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Ω There is a long-ish excerpt published below.

Testimonials. We haven’t collected any but please feel free to “Comment” to this message or send an email.    However.   I’m delighted to report, one of us has had an awakening. She bought one of the first copies of the book, and when she read to half-way through the last page of “Origin” section, she experienced her mind stopping completely. In the following days, she has continued experiencing the emptiness of emptiness and bliss.  This is a very private time, as well, so of course we can’t just rush over and start asking questions, but I’m very pleased she is journaling and sharing.  It’s sort of funny, but while her email about her enlightenment experience was on the screen, we were speaking here at the center of the universe about developing these web pages and I commented that the website didn’t have any “recommendations” or testimonials for the book and someone started laughing and just pointed at the screen.  Before we had even gotten to the point of collecting people’s responses for testimonials about the book, someone had woken up reading it! Well, that seems a pretty good testimonial! *smile*

But of course, no-one can say what “caused” an awakening.  This wonderful person has been attentively seeking for many years, has studied under Jan Frazier, where I think she shifted into the high-level person I met when she came to my events, too, at Jan’s recommendation.  She woke herself up.   She woke up her self.  Whatever, we’ll have to wait and see what she has to say, if anything, if ever.  So don’t think reading one book WILL do it, it’s just that you never know, So Keep Going, start and don’t stop.  If not my book, someone else’s.  Be SURE to read Jan’s book first.

By the way, under the ABOUT heading at the top-right of the main page, is information about new satsang schedules, planned new books, chance to join a many-week sangha peering sangha retreat (one three hour period a week with the same people every week, for Learning, Awakening, and Companionship) and more on the these pages.

For people to get together and not just listen or follow teaching, but to share With Each Other, bring questions to the teachers, yes, but also, begin to really get a feel for doing this without a “Teacher” because when you wake up, you’re on your own, as we at Karuna witnessed.

(Janny is off in the Maine wilderness enjoying a well-deserved “break” and sabbatical.  )

We’ve scheduled about twice as many Green River Yoga events as before.  All the last-Sundays of the month and few others for fun.

We’re planning a ten-week weekly Gathering.

With all these scheduled, I’m finally in a position to accept the invitations from Boston, Westborough, Williamstown, NYC, Albany, Amherst, etc.  One of the good things is we’ve been able to leave a lot of good dates open to follow up on these invitations.

This is just a quick-off blog, to fill in information.

(If you own a webserver and could offer a little room, I’m nearly ready to develop the new interactive teaching site.)

Facts facts facts.  But what do they have to do with YOU, with Consciousness?  Never forget, this is the work we do, showing up for our own lives!

I Love You.

Karuna Yoga Studio is a splendid space for freedom, realizations, for shifts happening and eyes alive with wonder.  So Yes, we create this space, just a few days away, the 22nd, don’t forget to wake up Sunday morning for the Awakening Retreat in Northampton at Karuna yoga studio (directions.)   We’ve scheduled from  9 to 5, a little bit early for some folk.  Although in fact, since we have the facility so early, we’ll be taking a gently gradient beginning… also so that late-comers don’t impact the event.

This will be my first full-day event since a weekender in Berlin in 2001!  The description in English and German, still worth reading.  I expect Sunday to be free-flowing and serious in a fun way.  Meaning, lots of understanding nods and appreciation.

Much of  our time together will be together…  will be experiential, as in, exercises to explore both perception and the sort of “how” of conclusions.  How conclusion-ing is done.  Sometimes one small thing slips in and has bigger results than imagined.  It’s often through conclusions getting affected or slanted.  Anyway, it will be a bit about that as well.

There will be some experiential exercises done outside during Lunch Break, as well.

