Embrace All That You Are

Meditation as a Path to Wholeness

By Jeff Carreira

Embracing All That You Are Meditation as a Path to Wholeness

By Jeff Carreira

Copyright © 2014 Emergence Education & Jeff Carreira

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this

publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0692321553 (Emergence Education) ISBN-10: 0692321551

Emergence Education 230 Stampers Street

Philadelphia, PA 19147

Cover design by www.choosefreeagency.com

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!If you could remain silent from all of your sensing and willing for one hour, then you will hear unutterable words of God.

—Jakob Boehme

!

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CONTENTS

Introduction 4

PART ONE

Chapter 1 The Nature of Reality 7 Chapter 2 Discover a New Way of Being 15 Chapter 3 Three Laws of Mind 33 Chapter 4 Change Begins with Acceptance 58

PART TWO

Chapter 5 Who Sits? 75 Chapter 6 A Trip to Nowhere 91 Chapter 7 Who Meditates? 115 Chapter 8 Living into the Fullness of Who You Are 130

INTRODUCTION

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You are about to explore a meditation practice called the Practice of No Problem. As you read, you will discover a deceptively simple approach to profound meditation. A practice so simple that literally anybody can do it and so profound that it can take you far beyond the experience of relaxation into profound states of awakened consciousness. This book weaves together a number of aspects of my own spiritual path into a full and coherent presentation of meditation as I have come to practice it. Deep meditation is always powerful, but what you will find here is a context for meditation that gives us access to a new way of being. I want to encourage you to simply relax, stay with what I am sharing, and allow yourself to be taken by the words you read. Reading a book like this is more like reading poetry than prose. Don’t be overly concerned with understanding. Allow the words to enter you, and be aware of your own responses to it. Let the book unfold in you, and see what happens

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as a result. Let go of the critical and analytic parts of your mind, and allow yourself to be carried away. Let it to be easy and wonderful and see what happens. ! !

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PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

THE NATURE OF REALITY

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In the twenty years that I have meditated I have been blessed with profound awakenings that have taken me into experiences of reality far beyond what I was taught was possible. More than anything I want to share the blessings that I have experienced with you, but we will begin this journey with five convictions about the nature of reality that my spiritual experience has compelled me to believe in. I want to share them so that you know why I am so passionately inspired about the transformative power of meditation. You don’t need to agree with them or take them on faith. All I suggest is that you open to the possibility that they point toward. Consider these convictions carefully because contemplating them will open the space inside for you to experience them for yourself. In the end, what I have come to, what I understand, and what blessings I have received don’t matter. The only gift worth receiving is your own

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awakening. That is the spirit with which I share these five convictions. In this first chapter of the book I will explain each conviction briefly with little explanation or justification. They are offered for your consideration, then we will leave them behind and I will only refer to them as they come up naturally in our exploration of meditation. They will remain in the background, sustaining the context that will allow the rest of the book to affect you in a deeper and more profound way. !

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First Conviction

The foundation of reality is awareness.

We live inside of a conscious universe. The foundation of reality is awareness itself. We have not been taught to think this way. Instead we have been trained to see ourselves as living things that coexist with other living things in an inanimate universe. This simply isn’t true. You are part of a living and awake universe. Nothing separates you from it. You are not a thing in the universe. You are part of it. !

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Second Conviction

Consciousness already extends far beyond our awareness of it.

We have been taught to define consciousness based on our experience of it. We assume that the way we experience consciousness is the way that consciousness is, end of story. One of the miracles of meditation is that it invites the recognition that consciousness is much more than our experience of it. Consciousness extends much further than that. We are having one experience of consciousness in a vast ocean of possibility. We assume that our experience is the limit of consciousness. It is not. !

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Third Conviction

If allowed, our awareness naturally expands beyond limitation.

Our awareness resists being limited by any limited or localized experience. Given the opportunity, it will naturally expand beyond previous limits. Awareness does not want to be limited. It wants to roam free and grow just like everything else in the universe. Just like a seed that grows into a tree, our consciousness in the proper environment will naturally expand far beyond your normal sense of boundary. !

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Fourth Conviction

We already have access to consciousness beyond our ability to

comprehend, cognize, and perceive. We are in the habit of limiting consciousness to include only what we can understand. Our awareness already extends far beyond our current understanding. What we know is not the limit of consciousness. We are much more than what we think we are. We are much more than we experience ourselves to be. We are much more than we know, and we are even more than what we can know. ! !

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Fifth Conviction

We are being called to grow beyond our current local

experience of consciousness. Our spiritual awakenings are not just openings to higher possibilities that we can choose to climb through. They are not passive; they are active. They are the voice of a higher possibility calling us to enter into the fullness of who we truly are. The living awareness at the core of the universe is calling us forward toward higher possibilities. ! !

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CHAPTER 2

DISCOVER A NEW WAY OF BEING !

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Now that we have created the ultimate context for our meditation practice, I want to share the technique of Having No Problem with you. By following this practice you will gradually learn to stop struggling with the way things are, and then you will naturally expand beyond your normal sense of limitation. We have all been conditioned to be on guard for problems. In fact in subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, ways we live with an almost unbroken sense that something is wrong. We experience this as an unquestioned assumption that this moment is “not it”—not full enough, not complete enough, not perfect enough. This sense of not being in the right moment gives us an ongoing experience of being driven—a feeling of continually needing to improve, perfect, and create. This drive is born out of an experience of deficiency, an assumption of lack, and a nagging feeling that something is wrong. Most of the time we are not aware of

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this. The moments when we do become aware of it are the moments that for many of us ignited our spiritual quest in the first place. There was a moment in my life like that some years ago. I was working as an engineer, even though I had always wanted to be an artist. Being an artist was not acceptable within my family, so I decided to be an architect, which seemed like art in a practical context, but in the end architecture wasn’t close enough to art for me, so I studied engineering instead. I decided that if I was going to let go of being an artist, I might as well do something really practical. As an associate staff member in a technology company, I realized that I needed a Ph.D. in order to succeed. Soon I found myself in my car driving frantically to a nearby university where registration was about to close. As I drove, I tried to read the

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course catalog to figure out what course I could take to build toward a higher degree. It is probably no surprise that I nearly got myself into a car accident. After swerving to avoid a collision, I got scared out of my franticness, and questions came into my mind: Why was I so urgently pursuing a future I didn’t even want? What was the source of this almost overwhelming sense of necessity that was literally driving me? I pulled the car off the highway and just sat in it. What am I doing? I asked myself. What is life really about? What am I striving for? In that moment my habit of having a problem became very obvious to me. I knew I had to find a way to live that wasn’t driven by a sense that something was wrong. I didn’t know how to do it, but this moment of simple awareness and truth began to open up a new world in which

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spiritual pursuit was the central point of life. The Practice of No Problem is a meditation technique based on everything I have learned about how we can replace the habit of having a problem with the habit of having no problem. Imagine a riverbed that water runs through. Habits of mind are like riverbeds that thoughts run through. You can’t fill in the riverbeds in your mind, but you can dig new ones that divert the water of your being in new directions and create new habits of mind. The Practice of No Problem allows us to move beyond our “having a problem” habit by creating a new habit—stronger than its counterpart—of “having no problem.” You will find by the end of this book that this practice, this meditation, can take you much, much further than that, but you have to start by consciously practicing having no problem until you develop a deep habit in that direction.

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When you meditate in this way, all you need to do is sit comfortably. You can close your eyes or leave them open, and the only instruction you need to follow is to have no problem. That means that no matter what happens and no matter what you experience, it’s fine. When you don’t have a problem, you don’t need to do anything because nothing is wrong. So to practice having no problem in meditation you simply do nothing. You assume that whatever you are experiencing is not a problem, and you just let it be exactly as it is. That’s it. You don’t need to do anything. Simply watch the habits of your mind unfold. Experiences will arise; you will react to those experiences in different ways; you will see yourself react; you will react to yourself reacting; and this will go on and on and on. All you have to do is watch all of these habits of mind unfold. Just allow it all to happen without getting involved in any of it. It will all

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happen anyway. You don’t need to do anything. Just sit and let it all be. As you sit, many things will pass through your mind. You may have insights about it all. That’s fine; just let it happen. Watch how interesting ideas initiate a process of mental metabolism that generates more ideas. Don’t identify with that process. Don’t assume that it is you thinking. Just let it happen. The fact that it’s happening is natural and obvious, and there is nothing you need to do about it. Just sit, and don’t relate to that experience in any way as a problem. When you sit in meditation, just observe the habits of your mind unfolding, and don’t make a problem out of anything. Continue to have no problem with whatever arises. See how simple it actually is. Be aware of whatever you are aware of; don’t make a problem out of any of it. Eventually you will be overwhelmed by how simple it is.

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At that point a counter argument may appear in your mind. “It can’t be this simple. If this is all meditation is, then meditation isn’t anything. It’s what I’m doing all the time anyway; it’s just living.” If such an argument appears in your awareness, simply observe it and let it be. Don’t do anything about it either. Don’t assume that the existence of that argument is a problem. Continue to have no problem no matter what arises, no matter what experiences you have, no matter what thoughts you have, no matter what thoughts you have about the experiences you’re having, no matter what thought you have about the fact that you’re having thoughts about your experience. You get the idea. None of it is a problem; it is all just what is arising in consciousness. In this meditation all you have to do is nothing.

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Question: I see how conditioned I am to always having something to worry about. There is always something that needs to be solved. I actually feel guilty when I start to feel like nothing is wrong. What should I do? Response: There are personally and culturally conditioned parts of ourselves that hold onto this kind of orientation, always keeping us turned toward solving our problems. If we want to think in evolutionary terms, the habit of having a problem probably goes very deep. There is a survival advantage to those who stay alert and stay on guard against danger and harm. I see a deep evolutionary habit of never relaxing, never taking for

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granted that you are beyond harm. We probably share that habit with most creatures, and as it manifests in the human experience it becomes part of our culture. It isn’t necessarily a reflection of the actual danger we are in at any given moment. It has become a habit of assuming that something is wrong. And as you said, if we start to feel like we don’t have a problem, if there is nothing wrong that we need to work on or worry about, we start to make a problem out of not having a problem. We often feel guilty when we don’t have a problem. We start to worry that we are lazy. In fact as we approach the possibility of having no problem, many of us become aware of a voice that says, “Well, if I don’t have a problem, why will I do anything? What will motivate me?” We fear that if we give up the sense of lack and deficiency and the assumption that something is wrong, we won’t do anything. We don’t trust that something other than lack and deficiency can motivate us.

