Truth Realization: Assorted Works 2 Connection, Thinking That Is the Answer to the Mystery of Life

Dedication

For Michelle

It is true that love is everywhere but it seems to shine in you just that little bit brighter.

i Edward Traversa Copyright

Table of Contents

Dedication...... i Copyright...... ii Preface ...... i A Helping Hand ...... 1 All at Sea ...... 2 Just is...... 5 Seeing is not Believing ...... 6 Probably Not ...... 13 Why You are Here ...... 14 Out of Step...... 15 One Little Dot...... 16 Commitment...... 20 The Who am I Koan...... 21 Teaching...... 23 Shadows ...... 24 Dreaming and Truth ...... 25 State Truth ...... 27 Find a Thought...... 28 Creativity ...... 29 Changing a Name...... 33 Realization ...... 34 Are you a Physical Body?...... 35 Intuition...... 38 Frozen Light ...... 39 When we Love...... 40

a Edward Traversa Depersonalization Disorder and Awakening ...... 41 Direction ...... 43 Purity of Intent...... 44 The Negative Process...... 45 That’s the basic process of preparing to awaken.A Good Day to Die...... 45 A Good Day to Die...... 46 Life after Death ...... 51 The Value of Synchronicity...... 52 Keeping Your Eye on the Ball...... 53 Bloody Zen Tales...... 54 Thought Control? ...... 56 Paradigms...... 57 Why was Maya Created ...... 58 Maya and the Absolute...... 62 Some Questions ...... 63 Abiding in Non Dual Awareness...... 66 Unity Consciousness...... 67 Be Still...... 71 Mysteries...... 72 Not Impressed! ...... 73 Beauty...... 75 Integration Summary...... 76 The Meaning of Life ...... 80 The Infinite God...... 81 Fools ...... 82 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly...... 83 Judgement ...... 85 The Script of Time ...... 86 Struggle and Strength...... 91

b Favourites ...... 92 Draw a Thought...... 93 What is it Like ...... 95 What If? ...... 97 Consciousness ...... 98 Picturing the Void...... 100 Teaching the Awakened ...... 101 Crying...... 103 The Death Rattle of the Walking Dead...... 104 Currents of Life ...... 106 What is Truth?...... 107 Power and Authority ...... 114 Accidents do Happen...... 115 Where are you Headed? ...... 116 Exercise 1: Start from where you are ...... 116 Exercise 2: An Empty Chair Can Be So Revealing...... 117 Thoughts ...... 123 Finding Truth ...... 124 Yes Miracles do Happen...... 127 Being in My Presence ...... 128 Life and Living...... 131 Spiralling Inward...... 132 Where Do I Start?...... 135 The Secret...... 136 Startled Response...... 139 Shadow Aspects of You ...... 140 A Silence Koan ...... 147 Sheep ...... 148 No One Home ...... 149

c Edward Traversa Insight Meditation and Releasing...... 150 Elaborating on Distance ...... 158 Silence and Stillness ...... 162 Silence and Stillness ...... 162 Facets of Purity of Intent ...... 163 Purpose ...... 171 The Tricks we Play ...... 172 To Know or not to Know...... 173 Deepak’s Illusions ...... 174 Deflated Self ...... 175 Perception...... 176 Negating Patterns...... 177 Rumi and Reality...... 179 The Divided Self ...... 180 Attachment and Service ...... 183

d Preface

This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. The book only came about after a series of requests from readers who wished to have some bedside reading to keep them company. It is a collection of various pieces of writings I have accumulated over the past few years via my truthrealization.com web site. Some pieces were derived from articles, others from reader’s comments or questions and a small percentage are derived from responses to emails. Nearly everything contained within these pages is or has been in the public domain. In this sense then, it is more a book for convenience sake than providing anything new.

Like the Web site there is no particular order as to how the material is presented. It just falls where it falls. Some of the material has been edited in places for clarity and comprehensions sake. By and large however the material is as it was originally written. I did not include every article I have ever written, mainly to avoid being overly repetitive. I do think what is presented here is a fair representation of the major concepts and ideas I have presented over the years.

There is no expectation that a reader will magically get enlightened by reading this book. It is just a book, no more or no less important than any other book. It may be wise to carry the same attitude into reading the material presented here. Perhaps it will serve as a stepping stone to help understand what spiritual enlightenment is and what it is not and additionally provide some material that may help you learn about yourself as you work your way through the mire that is the pathless path.

I would encourage you to take the attitude of being both the experiment and the experimenter as you read through this book. Try things on for size, see if things work or do not work for you. Some things will work well for some people, but not for others, so it is up to you to test the waters and begin to wade through the layers of illusion that you have taken yourself to be. In the end the best teacher is the person reading this. Bear that in mind as you read through the material. That is my best advice.

At the moment I am taking a break due to health reasons among others from active teaching. I may be contacted at the following email address [email protected] should you have enquiries or questions. It would be fair to warn you that sometimes it takes me a considerable period of time to

i Edward Traversa respond. Sometimes I am not able to respond at all, but you are free to try and see which way the wind blows.

ii A Helping Hand

I would like to offer you a helping hand. It is attached to your arm.

~ Zen saying~

1 Edward Traversa All at Sea

There is a common metaphor used when describing the reality of life that utilizes a wave and an ocean. Perhaps you have heard of it before? No matter if you have, it will not hurt to hear it again.

Imagine the only thing in existence is a body of water that is known as an ocean; one vast ocean and nothing else. This ocean has always existed and always will. It is a timeless ocean. We can ponder what it may be like to be a conscious wave. From the perspective of a wave not knowing its true nature, it may look towards other waves and start the same process of separation that human beings participate in.

Within this ocean there are waves that have an unshakable belief that there true nature is that of a wave. As such they are unaware of the underlying reality of the ocean and continue on identifying themselves as waves. When a wave is compared to another wave it can be described in many ways. It can be depicted in terms of how high or low the wave is or how big or small it is. It can be described in terms of powerful or less powerful or similar or dissimilar. If there is a perception of a wave that is gently ebbing in and out it can be described as peaceful or beautiful. If the wave takes the form of a tsunami it seems to be about horror and destruction. Sometimes there seems to be a beginning to the wave and sometimes there appears to be an ending as it laps up against the shore; a pseudo appearance of birth and death and of coming and going.

An idea may form in the consciousnesses of the wave. This idea may be that “I am not as big as the other waves” or “I am not as peaceful as the other waves” or “I am not as beautiful as the other waves.” A wave may perceive a beginning of its life as a wave and an ending of its life as a wave. The wave begins to suffer from the plague of ideas or more aptly from the plague of attachment to those ideas. It lives its life in fear. Fearing that it is disconnected and separate it may try to merge with other waves. Fearing its inevitable extinction it does not know how to embrace life and seeks only to extend the moments that seem peaceful or happy and minimize the moments that are not peaceful or happy.

Never realizing its true nature it seeks more moments of happiness or peace or

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 2 connection, thinking that is the answer to the mystery of life. But the wave does not know life, it knows only fear where each of its movements are a movement away from fear and invariably back to fear. No matter what it tries, fear always manifest in experience under many different guises, punctuated by moments of relative calm. The wave unconsciously fears what lies at the heart of the wave; no- wave which to the wave, is symbolically represented as the physical death of the wave. It sees this as an extinction of itself and does not comprehend that it is only a continuum of its real self.

If the wave was to touch her true nature it would realize it is the ocean and the fear or neurosis created by ideas would dissipate. There would be nowhere that she can look where she would not be. She would be in the beautiful wave, and in the not so beautiful wave, the peaceful and not so peaceful wave; all waves would be her for without her no wave could exist. But it is more than that, for that too is a comparison of sorts.

Having nothing to compare itself with the ocean is free from the illusion of birth and death, of coming and going and of beauty and ugliness and the illness of "we- ness". From the perspective of water all descriptions are invalid for it is all water, no matter what form the water appears to take on. It is literally the all in all.

Finally the wave realizes its truth. Waves are really water that comprise an ocean and take on the appearance of waves. It realizes that no-wave does not mean the end of life, rather it realizes that no-wave is true life; the genesis of all manifestations on which everything arises.

People perceive all manner of life in much the same way a wave would view its existence. We like to describe, categorize and label. There is a concern with birth and death, comings and goings, the beautiful and the ugly, the right and the wrong. We divide and separate and in doing so do not see the true nature of the wave; do not see the true nature of us...

Our true nature is the nature of no birth and no death. We do not have to go anywhere to touch our true nature. We do not have to look for bliss or nirvana because we are that. We are what we seek and all that needs to occur for enlightenment is to see the obviousness of the ocean that doesn’t contain a “we” separate to itself. It is to look at the wave and see that it is made of the ocean and

3 Edward Traversa then further inward to see that it is water, where water is the stillness that allows the arising of the entire playground of all possibilities.

Problems originate because we think we are like a wave and do not see the totality of the ocean or the water. We believe ourselves to be an individual that exists separately and independently of others. The manifestations of waves are but short and impermanent appearances of an aspect of the whole, but never the whole in themselves. Yet each impermanent appearance contains the whole within itself, since it is all water. That is why spiritual enlightenment is possible.

If we believe ourselves confined to be a wave that is what we take ourselves to be. If we believe ourselves to be confined to a wave dancing in an ocean among other confined and constricted waves that too is what we will take ourselves to be. It is our point of comparison to other waves and we start to notice that some waves dance better than others and others do not dance as well.

But when there is only an ocean in existence that is altogether different. We are that totality and in a boundless totality the centre of us is nowhere. As soon as it is seen that there is but the ocean; when we directly see that everything arises from that, then there is no need to take ourselves to be anything. There is just the ocean, the ultimate source, no matter how it is viewed. No points of comparisons can be made from this perspective. There can be no better than or worse off than. All that is viewed is an unimaginable dance of harmony and we see that we are in fact the dancer that creates the harmony that the wave cannot see or even dare to imagine.

Take the time to look deeply into your true nature. Look deeply and see that we are like water and that truly we are all at sea...

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 4 Just is

I find that I am not who I thought I was. What used to be called me is an imaginary construct much like a shadow believing itself to be real and important. A collection of thoughts, emotions, ideas, patterns, and instincts coalescing to construct the illusion of an individual self. In the beginning and the end not that That was a dream and there is but the dreamer.

Nothing matters despite appearances. No destination to arrive at, no striving, no progress, no free will. Nothing to do and no one doing it. All is being done and not done by the dreamer. A meaningless delicious dream game is this thing we call life. A game of the absolute remembering itself and not remembering itself.

Upon remembrance and non-remembrance a haunting beauty resonates through the core of everything that is, and is not. An unending freefall of deep comfort in not knowing, not being, not doing. No self. Overwhelming gratitude.

Just is

Now I find that who I thought I was is dreaming it is awake, where once it was dreaming it was asleep. A collection of thoughts, emotions, ideas, and patterns moving unerringly through consciousness without possession. Capable of love, capable of hate, capable of anything. It matters not; it is but a dream which appears to move but abides in stillness.

Appreciation for movement. Appreciation for stillness. Neither this nor that.

Just is

5 Edward Traversa Seeing is not Believing

Many of the great masters begin the sojourn into enlightenment with the perennial question of Who am I? In the eastern spiritual traditions this question represents a step into breaking free of the illusionary nature of identity. It is often referred to as the destruction of ego or achieving of no-self. The asking of ‘Who am I’ is meant to eventually lead to an identity that is securely grounded in reality as opposed to illusion. Though that is a bit misleading in that it denotes “another identity” where as it is more like a free flowing state of affairs that has no identity. Perhaps the best way to think about it is that concepts such as no-self denotes the self you think of as you is not really you.

To understand how this may work in practice let us consider a simple example. If I am walking along the road and happen to kick a rock, then I will experience pain in the form of my foot hurting. This belief seems logical enough and most would readily concur that indeed is what would happen.

An enlightened person (caveat: there really isn’t such a thing as an enlightened person) however would point to the illusionary nature of that seemingly painful experience. They might be prone to saying something like there is no rock there and no one there to kick the rock. From the perspective of enlightenment, this is as equally valid as you experiencing pain when the rock is kicked. So who is right? The answer is it depends on which perspective you are coming from.

We tend to think of ourselves as having physical mass; that we are solid objects in the form of a body, which in turn thinks, feels and has physical sensations. Yet, if we had the ability to infinitely zoom in on the body, eventually we would stumble across something mysterious and altogether counter-intuitive. We would see that what we normally consider physical mass is in fact great empty spaces.

To understand this more fully we need to comprehend that in the sub atomic world, there are vast distances between particles. If we were to lump all the particles together, our entire ‘solidness’ would fit into a pinhead. But that in itself is not the complete story. That pinhead of mass that is there is constantly disappearing and appearing in our universe. Quite literally there are moments

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 6 that all that is solid have disappeared from existence. No mass, no energy, nothing there at all.

As strange as that may seem to us, especially if we have a foot ache from that rock we just kicked, it is true nonetheless. Many experiments in quantum physics have verified these phenomena. Similarly they have confirmed another strange occurrence. Not only do the particles blink in out of existence, they also move around the universe freely so that the sub atomic material that is there within you is constantly being swapped over for other sub atomic material. In one year’s time, 99% of the sub atomic material within you will be interchanged. In four years time 100% of that material will be swapped completely. In other words the physical basis for your body will be replaced in its entirety.

In many of the eastern spiritual traditions there is a concept called emptiness. While the concept can vary somewhat between traditions, the essential point of the idea is that no object radiates its identity from its own side. To understand this more fully consider the following;

Imagine I am holding a blue pen and I ask you what it is that I am holding. Your most likely response would be a blue pen. I could go to a few people and in all probability would receive the same response.

However, let us assume that I am deep in the jungle somewhere and I stumble across a lost civilization that has never seen a blue pen. I hold this blue pen to the tribesmen and enquire, what is it that I am holding? A likely response may be “I don’t know.” Or perhaps some members of the tribe may conceive of it as some form of mini-spear or perhaps something else altogether.

From a spiritual perspective the object is considered empty because there is nothing about the object that radiates to all living beings that it is a pen. In order to understand what this object is in our minds we fill in the emptiness with preconceived perceptions and label it. To a tribesman it may well be the label of mini-spear. To someone else it may well be the label of blue pen.

The problem with most of us is that we take the label to represent reality and we get stuck in believing that our way is the ‘right’ way. You could argue vehemently to a tribesman that the object is a blue pen and write something down

7 Edward Traversa on paper to prove the point. The tribesman in turn, could take this object and spear your eye with it to prove his point. Both will have equally valid interpretations of the object from their own perspective.

The same thing occurs with humans in the form of an object. To some people the Dali Lama would be seen as a holy being. Yet to others there is nothing holy about the Dali Lama. Ask the Chinese government to confirm this. We can take Jesus Christ as another example. Did he radiate his holiness to all things? Apparently the people that crucified him did not seem to think so. Similarly we can apply it the other way around. Did or does Adolf Hitler radiate evil to everything? Neo-Nazis would say no.

The eastern traditions in their wisdom pointed to the illusionary nature of objects by positing that all objects are essentially empty, and it is only through our perceptions and internal mental processes that we construct a reality from the illusion. Science is also pointing in the same direction by clearing stating that the reality we are accustomed too is not as it seems.

Despite what the spiritual traditions and science teach us about the primary nature of reality, we have a continuity of experience. No matter how well it is argued that we are not a physical form, we cannot go past this continuity of experience. Even in cases of amnesia, there is still a sense of self that is continuous. True we may think of ourselves in differing ways throughout the lifespan, but we do not doubt our existence. Which then raises the question if there is no physical basis for existence then what really exists that gives us this continuity of experience?

Some would propose that this continuity of experience arises not because of physical existence, but because of a consciousness that transcends the mind. One method to examine this proposition is to look at times awareness exists when there should be no physiological basis for its existence.