The Karuna Retreat is sliding scale, from 60 to 100, many settling at 85. If you would like to advance-register, send me an email and if you can use PayPal, my email address to use at PayPal.com is mwalsh7782@yahoo.com But we want no-one left out, so please contact us.  We’ve been very pleased with the comfort level people have shown to share enough to work things out well.  Amazing beings!  Because this is the first event I’ve ever arranged over the internet, Registration has been confusing for people, I know.  I’m sorry.  I’m going to have it functioning very well very soon.  I am considering all inquiries and emails as if the person intended to register.  Pre-registration is no longer needed, so I’m comfortable accepting anyone and everyone who arrives with a ready heart.

This is a bring-your-own-lunch event, though some of us may wish to eat at one of the local places downstairs.  For those with their own lunch, and the desire, the gathering space will be Contemplative Lunch time, if possible.  Please have a breakfast beforehand or grab a granola bar or two on the way.

I so much want also to do something Jan Frazier (superlatives) has been asking for quite a while, doing a session where I just give only deep personal feedback, from emptiness here to emptiness and space in you.  It’s the best thing I can do, I’m told.  Still, we want to be varied and have fun and when the day is done feel like we’ve really experienced Good Stuff and smiling with the world again.  It won’t be me talking and “holding forth” all day.

Parking.  WHERE TO PARK — not always so easy, in Northampton. People can park legally in the FAR BACK section of the parking lot behind Karuna.

I’m pretty sure there are plenty of cushions and chairs in the studio, so people shouldn’t need to bring sitting things, but if you have a favorite cushion….   oh, the studio is two flights up, but they’re very nice stairs.

The elevator is kept locked, so PLEASE, if you need wheelchair access, please let us know so we can arrange for an elevator operator.

“Love is an expression of the willingness to create space in which something is allowed to change.” -Harry Palmer This Awakening Retreat is the love-expression of the willingness . . . . . and this event is the result.  It becomes the space . . . for You.  That is, here before you, the announcement of this event, is the expression of my willingness to create space for beings, including You, especially You, to evolve, to change, to move in the direction your heart leads and your head has a glimpse.  It is true I do this for living, but it is also true that WHAT I do is FOR peoples.  I do NOT alter it to fit my interests.  My greatest happiness is to see people graduate “past” me (though I do hope they drop by now and then!)           

Oh geez, I see I’m writing out the whole thing!  Welp!  I hope to see you there!

Origin

A Postscript

Regarding human sentience, the brain is what the body does. The mind is what the brain does. And YOU are what the mind does.

The brain springs into existence because the body grows it. When the brain starts running on all its cylinders, what you end up with is a mind. What your mind gets busy creating is a you.

The last part is what we are interested in here. You are the creation of your mind. It’s what minds do. Don’t take it personally; after all, you know that the first thing the mind did was decide it was special! It made a thinker and it created specialized thinking-about-yourself thinking called ego. But none of these things is the essential you, any more than you are your physical possessions. You are not your personal attributes, either. You’re just what the mind is doing, that’s all. If this upsets you, take a walk. If you simply don’t understand what I am saying, boot up your computer. See it come alive. Now shut it down. All that stuff the computer was doing is “gone,” not happening, finito. What you were watching was what the computer was DOING, not what the computer IS. It’s just a machine – hardware, metal, and silicone, connected with wires and the whole mess housed in a box and powered by electricity. Whereas the human organic central processing unit is made of gray and white mushy brain cells connected with nerve fibers and carefully housed in a special cocoon-like cranium which is mounted on a body powered by chemical digestion. But when you see either of these computers come on – what they do in action, oh boy!

On the first level there is a gross level of bodily meat and nerve and brain cells. A consciousness manifests within the functioning of this bodily unit. And finally, pure awareness can happen spontaneously or by exploring this consciousness.

Here’s how it works.

With its infinite potential to be anything, the mind starts doing stuff, at first just in response to things. The act of noticing something is the first step to its no longer “being” what it was originally. As soon as it notices something, notices SOMETHING IS *THAT*, then the mind instantly becomes *NOT* THAT. Before, the mind was all that it was, infinite potential. And now it is NOT THAT. “There is a THAT, and I ain’t it. And hey, I’m having an experience; oops, I can’t *be* what I’m *having*, so now there are TWO THATs. And I’m not either one!”