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It is a common assumption that there is no other motivation in the universe except those that come from deficiency and lack. What you discover in meditation is that when you stop being preoccupied with the motivation that is born out of deficiency, another motivation starts to reveal itself, one that is born out of abundance and wholeness and is compelled by possibility. The risk we have to take to discover this new motive is to let go of our sense of deficiency. We have to let go of the operating system that’s been running the show for longer than we can remember and trust that when that operating system dissolves a new one will replace it to take us to the next level. Meditation is an opportunity to let go of the old operating system and discover that a new one has been waiting for us all along.

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Question: I easily get carried away thinking about things. If I have an insight, my mind just goes. I’ve often had trouble meditating because I get caught in thoughts and then find myself trying to solve perplexing problems or clarify brilliant ideas. How can I break this habit and learn to just let everything be as it is? Response: If that is what’s happening when you meditate, that’s also fine. This practice is the practice of not having a problem with whatever happens, which includes getting caught in thought.

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Let’s look closely at what we think it means to get lost in thought in the first place. Usually what it means is that we start having a thought that is so captivating we forget that we’re meditating. A few minutes later we remember what we are doing, and we say, “Oh, no! I got lost in thought.” The irony is that the very moment that we realize we have been lost in thought is exactly the moment when we aren’t lost in thought any more. The meditation instruction does not say, “Don’t forget that you are meditating.” This is not the Practice of Never Forgetting That You Are Meditating. This is The Practice of No Problem. When you realize that you have been lost in thought, just don’t make a problem out of it. The instant you realize that you’ve been lost in thought, you’re not lost in thought anymore anyway.

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What makes these simple meditation instructions seem difficult is all of our ideas about what we think meditation is supposed to be. We think that we know what meditation should be. “I should remember that I’m meditating. I should not get lost in thought.” If we have ideas like this, we are probably not doing the practice of having no problem; we are most likely trying to have the experience that we think we’re supposed to have. In meditation there is no experience that is any better than any other. It’s all the same. The more you can develop the habit of having no problem with any of it, the more free you’ll be from all of it. We all take a ride on thought trains sometimes and then remember that we are meditating. All that proves is that the habit of thinking is very strong. That habit isn’t going to go away just because we decide to meditate. You can’t stop your mind using willpower.

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Your mind is like a car without a brake pedal. Your mind does seem to have a gas pedal that you push to make it go faster, and we have all built a lot of momentum that way. Unfortunately, there are no brakes. You can’t stop it. What you can do is take your foot off the gas and let your mind slow down, but if you’ve been driving it at full throttle for a long time, it isn’t going to slow down right away, but eventually it will stop. If we practice having no problem and meditate long enough, our mind can eventually stop too. If we stop feeding it, it will slow to a halt. This is a wonderful moment! But, and this is very important, the point of meditation isn’t to get the mind to stop. The point is to have no problem with it no matter what it is doing. The beautiful thing is that you don’t have to wait for your mind to stop

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in order for you to be free of it. That is the miracle I want to share with you. Most of us assume that we need our mind to stop before we can be free. You can be free even though your mind doesn’t stop. How is this possible? Because your mind isn’t you. Question: When I hear, “The Practice of No Problem,” I hear it as a non-active concept, an avoidance of responsibility. It’s almost as if I am hesitant to truly let go because I feel as though I’m being irresponsible, and I worry that I may be denying real problems. How do I see beyond that?

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Response: The only operating system we have ever had to work with is the one that is existentially caught up in an unending and relentless process of “something is wrong.” The only alternative we can imagine is some kind of happy-go-lucky denial of reality. This is actually a very cynical view of humanity. We can’t imagine being responsible unless we are forced into it by the sense that something is wrong and we must fix it. The Practice of No Problem can bring you into a recognition of something much bigger. The part of you that worries about problems is what is sometimes called the small “s” self. It is the sense of self that feels limited, separate, and isolated. It has its own set of existential problems to deal with, and it fears that if it gives up the sense of having a problem, it will get lost in a fantasy of denial.

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If you take the risk and really let go of this smaller experience of self, a much larger sense of Self appears. This larger identity has a different perspective and is concerned with larger issues than the small self is. Paradoxically, as you discover this larger part of yourself, your sphere of concern widens at the same time that the existential tension disappears. You discover an energy of divinity that is full of ease and at the same time cares much more than fear ever could. ! !

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CHAPTER 3

THREE LAWS OF MIND !

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The fifth conviction that I mentioned in chapter one speaks to our being invited to expand beyond our habitual human experience of consciousness. Human beings are deeply conditioned and habituated to experience consciousness in a particular way, and then we assume that’s the way consciousness is. Everything I intend to share with you is based on my own conviction that consciousness extends far beyond what we normally experience as consciousness. The invitation to all of us is to relax and allow ourselves to expand into an experience of consciousness far beyond our normal one. One way to think about how our minds become conditioned is to think in terms of forming habits. We have habitual ways of perceiving, ways that bind us to a particular experience of reality. Spiritual awakening occurs when we have experiences that lie outside of the current habits of our mind and we travel into the wider expanse of consciousness that lies

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beyond. The miracle that we discover is that we have access to this ocean of consciousness as soon as we are no longer fixated on the mental habits we have become accustomed to. The meditation practice that I teach focuses on breaking one particularly stubborn and persistent habit of mind—the habit of having a problem. The Practice of No Problem is designed to break that habit so we can transcend that habit. To create a context that will allow us to understand how it is possible for us to transcend the habits of our own mind, I will introduce three laws of mind. These give us a model for how the mind works outside of our habits, and we will see that these inner workings of the mind are the key to expanding beyond it. !

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The First Law of Mind

Minds accumulate over time. Time relentlessly marches forward, and over time minds accumulate; they acquire knowledge, experience, and understanding. Not everything that our mind accumulates is valuable; nevertheless they ceaselessly and naturally accumulate. !

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The Second Law of Mind

Minds form habits. The fact that minds form habits is not a surprise. What is less commonly appreciated is how deep those habits actually are. Our superficial habits are easy to see, but when we get to the foundational habits of mind—the ones that govern our perception—we no longer see them as habits; they just feel like reality to us. !

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The Third Law of Mind

Minds gain momentum. Habits gain momentum until they grow so large that we experience them as cravings. The cravings of some of our mental habits have built up so much momentum over time that it takes tremendous effort to break them. That is why practicing no problem feels like work. Doing nothing doesn’t take effort, but breaking the habit of doing something does. !

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As I said earlier, it is common to experience resistance in relationship to the Practice of No Problem in the form of fearing that if we give up the sense that something is wrong, we will lose the source of energy that drives us. And even worse, we may enter into a fantasy realm where we just pretend there is no problem. We don’t want the Practice of No Problem to become the Practice of Pretending There’s No Problem. From one point of view, the fear of losing our sense of drive seems reasonable. From another point of view, this objection is just a form of pushback that occurs when we are introduced to the possibility of having no problem. The idea of practicing no problem and the benefits that come from it make sense to most people, and yet there is a part of us that pushes back and insists that there is a problem with it. You feel this pushback energetically because what you are actually experiencing is the force of momentum behind the habit of having a problem.

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You don’t experience the momentum of a habit until you push against it. As long as you are going along satisfying the habit, you don’t even notice it. When you stop satisfying it, then you feel its momentum. It is when you try to stop smoking cigarettes that you feel your craving for them most. Similarly, when you try not to have a problem, your mind starts insisting that you do even more vehemently. We aren’t necessarily aware of the momentum behind the habit of having a problem until we consider the possibility of breaking it. That is when we feel the pushback of the momentum behind it. The pushback comes in the form of strong and often convincing arguments that we have with ourselves. The energy fueling these arguments is the momentum behind the habit of having a problem.

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Just for a moment, do a mental inventory and see if you can relate to the experience of pushback in relationship to the possibility of having no problem. If you really want to feel the pushback, all you need to do is start to seriously consider the possibility that you will never have a problem again. Often we will feel pushback in the form of some part of us that says, “No, that is not possible. That would be living in fantasyland. That is incongruent with reality.” The intensity behind the insistence is the momentum behind the habit of having a problem. The irony behind this argument is that the existential sense of having a problem is not helpful in solving problems. Paradoxically, the existential sense of having a problem inhibits our ability to respond to the real problems in life. It doesn’t help. I am sure you know this. A little existential tension might keep us driven and motivated, but when faced with larger, more pervasive, and more complex problems, that same

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existential sense of self-concern amplifies the problem rather than alleviates it. We will speak more about this in the next chapter, but for now we want to look more closely at how our minds have accumulated the habit of having a problem and built up so much momentum behind it. One of the ways that we experience the momentum of the habit of having a problem is by considering the possibility of not having a problem. When we do, our mind pushes back. The fact that you’re even considering not having a problem can feel like a problem. If you are able to look beyond the content of the argument and focus on the energy behind it, you will see that your mind is not pushing against you; you are pushing against the momentum of your mind. If you look around, you will see that momentum operating everywhere in your life.

