All sex, in fact all life everywhere, is about the meeting of masculine and feminine energy, the meeting of consciousness and light. This does not mean that men always represent the masculine, or that women always hold feminine energy. It means that sexual union is always about a more conscious presence penetrating a more yielding, loving surrender. We have worked with translucent gay couples, male and female. With some, one partner holds more masculine energy, and the other holds more feminine. And in many cases, they alternate who is the leading, masculine polarity and who is the surrendering, feminine polarity. For any couple, these polarities can sometimes be reversed. This has less to do with physical position than with disposition. As soon as a man relaxes, waits, becomes soft and vulnerable and yielding, and as soon as a woman becomes more assertive, initiating, and penetrating with her presence, you have reversed polarities. This can be a great thing to practice intentionally, for a few minutes at a time, to experience more deeply the opposite sexual essence.

For a translucent couple that has learned both to polarize and merge, sex is transformed from a personal act of intensified pleasure into something of quite different proportions. Orgasm is a glorified sneeze compared to what is possible when we step out of the small box of physical pleasure.

When partners are willing to practice with translucent sex, they both come to the sexual meeting from a physical fullness. The man has not only realized himself as empty consciousness, absolutely present and able to contain all movement, but he has also brought that realization down into the body. The woman has not only experienced the essence of love, but she has also practiced opening so much that she emanates that love itself, from her whole body. She becomes an embodiment of the divine feminine paradox: the supreme strength of absolute yielding, vulnerable surrender. This is not a matter of imitating or acting out certain qualities but of relaxing into your natural essence, which takes no doing or effort at all, only conscious practice.

A translucent couple is not meeting to get something from each other, or for themselves, although they will both be blessed. They are not meeting to get off on waves of physical pleasure, although their bodies will pass through those states as a result. They are not even meeting to love each other in a personal way, although they will know that love more fully than they could in any other way. They are not actually meeting as Hank and Loretta Higgins of Marigold Lane anymore, although that will be the point of departure. Sex is now being offered at the altar of translucence itself.

Translucent sexual union is what David Deida calls “the human realm replication of the union of consciousness and light.” This union can, and often does, occur within an individual. Tantric art shows us the union of Shiva and Shakti as the melting and merging of the inner man and inner woman. In hyper-masculine traditions, this was as good as it got, finding this union of the inner masculine and feminine, then meeting the world without gender.

With translucent sexual practice, we consciously choose to embody the great union of consciousness and light. The more masculine person (usually, but not always, a man) embodies consciousness gifting through the body, and the more feminine person (usually, but not always, a woman) embodies light and love in the body. Both partners are allowing a gifting that is universal, rather than personal, to pass through them. When a man and a woman meet in this way, the two polarized offerings become a full circle, and there is a fusion of consciousness and light, of yin and yang, much greater than could ever occur within an individual. The masculine essence gifts the feminine so deeply with trustworthy conscious presence, through one partner’s body, and the feminine essence gifts the masculine so deeply with love and light, through the other partner’s body, that the boundaries of fullness meeting fullness finally break, and they pour into one another.

Without this full circle, a masculine person’s disposition is to feel, “I want to get back to that nice peaceful emptiness; I don’t want to deal with all this stuff of life. It’s a burden, a hassle.” Through the completion of the circle, through giving the gift completely to the feminine, he realizes that that “stuff ” is not a problem at all; it is all made of consciousness anyway. He can surrender into life. He becomes uncollapsible, free in the midst of the swirling of form. No matter what, he can still fully give of himself. He is no longer afraid to open into life and finds the marriage of consciousness and form.

Woman is freed of her longing to be fully penetrated by God when she opens her heart way beyond the known and allows the Big Love to move through her. She realizes, in the undefended giving of everything, that her world of form is already fully penetrated by divine consciousness all the time, and always has been. She is no longer just Loretta Higgins; she has become Kumari, the Divine Goddess. She has become the feminine principle itself, opened in radiant undefended love. She allows herself to be completely penetrated and taken in a conscious act of surrender and devotion to the masculine principle, which is entering her and filling her with its consciousness. She is transported beyond her longing to be loved into being love itself.

To read more, purchase my book The Translucent Revolution HERE.

