Conflicting Views of Reality – How to Shift Upward

Often Isaac uses the metaphor of a multi-level building, where each floor presents a different view of reality through the window.
People fight each other simply because they don’t agree on their views. They think everybody should see their view, and they fight to make that happen.

Here’s a recap from our first blog post of volume 1, plus more about using your elevator to allow for many views:

How Can Everybody Be Right? A Multi-storied Building of Reality (Nov. 2017)

Think of a tall building, many stories tall, a skyscraper. You live on a particular floor, and your conflicting friend may live on another. Each of you holds a different opinion, a different attitude. From each floor of this building, the views are unique. The views change depending what floor you’re standing on.

The people of each level have their own shared view. They agree with each other: this is the truth. We are right.

On the first floor life is hard, not comfortable. From your window you see people walking by, dogs, trucks and taxis. You have dirt, trash, noise, even violence in the street.
Here at the bottom of the building we have more suffering. We don’t like it. We resist it. We hold rigid attitudes. We feel grumpy and constricted. This is a low vibration.

Higher up, you feel lighter. You look out over a treetop. You don’t feel bothered by that stuff on the street. You let go of it. It’s there, and you give what you can when you’re out on the sidewalk, yet you know you’re not in charge of all that. It’s the way of the world. You release resistance to it, and you enjoy your tree.

If someone lives very high on this building of vibration, their view is sky, clouds and birds. Lots of space, expansion. They feel light and happy. They have totally released resistance to whatever’s happening on the street, even if they must walk through it. They can allow all of it to be as it is.
They have the bigger perspective that shows them everything is in right order. They see everybody is “right.” Everybody is learning. Every situation is ultimately for the good.

(Now the elevator piece from chapter 31 of vol 1, Walking the Bridge – With a Fearless Heart.)

Conflicting Views of Reality – How to Shift Upward

We all contain the multi-level building of consciousness, many numerous levels. Maybe our elevator is rusty, and we can’t reach some of the levels yet. We need to oil it up. Maybe we live on the third floor, and we can see all the way to the ground. We think we’re pretty high up already, maybe we’re at the top of everything? But no. There are levels we haven’t seen yet.

Our mobility between levels, our elevator, is important. Turning our attention is the key to our mobility. Turning our attention changes our vibration. Our vibration allows us to move up or down on this elevator. But we cannot shift upward until we train our attention.

If we carry a lot of baggage, those painful stories about ourselves and our life, the elevator will sink, not rise.

You want freedom? Drop the baggage.

“Oh, but I like my baggage, this is my stuff.”

You are deluded. Our old baggage makes a cloud around the present moment, a cloud which is difficult to see through.

Be Present to what’s really here. Don’t fall into the old story.

(Excerpted from Walking the Bridge – With a Fearless Heart.)
(Thanks to pixabay for this image of windows.)

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The Largest You, All-Encompassing

Question: When you speak about the levels of consciousness – waking, dreaming, sleeping – I would like some clarity about where my consciousness is. Sometimes I can remember parts of my dreams but not always. Can you please say more about how to access these levels?

The three levels of waking, dreaming and sleeping – these are “you” in a localized personal way. You experience them through your own senses. They feel like “you.”

But there is a fourth level, a larger part of you, always there, observing, never leaving, always Present.

This Observing Consciousness is nonlocal.

It is attuned to everything.

It can be everywhere and anywhere.

With this larger part of your Consciousness, you can feel your way into what it’s like to be a bird or a cloud. You are the bird. You are everything.

This is an awareness beyond the physical senses.

When you direct consciousness through the senses, then you become localized.
Not only localized, but you think you are your senses.
This is the typical human way of being.
You become a subject looking at an object. Dualistic mode.
The waking state and the dreaming state are dualistic.
You are the subject confronting objects that appear to be outside of you.

The real you is always pure Consciousness.

But you have a case of mistaken identity.

You think the real you is what you experience through sight, sound, and all your senses.

 

The awareness of your Observing Consciousness is subtle and all-encompassing.

It includes everything.

Nothing is outside of it.

Everything is inside it.

It doesn’t separate subject from object.

It is All.

And It is you. It is the real, eternal you.

 

These are Isaac’s words from chapter 20 of Volume 3, Walking The Bridge: The Art of All-Is-Well 

(Thanks to pixabay for this image.)

