The Power of Awareness Is Also The Power to Love
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."Within the power of awareness is also the power to understand. And when we understand, we can love. When we have love, we share in the solidarity of humankind. No longer hating and resenting, we are free to be kind and to bear each other's burdens."
We all have a tendency to get lost in thought.
Daydreams, worries, plans, schemes, and imaginings are powerful and suck us in. We lose awareness and get lost in the daydream before we even know it has happened.
God is not realized or experienced in thinking or imagination. God is realized in the aware state. The aware state is the state we had just before we fell into the hypnotic daydream state.
But by practicing the meditation, you can learn to observe thought. Then when you get lost in thought, you will become aware this has happened, and you are once again above thought—the observer of thought.
We are all born in sin, fallen creatures, and compulsive about our worries and pipedreams. Some of us want to remain aware of what is right, but emotions and thoughts carry us away. We forget what is right, and we make mistakes.
The beauty of the meditation is that you don’t have to TRY to remember or TRY to not get lost in thought. The very act of trying is a thing of the ego and leads to frustration.
By finding the aware state, you can be aware when you fall into excessive thought, and effortlessly pull back.
In essence, it is the power of awareness itself that reminds you and lets you stand back. Awareness has a awakening quality, and it is a powerful antidote to excessive thinking.
It is not that thinking is wrong. Thinking has its place. But thinking should come from realizing. Thinking and imagination were not meant to over-ride realization.
Therefore, take heart, sincere seeker. You have tried to live in an aware moral way. You have sensed something wrong with your emotions and your angry or glory seeking thoughts. But you did not know how to deal with them properly. You always struggled with them, which only involved you more in the process of failing and falling.
Use, now, the meditation. Learn the secret of objectivity. It will permit you to effortlessly become aware when you are too involved in emotion or thought, and will permit you to pull out. Without effort, without struggle, without will. All that is necessary is the attitude of wanting to be aware, combined with the proper technology of the meditation.
All who sin are slaves says the Messiah. This statement is true as far as you want to take it. And so, it is not surprising that there would also be a state of consciousness that corresponds to the enslaving of sin and is a result of sin.
And that state of consciousness is the lower state of various levels of hypnosis. The higher state of awareness is the one we fall from and to which we must return if we are to find freedom and find salvation from the enslavement to our worries, preoccupations, and compulsions.
It is ironic that the person who is entranced does not even know he is (because he cannot realize in this fallen condition). Moreover, he thinks he is free. This because each new excitement and each new fixation seem to free him from guilt and anxiety.
True hope is from faith in God and an abiding awareness of His providence.
But the hope of the entranced is in some new excitement or love that will make them feel like the god they think they are or that will free them from the pain or consequences of their aberrant lifestyle.
The false faith of the damned is in those who recognize them as gods or who promise to make them great or cure them.
So, you see, there is a true faith and a false faith; a true hope and a false hope. Only the soul who is ready and willing to face the true can meditate properly. Most people want to be saved from awareness of their sins. The last thing in the world they want is to be made aware of their wrong. With this kind of an attitude, they cannot meditate properly. They make it into a hypnotic thing, and get caught up with technique or personality.
But the sincere soul does nt mind seeing his wrong, even though it be painful, because he wants to come completely clean. This person will be able to meditate and find the blessed aware state.
I believe that Christ is referring to this blessed state of awareness when in the Sermon on the Mount He speaks of the "Heavenly attitudes" (as translated from the Yonan Codex manuscript in Aramaic, the language Christ spoke)
Matthew – Chapter 5 (from the Yonan Codex translation of the Aramaic Bible)
5:1. When Jesus saw the crowds, He ascended the mount and when He was seated His disciples drew near (kribo) to Him.
5:2. He began speaking and teaching them said:
5:3. “A heavenly attitude is theirs (touveyhoun), those whose home (maskenii) is in (b’-) rukha (rukh); theirs is a heavenly state (malkoota d’shmea).
5:4. “A heavenly attitude is theirs (touveyhoun), those mourning their wrongs (abilii); they shall be comforted (nitbeyoon).
5:5. “A heavenly attitude is theirs (touveyhoun), those with humility (makikhii); they will gain (nartoun) the earth.
5:6. “A heavenly attitude is theirs (touveyhoun), those who hunger and thirst for justness (Kenoota); they shall attain it.
5:7. “A heavenly attitude is theirs (touveyhoun), those whose love is without conditions (rakhmanii); they will therefore receive unconditional love (rakhmii).
5:8. “A heavenly attitude is theirs (touveyhoun), those without fault (dadcean) in their minds (b’libhoun); they will see (nikhazoun) G-d (Alaha).
