Awakening to Higher Consciousness: the Devil is in the Context

January 21, 2018

When I was 15 I spent a great deal of time reading books at the Public Library and local metaphysical bookstore on Enlightenment and the path of awakening to Higher Consciousness. Like so many others that I’ve met, I easily developed the notion that Enlightenment was necessarily a massive shift in the very stuff of life: thoughts, emotions, and the very background feel of life would one day undergo a transformation so vast that the new state would be almost unrecognizable from the beginning state.

But this isn’t the case. Just as waves need not be altered or removed for the ocean to carry on, so the thoughts, feelings, and other movements of consciousness need not be obliterated or altered in order to experience deeper and more expansive inner vistas. In some ways it's really akin to a gestalt shift, the sudden realization that the duck is also a rabbit.

While there is certainly seemingly new content along the path, for many, encountering these new dimensions of experience is a lot like T.S. Elliot’s line that we “are coming back to the beginning and knowing it for the first time.”

We are like a great, big holographic ocean of awareness, in which the whole Ocean and every other wave, or drop, or particle, is represented in the smallest bit. There is nothing new under the sun, and yet there is the possibility to experience endless novelty from the closest and most essential- our very Essence.

Plumbing that depth is one of those easier said than done activities. While there are as many ways to experience this place as there are people and moments in time, for most I typically recommend a form of effortless meditation to as the backbone practice.

My practice of Ascension, to which much of this website is devoted, is one of those, as is Transcendental Meditation and a few others I've come across. I invested a lot of hours as a crazy teen monk putting myself through various wringers of concentration and discipline, and while there were certain benefits to be had, the biggest growth from those great efforts might have been the sheer exhaustion and readiness to really let go that came in their wake.

In addition, I find that meditation techniques are usually most effective when learned in person from a well-trained, experienced practitioner. Depending on how deeply they’ve explored, those teachers can also be helpful guides along the way. While the process of ultimate Yoga isn’t strictly linear and unfolds for different folks in different ways, there are nevertheless common stages of unfoldment where a savvy guide and an accurate inner topographic map can make the unfoldment more pleasant, effortless, and lucid. On that note, some of the next posts will be a light fleshing out of that topographical map of traveling far by going Nowhere.