One of the best examples of this comes from the study of the phenomenon known as blind sight. Here, damage to areas of the primary visual cortex removes all sensation of light and colour from corresponding areas of the visual field. Patients with this damage appear totally blind in one part of the visual field. If asked whether they can see an object in this area, the answer, obviously enough, is no.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 8 But, astonishingly, if the patients are forced to guess where this object is located they often point at it accurately. They will even automatically and unconsciously form their hand to the shape of an object in front of them, which they are asked to try to pick up even if they can’t see the object. In addition, Larry Weiskrantz from the University of Oxford has described how a few can have a mysterious feeling of awareness. They become aware of the object in consciousness, even though there is no sensory stimulus.

Another interesting field is lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming means to have awareness of the fact that you are dreaming while dreaming. Ordinarily we would think of the dream state as a non conscious state, yet increasingly people are developing the ability to stay aware, even when dreaming. It even goes a little beyond that in certain circumstances. There are some anecdotal reports of people who maintain awareness 24 hours per day, every day. They function normally, but remain aware even during all sleep phases.

Then we have the occasional occurrence of awareness during anaesthesia. Many patients have reported to the surgeons what the surgeons and operating staff were doing, even though the patient at the time was unconsciousness. They are able to describe in precise detail some of the surgical procedures and instruments used in the procedure. In addition, they are able to report conversations between surgical that occurred during the operation, even though they were unconscious due to anaesthesia. This phenomenon has become so common place that some hospitals have instructed staff to be careful about what they say during surgical procedures involving anaesthesia. Operations are frequently accompanied by relaxing music in order to help the ‘unconscious’ patient relax.

Perhaps some of the more remarkable and intriguing accounts come from the field of Near Death Experiences (NDE). In this phenomenon, patients are near death or at times even pronounced clinically dead. Even though there is no electrical activity in the brain, patients who have been resuscitated sometimes report strange experiences. As in the case of anaesthesia, they are frequently able to report conversations that took place between hospital staff and are able to describe medical procedures. But NDE’s also report an afterlife. Commonly they report a tunnel, a void, a light, meeting with dead relatives, meeting with historical figures, seeing God or Buddha and many other strange occurrences. I would like to draw attention to one example from the NDE literature.

9 Edward Traversa A patient who was totally blind at birth was involved in car accident, had cardiac arrest and no brain activity. Luckily he was resuscitated after much effort, but something strange had occurred to him in this unconscious state. He was able to accurately describe the doctors and nurses physical features, the appearance of the room. He reported seeing in colour and was able to associate objects with their correct colour, even though through his entire life he had been physiologically incapable of seeing. Yet during the NDE not only did he have awareness but was also able to see in vivid colour for the first time in his life. In case you are wondering the man never regained his sight when resuscitated.

As can be seen from these examples, we are often aware even in circumstances that there should be no physiological basis for awareness. No matter how scientists slice the brain, no matter how far they probe into orifices and cavities or how accurately they are able to measure the brain with the latest equipment, they are unable to find consciousness residing in the body.

At a quantum level however there is the notion of an observer. To understand this, we need to accept that at a primordial level the universe is probabilistic. Quantum physics is a theory that calculates probabilities with remarkable precision. It clearly states that what is in existence at this primary level are waves of probabilities. When these waves of probabilities are observed then they collapse into a particle.

Let us use an old Zen Koan to demonstrate. If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? In quantum physics the answer would be there would be a probability of a sound in the form of a sound wave, but unless someone hears the sound wave, “sound” would never come into existence. In other words there is potential for existence but unless observed there is no existence as we would normally think of sound.

Numerous studies in quantum physics verify the role of the observer. But scientists are unsure exactly who or what the observer is. Remember that consciousness does not appear to reside in the brain and therefore is not strictly a human function in a conventional sense. Therefore the question becomes who is really doing the observing at a fundamental level of reality. And that is when science begins to fall apart, because it assumes that the observed and the observer

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 10 are separate entities, as opposed to being one thing.

You should probably be examining your need to have an answer one way or another as to who is observing at this point in time.

Science is a great way to break up notions of who we are, in most cases far more useful than meditating on a candle. To this end let us go back and cover the aching foot that has hit the rock. Let us briefly look at the malleability of pain for a moment.

Consider this; if you have a terrible headache, and the phone suddenly rings, frequently your attention is not focused on pain, but rather on the phone ringing and wondering who is ringing you. The pain mysteriously vanishes momentarily.

In war zones it is not unheard of to hear of a soldier being shot, but not having any feeling of pain. Typically this phenomenon occurs while his attention is focused exclusively on saving his friends life. The moment his friend’s life is saved then the attention turns back to pain.

In certain remote parts of India, it is not uncommon for a pregnant woman to give birth while working in the rice fields and then immediately after birth return to work. For these women there is no pain associated with childbirth, because someone forgot to ‘educate’ these women into believing that childbirth is a painful experience.

Peter Jackson in a series of experiments, demonstrate that if women were hypnotically ‘uneducated’ from the association of pain and childbirth, and then hypnotically ‘educated’ to experience child birth as a pleasant experience, then they would experience a pleasant sensation. There are similar studies that demonstrate that pain is a malleable experience and in large is dependent upon what you believe pain to be.

It would seem that the pain caused by the kicking of the rock, is largely due to the fact that is what we believe will occur. But we still have a foot striking a rock do we not or do we? Something else that is very interesting that occurs at a sub atomic level that is counter intuitive and confounds the senses. The foot and the

11 Edward Traversa rock never really touch.

Your foot in part is composed of electrons, and so is the rock. As the foot apparently goes to strike the rock, the electrons create a charge that repels the foot away from the rock, before it touches the rock. In reality nothing can be touched, we can only have the perception of touch as formulated in a brain that at one level pops in and out of existence and changes completely every four years.

While these facts may seem astounding; as if they were derived from the strangest of science fiction novels, they have been well established by the scientific community.

We as human beings determine the physical world to be real, yet we as human beings do not seem to be what we appear to be. Is it any wonder then that enlightenment has remained so mysterious and elusive for so many, if the very basis of what perceive as reality is illusionary by nature?

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 12 Probably Not

If a person is talking in dualistic terms, for example there is a person there that needs saving and doesn’t qualify the dualistic statement by stating that there really isn’t two people there then they are probably not awake.

If a person sees the world as imperfect as is, then they are probably not awake. Perceived imperfections are just as much part of the absolute as anything else.

If they preach compassion, love or saving the world as a means to awaken then they are probably not awake.

If they do not understand that they as form as merely a projection, a shadow, a shell, a robot of sorts then they are probably not awake.

If they talk about the moment of enlightenment as adding something to self, e.g. knowledge, love and so on then they are probably not awake.

If they are talking about ecstatic experiences of radiating love to everyone and everything, then they are probably not awake.

If they have become identified with some property, e.g. Love, compassion, being more in the now, then they probably aren’t awake.

If they identify and espouse the human form as being the awake thing, then they probably aren’t awake.

If they are attempting to add something to you, e.g. become a better person, become more loving or compassionate, then they probably aren’t awake.

If they point to themselves as being the answer and fail to point to you as being the only true answer then they are probably not awake.

If they do not understand that no matter what is said, it is all a fundamental lie / illusion then they are probably not awake.

If they are demonstrating magical abilities, have you invested in initiation rituals, or have secret practices that are available only to a select few, then they are probably not awakened.

13 Edward Traversa Why You are Here

“Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know, you can’t explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there. Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad!”

~Morpheus, The Matrix~

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 14 Out of Step

If the world seems like it is out of step with you or you seem to be out of step with the world, then that may be a very good thing. Remember the world is insane. It is a world where we have an abundance of food, yet literally let millions of people starve each year. It is a world on the brink of environmental disaster. One in five children are sexually or physically abused. Wars are still here, we have not heeded the lessons of history. Violence is on the increase. More than ever Narcissism is becoming commonplace, with the emphasis on me, me, me. In all of humanity’s history we have not changed one single iota spiritually or psychologically.

Given all that, why would you want to fit in with all the insanity? Why would you want to be in step with the rest of the world?

So find the truth. It will set you free eventually. Peace will follow as a natural consequence and it will be a permanent state of abiding irrespective of moods, thoughts, and sensations.

15 Edward Traversa One Little Dot

At any one moment there are 6 billion bits of information coming into awareness. At any one moment 2 thousand bits of information are processed by the brain for conscious use.

People ask why they cannot stick to something as a resolution. It is simple; your conscious thought processes are only a tiny part of the equation. So small that if you looked at everything on this page, the browser, the web site etc as representing the whole of you, then symbolically you are trying to change the whole of you with this:

To add to the woes, that little dot has been magnified roughly a thousand times. You may have missed it; it is above this line and in the centre of the page.

To change one must get more than one tiny dot moving in the right direction. This does not mean that every single bit of information needs to be conscious. For example, it is not necessary to consciously know every single instant that the hair on your head is growing or not. Many things can be left in the background of our consciousness. That is where they need to be otherwise we would suffer from information overload and be paralysed.

It is necessary however to uncover all the major emotional and psychological issues that are occurring at an unconscious level and then have them move in the direction you would like. Not doing so is like having millions of dots working against one dot, because these unconscious issues affect the way you relate to yourself and the world.

A while back I ran into someone on a forum. This person had been bought up in an environment that was not ideal in the least, outright abusive emotionally and psychologically. He was raised to believe he was the saviour of humanity through his parents and the cult they belonged too. To that person he believed he had worked through the issues, because in his mind he was no longer following cult mentality.

Yet on the forum his predominate role was to warn others of cults, of which he

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 16 thought spiritual enlightenment was also cultish, pretty much everything was to him...

What he did not recognize was that he was still playing the role of a saviour. He was trying to save people from cults. For him no progress is possible until he squarely deals with that issue and has as many of his dots lined up as possible. In other words he will be doomed to play the role of the saviour, just like his parents intended and as such he is not living on his own two feet, but is unknowingly living for his parents and the cult they belonged too. He is trapped to respond in a certain way and that can hardly be called freedom.

Many years ago when working as a counsellor I was doing a workshop on relationships for a high school. I was attempting to make the point that our past relationships with paternal figures nearly always influence our choice of partners for relationships. And in that regard it is important to look at the opposite sex parent. A girls hand shot into the air, and asked that’s not possible for me. I asked why not? She replied by stating that she had never known her father. Her father had left her mother before she was born.

I told her that one thing she could become more aware of when she is ready for a relationship is that she will be inclined to find a partner that in some way is missing in her life. What would be important for her to recognize would be that she will have an inclination to be drawn to men that in some way are distant. It could be that they are emotionally unavailable, or married to their work, or perhaps isn’t attentive to her needs. At other extremes, it could be falling in love with a married man, or someone who travels a lot and isn’t physically present. In some way unconsciously the man she meets and falls in love with will be missing, will be unavailable to her in some way at a psychological level.

Does that mean she is bound to be drawn to such a man? Only if it remains unconscious. Only if the majority of dots are drawn in that direction.

Doing relationship counselling was interesting for me. Many counsellors believed that relationships were hard to understand, but for me they were always simple things to understand. They always revolved around three primary issues, control, trust, and intimacy and when viewing relationships from this perspective understanding relationships and in turn people was a simple matter, even though

17 Edward Traversa the individual manifestations of those issues varied greatly from person to person and from couple to couple.

One exercise I used when doing workshops type material for couples was I would get them to tell me something about themselves and why they were here. It would only need to be a minute or two introduction. I would then walk around to each couple and tell them pretty much what their relationship was about in terms of the control, trust, intimacy issues. Often they would be stunned and would say are you a mind reader. To which I would reply no, all I am doing is understanding the relationship from the viewpoint of the unconscious. When viewed from this perspective people are predictable, much more so than they like to think. The golden rule being that past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour. Unless of course those little dots start moving in the same direction.

While understanding relationships is a relatively simple affair, change in relationships is not. It is not because often we try and use one little dot to change the whole, whereas in fact what is required for change is to have more dots than not working for change. That is why working with relationships and people often takes time, though not always. Sometimes change can come about quickly if the person is open and receptive enough to look deeply within. In a sense they start to connect the dots and see the unconscious influences and begin to develop new ways of operating in the world. Most often though it is a complex process for meaningful change to occur.

This is because what often needs to occur is a grand revelation to begin with, where the person begins to connect the dots. It does not happen quickly because people as a rule are resistant to change and consequently do not want to see how the past influences them in the now. They are locked into a rigid unconscious pattern, where they have become so accustomed to operating in this way, it is very hard to see how things can be different. Better the devil we know is what is occurring unconsciously there.

Next time you feel stuck, next time you cannot seem to get yourself to move in the direction you would like, take a step back, take a deep breath, and start to look at the hidden dots and how they are influencing you.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 18 Doing so is about as spiritual as it gets. It is exactly part of the spiritual path and is far better than meditating on a candle in the hope that things turn out ok. It is to directly see the mind of you and when you see that, and then you can see more and more. As you see more, you begin to lift out of old rigid patterns and new ones begin to emerge.

Trying to change by using that one little dot is like using affirmations. Affirmations are the poorest thing you can do. Test after scientific test reveals that the efficacy of affirmations is very poor. You are much better off digging in, putting up with some upheaval and pain in your life and take a long hard look at how that pain has manifested for you rather than trying to create change with one little dot.

19 Edward Traversa Commitment

If you are 99% committed you are guaranteed that eventually you will fail at achieving what you want.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 20 The Who am I Koan

When we ask ourselves the question who am I in earnest, we have this expectation that we can answer the question.

In reality though it is a trick question which is designed to push you further and further into self, until you surrender completely and find no self exists and the question of who am I is totally irrelevant.

However this is not a conceptual exercise. It isn’t like saying ok I give up now and then you awaken. It isn’t even like saying, well since I cannot define who I am, I just give up trying.

It more akin to being in a fight with an adversary so powerful you stand no chance. This adversary keeps on punching you, until you're down on your knees and you think ok I have had enough, I cannot stand it. But when you say that, you almost instantly say “hang on I am not done yet.

Your adversary keeps on punching you constantly. This time you are on your very last breath of life and again you say ok had enough.

That still is not awakening. Somehow you manage to have the thought I am still not done, I am going to die, I know it, but I am not going to give it up to my adversary.

Your adversary swings at you with a fury and rage that is beyond fear and the final death blow comes; you are completely and utterly shattered emotionally, intellectually, on all levels you are defeated. You are immobilized and death ensues. You know the futility of the exercise as a deep felt experience encompassing all facts of your human form. You give up, you let death take you.

When death takes you, you look around and you are not there. Something is there though; something that seems so beautiful that it is inexpressible. That is still not awakening. I bet you wish it was though…

You have a sense that it’s not quite the end of the road; the adversary is still swinging blows at you, even in death, so you surrender again. The embrace of the nothingness takes you and everything vanishes (God’s will be done). And then you discover that you are this nothingness, this void, where the void is not

21 Edward Traversa devoid of anything, but is life itself. A life that can never be stated here in this world.

That is awakening.

That is the real purpose of asking the question “who am I.” To come to know the futility of asking the question in the first place. To come to know the futility of asking any question. To come to know the futility of having knowledge and spiritual techniques.

Who are you?

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 22 Teaching

Teaching nothing….

Teaching everything….

Who is the teacher?

Certainly not Eddie!

Who is the student?

Certainly not You!

What is being taught?

Nothing…

What is being learned

Nothing…

When there is nothing, there is everything….

23 Edward Traversa Shadows

As human beings we are shadows, but that is not our real identity, our real identity is the absolute, the thing that emanates everything, the only thing that is life, although not life in the way we can understand it with limited mind.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 24 Dreaming and Truth

Think about your own dreams. Within your dreams, there are dream characters that believe they have a life of their own and enact all sorts of dramas within the dream. In your dreams there are things like trees, birds, water, people, and all manner of things including some very strange things.

Within the dream everything is not real rather is part of your imagination. Everything within the dream is not true, it has no substance, and the things within the dream have no real life of their own. Even though if you were to look carefully enough at your dreams the characters within the dream believe it is real. A dream monster about to eat a dream you and within the dream there is fear etc… Even though there are emotions and sensations attached it is not real, it is but a dream.

Everything within the dream is an apparition. But the fact that it is dreamt is a reality. In the context of personal dreams it is the only truth: that it is a dream. Everything that is dreamt is part of you and emanates from you. Thus though there is the appearance of many in your personal dreams, there is in reality but one which everything stems from.