I know a man who is a detective with our local police force. I talk with him sometimes in the sauna at the gym. “Not only,” he told me, “is it true that everyone has a unique fingerprint, but it goes back historically as well.” It means that the unique fingerprint you have is not only different from the seven billion people alive on the planet, but it’s different from any human being who has ever lived.

Of course, the same is true with your DNA and many other things about your body as well. For example, have you ever met two people with exactly the same face? Even with so-called “identical” twins, when you put them side by side, you usually know who is who.

I’ve come to discover that exactly the same is true about less physical and tangible things. Just as no two human beings have exactly the same physical makeup, no two human beings have exactly the same psychological characteristics either.

Over many years of coaching and counseling people in all different ways, I’d say that this simple discovery is the most reliable indicator of deep fulfillment and well-being.  When you have the recognition, the appreciation, and giving of the gift that comes uniquely through you, all else falls into place.

Before we can really connect with this deepest gift, it’s important to recognize the difference between “natural character” and “the conditioned personality.” They easily get mixed up with one-another. Natural character is the way you are when you relax from every possible “should” or “shouldn’t” that’s been imposed upon you. It’s the way you were as a small child. You probably come back again, close to your natural character, when you feel vulnerable, when you get sick, or when you become very closely intimate with another human being. It’s you without the makeup.

The conditional personality, of course, is the face that we present to the world. It’s the habits of “not love” that we’ve inherited from our parents, our school teachers, and from all of society in a broader sense. It’s who you become when you get “bent out of shape by society’s pliers,” (to quote Bob Dylan).

Over the last many years, I’ve been developing a very precise, easy, and graceful way to uncover your unique gift. Once you understand the underlying principles, it’s very simple. I’m going to present you here with a few key insights to chew upon.

If you’d like know more, please join me for a free tele-seminar this Thursday, February 9th at 6pm Pacific time, and I’ll go into much more detail and answer your questions.

1. Your unique gift is not the same as what you do for a living. If you’re lucky, your work becomes an expression of your gift, but your gift existed when you were very small (before you had a job at all) and the gift flows in every aspect of your life, including when you’re not at work.

2. Ironically, the more awake and conscious you become, the more you feel “I don’t have any gift.” This is because the gift flows through you, not from you.

3. The gift you were born to give is not for you. It flows out through you to other people. It may not always feel good or even be what you want to do, but it was what you were born to do.

4. You may have more fear, nervousness, and shyness about your unique gift than you do about many other activities you perform. It’s more intimate, real, and authentic.

5. When you give your gift, even for short periods at a time, a muscle of effort relaxes completely within you. Even a few minutes of allowing the gift to flow can compensate for hours of other things you may find boring.

There’s lots more we can say about this topic. During the free tele-seminar this Thursday, I’m going to tell you about a 4-part series I’m going to offer in a few weeks, guiding you in how to discover, express, release blocks to, and make a living out of your unique gift.

You can register for the free tele-seminar here.

There are many ways to dedicate an intimate relationship, and this is a great season to stay with the question, “Why do I want to be in an intimate relationship with another person?” It’s a question we don’t always ask ourselves before we jump in.

You probably know that the divorce rate stands at higher than 50%, and even for those who stay together, relationship can be fraught with misunderstanding, hurt feelings and unmet needs. So for most people, this is not an undiluted joyride. The highs and the lows fall into place when we really know deeply why we’re together, and have a clear and shared understanding between us.

One very real reason to share your life with another person is to avoid loneliness. Human beings thrive on touch, connection, interaction, even if it’s sometimes laced with conflict. At the end of the second World War, hundreds of thousands of babies in Europe ended up in camps. Their parents had either been killed in the war, or separated from their children. Initially a policy was introduced not to touch the children, for fear of infecting them with disease. The small babies didn’t grow well, had little appetite, they were floundering. Then, as an experiment, the policy was reversed: “Touch, pick the children up, hold them as much as possible. Give them human touch and we’ll take the risk.” The same babies were now thriving. So that’s a good and real reason to want to be in a relationship: simply to have contact with another person.

