the experience remain in their unconscious, and later in their personal development journey, they would be able to access it more easily.
‘Let’s try something new’
This method doesn’t work, as this involves an ego ambition (like, ‘ok, try me, I can do it, you will see’). A person I tried with, in a Zoom conversation, said yes to my proposal. Still, after an hour, she forgot that it was an experiment, she got ego-triggered, and the ego-defense mechanisms activated. And then bye-bye, she never responded to my emails where I reminded her, “Hey, remember, it was an experiment you agreed upon, and I told you could get triggered, and you said ok”, etc.
‘Let me show you something new’
This is the approach that worked in many cases, but usually for people who were more advanced in the personal development process. I used to say ‘let me show you a perspective’, or ‘let me show you a flowing style’, or ‘how about this configuration’ (after I was enhancing that configuration in myself, so that the person could tune in more easily).
‘Identify this in yourself’
This method was about creating a flow, and when the configuration appeared during the flow (either a conversation, a dance, or some physical connection), I stopped and said something like: stop now, can you see this x or y? This method partially worked.
‘Soul-mate love channel’
I want to mention that I did these relational explorations after quitting a toxic relationship and allowing some years for intimate explorations. At one point, I had a soul-mate connection, and the soul-mate style felt so amazing that after we split up, I decided to see if it was possible to create it consciously, or use it intentionally, hoping it would generate a deep connection while interacting with women.
For this research, I had friendly chats with women from my soul-mate resonance family, selected from those who shared their awakening experiences through the internet. Also, I tried the soul-mate channel in a few intimate connections I had during my explorations years. It only worked once, in a personal connection. Still, the massive results occurred a year after we split up (what is important here is that the person had a kundalini awakening previously, and kundalini was active during our time together. The soul-mate style seemed so profound that it needed a lot of time to unfold and generate radiance in her being).
In the Zoom connections, it seems that even if they had a previous awakening, and we had a similar soul-mate resonance style, inviting them to new awakenings (connection-with-reality-styles) was not successful. What was nice about these types of connections, was how the connection drives (pulsions) tended to flow in a harmonic way.
Now, after the exploration time is over, I have to say that I tend to consider the soul-mate style a natural way of connecting with each other, and I hope that in the future, all human beings will be able to connect naturally in this profound way, and form conscious relationships that will have a soul-mate resonance style.
Analytic solutions (talk therapy) vs. awakening paths.
Here is how a method that is already in use in therapy could be used differently. I am talking about automatic writing. The technique that is already used in therapy can be summarized as:
Part one:
‘Trust yourself, and ask yourself the question you need an answer to. But pay attention to ask relevant and clear questions (define what you need, clearly).’
Part two:
‘Then, allow yourself to write down what comes to your mind, in a let-go-control automatic style.’
Usually, what therapists and clients do after writing down, is to analyze what flowed through.
An alternative part two:
‘Now, stop, don’t analyze the content. Instead of cognitively examining the answer, pay attention to the state you were in, while writing the answer. Notice and identify the nuanced configuration of yourself while you wrote the ideas. What you wrote doesn’t matter. What matters is the state you were in when you wrote those things. That is the answer: the configuration.
Then, allow that configuration to become a part of you, make it a permanent part of your experience, and allow yourself to flow and live also through that configuration. Introduce it in your vibrational structure consciously, intentionally, and use it until it habituates and becomes automatic. Allow the style of flowing/being to become a part of you forever! Begin now.’
How to deal with fears?
From an ‘awakening’ perspective, personal inner work with fear is irrelevant. What needs to be done is to accept fear as it is, and increase courage. Fears are natural responses, so if we look from the ‘source/center’ perspective, it is natural to have fears in us; they are natural responses to some unusual events and new situations. Instead, by activating courage, the energy body is balanced, and the energy flow begins to express itself naturally. In other words, analyzing where the fear comes from is useful, but it doesn’t change anything. Understanding where it comes from is helpful for adjusting to Life, but it is not useful for overcoming it. Instead, if we accept fear as a natural response, and activate more courage, we can move forward, with the fear response inside us.