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The energy of having a problem pervades everything. I noticed this when I first started teaching meditation. The more people I taught, the more I realized that everybody’s experience with meditation was so different—ranging from incredibly blissful, to extremely frustrating, to immensely peaceful—but no matter what, even if the experience was peaceful or blissful, the habit of making a problem out of the experience was present before, during, and after the meditation. One person would experience bliss and make a problem out of that. Someone else experienced fear and made a problem out of that. Yet another person was experiencing nothing special, and that was a problem too. No matter what people were experiencing, it was possible to define it in a way that made a problem out of it. Our experience changes all the time, but the sense that something is wrong with the experience we’re having is almost always present at some level. How you define the

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problem doesn’t matter. The habit is satisfied as long as we are convinced that we have a problem. This deep commitment to having a problem is a habit of mind, and The Practice of No Problem can liberate us from it. As I said earlier, the way you practice having no problem is by doing exactly what you do when you don’t have a problem—nothing. When there is nothing wrong, nothing needs to change. Therefore, we don’t do anything. We have a strong habit of constantly doing something, so when we meditate we will find ourselves endlessly tinkering with our experience and trying to perfect things. We don’t really know how to do nothing. In fact, we can hardly imagine it. When we meditate, we find that we are constantly tricked into thinking we have a problem that we need to do something about. Inevitably most

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of us, in practicing no problem, find ourselves wrapped up in trying to solve a problem over and over again. The good news is that getting tangled up in a problem doesn’t have to be a problem. Getting lost in a problem is really only getting lost in thought. In meditation we don’t get lost in problems; we only get lost in thoughts about there being problems. These are thoughts that say, “This is wrong. You need to do something about it. This isn’t working.” At some point you realize, “Oh, I’ve just been lost in the idea that there is a problem.” Once you realize that, you don’t need to do anything about it because that is not a problem; it is just what happened, and given the habitual pattern of our minds, it isn’t even surprising. The way that we practice having no problem is by doing nothing, and doing nothing is something we have to learn how to do.

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When we sit and do nothing, our habits of mind continue—the habits of thinking, solving problems, cultivating insight, and being frustrated keep going. All you have to do is sit and watch the show. The show is just the continuous unfolding of the habits of your mind. It’s amazing how much you can learn about your mind by just watching how it unfolds—watching how each experience leads to the next experience, which in turn elicits emotion, initiates thought processes, and then generates conclusions. Alongside all of this, there is a running commentary in which we talk to ourselves and explain everything as if we weren’t there. If you can really let go and stop engaging with your mind, you will see everything you need to about how it all works. Your habits of mind will reveal themselves moment to moment. Just relax, do nothing, and observe how the particular habitual patterns of your mind present themselves before your very eyes.

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You will learn so much about yourself and how your mind works. You will realize that the way you are in meditation is no different than the way you are in life. You recognize that the same habits of mind that appear in meditation are also driving your life. As your practice matures, you realize that there are ten, twenty, maybe fifty patterns that play out over and over again. You see this pattern and that pattern and another pattern, and you see how one pattern triggers another and some experiences trigger whole chains of patterns. Eventually, it gets more and more uninteresting. It’s just the same patterns over and over again. It’s like listening to a song that keeps repeating. As it all becomes less interesting, you find that your awareness begins to drift away from the experience of mind into a place that you cannot describe. Your awareness drifts off into the empty space outside of your normal experience of mind. The habits of mind are like swirling currents

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on the surface of the ocean. Your attention starts to sink into the vast ocean in which the current exists. Once you realize they’re all just habits that repeat themselves over and over again in different forms and different configurations, watching them starts to get boring because so little changes. What begins to captivate you is the experience of whoever it is that has always been watching the patterns of mind, watching the swirl in consciousness. Who is it that sees the patterns of mind and eventually gets bored with them? One of the habits of mind is the habit of getting caught in our experience of thought and feeling. It is the habit of having our awareness become so focused on a thought or a feeling that we forget everything else. We experience that habit in meditation when we forget that we are meditating because all of our attention has been consumed by some

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thought or feeling. In a much bigger sense we have all been caught for a long time in our current experience of mind. We have all had our awareness so fixated on our current habits of mind that we forgot everything else. As we become bored with the habits of mind and expand into the ocean of consciousness in which those habits emerged in the first place, we begin to remember who we are in the vastness of our being. We were never limited by our thoughts and feelings. We were never limited by our mind. We have always been that infinite source of awareness that the mind arose out of. We became temporarily lost in a limited experience of mind, and when we sit with no problem, we allow ourselves to remember who we are and expand into the totality of our Being.

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Question: I have a busy mind. When I try to practice having no problem and I become conscious of my thinking, I bring my attention to my breath, or I count backwards for a moment. Do you have other techniques you recommend? Response: I would say that when you recognize that you are thinking don’t do anything. Anything you do, for instance coming back to the breath or counting, is a technique designed to bring you back, and using these techniques implies that there is something wrong with where you are. We are trying to break the habit of assuming that there is something

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wrong with where we are. So when you recognize you have been thinking simply let it be. You will see that sometimes you are thinking about one thing and forgetting everything else. It doesn’t matter. Just sit and watch the show. See how the habits of mind unfold. The analogy that I like to use is flying an airplane in cloudy skies. Imagine that being in a cloud is like being lost in a thought. When you fly into a cloud, you can’t see the sunny, blue sky anymore. When you fly out of the cloud on the other side, you see the blue sky again. At that point there is nothing you need to do. You don’t need to turn the plane around because you’re already out of the cloud. You will probably fly into another cloud at some point and fly out of that one too. Eventually you stop worrying about flying through clouds because you know that the sunny sky is always there even when you are in the middle of a cloud. Eventually we learn to let ourselves move in and out of thought-clouds

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because we know that the vastness beyond thought is always there waiting for us on the other side. Question: I am observing a pattern of thought that I get caught in. It isn’t unpleasant. It is just that I quickly go into expanded states of consciousness and my whole body responds. My heart opens wide and I immediately start thinking about how amazing it is and wondering what I should do about it. I get caught in planning how to manifest it fully in my life.

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Response: The only adjustment I would suggest to everything that you are saying is not to define your experience as one of being “caught.” The idea of being caught is an interpretation that you are adding to what is only an unfolding experience. The experience is simply that you are overwhelmed by blissful openings. These openings initiate a thought process about what to do about them, which initiates a thought process about how you’re caught in a thought process. It is a pattern, as you said. It is a pattern that unfolds. But if you are taking the position that you are caught, then you are taking a position in relationship to the pattern. You are asserting that there is a problem when the whole point is not to have a problem.

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Question: A few weeks ago I had an experience that I would describe as finding my soul. I became deeply aware that I was aware. I was beyond thinking, and there was a sudden expansion of my being. All I was doing was watching myself watch. Response: All I can suggest is that you not think of the expanded awareness as an experience that happened in the past that you are hoping will happen again in the future. Instead be aware of how that experience is with you all the time. You are just not in the habit of noticing it all the time. Expanded consciousness doesn’t go away, just like the sun in the sky. If

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you look at it, you see it. If you look away, you don’t, but it never goes anywhere. If you stop insisting that you have to see it in order for it to exist, you will start to experience it even when you can’t see it. You’ll realize that it is present in your experience even when it is not an object you can see. The fact is that we are actually all awakening. We’re being attracted to come together and do things like practice meditation because we are already in a process of awakening. That process is already happening. The best way for us to participate in it is by allowing it to continue to happen and by appreciating that it is already happening. The way this practice of meditation helps is by allowing us to simply let go of the process and let the process unfold. !

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Question: When I was practicing doing nothing, I felt like I was sinking into a hole. Then I let everything be as it was without having any problem until I physically relaxed and experienced the world expanding around me. There was no separation between me and anything else. Response: We are in the habit of having a problem. Our habit of having a problem is part of a bigger habit of holding on to the way things are. When we begin to practice having no problem, which means “letting go,” we become available to awaken into expanded consciousness just like you described. When this happens, we will begin to have experiences far

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beyond the experience of self that we have been holding on to. We will start to discover that we are much more than we thought. Let’s think again of the metaphor of driving a car. The awakening process already knows the route. It’s like a GPS system that’s already built into the car. If we can break the habit of trying to control the car, we begin to see that there’s a spiritual guidance system that will guide us through awakening experiences. If we follow it, we will ride waves of awakening that will take us places we could never get to if we were controlling the process. !

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CHAPTER 4

CHANGE BEGINS WITH ACCEPTANCE !

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When we start to take the possibility of having no problem seriously, we encounter pushback from our mind. The mind will not accept the possibility of having no problem. The mind will object. One of the mind’s objections will be that accepting everything as it is means nothing will ever change. What I want to share with you in this chapter is the opposite: change usually only happens after we have accepted the way things are. This truth has is the reason that in the various twelve-step programs that have been used so effectively to help people overcome addiction, the first step is accepting that you have a problem. You must first accept that you are an addict because if you don’t, you won’t be able to change. The addiction that we are referring to in our discussion is not a

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substance addiction, of course. It is an addiction to our minds’ insistence that something is existentially wrong. This existential angst has nothing necessarily to do with the very real problems that do exist in the world. It is simply an unwillingness to accept the way things are. It is a commitment to continual struggle against reality. As long as you are stuck in the habit of fighting against the way things are, you will not be available to create real change. The existential problem of our minds is a denial of reality. Any of us who have made big changes in our lives can probably recognize this. You can struggle with something for a long time, and your mind will tell you that the struggle is good and that if you stop struggling it will never change, but when we finally get serious about change we stop struggling with the way things are, and we get down to the business of being different. Only when we accept the way things are, are we available to start to change.