A second reason many people choose to be in a committed relationship is to raise a family. As many of us know, there’s a tremendous fulfillment in pouring the best of what you have into your young children, and watching them flourish and grow, perhaps beyond the ways that you’ve been able to do yourself. We’ve raised two boys. My oldest is now off to University. It’s probably the greatest sense of fulfillment in my life, to see these two young men as healthy, capable and creative. It takes a team of adults to pull that off.

And the list goes on. You could want to be in a committed relationship so as to have regular sex. For sure, that’s also important, but probably not enough to sustain a relationship on it’s own.

I met my wife, Chameli, 10 years ago. We met in Sweden when I was over for a visit, and then we didn’t see each other for many months afterward. We had contact by email and phone, and slowly began to realize that we had the possibility for a deeper kind of relationship. But these few months really gave us the opportunity to dive more deeply into the question, “why do I want to be in a relationship?” It was actually a great benefit to us to be separated in this way while we could each get clear about this question.

To break free of the automatic habits of distraction and emotional reactivity, so as to live your deepest nature in an abiding way, can be very challenging. Mainstream culture doesn’t really support it very much. For this reason, some people have chosen to live in a community with a teacher, or to be frequently on retreat. We came to discover that intimate relationship, or a marriage, can, if it’s dedicated in the right way, become the ideal context to support living awakening.

So this is another possible way to dedicate a marriage, one among many. You come to discover that you can be more honest with yourself, that you can drop deeper in yourself, that you can discover your unique gift and give it more courageously in the world, with the support of a fellow traveler by your side. Of course, we’ve raised two boys together. Of course we enjoy our sexuality and sharing good food and friends. But it’s this deepest dedication of transforming marriage into a spiritual discipline, that has brought us the greatest fulfillment.

We’ve been supporting couples and singles for many years now in this approach to relationship, which we call The Deeper Love. Please join us for a tele-seminar this Thursday, February 2nd, at 6pm. We’ll be delighted to share more with you about The Deeper Love, and to enter into a dialogue together.

Register for the tele-seminar here.

We are offering our Deeper Love Retreat-at-Home, a complete course for couples and singles, which you can do over 30 days, for 50% off, up through Valentine’s Day. We have 50 sets available at this price.  If you’d like to grab one, you can do so here. Enter the code “valentine” for a 50% discount.

People who live translucently enter into an evolutionary process of feeling more and more, while becoming less and less reactive. They can feel without a story, without justifications. Usually, we need to say: “I am angry because of what so-and-so did.” Most of our energy then goes into changing so-and-so and very little into what we feel. It is very, very rare for anyone to be willing to feel without a logical cause:

“How are you doing?”

“I’m so mad I could kill with my bare hands.”

“My God, why?”

“No reason, it’s just a wave passing through. Feels great, actually. I love it!”

Translucents can be with feeling as a vibration, just as one might listen to a piece of music. If we are deeply honest, we have no clue about why we are feeling what we feel. Is it really the parking space? Or was it that funny remark in the elevator last week, or the promotion last January? Perhaps I am actually angry with my father. More likely, that extra glass of cheap wine last night is the culprit. Most of our stories are inaccurate, and in the final count there is no one reason for any specific feeling. The more stirred up you become, the more complicated things get and the more you are pulled into reactive behavior and disconnected from your depth.

When we feel without a story, our feelings become less distinct, more a part of one another. They defy labeling. Let’s look at an example. You are on a first date. You feel a quickening in your heartbeat, a tightening in your belly. Label it fear, and you have the beginnings of one story: I might get rejected. I know I’ll say something stupid. Label the same feeling excitement, and spin a different story: Maybe he’s the one. But if you leave the sensation undefined, and just feel it as a mystery, you discover that fear and excitement are a hairbreadth apart, separated only by a different explanation. They easily change into one another.