In the inner evolution process, fear is usually related to novel situations, and it is a result of the ‘static’ inertial tendencies of the current configuration, that opposes change. In Consciousness Sutras case study on ‘How to activate and navigate intentional visionary experiences’ (https://www.consciousness-quotient.com/how-to-activate-and-navigate-intentional-visionary-experiences), I have described various methods for going into the unconscious mind through dream-like experiences, and merge/absorb the ‘negative/adversity’ characters and situations. The easiest is to plunge into that content or breathe it in. Or any other method that connects the observer with the content.
Safety vs. freedom. The myth of ‘every flower blooms in its own time’.
So, does every flower bloom in its own time? Because, for awakening, it’s never the proper time. What I want to say here is better told by Catherine Blackwood, in an interview with Jenny Lynn, available online, where Catherine describes that at a certain point in her inner evolution, she had to choose freedom over safety.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS1HUuS2YJA. This polarity is also known to existential therapists, when they describe the ongoing tension between our need for stability and our need for flexibility.
In my view, a slow pace is necessary, obviously, but we are not flowers, and in my view, awakening is an evolutionary response to speed up the evolution, collectively, so that we can stop hurting Life and Nature, and participate more consciously in the collective evolution of all species on Earth. If we take the natural slow path, 80 years are not enough for a human being to fully blossom and for an individual to reach its full potential, then spend some time to generate evolutionary changes in the human collective, and enjoy Life.
In discussions with my friends, they often pointed out that what I do is too fast, using the ‘every flower blooms in its own time’ argument. But I wonder, do we have that time as a collective? How much time do we have, as a species, until Life decides that we are on the wrong path and creates a mutation that will erase the human species, with all that is bad and all that is good in us? Or, we should continue to fantasize that only the ‘bad’ ones will die, and the ‘good’ ones will be magically selected to live? Or we will ‘reincarnate’ to correct the mistakes? I prefer a rational approach, that we are all responsible right now in this lifetime, and I feel that my ‘assignment’ was to try these awakening methods and generate future rational conversations about how to awaken, what are the psychological mechanisms, what works and doesn’t work, and inspire future researchers to advance further to find more appropriate methods to facilitate the evolution of human species toward a more harmonic lifestyle.
From an integral perspective, I would say that both paths are needed, slow and fast, depending on the transformative wave we are in. Relevant to this discussion are the following sutras, from chapter two of the Consciousness Sutras, related to inner evolution drives:
34. Life on Earth is a continuous flow of change; collective adaptation and evolution unfold continuously in every human being, driven by internal and external circumstances.
35. Inner evolution happens when unexpected events, whether personal, social, or planetary, require adaptation to new circumstances.
36. Along with the temporary drives requiring adaptation to unexpected issues in Life, ten evolutionary drives can generate and sustain accelerated transformative waves in individuals.
The ten evolutionary drives are: Giving birth to Life; Connect and align; No more!; What’s this?; Being human; Sattva; Feel alive; What’s beyond?; Support and protect Life; Innovate and share (their description is available here https://www.consciousness-quotient.com/consciousness-sutras-principles-of-becoming-conscious).
47. These evolutionary drives run in the background of conscious experience and shape the individual’s inner journey toward fulfilling its evolutionary goal, which supports collective evolution.
48. The transformative waves generated by these drives could extend over many years or decades.
49. A transformative wave begins with a challenge, when an issue is presented to the global workspace of conscious awareness, followed by some chaos when new information is flooding inner experience. Then the wave reaches a peak, when the ‘chaos’ is structured into new patterns, generating a shift (unfolding as insights, energy re-arrangements, ecstatic states, new perspectives, awakenings, decisions, etc.), usually followed by integration. This will eventually lead to a new structure of personality (self-identity) or new ways of being alive. It can be unhealthy to enter the new personality before the transformative wave has slowed down naturally.
50. A transformative wave ends when that specific adaptation is acquired, the specific need has been satisfied, and the evolutionary seed unfolds. Multiple rounds of chaos/adaptation cycles could occur before the drive is satisfied. Some evolutionary drives are active for a very long time, or through the entire Life of an individual, and their effects could be mistakenly considered as ‘stable personality traits’.