A dream character cannot break free of the dream, cannot recognise who is the dreamer. The only way a dream character in your personal dreams can come to know its being dreamt is if you have a lucid dream where you demonstrate within the dream that it’s a dream. Even then the dream character does not come to life, it only can recognize it is being dreamt, and its real identity is the thing that dreams, since there is only one in existence in terms of a personal dreams.

Now apply that analogy to the absolute, the dreamer is the one truth, everything dreamt is an appearance: the one appearing as many...

But don’t ascribe human properties and values to the absolute, rather think of it more as something that doesn’t have definition, like a boundless, timeless, field of infinite potentials. In other words the Absolute is not a being in the same sense that we use the word and that is why it is ineffable to us, because it is beyond us, just like a the dreamer is beyond the dream character in the dream.

25 Edward Traversa Of course no analogy will ever accurately portray the state of the Absolute. The dream analogy has shortcomings as any would. But it may give a sense of how one can appear as the many.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 26 State Truth

Most people gloss over this part in Jed’s first book, so I want to highlight it.

“Here’s a thought,” I continue. “When you’re doing the writing, Spiritual Autolysis, do it for someone else. Write it for someone else. Express your knowledge for someone else’s benefit. Write it for publication, as if the whole world will see it. Or write it as a series of letters to your son, or to an imaginary friend, or to the child you once were. Whatever.

Use the process of Spiritual Autolysis as a means of expressing your own highest knowledge for someone else’s benefit. And, of course, keep improving it until you’ve stated the truth.”

“ Which I’ll never do?”

“What, state the truth? No, of course not.”

Jed McKenna....

27 Edward Traversa Find a Thought

Find a thought, that has no genesis from your parents, teachers, significant others, family, friends, media, culture or society at large. Spend some time on this.

Isn’t your mind more like a conglomeration of other people’s thoughts, ideas, and behaviour sets? Are you not more like a composite character of everyone else’s notions? And if so, then where are you?

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 28 Creativity

It is serendipity when someone writes me and says they have been thinking about creativity and over the past few weeks I have been giving some thought to this topic. As I have said before I don’t perceive that I put out energy waves to others, but I would say that sometimes people can be in tune with each other. Actually I will show you how to really get in tune with another person in a separate post, but for now want to focus on the subject of creativity.

Where does it come from? Same place everything else comes from, the Absolute. As a projection (e.g. human form), the absolute is neurotic, psychopathic, creative, loving, hateful, and anything else you can think of. There is nothing we can point to, talk about, and perceive that is not the absolute as a limited projection. In other words it’s all the absolute albeit in different formats.

Creativity is subjective as well, what may be creative to me, may not be to you or the next person. So there is an inherent difficulty in defining creativity. For my part I tend to think of something as creative when it differs in some way to how we normally act or behave. For something to be creative it has to be different in some regards, at least to my way of thinking.

Creativity is an expression. What is being expressed? The absolute! Those pretty words; that line of code, that painting, that movie, is the absolute expressing itself as form.

Then we should ask how does creativity form in a human mind and this is the part that gets interesting. Usually the most creative we are is when we are not in thought but rather are following pre-thought. What is meant by this?

If you monitor your thoughts closely you will notice that your thought patterns go something like this: A thought begins to form; let’s say the thought is centred on money by way of example. So your initial thought which is more like a pre- thought than a typical actualized thought would go something like this:

That’s a money maker…. Or even just money maker… That’s a….

29 Edward Traversa Where this pre-thought is disrupted by your normal thoughts and is rarely followed through or paid attention too. So a pattern may look something like this: That’s a money maker…. (Slight pause in thought) Oh I have to pay the bills; if I don’t pay the bills I am in trouble and life ends, I have to get to work etc. That initial thought that is about to take shape is disrupted by the normal and rigid thought patterns we engage in and consequently is rarely followed through. Instead we become creatures of habit and find ourselves doing the same thing day in day out.

To really get a handle on this, you should observe your thoughts for at least an hour a day and for a few months, so that you experientially understand how we cut off potentially creative processes all the time. You should also note the times you are creative if any and monitor where that initial thought came from and how it was followed through. You will find that there are two distinct patterns of thoughts there and it is important to become aware of the different processes that occur internally.

Once you become more familiar with your patterns you can then more easily track back to the original pre-thought, the one that is just about to take some shape, but doesn’t get followed through all the way.

As an aside I don’t think I am particularly more creative after enlightenment as opposed to pre-enlightenment. It certainly isn’t my experience that bang you suddenly get transformed into a version of Leonardo Da Vinci. But what I would say is that there is a lot more recognition of what should be followed and what shouldn’t, which is by and large an intuitive processes.

I would also say that you get less stuck. To illustrate, let’s take a look back in time and my behaviour in regards to programming something for the Web.

I would get an idea and then I would be possessed by that idea to the point where I would go days without sleep at times and then drop into bed through sheer exhaustion only to get back up again the next day to start the processes again until the problem I was working on was solved. And in my mind that problem had to be solved, it became larger than life so to speak.

When the problem was solved I would experience maybe ten or twenty minutes

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 30 of exhilaration and run around saying to myself, “yeah, you the man”. So I may have worked on a particular problem for a few weeks, for what 20 minutes of exhilaration. If that seems lop sided to you, that’s the way most people function, long periods of work for a few minutes of happiness.

These days however there is a marked difference. For example of late I have been working on revamping my DHTML site and just like in the past an idea would form where I think of something that I want to do with the site either graphically or programmatically.

But what isn’t there any longer is the urgency or the obsession with getting my idea to bear fruit. In my mind there isn’t a problem there, there is just a thing that I am working on which will have a certain outcome and what the outcome is I don’t really care. If I drop the project mid stream no problem, if I follow it through no problem.

When I feel sleepy, I don’t stay up all night trying to get this thing completed, rather I do what anyone with some measure of sense would do; I go to sleep and rest. More often than not the idea bears fruit anyway so to speak, only with less stress; more rest and a deeper sense of calm as I observe the pieces of that initial pre-thought come together. And that’s what it is like a lot of the time, observing pieces coming together.

True I don’t get high when I complete something. For example, Michelle my partner asked me if I was happy when I had my new site working. The idea of being happy over a Web site is now foreign to me. It is just a Web site (The DHTML site) which has an intended purpose, to share information with others and also earn money for me so that I can devote more time to “spiritual” matters. All I have to do is sit back and watch it happen.

It’s the same with the book I am working on. If it gets completed it gets completed, if not so what? I mean really where is the tragedy of not completing a book?

What does seem to be central though is to watch it progress. I write a pretty line and have a sense of gratitude as it appears on paper. It’s the same with coding and graphics, it’s just watching them appear before your eyes with no sense of

31 Edward Traversa ownership. Rather it’s much like appreciating a fine piece of art or music or movie. It doesn’t matter to you that it appears that your hands are doing all this, because deep down you know they aren’t your hands, not really…

It also doesn’t matter whether anyone else happens to think it’s creative or not. To you as its experienced it’s an appreciation of the processes involved where the line of code or piece of writing is just a part of a much deeper unfolding of a grander pattern which has no end or purpose. And the fact that it doesn’t really have a purpose doesn’t bother you in the slightest. On the contrary it is freeing, which in itself is creative.

To get this deep level of appreciation, then one must first become aware of the processes. As always plunge on in and see for yourself.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 32 Changing a Name

It always struck me as amusing when someone claims to be enlightened changes his name to something mystical or holy sounding, usually eastern in nature. Sri blah, blah etc...

Is it not funny that they do change their names to “I am stupid”? I mean why not, if you’re going to change names, why not something like “I am stupid.” Obviously that doesn’t sound holy enough and that in itself should make you wonder what people are trying to convey by changing their names.

Are they not in fact trying to proclaim that they have reached a special state? If so who is it that has reached this special state and who is it that wants to change their name to signify that state?

Is it not about lineage where a guru says to another ok you’re enlightened now and so here is your new name? Which in turn gives both the guru and the newly appointed enlightened one special status? They get to be in the club.

So what then is all this changing name stuff all about? Enlightenment or status, prestige etc…

Something to think about…

33 Edward Traversa Realization

There is no realization from the perspective of the absolute. It never sleeps for it to awake, where sleep just doesn’t really apply to the absolute, or for that matter being awake. In other words it isn’t like the absolute wakes up in the morning and recognizes it has been dreaming and that this dream was our universe and that this universe has some weird rules.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 34 Are you a Physical Body?

This is an excellent form of enquiry for a seeker to engage in as demonstrates a lot about how the human mind works. So how can you determine if you have a physical body?

Well one way would be to smash a hammer on your hand and see if it hurts.

But does that determine whether you have a body or a hand that hurts? And exactly which part of the hand hurts?

See in our minds we have an assumption of us as a complete body. By this I mean we have an overall sense that we have a body. Part of enquiring into this is, is that sense really accurate and how does that sense come about?

See if you can do this. See if at the exact point in time, you can feel your whole body from the hair on your head, that’s every single hair, right down to your toes and everything in between. Your heart beating, the breathing rate, your hand, your knee etc.... Exactly how much information can you hold at any one time about the body?

Now if you notice intently you may begin to notice that your attention flickers quickly from one body part or sensation to another. At no real time do you grab the whole body in consciousness at one point in time.

So one thing you can discern from this is that the mind likes to trick us with an overall impression by filling in the blanks. For example if you flicker through your hands to your feet, it’s more like a progression scan of awareness, like little points of awareness that give an overall sense of the whole.

In a sense that is part of the illusion. The illusion being that we are always whole in terms of bodily consciousness, whereas in fact, we are composites of different bodily parts.

Practicalities aside, You can think of it like this, it would be more accurate to describe oneself as a hand here, a foot here, a heartbeat here. For example I am focussing on my hand and that’s really all there is, everything else is missing unless I bring awareness to it.

Now awareness is the constant, the physical body as a whole is not; rather we fill in the blanks unconsciously through cultural and societal assumptions. For

35 Edward Traversa example, we are told to get more into the body, which assumes there is a whole body in consciousness all the time. Paying attention to the role awareness plays in all this is important so see if you can just notice how your awareness operates.

That is one level of the body.

Now we can go a bit deeper. Hold your hand in consciousness, first feel your skin. I mean really see what it feels like. Then feel inside of your skin. At first you may notice little pulses or sensations, but if you stick with it, the deeper you focus on inside your skin, the more attuned you will become with the energy inside.

The energy can be like a tingly sensation or something different, but it will be unlike the physical sensation of the skin and feel more energetic and vibrational in nature. If you practice this for any length of time, your perception switches to a more energetic pattern than a physical pattern.

Being in tune in this manner is very healing, healing because the more attention you bring to it, the more you can notice blockages of energy in the body. There are many ways to clear those blockages, including some yoga techniques, breathing techniques and my favourite some Taoist techniques. But that’s beyond the scope of this article.

Aside from the healing aspects, it is a good exercise in awareness. You can really appreciate in an experiential manner that there is a whole lot going on that we often are not aware of and this often clashes with our sense of whom we think we are. That is a good thing as in fact we really want to question the fabric of us.

There are levels beyond that energetic state that one can be attuned to as well. If you go deeper into the energy by doing the same thing and focussing on what is inside the energy that can often bring about surprising insights.

Back to the original question. Are you a body? The answer is that it is for you to determine by enquiring within, figuring out all the relevant information, and then seeing what assumptions can be challenged.

Here are a few extra things can you try.

Can you shift the location of your thoughts around?

By this I mean we often seem to think from the same place in our heads. Can it be shifted so that perception can be changed to another perception at a different place. Just try it and see if you can shift the location even if it is ever so slightly.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 36 Can you breathe into your head?

Instead of following your breath down into your stomach, see if you can have a perception of drawing the breath at the top of your nose, then hold it. Then try for a little higher and so on... Sure your stomach will fill up still, well at least it should, though the majority of people breath from the chests only and don’t really fill their stomachs up in the same manner as a little baby would for example, but in doing so you should still have a sensation of something going up your nose and into your head. This is good for clarity and stress reduction when breathing in this manner.

The whole gist of the above is to try and shake yourself and just see what is possible. Try and break some assumptions about your body and what is possible with it etc...

37 Edward Traversa

Intuition

That’s the one you want to focus on as much as possible while on the pathless path: Intuition. Uncover it, examine it from all angles, and make it your best friend. It will be one of your most powerful allies as you are uncovering self.

Pay particular attention to the space between thoughts, emotions, and sensations. This is where the greatest possibility for change resides. One can only intuit this and cannot come to it via logical conclusion or analysis.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 38 Frozen Light

I was reading an article in Scientific American about light and something interesting caught my eye. Normally, we perceive light as travelling at a constant speed. In various experiments in the past few years, scientists have been slowing the speed of light down. For example, having light travel at 60 kilometres per hour or lower.

They have become so adept at slowing light down, that they can stop light travelling altogether, hence the term frozen light. Something really interesting happens when light stops travelling; it becomes synchronous and for all intents and purposes is one single quantum state.

Hmmm I can feel a metaphor coming on....

39 Edward Traversa When we Love

When we love the pain of existence as much as we love the joy of existence that is love.

When we love the simple step of a foot on the ground as much as we love ecstatic experiences that is love.

When our loved ones are not physically with us and never will be again, but are in the trees, in the softness of a gentle wind caressing our cheeks, in the beauty of night dreams and we know this deeply that is love.

When we allow things to come freely and to move away freely that is love.

When there is no reason to love, no need to love, and there is still love, that is love.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 40 Depersonalization Disorder and Awakening

I have been asked to make a few comments on Depersonalization disorder and awakening since I have a psychological background.

Depersonalization disorder typically occurs when there is a traumatic event in one’s life, e.g., death of a loved one, accident etc... It is a state of dissociation specifically designed to keep anxiety and fear at bay and it is a state of being stuck, which causes distress to the person experiencing it be it mild or severe.

Being awake is different because there is no fear, so each experience can pass through one without clinging, which doesn’t mean you don’t experience things, rather you do. E.g., today I love, tomorrow I may not. So it is not a state in the strictest sense of the word, since one can flow into various states with ease and comfort. In other words anxiety and control are not features of being awake. They are features of DPD.

Love is a dream sure enough, but it doesn’t mean the dream doesn’t exist, what is Maya is that it is seen as a tangible thing as opposed to something that comes and goes and is a dream in ultimate reality. The dream can flow with greater depth if it allowed too. However, typically there is attachment there before awakening, which hinders emotions and makes one live a life where they are always trying to control one thing or another. So we negate, not necessarily to become emotionless, but rather to get the core of us, which can’t possibly have attachments.

For example, one moment you love deeply and that is accepted, the next you do not and that is accepted, that is really non attachment in practice. But they are not viewed as things that are you, as in true self, rather they are viewed as a passing dream which can be enjoyed or not. After awakening an emotional response would be seen as being part of the script, known as not really occurring in true identity so whatever occurs is accepted. It is not a denial in other words, but rather seen for the relative truth that it is.

Depersonalization disorder is being out of touch with reality, being awake is in touch with reality. They are miles apart, since being awake is not being in a

41 Edward Traversa frozen observer mode, observer mode is Maya too, and it comes and goes. Awakening is beyond that...

The other thing of note where DPD is concerned is to note how ego always manages to find fear. So let’s say you did go towards DPD, it’s not the worst thing that can happen in your life and is treatable anyway. Yet ego likes a drama of am I going to DPD or Awakening which of course keeps you in a state of guessing and distraction from the task at hand.

Doubts, uncertainties are par for the course, but if one is to awake, they must be dealt with as an enquiry and validated by yourself if they are truth...

When it is said the cost of enlightenment is everything, this also includes doubting your own sanity. Many a time I thought I was going insane and many a time I could have labelled myself with some disorder. Remember that psychology is about conformity and if you don’t conform almost certainly you will find a psychological label for that non conformity.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 42 Direction

If you are unsure about which direction to take in life, then don’t take any direction. Take some time, breath and wait it out.

This does not mean you become action-less, rather it is to observe what to act on and what not to act on. The thing to act on will always appear as synchronicity in life and when it appears you go at it with no half measures.