In fairly short order, the mind comes around to deciding what it IS instead of what it isn’t. “I am the thinker!” And this is more of not being – “I am not the not-thinker.”

So this is you. It goes on your whole life simply because that’s what the mind does. It will continue until Shut Down. Unless, unless, well, here is the peculiar thing. One of the things the mind has evolved into doing (infinite potential, remember) is sometimes becoming a YOU that heads into the direction of becoming less, not more, of the YOU it is being. Perhaps it simply noticed it had been creating more “I,” and the more “I” it tried to be, the more trouble it got itself into. Perhaps it merely ran into the notion that being less-I might be more pleasing. Whatever: the mind goes with it; it reverses course and becomes aware of itself being itself. Conscious. Hey, I was wrong, I AM some of those things I was claiming I wasn’t. Hmmm, could I be none of those things I think I am? Can I therefore maybe be even all those things I said I wasn’t? And if I can even ask these questions, is not everything in doubt? And if so, WHO AM I REALLY?

This is where the fear comes in. Some have said this is the ego making a last-ditch effort to stop you from turning it off. But it may be just the unknowingness of not being anything. Ego-fear is a simple survival mechanism which may be easily turned off. Maybe it is not necessary to go through a big project of battling with the ego and working down all its defenses. (This may account for spontaneous awakenings. No one told ‘em it would be hard to do, that ego battle. No one told them they couldn’t wake up without twenty years of meditation: so they don’t bother waiting; they just wake up.)

Originally, we were infinite potential, not knowing even that, just the potential of ALL. When somebody wakes up, they often later report that they realize they were all of everything the whole time. I believe even that description is this side of the veil. That is to say, they WERE back at pure potential but then, but then (for some unknown reason), they notice something and blammo, they are something other than ALL. Coming a little further, they notice many things. One of them is the ability to speak, and they say (not from Infinite Potential, but from being very little of an “I”) I AM THAT. They were being Infinite Potential but they are now being just short of that; they are being the “I” that knows it is THAT, but still, being the “I” that is able to say it. A moment before, they were the THAT they refer to, but the THAT was actually even less than a THAT; it was (is) all-that-is, infinite potential, a no-thing. It’s what they were when they started out in life. Which may also be the reason such an I-AM-THAT being “comes back” from revelation; it is being a mind that has a built-in proclivity to notice things. And you know what happens when you notice something. Here you are again!

So there you go. If you become less and less of an identity, you become more and more of the alternative (where you came from) – which, as it turns out, is pretty damn big: All That Is! Infinite Potential! Yikes! And to think, you’ve been looking for yourself!

So where were we? Oh yeah, about not being anything. So once a being is being no-thing, or at least so little of things that it’s just barely worldly enough to operate as a human, it is like pure awareness. It be-s. (Notice that English does not leave room for the word “bes.” You can eat: “He eats.” But you can’t be: “He bes.” Interesting.)

So dig this. The person bes, right? He is not anything, but, say, he looks at a mountain. He’s not Being or Doing anything, right, except being a human being being nothing – except . . . except, all systems are ON. That is, his senses are running, his organic cpu is booted up and functioning in as-a-human-being mode, that is, ready for interaction with things NOT-HIM, or from his point of view (if he had a point of view, but remember, he has not done anything yet, even “notice”), NOT-I. He is receiving information, data is coming in through default pathways and yet his mind has not responded . . . because “his mind” IS the response which may or may not happen due to the influx of information. His brain has aptic structures (such as, his ears connect to brain areas uniquely suited to sorting through signals generated by a human ear), so if sound vibrations strike his ear, it is possible – we may say it is even likely – that signals will begin to pass through the nerve channels to the passive idling brain. It is, we can say, APT to happen. Just as if you let go of an apple, it is apt to fall to the ground.

