Nollind Whachell

Whenever we expand beyond limits, the ego experiences it as a death. Whenever we go beyond ourselves, the ego experiences a little death because the ego is defined by its limits. That’s what the ego is, a limitation or an apparent limitation on our true nature.

The ego says, “Ah, if Darren gets a job working at a higher level, he’s going to expand beyond his current limitations.”

So the ego says, “I will not survive that expansion. I will die.”

That’s the voice of doubt in you. That’s the voice of the doubt.

It’s the ego telling you, “No, no, no, no, don’t, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t expand. I’ll die. I’ll die. You don’t, don’t do that. Just stay comfortable. You’re fine. You’re well paid. You’re well respected. You have a nice life.”

Really the ego couldn’t care less about you. It just wants to stay. It just wants to stay. It doesn’t want to die.

Fortunately the impulse for truth is stronger than the ego’s resistance to it, sooner or later. To begin with they kind of battle with each other. They go backwards and forth. But sooner or later, truth—our intuition of truth—overrides our fear.

So it’s helpful to have the right interpretation for the doubt because when it rises again. you’re less likely to listen to it, if you understand the mechanisms behind it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you find that just by having this confidence in this intuition that you have and no longer listening to the doubt because of this correspondence between our inner life and the outside world that just having this understanding will in some way somehow reconfigure the world that you live in and some new opportunity will open up. There’ll be this magical response of the world to this inner change in you and all the inner changes.

You’ve understood the doubt. You no longer listen to it. You’re going to listen to this deeper voice inside you. You’re going to acknowledge it, validate it, follow it, and not let the doubt prevent it. And chances are the world will respond to that.

Rupert Spira

Rupert’s words above are a beautiful embodiment of the hero slaying the monster within the Hero’s Journey. The monster embodies our fears which stands in our way, blocking our progress. But it is created from our limited beliefs which are a part of our current identity, now having become outdated.

So to go beyond it, we have to let go of our old sense of self and our old sense of beliefs which effectively feels like we are killing ourselves by letting go our old sense of self and discarding it by the wayside, thus no longer giving it the attention it feeds from and desires. But in the process of doing so, we are able to expand our sense of self-identity, become more than we thought possible.

This is the struggle I am going through with my old sense of self right now. And the more I struggle with it, the more I realize that you just can’t ignore it and “get busy” to try to overcome it because that’s the very thing it feeds off of. Instead you have to fully stop, turn towards it, stare at it, sit still with it, and say, “I see you for what you are.”

This is why vertical development to me is like playing within a MMORPG. Your True Self is the “player” and your identity, who you misbelieve you are, is your “character.” When your character has achieved enough experience in life to outgrown itself and level up its level of consciousness, it does so without fear or grief of losing itself. Instead it’s seen as a wondrous experience of greater opportunities and possibilities, as it expands itself.

Knowing this is one thing though. Living it is completely another.

You’re still expecting something to happen. That’s the problem.

Enlightenment is not an event. It’s not a marvellous event. It’s not a mundane event. It’s not any kind of event. It’s not something that happens.

Enlightenment is not something new. It’s not something that was lost and now has to be found. At best, and even this is not quite true, but at best we could say it was overlooked…

In fact, awareness doesn’t have problems, doesn’t know problems. Why? Because in order for there to be a problem, there needs to be resistance. There needs to be the, “I don’t like this.” That’s what makes a situation a problem.

But awareness is like empty space. It’s never saying to the current experience, “I don’t like you.” And therefore, it doesn’t have problems.

So it’s not saying, “My separate horrible self needs to be got rid of. I’m fed up with her.” The “I” that is fed up with her is another form of herself. In other words the separate self is perpetuating itself by trying to get rid of itself.

So you’re caught in this mind from which you are understandably tired of trying to get rid of yourself. “I, the separate self, want to get rid of myself, so that I, the separate self, can experience enlightenment.”

And you’re going round and round and round. And you’re rightly frustrated and disheartened because you’re engaged in a never-ending endeavour which is perpetuating the separate self by trying to get rid of it.

It’s just see the situation clearly. You cannot get rid of an illusion.

What can you do to an illusion, what do you need to do to an illusion, just to see that it’s an illusion? Don’t spend your life trying to get rid of an illusion. It’s a waste of a lifetime.

Just live what you understand. Take your stand there.

In other words, enlightenment is a fancy name for the most simple, the most ordinary, the most well-known experience there is. And all seven billion of us know it. However, because it cannot be found by the mind, in most cases it is deemed missing. And as a result of that, the peace and the happiness that are inherent in it are also considered missing. And hence, the imaginary self goes off into the world in search  for the missing peace and happiness.

