I give a lot of credence to grounding and to being in the body. Because this is the ordeal on the spiritual path.
I meet many of you who have already ascended. You don’t have much problem with ascension, because it’s all bliss, awareness, spaciousness, peace, God and Truth. But it’s the descent, it’s coming into the body where we really actualize…where we make it real.
Let’s talk about grounding. This is the conversation of making something real. With grounding there are really two realities:
One. There’s the absolute reality, which by the way, needs no world to be real. If you take everything away it’s what’s left over.
But that’s not much. There’s nothing there.
When you get there, and that’s all there is, then that’s all there is forever. It is the most important attainment on the spiritual path, the realisation of the Absolute, the Sat. However, its utility, or its full appreciation can only be experienced when you’ve met the other reality which is the one that occurs in our embodied condition.
Sat and Asat
I’ve spoken of this as the Sat and the Asat in a number of my talks. The Sat is the transcendent unchanging, timeless condition of consciousness. This is the condition prior to consciousness that is more accurate, from which all existence emerged. The Asat is the same principle, but totally embedded in matter and its consciousness. The condition of consciousness in the Asat is at the other side of the spectrum of the condition of consciousness in the Sat.
In the Sat, the consciousness is like the energy that comes out of the event horizon on the edge of the black hole. But the Asat is the energy embedded in all matter. In its most dense aspects of matter, its job is to emerge out of the unconscious, emerge out of the inconscient, the thing prior to the unconsciousness. It doesn’t know anything at all.
So it’s inherently truth. It emerges, it pushes, it’s what pushes matter to evolve. In the physical dimension of things, it is energy. It’s the E in Einstein’s E = mc2. It is that energy which is the impetus, and which this entire physical creation was cast in the cauldron of diversification and expansion.
And, of course, the beginning of evolution.
So, inherent in all matter is the same reality that exists in the most supreme transcendent superconscious states. So matter, and that means our matter, the matter of our body and our system, our biology, matters.
Matter matters.
Without the contrast of these two realities, this supreme reality and this embedded reality, consciousness cannot become fully complete or fully mature.
Human beings are instinctively engaged in expressing this Asat principle. It is the motive, the motivating impetus, it’s the primal impulse, the creative impulse in which all of us are expressions of.
Our breath and our life are all an expression of it.
The Three Waves
Sri Aurobindo described that there were three waves in the creation that were the unfolding of this Asat.
The first wave was the formation of Matter from its most simple forms into more and more complex configurations. When these complex configurations reached a certain crescendo, the elements were formed, and life then became possible.
The second wave of the unfolding of the Asat was Life. From the most primitive organic biological life, that was beginning the next phase of the unfolding of the inherent reality embedded in matter. Life could move in ways that matter could not. Life could become more individualized, more autonomous. The more it evolved the more it had the capacity for expressing itself, discovering, experiencing, knowing and waking up.
So, it is in life that we create the second wave, we create the biological basis, which would allow for our consciousness to eventually wake up. This wave is evolving without any understanding that it’s evolving, without any recognition of evolution, and it’s going through the endless ordeals of shedding the past insufficient structures and learning to expand into new, more sufficient, more complex, more sophisticated structures.
And this process is a process of pain, difficulty, and death.
Evolution is a horrific process, a catastrophe, in terms of consciousness. But, fortunately consciousness isn’t awake enough to know that’s what’s happening, so it’s blithely asleep, like under anaesthesia. Ignorance is bliss, it doesn’t know how much it’s suffering, it’s just being life.
Life then evolves to a certain point where Sri Aurobindo’s third wave is revealed. This third wave is Mind. The principle of the Mind that is that it has the capacity to know, to learn, and to record.
This was actually going on in within Matter, and within Life. There was a vast record of this evolutionary process being stored in the field of the one consciousness of which we’re all expressions of. And that Mind began to get particularized.
It began to get organized, it began to put structure into the unfolding of life, even before the evolution of life had reached very far along on its movement towards the next stage. It formed the DNA, it formed the spinal system, it formed the intelligence and the organization of life so that it could sustain itself, it could perpetuate itself.
It began to set in place the rules and structures of existence which we have been discovering in science and psychology and the rest of it. When Mind reaches its crescendo you then have Matter and Life and Mind. Each additional wave enhances the previous wave. By the time the three waves are vigorously active, Evolution is accelerating very, very quickly. And at that point, Mind makes the shift.
What happens?
The Buddhi comes, the intelligence comes. The Buddhi is what created the frontal cortex in the developing of the biological life that allowed for individual human beings and for some other animal beings to become self-aware, to have some degree of self-awareness. Though at first it’s very much overtaken and determined by the previous three waves it begins to get more and more articulate.
This intelligence of self-awareness is actually the mature expression of the unfolding of the Asat in matter, having taken on an individualized form as well as a more universal form.