The key here is to just to notice. No great big introspection, no need to analyse or ask why, it is just noticing much like noticing that the sky is blue.

A good guide is if there is some cognitive disparity or confusion appearing is just to let it abate back to where it came from and don’t act on it. If there is a clear direction that manifests as synchronicity that’s the thing to follow, however try as best as you can not to have expectations where it may lead. The signals are never wrong, but our interpretations of them often are.

43 Edward Traversa Purity of Intent

Jed McKenna calls it purity of intent; I call it grim faced determination. The label itself doesn’t matter. If you want something in life, then you have to have purity of intent. Truth realization, awakening, enlightenment call it what you will requires purity of intent.

What is purity of intent? It is simply going after something with ever fibre of your being and going after it regardless of the cost and regardless of what you have to do to get it. For example, let’s look at Buddha.

What most Buddhists don’t understand is that when Buddha sat himself down underneath the tree, that it wasn’t the practice of meditation that allowed Buddha to awake, it was his purity of intent. The meditation was superfluous; he meditated for many years without awakening and could have meditated many more without awakening if he did not have purity of intent. Buddha could just as easily been walking, been laying bricks or whatever it really wouldn’t have mattered. It wouldn’t have mattered because Buddha had purity of intent.

He sat himself down and said to himself I am going to find the answer no matter what, even if it means my life. That’s key here.

The practice of meditation was just something people did in those days. If people were more into journaling in those days, then Buddhism of today would be a doctrine of journaling as opposed to meditation. Or if Buddha had been walking, then it would be a doctrine of walking.

The practice doesn’t matter, the commitment is the thing.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 44 The Negative Process

If you are feeling frustrated, scared, confused then that’s an indication that you’re making progress (ok apparent progress if you want to get technical). However what most people do is attempt to alleviate these apparent negative responses, by trying to calm themselves down, meditating more, or stilling the mind etc. It distracts away from the natural process of awakening and puts the person right back into ego. It then becomes a vicious circle, where no one awakens and is why enlightenment is so hard to discover.

The key is to push through the negative emotions, explore them deeply and see what or who is driving them. Instead of using the energy of the emotion to move you into a more tranquil state, you use the energy of the emotion to disrupt your ego, is a good way of thinking about it.

For example, at times I was frustrated, but by plunging deeper into that frustration, I was able to see that I was trying to control the process. By seeing that attempt at control then I was able to realize that I have no control really. No matter what I did, I would always end up back into the circular pattern. In recognizing the attempt at control and diminishing its hold it was one powerful concept negated that doesn’t have energy: One less construct to identify with. That’s the basic process of preparing to awaken.

45 Edward Traversa A Good Day to Die

Our enemy is fear. In fact prior to truth realization this is all we know. I once remarked to a student, that people are not living, not really. It is more like they are dead to life and are pretending to be living a life that is in accordance with the expectations of society, even the fringe elements of society. What they think is an individual self, which they think determines their own destiny is nothing more than a conglomerate of other people’s expectations and ideas. Most particularly your family, but not exclusively limited to family, it is far more pervasive than that if you really care to open your eyes and look.

To tear away these layers of fabrication about who you are and what you are composed off is the head on assault on fear. It is to see that what you thought was true, is in fact nothing more than an idea of what truth should be. If you are diligent and preserve enough, eventually you come to a conclusion about truth. All that can be stated about truth is that “I Am.” At first this will most likely be an intellectual formation in mind, which by no means is really truth realized. But it may be the spark that starts the whole ball rolling until you directly see the truth of existence, which is that truth, exists or another way of saying it is “I Am.”

Over these past months, I have been reading some books on spirituality and by and large they are the normal drivel that passes for spiritual literature. I read things like there is nothing to do and no one to do it, which is a truism in a fashion, but also I clearly see that these “spiritual masters” have really just dug a bigger well of Maya to hide in. It would be equally true to say that, there is an indescribable and ineffable one, and this one is doing everything simultaneously. God, consciousness, call it what you will, is not a God of death, it is a God of life. Life /existence are its essence....

When we examine life from this perspective then what appears to be chaos and disorder is in fact harmony and order, where nothing, absolutely nothing is out of place. Everything is as should be. We do not see this because we are in a constant state of fear. A fear of not being successful, happy, a good parent, financially stable, and yes a fear of not being enlightened. So we strive to become, without truly understanding that becoming is a crock... We add to ourselves, we distract ourselves, we strive harder and harder, and in the end we face death, usually very unhappily.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 46

It isn’t so much the striving or the trying that is the problem, it is that the striving and trying is in the wrong direction, where we try and make ourselves to be more that what we are, without realizing that if you really looked inside we are far more that we could ever imagine in the first place. To get to here, means to peel away layer after layer of delusion or illusion as some prefer to call it. It means less, not more...

In practical terms you don’t want more anxiety, you want less... You don’t want more fear you want less. Yet, nearly everything in life is conducive to bringing more fear into life. Will I have enough money to pay the mortgage? What happens if I lose my job, my health, the love of my life? How can I make my children better, wiser or be a better parent? These are pretty typical concerns for most people, things we expect from life and are ingrained into our psyche.

But have you considered what may happen if fear is removed from the equation? What do you suppose might enter consciousness then? Aside from the freeing of lot of psychic energy, the most prominent thing that enters consciousness is gratitude!

Around a month ago, I was laying in a hospital bed about to have my chest sawed open and my heart stopped. The nurses are shaving me. It strikes me as quite as metaphor that here in what may be my last moments on this planet; I am being stripped further away. I am becoming hairless, like a new born infant...

In the bed next to me is a man. An elderly man who is sobbing, crying, not wishing to go through what he is about to go through. He too is being prepared for surgery. I have an itch to speak to him and say there is nothing to fear, this moment is perfect. But I do not scratch this itch for I also understand that at where he is now, it would be meaningless new age mumbo jumbo to him. You either know it’s a perfect moment, irrespective of what the moment is, or you do not. I let the moment pass and focus back on the sensation of being shaved.

The contrast seems obvious to the nurses who remark that I seem to be placid about this ordeal I was about to face. I explain to them, that while I have no perception that I am about to die, that if I did die, what could be more perfect than this? I’ll be unconscious; I won’t feel a thing... I will simply go to sleep and wont wake up again. I couldn’t wish for a more perfect way to die... Apart from

47 Edward Traversa that I have no regrets, I am at peace, comfortable and have no need to go through my personal history to see if there is anything I should have done. It is a perfect moment I say to them.

Of course the nurses miss the point and tell me that everything will be ok, that I will not die and so on. The point they missed being that it is ok anyway irrespective of what happens and that what they should be focusing on if they had any measure of intelligence is why is there one man weeping and crying about life not 20 feet from me, and me here right in there face as calm as can be loving the fact that he is looking like a new born baby again. Would you not wonder at the disparity? My mother is with me, it is nearly time for me to be wheeled off into surgery. I sense she wants to say it. If you were in the room, I would venture to say you would sense it too, as the sense is so pervasive. She is struggling to say one thing to me. It is a simple thing she struggles with. She wants to say,” I love you.” I watch her intently to see if the dam is about the burst open and she says it. She does not... When I tell that to people, people usually say how sad that is.

But then they probably do not see what I see. For the first time in her life she is struggling with the recognition that she wants to say I love you, but is blocked from doing so. What appears to be non-progress from an asleep perspective is in fact the first inkling of a deep internal conflict within her. I am content that she has come to this point and can think of no better way to enter an operating theatre knowing that something within her has started.

It’s time now and off I go into this grand adventure. An adventure I might add I am entirely grateful for. I am awash in gratitude... Why? I just explained why... There is no fear... Not the slightest bit of anxiety to be found. I am not reminiscing about life, not wondering what could or might have been, instead I am intently focussed on what is occurring, the needle being put into my vein and how that feels. Not as bad as many would think. The pleasant warmth of a blanket being placed over me again washes me in gratitude.

Here is the thing about truth realization in case you have missed it. The idea or notion that something is wrong or out of place is completely lost on me. Where most would find fault, I clearly see the rightness of the situation and that it could not possibly be any other way. That is why gratitude permeates consciousness so

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 48 much when fear is removed. The duality of wrong or right is replaced with It just is... I do not mean this in a fatalistic sense; rather it is a complete acceptance of the moment as it transpires.

Now don’t get me wrong here. I do not abide in a perpetual state of bliss. I have preferences much like everyone else has preferences. Perhaps the only difference being I don’t get too caught up in the preferences.

An example would be that upon waking from surgery they were pulling this hose from my throat. It was the heart lung machine that was keeping me alive till then and now it was time for me to start the simplest of things again, to breathe.

My recollection of the experience was that it was a pleasant one. I remember thinking this is nowhere near as bad as the horror stories of this hose stuck down your throat as I have heard. Yet ask the doctors and nurses at the time and they will avidly tell you that I was visibly in discomfort and attempting to rip this hose from my throat. From what they tell me, I gave them a hard time. No memory of that... What’s not to be grateful for?

Then a small pattern which is part of a much larger pattern makes itself known. Once I start to breathe on my own again, I am asked if I wanted to shift position. I say yes. Moments later I think oh oh.... I cannot breathe. I am gasping for air. It is not a pleasant situation from a preference perspective. It is probably made more unpleasant as I am filled with drugs and my mind is not very lucid, so much like anyone else the body begins to panic and attempts to gasp for air.

I hear a voice and it says breathe through your nose. I stop the struggle, I let the displeasure wash away and focus on this one thing. To breathe as I am told to breathe by the universe. The universe in this case was a nurse in case you are wondering. Then in a few seconds everything is ok. I am breathing again. Shortly after gratitude washes over me.

Immediately I am reminded of the new born metaphor, here I am pretty much shaved hairless and I am learning to breathe again like a new born infant. The pattern being the importance of breathing correctly. Typically I am slow breather, or at least have taught myself to become that over the years. But this past year, my heart has been working overtime and consequently my breathing has become shallow once again. Fast paced type of breathing, the way nearly everyone

49 Edward Traversa breathes. Now it wasn’t that I was not aware of the change in my breathing, in fact I was acutely aware of it.

But breathing in a much quicker fashion is what kept me alive until this point. In other words there was “rightness” in what had transpired. And now “rightness” is to breathe again in a much deeper slower fashion and allow the body to realign itself into a more proper state of health. Which eventually will manifest in healthier looking skin and appearance? Not that I am that caught up in appearance, but that is actually what happens when we breathe in a more natural fashion. Babies do it instinctively, by the time they are children they are taught to become anxious and consequently shallow anxiety type breathing sets in.

I don’t have a child of my own, but if I did the first thing I would teach them is to continue breathing naturally. This would become more important than learning the alphabet or numerical system we use. It would be the foundation that they would build their life upon.

These doctors and nurses seem to know the importance of how important breathing is after surgery. They encourage you every so often to do your breathing exercises. They know it intellectually, yet if you observe their own breathing, they breathe shallow too. So when asked to do these exercises I play dumb and say show me, do it with me, so I get the idea. I ask them why they don’t practice those themselves, as it seems to me they breathe quite shallow as their typical method of breathing. They remark, your right I should do it more, it always makes me feel better when I practice breathing like that. I say well there is your answer and another perfect moment passes.

Yes open heart surgery can be construed as an ordeal, there will be moments of pain, I experienced them as I am sure nearly everyone else who undergoes the procedure does. This is but a body after all. But when we turn to face the pain and begin to look at it from the inside then pain boils down to a sensation, and if we dig further the pain is only there to remind us that for the moment it needs to be there. If we fear the pain it becomes accentuated, and like that man I described earlier we end up a crying raving mess. If we just let go of the fear, then what permeates consciousness eventually will be gratitude and if a tear just does happen to come along it won’t be one of sadness or fear, it will be the water of grace flowing down your cheek.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 50 Life after Death

I do have to admit, I always thought it would be fun to be in some version of heaven and hit people over the head with an energetic Zen stick while they are staring at some bright white light or some old man with a beard and say not this nor that!

51 Edward Traversa The Value of Synchronicity

Synchronicity isn’t about acquiring material possessions or fulfilling personal desires. It will always guide you to what you need to do, not what you think you need.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 52 Keeping Your Eye on the Ball

Almost everyone is taking his or her eye of the ball, almost always.

The ball is not enlightenment. It is the thing that has to be contended with, your block, your obstacle. That’s the ball and its one ball at a time until there is nothing left.

You have to be single minded with the thing that is the obstruction and every time you start to look at enlightenment as a goal, as something that you’re going to get, as something in the future, you are not dealing with that one obstruction and nothing will appear to change. In other words, the goal of enlightenment and focusing on it is a way to distract you from the task at hand. Try and keep your focus on one thing at a time.

53 Edward Traversa Bloody Zen Tales

A few months ago I was reading a free online book that contained a lot of short Zen stories. Wish I could remember where that link was as I would point you to it. There was one Zen story that caught my eye, not so much for the story itself but the people’s commentary on it. Just to clarify in this book, there was a Zen tale followed by peoples impressions and interpretations of the tale.

The gist of this story goes something like this.

One day there was a enlightened teacher who when asked where enlightenment could be found would point with his finger into thin air. A student of his saw his teacher’s behaviour and began to mimic it to the town’s folk. This went on for many months, and each time the student was asked where enlightenment could be found he would point his finger into thin air in a mimic of his master.

The enlightened teacher saw this. He went up to his student and asked him where enlightenment could be found. The student pointed his finger into thin air to which the enlightened teacher responded by pulling out his sword and chopping the students finger off in one clean cut.

As the student’s finger lay on the ground and blood oozing from where his finger once was, the enlightened teacher asked once again, where can enlightenment be found?

In that moment the student was enlightened.

People’s reactions to this story were interesting to read and was certainly the one tale that seemed to spark the most controversy. In general most did not understand the point of the tale and were comfortable in just stating so. That is good; it’s a measure of honesty. Others were remarking on the cruelty of the teacher. Others still were moaning about a potential loss of a finger.

The first thing that stands out to me is the attachment to the finger. If it is a choice between enlightenment and the loss of a finger or any bodily part for that matter, then enlightenment needs to be above that attachment. On the teachers supposed

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 54 cruelty as perceived by the readers. It points to the need of most spiritual seekers to hear only the sweet and light. When it comes to the discipline, the service to others, the inherent sacrifices of this pathless path, the pain staking struggle of diminishing an individual self, they do not want to know about it. At least the vast majority do not.

That is a couple of points to be made from that.

What of the moral of the story? To my way of thinking there are a couple contained in the Zen tale. The obvious one to me was that the student was pointing to the “finger” pointing at the moon. His mimicking behaviour was borne from ego’s need to impress the town’s folk. Further he was attached to that behaviour as it went on for some time. When literally his attachment was severed by his enlightened teacher it forced the student into a place of NOT being able to know at an intellectual level. The student did not know how to react when asked where enlightenment can be found. His mind shut down in other words which in turn allowed him to see enlightenment directly because it was no longer in the way.

The other point is that Enlightenment is not about mimicking another human being. That is what the student was doing. Mimicking the behaviour of his teacher was not enlightenment. It is the same with any teacher who has walked the earth. Copying your favourite teacher only denotes that a person is still relatively in spiritual Kindergarten and as yet has not forged their own pathless path.

Enlightenment cannot stand upon a structure of a teaching. Any teaching... It cannot because it is beyond words, beyond knowledge, beyond behaviour and beyond everything in perception.

The final point to be made is that Zen is not about understanding tales and koans. It is about stopping the mind, so that mind doesn’t know how to respond. It is at that moment of not knowing that the greatest opportunity for enlightenment comes.

So the thing to do in those situations is to observe how the ego absolutely hates not knowing, and attempts to jump straight back into the accumulation of more and more facts. The more cognizant you can become of this trait the better.

55 Edward Traversa Thought Control?

If we are so in control of our lives, then why is it problematic to silently count to ten or twenty or a thousand in your head without another thought intruding?

And what about that intruding thought? Was it you’re thought really?

What about the space between thoughts, emotions, and sensations? Is that your space, something you control or something else?