Surrender into Simplicity

Many Thanks to the Scribe who wrote these notes, based on personal understanding of Isaac’s teachings. These are not transcripts but perceptions through the student’s natural filters.
1) The holy has the power to absorb the ordinary into holiness.

2) Once we’re exposed to spiritual fire, it begins to transform us, because it is smarter than we are.  We complicate life by believing all problems are on our shoulders – that we’re indispensable – rather than choosing to live simply.

3) Wisdom’s first lesson is that we know nothing and that we don’t need to know anything.  While this is often painful, ultimately it teaches us to learn to be happy with little and without fame, fortune and endless  pleasure-seeking.

4) Although the world urges us to make ourselves more powerful, bigger, richer, more beautiful for our own pleasure, teachers advise us to make ourselves smaller, less important.  There’s a subtle maneuver, usually done with tears rather than words, which allows Life to illuminate from beyond the personal self through us, and thereby be a blessing to the world.  It’s a position of awareness. It is the first gate to pass through toward Divinity. “May the light of our lives be utilized in Your service rather than wasted on personal desires.  If we’re conscious during our final moments of life, may we delight in having expressed our love for You through holy ways.”

Narrow View, Broad View

Have you ever played with a telescope? How does it enlarge the moon? It narrows the view, which enlarges one item. You block out all the rest of the sky and focus only on the moon. It becomes so much larger.

This narrowed focus works well for examining and studying things. But narrow view also plays a big role in our desire and fear. We narrow our focus and see only our object of desire or fear. We lose the big perspective of the whole sky and all the wonderful things in our life. We narrow the view.

Our attention to desire or fear is magnetic. Desire and fear tend to grab us strongly. We go narrow, zooming in to that desire or fear, shutting out everything else.

In his teen years, Isaac experienced spontaneous rushes of energy up his spine. He had no knowledge of what this meant. It seemed frightening. One night he was rolling over and rolled right up out of his body. He stood there beside the bed, watching himself sleep. There was a sense of profound calm. It felt good. He had a desire to explore the rest of the house this way, but he wasn’t sure how to move. He looked at the door, and his desire to go there – his attention – drew him toward the door. Suddenly he felt afraid he might collide with the door. Rather than slowing down, his fear magnetized him all the faster toward the door.

This is an example of how our attention to desire or fear makes us zoom in and go narrow.

We are all being dreamed by our Creator.

When you dream at night, at the end of your dream, the characters fall away, they dissolve, as if they die. Is their death important to you? No. After all, it’s a dream. They come and go, just as we come and go in the great scheme of things.

God is One, just as our prayer says. All is One. I am you and you are me. There is no “me.”

I think I am me because I put a rubber band around a group of sensations and I call this bundle “me” – my sensations.

When the mystics connect with the Divine and become One with all, they break that rubber band.

You might fear that if you did this, you would lose control of your sensations or the ability to be aware. But you don’t lose anything. You receive awareness of all. You go into the broader perspective. You see the whole sky.

You become non-local. You don’t have a specific location anymore. The non-local is all here, all the time.

Your awareness is your telescope. Awareness and attention bring you to broad view or narrow view. We tend to live daily life in narrow view. Your awareness narrows down to be “you” and shuts out the broad perspective. This is me, and everything else is not-me. Such is our mindset. Such is our typical telescope focus. Such is our habit of attention.

 

Now go into meditation for a moment. Remember your streams of sensation – of seeing, hearing, feeling. They are streams because they are always moving. Something new is constantly arising in these streams of sensation.

Can you feel each of these streams flowing by, without calling these sensations yours?

A sensation flows by but does not belong to you personally. You feel it as energy flowing within the One, the All. You hear sound rise and fall, part of the All. You are the All.

Just watch the streams.

Break the rubber band of your bundle.

BE all sensations everywhere.

 

 

This excerpt is from chapter 46 of  Volume 1 Walking the Bridge: with a Fearless Heart
(Thanks to pixabay for this telescope.)

 

How to Fine-Tune Meditation by Understanding Ego

The ego creates time. The ego exists only in the Past or in the Future. Ego cannot function in the Present. In the Present there is no time. Everything is Now. Only the Past and Future give rise to the concept of Time.