51. It’s natural for these drives to be depleted if the change requires a broad adaptation that cannot be acquired in one or a few transformative waves. Sometimes a drive may activate again, generating another attempt to synchronize. Sometimes it remains inactive, and the drive energy is ‘reassigned’ by Life’s intelligence to follow the natural pace of collective evolution.
52. More than one drive may be active simultaneously in an individual, at a given time, generating inner experiences with enhanced complexity and aliveness. For any individual who wants to understand what’s emerging now in the inner Life, it is helpful to become aware of these active transformative waves, noticing whether the wave is peaking, or the energy is before or after the peak.
Connecting with the core/source, and why knowing that ‘thinking is a post-event reflection’ is essential.
Thinking and emotions happen after the fact has already happened, the mind is a reflection of what already happened. In chapter one of the Consciousness Sutras, I describe in detail the chronology of the processes that generate awareness and thinking.
Understanding this allows the possibility to work with the ‘source’, to influence the source, instead of trying to alter the effects (aka – mind, emotions, etc.). To impact the ‘source/core’, we must transition from ‘analyzing’ to experiential methods. In this way, after we correct the dis-harmony in the aliveness flow, the thinking will reflect the configuration in a different way. That’s why in the chapter on discovery journeys from the Consciousness Sutras, I describe various methods that can be used in experiential ‘inner art sessions’.
These three consciousness sutras are essential from this perspective:
6. Life’s adaptive processing develops in progressive steps. Around 80 to 90% of the processing develops automatically, entirely outside of our awareness, while regulating the functioning of our body. The other 10-20% of Life’s adaptive processing creates three awareness types. Primary processing, from 20ms (milliseconds) to 100ms after the stimulus onset, generates basic awareness. Secondary processing, from 100ms to 300ms, creates pre-conscious awareness, and tertiary processing, from 300ms to 600ms and beyond, generates conscious awareness through cognition.
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Peter Walla, in ‘Non-Conscious Brain Processes Revealed by Magnetoencephalography (MEG)’, writes: “Findings revealed by MEG and other methods clearly demonstrate that only a little fraction of brain processes related to even high cognitive functions such as our self are associated with consciousness. Or in other words, much of our even highest cognitive functions do happen non-consciously. It almost seems as if we mainly run non-consciously with only bits and pieces entering the stream of consciousness.
It may be reasonable to believe that around 80 to 90% of our daily activities are controlled outside our own awareness. However, we should not make the mistake to underestimate consciousness as it arises now […] while reading these lines. Consciousness still seems to be inevitable to appreciate a lot of what we are so much used to. The appreciation of music and art, the ability to love and to feel happy are just some of them. In fact, the more we learn about how dominant non-conscious processes guide our behaviour the more we learn to appreciate what our individual consciousness actually means to us.”
From a psychological-experiential perspective, and for practical purposes, the chronology of adaptive processing that generates conscious awareness can be summarized using three stages:
– The first stage occurs from 20-50ms to 100ms after the stimulus, when primary processing generates basic awareness. In this initial stage, information that ‘something’ is there exists, but the information about ‘what is there’ is not yet processed. In this interval, the attention is automatically oriented toward stimuli. Some studies reveal that auditory stimulation might attract attention 20ms to 50ms after stimulus onset, while visual processing and non-conscious recognition of visual stimuli could arise later, 50ms-100ms after the stimulus onset.[6b]
– The second stage emerges from 100ms to 300ms after the stimulus, when secondary processing creates degrees of pre-conscious awareness, while more information is being processed, using early local recurrent and late top-down feedback processes.
Still, at this stage, there is no conscious awareness of what the stimulus is. The earliest emotional processing occurs in this interval, generating pre-conscious emotions, which may automatically influence our behavior, especially when there is a life-threatening situation. Semantic processing (i.e., understanding words) also begins as a pre-conscious process, together with spatial perception about the possible ‘location in space’ of the stimulus (‘in the body or outside it’). The self-identity processing (identifying that ‘it is about me’) starts at the earliest between 200ms and 300ms.
