The Awakening Guide: A Companion for the Inward Journey (Companions for the Inward Journey Book 2) Read online

  The

  Awakening

  Guide

  A COMPANION FOR THE INWARD JOURNEY

  Volume 2: Consciousness

  By

  Bonnie L. Greenwell Ph.D.

  The Awakening Guide

  A Companion for the Inward Journey

  COPYRIGHT 2014 All rights reserved.

  by Bonnie L. Greenwell Ph.D.

  Published by

  Shakti River Press, Ashland, OR

  Please do not print or reproduce any part

  of this book In digital or print form

  without written permission of the author,

  with the exception of limited quotes

  for the purpose of reviews.

  For More Information or to Contact the Author:

  www.kundaliniguide.com

  www.awakeningguide.com

  kundaliniguide.blogspot.com

  Cover Art:“Buddha Flowering”

  By Frederik Jan Hopman

  Printed with permission

  All Moral Rights Reserved 2006

  by Rhea Quien Hopman

  Cover Design:

  Deborah Perdue: www.illuminationgraphics.com

  Most of chapters 1 and 9 in this volume were

  previously published on the author’s

  website: www.awakeningguide.com

  ISBN 978-0-9627327-5-1

  Dedicated to all the Beings who have taken the journey to awakening, and left the traces in their footsteps and the flavors of their lives. Their pointers give us the inspiration and encouragement that Truth can be known, not through the accumulation of information, but through the opening of our hearts and minds, and trusting our own inward passage.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction: The Awakening Guide

  Chapter 1: The Longing of the Spirit

  The Inward Journey

  Spiritual Waking Up

  The Varieties of Awakening

  A Glimpse of Reality

  Biofeedback as a Trigger

  Near-Death as a Trigger

  Waking Up is Not an Experience

  A Teacher can Shift Your World

  After Discovery, Deconstruction

  Chapter 2: The Mystery of Being

  Awareness Has no Identity

  What the Sages Say of Freedom

  Chapter 3: the Spaciousness of Mind

  What About the Mind?

  The Open Mind

  Wisdom and Compassion

  Chapter 4: The I and the Self

  The Tendency to Entrancement

  The Desire to Stay Awake

  The Role of Spiritual Practice

  The Release of Conditioning

  Doing it NOW

  Chapter 5: Portals to Awakening

  Preparation

  Trust and a Clear View

  The Willingness Not to Know

  Seeing through Conditioned Mind

  Meeting Truth in the Teacher

  Always Now

  Bringing Awareness Through

  The Body/Mind

  Natural Portals

  Sudden and Gradual Awakening

  Chapter 6: The Deconsruction Zone

  A Basic Misunderstanding

  The Hell Realms

  Misguided Letting Go

  Chapter 7: Burning off the Dregs

  The Seduction of Thought

  Persistent Identifications

  Burning Away the “I”

  Planetary Hell Realms

  The imperative of Awakening

  Chapter 8: The Cul-de-Sacs

  The Obstacles to Enlightenment

  Breaking Free of Concepts

  How to Become Free

  How do We Endure this Process?

  Chapter 9: When the I Steps Aside

  Being at the Threshold of Truth

  Love Versus Attachment

  Natural Wisdom

  When the I Steps Aside

  Chapter 10: Reflections on Liberation

  Awareness Awakening Itself

  Siddhis and Powers

  Expressions of Liberation

  Resonation

  Liberated Wisdom

  Chapter 11: A World Awake

  Our Challenge and Our Hope

  Awakened Lives are not Passive

  The Impersonal Movement of Freedom

  Appendix A. Questions

  Appendix B: Books about Awakening

  Introduction

  The Awakening Guide

  It's possible the most pressing question you have as you open this book is "Just how do I awaken?" I believe this because I have also opened many spiritual books over the years while holding this question, looking for hints in the stories of others. It is human nature to want clear instructions, and to hope to be protected from the mistake of making a false move when you are moving toward a goal. Just because the goal appears to be spiritual does not make it seem less approachable to the mind, as long as the right rules are applied.

  Since it is quite discouraging to hear that there is no one path with a guarantee, most spiritual organizations tell you they have the right and only path, and that if you do not make it in this lifetime, at least they will prepare you for the next. This is like telling a hungry traveler that they are in the right place and this is the only restaurant in town, and if no food is available tonight it may arrive next month or next year.

  Non-dual teachers have another tactic for dealing with the lack of guarantees on the spiritual path. They offer "pointers" as general direction signs, and they remind you that in the end you will find the path goes nowhere because you actually are what you are seeking. They offer confusing paradoxes such as "You do not exist!" or "This is it!" or "Stop the search!" They may respond to a question with silence, a riddle, or an incomprehensible spontaneous movement. You never know what to expect. They are not interested in your stories, or healing your angst, and they tend to view crisis as simply another natural event in the human condition. They give a spiritual talk, and then tell you not to believe anything they have to say. When you find there is nowhere to stand and nothing to believe and no one who needs help, well then it seems you are closer to who you really are, something unknown and quiet, but eternally present.