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It is important to remember that when we are talking about spiritual change we are not talking about something that you can do. The transformation of spirit is something that you make yourself available for and allow to happen. As long as we are fighting against the way things are, we are still completely engaged; we still have our hands on the wheel. We may be getting some benefit from that activity, but we are not available for anything bigger than what we are striving for. There is no room for a miracle. When we accept the way things are and allow ourselves to have no problem, we become available. We take our hands off the wheel, and we become receptive to sources of wisdom that are much larger than us to become active in our consciousness and in our lives. I don’t want you to get the impression that this is some kind of trick that we play on ourselves—pretending that there is no problem so that

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something can happen. The deeper you go into this practice, the more you realize that from an existential point of view there actually is no problem. That doesn’t mean that everything is as good as it will ever be. What it does mean is that everything is the way it is because of what happened prior and because of the circumstances in which they arise, and they can’t be any other way than the way they are. Our sense of having a problem revolves around the belief that we know how things should be and that things are not that way now. How do we know how things should be? What makes us so sure that our idea about the way things should be is accurate? Maybe things are exactly the way they should be right now. Maybe this is all perfectly as it should be even if we can imagine them being much, much better. Accepting things the way they are doesn’t imply that they can’t be better. It doesn’t imply that we don’t want them to be better. And it doesn’t mean that we

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won’t make tremendous effort to create positive change. The argument that our minds present to us is that if we have no problem with the way things are, then we will be satisfied with what is, and we won’t be motivated to generate any change. That’s not my experience. My experience is the opposite. The more that I have no problem with the way things are, the more clearly I am able to see how much better they can be. And the more I see how much better things can be, the more driven I feel to make them that way and the more capable I am to produce change. Relaxing into the way things are, having no problem with reality as it is, and abiding in perfect acceptance allows me to see more clearly how much better everything can be, which inspires me to act with more passion, more vigor, more energy, and more consistency. Acceptance is

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the foundation of real change. The energy that we spend and exert fighting against the way things are is energy that is not available for change. The consciousness that has a problem with the way things are is the same consciousness that is motivated to stop things from being that way. It is a destructive force, not a creative one. It sets itself up against the wrongs of the world. The consciousness that accepts the way things are, on the other hand, opens us to greater possibilities of the way things could be and is motivated to manifest those possibilities. It is a different operating system. One system is focused on ending injustice and bringing an end to what is wrong. The other is focused on creating what is better. My experience is that the second, the force of creation, is more powerful than the first and leads to more change.

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In your meditation, embrace the truth of no problem. Having no problem is not just a trick. It’s not just a technique that we adopt in order for something to happen. Having no problem is a reflection of the way things are. When we step way, way back into that expanded consciousness, we don’t experience a problem. We experience the magnificence of reality, the intricateness of it all, the pain, the suffering, the joy, and the glory—all of it. We experience the totality of what is. We don’t experience any of it as a problem. It’s all part of one magnificent reality. With that kind of freedom of spirit and that wide a heart, we are able to engage with all of life toward the possibility of a better future. No longer driven by the consciousness that experiences a problem, we are now compelled by the consciousness that recognizes the magnificence and fullness of reality. From that place we only want to raise every part of reality up to the level of its magnificent wholeness. It

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is a different operating system, a different energy source. This new energy source is deeply compelled by what is possible, and it inspires us to care so much that it makes miracles possible. The deeper wisdom guiding the process of universal unfolding wants our consciousness to expand, to open up to the fullness of the way things are. Ultimately our acceptance of the way things are is not in service of our relaxation. It isn’t just a way to feel better and stop working so hard. It is a vehicle that allows us to open up to the magnificence of reality and care even more about everything. The mind fears that the Practice of No Problem will bring us to a place where we care less or not at all. In reality it expands our consciousness to a place where we care much, much more about everything. Change always requires acceptance because it is only when we accept the way

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things are that we are available to care about what is possible. When we stop fighting against the way things are, our energy is freed up to start fighting for the way things could be. The only way to practice having no problem is to do nothing. As you sit having no problem, a process of growth and awakening has an opportunity to carry you wherever your journey is going next. As you sit, simply don’t struggle at all with any part of your experience. If you notice yourself struggling, don’t struggle with that either. Don’t fight against anything. Don’t try to change anything. Don’t do anything. Allow yourself to be in perfect acceptance of the way things are. From that place of perfect acceptance something unimaginable can happen. You may discover what life’s plan for you actually is. Accepting the way things are is taking your hands off the steering wheel.

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When you take your hands off the wheel, you begin to see where the car wants to go. If you let it drive itself, you will become uninterested in your normal patterns of mental behavior. You will find yourself opening to the deeper mysteries of consciousness that are ready to operate through you. Consciousness expands naturally when we let go of having a problem and give up control. If we allow it, we naturally enter into a process of awakening that is always there ready to carry us to the next level of our being. If you begin to feel the gentle current of expansion pulling you beyond all of your edges and boundaries, simply accept it and allow it to happen. Allow yourself to expand. Allow yourself to grow beyond your previous limits and edges. Be very gentle. Don’t contribute anything to the process, but also don’t pull away from it either. Allow the process of awakening to move at whatever pace it wants, expanding exactly as it sees fit in regards to your particular being.

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The only way to let go of the places where you are holding on is to accept that you are holding on. Allow each little attachment to be as it is, and it will loosen in its own time. Relax into the expansion that wants to happen in your heart and mind. !

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Question: In meditation I felt like I was in a swimming pool floating, but with constraints all around me. Then suddenly that shifted, and it was as if I was floating in the ocean, and then I was the ocean. I contained everything! My heart just opened up, and all of these tears started coming out, and I had no idea what was happening. Response: Your description of shifting from being something in the ocean to being the ocean is a beautiful description of the kind of expanded consciousness that we are talking about. That expansion in consciousness opens your heart widely, and if you continue to allow that

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expansion to occur, you can enter into a process of continuous expansion of heart and mind. Question: What I notice is that I am sometimes in an expanded place, and when a thought comes I contract in my body and emotions. One thing you said that was really helpful was that consciousness is actually expanding whether we experience it as expanding or not. It is actually taking us somewhere. That was reassuring, and I was able to relax at a deeper level even though the contractions still felt real.

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Response: I wouldn’t say that the contractions weren’t real. They are real habits of mind, but they are a very small part of a much bigger reality. Imagine you have spent your whole life in a one-room house. Everything in that room is real, but when you suddenly realize that there is a whole world beyond that house, you become much less concerned with what is in the room and much more concerned with the expansive reality yet to be explored. As we let go more and more in meditation, everything that was happening before continues to happen, but it is now happening in a much larger context. It is as real as it ever was, and we still need to respond to it as real. At the same time it is now a small part of a much

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bigger picture of who we are. The invitation of meditation is to embrace the magnificence and the beauty of who we really are. We habitually stay focused on a very small part of ourselves, and meditation invites us into an immensity that is so glorious and awe-inspiring that we can hardly contain it in our physical being. Question:"" In meditation I had a sense of a huge energy that was coursing through my body, and out of nowhere came this sense of relaxing into it. I had a feeling of communal peace and a sense that this energy was available for everyone. I’ve never experienced such deep receptivity.

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Response: Meditation is an individual activity from one point of view, but when we are engaged in it together we’re not just meditating; we are communing in spirit, and we are affecting each other’s awakening. Eventually, the practice of meditation dissolves the sense of separation, and as the boundaries and barriers that normally separate and isolate us dissolve, we have tremendous heart-opening experiences of communion and connection. When we meditate together, we can feel an overwhelming sense of intimacy that we are not used to and don’t necessarily know what to do with. We may discover a bond between us that is more intense and more real than anything we’ve experienced before. I believe that learning to live in this sacred intimacy is humanity’s ultimate destiny and the goal of spiritual life. ! !

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PART TWO

CHAPTER 5

WHO SITS? !

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If you think of yourself, if you think of the person who woke up today, who went through whatever routine you go through to get yourself to wherever you are right now, who is that person? Or maybe more appropriately, who do you think that person is? Who do you think it is that gets up every morning, that does the things that you do, ends up in the places you end up in, has the experiences you have, and makes the choices that you make? Who is it that turns toward me when I call your name? Imagine your name. Imagine the moment when you hear your name. Imagine how you instinctively respond to your name. Who is that person? Who is Jeff? Who is the being associated with your name? If you open your eyes and look around, you will notice that as your vision scans the room, you also have a sense of being someone whose vision is

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scanning the room. You have a sense that you are the person located at the other end of whatever you're seeing. And because we all have a very highly developed sense of self, we not only have a sense of being a person scanning the room, we also hold a mental image of ourselves sitting and looking. We experience ourselves from the inside, and we experience ourselves from the outside. If you experience yourself from the inside looking out—listening, smelling, and feeling the world outside—you have a sense that you are doing these things, that you are the recipient of your sensations. If you flip that around, you can experience yourself from the outside. You can see yourself. That’s me. I can see myself doing the things that I’m doing. We have both the ability to see ourselves from the outside and experience ourselves from the inside. But who is that self? My self has a

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name; it’s Jeff. That self has a body, and it has a history; it has a personality; it has habitual ways of being; it has certain characteristics; it has a set of relationships. That self is associated with all of the things that I am—my body, my history, my personality, my memories, my capacities, and my skills. You can go on and on. If I gave you a piece of paper, you could write an endless string of qualities, characteristics, and possessions that would define who you are. Most of the time we live our lives very securely sitting inside of our ideas about who we are without being aware of them. We simply sit inside of them, and they create an invisible cocoon that surrounds us. These ideas about who we are create a sense of being limited that can feel very comfortable. It makes us feel secure and safe. It allows us to feel that we know who we are and what we’re capable of. With this all-important knowledge we believe we can safely navigate through the world.