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 56 Paradigms

The awareness / presence / consciousness paradigm that people take to be enlightenment is not enlightenment. They are forms of identification which can lead to a much better life as a human being and have implications for the way a human being leads life, but they are not enlightenment.

Enlightenment is the source that allows consciousness / awareness / presence to manifest as an appearance. Enlightenment is before all things.

57 Edward Traversa Why was Maya Created

Another one of those frequent student questions, why does Maya / Illusion even exist? The answer is Maya was never created. That is a fundamental misconception that most likely stems from religious or new age teachings.

There was never a moment in time when there was a creation of separation. Rather it is that Maya is the Absolute. As such it is also beyond time. I could use the word eternal here which is a reasonable way to think about it, but that implies the notion of time. No matter, the reality is that nothing has been created ever. It cannot have been because there never was an actual moment in time for creation to occur.

We can say from our perspective there appears to be time and it appears to be moving forward, but that is a perception not a statement of truth. More than that, it is an old fashion viewpoint that is out of step with current scientific evidence.

The problem for a seeker is that it contradicts logic. For example, all things being equal we can be reasonably certain that the sun will rise tomorrow. So to us it appears that there is a creation of a sunset.

The reality however is quite different. The sun has already set. There is no forward arrow of time, or in other words there is no tomorrow. In fact from a scientific viewpoint we unequivocally know that the notion of time moving forward just does not work at all. It doesn’t stack up in any way, shape or form.

Time is frozen. So while you are reading this very line, it is a series of frozen moments that are eternal. It is embedded forever in the grand consciousness of the Absolute.

It is the same with the creation of the universe that very moment exists eternally as a frozen slice. Every love affair you have had, every ounce of pain, every single experience you have had is frozen, a still image that will be eternal. What we perceive as the future also works in the same manner. Everything you will ever appear to be doing you already have done from the perspective of time.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 58 Yes I know this contradicts your experiences but it doesn’t change the fact that is how time works. It is exactly like looking over an ocean and all your perceptual senses say it is flat. We perceive a flat earth yet that doesn’t mean we live on a flat earth. Much the same phenomena is going on here.

We tend to think of creation in very egotistical terms. For example, God created us for a reason and it’s a special reason etc... We make up all sorts of fairy tales around this. For example, people say because I am still alive, there must be a reason for that. But there is none. That’s just something people like to believe in order to bolster their own sense of ego and belief in their own specialness.

So the question of why does Maya exist stems from this belief, be it unconscious or conscious.

Maya is the absolute as the appearance of form. Everything in perception is literally God. It is only that human nature likes to divide and separate that creates this division between God or Buddha or the absolute. So we split things up calling the illusion bad and the absolute good, never realizing that they are one and the same.

Consider for a moment that Maya is the absolute in the appearance of form. All forms. Then where are you? When exactly where you created if underneath the illusory perception of an individual you, you are in fact the absolute. In other words when were the Absolute / God / Buddha etc created if that was outside of the realm of time completely?

So there are two misconceptions there, one being at the level of the universe time moves forward, and the other being that the Absolute / God also resides in time. For creation to occur there must be a point of time for it to occur in and if there is no time, then creation is impossible.

That leaves a problem however from a human understanding point of view. We can say it appears that the universe was created, and that we were born etc and that would be true enough from a perceptual point of view. Yet we don’t seem to fathom is this:

From the viewpoint of the absolute there is no universe, there is just the absolute.

59 Edward Traversa In other words the universe is not differentiated into being separate or apart from the absolute, rather it is that the Absolute and the Universe are one and the same.

There was no creation of the universe because what appears to us as a moment of time of creation is still the absolute and abides beyond time as a frozen image slice. There is no end to the universe because that ending exists eternally so to speak. Each image slice is part of the absolute, is the absolute.

No one denies that we have this perception; all that is being said though is that it fundamentally illusory in nature.

Then we come to the other fallacy. Here is a God that one day decided to create a universe. It is much more like that everything in the universe, everything beyond the universe, everything in other universes, and everything that has no shape, manner or form exists. It exists without time, without movement and abides in perfect stillness that couldn’t be touched if you dropped billions of nuclear weapons onto it.

It exists because it is the Absolute. As such, there is no reason for its existence. There is no reason for Maya. Rather it just is...

One way to conceptualize it then is to imagine everything that has ever happened, everything that ever will happen and everything that is happening right now. Imagine then that there was a being and that all these things were part of the being. Everything constitutes that being. Both in form and as the formless.

To us it may seem like there are countless different human beings, trees, objects stars etc, but from the vantage point of the absolute, these are all it. Further, there is no us to be differentiating between things, from ultimate reality.

Now you may wonder why didn’t the Absolute give everyone awareness of this fact? But you’re missing it, there is no everyone, there is only the Absolute and essentially that is the illusion. All that happens when enlightenment occurs is that someone trips over this fact, usually by pounding their head against a brick wall for long stretches of time and then wonders how they could possibly have missed something so obvious.

So you want to know why Maya was created? It wasn’t, it just is...

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 60 Here is a final thought to consider. Questions like this are completely useless to a seeker. They are a distraction, perhaps an interesting one for some, but they do not move you an inch closer to understanding self.

As the answer to this question irrevocably demonstrates...

61 Edward Traversa Maya and the Absolute

Maya is to the Absolute as fire is to heat or as ice is to cold.

A reader’s question: “So in your analogy, cold acts on water to produce ice, heat acts on a flammable substance such as wood to produce fire. What does the absolute act on to produce Maya?”

You might say that if the Absolute were a thing of substance as in here is this being creating all this stuff...

But it isn’t like that, it’s not a tangible solid thing so it doesn’t have anything to rub up against that human mind could comprehend. Rather it is more like that the absolute appears as everything including Maya...

By saying that it’s like fire and heat, it points to the indivisible nature of the absolute... in other words Maya cannot be separated from the absolute, because it is the appearance of the absolute...

If it were possible to look at Maya in isolation, as something separate, then you might say its consciousness rubbing up against itself.. Everyone’s and everything’s consciousness rubbing against each other in the form of a hologram...

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 62 Some Questions

Some reader questions:

Question: You and Jed describe the after enlightenment experience as a state of constant free fall what do you mean by that?

Answer: Cannot speak for Jed, but from here it means that things come and go without attachment. So in this sense you are always in a state of freefall which is like surrendering or accepting of what is on a moment to moment basis. One moment there is an experience of happiness, the next of sadness, but neither is viewed from the inside out or from the outside in, where there is a sense of ownership of the experience. In other words they are not viewed as things occurring to me, rather they are occurring without a sense that these experiences belong to me. When there is that sense of no ownership it is much like a jump into the unknown where the jump never ends.

Question: Because there is more information readily available on the internet to more people does that mean there will be more enlightened beings?

Answer: No. Information is not a path to enlightenment; it never has been and never will be. Enlightenment is not about earning a doctorate on scripture or spiritual techniques; it is about uncovering what you really are to begin with and what you always are regardless of what you believe. On top of that technology does not produce spiritual and psychological change. It may enable us to have more information, live longer lives, go from A to B faster, but at a spiritual level the world has not changed from day 1 nor will it.

It is also important to understand that a genuine enlightenment is not about saving the world or making it a better place. It is more about discovering that everything is fine as is which cannot really be taught or disseminated through information. It can only be directly experienced.

Also the internet has some disadvantages and it’s important for people to see them in addition to the positives. For example, while we may communicate through email, there is a world of difference in communicating via the medium as

63 Edward Traversa there is to communicating in person. We cannot share an ice cream, we cannot see and feel the energy of each other and note all the little subtle cues that go on in a face to face conversation.

Question: Why are there evil people?

Answer: That question has a ring of arrogance for it implies that ego knows better than the Absolute. Who defines evil is really the question of importance here.

Everything is unfolding as it should, in fact everything has already unfolded and the end is not what we imagine it to be, for it has nothing to do with an individual self, nor is there ever an end for that matter. The cosmic dance is far bigger that we can see from the perspective of a human mind, with many interwoven patterns that have yet to be revealed to humanity as yet.

You may think of certain people as being good, e.g., Jesus or Buddha, but Hitler and Osama and George Bush arise from the same source as Jesus and Buddha. They are all imaginary projections of the same source and as such are meant to be and in this sense everything is holy. The rock is holy, the tree is holy, the murder is holy, the birth of a child is holy. Everything is holy since it is the appearance of the absolute as an expression of infinite possibility that to us at times does not seem to make sense. It is only your beliefs that judge and put things into the category of unholy. But human mind is not true God mind or perhaps it is better to say it is a limited expression of God mind that we think we own. As such we try to interject our beliefs onto the Absolute and get caught in the belief that things should be another way.

This does not mean that we have to be passive and just accept mediocrity. If I do not like someone, that too is an arising from the same source and is but part of the dance of the cosmos. But I can also see that what most call evil also plays a part in the dualistic world, for without what people call evil or suffering, there could not be joy or goodness to contrast again. It makes the world go around and allows for a variety of different experiences. Where most people get into trouble is they become highly polarized in one position or another.

If you really do not want evil in the world, then work on yourself and do the best you can which is all you can do. Do not worry about the behaviour of others, but make the most of who you can be and lead by example. Most of all think it

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 64 through and try to see both sides of the coin before acting. See the truth of things and evil, which is but another form of fear dissolves and that’s one less person creating havoc in the world.

Question: Does the Absolute have intent or Free will?

Answer: From an ultimate perspective, no. Everything that will happen has already happened at one level (consciousness). At another nothing has happened or ever will happen (the void or stillness). They are both the absolute appearing in different forms but neither of these allow for free will or intent. The absolute didn’t intend the universe or make a choice to create the universe; rather the reality is that the universe is the absolute as an imaginary projection. There isn’t a separation between the Absolute and the Universe; they are in fact one and the same. The Absolute is beyond the concept of free will or intent; it is only our egoist need that attempts to ascribe these attributes to the Absolute which leads to us trying to control everything in our lives.

65 Edward Traversa

Abiding in Non Dual Awareness

We would be wise to take note that abiding in non-dual awareness is written neither as one-awareness, presence- awareness, now-awareness, or loving- awareness or any other type of awareness. We would equally be wise to recognize that almost every single enlightenment teacher, attempts to make it something other than non-dual awareness.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 66 Unity Consciousness

The experience of unity consciousness while it lasts from a human perspective is preferable to spiritual enlightenment. I say that because it tends to generate very positive human emotions and as such a person can more readily relate to this. The other big difference of course is that in the unity consciousness experience there is still a person there that identifies with the experience. In spiritual enlightenment there isn’t a person there, there is but the Absolute / God. There is none of the notion of we are all connected or we are all in this together etc... Be clear, there is but one, where this one appears as a projection of the many.

Back to the topic at hand; unity consciousness. In this experience you are in love in the truest sense of the word with everything. This can be a highly mystical experience where it seems like everything is connected and that the universe consists of love and it is not infrequent to hear reports that everything had a glow around it, like a white light. There is also a real sense of we are all one, but that is often confused with enlightenment in spiritual jargon. This unity experience is more connective by nature in that there is still an appearance of we. We are all connected is what it feels like. Enlightenment is different in that there is no we to be connected, rather there is just one, where this one is playing all roles and all things at once.

A way to describe the unity consciousness experience is like so. Imagine every time in your life when you were on a high, imagine every time you really felt good about yourself, imagine every time you were in love be it with another human being, a pet, an object etc.... In short imagine every positive experience you have ever had. Then imagine if you could roll all those experiences into one experience and multiply that by a factor of a few thousand. It would be a hugely intense positive experience right? Well that is pretty much what unity consciousness feels like.

The problem however is that it fades away. In my case after a week, but I have heard of other people experiencing it for longer, e.g. a few months, and on the other end of the scale a few minutes. The common thing though is it fades away into oblivion. No matter how much one tries the experience is gone and is but a memory. One may experience that again later in life, but it will be much the same, last a certain period of time and then go. In fact many spiritual seekers are

67 Edward Traversa really searching to either find unity consciousness or to regain an experience they once had.

Enlightenment is different. It doesn’t go in the same manner. It can recede into the background particularly in early stages of integration but it is ever present nonetheless. What is mean by this, is when the unity consciousness experience disappears it is much like a memory. That is how it exists as a memory. The memory frequently causes a person to long for the unity consciousness experience again.

In the after enlightenment experience (for lack of a better term), all that can happen is that you can occasionally get caught up in thoughts, emotions, physical sensations etc. So in this sense enlightenment seems to have gone because you are operating in the same manner as before, but there is a difference and a big one at that. Once it is recognized that you’re caught up in a story of you then what seems to happen is that you drop into being unattached again and the identification with a human self drops.

It is the identification with thoughts, experiences, sensations and emotions that drops consistently and the longer you go on after the enlightenment experience then that becomes more prominent. Contrast that with the unity consciousness experience where there is still a you, albeit a you that seems connected to everything that is caught in the story of attaining the state of unity consciousness again. Unity consciousness is the attempt at the seeking of a human state which is a story of a human being that is all loving and radiating bliss to the world. Spiritual enlightenment is the dropping of the illusion of the human story.

Another difference is in the state of mind. In the unity consciousness experience you are likely to have many positive thoughts. These thoughts make you feel good, at least while it last. You are addicted to feeling good in other words. But after enlightenment thoughts appear much like your fingernails growing. They are there, but no mind is paid to them, much like your fingernails are there now and you don’t pay attention to them. You do not let your fingernails rule your life, and it is the same with thoughts, they do not rule your life. They have the same qualitative impact as your fingernails.

Why people cannot relate to this very well, is they are busy producing thoughts and that essentially what everyone is, one mess of an illusion producing machine, that is too frightened to look within and find out how mind really operates. It is discovering what you really are before noisy and intrusive mind.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 68 Descartes famous dictum of I think therefore I Am, is the malaise of humanity. It is that I AM, therefore there is thinking and everything else, and that’s the difference. Thinking is no longer who you are, but is a by-product of the one mind of the all in all. It is just something that happens for a period of time, like your fingernails grow for a period of time.

Which brings us on to the next part I want to highlight. How do you know when you are enlightened? But that is just it, it’s not about thinking you are enlightened, the whole question simply doesn’t arise or perhaps more aptly is not identified with. It is a completely irrelevant question, because there isn’t identification with questions and answers etc... In other words there is no story of a person seeking, gaining, being enlightened. As such it is not that you walk around saying to yourself “I am enlightened or I am that etc” That’s nonsense and egotistical.

It is the direct seeing that everything is the one appearing as the many. As such, everything already is enlightened because everything in appearance is the Absolute / God. Do not mistake this with the belief that we are all like Gods. There is no we. There is only God and that is what everyone is, when the illusion that there is an everyone drops from existence.

So how do you know when you are enlightened? You already are and it doesn’t matter one iota whether you know it or not. It doesn’t matter because even when this is recognised there won’t really be a you there to be asking or pondering the dilemma or Am I enlightened or aren’t I.

You are not going to gain or achieve anything at all, because your thoughts, emotions etc will become like fingernails. There still but not paid much mind too.

This may be disturbing to some, but that is only because they are busy being disturbed and think that life is meant to be in a certain way, because paradoxically their thoughts dictate it so. But what actually happens after- enlightenment is you become less and less disturbed by things. You can be in pain as in bodily pain or have an illness etc. The pain and illness are still there, but internally you are peaceful, possibly even happy, or happier, though that gives the wrong connotation. Hmmm more like being comfortable. Comfort doesn’t mean running away from pain, it means you are comfortable internally regardless of whether pain or not is in experience. In other words you are comfortable with whatever happens in experience. If you find anger appears and you appear to be angry then you’re comfortable with that. It is perfectly ok. It is

69 Edward Traversa this comfort that tends to generate feelings of gratitude and peace internally and consequently you could say you are happier. Though to be honest the whole notion of whether I am happy or not doesn’t enter consciousness a lot. It is probably more akin to an energetic positivity than anything else.

The unity consciousness experience is not like this, it doesn’t generate a place where you can consistently drop back into no-self. Rather once the experience is gone, it generates a sense of lack, that something is missing in life etc...

