Hi,
This is Ruben from Burn in Space.
This meditative talk focuses on the process of awakening and the reality of that process from my own perspective.
If you wish,
You can also use it as a meditation.
Just close your eyes,
Make yourself comfortable and find the natural rhythm of your breath and just listen to my voice.
There will be pauses,
Moments of silence and a meditative pattern in my words.
Let the story sink in to your own conscious.
If you don't want to meditate,
But simply listen,
That is also fine.
I'm grateful that you found me here.
So let's begin.
What is being awake?
According to the Urban Dictionary,
Its definition is,
Spiritually aware of the universe and its direct metaphysical connection to one's own being and the connection it has to all life forces.
According to Deepak Chopra,
Awakening happens when you are no longer living in dream worlds,
Where you filter everything through your ego and focusing on the future and the past.
Instead you have an almost simultaneous awareness of your individual self and the connection between that and everything else.
Take for example the metaphor of a wave in the ocean.
You are both the wave and the ocean.
The ability to maintain both separation and connection seems to indicate a different level of spiritual evolution.
There are many different approaches,
Views and perspectives on what awakening is and how to get there.
From my point of view,
There is just one thing I know for sure about awakening.
Awakening is not about seeing things that weren't always here in the first place.
The process of awakening to me is work.
It's definitely not a holiday or a fun ride.
And personally,
I didn't ask for it.
It happened to me.
I got to these points in my life where I simply could not ignore the signs of a bigger picture.
It felt like my inner cell phone needed recharging,
Needed new juice,
Tapped into a different network,
Fueled by clean energy.
There was a certain point in my life where I decided that I wanted to put connection over competition.
I was in need of a different set of beliefs,
Values and actions.
So I was surprised that my life offered me a chance to invest in those new settings.
Through losing my job,
Separating from my long-time partner and suddenly meeting people that gave me a different kind of energy in the last six months.
On the other hand,
I was scared.
Scared to put myself out there,
To leave my comfort zone and become something I might not control.
I had fear of having faith in myself.
I had trust issues with the universe.
And even though I'm talking in the past tense,
I'm still in the middle of all this.
And to give you an impression of where I am on the scale of awakening,
I guess I'm somewhere around,
Wanting to go back to sleep but not believing in the quality of the bed anymore.
I hope you know what I mean.
Creating these meditations is not a way for me to confront my doubts,
My fears,
My false beliefs and to travel with my fear instead of taking opposite directions just to meet each other at the end.
The difficulty with defining what awakening is like is in the uniqueness of the process.
Awakening is like your DNA or your fingerprint.
It is one of a kind.
It cannot be duplicated.
Whatever it is for you might not be the same for me.
But that doesn't mean it cannot be seen or felt.
And it doesn't mean it can't hurt either.
In the movie The Shawshank Redemption from 1994,
Which is about friendship and imprisonment,
There is a scene where a prisoner who spends his whole life in incarceration is finally released.
This man has been in the same environment for decades.
The prison was his world.
He knew the rules.
He knew the people.
He had friendships and deep connections there.
He trusted the space between these walls guarded by barbed wire.
When he is set free,
He is lost.
He runs a place,
Tries to find a job,
Only to feel incredibly lonely,
Unseen and misunderstood.
He wishes he could go back.
One day,
He walks out of his house,
He buys a newspaper,
Goes back to his room and takes his own life.
He isn't able to deal with a freedom he never had before.
Awakening is all about freedom.
It's about finding the freedom of being who you really are.
Freedom comes with a price.
That price is to take responsibility for your own thoughts,
Feelings and actions.
Freedom is found in limitations and setting boundaries.
For most of us,
Those limitations are set by our collective conditioning.
We follow the rules that are given to us,
Which is a lot easier than thinking outside of those rules.
While deep inside,
We know we are being lived,
We know we are being lived by the system.
We accept the comfort it provides us.
We accept the script and we read the lines that others write for us.
In our fantastic book,
The Spiritual Awakening Guide,
A book which I think is very special because it describes a detailed personal awakening process from within,
Rather than being a book about how or why to awaken.
Mary Muller Schutteam describes twelve layers of awakening.
These are,
In descending order,
The self,
Past lives,
Family systems,
Ancestors,
The ancestry systems,
Collective conditioning,
Karmic patterns,
Cosmic patterns,
The death and rebirth of the eagle,
Thought structures,
Archetypical structures,
Mythological systems,
And the first and deepest layer,
The destroyer.
The destroyer is the part of us that will use all of its power to prevent us from growth.
It is our deepest,
Darkest element,
The mothership of shadows.
It overrules all our egos and all of the layers to the light.
The destroyer is able to create depression,
Addiction,
Suicidal tendencies,
Abuse,
Or worse.
Eventually,
All at once,
As we loved and seen in its true form,
To be accepted with all its darkness and growling aggression.
The acceptance of the destroyer is never completely finished,
And therefore a spiritual awakening,
An ongoing process.
Each layer has its own rules and history,
Its own blockages and types of bliss.
Once you go through the twelve layers here at the core of your being,
You could call it enlightenment or wholeness.
Go down the rabbit hole,
All the way down,
Into the deepest depths of your soul.
You could think of it as descending into the core of the earth.
This journey will change you forever,
And once you're down,
You will find that you will have to go up again.
This is serious inner fitness,
A spiritual boot camp.
The layers are all moving together on the part,
Sometimes releasing pain and gaining new pain along the way.
To me,
This means that awakening is not a finished job,
Ever.
It is hard to be awake and find yourself released from suffering,
While the majority of people around you is not.
It's like going to McDonald's,
Hoping to find a live chicken in good health.
It's just too good to be true.
The fact is,
Once you've reached certain levels of consciousness,
I think there is no way back to unreaching them.
You have to face your own fears,
The fears of others,
And the collective fear on which this world is built in different stages.
And that is what I call no joy ride.
The bliss of universal connection brings up questions about disconnection from those who do not know,
Practice,
Or care for that connection.
As Nelson Mandela said,
We tend to think we fear our darkness,
But we really fear the incredible force of standing in our own light.
I hope that by sharing my experiences on this platform,
I inspire you to go deeper inside yourself,
Find your own mind,
Find your own light.
Overcome your struggles and create your own bliss.
If you are dealing with depression or suicidal thoughts,
Please reach out for professional help.
Don't assume you're lost,
Because you are absolutely not.
There is help available and you can get it.
Thank you for being part of my mental,
Emotional and spiritual journey.
If you leave a review,
I always respond to everyone personally.
Much love.
Namaste.
Namaste.