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Most often when we meditate we do so as that limited sense of self. We are meditating from the point of view of the being that is limited by all the characteristics, qualities, and contingencies that we believe we are limited by, that we believe define us. Typically, in spiritual terms, that’s called the little “s” self, and more often than not, it is the little “s” self that comes to meditation. It’s the little “s” self that gets itself out of bed, that makes its way to the cushion, and that sits down to meditate. Today we are exploring meditation as a path to wholeness, which you could also say means a big “S” Self meditation. I would like to share one of the first experiences of the bigger Self that I Am. It was a time in my life that was very challenging, and I needed to make some difficult choices. My future hinged on these choices. I was contemplating leaving the life I was living so that I could pursue a

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spiritual life in earnest. Eventually I did make the choices that moved me away from the life I had been living at the time and put me on a very different course. In making that leap, something fell away. It felt like I had been wearing a suit of armor my whole life without realizing it. I would walk around every day wearing something like an iron straightjacket, dragging all that extra weight around on my body. Whenever I did anything, I had to take all of this extra weight with me. When the weight was lifted off my body, I realized that it was made up of all of my ideas about who I was and who I wasn’t. All of my ideas about what I was capable of and what I was not capable of, what was valuable about me, what was not, what I knew and what I didn’t. It was a suit of armor made up of the entire collection of ideas about me that I had learned to believe in. When they fell away, I had no idea who I was. And because I had no idea who I was, I felt completely free, completely

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light as a feather. It was free-floating, and I realized that this is what it feels like to be alive. Life feels free and light and immediate. What I had been living and considered to be life was much closer to death than this. In meditation you try to sit quietly, as still as you possibly can. If you are able to be still, you will be surprised how much benefit you can get simply from that. When you sit still and practice having no problem with whatever arises, you simply surrender to the way things are. Let everything be however you find it without making any effort to change anything. Just let everything be, and if you find yourself fiddling or trying to manipulate or control the way things are, don’t make a problem out of that either. When you do this, you are practicing the first surrender of meditation, which means surrendering to the way things are. You allow everything to

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be exactly the way it is without trying to make it anything else and without needing to do anything about it. Whatever it is, that’s what it is. You allow it to be exactly that way. Simply let yourself go. Let everything be as it is. And as you relax, allow your awareness to spread. Allow everything to unravel. It’s safe. The universe that we have been born into is perfectly suited for this kind of awakening. It was designed for this kind of awakening. We were designed for this kind of awakening. We are a seed that wants to be born into a new being. Allow yourself to be born. Allow the shell of the small “s” self, the limited self, the separate self, the isolated self that you are encased in, to relax and fall away. Allow yourself to be born into a more full, more whole, more complete version of who you are. The metaphor we are working with is birth. The practice of meditation can trigger a spiritual birthing process. By learning to relax and let go, we

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become available for the process of spiritual birth. Continue to relax and to allow everything to be the way it is. Continue to have no problem. No matter what happens and no matter how hard your mind tries to convince you that you have a problem, do not have one. Be perfectly fine with everything exactly the way it is. Letting go, letting go, and continuing to let go. Whatever arises next you simply let it be, and whatever follows that you let it be. None of it is a problem. Nothing’s wrong. The longer you maintain the position that nothing is wrong, the more relaxed you will become and the more the “you” that you think you are will unravel. All of the ideas about you will begin to loosen, lose their spell, and fall away. If that starts to happen, simply have no problem. It’s okay. It’s a natural process of shedding who we were to create space for who we really are and will be. The process of awakening is a birth process, and like any birth process it is natural; it is

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effortless; it isn’t something we do. It is something we allow to happen. This universe was made for birth. It’s safe. Allow yourself to relax, have no problem, and surrender to the way things are, until there is no more holding on and there is nothing limiting or constraining you. That is when you become available for a birth process to initiate and fulfill itself. "

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Question: When I meditate, I feel like I’m dreaming. When I recognize this, I feel lost, and I struggle to get out of it. I’m trying to come back to something that feels more conscious. Is this the right way to practice? Response: Why do you think that dreamy state is less desirable than any other state? When you find yourself in that dreamy state, you feel lost, and you want to get back to where you were before the dream. The whole point of meditation is to lose track of your self. So you don’t have to worry about whether you feel dreamy or lost. You can relax. What’s the worst thing that can happen if you start to get dreamy? I mean, you could fall asleep,

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but you'll wake up. It’s not that big a risk. So my advice would be to allow whatever is happening to happen without trying to manipulate or control it. If there is struggle in your meditation, it is because there is a judgment; in this case it is a judgment about dreaminess being wrong. Whenever dreaminess arises in you, that judgment initiates a process of control to bring you back to what you believe is a better place. Until the judgment goes away, every time you have that dreamy quality arising a process of control will start, and you will find yourself trying to get back to reality. There’s no guarantee that the dreaminess is anything more than just getting sleepy, but it is possible that awakening is on the other side of the dreaminess. It’s possible that if you let yourself go into the dreaminess, the world would fall apart and reconfigure. You could find yourself in a completely new world and from there realize that the world you were

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holding on to was actually the false one. In the end, if you are lucky, some version of this is what happens. Eventually, you feel yourself drawn into something, maybe something you’ve been drawn towards a thousand times before. Every other time you held yourself back, but this time, for some reason, you let yourself go. On the other side of an invisible barrier you are reconfigured. You discover that you are not the same person. And that’s the movement we are focused on here. The person who sat down on the cushion to meditate doesn’t have to be the person that completes the meditation. And in the end, if awakening really happens, the person that we’ve been holding onto is going to be seen as a limited identity in the light of a deeper recognition of who we really are. Experiment with the conviction that if a dreaminess is arising it’s

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because it’s supposed to arise. That is part of the plan. It’s part of the divine journey that’s been laid out for you. See what happens when you go through it rather than pull yourself back. Maybe the dreaminess occurs when the identity is starting to fall away. You start to feel unearthed, unraveled, and if you can be present enough to allow it to continue, something miraculous might happen. Question: I had a similar experience. I was floating into a dreamy thought, and when you said, “Just relax and let go,” there was a sense of perspective. The large “S” Self was actually a larger perspective through which I could see the content of those thoughts mixed with the contents of other people’s thoughts. Then I started moving freely between the thoughts of the small self and the thoughts of the large Self. I was just

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floating back and forth. There was a little judgement about the small thoughts, but that eventually disappeared because they’re just thoughts seen amidst a world of thoughts and a world full of people having thoughts. Response: Yes. It’s very beautiful, the way you're describing it. When we are not feeling dreamy, we have a very clear sense of which thoughts are ours and which are not. That’s what gives us the clear sense of not being dreamy. There’s a distinct edge between all the things that are on the inside that we identify with as us and all the things that are on the outside. The more dreamy consciousness can occur because we are

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letting go of a sharp dividing line between inner and outer. Dreamy doesn’t have to mean unconscious or sleepy; it might mean that you're letting go of all the structures that are holding everything in place. You're letting all the edges fall away and blur, and you're allowing yourself to move freely through consciousness, as consciousness, in a way that you didn’t have permission to before. !

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CHAPTER 6

A TRIP TO NOWHERE !

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How do you travel to where you already are? How do you take a trip to nowhere? Spiritual transformation is often spoken about as a journey or a path. The difficulty with this metaphor is that it implies moving from one place to another. It implies that when we start the journey we are in one place and must travel some distance before we arrive at the destination. When we are talking about awakening, we are talking about the discovery of who we already are. This is not a journey as much as it is an illumination. The word illumination is appropriate because in a darkened room you can’t see. When you turn on the lights, you don’t go anywhere, yet suddenly you can see what was there all along. You’re not in a different place. You were in the same room the whole time. You just couldn’t see what was already there. Awakening is the goal of meditation.

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Our aim is to illuminate what is already here and who we already are. We aren’t going anywhere. We aren’t becoming anything. We are simply realizing where we are and who we are. Earlier the idea of dreaminess came up a couple of times. And waking up from a dream is another metaphor often associated with spiritual awakening. We hear people speak about waking up from the dream. I sometimes talk about waking up from the dream of the separate and isolated sense of self. The challenge with this metaphor, as useful as it can be at times, is that we assume that we are the one that is going to wake up from the dream when in fact we are the dream to be woken up from. The person who responds to my name by turning when someone says, “Jeff,” that person who has my history and my memories and my qualities and my personality, and who I habitually think that I am, is a dream. The dream is my belief that I am Jeff, with all of the qualities and

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characteristics that define me. Jeff is not waking up from the dream. Jeff is the dream. I am waking from the dream of being Jeff. You, the person you think you are while you're reading these words, is not the one waking up from the dream. You, the one who has been drawn to the possibility of awakening for this entire lifetime and probably many more, you who have been following the call to awaken, who has come in and out of lifetimes, the one that is eternal and unlimited—that one is waking up from the dream, and you are that. We are waking up from the dream of being Jeff, and Stan and Elizabeth or Amy or Frank. We, as the eternal One, are awakening from the dream of us as separate individuals. This book was not written for separate individuals; it was created for that eternal One that longs to awaken from the dream of separation through you.

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Meditation is a path to wholeness when it is done on behalf of the One that longs to awaken through the dream of separation into full recognition of its eternal being. If there is any part of you that can hear that call and recognizes the reality of what this is about, then you can see why it is necessary to let all distinctions fall away. All of our current ways of defining reality must yield, and that relinquishment of limiting ideas can generate a dream-like state in which it is hard to tell what is real and what is not. In order for us to move from deep identification with the unreality of the separate sense of self into an authentic identification with the eternal being that we are, we must be willing to travel, not in distance, not to some other place, but through a state of existential confusion about who and where we are. Our willingness to endure the experience of confusion creates the space and the fluidity that will allow the truth of who we are to be revealed.

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So I ask again, how do you travel to where you already are? The answer is that you have to let your current experience of reality fall away. You have to let it slide off of your body. Let it wash away. Endure any sense of confusion and dreaminess that might arise and allow yourself to become unhinged from your normal sense of the way things are. Untether yourself so that you can float freely through consciousness and ultimately lose track of yourself completely. You need not worry because it is safe. You are only meditating, and we are here to support each other through the ordeal of moving from limitation to the truth. The unraveling of the limited sense of self that leads to the realization of who we really are is a natural process. It is a process that involves shedding our previous limitations and expanding into a new fullness. It is as natural as the process through which a seed grows into a tree, or a

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baby grows into an adult. Growth is what our universe is designed to do. It continually gives birth to new beings and new possibilities. Those of us who realize this have the opportunity to consciously participate in the birth of a new being by simply allowing the person who we think we are to fall away so that more of who we are can surface. All we have to do is resist the temptation to continually ground ourselves in what we know. In meditation let yourself float off into unknown possibilities without reaching back to hold yourself to the ground. Let yourself go. When I teach meditation, I make a distinction between two stages of meditation that could be referred to as first and second surrender. The first surrender of meditation is a deep, passive acceptance of what is. In that state of abandon you make yourself available for awakening. You give up control, and you allow divine wisdom to carry you into

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higher consciousness. The practice of meditation does not end with perfect acceptance and passivity. The dynamics of awakening do require us to give up willful effort. Awakening cannot be forced. At the same time we must actively participate in the process. Imagine it like this: You have to be asked before you can dance, but once you are asked you have to get up and walk out onto the dance floor. If you don’t move when the invitation is made, you will lose the opportunity to dance. Similarly, in a profound and mysterious way, you have to actively participate in the process of surrender once you are invited to awaken. Often spiritual awakening is thought of in terms of falling over an edge.