If you have the perception of lacking in life, then you haven’t gone all the way yet. You have not recognised the full extent of reality... So perhaps that can serve as a guide for those treading the waters on this pathless path to enlightenment. Or not...

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 70 Be Still

What is there other than this?

No don’t answer the question, instead be aware that there is only this. Do not worry what has come before of what will come. Just this...

If only for a moment, be aware of just this and it has begun.

71 Edward Traversa Mysteries

We sometimes may see a spark of a mystery and the process of undoing begins... The recognition that there is more than meets the eye is a bridge that can be turned inwards as a spiral to that which is...

You are a mystery, and mysteries are reflected everywhere in illusion, because the illusion is also an aspect of truth. Your job is not to uncover the lie of the bible, or Buddhism or society or other people etc. It is to uncover layer by layer, inch by inch, the lie that you believe yourself to be. That is the quest each must undertake.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 72 Not Impressed!

In response to a reader remark that life was not impressive:

You can be guaranteed that all versions of enlightenment are distortions. Enlightenment is not a thing that can be stated here. No one ever has and no one ever will. That is why one must come and see for themselves and the only way to see is to look within.

In your life, your project your own internal fears onto others, as practically everyone does. It is far easier to attempt to deal with fear if it is out there as in contained with other things. But the attempt in itself is futile, because you become the thing you hate.

You are scared of becoming a bitter old man, but are you not already headed that way? Has not dealing with fear by looking outwards at other things and other people etc, turned you into something that is fear driven and immobilized. A thing that goes around and around in circles? A thing that cannot see the majesty of Maya?

I don’t know, but gee in the past year, we have had tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes etc and you cannot be impressed by the power of nature? Cannot be impressed by the drama people make around those things? Cannot be impressed by the stupidity of Governments and people in handling those things? Cannot be impressed by the generosity of others, the selfless service of aid workers, the risking of one’s life to save another? Cannot be impressed by the selfish nature of humans as they rob the dead? Cannot be impressed when leaves turn colours or when an unknown child smiles at you and our heart melts?

Hollywood pales into insignificance against the greatest movie maker of all time and you fail to be impressed?

Is your failure to be impressed then only a condition of your own mind, in that you want things to be a certain way and then find that they are not? And in wishing them to be a certain way are you not then locking yourself into a very filtered perspective of the world and the universe? A perspective that keeps you from being impressed? A perspective that keeps you from seeing beauty even in

73 Edward Traversa what most would consider destructive?

Maya is not going to go away after you awake... It is there and will always be there. But it is a movie, nothing of substance, nothing real, just like fear isn’t real and when fear is no longer real then nothing can be viewed as anything other than a dream when awake: an interwoven thing of grace and synchronicity. Maya is yours to see it in any way you want... It can be an amusement park of horror or an amusement park of joy, either way it’s all an amusement when awake....

All your life you looked to others and asked questions of them and found nothing but disappointment. Now is the time to ask questions of yourself. Now is the time to do something different....

Then perhaps the dance will be beautiful...

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 74 Beauty

You don’t have to be awake to see the beauty and majesty of the world!

In fact, it’s like saying, well I will see the beauty when I am awake, and until then I will not! Kind of self-defeating don’t you think?

The beauty is always there. Already there... We just need to look.

I am reminded of an image from the tsunami. Here in Australia we had some reporters doing a story on the devastation to children caused by the tsunami, and they were showing some pretty horrific pictures of children, some dead, some injured etc. But as the camera was panning around, it caught a shot of some children playing in the rubble, carefree laughing etc... So even in the worst of circumstances there was this joy and laughter and lightness.

One but needed to look to see that... Of course the reporters didn’t do that, since there agenda was to make it appear all bad, but it was there irrespective of the reporters intention. More importantly, it has nothing to do with being awake or not, because the next day a few of my friends were discussing that very same thing. How the children were playful in the midst of calamity.

75 Edward Traversa Integration Summary

One persistent topic that people seem interested in is integration. Part of this period of absence from writing and working on the book has made it clearer than this topic needs to be covered with some depth, and as such the book is now being expanded to accommodate this topic along with a few others that have become clearer in consciousness that they need to be covered.

In this article, I just want to provide a point form summary of the main themes of integration, just to give people a bit of an idea about what occurs and what is involved.

I guess many people have this notion, that once you awake then everything becomes a state of bliss or joy overnight. They do not understand that the awakening part is not an ending, but rather is a beginning; it is a birth of the highest magnitude that invariably will bring many changes over the years into life. This is basically what I call integration and here in point form is some of the major things it consists of.

1. The gradual and continual reduction of fear / anxiety. As time apparently moves forward the shock that your existence is one of no self begins to filter through. It becomes clearer and clearer that you literally have nothing to lose, no matter what the circumstance may be at the time. When there is nothing to lose then there is nothing to fear and your life begins to revolve around this state of living in by and large an anxiety free state.

2. As fear is being diminished what most people will find entering consciousness is gratitude. An abundance of it! Why? Because once fear is gone, then the concept that something is wrong also vanishes. That is a lot to be grateful for.

3. Simplicity. Where once life was cluttered, there is gradual but powerful pull to make life as simple as can be. Simple in this context should not be mistaken for dullness. In fact it is quite the opposite; simple becomes deeper, richer... In my experience this manifests in many ways. Examples would be that there is a focus on quality as opposed to quantity. At one point I had many people I called “friends.” Now I have a bare minimum of people that are friends, yet they are the best of friends... My social circle has narrowed greatly and will likely continue to

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 76 do so. It goes beyond that, everything that is not really necessary begins to get removed from life. Where I once relied upon driving a car and using a mobile phone, I found them to be distractions as opposed to making my life better. So out the window they go so to speak. What comes in the window is peace, time to reflect, time to enjoy oneself simply by observing whatever is occurring.

4. As I mentioned before the assumption that something is wrong or out of place begins to vanish. An example would be the recent heart surgery. The idea that there was something wrong just never occurs. What occurs is more like a mystery, a curiosity, a pattern manifesting that must lead to “perfection” in some way, at some point in time, even if we are totally clueless as to what that outcome may be. I have some good example to illustrate this point, which I will write about in the next post. Hopefully the distinction will be a lot clearer once the examples are read.

5. You begin to function more on instinct and intuition, and less on long deliberate rational thought. Thought in the normal sense of the word kind of takes a back seat and you tend to work of instincts, following patterns as they appear in life.

6. Loss of identity. How horrifying... Well actually it isn’t, because the identity you think of as you is not really you to begin with. What occurs is simply this; let us say there is a car outside passing by. There is consciousness of the car passing by and associated noises it makes. In this sense it is no different than your day to day experiences. But what is different is that there is no middle man. There is just the sound of the car driving by as opposed to “Eddie listening to a sound of a car driving by.” This is something you can test out in your own experiences right now. Take a step with your foot and focus on that step. What is there but a step? The whole idea that you’re taking a step comes after the moment; it is a memory of sorts where you interject a persona of self taking a step. Take away that persona and what remains? Just the “isness” of the step. Take a bite of your favourite food, stop thinking you’re eating, and just focus on the flavour and texture. Remove yourself from the equation and what remains is just delicious flavour and texture. What diminishes is this sense of you as a person doing things and is gradually replaced by more spontaneous and direct immediate experiences of whatever is occurring in consciousness.

77 Edward Traversa 7. Present moment awareness. I alluded to this earlier on, but I also wanted to mention something else about this. It is not uncommon to have memory lapses of sorts. I once wrote on this blog that one day I found myself in the shower and initially could not remember how I got there. With some effort I managed to recall the memory and trace my steps back and saw that I was so focussed on the moment that as each moment passed it was forgotten. The memory as such isn’t really lost; it’s just that there is no concern with what occurred previously. As the years go on, then what seems like strange stuff seems to occur. For example, I want a cup of tea and get up to make one, but once I get into the kitchen there is a cup of tea there waiting for me. I think I better turn on the heater, so I go to switch it on, but it’s already on... Some may take that to be magic, but all that’s really happened over time is the letting go of what occurs in the immediate past. If I really wanted to, I could retrace my steps and have that memory of me making that cup of tea. But in consciousness now that seems like an awful big effort to make, since all I wanted is a cup of tea and that is what I got. How I made it, how it appeared is just of no concern any longer. Want cup of tea, got cup of tea. That’s enough...

8. As fear diminishes and gratitude begins to permeate consciousness a flow begins to appear in life. It is manifestation of the highest order simply by keeping your eyes open and your head clear. What I mean by flow and manifestation differs from what you typically read about. Manifestation and flow from this integrated perspective is not about owning a Ferrari, having a trophy wife or husband, a better job etc... It is the recognition that the universe / god manifests and your prayer of intent if you will is for the manifestation of whatever is best for the universe. Invariably what is best for the universe will be best for you, even though at times it may seem otherwise. It is the clear seeing that the universe is not chaotic, but rather is harmonious and has an intelligence that cannot be imagined. So let the universe run the show, since it is doing so anyway and you will find that life will turn around for the better... You may not be a millionaire, but you will be richer in other ways that you cannot imagine as yet and will be eternally grateful for it. If there is a message here, it would be this, let go and let God... Ok it’s a bit more complex than that, but the more you get yourself out of the equation the easier life becomes is the main point to take from this.

9. You begin to do what you really want to do. If you don’t like the job, loose it. If

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 78 you don’t like that friend lose it. If you don’t want to visit your family don’t. The shackles of what everyone wants you to be are broken as time continues you see more clearly how obstructed from flow you really are. I do not mean this in an immature sense, as if we become gluttons and eat our way to fatness or become lazy or drink yourself into oblivion. What I mean is that since the BS of what you have been taught over the years diminishes in time, it frees up the energy to be doing what you truly desire to be doing. For example, you feel tired in the afternoon, and you feel like a nap. You take one. There is no longer the obligation to be doing something, working towards being better, there is just this recognition now’s a good time for a nap and that’s exactly what I am going to do because that is what is indicated. What you will find as time progresses is that your truest desires become apparent and you begin to adjust your life accordingly.

10. Fascination with what some would call the mystical. You may find a growing interest, nay more like a pull towards the mystical. As the process of finding your own feet in this rebirth continues, things like the space between thoughts, the energy that goes into that and comes out of there as one example may captivate your interest. You may find yourself become even more acutely aware of your body energy. Part of the reason for this is you are begging to examine life from a new perspective and you are become more in tune with what you have missed about existence for so long.

11. You will begin to find that you trust yourself more and more as time progresses. What may appear as lunacy to others is perfect harmony and the perfect thing for you to do, even though no one else may see it that way.

12. You are free, for the first time in your life you are free. This grows...

The above is just a small sample of some of the things I will be writing about in terms of integration. I should add that while the above focuses mainly on the positive things, that one should also be aware that it very common to initially find this “new” state to be disturbing. It isn’t all quiet a bed of roses and struggles will continue to manifest in life. Yes there are pitfalls along the way too and I will discuss them also at some point.

The point though I mainly want to get across for now is that integration is a bit like the gravy on the meat and potatoes. But like anything else it takes time to cultivate and allowed to flourish.

79 Edward Traversa The Meaning of Life

There is none.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 80 The Infinite God

One of the greatest areas for confusion is assuming that the universe is all of God, or all of consciousness. Consciousness is infinite in size. It is not expanding, it is not moving. It cannot be, since there is no such thing as infinity plus one.

The appearance of this universe however, is an apparent movement in consciousness. The universe is limited in size, but is growing and expanding as a movement in the consciousness of God.

So when it is said that God is expanding, that is not entirely true as God is already infinite. The appearance of the physical universe however is a state of expansion as a projection of the infinite.

81 Edward Traversa Fools

The source of all that is not emanates the appearance of dumbness and fools. Duality, which is just as much part of the Absolute as anything else, needs fools and as such all is perfect.

Allowing a person to discover that they are a fool is a pointing within, should the person dare to look within, which nearly everyone doesn’t. A place where one can enquire and understand that all their lives they have been fooled. Perhaps one in a hundred million will undergo that sort of internal enquiry and perhaps one in a hundred million of those will awake to realize that they are but dreaming they are awake. For all that is, is a dream.

Is source a fool? No, but then it is not acceptance, nor love, nor compassion or anything else you care to name it either. It is beyond all those things... Does source emanate fools? You betcha! Since source is the potential for all things, then that includes the possibility of fools appearing.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 82 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

In the comments section of the site, I made the following remark in reference to someone stating that having a heart attack was because of being broken hearted.

"As for being broken hearted, I would gladly live this life again, with every single bit of pain, trauma, childhood abuse, betrayal, heart attacks, diabetes, and everything everyone else considers to be suffering. I can look back and say truly it has been a blessed life and that I would not swap a minute of it. Not even a second of it."

One person in the comments section was curious about this statement so I will repeat their response here.

“Eddie one question, from the above quote of yours, I’m curious. I can't help but ask you: why would you want to live life, with each and every moment of child abuse, pain, trauma etc. How do you see all of that as a blessing? So much so, that you wouldn't want to swap a minute of it?

A few people since then have also enquired along the same lines, so I thought now is a good time to respond to this query.

The answer is relatively simple. It is because now there is a change of view, where one can see the function of disharmony, pain, and suffering in life. I relate well to the scene in Forest Gump where his army friend who had lost his legs is atop the mast in the middle of a storm shouting in anger at God, proclaiming is that the best you can do and stating something to the effect well guess what I am still here!

Later in life this same person becomes successful and is happily married. Ok it is a movie, we all understand that. Nonetheless life is much like that. Suffering creates movement and if used constructively can be of great benefit to understanding self. I will say that very few have the consumption to use it constructively, but nonetheless the opportunity to do so exists.

So in retrospect, I see how everything fitted together. Without all that suffering, there would never have been a need to attempt to progress, to overcome the

83 Edward Traversa suffering, to seek the answers to life. Of course in the end all that seeking was futile, but the futility in itself is part of the journey and simply had to be gotten through.

What remains in the end is the seeing of a very intricate pattern of how everything fitted together to bring one to a point of no self. It was a conspiracy, without a conspirer, a grand plan, without a planner. The good, the bad and the ugly were all part of this and if but a single piece had changed or not been there, the discovery / remembrance of emptiness for lack of better terminology would have been missed. That is why I would go through it all again, if I had too.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 84 Judgement

Readers Question: If fools and enlighten are both emanated from the dreamer, then aren’t both the same thing, just a dream? Is judging a pointless exercise of the dreamer since really there is no point to judge?

There is no point to not judging either. Judge or not it doesn’t’ make a difference, since both are equal in that they are dreams and only part of imagination. One is not better than the other...

But one can lead in a certain direction and the other in a different direction as manifested here in the dual.

85 Edward Traversa The Script of Time

Sometimes when I am describing the nature of day to day reality I use the metaphor that it is like a movie or a dream. In consciousness everything is dreamlike including what others would perceive to be me. This peculiar way of operating in the world is called being awake in spiritual circles, but it is misleading in the sense that it is only a dream of being awake. It can be said that masses are dreaming they are asleep, then there a few that are dreaming they are dreaming and finally there is the rarity of dreaming of being awake.

Frequently, I am asked who is the dreamer or writer of the dream / script. It is a natural enough question to ask, since in logic if there is a dream there must be a dreamer. That would be the conventional way of thinking of it. The reality is that the dreamer and dream are one and the same, which in many people’s minds would raise a paradox. Let us examine this paradox by using our thoughts as an example.

In daily experience there is a perception that we are in control of our thoughts and this rarely if ever goes unquestioned. However, if we examine our thoughts thoroughly we will come to the inevitable conclusion that it is not as clear as we would like to believe that we are in control of our thoughts.

An example to illustrate this would be to examine your own internal experience and be mindful of what happens when you first awake in the morning. When did you decide to switch on your thoughts? Where your thoughts even off in the first place, for them to be switched on or were they just simply there? If they were just there, then who or what is making them appear, since it does not seem to be you?

There is another example I would like to share before moving into a discussion of who is in control. If you are an inexperienced mediator try counting to 100 silently in your mind. It is a simple enough request to do if you are really in control of your thoughts is it not?