Try this the next time you feel afraid. Ask yourself if you know, for sure, that what you’re feeling is fear. Could it equally be labeled excitement? Can you leave it without any label at all? The same is true of grief and gratitude. The next time you feel deep grief, see if it is possible, just for a moment, to feel it more deeply while thinking less about why. Then look around at anything, a flower, a color, a bird, and see if your tears are only of regret or also of thanks. Fear and excitement, grief and gratitude, anger and power, sadness and vulnerability: they are all separated from one another when we make them into an emotional drama but one when we feel them as pure energy. Chameli talks about how our feelings shift:

Stay alert to changes. Be aware that your feelings might change any moment. When you say “yes,” but not just to make it go away, you will very soon discover that it is changing all the time. The story, the explanation, keeps it going on a track that would otherwise change very quickly. When you are present with feelings, they are just waves arising and changing into something else. Just to be in that flow brings you into the present, which can be very light, or may become anger, or change into sadness, and then change into laughter. It changes so quickly. The Big Love is right here, all the time, it is the medium in which all the waves are moving. It is always right here. If we are not following the addiction to a story, feelings change quickly.

The more we become emotionally reactive, the more complicated things get, and the more we are disconnected from depth, and from the present moment. The more deeply we can feel, the more at peace we become and the simpler outer situations become. We can really give the gift of pure response to the situation instead of reacting to it. We can express what we are feeling, in tune with the present moment. We are no longer carrying any resistance. Now grief or anger or overwhelming affection can all be gifts to enhance the world, to bring to it more color, more aliveness. Feelings become a form of honest gifting, a generosity of spirit.

To read more, purchase my book The Translucent Revolution HERE.

There are a lot of things not to like about going to an English public school. Imagine putting a few hundred testosterone-driven adolescent boys into close quarters, where dozens sleep together in rows in the same room, have no contact with girls, and eat food that looks mostly like wallpaper paste, and is served with a ladle out of a bucket. The closest thing that exists like that today would be a lock-down for criminals. But 40 years ago, that was how the “privalidged” got educated in England.

Like many of the things that happen in unpleasant environments, I’ve tended to dismiss almost everything about those years. But it had its golden moments, too. Like something that the headmaster said at a morning assembly one day when I was 14, which has stuck with me ever since.

What is Heaven?
The headmaster was giving a speech about the difference between Heaven and Hell. “Hell,” he said, “is where a great number of very hungry people sit together on benches in a long, long, long row. There is a table in front of them, about six feet away, piled with all sorts of sumptuous dishes from all around the world. Each of the people sitting on the benches has a pair of six-foot long chopsticks. They are able to use the chopsticks to reach the food, but of course they have no way to get it to their mouth.

“And as for heaven,” he said, “Heaven is also filled with a great many people sitting on a long, long, long row of benches. The same tables are in front of them, also six feet away, and also laden with all kinds of delicious foods from around the world. In heaven, they also each have a pair of chopsticks long enough to reach the food.

“The difference,” he said, “is that in heaven, people use the chopsticks to feed each other.”

I don’t think I fully appreciated or digested the beauty of this story at the time that I heard it, maybe because of the very hard seat I was sitting on and the very uncomfortable school uniform I was wearing. But now, 40 years later, I feel that aging Anglican cleric was right on the money. That is the the difference between heaven and hell, and that’s the difference that we’re all being invited to participate in today.

Last week, we met for a tele-seminar about the most effective ways that you can be of service to other people in this time of transition. We talked about three of the most important qualities for being an instrument of awakening to others. We talked about “inspired certainty” as the capacity to hold a vision of what is true and abiding. “Absolute presence” means to be with another person without any kind of distraction, either internal or external. And “radical awakening” we described as the capacity to help another person shift from the preoccupation of thoughts and feelings to limitless, expansive consciousness in just a few minutes.

You can listen to last week’s tele-seminar here.

This week, we’re going to continue talking about how you can be an instrument of awakening to other people. We’re going to talk about how easy it is to free up contractions and emotional charge when we know how to free it from a story. We’re going to talk about the right use of practice, to shift from habits that create suffering to those that create joy and play. We’re going to talk about recognizing and bringing forth the unique gift in another person, and we’re going to talk about the mysterious magic of “spontaneous creation.”

Please join me on Thursday, January 26th at 6pm Pacific time for this discussion.

Register for the free tele-seminar here.

Photo credits: carlos porto, Suat Eman, Idea go

Leap Before You Look.