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If you fall physically, you don’t have to participate at all. It just happens. But spiritual awakening is more like falling in love. Yes, it does sweep you up off of your feet, but you also have to participate, because you can still resist and stop the process. Awakening is spontaneous and participatory—irrepressible and chosen. As we practice the first surrender of letting go, which means not having a problem, something begins to happen. We begin to feel universal energies—birth energies—inviting us into a process of transformation. We feel ourselves being carried into a current of awakening. It is like realizing that you are caught in an ocean current, and often feeling the feeling of being swept away scares us. We get startled. We feel ourselves lifting off, and so we reach back down to grab something—usually a familiar thought or feeling—to hold on to. We pull ourselves to the

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ground, and we start again. Maybe we believe that that feeling of being grounded is the right way to feel. I’m asking you to experiment with a second surrender that happens after you’ve let go, after you’ve adopted a stance of no problem. At that point you will feel yourself being lifted, being taken. Maybe you'll experience it as dreaminess or maybe as a sense of confusion or simply a sense of spiritual upliftment. However it appears, however the energy of awakening begins to move you, the second surrender of meditation is to allow yourself to be moved, to avoid the temptation of reaching out and pulling yourself back to the ground. Most of us need to have a very keen, present mind. The instinctive reflex of reaching out and holding on as soon as we feel ourselves being moved is so deeply habitual it happens sometimes with lightning quickness. But if we can be present and still and aware and if we can allow a deep sense of love for the divine to fill

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us, we can overcome the temptation to hold on, and we can give ourselves to the movement of spirit that is taking us. When you practice, begin by not making a problem out of anything that happens, no matter what it is. Then if subtle currents of awakening begin to move you, simply allow yourself to be moved. Let yourself go. Don’t insist on reaching back and holding on. It may be startling to feel yourself move. It may be frightening. It may be exhilarating. You may not be able to believe how lucky you are that spirit is moving you into awakening. However it shows up, simply let yourself be moved. Know that it is safe. In fact it is the reason we are here. There is nothing you need to do to control or limit the process. Just let yourself go like a kite being lifted by the wind. Don’t make a problem out of anything. Allow it to happen and see where you go. If things get dreamy, let them be. If things get confusing, let them be. Awakening is safe and natural, and if

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you feel unmoved, if you feel stuck or resistant, let that be too. There’s nothing wrong. There’s no problem. Just let it all be. As you sit quiet and still, if you feel yourself being stirred, being moved, give yourself permission to awaken beyond who you think you are. Awakening is real; it’s true; it’s possible; and it’s here now and nowhere else. There is nowhere else. Everything is right here. Allow this to be it. Allow this moment to be the moment of awakening. Allow yourself to be moved. Realize that there is nowhere to go. There is no other place, no distance in space or time that separates you from who you already are. Let the awakening happen. Awakening always wants to happen, and it will happen as soon as we stop resisting it. What we will discover in the end is that we were not looking for awakening. Awakening was looking for

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us. We were not seeking; we were being sought. The awakening that you want wants you more. All you have to do to travel to where you already are is let go; don’t make a problem out of where you are; and gradually, or maybe quickly, you will awaken to who you really are and always have been. If you feel yourself being moved, let it happen. Let yourself go. Surrender into the current of awakening that has always been right here. Sit without any problem, or any sense of destination. Allow your self to be at rest without needing anything to be different, or needing to be anywhere other than where you already are. In this perfect acceptance of the way things are, notice the current of awakening that is always present. If that current of awakening moves you, if you start to feel yourself floating off, allow yourself to be taken. Let yourself wake up to who you really are.

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Question: I had an experience when you were speaking of first being inspired and then having a fear come up that seemed to say, “I can’t wake up right now because . . . ” and then a cascade of things came up that I don’t want to give up. And I really got what you meant when you said that awakening wants to happen more than we want it to. I felt things lifting off and yet was always pulling them back down. Response: If we find ourselves at the edge of awakening, we may start to feel that something’s moving us. We almost feel ourselves expanding into an impossible possibility. In response to this a habitual fear arises that leads

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us to contract. We recoil back from the edge of awakening. If you see that happen in your meditation, you don’t need to do anything about that. You just don’t make a problem out of what is happening and where you are. That is just the way it is. Something will always happen next. You may find yourself at the doorway of awakening only to back away many times before you are ready to pass through. I remember vividly the first time I consciously passed through the threshold, and it is important to recognize that it is different to consciously pass through the threshold than to have circumstance force you through. It is different when you pass through because you were awake to the possibility and allowed it to happen consciously. We are exploring the ever-present possibility of consciously passing through the threshold of awakening. The possibility of making that journey to where we already are is always here. All we have to do is be aware of our experience without making a

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problem out of any of it, until the process of unfolding begins to unfold. Question: My experience of meditation is so full of resistance, and I am realizing that my small self is never going to want to let go. There is no way that I can use my mind to convince myself that this is a good idea, but it is really very different for me not to make a problem out of that and just be with the pain that arises from putting on the brakes to a process that is natural and beginning to unfold.

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Response: Remember, putting on the brakes is part of the process. Moving through the experience of braking appears to be part of the process of awakening. So can you allow yourself the room to be resistant without making a problem out of it? You don’t have to worry that it is not going to happen, because it has already happened. There’s just a part of you, which you are very used to listening to, that keeps convincing you that awakening is somewhere other than this. All you have to do is stop listening to that voice, and you'll realize that there really was never a problem. It really was always here, and there never was actually any place to get to other than where you already are. You can hear this as a conversation with your little self where I am

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coaching you into not having a problem with your experience so that you will relax enough for something else to happen, or you can hear this as a conversation with who you really are that simply tells you that it is already over. You are here. Let yourself become more interested in the second conversation with who you already are than in the one about your resistance. Let the resistance not be a problem. Don’t try to do anything about it. Don’t try to make it go away. Don’t try to make it smaller. Just allow yourself to fall in love with what you recognize to be here already.

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Question: I wonder if the visual art and poetry that I am involved with are part of my meditation? It seems like when I am doing the art I’m in a whole different space. When I’m doing poetry, I’m in a whole different place. So it does seem really connected but I'm not sure how, and there is a part of me that fears it is connected only to the small limited self. Are those practices part of the process of moving into a different way of being? Response: They certainly can be. Art and poetry have often been used as the language of awakening because both art and poetry have a certain

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ambiguity in their expression. That ambiguity leaves room for interpretation, so art and poetry do not pin us down in the way that some other forms of communication do. That is why they have often been the initial means of communicating new ideas. I believe that art and poetry, like awakening, want to move us into the biggest possibility of who we are. So if you let them take you to where they want to take you, you are heading toward fullness of being. If you try to control them or limit them, then they will simply be in the hands of the small self. The movement of surrender, particularly the second surrender that we’ve been talking about, is the movement of allowing yourself to be moved, and that could apply to your art and poetry as well. When you do art or poetry, just surrender and let it happen.

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Question: I find that I’m always on the threshold that you have been talking about. I try to practice having no problem with whatever happens, but there is always a point where I recognize that I am drifting off and making that a problem. When I see this, I acknowledge that it is not a problem, but I'm just not sure what to do after that. Response: We need to have patience. Many times in my practice I have found myself at the doorway to awakening only to find that the door is closed. So we sit, and we wait patiently. Being patient means being content to wait even if the door never opens. We are ready to wait forever, perfectly

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content and patient. If we can be that free and unattached, then we’ve already won. It doesn’t matter if the door opens or not because we are perfectly content anyway. It may happen that the door opens, and we pass through, and we will be perfectly content with that too. Nothing changes. Either way we are perfectly content. We are free from the need for anything to be other than it is. My advice would be to find the place in yourself where you are perfectly happy and content to wait forever. Question: Doesn’t the small self remain important even after awakening? Even after we have arrived into our full being, our accumulated experience seems to be an important part of our capacity to engage with having arrived into fullness.

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Response: The small self is the boat that carried you across the ocean to this point of arrival. You should honor it and be deeply grateful that it brought you here. Then you should get out of it and let it float away. You don’t need it anymore because you’ve arrived. To understand this you have to be very clear about what the small self is. It is not the accumulation of your experience and wisdom. It is a false sense of self built on fear and limitation that will no longer serve you upon arrival. Your accumulated experience and wisdom do not have to be protected. They are already yours. You don’t have to worry about holding onto them. The part of you that wants to hold on is motivated by fear of loss. That is not the energy we want to engage. Embrace the fact that you are who you are with whatever skill and understanding you

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have gained. That is yours, and it will not be taken away. You can stop worrying about it. There is no need to keep checking to make sure it is still there. It is there. It is really yours. !

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CHAPTER 7

WHO MEDITATES? !

