“You are required right now. There is an amazing shift in consciousness occurring, and you are needed. Consciousness is silently inviting you into your bigness”
- Pamela Wilson
Pamela’s words resonate deeply with and yet it is not easy to explain what she means. Perhaps this is also your experience? You may be asking, “what exactly is consciousness?”
According to Eckhart Tolle, this question cannot be answered and “the moment you answer it, you have falsified it, made it into another object.”
“ Consciousness, the traditional word for which is spirit, cannot be known in the normal sense of the word, and seeking it is futile.
Although you cannot know consciousness, you can become conscious of it as yourself. You can sense it directly in any situation, no matter where you are. You can sense it here and now as your very Presence. It is the underlying I Am, the underlying background to every experience, thought, feeling.
- Eckhart Tolle, “The Power of Now”
Feeling a union with consciousness as a felt sensation is the ultimate goal of our time together, and is, as Eckhart suggests, the primary purpose of our lives. Yet, how does one attain this illusive state if not guided by words?
Fortunately, while fully disclosing the limitations, Eckhart does offer more words on this subject:
“Consciousness is the luminous space in which the world arises and subsides. That space is the life that I Am. It is timeless and eternal. Consciousness can also be called:
God
Spirit
Eternal
Source
Formlessness
Space
Stillness
Silence
The Unmanifested “
So, though we can never really know consciousness, we can experience our union with it.
We enter into this union every time we experience sacred silence. As Friar Richard Rohr says: “Silence has a life of its own. It is not just that which is around words and underneath images and events. It is a being in itself to which we can relate and become intimately familiar. When we connect with silence as a living, primordial presence, we can then see all other things—and experience them deeply—inside that container. Silence is not just an absence, but a primal presence.”
Fr. Lucien Kemble
I had a great uncle who, I believe, experienced this primal presence, this union with consciousness.
My Great Uncle, Father Lucien Kemble (1922-1999) was a dedicated Franciscan Friar. Though I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with my “Uncle Bert” he left a lasting impression on me. He had a warm heart and practical and grounded wisdom.
In addition to teaching, preaching and helping people, he loved to gaze at the stars and was an active and well respected member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada - he even discovered a cluster of stars which became known as Kemble’s Cascade!
“Asked if the sheer immensity of the universe made him feel insignificant, Fr. Lucian replied: “Au contraire. I am as big as that which I contemplate.”
- Brian Brennan, Calgary Herald, March 5, 1999
“Kemble’s Cascade”
What I believe my Uncle meant by this statement, is the same thing Pamela means when she says that ‘consciousness is silently inviting you into your bigness’. They are both pointing to the Truth that, though apparently contained in a limited form we call our bodies, our true essence is as vast as the Universe that we perceive.
The key to awakening, and thereby ending suffering, is to to unite with Consciousness (or God, Spirit, the Eternal, Source, Formlessness, Space, Stillness, Silence…feel free to substitute with the word you feel the most resonance with). Only then can we dis-identify from our limited sense of “I” and our destructive ego.
And the only way to experience this union is to listen to the silence, that is, to become fully present (over the next few weeks we will discuss methods for becoming present and aware of the ego).
We intuitively feel this union when we are in nature. Nature teaches us how to find our way home, to listen to the silence and remember our union with it.
“Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.”
- Eckhart Tolle, “Stillness Speaks”
“When you are alert and contemplate a flower, crystal, or a bird without naming it mentally, it becomes a window into the formless. There is an inner opening, however slight, into the realm of spirit. This is why these three “en-lightened” forms have played such an important part in the evolution of human consciousness since ancient times; why, for example, the jewel in the lotus flower is a central symbol of Buddhism and a white bird, the dove, signifies the Holy Spirit in Christianity. They have been preparing the ground for a more profound shift in the planetary consciousness that is destined to take place in the human species. This is the spiritual awakening that we are beginning to witness now.
Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness, an inner flowering so radical and profound that compared to it the flowering of plants, no matter how beautiful, is only a pale reflection?”
-Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”
“Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness?” Eckhart Tolle asked this question back in 2005 and I, along with the millions of others who were moved by his teachings, answered with a resounding “YES, we are ready”!
Fifteen years later, so many of us on the planet are this “YES” with much more intensity than ever before!
“Awakening and staying awake is the shared purpose of every human being. This evolutionary step is our inner purpose and is the most important thing that can happen to and through a human being. Then what we do in the world, our outer purpose, is revealed to us and lived out through us. Harmonious actions, relationships, communities, and business practices set the foundation for balanced, sustainable, and abundant economic & government systems. The awakened state of consciousness is the New Heaven. Being and doing in that state are the foundation of the New Earth.”
- From “A New Earth in a Nutshell”, a commentary written by Brendon Lumgair (and shared with his permission)
What Eckhart calls the “New Heaven” can be likened to what the Mahayana Buddhists call bodhichitta. In Sanskrit, bodhi means “awake” and chitta means “heart” or “mind”, so bodhichitta means the awakened heart. The Buddhists believe that a commitment to bodhichitta is the only way to affect change here on earth.
“We are at at time when old systems and ideas are being questioned and falling apart, and there is great opportunity for something fresh to emerge. I have no idea what that will look like and no preconceptions about how things should turn out, but I do have a strong sense that the time we live in is a fertile ground for training in being open-minded and open-hearted. If we can learn to hold this falling apart-ness without polarizing and without becoming fundamentalists, then whatever we do today will have a positive effect on the future.”
- Pema Chodron “Welcoming the Unwelcome”
A paradox of our times seems to be that we, as a society, are both ripe for awakening and simultaneously presented with a plethora of obstacles preventing this very awakening. On one hand, we have unprecedented access to teachings, we are free to practice without fear of persecution, and there is a growing awareness of and a desire for a shift in consciousness. On the other hand, many of these same forces that are enabling a spreading of consciousness (internet, social media, email)are also distracting and preventing us from achieving the only thing that really matters, the only thing that can actually awaken us - our connection with stillness!
In her audio book “Walking the Walk”, Pema Chodron says, “our society is habitually used to being unconscious rather than being conscious and that there seems to more and more cultural support for unconsciousness, that is to say more and more cultural support to become distracted and disengaged from the present moment.”
In “A New Earth”, Eckhart Tolle refers to the power of television to pull us out of presence and to feed our unconscious pain bodies. At the time of his writing, social media, a force much more powerful than television was not even in existence!
We need a return to presence and a return to grace! And as Pema says:
“Our only shot at accomplishing this is by first attaining enlightenment ourselves. Along the way, we can take one step at a time, doing our best to keep our longing and commitment going during the ups and downs of our lives.”
We begin with ourselves…we listen….and we remember!
On Grace…
“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent on things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly.”
-Eckhart Tolle
“Grace can lie in a smooth, well coordinate motion, or in a humble and tolerant attitude. More often than not, the two go hand in hand. The people who move well will tend to be folks you want to be around. Their ease comes from being comfortable in their own skin, and that’s what we’re drawn to - not to technique or practiced perfection, but to what smooth physicality conveys about a person’s nature. Grace has nothing to do with looks or sophistication, and everything to do with compassion and courage.”
- Sarah L. Kaufman, “The Art of Grace”
Our Closing Meditation:
Prayer of the Lotus Nectar
Beloved Kuan Yin, help me realize the connection to myself and to Life that I need to be able to live my highest vibrational life, where I am well, replenished, joyful and connected to the endless flow of divine energy and life force in our Universe. Please bring me clear guidance about how to best cultivate chi now, how to be open to receive the Nectar of the Lotus, the life force and love of the Divine Mother, for my highest good, so be it. Om Mani Padme Hum.
“Om Mani Padme Hum”
This is a powerful heart opening mantra.
It means ’the opening of the jewel in the lotus,’ or ‘may the heart awaken with divine compassion and may I know myself to be an awakened being of light’.