And as we all know, it doesn’t live there. Where does it live? In the simple knowing of our own being. It’s knowing of itself. That is awarenesses awareness of awareness.

Instead of mistaking yourself for a cluster of thoughts and feelings, just noticed, “Oh no. I am the one who is aware of those. I’m not a cluster of thoughts and feelings. All those flow by. But I’m not flowing by, I’m just always here.”

Just allow that to come from the background into the foreground, more and more.

Rupert Spira

Rupert uses an amazing metaphor for life within this video as thought one were looking at a movie screen and seeing their life play out upon it (which mirrors Plato’s Allegory of the Cave) but then forgetting that what we’re seeing is an illusion cast upon a screen. (I, myself, prefer a more modern metaphor for this whereby life is playing out upon a VR headset screen that is covering our eyes which is why it’s hard for us to realize this.)

Thus this “screen” is what is often overlooked, as he notes.

Compared to the woman who Rupert is speaking to, who is experiencing this problem, I would say it mirrors my own experience in that I’m seeking some transitory and transformative event that will shift my perception but that in looking for it, even expecting it, I’m actually preventing it from happening.

In effect, so often how we think things will turn out is completely different than how they will because we often misinterpret the meaning of the experience itself, thinking we know it. When it’s actually much more paradoxical than we imagined it would be.

At the same time though, the reverse of this also happens! In effect, we often do things that we think are “wrong” but they are actually naturally right. Like I kept feeling like having a blog and taking things only one step at a time and just writing that thread of an experience separately, wasn’t enough. So I put a massive expectation upon myself to try to force it all out at once which only made it worse and made me stuck even more.

Yet you can’t force a seed to grow. You have to give it time, space, and room to grow on its own. Thus when finally in the right fertile environment and conditions, it flourishes rapidly upon its own.

It’s funny. I remember saying something a while back about the quote, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I said that the teacher is actually always there, they’re often just not noticed. This is remarkably similar to what Rupert is saying here. Our awareness, which is constantly with us, is always there.

BTW Rupert’s mention of defusing your vision to become aware of our awareness is also remarkable close to an experience I had many years back, while I was in a liminal state while preparing to fall asleep. Effectively my deep rhythmic breathing and a state of focus that was out of focus, both between what was I looking at and what I was, caused this experience to occur. But as I noted before, I never replicated this experience, even though I knew I could, because I was too afraid of the feeling of the experience of not being my “self” and thus potentially losing my “self” permanently in the process.

When it comes to poetry, we should not demand that the poet uses words in too literal or rational a way. The words of a poem don’t operate on the rational mind, they operate on a deeper level. And the same is true of a prayer.

So the main thing to understand is that the god to whom we might pray, if we’re inclined to pray in words like that, the god to whom we might pray is the god that we are. It is a prayer of ourself to our self, couched in the limitations of language.

Sitting in abidance, abidance as being, is the ultimate prayer. Liberate your idea of prayer from the belief that it is something that is contained in words or expressed in words.

So abidance, being knowingly the presence of awareness or resting in being, is the highest form of prayer.

Understand you are the one you are praying to. It’s a way of speaking to yourself. It’s a way of personifying yourself, so that you feel that you can, in some ways in your mind, objectify yourself and have a relationship with yourself. But at some point that has to go, so that you feel that you are the being that you pray to.

I remembered a while back reading something that mentioned that people are “seeking something larger than themselves” and I intuitively realized at the time that this “something,” that was “larger” than themselves, was actually their True Self which lies beyond their current limited sense of “self.”

This video above by Rupert Spira mirrors this realization.

In fact, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero Path mirrors this realization as well.

And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.

Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone
we shall be with all the world.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero Path

That Rupert also mentions that it’s about having a relationship with yourself is also poignant, as I’ve noted before that this is what vertical development is really about at its core. It’s about beginning a lifelong journey of getting to know yourself by being within an intrapersonal relationship with yourself.

Why? Because when we reach a point of being able to truly accept and love ourselves as we are, thus truly becoming at “home” with ourselves, then will we be able to accept and love others as they are as well. This is the oneness, the “god”, within us all, as Joseph Campbell speaks above about.

This also poignantly ties into what I intuitively felt like was required to “level up” one’s level of consciousness. In effect, one has to completely trust one’s larger sense of Self would catch oneself, as one falls back into its embrace which occurs when one turns around and steps back from one’s life to understand it better.