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From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. We already spoke about the self that sits down to meditate, but who is the self that actually meditates? The separate sense of self, the isolated individual self, tries to meditate. It works at meditating. It struggles to let go, sometimes even earnestly, but when meditation happens, it’s not something the small self does. It is something that appears. We discover meditation; we don’t do it. Meditation is not an activity. It is a space in consciousness. It was there the whole time. It just wasn’t where we were looking. When meditation occurs, it occurs to an undivided self. It isn’t

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something that is happening to a separate and isolated being. It is not happening to me. It is just happening. I am that act of awakened consciousness. That living awareness is who I am. It’s not something I can claim credit for. It simply is, and I am that. When real meditation occurs, the separate and isolated sense of self is not present at all. Real meditation and the sense of separation cannot exist at the same time. The separate self can relax; it can even sit down and follow meditation instructions, but it cannot meditate. I realized at some point in the history of my practice that if the goal was to have no problem no matter what happened, and if I truly intended to do that, if I really was going to let every single thing be as it is without exception and I knew I was going to do that, then there was no reason for me to control anything. There is no reason for me, the self-aware,

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self-conscious, separate individual called Jeff, to do anything at all. There was no reason to monitor the meditation to make sure it was going to happen correctly. If I wasn’t going to change anything that happened, then there was no reason for me to look to see what was happening because no matter what it was I was only going to leave it alone anyway. Imagine if someone asked you to walk a mile and enter a house and leave everything the way you found it and then come back. You would wonder why in the world you should go look in the house if you already knew you weren’t going to do anything once you got there. This is difficult to explain, but at some point I learned that I can sit my body down in meditation and allow my mind to do whatever it wants and I don’t need to be present at all. I can leave. I can go away. I can let my mind and body do whatever they want, and it doesn’t matter. I simply allow myself to let go. The meditation is happening. My mind is

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doing what my mind does. And, in a way that is too mysterious to explain precisely, I’m not there. It’s just happening. The amount of freedom you discover in that kind of meditation is astounding. It is a complete release. It is a total detachment from the movements of mind and body. Where do you go when you let the meditation happen without you? You don’t go anywhere. You don’t go anywhere, and you find yourself everywhere. You enter into a consciousness that is infinite and eternal. Your separate sense of self was only a tiny part of that ocean of awareness. All of my ideas about meditation and awakening were just a whisper. Anything that I could ever feel, think, or do would always be just a tiny part of the consciousness that contained it all. In the most mysterious way we are all always the consciousness that contains it all.

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There are moments of illumination when we see directly who we really are. What is even more profound is the recognition that we are always that, whether we realize it or not. That ultimate source of awareness is who we are even when we are not in direct contact with it. We don’t need to see our true self to be our self. We are so attached to needing to know things in order for them to be real that our spiritual life tends to become an attempt to know by seeing our self, when in fact who you are cannot be seen. Who you are is the seeing itself. The capacity to see and experience, to be aware and conscious, is the source of all that we are. It has been behind everything we have ever experienced. It’s always been who we are. It is who we are right now, and it will always be who we are. Meditation is not ultimately for the benefit of separate individuals. It is an opportunity for the pure conscious awareness that we are to rise to the surface and be illuminated by its own light. The awakening is not our

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awakening. It is not the illumination of the separate self. It is the awakening of consciousness. It is not Jeff realizing that he is an eternal source of awareness. It is about the eternal source of awareness recognizing that it has been lost in a dream of being Jeff. We allow the source of awareness to awaken from the dream of separation into the wholeness that we are. We are participating in a universal awakening, not an individual awakening. That universal awareness is the true meditator. It has been meditating for eternity. Its meditation is continuous and unending, whether we are aware of it or not. If you resist the temptation to define yourself, limit yourself, describe yourself, know yourself, and even experience yourself, you discover what can never be let go of—awareness. Awareness is. It is undeniable. It passes through this mind and body and develops a strong habit of identifying with a story about being an individual named Jeff. That is not

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the limit of who I am. Your story is not the limit of who you are. We are an access point through which the ultimate source of awareness encounters the experience of life in human form. We can read about this truth in scriptures from all traditions, often expressed more beautifully than this. This truth is readily available in our day and age. Embracing this truth and letting go of any doubt about it is much more difficult. Meditation is an embrace of that source of consciousness behind all of life that is ultimately who you are. How do you embrace that being? How do you let go into it? That is the question. When you meditate, try not to do so as the isolated separate self that responds to your name. Meditate as the source of consciousness. Allow yourself to fall into that source and to become that. Gently hold the question, “Who is it? Who sees through my eyes? Who is it that is having

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the experience that I always thought I was having? Who is having this experience of sitting and meditating?” Know that the experience you are having is not limited to the person who has your name. It is sourced by a universal consciousness that is having the experience of being you and is probably, to some extent, lost in that experience of separation and wanting to be liberated into wholeness. As you sit, without making a problem out of anything, allow yourself to lightly question, who is meditating? At one level it is you meditating, the normal you with a name who originally sat down and who occasionally gets caught in thought before moving on. It seems obvious that it is me who is meditating, the one making the

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effort to follow the instructions. But who is aware of that self? Who is aware of following the instructions? Who is aware when I get lost? Who is aware when I get found? Who is aware of making effort? Who is aware of being aware of all of this even when I am lost in thought? As you sit, allow yourself to wonder who you really are. If you feel yourself being moved, go with it. If energies of awakening start to take you, let them. If you start being uncertain about what is real and what is unreal, allow it to be. If your consciousness gets dreamy, don’t make a problem out of it. You might be drifting away from what you have known. Allow it to fall away so that something else can replace it. Allow space for awakening. It’s why you are here. It’s what you came for.

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Question: I love the idea of metaphors because they make the mystery intelligible. I want to ask you to speak from your own experience about how you relate to the big self and the small self in day-to-day life? Response: My experience is that most of the time, more often than not, I am in an experience of small-self experience. I am Jeff roaming around doing what Jeff does, sometimes well, sometimes not so well. Over time getting generally better. I am improving at being Jeff. Then there are times under the right circumstances when I have a deep and compelling

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and full experience of that which all of us really are. What is most valuable for me to share is that even when I am experiencing myself as Jeff, the isolated individual running around doing Jeff’s stuff, I never doubt who I really am. The source of liberation that I experience is that I don’t need to be in contact with God to know that God is. And so at an existential level I always feel relaxed and at peace and at home, even if as Jeff I’m running around doing what Jeff does, sometimes well, sometimes not so well. And I just think that’s the human predicament. I think right now on this planet the consciousness is such that the vast majority of us are going to flicker between the individual sense of self and the oneness of God, and we are going to need to spend more time in the individual self because that’s where the vibrational energy of this planet is right now. And so the heroic being is willing to embrace the human experience as it actually is on this planet and still never lose faith in the reality of oneness.

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Question: Do you think it is possible to forget these profundities for a long enough time so that you have to work again to come back to where you were? Response: I assume that it is always possible to slip back. I don’t want to risk it, so I’ve arranged my life to be as focused as I can make it on that oneness so I will not forget. If I lived a life that put my attention in other places, could I lose it? I imagine certainly. We all like to think that we are strong enough and evolved enough and centered enough in God that we could never forget, but I don’t know that that’s true, and so I think the best

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safeguard is to create a life in which the activities of your life remain as centered on God as possible and surround yourself with the most awake people you can. Question: Something popped in my last meditation. At first I kept thinking, “It isn’t me seeking the ultimate; it is the ultimate seeking me.” And then I thought, “Wait a minute, I am the ultimate looking at me,” and there I was for a second—the ultimate looking at me and me looking at the ultimate, and it was laughing. What the heck? And then things popped back to normal again. When I saw myself start striving for it again, I remembered to just let it be, and then as soon as I did it happened again.

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Response: When you allow yourself to shift and see from the perspective of the big Self, it is exactly as you describe: the big Self seeing the little self and the little self seeing the big Self at the same time. Like a deer caught in the headlights, we think, “Oh my god—who’s there?” I want to encourage you to just keep relaxing without the striving, like you described, and allow that process of shifting to continue. It will pop in and out in the way you described for a while, and eventually something very subtle will shift, and a whole other chapter in your practice and in your life will open. That’s the way it works. You live through chapter after chapter of an ever-deeper process of growth and awakening.

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CHAPTER 8

LIVING INTO THE FULLNESS OF WHO WE ARE !

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As we move into the space of wholeness, we become aware of the small self and the background of pure consciousness that is who we really are. When this awakened awareness of pure consciousness occurs in many people simultaneously, you cannot help wondering what exactly makes us feel separate. I once had the luxury of spending an extended period of time on retreat and experiencing two months of unbroken connection with the background of consciousness. I knew that consciousness was who I really was, and no matter how it might appear, I was and always will be that. In the middle of that retreat I was meditating with a group of people deeply perplexed because I did not understand why I could not see through everyone else’s eyes. It just made no sense. I knew that I was always in direct contact with the source of awareness that was seeing

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through everyone’s eyes, so why did my vision seem limited only to my own? That sense of separation and limitation bothered me, and I believed that if I could open myself wide enough I would be able to see through everyone’s eyes. If only I could let go enough to relax any assumed boundaries that limited reality, including the assumption of being a separate isolated individual, then I imagined I would experience a breakthrough. Of course, gaining the ability to see through eyes other than my own was never the point. The point was simply to challenge any sense of assumed limitation. In deep moments of revelation we recognize that we are the eternal, universal source of awareness behind all—and everyone else is as well. Between us there is only one meditation happening.

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I’m here writing these words. I am experiencing a beautiful fluidity of consciousness. I can feel my mind expanding, but is that my mind or our mind? If you can find the place where your mind is expanding and I can find the place where my mind is expanding, isn’t that the same expansion? If you allow yourself to let go into the reality of how connected we are and you find the place where consciousness is expanding, you will begin to realize that that expansion doesn’t belong to you; it is ours. I’m experiencing it from the perspective of this self; you're experiencing it from the perspective of that self; and everyone else who is connected to it is experiencing it from a different vantage point; and yet it is one expansion. As I give myself to that expansion, as I pour my energy and my heart and my soul into the possibility of awakening, I don’t do it only for myself, because it’s our awakening. I give my energy and my love and my heart to the expansion that we are all sharing. And when you do the same, when you pour your own energy and love into

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the possibility of awakening, you are not only doing it for yourself either. You are acting on behalf of the collective awakening that we are. Imagine that if you open just a little bit more, I will feel that opening in myself. And if I open a little bit more, you will feel that opening in you. Allow yourself to connect to the reality of the fact that we are having one meditation, and we are participating in it not only for ourselves, but for each other. Awakening is challenging. It’s difficult. It takes energy. It takes courage. It has been my experience that my own liberation is not motivating enough to inspire the commitment necessary. But awakening for all of us is. The desire to support the upliftment of a gathering of like-minded souls motivates me to leap beyond limits and give wholeheartedly to a possibility that can only arise between us. Even in this inward meditative

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space there is a consciousness that we share, and we are giving to it together. Even as I write about it I can feel myself inspired to give more. That inspiration to give more is also not mine. It is our inspiration to lift ourselves and each other up into places that none of us would ever be able to get to on our own. This is when meditation stops being about the separate self and it starts being about the one meditation that we are all having together. As you become more and more certain that your efforts to awaken are contributing to the awakening of others, you are filled with inspiration and passion. You find a capacity to serve that goes far beyond what you had access to on your own. Allow yourself to become aware of the fact that we’re all pouring our energy and our love into this space, and as the space between us becomes full, it lifts all of us up.