Sit together with your intimate partner
Or a close friend.
Decide who will be partner A,
And who will be B.
Partner A,
You are going to share five withholds:
Something significant
And relevant to your relationship
That has not been said.
This could be a judgment,
It could be something that happened,
Or it could be something you have been thinking
Or planning.
Keep your withholds short:
No more than a sentence or two.
Partner B, after each withhold,
Just say “thank you.”
Do not respond or react in any other way.
After five withholds,
Close your eyes and sit together for a few minutes,
Then switch roles.

Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks talk about relationship like a dance floor. You are moving together, coming very close and then moving away for a moment, moving fast and then slow. Your relationship is set to different kinds of music with different tempos, and the tempo can change at any time. At any moment, you both need to be ready and available to respond to the change in the rhythm or the speed of the dance. They describe withheld communication as globs of chewing gum on the dance floor, where your shoes get stuck. The dance can no longer flow.

We may have all kinds of motivations in our life to be honest or dishonest. Here, we are using it as a practice not for the usual moral or strategic reasons, but to create more space for the dance to flow. When we share and dissolve our withholds in this way, we let go of the boundaries that keep us separate.

This practice is less about the exchange of information than it is about a spirit of self-effacing disclosure. The withholds you share may seem very significant and important: “I’m considering moving to Canada.” “I slept with your sister.” “Yesterday when you said what you did in the restaurant, I felt really hurt.” Or they might seem quite petty and mundane, not even worth mentioning: “I don’t like the color of your socks.” “Your stories bore me.” “I had a cigarette yesterday, after I said I had quit.” Keep them very short: label and move on. We are not psychologically processing here, but letting go of what gets in the way. Once it has been said, it is done.

When you are the one listening, it is important not to react in any way. Just listen and breathe and let go. Don’t throw things back in your partner’s face by making one of your withholds be a reaction to what was just said. After you are both done, there should be no postmortem, no discussion of what was said. This may sound difficult, but it doesn’t take long to recognize the great value of this of this practice.

When we tell the truth about something, we open the door to a deeper intimacy with the other person. We create and share more space. Share your withholds often, so they do not build up.

Enjoy the greater space you open between you, and within you.

To read more, purchase my book Leap Before You Look here.

Just ….

Next week I will share with you more about what I discovered.

But for now, I’d love to hear your experience of being in retreat from the world.

Share with me in the comments section below.

with love

your friend

Arjuna

It’s 4 PM on December 31, 2011. Eight hours to go, and it’s 2012.

The aliens will be landing, the tidal waves will be crashing in,  even in our little town in the foothills of the mountains, the supermarkets will have no food, money won’t be worth anything anymore, and solar flares will make your electronic devices inoperable. (This means you’re not reading this anyway. Which makes me wonder why I’m writing it.)

Or…

Very spiritual people, with names like “Orgasmic Butterfly,” and “Joyous Rainbow Child,” will take to the streets in all their tie-dyed, chakra-opened, interconnected glory, and shout out Hallelujiah!   Crop Circles will appear on the White House Lawn.   Grumpiness, discord, irritability, and people with more than 12 items at the express lane at the supermarket will magically disappear from the planet forever, and we will be living in a homogenous Golden Soup of Luuurrrv….

Or…

None of the above.

Anyway, whatever the New Year brings, this is my last blog post for 2011. And I’ve got to admit, I’m feeling some performance anxiety now, to make it absolutely, incredibly, incomparably awesome. Wish me luck.

So I posted a little competition on my Facebook page. This turned out to be a really smart idea, and something I plan to do again. I asked my friends what they thought would be the best topic for my last blog post of 2011. And here are the top ten most interesting answers:

• Robert Lyons said:   On allowing the causeless joy that is in us to have its way.
• Mari Heart said: Be infinite happiness and Love. The choice is yours:)
• Cassandra Eve said:Living timelessly…… what does that mean to you?
• Julie Fatemian said: Fulfillment in a time of crisis
• Julie Hall said: The end is the beginning. (or is that too obvious? ; )
• Anton Larson said: Giving up spirituality.
• Matthew Blom said: Awesome.
• Cathrine Løvaas said: Why we need “new beginnings” and “time outs” like new years can be, to change, breathe, take an overview and start something new.
• Jane Cassidy said: Why does spirirual awakening have to be such a struggle. Why did it leave me so many times lost alone frightened and depressed to the point were i was lucky to have made it through. I know to a degree that was a choice but it does seem to be a popular one. Why does awakening have to hurt?
• Patricia Saferite said: If I could tell the whole world this one thing about awakening, it would be . . .