Most people do not make it much past counting five or six before another thought enters consciousness, seemingly against their volition. The length of counting numbers may vary for experienced mediators’, but habitually a thought will eventually intrude against volition. While many seekers try to use this simple exercise as an “I am better than you, because I can count further without another thought intruding” exercise, the real point has nothing to do with how many

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 86 numbers one can count. One of the purposes of this exercise is to demonstrate that we are nowhere as in control as we would have ourselves believe. Another is the intentional throwing of the seeker into a predicament.

A predicament arises because if there is an observation of thoughts, there will be times when a person appears to be in control and other times when they are not. The pickle that a seeker then finds is who is in control, is it the Absolute or is it me? The lines become blurred and the seeker is thrust into a state of not knowing from which they will seek to escape.

Rather than abiding in this state of not knowing; in what is present in their experiences and delving deeper into the mysteries of self, typically they make straight for the abyss of knowledge as quickly as they can. In consciousness, they think “if only that piece of the puzzle is revealed in my mind then it will be ok.” There is a movement that seeks something that is external to them, in this case an object of knowledge. The subtle arguments of the mind which by now have been deeply entrenched in psyche will convince the seeker that they are looking within, when in actuality they are looking outside of themselves without realizing it. In other words they are looking to acquire, to gain, and to possess as opposed to examining the very thing before them; the state of not knowing. It is ego bolstering instead of deconstructing ego.

Let us do some ego bolstering for the moment in order to demonstrate that enlightenment has nothing to do with the acquisition of knowledge or any other quality for that matter. The apparent paradox of who is in control dissipates when one considers that there is no end and no beginning.

The script is not one where this is an omnipotent being who is pulling your strings. It is that everything that has happened is still happening, everything happening now will always happen, and everything that will happen has already happened. Let us use the medium of science to illustrate some points that may be relevant to the paradox.

Reflect on your day to day experiences. Time appears to move forward, where today rolls onto tomorrow and tomorrow rolls onto the next day. In consciousness this gives the impression that there is an arrow of time, where time is moving forward. No one denies that this is the impression that we have.

However, the model of an arrow of time moving forward, does not work scientifically. It could not be more wrong if it tried. We know this from the

87 Edward Traversa realms or physics and cosmology to name a few where a number of experiments have demonstrated that time simply does not work in the way we perceive it. What does work scientifically is a frozen river of time model.

Imagine a river that represents time, where the river is frozen, hence time is frozen. If you had the ability to traverse up and down the river you would be stepping on discrete pieces of time. Each of these segments is eternal and is unchangeable. It cannot be altered in any way, shape or form. It just exists always as it is. Further you could make your way into the future just as easily as you could into the past. There is no real arrow of time in other words.

Now let us bring this back to the notion of a scripter or creator. From our vantage point as human beings we can say there is a script, since everything is predestined. What will be, will be.

However since there is no beginning or no end, there cannot be a point in time where something was created. Rather it just is and what is more it just is eternally... It may appear ongoing to us and it may appear that things are created and destroyed, but in reality even at the level of manifestation it is not as ongoing as we perceive it. It is that when you had your cup of tea or coffee or orange juice this morning or whatever it was you had, that even at the level of manifestation that moment lives eternally.

If there is only one in existence, then this one at some level must convey something of its essence at all times and at all levels. While we say that Maya is illusory, many forget that Maya is also the appearance of the Absolute in form. As such at some level it must convey something of its essential nature even if only symbolically, while simultaneously producing an illusory construct. The illusory construct is the perception of time moving forward in an arrow like fashion. Its essence is revealed in the eternity of frozen time.

The thought exists eternally without a thinker, without movement and without energy. It is the spirit of stillness manifest; the Absolute in condensed emptiness, yet veiled from normal perception in the illusory dualistic world. The illusion being that there is a thinker of a thought, a creator of the script.

It is important to note that in this instance what is being discussed is manifest reality. In the more real, which sometimes is called ultimate reality; there is just pristine stillness, an emptiness that doesn’t comprise of objects, collections of

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 88 thoughts or even frozen time. But since we are concerned with time and creation, it is more prudent to stick to the topic at hand.

The above may bring a little clarity and end some confusion for a small measure of time, but it does not typically move one in the direction of transcending the thought and its relation to time. Rather it has the opposite effect and keeps one glued to thoughts and bound by time.

There are some ways you can examine time and thought in an experiential manner that may help alleviate an over reliance on intellectualization. The difference in these exercises is that the seeker is not looking to acquire anything. It is merely to observe what is already there in your experience.

Stand in front of mirror and focus attention on your face. Note that the face you perceive is older than it was ten years ago. Notice something else. The essential sense of you being you has not changed no matter how far back a person goes into the past. Ten years ago, twenty years ago, or any period of time for that matter there was always a sense of you being you. Certainly there can be perceptions that a person’s psychological and physical makeup has altered, yet unerringly there is a sense of “I am me.” Or as sages like to say a sense of I am... Doesn’t it strike you as odd that in a world where nearly everyone proclaims the only constant is change that this sense has not changed over the years?

Consider if you will that there is something about your existence that is unwavering. Notice again that the inclination will be to try and define it. This time instead of attempting to escape, turn your attention around, and explore this sense of an unwavering I am.

There is something else you could notice about your experiences. Look to your thoughts and emotions and just notice that they come and go. In your experience they occur in the context of time, there is an ending to one thought or emotion and a beginning to another. But isn’t there something that is also aware of the thoughts coming and going? And doesn’t this awareness also seem to be a constant, a thing that is ever present and seemingly not bound by time?

Could it be possible that you have identified with the passage of time, the comings and goings of mind and overlooked the constant in your own individual experiences and missed that the script is always calling you to return to true self for no other reason, other than that it is its nature? No one pulling your strings,

89 Edward Traversa just an ever present opportunity to awaken, that is woven into the very fabric of being.

Likely that too did not enable a transcendence of your identification with self, but at least it is in the correct direction and no person can do any better than travel in the direction that they were meant to travel towards.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 90 Struggle and Strength

From struggle comes strength. To transcend the struggle one must first experience it. Everything is as it should be

91 Edward Traversa Favourites

One of my favourites as it encapsulates a lot with not many words.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery.

~Tao TE CHING~

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 92 Draw a Thought

There is more than one way to skin yourself alive.

We often think of journaling as a means to providing insight and consequently open the door for negation as purely a written exercise and restrict it to that. Yet we can often find many undiscovered aspects of self by using different mediums to achieve the same end.

A good way to push further is to use art in it myriad forms. For example, we could try to do some illustration or art work with the following theme.

Draw a thought, not the content of the thought, but a thought itself.

The artwork becomes like a Zen Koan because it is difficult for the mind to wrap itself around such a thing. It can become a series of progressing drawings each trying to capture the essence of thought, where you can look at your first drawing, then the next and so on and see a pattern unfolding within the artwork itself, which may not be normally seen through conventional journaling.

This type of work can be good for people who are too stuck in their heads as it allows them to explore the same subject manner from a different perspective and allow themselves to experientially discover that thinking is not necessarily what it is cracked up to be.

It doesn’t have to be a drawing; clay sculpting is excellent for this type of work as it’s akin to putting something of yourself in the sculpture. You could also express it through a tapestry, sowing, music, photographs etc...

The quality of the art does not really matter. The intent is not to create a masterpiece, but rather is one of expressing oneself and more importantly discovering oneself through journaling in an atypical manner.

So you could start with doing something like, where you perceive yourself to be now and where you would like to be at some point in the future.

93 Edward Traversa You could then go on and draw different aspects of self. The angry self, the happy self, the carefree self, the intellectual self etc...

Draw the thing that you perceive to be in the way of awakening. Draw the thing that you perceive would take away the thing that stands in the way.

You could then extend it further, draw what you’re like when you perceive yourself to be in control. Then draw what it is like to be controlled by others. Then draw control itself.

What would control look like in a painting, a mural, a sculpture?

Do not limit the form that the journaling takes, for all it does is limit yourself and when it comes to awakening you want to throw everything you can at it.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 94 What is it Like

One of the most frequent questions I get is what is the experience of being enlightened like? I understand the curiosity but unfortunately most are missing the point.

Most are looking for a human experience to indicate enlightenment but all experiences are illusory. Enlightenment is not a state of higher consciousness or an altered state. Altered states are relatively easy to attain. Sit with me for 20 minutes or so and ill trip your mind into an altered state as easy as saying 1,2,3. But that has nothing to do with enlightenment.

Enlightenment is not something you can imagine, nor can you bear witness to, for there isn’t that sort of separation. The human being is not in existence in that momentless moment. There was no Eddie having an experience of enlightenment, there was just the absolute which was enlightenment and what remains in small consciousness are artefacts’ of that. It would even be more accurate to say that what remains are distorted artefacts in the sense that no matter what is said about the absolute it is always a distortion of one sort of another. Truth cannot be stated ever. It can only be known, by being truth which is not something that is related to the human being.

I know of some people that had disturbances after the experience and I know of others that immediately went into a deep peaceful state. The point being experiences are not a thing to hang your hat on for they can vary greatly. They come and go, but the absolute is always there, appearing here as the dream, no appearance there in the formless, which paradoxically is right here too in everything.

The lead up to enlightenment can be remembered, the after effects of enlightenment can be remembered, but the lead up and the aftermath are just forms of illusions. What is in between is reality, but it is not a reality that can be held with a human mind, it can only be held with direct mind where in actuality it is the mind of the Absolute communing with the mind of the Absolute and not the human mind communicating with a deity of some sorts.

95 Edward Traversa That is why I am often hard on people who say they have had many mystical experiences and claim them to be some indicator of enlightenment.I am hard for they do not understand that while experiences can be very profound, very mystical, and very beautiful; they are absolutely no different to experiences of taking a walk in the park, witnessing a murder, drinking a glass of water. There is no where that the absolute (God) is not and that is a literal thing and not a metaphor. The only thing you need to look at in terms of enlightenment is yourself. You are the koan of life; it is the only koan in existence that you need to work on. The only one that matters. How are koans solved? By transcending them, or shattering them completely.

Think about that in terms of experiences. When I describe my experiences they are but dream experiences of a person dreaming they are awake, that seemingly differ from pre-enlightenment experiences. Yet no matter the experience, it is always known that they are dreams. It is but a dream without attachment to a story, a goal, an outcome. That is all that is going on... No one ever has or ever will be enlightened. Worth thinking about that too!

Knock yourselves out and keep having mystical experiences but in the end, know that they must be shattered for the illusion that they are too.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 96 What If?

What if death was the greatest lie ever told? What if a personal God was the greatest lie ever told? What if pain is the greatest lie ever told? What if the existence of you is the greatest lie ever told?

What then?

97 Edward Traversa Consciousness

Consciousness is what you want you as a human being. It is where you will find an abundance of love and the world will appear to be your oyster.

In this lifetime, if you are on a spiritual path, you are treading paths to consciousness. Some will move beyond that by unbecoming, until all paths, all thoughts, all emotions, all experiences are seen for the dream they are...

All paths lead to consciousness eventually, be it in this lifetime or another.

No path leads to spiritual enlightenment. Enlightenment is beyond the human being... Enlightenment is beyond consciousness... It is not a thing one can become. One can only un-become and return home. Though returning home implies that something has been lost and in reality nothing has. For now though the usage of returning home will suffice.

Eventually all return home just like the road to consciousness, though not necessarily in this lifetime. Most will stop along the way to enjoy the fruits of consciousness. Moving past consciousness becomes another thing altogether, where we are the dreamer, which is what we all really are, except there is no we.

Consciousness is about connection and unity and manifestation.

Enlightenment is alone and things like connection, unity, and manifestation are seen for the reality of the dream that they are...

Do you really want to be alone? The only thing in existence?

You see you can say you do, but you really don’t, not deep down. You will run to all sorts of things to not be alone. To nature, to repeating patterns of behaviour, to distractions, to love etc to avoid one thing: fear. The fear of being alone. The fear of no-self.

It is not that we fear as ego, it is that we are fear. And to destroy the fear we must destroy our hearts... That is why enlightenment is beyond consciousness, consciousness is heart, enlightenment is beyond...

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 98

Does that mean that we then become emotionless when awake? Not at all. It is only that the emotions are no longer us, rather they just occur in experience, and are viewed as a dream, as all things are...

A dream, a fairytale, a thing of imagination....

99 Edward Traversa Picturing the Void

If you are picturing something it becomes manifest; an object of perception and therefore cannot be the nameless, eternal Tao.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 100 Teaching the Awakened

A reader’s question:

"I've read that the time to find a teacher is after awakening, can you tell me what that means? That means there are pitfalls doesn't it"?

It would be the same with seekers; most seekers probably need a good teacher at some point even if it is for a short while. But the emphasis here should not be on a traditional seeker – teacher relationship, e.g. like doing the guru student thing or creating a huge ashram etc... The emphasis should be on allowing the student to discover that in fact they are their own map and are the territory.

It also raises the question of what is a teacher. There is a myth in spiritual circles that once enlightened that being a good spiritual teacher is a formality. Teaching in itself is a skill that is developed like any other skill. It is not an outcome of enlightenment. It is a product of the skill set you have acquired through life. So if you were a poor teacher before enlightenment, unless you work very hard to become a good teacher, you will remain a poor teacher. If you have good skills prior to awakening in this area, then those can be applied to the teaching.

A teacher does not necessarily have to be a spiritual guru. When I look back on my experiences, I didn’t have a formal spiritual teacher. Yet I had many different teachers through my life, which includes, a counsellor, some friends, some past lovers, family etc to name but a few... None of them would consider themselves to be a spiritual teacher, yet unequivocally each taught me something about myself. And learning about yourself is where it’s all at.

Which brings us back to the original question of finding a teacher after awakening. I would say it would be dependent on a per individual basis. If there are aspect that one finds disturbing because it conflicts with prior conditioning then there is nothing wrong with asking someone what is going on.

Remembering that the human being is not the enlightened thing, the after image, the person in other words will find what may at first seem like strange occurrences. But they are not really strange or out of the ordinary in any true sense of the word. It is only that while ego has dominance that we do not see

101 Edward Traversa what is already there. As ego goes more to the background, then what is apparent rises to consciousness.

An example of this would be no mind. People do no mind all the time. It is just they don’t pay attention to it because their thoughts or emotions or experiences are construed to be more important that what is between the thoughts, emotions and experiences. So it’s not like suddenly bang no mind appears out of nowhere, rather it is seen that here is one aspect of life that barely anyone notices.

When one begins to notice that more, then one falls outside of societal norms. One can then wonder if they are going insane or not and this can cause disharmony in the sense that one is not operating in a free flowing fashion.

That is just one example, there are many more that come readily to mind, but the point is that the after awakening experiences cannot possibly fall under what society calls normal. It cannot because everyone else thinks the world operates in one way, where as you know it works in quite a different manner to what we have been conditioned to believe.

A teacher could be useful for someone awakened and experiencing some disturbance in the sense that what may seem “out there” or not normal to the seeker can then be viewed as just an ongoing part of integration.

That said though, there is a lot to be said for flying by the seat of your pants and allowing things to just manifest.

Finally, no there are no pitfalls, at least not really. Pitfalls are a manifestation; they are related to human functioning as judged by prior conditioning. There should be no attachment to whether you live the rest of your life in misery or the rest of your life in peace and joy. Either is perfectly ok, and once it is perfectly ok then well that’s a whole new ball game...

Part of the mystery and fun is to discover the whole new ball game and see whether you wish to partake in it or not.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 102 Crying

I cried for a thousand and one nights only to awake to find that there was no one crying.

103 Edward Traversa The Death Rattle of the Walking Dead

Frequently, I am asked how I cope with life after awakening, but see the thing is I do not cope in the ordinary sense of the word. It is not a thing where I try and cope, rather I just do whatever is indicated at the time. So let’s see if I give a sense of this by using an extreme example from my life. While the example is extreme, it applies to a lot of other things as well.

I have a damaged heart which causes me to physically be unwell at times. Around a month ago, I started to cough and then proceeded to vomit. This intensified, and I noted pains running through my neck, chest and arms. This continued for a little while, and then I started to gasp for air. I couldn’t breathe.