So as soon as one human being became self-aware, in the field of the collective consciousness, self-awareness became a possibility. And that opens up the space for self-awareness to continue to expand to the point that, relatively speaking, there are many self-aware beings, or relatively self-aware beings on the planet.
So, what’s happened?
The Asat has woken up as us.
You could say, matter has woken up as matter, life has woken up as life, mind has woken up as mind, through this capacity of the buddhi, the intelligence. At that point, the Asat has become real, and is now become self-aware, and it finds itself embodied in the organic vehicle in which that self-awareness woke up in. Therefore, it tends to identify with the vehicle as its reality, as what it is.
It does not yet know of its original nature, but it does have that quality of knowingness, knowing that it knows, being aware, being able to be the experiencer of the experience.
This knower and experiencer is the distinct quality of the full expression of the Asat. This is the purpose of the Creation, and this reality is, literally, as real as the supreme Reality.
So when one comes to the state in the evolutionary process where the identification of the intelligence with the mind, vital body, life body, matter, physical body, the five senses, and all the nervous system begins to weaken or fade, then it becomes possible for the buddhi to become aware of itself. Consciousness wakes up to itself.
At that point, anything now can happen.
Returning to the Source
When consciousness wakes up to itself, the habits and the conditioning and the programming of its biological psychological emotional and mental life begins to unravel and it becomes more and more free. The energy that was required in order to sustain the body and the emotional nature and the mental nature starts being retracted into that essential quality of consciousness that resides in the individual buddhi.
Then it can start playing in the domains of consciousness that are not as bound as the domains of matter, body, life and mind.
And that’s where we are pulled to ascend into a more deep and profound relationship with that which is awakened within us. Because as soon as we individually awaken to ourselves as consciousness, there is an automatic process where, after the wonder of that awakening has quieted, when the consciousness then is pulled to return to its source, which is the Sat.
So, basically, the Asat has become aware of itself as each of us, and now the Asat returning to its origin as the Sat. It’s emerging out from the whole cause of creation and all it wants to do is return to its original pure source, only without the “A.”
Maybe that’s why we say “aaaaa” the whole way…
Because the “aaa..” then disappears into the sat, the Asat becomes the Sat again and the journey is complete.
But in order for this to be fully manifested, fully integrated, fully lived, the ideal situation is for the Sat and the Asat to co-inhabit the same vessel. Which means we need to learn how to bring in these higher states of consciousness into our body.
The more we can do this at the individual level, mostly through the process of embodied awareness, or the awakening of the kundalini at the bodily level, and the first six chakras the individual system has now enlivened itself into the nature of its truth.
It’s the reality of itself, consciousness and matter are, at a individual level, at the highest level of cooperation and attention. In that process, we can discover what else in our system is that is obscuring, that is still obscure due to the habit and the conditioning of the evolutionary process.
That of course, has its reference points in our mental development and our mental conditioning, from the early educational training in school and university, as well as our social training, which drops into our emotional nature and our vital nature and our feeling nature and our instinctive nature, as all the way down into the very fundamental structures of the capacities of the body to function, to digest food, to live, to have energy, to what creates the electromagnetic field around the body, in the biochemistry of the processes within the body.
The Kundalini
There is this unfolding of the nature of the structure in which we’ve awakened in. This process allows an integration; it allows for the Asat in the more dense part of ourselves to wake up. Many call this the kundalini, the chit shakti, the current of the Asat, the satchitananda, to wake up from it’s embedment in the cells of the body, within the bioenergy of the body, activating the intelligence of the body.
All of that is part of the process that will unfold naturally in a mature spiritual practice. This will naturally reveal, in its process, what’s hidden, showing us the nature of what’s still in ignorance, still in inconscient or sub-conscious or unconscious conditions in ourselves.
When this process has come along to a certain extent, the universe will start to awaken as us. The Asat in the individual will begin to open up to universal forces, and these universal forces will very much augment and accelerate that process of integration.
We may have a whole horrific bunch of stuff showing up in our own individual psychology in the individual kundalini awakening or awareness awakening. However, once one opens to the universe, that process is greatly accelerated but then the individual system begins to process the collective unconscious, the collective subconscious, the collective conditioning.
For the body to survive that process, then it really has to become purified, transparent, an empty vehicle for these forces to reside and be expressed through. The body needs to tolerate the incredible forces that are coming in, and at this point, the forces of the Sat and the Asat become more and more intense as they merge in the body.
And the ability of the body to hold these two conditions simultaneously is part of the opportunity of the final states, of the universal states of consciousness, where we merge with what we would call God or Truth, the Absolute, and that process of bringing the Asat and the Sat together in our body.
I don’t know if that’s been fully articulated.
I do know this is what’s happened to me. I do know, of course, it’s continuing to happen…
And I do know that this is the inherent possibility with for every awakened being in a body.