So there our fellow stands. Light shears from the sun’s surface, travels millions of miles, bounces off an outcrop on the planet Earth, and a minuscule portion of the bouncing light continues across a valley to our friend (our booted-up idle human nobody person) and the light enters the eyes, passing through the cornea, lens, and fluid, and striking the retina (the imperfect organic form of the perfect CCD chip which is in your digital camera). The photon happens to strike precisely in a way to go into a structural part of a rod or cone eye-cell wherein there is nowhere else for it to go, and its energy (the “energy” of its very existence, we could say) sets off a quantum interaction in the cell. (This is the first known area, by the way, where science precisely observes and sees us operating in a quantum way, when quantum bits are triggered by photons in the eye to generate charge potential, and neural cells are apt to create signals when charged, and also pass the potential via a synapse to an adjacent neuron) and a “usual” electrical neuron signal is generated and propagates along the optic nerve. Then another photon, and then another signal, more and more, and soon there is a flow, and the optic nerve begins to flood on towards connection with a brain structure which has its own design, its own aptic structure, and flooded, it accepts the incoming signals, shuffles them around, ignores them as noise or this or that, but finally, at some point, maybe milliseconds, maybe minutes, finally it does what it is structurally most apt to do: it assembles all the signals in a way relative to the pattern of the excited retina, and a theoretic “image” is formed in the cells and neurons of the visual cortex. It has done what humans call “seeing.”

Only, only, nobody has yet seen it, because there is no-one there, remember? Welp, that is about to change, because the brain is an aptic structure too; it is apt to act, do, and think like a human being and so, randomly, it being ready for just about anything a human can be ready for, it experiences the visual cortex’s “I have an image to present,” and the human brain, now starting to “act” or operate, more than simple “idling,” it then accepts the image and POOF BAM – - – MOUNTAIN!

MOUNTAIN IS

now operating, now Being more than just at-ready-idle, he IS the mountain. He HAS to be. He can’t be anything else; he is being no-thing, cannot be anything. All that is happening from a human point of view is the “MOUNTAIN IS” signal is accepted, registered, and essentially IS that human’s experience. So when he sees a mountain, he IS the mountain, which is all-that-is, because that is what he is seeing, being. Ask him “Who are you?” and if he responds spontaneously (instead of noticing he has been asked a question), he will say, “Mountain.” He isn’t even “here”! Nobody home!

Whatever he perceives or apperceives, he is that. It is his ONLY experience and therefore the totality of his experience. HE IS THAT, but he would say, “IAMTHAT,” indicating the mountain, that being all there is.

Now, when such a being is looking at YOU, he bes YOU. And if you look at him, well, what do you see? You’ll see yourself of course, though you won’t see the “who” that you Think you are; you will see what he sees, what you Really are.

This last should neatly explain bodhisattvas, enlightened teachers, the idea of “transmitting” awakening, and a host of other shifts that one can experience with another. You are seeing yourself through another’s eyes, only you don’t realize it’s you, you think it’s Him, and you go, “Oh man, he’s beautiful!” and he sees what you are doing, and compassion fills his face, and boy, do you feel close to him then!

When you see another who is being you, you experience the very thing you’ve been searching for. You think it’s this spiritual person in front of you. But it’s only you. Him being you. You feel like something is going on, some answers are near. You open up to who you really are and look. You become totally present with the reflection which he is being. You begin to reflect what you are seeing. And what you are seeing is what? What you are seeing is the being you are being.

In physics, they put two mirrors on the end of a ruby and energize the ruby to give off light. The light bounces between the mirrors until so much builds up that it breaks through one end as a laser beam.

When one person is totally present with an awakened being who is being the (other) person, anything can happen. And does.

Cool, huh?

Suddenly, on awakening, all the “I” melts away and there you are! Trembling with the knowledge that you are Home.

• Michael Walsh

Origins Originally Written in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, 1999