Being Spiritually Awake Has Nothing To Do With Being "Good"

This recording is an excerpt from an interview I had with Kerri Hummingbird on her Soul Nectar Show (recorded September 2020, aired January 2021). I talk about spiritual awakening as having nothing to do with following conceptual rules, including rules of good and bad, but rather as being about awakening to the peace-filled formless awareness that we are beyond the mind.

Transcript

So these patterns,

Whether you believe in a pre-life or an afterlife or not,

It doesn't matter.

These patterns are basically what people refer to as karma.

It's our conditioning that gets played out.

And the beautiful thing about that is when you recognize that either good and bad only exist in the mind.

Also,

Then the notions of good and bad karma only exist in the mind.

They're irrelevant and a complete distraction to think about whether you're experiencing good or bad karma.

Just understand that the way you're experiencing life is a reflection of the patterns of functioning,

Mental,

Emotional,

Behavioral,

That you have mistakenly identified with.

When you begin to question those patterns,

The karma dissolves,

As it were.

Your experience of life ceases to need to be reflected back to you to show you these patterns.

And so what shape then does your life take if it's no longer driven by karma?

Well,

It takes the shape that the essence of life wants it to take.

The expression that we are as an individual expression of the universal consciousness.

We become the expression of life.

We become an expression of the creativity and intuition that is the universal intelligence expressing through us as an individual.

That expression no longer blocked or distorted or interfered with by the mistaken identification that we've had with form,

With conceptual form,

Physical form,

Emotional form.

In other words,

It's no longer blocked or interfered with or distorted by our karma.

So you're not really trying to be anything or do anything.

You're just going along with whatever's arising.

Yeah,

Well,

I like the way that you expressed that,

Particularly at the end there.

You know,

You're not trying to be anything in particular.

And many people who aspire to the realization or the expression or the awakening to the spiritual dimension of themselves and life.

Many of them get really caught up in mental conceptions of what being spiritual should look like.

And again,

It's just another trap laid by the conceptual mind,

By the conceptual identity.

I'm a spiritual person and that looks like this.

I do these sorts of things.

I say these sorts of things.

I do these sorts of practices.

I eat certain things and I don't eat certain other things.

And there are myriad rules that the mind applies if we allow our aspiration to live a spiritual life to be a conceptualized thing.

And I have to say that 90 or 95 percent of people who are very actively identifying as wanting to live and trying to live a spiritual life are caught up in what the mind is telling them a spiritual life should be.

Which is not even to go into the territory of what religious people say.

You know,

A different kind of,

Inverted commas,

Different kind of spirituality,

Religious spirituality,

But they're so caught up in what the mind is telling them that means.

And the irony is that what it means is absolutely nothing whatever to do with what the mind can conceive.

The more strongly we believe in anything,

The more removed we are from being that flow expression that you use to use that term and I've heard it used a guy with an unpronounceable name wrote a beautiful book about flow.

Chichinchalaya lemia,

You know the one,

Maybe.

But spirituality can't be defined.

It's not about following rules.

I'm glad this came up.

I want to get it out because spirituality is not about following conceptual rules,

Not following rules about even,

It's not even following rules about good and bad that come from the mind.

Let's come back to this question of good and bad.

I'm glad we came back here because I didn't fully deal with it.

Well,

Fully inverted commas,

I'll never fully deal with it.

But look,

Being spiritual is absolutely nothing whatever to do with being good and bad.

Good and bad are games played by the conceptual mind,

By the conditioned mind.

That's where we kind of took myself off the track of the coming back to that answer your question.

Ultimately,

I went off to talk about conditioning forgot to say that one of the core elements of conditioning is around what things are good and what things are bad.

And whether I'm good if I do certain things and say certain things or whether I'm bad if I say those things all those sorts of things.

Now,

They're judgments of the conditioned mind.

They're nothing whatever to do with truth or reality.

And yet,

Everyone still has some sort of sense,

You know,

That there's something,

It would be good to wake up for example so I'm still applying this word good you know as it would be good for me to realize my spiritual nature and allow it to flow.

Freely in the world,

That would be good.

So there's again this this sense of,

Well there's good and bad it's bad to be,

As it were shut down and locked into a karmic prison,

And it would be good to be free of that.

So,

How does that work then if good and bad are only.

Well,

This,

As it were,

Two levels.

If we're playing the game of good and bad as is almost universally in this world played,

It's out of the conceptual mind.

And things can be endlessly debated,

And that's why politics and various other fields of human endeavor are endless debates.

They're unresolvable debates,

Because nothing in the conceptual world can ever be resolved.

The history of philosophy,

East and West,

Modern and ancient,

Is replete with this recognition that no conceptual idea can ever be proven to be true for certain.

But they can all be refuted.

That's the game of the conceptual mind,

And of the conditioned mind.

But there is a sense of things being more real,

Of being more true,

That we begin to feel more clearly as we clear away the mist of the conditioned mind as we as we begin to question the dominance of the thoughts that pop up in our mind that have we have tended to allow to run our lives.

We see more and more that they're a can't ever be shown to be true and be they're not me anyway they're just thoughts that arise and so forth,

Largely out of my conditioning,

Or the cultural conditioning or both.

As we become less and less identified with the mind,

And more and more feeling this background sense of calm and presence,

What we find is that we still then have a sense that this is the way it feels right for me to go in,

We could say it would be right for me to do this,

But I don't feel it's right for me to do it,

Or even if you wanted to say it would be wrong for me or be bad for me to do that now I feel it would be good for me to do this.

It's a different as it were level of consciousness that saying,

This feels right,

This feels not right for me.

This feels good.

This feels bad.

It's not the conceptual minds game going on here.

It's what feels more real for me.

Well you're saying feel instead of think.

Yes,

Yes,

It is that.

And the other aspect of this different kind of sense of good and bad is that in the conceptual mind,

Good and bad are very much wrapped around attachment around buying into needing things to happen a certain way,

Feeling bad if they don't happen that way,

Feeling great if they do happen that way elated for a certain short period of time.

You know,

Some wonderful success,

This good thing that I wanted to achieve I did it way and aren't I great for doing that,

Or I feel so good about myself for doing that all these conceptual,

This is all good conceptual mind play stuff.

The ego or the conceptual sense of self says this is all great or I would hate it if that happened or I would hate it.

I hate it when that person speaks to me that way and blah blah.

This is all very much attachment stuff that drives of course our emotional reactions and often our behaviors and the kind of circus of reactivity that characterizes still the world of humanity most of the time,

But this other level of good and bad.

You know,

I still hesitate even to say the words because the mind for many people will grab hold of them and say,

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah,

Continue the debate.

Now they're beyond debate,

Because they're a different level of beingness and different level of expression of the essence of who I am,

And what's going on in the world or recognition that the world ultimately,

Even with all the human circus that's going on,

It's still ultimately orchestrated by an infinite intelligence compared with the puny little intelligences that we think we each have as individuals,

You know,

Or as a culture.

So good and bad comes to be an expression of something that the mind doesn't even play a part in hardly except in its most mechanical ways,

You know,

Yes,

I'll work out how to do this particular practical thing.

Yes,

That's fine.

Mind still has a practical role to play as a tool,

But the good and bad really are quite different things that aren't driven by attachment.

They're driven by the intelligence of life wanting to express in a particular way through this particular individuality.