– The third stage, from 300ms to 600ms and beyond, is when tertiary processing generates degrees of conscious awareness through cognition about the stimulus. In this stage, neural decision-making takes place, by selecting one option out of the multiple possibilities generated in the previous stage of processing. During this stage, the localization of the stimulus in space is decided; i.e., the source of the stimulus, its 3D positioning, either in the body or outside of it. Olfaction (smell) is processed between 200ms and 500ms after the stimulus onset, followed by more complex processing between 600ms and 900ms.”
7. Reflective self-awareness (‘mental presence’), involving cognition and perception of time, needs at least 1-3 seconds to evoke the nowness experience, the localizing of an event in time as happening ‘now’. However, through witnessing awareness, which requires minimal categorization and cognition, humans could have a continuous ‘raw’ part of the conscious experience, subjectively felt as a fresh ‘being in the now’. Witnessing awareness begins to unfold from basic and pre-conscious awareness (below the 300ms threshold), while mindfulness is available later, after cognition gets involved in processing and the ‘nowness’ experience is generated. That’s why some contemplative experiences, with a significant witnessing component, are perceived as ‘atemporal’, or ‘with no self-identity’, while usual mindfulness experiences feel more like this: ‘I am observing reality here-now’.
…
8. From a temporal unfolding perspective, conscious experience is a flowing ‘window to reality’: it includes fresh components (generated by witnessing, with not as much choice available) and delayed components (generated by witnessing, cognition, and other aspects of processing, with greater freedom of choice available). The weight of these two components, in the overall conscious experience, is highly dynamic; some experiences can be ‘more fresh’ (when witnessing has more weight), while others can be ‘more delayed’ (when cognitive processing has more weight).
Flow states vs. awakened aliveness.
The flow states have become a popular topic, also with the name ‘being in the zone’. The important idea here is that we are always in the flow, but our patterns of allowing block us from allowing Life to unfold through us.
The method that is useful to overcome this issue is ‘liquifying the liquifying’, described in the last case study from the Consciousness Sutras, also available online here: https://www.consciousness-quotient.com/how-to-activate-and-navigate-intentional-visionary-experiences/
Whatever methods we use in these flow states, it is vital to allow the whole (the source) to select what is essential for us, not to impose our cognition on what is needed. We need to let our totality provide the answer, not just our self-identity patterns (or ego).
Awakening is not a one-time action; it’s a process.
From sutra 121: most awakenings are new ways of flowing, not fixed states; they emerge by abandoning oneself continuously into the layers of the present moment and not through remembering.
When individuals allow themselves to flow for the first time, they tend to consider ‘awakening’ as a static/fixed state, and then try to ‘remember’ it. A proper action is to flow continuously, not remember a previous ‘awakening’. Awakened aliveness is a flowing in the present moment; we can only attend to the present moment through flowing.
From sutra 11: Witnessing is a fluid experience, a dynamic process, not a static ‘component’ of the conscious experience. It flows moment to moment. As Life’s intelligence evolves, this perceptual ability also evolves, becoming richer and more complex. However, this evolutionary feature is at its earliest stage of development in humans, and it seems to reach its full potential in the post-autonomous stages of inner growth, through in-depth inner work and long-term efforts to de-automatize the psychological system and educate the attentional mechanisms.
This confusion – that we have to ‘reach’ enlightenment or experience an ‘awakening’ – has to be clarified here. There is nothing to reach; all we have to do is allow Life to happen through us, expand our conscious awareness, and work with the blockages we accumulated during our lifetime up to that moment. But, even this is not necessary to experience any type of awakening for some moments.
We can have a glimpse of an awakening as a peak experience, even if we have blockages and unsolved traumas.
Habituating an awakening configuration, that’s the work, not reaching. Search for ‘habituate’ in the Consciousness Sutras text, to see what I mean: https://www.consciousness-quotient.com/consciousness-sutras-principles-of-becoming-conscious.
