If awakening and enlightenment equate to personal liberation, there seems to be a lot of it around nowadays. Look in the appropriate magazines, on the relevant websites, and they are teeming with people who have 'woken up', or are well on the way to doing so. Many of them will help the reader to become awake, too, normally for a fee (which is reasonable enough: even awakened ones need to earn a crust for their potatoes and eggs). Some are, or have been, disciples in bare-bones Buddhism, as I call it, or Advaita in some shape or form. Other still have become 'mushroom teachers', as John Smith (more of him later) calls them, popping up like woodland fungi from nowhere. Typically, such people were washing down the car on a Sunday morning, or perusing the tins of soup in the local supermarket when, unbidden and unanticipated - boom! Something happened. Separate selfhood disappeared, maybe, or a complete ineffable oneness with all the universe opened up where just a moment ago were lines of lentil and bacon soup cans. Henceforth, everything is different; once blasted by awakening, the subject (not that subject and object any longer exist) lives a transformed life.
As well as mushroom teachers there are, I suppose, mushroom groups, or hybrid mushroom communities. One such is Liberation Unleashed - or LU, as I call it for the sake of brevity. I was first made aware of LU near the end of last year by a friend of mine, who contacted me in a state of great energy and enthusiasm for the process which LU oversees. I know a number of people who have undergone the LU process, and they speak in glowing terms. Liberation Unleashed can lead you to an experience of 'No Self', a direct experience of how that separate self you have based your life on and who you have always believed in is nothing but a fiction, a fantasy; in spiritual terms, the big hindrance. The method is 'direct pointing': engage online regularly and in total honesty with a guide, and you will be led seamlessly to the experience of your own 'no self' nature'.On checking them out, I found LU to be friendly and up-front about what they are doing. There is a freshness and pragmatism about some of the content of the website. 'This is the process, and this can be the result' is the simple message; in a sense, they are making no great claims, aside from that single focus on the reality that you don't have a self. An additional plus is that there is no need for a guru, with all the emotional complications that can follow this particular style of awakening: in LU, you just find yourself a guide, report regularly, and off you go.
The LU process follows the time-honoured tradition of looking closely - very closely - at experience: your real experience, not what you think or imagine or assume your experience is. Some of the results of this remarkably simple yet remarkably difficult technique reported by followers of this direct pointing echoed closely some of my own experiences over recent years. Following Don Juan's recommendations to Carlos Castaneda in 'A Separate Reality' I had started to listen to sounds - in my case having adopted traditional meditation posture. The awareness began to arise that there was not really a sound 'out there' being listened to by a receiver 'in here' at all. This was simply a construct habitually created around the pure sensation of sound, which arose then faded away within a far greater space of consciousness. To begin to perceive in such a pure and direct fashion was quietly miraculous, since I had wondered whether it was a level of reality that I would ever experience outwith the aid of psychedelic teacher substances.
From there I began to apply the same method to the other senses and elements of experience. Most obstinate in 'de-identifying' were, I discovered, thoughts. I found that I identify massively with the thoughts which pass through the space habitually referred to as 'my mind'. The LU aproach to thoughts, deduced from carefully reading several of the many 'case studies' available on their website, I found most useful in helping to de-identify from thoughts. Accompanying this process was an undoubted fading away of some of the claptrap coursing through my consciousness, mainly nonsense related to the (lessening) anxiety that has been my bugbear over the years, and which I have written about before.
So far, so good. Very good, in fact. Rationally, it might be time to really plunge in, get my insights verified by a guide, and then move on to further techniques aimed at removing evermore subtle signs of that fictional sense of self.
It was at this moment that the Queen of the Dark Hours, Lady of the Silver Planet, decided to cast her wan light once more over my life. "There's something a bit off here" she began her familiar intoning. "I don't know what it is, but there's something not quite right." I watched as she manifested then disappeared behind the night clouds scudding rapidly above me. Her ever-changing mystery is magnetic, and, and I have discovered the painful way, ignored at your peril. By now I know her well enough; I surrendered to her higher wisdom without resistance.
Under her guiding influence I found myself unaccountably reading through my shamanic diaries from many years back (see blog post 'Shamanic Journey', 23rd July 2016). I took down from the shelves my dusty volumes of Jung and Jungiana, and drew up my onion of consciousness as a description of the layers of consciousness as I had experienced them. I delved then dived into the Tarot, eventually finding a couple of decks which seemed to resonate with me. As a result of some of my Tarot studies, I had a proper look at the Kabbalistic tree of life with its emanations, the Sephiroth, which, for the first time in my life, spoke to me rather than being a source of brain-ache and irritation.
In addition , I started to feel a bit uneasy with some of the effects of neo-advaita-style mind work. The Liberation Unleashed type of practice had seemed to remove plenty of dirty dishwater; simultaneously, I began to feel that continuing with this style of consciousness work would begin to take out stuff that I wasn't happy with taking out. Not because I was afraid of 'no self', but because it was 'content of consciousness' which expressed meaning. In fact, I increasingly felt that the specific sense experiences were not to be negated, or dismissed as irrelevant, but were our portals into deeper levels of mind. The sacred began to burst forth from, or through, every sight, sound, tactile sensation, that was registered within my field of consciousness. These were unique to myself and to this unique moment in time, and came resonating with, well, something that was necessary and magnificent. The 'no self' approach, if adopted exclusively, seemed to lead to a vivid experience of the field of consciousness within which phenomena come and go, but seemed to ignore the sacred aspect to the phenomena themselves popping up and popping out within that field. It was a one-eyed practice. I felt in danger of short-circuiting myself, especially those emotions which can be gateways into the divine.
Put another way, the fabric of the universe is not a coincidence or irritating impediment. It comes redolent with significance, with meaning. In one way, sure, it is illusory or unreal; in another way, it is anything but. It is the warp and weft from which all is woven. This was the underlying feeling giving rise to the notion of sacred polarities that I wrote about in 'The Divinity of Polarity', 10th June 2016.
In the cosmic jigsaw of synchronicity that such perception unleashes, I came upon a quote from Jung that I had first read years ago, but since forgotten. He was deeply influenced by practices and philosophies originating in the the East, especially Buddhism and Taoism, but his final comment (on Hinduism, but relevant here as well, I think) came like this: "The universe does not seem to exist for the sole purpose of man denying or escaping it." I originally dismissed Jung's comment with a 'He doesn't understand Buddhism and Hinduism', and there might be something in that. Nevertheless, I now wonder whether he was onto something.
Next episode on the subject to follow shortly.......
Image: Sirian Starseed Tarot