  This book also is not a formula, not a guaranteed plan. It describes the journey so that you might recognize the territory as it appears in your life. It tells you the nature of the weather you may encounter, and the possible portals and cul-de-sacs you might meet along the way. It addresses common fears and misperceptions. It speaks of changes, both subtle and intense, that accompany a true awakening. In addition, it is a support for those who have already felt the force of realization and are wondering how to deal with the fallout in their lives. It is a companion for your spiritual evolution.

  If you want a general guide for what to do to become more ready for awakening, I'll give you upfront a few pointers, but I suggest you explore more deeply into this Guide to better understand what it is you are seeking and what to expect. Here are some ways to begin the journey to awakening:

  1. Trust that awakening is available here and now.

  2. Be willing to let go of all preconceptions and beliefs. Consider that nothing the mind can conceive of is 100% true. It is primarily neurons bouncing around generating conditioned memories and responding to emotion, desire and fear.

  3. Open to life as it is, even if your heart is breaking. Be willing to be life experiencing itself.

  4. Regularly sit as quiet stillness, tuning into
your body at the place where stillness already exists, and let thoughts become irrelevant, until you are deeply settled as presence.

  5. Live a moderate lifestyle that supports your spiritual longings instead of distracting you from them. Find something of beauty in each day.

  6. Forgive your human flaws and accept yourself for who you are. Better yet, find the place inside of yourself that already is accepting you the way you are. You can only transform the unhealthy parts of yourself by meeting them and inviting them into the freedom you are seeking.

  7. Be curious about the experience of awareness that is already here. What is aware? Who is aware? Do not go to the mind for an answer.

  8. Listen to your heart and your body to create balance instead of stress in your life.

  9. Find a spiritual guide or teacher with whom you feel a true resonance.

  10. Practice being present NOW, in the space you are in, feeling what you feel, seeing what is around you, breathing the air, simply being instead of thinking, wherever you happen to be.

  Much more than the compiling of suggestions, "The Awakening Guide" is offered to those of you who are seeking a personal and direct experience of your True Nature, a realization or remembrance so clear that it shifts your identity and your life. It is not offered with a promise of liberation, but simply a trust that you will awaken in your own way. I know that many other books and teachings by many flavors of teachers are also available to direct and support your journey. This Guide is the best I have to offer after almost 50 years of exploring and 35 years of listening to the stories of other spiritual pilgrims who have undertaken this inward pilgrimage toward Truth. I have been a therapist, a guide, and a mentor specializing in the relatively unknown area of spiritual emergency and spiritual emergence, and in this role had the tremendous grace of knowing over two thousand individuals who shared their spiritual journeys, recording both the joy and the dark nights they discovered along the way.

  It is still a mystery to me how it is I ended up in this unconventional and to some people, radical work. When I was a girl I was a serious Catholic, and when I was 14, my mother died suddenly of an aneurysm in the brain. I was stunned that a God I had trusted could do something so inconceivable as take away a mother, leaving a heart-broken father and three children with no wisdom to take care of themselves. I lost my mother, the vitality that had been in my father, and my sense of God during those early adolescent years.

  It was fourteen years later and during the height of the encounter movement of the 60's when I finally faced the emptiness in my heart, and the warped emotional range I had carried through high school, and during the early years of marriage and parenting. As I faced my un-experienced grief I realized faith was out of the question for me, and I was advised to consider meditation if I wanted to know if there was a God. This catalyzed a life-long quest in search of what is True.

  Everyone engages in this search in his or her own unique style. I sought teachers, and I sat in meditation whenever I had the time within the parameters of raising a family, attending college, and working part-time (this meant usually late at night, or while the children were in school). I did Jungian analysis and graduate school, body therapies and energy work, yoga and movement programs, shamanic and breathwork trainings, pursued serious scriptural studies of Eastern teachings, and sat with over a dozen gurus in the US and India over many years. I earned a Ph.D. in transpersonal psychology, helped to establish a spiritual network, and eventually found an end-of-the-road teacher who brought all my searching to a halt. Along the way I had many experiences, high and low, rich and shallow, but eventually the sense of "me" became so thin that I rarely find there is anyone within me motivated to experience anything anymore.

  To the extent awakening has happened it has happened in layers for me -- openings in which I felt in every cell that I was one with everything, moments of merging into deep space as if I were part of the Milky Way, days of streaming bliss when there was no thought but only Being, and consciousness falling out of the body and into expansive ethers of love and impersonal knowing. Underneath all experience, only presence. Ultimately what was mystical or dramatic has all become memories, and the present moment is enough, whatever it is, however it is, just being quiet and being here and being no one in particular seeking nothing at all. I find this to be true peace.