III. Vasanas and Desires
Can we really ‘liberate’ ourselves from desires?
In Yoga Sutras, and spiritual/oriental traditions, the answer is simple, yes, we can.
From https://ramana-maharshi.weebly.com/vasanas.html
“Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi often stressed the importance of removing vasanas (tendencies) for Self-Realization in his talks.
Distractions result from inherited tendencies. Can they be cast off too?
Maharishi: Yes. Many have done so. Believe it! They did so because they believed they could. Vasanas (predispositions) can be obliterated. It is done by concentration on that which is free from vasanas, and yet is their core.
How long is the practice to continue?
Maharishi: Till success is achieved and until yoga-liberation becomes permanent. Success begets success. If one distraction is conquered the next is conquered and so on, until all are finally conquered. The process is like reducing an enemy’s fort by slaying its man-power — one by one, as each issues out.
What is the goal of this process?
M.: Realising the Real.”
My research and personal experience showed me a different path for this topic. Some imprints are changeable, indeed. But what about the natural desire, the desire of Nature to perpetuate itself, which reflects as ‘desire’ in our human psychology? What about the fundamental force of the Universe which attracts and repels polarities?
Is ‘desire’ rooted in our body? Sexuality and sex/polar principle in the Universe.
In my view, the ‘desire’ has its roots in this fundamental sex/polar principle, as described by Walter Russell.
From https://svpwiki.com/Sex:
The use of the term sex by Russell is basically his way of saying Polar which is the same as active or dynamic dipole, bias, dual, Yin-Yang, Male/Female, positive/negative, etc.
“Sex is the division of a balanced equilibrium condition into two equally unbalanced conditions which negate each other periodically for the purpose of repeating the two unbalanced conditions. Sex is the creative principle. It is the dual desire force in Mind for expressing its One Idea. Without a division of the one unconditioned Light into two seemingly conditioned lights, Creation could not be.
Sex is not a thing, it is a condition of a thing. An electrically balanced condition of anything is sexless whether it be a man, woman, electric battery, or the atmosphere. A sexed condition is an unbalanced condition. An electric battery which is fully charged is dually unbalanced by the opposite electric pressures of compression and expansion. These two opposite unbalanced conditions violently desire to return to the oneness of balance from which they were divided into two. A short circuit between the two poles of the battery will give it that balance. We then say it is dead, for it will no longer perform work by expressing its desire for balance.” [Walter Russell, The Secret of Light, pages 119-120]
For an in-depth exploration of this process of ‘liberating from vasanas/samskaras’, I provided a context in the Consciousness Sutras:
17. Organic Life on Earth developed collective patterns of functioning through the evolutionary process, reflected in human inner experience as collective root tendencies. These natural tendencies organize the adaptive processing in our body layers, generating various functional patterns inside the conscious experience, common to all humans.
18. Root tendencies are barely accessible to our conscious awareness. Still, through in-depth self-exploration, it is possible to attend to their flows and adjust their effects in our inner Life through conscious interventions. The collective root tendencies provide the initial structure for the personal vāsanās/samskaras, identified and described by Advaita, Yoga, Buddhism, and their practitioners; vāsanās/samskaras are sub-conscious drives and psychological imprints that automatically influence our thoughts, emotions, and behavior.
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Swami Sivananda explains: “Vasanas are very subtle. Just as the sprout or flower exists in the seed, the vasanas lie dormant or latent in the heart. They agitate the bed of samskaras. Through agitation of samskaras or subtle impressions, memory of pleasure comes. Through memory of pleasure, desire arises. When desire arises, the senses begin to function in conjunction with their leader—the mind.[…] A mind that is filled with impure vasanas tends to bondage, whereas a mind that is destitute of Vasanas tends to freedom. Mind is no mind when the Vasanas are destroyed. You become mindless. When you become mindless, intuition dawns, and you are endowed with the eye of wisdom. You will enjoy indescribable peace.”
