Deepening Our Awareness

As I sit here to write this morning, it is Thanksgiving Day.  As I reflect on this, I can feel my heart opening, and from this opening a flood of gratitude gushes forth.  Gratitude for the opportunity to share the important things in this life with you.  Gratitude for each of you who are reading this – my fellow travelers on this great path into ever deepening Awareness.  Gratitude that we are each held and cherished in God’s holy Presence.

Have you ever stopped to wonder about the strangeness of our life?  I’m not sure I’ll be able to put this into words very clearly, but our daily round – our typical daily experiences – are dualistic.  We use positional thinking constantly: this is good, that’s bad, this is right, that’s not, and so on.  We divide our actual experience – our felt, lived experience – into parts.  This dividing is so natural to us that we never think about it.  For us, it is the normal and natural thing to do.  On reflection, however, it seems terribly misguided.

We never stop to look at the consequences of our positioning.  While we learned positional thinking as infants in order to get along in the world, we didn’t notice the negative consequences that are a necessary part of positioning.  We didn’t notice that our positional thinking estranges us from All That Is, from God.  That’s a pretty high price to pay, isn’t it!  And neither did we notice that our positional thinking is the underlying process that creates all the problems we have either.  

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Let me give you an immediate example of this.  I notice sensations in my body on this Thanksgiving morning, sensations that I interpret as a little bit of hunger.  From a unitive perspective, this bit of hunger just is.  It doesn’t require immediate attention, nor does it require diminishment.  In fact, if I were to go get a snack right now, I would have less room for the Thanksgiving feast that will follow this afternoon.  But typically, when I feel sensations like these, I run to the kitchen to make them go away.

To be as explicit as possible – I label these sensations as a problem.  If I simply accepted them, there would be no problem.  But I language these sensations, and in the process, I have created a problem for myself – to eat or not to eat.  The dualistic conundrum in a nutshell!  If the languaging stopped here, at the domain of thought, it would be bad enough.  But no, I have to go and make it worse.  I attach my emotions to this wretched algorithm, thereby creating urgency.  Now I am starving and I absolutely have to find a snack right NOW.  Not only that, but it has to be just the right kind of snack – the very best tasty morsel that I can find.

Do you see the craziness of this?  There was no problem initially; there were just some sensations in my belly.  But thinking about the sensations made the sensations appear larger and more important than they really were.  Connecting my emotions to this thinking process made it appear that it had to be addressed immediately.  I started with some ordinary sensations and then blew them up into an urgent problem!

This process happens on a continual basis, every day of our lives.  We overlook our actual experiences, which are unitive in nature, and in their place, we substitute dualism.  It is extremely hard to recognize this.  It is much harder to recognize it on an ongoing basis.  But once you start to recognize it, the question then becomes: “How can we overcome our dualism and acquire real spiritual knowledge?”

I hope you recognized the inherent dualism in the question that I just posed above.  The assumption is that we are over here, somehow lacking this special thing called “spiritual knowledge,” and that special entity of “spiritual knowledge” is over there somewhere else.  To even frame this question, we have to use the dualism inherent in language!  So how can we ever get past this?

We get past it when we open our eyes to see what has always been there – the underlying non-dual, unitive experiences that we constantly experience.

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The most spiritually rewarding perspective is when we come to understand that what we seek is already within us.  There is that beautiful saying in the Gospel of Thomas where Jesus says, “The Kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.” That is, the kingdom of God is inside of us and all around us.  There is no place that is apart from this kingdom.  There is no one who is not cherished by the Divine.

Typically, we overlook our actual unitive experience of the world.  As Thomas says, just a little further on in his gospel, “Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.  For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.”

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The most productive attitude for spiritual work is the attitude of receptivity, an attitude of just noticing without feeling compelled to go do something.  The typical attitude that people adopt is that they have to go do or get something.  This is dualism written large – we are somehow lacking and there is some special thing, some special knowledge, that we must obtain.

Going deeper, the spiritual understandings we are seeking cannot be found.  The spiritual understandings we seek are actually self–revealing.  They are right in front of us.  The more we become aware of the ubiquity of our dualism and positional thinking, the more familiar we become with spiritual principles, the more conversant we are with spiritual disciplines, the more we open ourselves to self–realization.

Why do I say self–realization?  Because the kingdom of heaven is not out there, apart from us.  The kingdom is within us and we ourselves are situated in the midst of the kingdom.  As a result, there is nothing to do.  There is no path that we must travel.  There is no result that we don’t already have.  And it is for this, on this beautiful Thanksgiving morning, that I am most grateful for!

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In keeping with these ideas, let me introduce you to a way of deepening your meditation from our last newsletter, deepening your awareness.  As you explore this, you will find that there is nothing to do.  We are moving, in this set of meditations, from doing towards Being.