How successful or how effective we can do this, varies widely because it’s not our own effort that is enough. There has to be circumstances, there has to be accumulated impressions that are very much aligned so that it would allow this to happen.
Planes of Consciousness
Puna karmas, the Indians say positive karmas are oriented to God or Truth.
Lifetimes of practices that expand the evolving consciousness’ capacity to endure and surrender to the very intense processes that occurs naturally when this stage comes. In any one life, anyone could be in any one of these stages.
But it’s very clear to me that the final stages, when this universal polarity between the Sat and the Asat, tries to work itself out in our individual transformation process there has to be someone around who can hold that possibility, hold that space, that would allow for such a soul to be able to make this transition from being a transformed individual, to becoming a transformed vessel or a channel for universe. Because it’s outside of the domain of what we could possibly know up to that point.
This is an entirely different means of knowing or experiencing than is available at earlier stages of the spiritual path. Because it arises from a completely different paradigm for doing so than those available up until this stage. It goes beyond language and mind. It comes through a different means of being, one of knowingness, of recognition, revelation and realization.
The knowingness that was sufficient in the mind, which is time-based knowing, with past, present and future isn’t sufficient for the knowingness that’s required here. Once we step out of the domain of mind and move into the domain of intelligence, and then, of course, the higher vibrational frequencies that occur, which I call the the planes of consciousness.
So all that is is a process of recognition, a groping, and then a clarification to the revelation and eventually, the wisdom and the maturity of the realization that comes as a continuous cycling process.
This ever expanding upward spiral shows us how to know and experience outside of mind, vital and body and gives us information about the nature of ourselves, the world, the nature of reality and what’s happening that is beyond all that can be known or experienced now.
And then, there is a kind of wisdom that doesn’t change, that has no past or a future, but when it arises, one is able to see its nature, where it comes from and where it’s going to in a timeless moment. Now, how much this can be articulated and described, I don’t know, I’m making the attempts.
The Bhagavad Gita is the classic reference that, from the seventh chapter and on, is pointing to the different conditions and possibilities of consciousness that occur as the Asat moves into a more mature relationship to that from which it originally emerged, the Sat.
So this, perhaps hasn’t been articulated fully, but it’s fully clear to me that the body is a reality that is an essential part of this process.
Ego: Embodied Consciousness
It seems that, because of the self-referencing that comes out of forming an individual ego, while we’re in a body, this is the scaffolding for the unfolding to the state of consciousness that allows us to hold and not lose what comes as we move into the higher planes.
It is a process where the individual ego become a transparent ego, one without an individual agenda. An impersonal individual, one who no longer takes one’s self personally.
There is the essential quality of “I am”ness that core of self-awareness that know of its own existence. One that has temporarily lost its individual coating and its individual content and in that moment able to be present with what is there. That deeply inconscient, unconscious, subconscious structures to be revealed and in the process be present with the increasingly intense and powerful primal forces of consciousness and being that occurs as one returns to source…as the Asat returns to its source as the Sat. And this condition, this capacity, when it can become embodied can literally change the World’s vibration. It can literally shift the consciousness of the domain its occupying simply by being able to be present there.
So the fruit of this journey would be this full, expanded and integrated state of embodiment. This is the final frontier of the spiritual journey. The true manifestation of spirit in matter.
Why is this so? Because grounding allows for the full appreciation of the higher states by being able to be in the lower states simultaneously. This is the paradox that occurs on the spiritual path. It’s that “why am I so irritable and angry at the same time I’m having this very extraordinary expanded condition of consciousness” question. It’s in the duality, it’s in the polarity between the bounded condition, the Asat, and the Sat that the full effectiveness and power of force of the two can express itself in this dimension, and it can be known in this dimension.
Becoming a Channel for the Universe
It lifts the world to be able to bring into our body what we attain, the more we can live it as individuals, the more full and mature and complete is its expression into this dimension. This was the point of the Bhagavad Gita, the whole conversation of avatar consciousness or incarnation, a conscious incarnation, this possibility of being a vessel or channel, an instrument for the universe.
This is the fulfilment that the Bhagavad Gita talks about.
Now, when I talk to many of you, you’re all in a different places in this process.
Most of you are well along in your own individual transformation, your own individual awakening, the maturing of your own individual awakening. Some of you have crossed that threshold of individual maturation. A fewer number of you have crossed into the early thresholds of universal awakening, and some of you have been thrust fully into the universal awakening and more likely than not, you don’t know what the hell’s goin’ on.
It is almost impossible to know which phase you are in. There is no reference point and it makes my work very interesting.
It also makes it very difficult to address all of you at once in a conversation like this, but the words that are coming out of this mouth carry with it the same Sat from which the Asat emerged, from which these words are emerging. But just know there is something being transmitted that can be received at whatever level you’re at. And that would be its utility, nothing more, nothing less.