So, in this context, desire is, in fact, the main drive for all our movements in all body layers, physical, energy, and information. Isn’t curiosity a ‘desire’? Isn’t the intention for ‘liberation’ a desire? I would say that we can’t escape desire and sex/polar attraction. And considering otherwise is just another delusion. Yes, we can liberate our ‘selves’ from ‘desires,’ but deep inside us, we can’t. What we can do, is to adjust, while we have these vasanas in us, and change the functioning of the whole being so that the outcomes of these vasanas would be kind and less damaging for ourselves and Life on Earth.
From Consciousness Sutras:
176. What will happen when conscious harmonic resonance evolves to its full potential, in all three layers of our body: physical, energy, and information? There may already be a word for this vibrational harmony: satcitānanda—harmonic existence and truth, harmonic conscious awareness, and harmonic enstatic bliss. And maybe the path is spanda—harmonic synchrony with the primordial vibration of the universe.
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Imagine the life ‘pulses’ happening in simultaneity, in all 1,000+ ranges of life frequencies, and in various systemic combinations of these frequencies. When Life pulsates, it ‘forces’ a synchronization between all the parts of the system. The parts that are not in synchrony tend to ‘tune in’ to the global synchrony by performing micro-adjustments.
The micro-adjustments and their effects are what we perceive as thinking, feeling, or kundalini spikes. For instance, repetitive thoughts occur because some parts of us are not in synchrony with the whole, and the life pulse is trying to synchronize them, using conscious awareness. This oscillating-vibrational process is continuous, not just in life processes, but in the entire universe.
From this perspective, it seems technically impossible for any human being to achieve ‘perfect’ or complete harmony, now or in the future. The entire universe is looking for this perfect synchrony; but, the entire universe—Life included—is on a continuous evolutionary-expansive cycle. And this expansion will continue until there is no more ‘movement’ potential left in the universe, and matter, energy, and information will reach their final destination: maximum entropy or stillness.
I came to these conclusions after many years of allowing myself to flow freely and watching what happened in myself while allowing my desires to be. The hard part was to adjust the flows created by these desires, so that they would be in harmony while they were manifesting.
I know this conclusion is highly debatable and can create unusual conversations. Still, we need to accept that we cannot ‘liberate’ entirely from desires, and the framework ‘we need to liberate ourselves from desires’ is just a step in our human evolution, which leaves some parts of the process unexplored.
Intentionally inviting vasanas to unfold.
Recently, I was happy (and somehow redeemed) to discover the following texts in Tripura Rahasya, Chapter XIX (the edition translated by Swami Sri Ramanananda Saraswathi):
“84-86. Sages with subtle and clear intellect have not considered it worthwhile to eradicate their desire, etc., by forcing other thoughts to take their place, because desires do not obstruct realisation. Therefore their desires continue to manifest even after realisation, as before.
106-08. Jnanis of the highest order, however, are seen to be active because they voluntarily bring out the vasanas from the depth of the mind and allow them to run out. Their action is similar to that of a father sporting with his child, moving his dolls, laughing at the imagined victory of one doll over another, and appearing to grieve over the injury to another, and so on; so the many-minded Sages have pleasure or pain from work.
109-12. The vasanas not inimical to realisation are not weeded out by the best class of Jnanis because they cannot seek new ones to crowd the old out. Therefore the old ones continue until they are exhausted and thus you find among them some highly irritable.”
Looks like the idea of allowing vasanas to manifest was recommended by Dattatreya, but I didn’t know in those ten years I allowed them to manifest. To me, it just felt the right way. What I would say, is that it was a super difficult process, but also fulfilling. With each step, while vasanas were unfolding, the proper paths opened up. My quest was to discover what I have to do in this life, so… a lot of stuff had to be processed, to clean up the consequences of my past actions and move on with my life while the cleaning process was fully on in the background (or in the foreground).
Allowing vasanas to unfold in me as drives (pulsions) looked quite weird to the people around me, just because I was expressing things and energy stuff that were usually repressed in them. But, it was one of the keys to habituating myself in a permanent ‘flow configuration’. And, it felt like I was not doing this process just for myself, but for all humans with whom I had the ‘karma-eating’ connection active.