It’s important to recognize how different this action is, compared to what most of us were taught in church.  In church, the message is we need to do things differently; that we are somehow lacking or deficient, and this deficiency needs to be remedied.  Briefly, we are sinners and we need to repent from our sinful ways.

This perspective misses what may be the most important aspect of the Christian message.  It overlooks that Jesus came from God to us, to open the way of freedom and peace for each of us.  He didn’t make us come to him.  There were no preconditions put on us.  Jesus didn’t say that you had to become sinless in order to receive him.  In fact, our Lord spent his time with ordinary people – ordinary husbands and wives, ordinary fishermen, tax collectors, and farmers – in a word, with those who have come to be known by the Church as sinners.  He spent his precious time not with the powerful or wealthy.  He spent his time with anyone who was open to receive him.

Hear these words because they are so very important.  We are not the ones doing the doing; it is our Lord Jesus Christ, who freely comes to us in the midst of our ignorance.  The only requirement, if you can even call it that, for those who wish to follow Jesus, is that we open our hearts, to the best of our ability, so that we can receive him.

What this really means is that we cannot go beyond our self-imposed limits – the limits inherent in our judgment and our positional thinking.  If we try to rely on our own powers, we are stuck.  Trapped in our dualism.  Trapped in our reflexive pushing God away.  

Our deepening in the spiritual way that Jesus describes, occurs only by opening ourselves to the marvelous grace of God.  Our job, in this great endeavor, is to be receptive, because our doing only pushes God away.

• Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed.  Turn off your cell phone and deal with other potential distractions.

• Be seated in a chair, with your spine upright and your feet flat on the floor, cradling your right hand in your left.  Don’t cross your legs or ankles, and don’t interlace your fingers because they are likely to fall asleep, which will distract you from your practice.  

• Close your eyes and focus your attention within your body.  Simply observe, and refrain from judging what you experience there.

• Notice the flow of your thoughts and emotions.  No need to chase after them or elaborate on them.  Be receptive to them and just observe.   

• In this space, your mind will start telling you stories.  These stories may focus on your physical sensations, they may focus on some unfinished business you had prior to sitting in meditation, or on any number of other subjects.  

• Experience these sensations, thoughts, and emotions as they arise in your awareness.  Acknowledge them, but don't go chasing after them.  Rest your focus in your awareness.  Refuse to engage with these distractions.  Acknowledge them, and then let them go.  

• As you release these thoughts, and the stories they want to distract you with, notice the progressive deepening that is occurring, very gentle and slow at first.  Instead of the noise that’s generated from all of your competing thoughts, you will begin to sense a deepening silence.

• As you open to this deepening, as you relinquish your focus on the various ‘objects of awareness,’ you will begin to notice your awareness itself.  

• As the internal silence grows, you will gradually begin to notice a stillness – a holy Stillness – that exists within the silence.  When you sense this, give yourself over to this Stillness; surrender to it.  No need for thoughts.  No need for words.  Rest in this Stillness for the period of your meditation.

• Especially at the beginning of this practice, you will find your mind churning through thought after thought, through sensation after sensation.  When this occurs, simply release the distraction and move your attention back to your awareness.

• Rest here without moving for the period of your meditation.

• When you are ready, let the feeling come back into your feet, your hands, and your face.  Take a deep breath and open your eyes.

That’s enough for now, I think.  I expect that you will find the meditation practice outlined in this newsletter to be very valuable on your inward journey.  Please remember to practice daily, if your time permits.  

In addition to your daily meditation, I would like to suggest a spiritual discipline that will facilitate your inward journey.  Start noticing the many unitive experiences that pervade your daily life.  Notice, for example, that there is no such entity as ‘darkness.’  There is only light and its absence.  Notice that there is no such entity as cold.  There is only heat and its absence.  Let yourself become aware of the underlying unity which is both within you, and all around you.

Also, please remember that you are free to contact me if you have any questions about the practices I present or the experiences they yield.  I will do my best to address your concerns as time permits. Just email me at [email protected].

With great thanksgiving for the joy of walking with you,Start writing your email content here...

P.S.  These newsletters were written in a particular order, but due to the limitations of our email delivery system, we cannot send them in the order in which they were written.  We can send out the first five in order, but then the system sends out the next one, whatever that happens to be.

So, if you are suddenly moving from issue #5 to issue #whatever, it might be a little jarring.  If this sounds like you, I would encourage you to go back into our archives and do your best to read them in order. 

P.P.S.  Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class.  If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web.  If you have an interest, please write me at [email protected]. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

To access the other newsletter editions of the “Inside The Invisible Newsletter,” or if you’d like to read ahead or go back.

Please Note: These newsletters are meant to be read in order.