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As you sit, wonder or notice how willing you are to extend your love and energy into the meditation that we are all always having. Do you feel the place where you are compelled, where you feel inspired to give for everyone’s sake? How open are you to accepting all of the love and energy that is being offered back to you? How open are you to embracing that love and energy? Who is meditating here? Am I meditating? Are we meditating? Or is there something bigger than all of us meditating through us because we are finally available for its awakening? How willing are you to extend your love and energy into this meditation, and how open are you to receive the love and energy that is being returned?

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Early on in this book I mentioned that the invitation is to an expansion beyond our habitual human experience of consciousness into a much bigger consciousness. That expansion can take us beyond any sense of separation from each other or from the universe itself. As we move beyond our habitual sense of being a separate isolated individual, we discover an inexpressible wholeness that is already who we are. Through the Practice of No Problem we let go of any sense that there is anything wrong. At the same time we let go of all of our attempts to manipulate and control reality so that we can discover the way reality is when we are not limiting it. The experience of letting go in this way leaves us feeling vulnerable in the most positive and beautiful way. The vulnerability comes from having given up control and allowing our experience to be guided by

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something beyond us. Meditation invites us to align with, and surrender into, the flow and intelligence of the universe. This is something that great realizers have talked about in different ways for a long time. One of my favorite quotations from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nineteenth-century American mystic and sage, says:

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.

That is a beautiful description of what the Practice of No Problem is. Although it sounds like doing nothing, it is really a way of placing ourselves in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom that animates all who float in it. It is a way of allowing ourselves to let go into

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the ocean of intelligence that is the source of Life. Another of Emerson’s quotations and arguably his most famous is:

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

As our practice deepens, we gradually become aware that there is something far beyond the habits of our individual mind moving us. We might feel that we are starting to get a glimpse of the workings of the universe. Some would even say that they were seeing the workings of God inside themselves. However we describe it, what we are seeing is that we are inextricably part of the universe, and whatever guides its unfolding is also active in us. When we pay attention to the way things actually are, our experience reveals to us the mysteries of Universal

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Being. Through the Practice of No Problem we give up struggling with reality by embracing no problem. When we do, we expand into a direct recognition of the glorious totality of which our experience has always been a small part. This is when we open up to all the glory, all the pain, all the joy, and all the sorrow in the universe—everything. We embrace the whole beautiful, messy event of life in all its forms. We become awestruck at having the opportunity to be a part of something so magnificent. There is no separation between us and that totality. The intelligence that is having our experiences of awakening is not separate from the intelligence of this whole glorious universe. Everything is looping back on itself. Our experience is the experience of the universe. Our awakening is the awakening of the universe. The universe is awakening through us and we through it.

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We are not having isolated separate experiences; life is a collective event. Together we are opening up to universal currents of spirit. If you allow yourself to move even slightly toward this recognition, you can begin to feel directly that this awakening is not happening to you alone. There aren’t words to adequately describe what it feels like when you realize directly that you are experiencing the same awakening together with everyone else. It is not only a personal awakening, and it is not only the awakening of all of us together—it is an awakening of the consciousness that we all already are, and it is inviting us to manifest our true selves fully through the actions of our lives. The invitation of meditation and particularly the invitation of the collective experience of meditation is an invitation to live together in harmony with the way things are. It is an invitation to live together in union with the universal

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forces of expansion and awakening that want to take reality to higher possibilities. What would happen if you were to suddenly realize that your awakening is happening between us all? What if the realizations that are uplifting your soul were not something happening inside of you but something more like a wave of awakening moving through the universe? What if, ultimately, that wave of awakening is not happening to us, but is rather an occurrence within the larger mind of which we are a part? If we knew that the awakening that we were experiencing was happening in a singular consciousness that we were all a part of, how connected would we feel then? That larger awakening in consciousness includes our personal triumphs and the individual ways in which we expand beyond our individual

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habits. It also includes our collective leaps forward and the opening of our own hearts toward life and toward each other. And yet, ultimately this is the expansion of one mind and the opening of one heart. It is a collective loosening of the boundaries that separate us from each other and from life. As those boundaries fall away, we find ourselves in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom that animates all who float in it. In fact, if we continue to pay attention, we realize that we are in that ocean, and simultaneously we are that ocean of being in which everything floats. We realize that our awakening is also the awakening of that ocean. We are invited to participate together in awakening the universe. All we need to do, at least in the context of meditation, is to practice having no problem. If we have no problem with reality as it is and have

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taken our hands off the wheel, then we have given up control and are no longer driving the car. Something else can then begin to drive all of us through the twists and turns and straightaways of the journey. As your heart opens and your mind expands beyond the perspective of an isolated individual, you will find yourself in the perspective of the All that you are. This awakening is not an endpoint. It is a first step on a much bigger journey. Spirit gives us each next step as we need it. As we embrace the reality of no problem, we discover that we are all part of a magnificent universal process of awakening. Although we sometimes grab hold of the wheel and take ourselves off the road again, we can always let go again and discover where the universal current will take us next. The process of navigating this universal current of being is a source of continuous growth. The longer we allow ourselves to be taken from one

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experience to the next on a journey of awakening, the more humble we become. The depth of wisdom that is guiding this process is awe-inspiring. The more we surrender to that wisdom, the more compelled we are to let go more. Awakening can happen very steadily and quickly. Our minds are capable of that. Our hearts are capable of that. We have so much potential for expanded consciousness and opening heart. This potential reveals itself whenever we come together and engage in the expansion of mind and the opening of heart that already wants to happen. In these moments we come into the presence of something so holy and sacred that it leaves us speechless. The invitation to live together in harmony with the way things are is immense, beautiful, and magnificent. The opportunity to expand and grow in wisdom and in love together is deeply compelling. There’s nothing that is more valuable to do.

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When you meditate, pay particular attention to being open to the subtle currents of spiritual growth that are already running through us. It is exactly the same as having no problem. By having no problem with the way things are and by letting go of control, we open up to the currents of spiritual growth that are already running through us. Although those currents manifest differently in every individual, they also bind us and unite us because they are the same. We are all hearing the same call, responding to the same call, and coming together in service of the same call to awaken. As you sit in meditation, allow yourself to have no problem. Embrace the reality of no problem so deeply that your whole being—heart and mind—begins to open and expand and engulf everyone until you realize that your individual meditation is part of the much bigger meditation

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that we are doing together. Enter into a living harmony with the spiritual currents of growth that run through this universe. You don’t need to do anything; the practice is still to do nothing. Just watch how these currents are opening you and expanding you. Allow that process to unfold knowing that everyone who is open is experiencing the movement of the same currents of spiritual awakening. As you sit and do nothing, have no problem with whatever arises. No matter what insight, opening, expansion, fear, sorrow, pain, joy, or love arrives, fully allow it to be as it is in the recognition that this, whatever it is, is the universal current of being right now as it manifests through me. The experience of this very moment is what is being offered as the next step of the journey. We don’t need to try to figure out why this or that experience is being

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offered. There is no reason to know. There is no reason to second-guess the wisdom of the universe. Accept each next step. Find a way to align harmoniously with the journey as you are invited into it. As your meditation progresses, you may notice places where there is an unwillingness to let go. There may be experiences of love you feel unwilling to have, expansions of consciousness you are hesitant to allow, intimacy you don’t feel ready for, fear or pain that frightens you. Wherever you find unwillingness, don’t make a problem out of it. Allow it to be exactly as it is. Give it the space it needs to dissolve so that you can be carried to the next place of awakening. Simply allow yourself to expand. All of you is being invited to join together in the reality of the Being that we are. There is no need to resist or fight any experience that arises. Whatever it is can be embraced and

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accepted as the next step of the journey. The journey is being guided by the love and wisdom and intelligence that is inherent in the fabric of reality. We are already part of a universal awakening. It is safe to trust that process and allow yourself to be moved by it. We will find ourselves together in the end having completed the journey into the fullness of who we are. !

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Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it.

—Simone Weil

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeff Carreira originally received an undergraduate degree in physics and spent five years working as a research engineer before realizing that life’s deepest questions could not be answered through science alone. He decided to work in a more humanitarian field and received a master’s degree in education and spent seven years working as a special-education teacher and school administrator.

He embarked on a life devoted to awakening in 1992 when he met spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen and embraced the perspective of Evolutionary Enlightenment. A series of life-changing experiences led him to become a prominent member of a global spiritual movement

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where he created educational programs that supported the ongoing spiritual growth of people around the world.

Jeff teaches internationally and leads multi-year programs for small groups committed to exploring leadership in the context of higher consciousness and awakened community. He is also currently fascinated with the relationship between creativity, spontaneity and awakening.

He is the author of six books, The Miracle of Meditation, The Practice of No Problem, Embrace All That You Are, Philosophy Is Not a Luxury, Radical Inclusivity, and The Soul of a New Self. He also co-authored the book Mutual Awakening with Patricia Albere. For more information about Jeff, visit: www.jeffcarreira.com.