‘We become karma-eating machines, offering cellular forgiveness’.
Here is an excerpt from ‘Biology of Kundalini’, a book by Jana Dixon, where she explains the ‘karma-eating’ process and what happens when energy flow (kundalini) is allowed to control the process.
“Kundalini burns off much of the primary reactivity imprinted from our family of origin and early life experience. With kundalini the opportunity for change is increased because our neurological slate is wiped relatively clean, but it depends on our will, faith and environment as to how far we can grow. If we do not change our habits to reflect the Self’s true interests, we will continue to rebuild the conditioned reactive self we thought ourselves to be. We spend our entire lives thinking we are an entity that was created by our parents and culture…but are we really that entity? I mean they don’t even know us, they only know their projections of us. The Grail of course is the true Self that is beyond all such imposition.
It is the unusual nature and intensity of metamorphosis which forces respect, awareness, awe and faith. Fear is unavoidable with the hyperactivation of the sympathetic nervous system and the unknown quality of what is happening and where it’s going. But in the end passing through this fear leaves one with such an altered perspective and physiology that one essentially transcends the collective fear. Only then do we have any power to dispel consensus fear and increase love in the world. We become karma eating machines, offering cellular forgiveness.
The nature of one’s individual awakening not only depends on one’s past history it is also determined by one’s future history. That is, what one is to become and experience is already at play in one’s present. In-forming us trans-temporally in ways the rational mind cannot perceive. The tree is already inherent in the seed. The future magnetically draws us toward it. One could call this, the karma of the future.
It seems like the more open, surrendered and evolved one is, then the more challenge one is faced with in incarnating one’s soul. So here’s the rub…the more spiritual preparation one does, the larger the flow of kundalini coursing through one. But if we don’t have some form of yoga and meditation, then we are upstream without a paddle and are battered about on the rapids with no sense of control over our boat. Traditional spiritual practices were developed to both bring on an awakening, give one the strength and skills for navigating the awakening and to substantiate the awakening in the life of the individual and his/her relationship to the world.”
The harmonically-integrated ‘desires’.
Anyway, after many years, I realized that to solve this vasana/no-vasana debate, I have to introduce another perspective: that what we need to do is to become ‘harmonic’ human beings, and we need to develop our harmonic intelligence. We need to see the ideas of spiritual ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’ from a different perspective: that we, as individuals, cannot alter too much our root tendencies, and we need to move forward, as a collective, to a more harmonic social organization that would allow more freedom, and less denial of our innate human nature, rooted in various types of desires.
And, for our inner evolution, what would it be like if we accept that each individual is born from desire, is born with desires, and we desire something throughout our entire lifetime, and, instead of trying to ‘get rid’ of desires, we would find a way to organize the desires in a harmonic way, so that our actions won’t generate suffering and would support the evolution of Life on Earth?
An example: for many years, I have practiced the usual ‘raise your sexual energy to the upper chakras’. Later in my inner evolution, I realized that this is not ok. And I tried another approach: to allow the sexual energy to be there, in the sexual center, and work with other facets of my energy body, so that the sexual desire would be integrated into a more harmonic whole. It took me many years to figure out how to do it properly, without attempting to move the energy from where it is (through visualizing and feeling the ‘energy micro-macrocosmic orbits’). And I am still learning.
In my view, as a species, we are just beginning to discover the wonders and the aliveness provided by harmonically-integrated ‘desires’. Think about this for a while before beginning a journey to repress, deny, or ‘liberate from’ our natural desires.
Note: this analysis does not refer to the idea of controlling our manifested desires (which is a good thing, obviously); here I refer to the ‘root’ of desires, or, in other words, what can we do before the desires become active as drives/pulsions, so that we can control the ones that are not ok, and allow those that are ok, through various methods. For the moment, humanity is at the stage of ‘controlling’ desires, but I hope in the future, we will evolve into a more in-tune-with-life species, when the ‘harmonically-integrated-desires’ approach would provide a better attunement to Life energy.
Good journeys!
(video by Jasmin Rituper and Julian Artner)