5:9. “A heavenly attitude is theirs (touveyhoun), those serving (abdey) the peace of G-d (shlama); they will be called the children of G-d (Alaha).
I believe this beautiful translation is referring to the aware state, where we stand back from our own fallen nature and see things as they are. This Heavenly attitude is a gift from God to those who yearn for truth and who are willing to admit wrong.
If we see ourselves and other people from this perspective, how can we not have patience? How can we not see and regret our wrongs? How can we not abandon pride, some sort of false notion of our own goodness or cleverness. In the aware state, we inherit faith, we inherit understanding. And the Presence of God’s redeeming Light causes us to see our wrong and permits us to be sorry.
Without awareness and objectivity, we can only deal with our own faults egotistically. We may see our wrong, but not the reason for it. And even if we see the wrong and the reason, our egotistical struggle with it is just another response to temptation (as it now embodies itself in our error or infirmity).
The aware state is the only state in which we can realize truth and realize God. We think we are aware when we are at best merely awake. Mostly we walk around in some level of trance. Bear in mind that the trance state is virtually indistinguishable. People are entranced and don’t even know it. When you see someone lost in a cell phone call (and unaware that they are driving erratically) or someone screaming at a ball game, they are obviously entranced. When you watch people watching television or the internet, you can often sense they they are caught up. When you see someone who is head over heals in love with some person, they are hypnotized.
But less obvious is the momentary fleeting levels of hypnosis we fall into and walk around in all the time. Mostly our attention is captured by one thing; then it is captured by another. Our attention is ever fixated from one thing to another. Sometimes you will observe a person who is getting ready to have a shot at the doctor’s office fixating on and studying a picture on the wall. They are attempting to have their attention captured by the picture in order to take it away from the looming shot.
When a person escapes from one bad relationship into another, they are trading involvements. A person will be lost in their meal and dreaming of desert. They never allow a moment’s respite where they would realize guilt and the ignominy of their habits. Some people go from the bottle to church and then back to the bottle.
When a person is caught up with some leader and that leader weakens, they often hate the leader (because of the weakening trance, as their leader falters and fails to keep them hypnotized and direct them) and find a new one to whom they transfer their allegiance.
Once again, understand the principle. When a person does not want to realize truth (because it brings shame, humiliation and pain), they simply will not wake up.
And when they are forced to wake up and see their mistakes, they resort to excuses and justifications for whatever they did in their trance state.
Most of us have occasional moments of clarity when we see things as they are, and without realizing it, we are in the aware state. It is in this state, and only in this state, that real positive change can occur.
I recently read the story told by a professional athlete about how he had struggled with alcohol for years. He went into rehab and then fell off the wagon and was back to drinking again. Nothing worked until one day he was on the freeway, heading toward a bar where he was going to drunk with his buddies (instead of going home to his wife). All of a sudden in a moment of clarity, he said “this is crazy.” He got off the freeway at the next exit, turned the car around, went home and never touched another drink again. Without realizing it, he had come up to the aware state, in which he saw his error clearly, saw that it was wrong, and was free to choose to let it go.
Anyone who had dealt with addicts of various kinds knows that real change only happens when the person really sees the need to change and really wants to change.
Many of us have experienced the shock of suddenly getting a glimpse of some leader we have been following and seeing what they are really like. In a lighting flash we are warned by what we see. We back off and are safe.
Others of us have suddenly had a profound sense of danger or a sense that we should not do something. By heading this wordless hunch, we are saved from some terrible tragedy.
I also believe that many bystanders who rush to rescue someone are in this elevated aware state. Afterwards, they are called heroes, but they always say: “I don’t feel like a hero, I just saw something that needed to be done and I did it.”
It is in a moment of clarity, of clear seeing, that our soul flashes on reality, and is able to make a simple move that saves us or another from something awful.
It is comforting to know that God does grant us access to this protection, even in our unaware entranced emotional state. Awareness is always there, just above thinking, daydreaming, and imagining. It is in the aware state that God moves upon the soul and through the soul to do good or avoid evil or danger.
We have all had close calls, whereby we have a wake up call just in time to avoid the fatal error. We then experience gratitude and relief. But even the best of us usually soon starts to slip back into the old emotional thinking and feeling, as we fall back into being affected by the stresses and temptations around us. And before you know it, we are back in our comfort zone trance state.
The secret is to find the aware state and hold on to it.
Thereby you have protection, enlightenment, intuitive guidance, and wisdom all the time. The only way I know to do this is via the meditation exercise. And it only for those who are ready. It takes a special kind of soul (one which I hope you will become) who is willing to see their own wrong, and who welcomes the redeeming purging pain of conscience. Wanting to be right with God and a willingness to see our own faults permits us to meditate properly. The prize is awareness.