Monday, June 13, 2016

Becoming Conscious

Awareness

It is impossible to experience the appearance of awareness. We are that awareness to which such an appearance would occur. We have no experience of a beginning to the awareness that is seeing these words. We have no experience of its birth. We have no experience that we, awareness, are born.”
Rupert Spira (Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience)

We had an interesting discussion yesterday in a Jungian study group about becoming conscious. In thousands of years, only a few humans have fully comprehended the nature of consciousness, and why it is so important to cultivate. Jung described it as the joining of the opposites—when all the opposites are joined within one person, that person becomes fully conscious. Jesus is quoted as describing it this way in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Saying #22: “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so the male shall not be [only] male, and the female shall not be [only] female...then you shall enter the kingdom of heaven.” When we understand that there is no degree of separation, that we are individual expressions of one conscious awareness that has no beginning and no end, then we will attain individual consciousness.

Another, less complicated way of looking at it is, “the devil is in the division.” When we don't understand that we are all part of one whole, we perceive ourselves as separate. We split into us-and-them, good-and-evil, right-and-wrong, worthy-and-unworthy. When we don't see the darkness of our own shadow in the world, we feel justified in wreaking havoc with our weapons and our wars because “they” are our enemy, and therefore must be defeated. Rupert Spira, in his book, The Transparency of Things, said, “We take that which is unreal to be real, and that which is real to be unreal.”

The cultivation of consciousness is critically important in our world. We are seeing the consequences of its lack in every corner of this planet, in every arena from governments to weather, from all-out war to street fighting, from the migration of millions of besieged people to shut gates and built walls, and from the worst mass shootings in history against people simply because they are perceived as “other”. We must pay attention to the “We are...” chants that we call out at such times: We are Charlie Hebdo! We are Paris! We are Sandy Hook! And Ferguson, and Aurora, and Chicago, and nine living souls shot dead in a Charleston Church. And now, we are Orlando. Indeed, we are. It is time for humanity to make this leap. We must become aware of our oneness.

                                                    In the Spirit,

                                                         Jane

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