When we are fully Present, ego is not in charge.

It’s not that the ego is “bad.” Rather, the ego is our vehicle in this world. Like our car, the ego helps us function. We need it.

Our thoughts, too, deal in past and future, avoiding the present moment.

If we can meditate into the Now moment, into the Present, without Thought, we enter a state of Timelessness. A Place without Time. Our Western traditions call this Union with God. In the East they call it Samadhi.

This is the place of still water. Perfectly still and clear, like the surface of a mirror.

When thoughts arise, the water gets choppy with ripples and waves. With the movement of each thought-wave, which takes us to the past or future, a sense of time begins again.

How can we let go of our thoughts? How can we still the waters of the mind?

It begins with noticing your thoughts. Listen to your thoughts as an observer. What are your thoughts saying? How many thoughts are wasted words? Your ego chatters on, telling you what you already know. It likes to talk. Many of our thoughts are a sheer waste of time, or worse – they are detrimental to our wellbeing. Sometimes they are outright lies.

What is your particular inner chatter? Just listen to it sometime. Take time to observe what you are telling yourself.

Those who can’t step back and observe in this way will be dominated by their habitual thoughts, their habitual ego-chatter.

How will these thoughts finally diminish? There’s really only one way, and that is disinterest. You become disinterested in whatever they are telling you. You truly are so tired of listening that you don’t listen anymore to that repetitive stuff.

This is most important: when you are meditating and thoughts arise, don’t fight them.

What if you sit with a grim determination to focus on emptiness, and you yell at your thought, “Get out of here! I told you already!” What happens? Any struggle like this arouses the ego. There you are trying to be spiritual, and already the ego is hijacking the situation. It takes charge and says, “Good for you, we’ll fight those thoughts.” The ego takes on the role of spiritual warrior, and you barely notice. It slips under your radar. As soon as you fight, you’re hooked in.

So you want to meditate on an empty blue sky. You can see it. A thought comes in like a cloud overhead. Do you yell at the cloud? Will it do any good? No. Yelling will only get you riled up. Rather you increase your patience and let that cloud float past until it’s gone. Don’t even engage with that cloud. Avoid engagement. Let thoughts blow by without you. Don’t attach.

What if you had a friend who keeps calling you up, wanting to hang out at your house all the time? They keep coming over, always wanting to chat. But everything out of their mouth is redundant. Maybe they get excited or emotional – positively or negatively – and they want to take you along, get you involved in their story. They just keep expressing themselves, but you’re getting tired of listening. You realize that everything they say is a sheer waste of your time. You would do something to avoid this friend.

So it is with your ego. It’s that kind of relationship. As you observe what comes out of your ego’s mouth, you just get tired of it. I’m tired of these thoughts. I’m just not interested any more. I don’t care what it has to say. I don’t want to listen to any of it. I’m so done.

When you are finally, really, not listening anymore – this is the only thing that will quiet the ego and stop it from talking.

Now you can get to a quiet place. Now you can be fully Present. In the Present, the ego doesn’t exist. So the closer you get to full, quiet Presence, the more the ego fears its death. As you face the Present, what does the frantic ego say? “Let’s talk about this.”

It slips itself between you and your focus once again. It may say, “Oh, this is quiet, this is deeper than before.” A running commentary, more subtle than before. You think the talk died out, but it’s giving spiritual talk now. It’s still talk. The ego has tricked you into letting it take charge again.

Or if you are fortunate enough to be without words, the ego brings up emotion. Emotions are even stronger than words. This is usually fear. It is the ego’s intense fear of dying. Many say that the deeper the meditation, the more terror they feel. And it can be absolute terror. This is the ego’s fear of losing its very existence.

The best thing to do is trust the Present and allow the fear to pass.

 

(These words from Isaac are in Chapter 15 of  Volume 2, Walking the Bridge – With Balance   -Guidance from a Wisdom School.)
(Thanks to pixabay for this lovely sky.)

Bask Effortlessly in Divine Sunshine

The longer we live, we begin to realize we can stop efforting. All our reading and studying and trying new practices, polishing ourselves. What’s it all for?

All our small efforts can’t even touch, much less control, the Limitless One. We find that everything we receive is a Gift. We can’t do anything to enhance it.