To know this in your own experience, to know where you are in this process is less important than to be in touch with the fire of the Asat awakening within you. This fire is all the evidence you need. This fire creates the desperate longing, drive, motive, aspiration for more of “That”, whatever we call it. This drive is the original drive of Existence, to Be, to learn and grow to wake up. It is the source of all that acts, from which all action arises, the endless seeking of Life itself.
But when it comes to its full maturity, it becomes focused and directed, and there is a sense of a direction, a sense of purpose, a sense of not just meaning. Meaning is not quite enough, but a form of resolve and determination. This makes you more and more clear that real progress is being made. And this sense of progressing, of movement, becomes more and more apparent to you, not just now and then, but in time it becomes a lived reality. This process validates our faith in the process and you perceive and experience your life shifting in previously unimaginable ways.
So, both the experience of the longing, of the aspiration, of the drive that comes from the spiritual experience, the fire that comes from spiritual experience, and the direct experience of the shifts in your perceptual realities. The falling away of old patterns such as your reactivity or the need to be right, as well as your pull to the world, for acknowledgement, for friends of wealth or security. There is also, often simultaneously a greater and greater capacity for experiences that are supersensual, beyond the dimension of the ordinary five senses and physical world.
Both of these can be shifts in the perception of reality, and ultimately there is a sense that you are not the person you were a year ago, a month ago, yesterday, five minutes ago. So this sense of shifting realities, is evidence of progress. If either of these or both of these are occurring, then you can take comfort that you are in the process. The more quickly it is, the more these shifts occur, the more rapid you experience yourself progressing and the harder it is to keep track of things as if you are accelerating too fast to keep track of the changes anymore.
That then leads you to a state of pure presence, of continuous unfolding now-ness…now, now, now, now…is all that is left. Then you can know a leap has been made out of time into a new paradigm. This is evidence that a tremendous amount of content has been moved in order for your consciousness to be present in that kind of very intense acceleration.
The Dark and the Light
It’s definitely what happens with every leap we make in the path, if it’s to be able to take us further, is it has to have its concurrent Asat. The negative, resistant, rebellious, denial, unconscious structures have to be revealed at the same time. As the light increases, the darkness is revealed. They happen simultaneously.
So the more we’re in touch with ourselves as the intelligent consciousness, churning in its relationship to the one reality, the more is shown. This is the process, the cauldron of transformation. The collision of the Sat descending from above meeting the Asat ascending from below.
And in this process we learn to be, we learn to move into relationship with existence such that the Asat becomes Sat, the untruth becomes truth, that the hatred and selfishness become forgiveness and love, that the unseen can be seen. This endless unfolding of all the contradictory polarities are the evidence, and necessary in order for what’s coming to be integral and embodied…a state of Being.
But be alert. To go just to the light and to try to stay into the transcendent state without meeting the comparable dark that remains in our system will thwart our ability to make further progress.
If there’s a tremendous amount of content and processing going on inside your body and inside your psychology, inside your mind and vital, you can be sure that the universe has taken over the process and is carving pathways by which your consciousness can expand to new heights. The more these two efforts, the more these two actions of darkness and light can become concurrent, or near concurrent, the more harmonious and the more integrated is the process.
When I work with all of you, this is what I look at. I look at the balance; I look at the stage; I look at how much you’re in touch with the longing and aspiration and how grounded you are, relatively speaking, for what has come to you. Helping you sort this out is the bulk of what I do. It give you correct information and to support you in holding the process, to allow it to do its work within you, so that a more integral development is possible.
It’s my experience that it’s best to be steady than to be sudden. It’s best to have a progressive development where both the light and the dark can be met sufficiently before it moves to the next stage. Unmet or immature bits and pieces of ourselves can create much great trouble further along. It is always better to meet and resolve them along the way rather than have them overtake you later on.
Mostly, once we awaken, we don’t want to have anything to do with the Asat, with the unmet or undeveloped remaining parts of ourselves. We want to live in the new reality that has shown itself, because it’s so free, it’s so expanded, it’s so full of power and love and connection and oneness. Who would want to come back to this small, narrow, miserable, shallow unexamined vehicle that you had been occupying?
Yet this is actually the most important part of the work.
Because if you leave the world without transforming that, you leave the world behind, you leave behind the purpose for your awakening. Which is to contribute it to the collective consciousness, to open a possibility for existence, for mankind and for the world, that has not even be able to be conceived yet, because the possibility of it was not near enough to even be able to be imagined, but I can sense it’s coming, and many others could sense that it’s coming, this new Consciousness, this new possibility for mankind.
So in this age, part of the conversation that I am having with all of you is the same. Is the message that your awakening is purposeful? It’s not just about you, or your freedom, or your attainment. It’s about how becoming a more and more capable vessel, channel, or instrument for the universe to fulfill its purpose.