I really wanted to try and write a post that included all of them. Now don’t try this at home kids, it could cause serious injury, death, or even worse, making a terrible full of yourself.  But here we go:

 If I could tell the whole world this one thing about awakening, it would be . . .

This one very simple thing, illustrated in this one very fine story, told to me by my teacher in India, who was not only the wisest and most awake man I have ever known, but also the naughtiest, and the funniest.

A long long time ago, when things were slow and simple and generally smelled better than they do now, there was a family living together. A husband, his wife, and two young boys. The husband’s business took him all around the land, you could say he was perhaps the medieval equivalent of the traveling salesman.

One day, after he’d been gone for several weeks, a messenger arrived on horseback, with terrible news. The husband had gotten terribly sick in a faraway place and he had died. Of course the widow and her children were grief stricken. They were devastated. Not only had they lost their father, their partner, but they had also lost the only breadwinner for the house. They were very distraught.

After a week or two had passed, the young widow managed to find herself a simple sewing machine, she set it up in the middle of the kitchen, and she took in mending, altering, and other jobs from the neighbors. In this way she raised her two sons in dire poverty for many years. Somehow they just scraped by with enough to eat, somehow they had a shirt on their backs, one old pair of shoes each, but every day seemed like it could be their last.

Years passed.

And then a visitor came, an old friend of the father’s, who they had not seen for a long time. “I’m sorry to surprise you like this,” he said, “I haven’t been through this area many years, and I so much wanted to visit the family.” But then he looked around at the house, so run down, he looked at the faces of the mother and the two boys, both teenagers now, looking so stressed and unhappy. He saw that the kitchen was bare, almost no cups or plates, and no signs of any food. And he felt confused. “I don’t understand, he said, “What happened to you? Your husband, your father, left you well provided for, why are you living in this way?”

Now was the widows turn, and the sons’ turn, to feel confused. What did he mean well provided for? They had been left with nothing.

“Didn’t he tell you?” said the stranger. “He’d collected gold and silver and very many other precious things, and he hid them in a chest under a board in the middle of the kitchen.  I was so sure that he had told you where it was all hidden.” And so between them they lifted up the sewing machine from the middle of the kitchen. They scraped away, and there was the board. They lifted the board, and there was the treasure.

As you can imagine, they never needed to desire for anything again. They could be at peace, they had everything. And of course, they  had everything all along, but they just didn’t know.

So this is the one thing that we need to know about awakening. In the midst of all our frantic activity, and stress, and worry, and anxiety, and doing, and feeling alone and abandoned and isolated, there is hidden treasure. The treasure is hidden underneath the busyness of our activity. Instead of doing more, we just need to move to the side our business as usual, long enough to look deeper. And then we realize it was all in vain, it was all unnecessary. We were already rich for life.

That’s the one thing I’d like to share with you to take with us into 2012.

Like the son of a rich man, begging door to door,
Like a fish in the sea, crying out I’m thirsty

So we go on seeking for an end to trouble, without realizing that all our activity is standing on the foundation of that for which we are seeking.

This is not a process, or something you have to get good at. Jane, this does not need to be a struggle, there’s nothing to make it through. This is just a matter of seeing once and for all, who you are and what is ultimately real. Thoughts and reactive feelings all move outward, away from the thinker in endless complexity. Inquiry, sanity, awakening, move in the other direction. They move from activity to awareness.

If we see this today, tonight, on the last day of 2011, then we can start the New Year with our pockets full of treasures, and from a place of  generosity rather than grasping. This just takes a finger snap, of coming to our senses, and waking up to what is real.

That’s it. That’s the one thing.

