Spiritual unconsciousness is not what you think it is

What is unconsciousness, in the spiritual context? It’s not like when you get put under for surgery. Today a client said, “Something happened on our call yesterday.” I asked, “What?” They replied, “Maybe you didn’t notice. I started to get more anxious as we were talking. Started crying. Started to let thoughts take over, which I realized is my issue.”

Oh, I noticed. But what I noticed was not important. It’s what they notice that matters. This was a major breakthrough. Thoughts are just thoughts; not the reality of what is actually now. The client “woke-up” out of the thoughts, and recognized what was actually, truly happening. It was a priceless moment.

What generally happens at first is they just go off into the thoughts, without coming out of it, without seeing it as unreal, and without recognizing what just happened. And then they want to discuss the content of thought. But it’s quite like waking up out of a sleep dream, say of being chased by a tiger. When you wake up, are you interested in the tiger still? Do you need to run? Or do you recognize that it wasn’t real to begin with? It was just a dream.

The first time you have such a recognition, you may see that the content of the thought is not actually what is now, but you may not be clear on what or how this happened. The client didn’t “let” thoughts take over. What is that “letting”? That is not what we do. We actually engage thoughts, with our interest and attention, to the exclusion of reality, and we miss that we do that.

We become literally blind, deaf, and ignorant to everything else actually going on. We can miss what people say, we can miss some event, action, or critical piece of information that would completely negate what we are believing in the head.

I continued, “You stopped hearing me and started paying attention to the thoughts instead. You can’t both be staying with reality and being in the movie in the mind at the same time.”

This is actually what this work points to, the use and misuse of the five powers you were born with, in hopes that people will have these wake-up moments and recognize what’s actually going on, rather than just staying in the head with thoughts.

“Ahhh!!!!” they said. “I need that reinforced.”

“You will have more wake-up moments now,” I replied.

Once you start to discern the difference between thought and reality, and see what and how this happens, there is no turning back. You will have fewer and fewer “waking sleep-walks,” and more and more moments of being present to reality.

While we call this problem “spiritual,” it has more to do with not knowing how the body-mind functions rather than something intangible called “spiritual.” And it is mass unconsciousness. This is happening to people in all religions, all cultures, all societies, all ages, and of all genders.

Almost everybody is living like the story in the mind is what is in reality, and everyone is affirming and supporting everyone else’s story in the mind.

This unconsciousness is generally only being recognized and explored by people who have identified themselves as spiritual seekers, no matter what their religious background, and even without a religious background. (In other circles, its just called suffering, and may become mental illness.)

So spirituality has nothing to do with the ideas you have about yourself or others. Ideas or thoughts perpetuate more thoughts, more content. More dreaming. In this work, we are not interested in the content of thoughts. It’s about the fact of a thought, as a thought, separate and different from what is. Our imaginary thoughts and attachments to them (via believing they are real or important) are what cause our mental pain and suffering. Reality is much kinder.

You can discover and begin to master the five powers you were born with and discern the difference at the 2016 Ego Boot Camp.

This recognition and discernment of thought from reality is powerful, and once you know the truth about what is going on, you can’t ever not know it again.

And still, there is one step further… What ultimately causes this confusion about the difference between thoughts and reality, and the suffering that ensures because of it? It is not realizing the difference between you, and a thought. It is not knowing the truth of yourself, and identification with thought happens. When you mistake yourself for the character in the movie in the mind, that character is subject to the horror movie that can unconsciously play. Good thing it’s not who you actually are.

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Photo: by China’s Tiger at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.5

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