You and your efforts are the character in a dream. Your dream character is working so hard, wanting a reward to enjoy in that dream.

But the reward turns out to be that the whole thing is a dream.

We are being nurtured by the Divine the same way a flower is fed by the sun. You know those flowers that turn to face the sun, wherever it is? How wonderful to be like them, gazing at the sun.

But remember, we are given divine support even when we don’t face it. It’s always there for us, 24/7. The divine sun shining upon us.

The whole point is to sunbathe. Allow your skin to be blessed by the sun. And instead of covering up some skin and getting a tan line, we need to allow all our parts to sunbathe. All those parts we don’t want anyone to see about us. It’s not necessary to tell anyone about these parts. Sometimes years of therapy accomplishes very little.

But it is necessary to open your own awareness to those parts you tend to hide, even from yourself. Expose all your parts to the sun. Share your warts and all with God. Let all your parts be blessed. Because they are blessed, whether they seem negative or not. God blesses all of your being.

 

(These are Isaac’s words from Chapter 38 of  Volume 1 Walking the Bridge: with a Fearless Heart)
(Thanks to MaxPixel for this flower basking in the sun.)

 

Wipe out Doubt, All Is Well

In this season between Purim and Passover, we fight our doubt. Amalek is hounding us, chasing the Israelites through the desert. (Amalek’s name signifies doubt. The Amalekites were the recurring enemy of the Israelites. Moses held up his hands to Heaven in constant prayer to keep the Amalekites at bay.)

In the same way that Amalek pursues us, our doubt pesters us, causing trouble for our divine connection.

The Torah tells us, “Remember to wipe out all remembrance of Amalek. Don’t forget!” This line itself is very strange.

What does it mean?

“Remember to drop this memory; don’t forget.”
It’s a crazy line, in the same way that Amalek was crazy.

Here were these people, the Israelites, who clearly had Divine Protection. They followed their pillar of cloud by day, pillar of fire by night. Everybody could see these pillars from miles around. This was supernatural. Yet Amalek kept attacking them. How crazy is that, to go against God Himself?

Doubt is that crazy. In some ways doubt is the most insidious and limiting aspect of our mind. Doubt destroys trust.

Trust is what we need for Divine Connection.
Without trust we have no faith and no connection.

Imagine your doubt as a pair of lips, somewhere in your head.
It’s just an inner mouth, really, that never seems to shut up. It is constantly jabbering away, saying unhelpful things to you. This is how you constantly second-guess yourself and the situations around you.

No matter how much spiritual experience we may have, we are all at the mercy of our own doubt. It will continue to crop up. Such is the human condition.

Here on the earth, Amalek, or Doubt, is always with us. In fact Amalek comes to you disguised as your own voice. Amalek sounds like you.

That’s how Doubt creeps in, under your radar. You can’t be sure what is truth or what you think is truth, versus what is Amalek, Doubt, disguised as truth. They both may sound the same to you.

The more you doubt, the more life lives down to your expectations, and the more reason you will have to doubt because you point to your situation and say, “See, it’s as bad as I thought.”

Yet each of us, when we came to earth, we were told: “Remember to wipe out doubt – don’t forget.”

So we are fighting Amalek, fighting doubt, in this season. But you can’t fight doubt with more doubt, while you struggle to discern what’s true or false.

The way to move out of doubt is to remember the Primary View that all is well, all of the time. That everything happening here is the Divine Will. No matter what it is.

When you attach to Primary sight, you understand that all is well. Every bit of it.

Everything arising here always begins with the Primary before it moves to the Secondary.

The Secondary View is that life is difficult, so much is broken, so much goes wrong. This is the position of doubt. The belief that things are bad and can’t get much better. Doubt encourages everything to go from bad to worse.

The only way to “fight” doubt is to hold onto the Primary View despite whatever is happening. No matter what problems arise in Secondary View, we maintain, at the same time, our Primary View that all is well.

This is a position of “Emuna,” the trust held by the Israelites. They maintained their trust in Divine protection despite Amalek chasing them.

Trust is faith.

Trust is believing that all is well.

 

This excerpt comes from chapter 13 of Volume 3, Walking The Bridge: The Art of All-Is-Well
(Thanks to wikimedia commons for this portrayal of Moses praying for safety.)