Now let the party begin…

The word belief originates with the Old English word leof, which means “to hold dear.” The Encarta World English Dictionary defines it as “acceptance by the mind that something is true or real, often underpinned by an emotional or

But we only develop beliefs about certain things. There are many aspects of our experience we never question. For example, we may have a belief about life on other planets, but not about the existence of the moon. We may have beliefs about our ability to earn a million dollars in ten years, but not about our ability to brush our teeth. We may believe in past lives, but we don’t need to believe in yesterday. In other words, we hold beliefs about things that we don’t know about from direct experience. Why? Because we are unwilling to stay in not knowing. We take for granted that it is normal to come to fixed conclusions. But it seems we are the only species that clings to concepts in this way. The very idea of a fundamentalist penguin, or of an atheist cat, is absurd, the stuff of Gary Larson’s “Far Side.” What dog sits around the house postulating whether or not the universe is expanding?

No, only the human mind in the grip of ego comes to conclusions, independent of direct experience.

“Everyone wants to find a way to happiness. And the way to happiness is waking up to what really is true. Until we question what we believe, we’re blind to it.”
— Byron Katie, “Inspired Certainty”

We need belief because we feel cut off from a deep connection to what is real. Animals, small children, and translucent people do not need to believe anything, because they are loyal to what is. Sometimes people ask, “Do you believe in God?” But what difference does a mental conclusion make? Either we feel God all around us and within us, and our heart is open to the Great Spirit creating and connecting all things — or we don’t. Believing in what we do not feel creates a plastic, mental world with no nourishment or depth to it. We only need faith when we insist on closing our hearts.

Animals do, of course, learn from their environment. Our cat has learned how to use the cat door, an entirely conditioned response based on direct experience. And small children are the same. But ego-hypnotized human beings develop many beliefs despite their learning, beliefs that may even contradict their direct experience.

Jean Piaget, the French developmental psychologist, discovered that newborns do not experience themselves and their environment as separate. Piaget confirmed this through close observation of how infants move. He saw that when a newborn grabs a rattle, for example, and pulls it toward her body, she is surprised when the rattle meets a solid form. He concluded that very young babies experience themselves as space. After six months or so, this changes, and their body movement anticipates that they have a form. It takes a few years for a child to lock into the idea of “me” as a separate identity from the environment and to begin to negotiate exchange. Many people retain this feeling of being space, later in their life, as a “cellular memory.”

Human beings, then, come into the world with a sense of wholeness, a sense of oneness, of non-separation. Small children don’t have any beliefs about anything. Is your two-year-old a Christian or a Buddhist or a Hare Krishna? Only if you decide to call her one. Does your three-year-old discuss the presidential debates or side with political parties? Many different mechanisms cause us to adopt positions. We may imitate the beliefs of our immediate family or culture, or we may develop a belief system as a reaction against them. But the beliefs that run deepest in us, and that are most hardwired into our bodies, we have assimilated by learning to cut off different movements of energy within our psyches.

“When one is still in a very fundamental way absorbed in and deluded by the fears and desires of their own ego, there is a vague sense of the larger context out there, but mainly individuals are absorbed in this very subjective experience.“
— Andrew Cohen

Here is an exercise you can do to free up your own beliefs. You can practice this alone or with a translucent ally:
Think of a sticky issue in your life, one that requires taking action. Ideally, find a situation in which you truly don’t know what to do, but one in which not doing seems to invite catastrophe. If you are alone, write down all the thoughts you have about your impending decision, and list them as one-line points of view. If you have a friend, you can go a little deeper. You can kick back, close your eyes, talk about your issue, and ask your friend to make a note whenever she or he hears you express a belief.

Click here to purchase a copy of the book

You will probably come up with quite a list.

From The Translucent Revolution, New World Library, 2005

This is the last post I write in 2011, before we enter cautiously into the most hyped year in human history: two thousand and twelve.

Rather like the latest Star Wars film, or Harry Potter book, the anticipation builds us up into such a state of frenzy that we may have no choice but to simply feel a sense of anticlimax.

2012 prophecies have basically fallen into one of two categories:

The first we saw blown up large in Roland Emmerich’s films, “2012” and “The Day After Tomorrow,” which are both examples of films mostly about destruction. Earthquakes, tidal waves, comets crashing into the earth. Many people sense that the day of judgement is at hand.