  Some people believe that having supra-normal powers, or being in a continual state of bliss are signs of enlightenment. Others might think that if a person is so filled with dynamic energy that everyone around them falls into altered states, it is a certain indicator of liberation. But these are all experiences, and experiences pass, and they are not of much essential value if you never discover who or what it is that is having the experience. Awakening happens when in the midst of experience, be it mystical or mundane, you remember what you are. Primary consciousness unveils itself!.

  No teacher can tell you what you are although many (including me) have tried. According to his or her inclination a teacher may point out the Truth with words or gestures, may shatter your thoughts with a penetrating gaze, may prescribe months or years of practices, may energize you with shakti, may offer riddles or challenges, or may bathe you in love, fear or even criticism. This is all done in an effort to shake you out of your ordinary perspective and shut down the delusion of separation that holds you unconscious of your true Self. A percentage of students will awaken with anyone, but just as many wake up spontaneously, with no teacher at all.

  After inviting me to teach, Adyashanti advised me to stay with my own experience, to speak from this alone. Aside from my own mystical explorations and sweet explosions of awakening, my richest experience has been that of listener for many years, offering support, direction and a paradigm of normalcy to those awakening to Truth from many traditions, and out of varied circumstances. Life has taught me that all of us share a single birthright, a single source of consciousness, and each of us can wake up to this, and will find great changes in our world view and our minds and hearts when we do. So this guide is to let you know how awakening has been seen from this perspective -- from one perspective, from one life reflecting upon many lives. Hopefully some small insight will arise that will be exactly what you need to begin, to continue, or to feel complete in your search.

  When I knew I was no one, and everyone, and just a stream of energy dancing in the world, I became joy unbounded and I laughed and cried in gratitude all night for everyone who had ever touched me along the way -- from an old friend who initially suggested I read Paramahansa Yogananda's biography (my first venture into eastern thought); for a remarkable woman named Amelia who was the heart and fire of an organization called Creative Initiative, (where I was first exposed to meditation and psychology); for the quiet wisdom and writings of Baba Hari Das at Mt. Madonna Center; for the subtle touching of gurus such as Muktananda, and Mother Meera; for my Jungian and yogi analyst Thomas Parker; for all the passionately seeking friends I met through the Kundalini Research Network; for the friends and faculty at ITP who taught me about energy, love and laughter as part of spirituality; for my husband who supported me along the way, and for many, many more, leading ultimately to the amazingly clear and compassionate teacher Adyashanti, who quietly provided the environment for me to become free of myself. I have had so many opportunities to open to love, and so many adventures that catalyzed insights. Wonderful lives have shared their stories with me and in the end that is all I have, within the emptiness that I am, those lives that have been shared that make up my life experience.

  Yes there is still an "I" of some sort, and here she is telling a story of herself. She will pass away soon enough. I have no objection to being her and only a small objection to letting her go. I can't take her seriously but she is the flavor through which I live my life -- a wife and mother and grandmother and sometimes a mentor or friend, therapist or writer, cook or housecleaner. Nothing is more or less than Now, Being, and daily experience.

  We touch and are touched by many
people as we move through the years of our lives, and never consciously know the impact we have upon one another. We are all One Being teaching ourselves through each other. Some are destined for a bigger stage than others, but every life is part of the mosaic of sacred expression. From a non-dual perspective, it may seem we are illusion and not to be taken very seriously, but paradoxically this life is what we have -- each life is an expression, like a fraction in the mathematical perfection of the universe. Nothing can be removed from the Whole. All expressions have their rightful place in an expanding and unlimited universe. We are it! We are all the forms expressing spontaneously in the service of something greater than ourselves that lies forever within mystery.

  This book on “Awakening”, a companion to "The Kundalini Guide" and an earlier book based on my doctoral research, "Energies of Transformation: A Guide to the Kundalini Process", is my small contribution to the whole. May it encourage you in your own awakening and inspire your own contribution to the light of the world.

  Chapter 1

  The Longing of the Spirit

  One of the early Buddhist patriarchs called the motivation for the spiritual search, “The need for clarifying the matter of who we are.” Traveling through the hours allotted between life and death, many people feel a great hunger to know about the foundation of human life. They want to penetrate the mystery of the impermanence they feel. To the mind it seems a great error that humans might be born and die, and have no other function in existence. Many great myths and stories have been created in order to bring comforting thoughts and explanations related to this limitation of the human system. For some people, their faith in these stories is enough; for others, it just won’t hold them. They are called to know Truth on their own.