The other way we lean with 2012 prophecies is quite the opposite, that we’re entering into a golden age of enlightenment, where humanity suddenly and inexplicably evolves to it’s next level of integration.  Greed, conflict and ignorance evaporate into thin air, and we are all left grinning in contentment.

Now maybe, just maybe, you may listen to both of these extremes with a measure of skepticism. Cos I know I do.

My good friend Jean Huston, one of the sanest people I know, was asked for her 2012 prediction recently. “I feel quite confident,” she says, “about what will happen in 2012. People will cook food, go shopping and pick up their kids from school. They’ll also go to the bathroom, go to sleep and take showers.”

Or Leonard Cohen, another of the wisest people I’ve met, said: “You know I think 2012 might have almost as big an impact on us as Y2K.” His tongue, as you can imagine, was embedded deeply in his cheek as he said this.

But I also think that there’s a reason why, outlandish and exaggerated as these predictions may become, we have a sense that “the times they are a’changing.”

If we take a sharp swerve now away from the new age, the spiritual and the speculative, even mainstream political and economic commentators are aware that something has gotta give.

For example:

The economic system we’ve created has more or less reached the end of its capacity to stay in balance. The economies of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy are on the verge of default, and the United States, with 14.3 trillion dollars of debt, could actually go under, any time the Chinese decide to reel it in.

The gap between the haves and the have-nots has never been greater, both globally and here in the US.

The earth’s population just hit 7 billion. It’s easy to overlook the significance of this without a little picture, so take a look at this graph here:

As you can see, the human population of this earth hummed along between 300 and 500 million for thousands of years, until it turned a sharp corner with the industrial and then the medical revolutions. The population of the earth has doubled in the last 35 years. This is something that has never happened before. This also, obviously, is a situation that’s unsustainable. We can’t keep adding another billion every 10 to 12 years for much longer.

Although there have always been wars and political tensions in the world, we’ve never before created this kind of capacity to be able to create mass disruption with the flick of a switch, whether that switch is in the hand of a President or a terrorist.

Human beings’ impact on the environment has never been greater, and in part because of the sophistication of the environments we’ve created. We’re using up the earth’s resources at a much faster pace than they can be replenished, which, again, is unsustainable.

We could go on and on, but it’s these undeniable facts taken together which make an end-of-the-world scenario, in some way resonant. Everybody knows that something’s got to give.

At the same time, beneath the hype and the new-age speculation, there are also good reasons why we resonate with the golden age scenario. As you may know, I’ve been facilitating awakening, in individuals and groups of people, for more than 20 years. That’s what my life has really been about. By awakening, I mean having direct access to a deeper dimension of yourself, which is limitless, which is free, and which is not separate from anything else.

When I started teaching back in the early 90’s, it was very rare for anyone to even have a glimpse of their true nature as infinite. Today it’s quite commonplace. Whether in Vienna, or London, or California or New Jersey, there’s no doubt whatsoever that more people are opening up to more expanded states of consciousness, even if just in glimpses. This is not only my experience. Every writer and teacher I know who works in this field has witnessed the same thing.

At the same time, all kinds of other breakthroughs in consciousness are happening. We have a much greater understanding, for example, of what it takes to find peaceful resolution. The recognition of the gifts of the feminine, to come in balance with thousands of years of masculine domination is flowering.  A huge uprising of people now have a greater intuition of their true gift to the world and their  purpose in being here.

Put all this together, and it reminds me of the end of one of a James Bond film. The clock is ticking. Will the mother of all bombs go off, and blow up the entire planet, or will James Bond, sleek, conscious, and good, detonate it just in time, with a happy ending for all?

It is all of these factors coming together which make 2012 symbolic of a fresh start in so many ways. Whatever conclusions we may come to in another 12 months (if we’re still around to draw conclusions!), it is clear to me, and many others as well, that the remedy is the same, whatever the outcome. There’s only really one thing that you and I need to focus on in the next 12 months, in very specific and concrete ways, and the rest will take care of itself.

I’m going to guide you through what that is  in free a tele-seminar this coming Thursday, December 29th, at 6 pm Pacific time.

Please join me live on the call, or use the same link to register for the replay.

Big love to everybody.

Arjuna

REGISTER FOR THE TELESEMINAR HERE