It occurred to me that I may well be taking my last breaths on this planet and quite possible I would collapse dead, right there over the toilet bowl. The “enlightened guy” dying in the toilet, how fitting...

Yet despite not being able to breathe, and having pains running around my upper body, I was calm internally, dead calm. Sorry couldn’t resist the pun. The only thing I was interested in was what is going to happen now, and that interest had a low level sense of joy as I began to revel in the experience of what I perceived to be dying at the time.

Here I am possibly taking my last breath on Earth and instead of panic and fear, I was just focused on each sensation as it came and went. Wondering what it would be like to collapse there and then, wondering what the next sensation would be, wondering if there would be a next breath.

I could have even slipped into observer mode and just watched from afar, which probably would have made it a different experience again, but no, I wanted to experience this, and I wanted to experience the bodies’ last death rattle from the experience of the body.

I observe my hand reaching for the wall to gain balance and note the texture of the tiles on the walls. Curious I think, I am dying and here I am feeling how the tiles feel against my hand.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 104

I gasp for air again, and I note how the air goes in, and how the body wants more, my lungs feeling constricted. “Oh, there is a nice bit of pain in my upper arm”, I think, and I note the movement of the pain, how it starts, how it moves, and how it diminishes only to start again somewhere else. I seem to be observing things as if time slowed down, as if a microsecond was an hour.

In my dying seconds or at least the perception of my dying seconds, I am experiencing each experience as it comes. I have recognition that death possibly is approaching, I have recognition that if it comes, it will be kind of cool, shiny even for the firefly fans.

Probably if there was someone watching me, it would have appeared to them that this was a person in serious trouble. I mean after all, here is a body trying to get more air into it, trying to get balanced, etc... But internally, it was just the body going through the motions of being in serious trouble, except to me it wasn’t that serious. I wasn’t coping, I was just experiencing and all experiences are not that serious anymore.

What I mean by that is that death is not a serious issue unless you make it one. It’s a dream, a dream of dying. And as such, while pain, gasping for air, striving for balance may appear in the body, the thing of it is, it doesn’t matter if the body dies.

It doesn’t matter, because I know where I am going, for I am already there....

Now obviously I didn’t die, probably had a minor heart attack (who knows and who cares, not me as yet), but I haven’t bothered to check if that is the case as yet. One day, when it’s indicated, I may do so, and then that will be another dream, where the dream will be getting my heart checked out, once again...

Sometime in the future, death will come for me to be sure. Perhaps it will be experienced differently, perhaps not. The only thing I can be certain of is that it will be an experience and that’s enough....

105 Edward Traversa Currents of Life

“We must take the current when it serves.”

~Shakespeare~

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 106 What is Truth?

Truth cannot be stated. Most people who read Jed’s book conveniently miss the part where it is stated that one attempts to define the highest truth, but it cannot ever be defined. It is not a thing that is ever going to be written down on paper and it certainly isn’t a thing that forms in a human mind.

Truth in the context of awakening isn’t a tangible thing in the same way that 1+1 = 2 may be considered tangible. It is not a truth that is inside of the human mind which appears as a thought, emotion, sensation or any form of experience, no matter how profound that experience may appear to be. Truth is not the acquirement of some piece of knowledge. It doesn’t come from books, it doesn’t come from others, and it doesn’t come from you as a person.

The closest we can come to stating truth is that there is existence, but what that existence is and what it comprises of is ineffable. Even then that is merely an approximation, a sort of intellectual truth that does in no way do justice to that which is...

To look within for truth doesn’t mean that there is something at the core of us internally that is truth. That notion tends to give seekers the impression that at the heart of us is a soul or a higher being, an inner child, an intuitive self and so on. Enlightenment is beyond all those things. It means that eventually, it is directly seen that there is no one home, nothing in us and nothing around us.

Nothing though is not what it seems. It would be more accurate to say that what is within or outside of us is the absolute or God or insert your favourite deity’s names here. Nothing then is used in the context that what is within and outside is ineffable; completely and utterly indefinable. Words like emptiness or void or stillness are used to attempt the convey this.

Regardless, no matter how many times this is said or whoever says it, a seeker wants to “possess” truth as if it was some sort of commodity that can be owned. In short they want to understand that which cannot be understood and make it their own.

That is why the spiritual marketplace is filled to the brim with spiritual nonsense.

107 Edward Traversa All someone needs to do is write very well, give people something they can posses and market it as within everyone’s reach. Best sellers work of that principle and seekers fall for it time and time again. Why do they fall for it? Because they want too... The fault is not in the writer of the book, it is in the gullibility of people and their inability to think through what is being said.

You take a simple notion, like being in the now, which by the way has been written about many times before, then you market it as the answer and before you know it you have a franchise and a following of millions.

If one were to think through what was being stated then one would see the sheer nonsense of this proposition. You are always in the now. Even when you think about past thoughts, they occur in the now. Same with future thoughts, they occur in the now. Getting in the place between thoughts also occurs in the now. There is nothing you can do, to not be in the NOW. Now is always here, always present, that is worth noticing more than attempting to be in something you are already in.

Past memories or future imaginations are not the problem. One can tell this from their own internal experiences, where some memories will cause pain and others will be pleasant and some will have no effect at all. The memories or imagination of the future are not the problem as far as human functioning goes.

What is problematic for most people is the identification with the story of you as a suffering being. The story that things should be another way than what they are. Which would lead most people to think that acceptance is the key. Yes there have been best sellers written on this topic as well. No huge surprise here.

We then have all this stuff about being that also has been around for ages. But enlightenment is neither being or non-being, where nearly every spiritual seeker things it is something to do with being in a certain state of being.

Let’s take Jed. Now I like Jed’s books a lot. But here is a guy that is claiming certain things in his book. An ashram for one that no one on the planet seems to have heard of, and in the ashram there are plenty of students Jed would tell us. Would it not seem plausible then that at least one of his students would identify him, given that in this line there are always going to be students bitching about

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 108 their former teachers?

So here is a guy claiming to have a certain success rate as far as enlightenment goes, yet most people don’t question the viability of that. Have you ever read Jed McKenna’s proposal for his first book? For a guy that claims to not care about marketing he sure does try and convince the publisher that his book will be highly marketable.

As I said like Jed’s books a lot and recommend them and will continue to do so, but you got to take Jed and his concepts apart too... This will be the same for me as well, when and if I ever finish my book.

Enlightenment then or truth has nothing to do with being more actively present, being more accepting or compassionate or loving. It is the complete and utter falling away of the illusion that there is someone there that needs to be enlightened in the first place. The emphasis here is not on this occurring as a thought inside of someone head. Rather it is that in the absolute there is only the absolute.

That means there is no you, no we, no others. That is what dissipates in an implosion / explosion which starts of in mind and ends with no self.

There is only one. This one, sometimes described as the Absolute, God or Stillness, Emptiness and so on appears as everything. The appearance is not the reality, it is holy yes, but it is not the reality in the truest sense of the word. The appearance is the absolute as a limited illusory form.

We can always say that the appearance is not that, because every appearance, every experience is always mired in duality; an object there and a perceiver here. Duality is not a bad thing by the way. It should be remembered that duality is a manifestation from the absolute.

Which leads back to an earlier point: It is that seekers tendency is to possess. So they make a story up that there is thing over there called enlightenment which is non dual and there is a thing over here called me which is dual, but wants to be non-dual. A seeker wants to possess non-duality in other words, which always makes two and never ever can be one.

109 Edward Traversa

To discover truth then, one must begin a process of deconstruction of the self. The way to do that is to engage in self awareness, but self awareness that does not bolster the ego or better put does it with the least amount of ego bolstering as possible.

What is ego? Ego is everything you believe to be you. It isn’t an arrogance thing as is commonly conveyed. Ego is your thoughts, your emotions, your physical sensations, your experiences. It is everything you believe in, including notions of enlightenment.

You dwindle yourself away by examining yourself and seeing the untruth of what you take yourself to be.

You as such cannot be successful at attaining enlightenment. What starts off on the path is not what ends up as enlightenment. That is why the butterfly analogy is often used. A butterfly in comparison to a caterpillar is of an entirely different order and magnitude. You cannot kill the caterpillar that you are for if you did then it will never transform into a butterfly. An analogy would be, if a caterpillar committed suicide, then it would not magically transform into a butterfly.

It is the same on this pathless path. Ego cannot kill ego, because it’s always ego doing the killing. Likewise someone else cannot kill ego for you. If something else killed the caterpillar, then the caterpillar would not become a butterfly.

What does one do then? They prepare themselves as best as they can to become a butterfly. A caterpillar takes care of itself, it eats the right food, stays out of harm’s way as best as it can and lets what must inevitability occur, occur.

This does not mean that as human beings we gorge on food and lock ourselves up in our rooms waiting to become enlightened. Our food in this analogy is awareness and staying out of harm’s way in this analogy often is quite the opposite of what we believe. More on that in a minute.

To be increasingly aware means a very rigorous and dedicated undertaking on the part of the student. While it is true that the potential for this exists in everyone, very few actually follow it through. For example at its most basic, a

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 110 drug addict isn’t going to become enlightened while on drugs.

That person needs to get off the drugs first. Which is in fact the spiritual path for that person. They could be meditating, tweaking chakras, saying mantras all they like, but if they are pushing a dose of heroin into their veins, all that supposedly “spiritual stuff” is in vain. They would need to examine what got them into drugs in the first place, what kept the behaviour intact for so long, what did they get out of it and so on. They become increasingly aware of themselves and how they interact with the world. Finally and with some luck they may see that a drug addict is not who they are.

For most people though, they will just simply jump around from one form of identity to another. In the case of the drug addict they may then define themselves as a good person. That too is an identity which needs to be examined. It is the same with everything in life. If you’re experiencing a relationship breakdown, then that in fact is the spiritual path. It is the grist provided for introspection.

What is the purpose of awareness then? To see the untruth of us and that is a thing that no one can really want. They cannot want it, because what is wanting it is also an untruth.

At this point you may be thinking that all of this sounds like an exercise in futility. And you’re right. It is exactly an exercise in futility, but an exercise that one must engage in nonetheless.

A caterpillar may do all the right things, eat well and stay out of harm’s way and find itself wrapped in a cocoon. One day, a kid comes along and sees the cacoon and crushes it and the butterfly that was going to be is no more. All that eating and staying out of harm’s way is futile then in this sense. But what the caterpillar did do was give itself the best possible chance of becoming a butterfly. That is all it can do, and that is all you can do.

Increasing self awareness is your food. Eat well....

What is eating well?

111 Edward Traversa Let us go back to the power of now example. It is quite easy to take apart a notion in that manner, but that is an intellectual thing; a thing of logic and discernment. It doesn’t particularly serve a seeker well, unless the seeker engages in some intensive introspection as to why they bought that whole notion in the first place. They would question their motivation, what they were really seeking, and what they thought they had found. All this would be internal thing examining themselves, rather than the concepts of the book. That is the difference.

Books are fine to read, but their actual content is useless. It is not the words that have value or in fact lead anywhere. What may be beneficial is the affect on you as a person that a book may have. If it evokes a feeling, be it positive or negative then that is the food to examine and digest. It always has to be something internal as opposed to something out there as an intellectual exercise.

In the search for truth, it doesn’t matter particularly matter what the reading material is. The Gita is no better than Mien Kampf in this regard, the Bible no better than some erotic novel. The words are of no value, all words in every book ever written are fundamental lies. As I said though, if it evokes something internally one way or another, then that is what may help a seeker discover something about themselves.

Then there is the notion of staying out of harm’s way. Most would think this would mean leading a trouble free life. On the pathless path though, it is not so much staying out of harm’s way as it is learning to cope with trouble. Perhaps even that has the wrong connotation.

It is not so much a coping as it is making an issue dead and buried. For example, in the drug addict example, one can get to a point where the issue of taking drugs no longer affects the person. The drug taking behaviour then is seen as a learning point from one which one has to move on and accept other challenges. Each challenge in life then becomes an opportunity to prepare oneself for enlightenment with the full understanding that enlightenment is unlikely in this lifetime. Too many kids ready to crush cacoons...

The thing about life is you do not have to go seek trouble, or opportunities to learn which is what trouble is disguised as, it will find you.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 112 What is truth was asked at the beginning?

If I were to say that I am the absolute, then that would be a lie.

If I were to say that I am not the absolute then that too would a lie.

No matter what I say, it would be a fundamental lie. Where a lie here is not something akin to knowingly telling a lie, rather it is that there is no way to express the truth, there never will be and never has been. As such anything written, anything stating will never be that... Even staying silent would still be a fundamental lie as there would be an appearance of “someone” in silence.

The Tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal Name and all that...

You may well think you want truth, but really you want to possess it and each time you grasp at it, you will find that it slips right on through your fingers. Before a butterfly can be born, the caterpillar must die, but who can kill the caterpillar in such a way that it will allow the butterfly to be born?

113 Edward Traversa Power and Authority

There is no power / authority in that moment-less moment rather it is more akin to returning home after a prolonged absence to discover you never left to begin within. Even then that is misleading in the sense that it conveys that there is a you to experience feelings of returning home, but there is no you, no Eddie, no one... What exists is that which cannot be named, cannot be limited and cannot have concepts. This is our true nature, everyone’s, except there is no everyone in ultimate reality, only the projection of everyone and everything, which is the absolute appearing in different forms.

Things like unity consciousness or Satori evoke feelings of power or authority and then they leave relatively quickly only to have a person wishing it would return and have them trying to make it return.

This is not enlightenment however, enlightenment cannot come and go, it is there always and is not a thing of power or authority, rather it is absent of these notions. It is beyond what most people consider to be enlightenment and is beyond definition.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 114 Accidents do Happen

“Enlightenment is an accident, but you can–and must–work to become accident- prone!”

~Richard Rose~

115 Edward Traversa Where are you Headed?

Jed McKenna one of my favourite authors on the topic of enlightenment makes an excellent point in his first book. A big part of the process is to know where you are at in life and where you want to head. The problem with Jed though is he a bit ambiguous as to how one would go about this and tends to keep things very much at a surface level. Surface level is ok as stepping stone, but we want to really dig deeper and see what sort of unconscious assumptions are there regarding enlightenment so that we can tackle them.

These first set of exercises may help clarify where you are in life and where you want to head. The first exercise is a simple conscious question and answer format. The other two are designed to dig a little further into the unconscious.

Exercise 1: Start from where you are

Why are you seeking spiritual enlightenment?

------

What is spiritual enlightenment?

------

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 116 Other than reading from books or hearing what enlightenment is from other people, what unequivocal proof do you have that enlightenment is what you imagine it to be?

------

What do you think are the barriers that are preventing spiritual enlightenment?

------

In a year from now how would you like your life to be? Be very specific.

------

What do you think are the barriers that may prevent you from getting what you want from life in a year from now? Be very specific.

------

Exercise 2: An Empty Chair Can Be So Revealing

117 Edward Traversa This technique is a variation on the Gestalt empty chair technique. In Gestalt therapy, the empty chair technique is used to create a cathartic situation for the client. Here we aren’t interested in that, rather we want to use the technique as a method to gain some insight into ourselves.

At first this exercise may make you feel uncomfortable as you will be talking to yourself by playing two distinct roles. That is ok, as it is merely a function of not being accustomed to working in this manner.

It is also helpful to have a tape recorder and to record the interaction. If you do not have one, you can transcribe as much as you are able to remember in a journal.

Step 1: Place two chairs directly opposite to each other.

When you sit in one chair you will be playing the role of seeker. When you sit in the other chair you will be playing the role of an enlightened sage. Imagine both roles as vividly as possible and play them out.

Step 2: Begin by playing the role of the seeker and ask a question to the empty chair as if there was an enlightened sage sitting in the chair. Say this out loud and verbalize the question.

Step 3: Once the question has been asked, then sit in the other chair and respond to the seeker as an enlightened sage. Again verbalize the response.

Step 4: Continue switching chairs and roles for approximately 10-15 minutes.

Step 5: If you have a tape recorder listen back to the session. If you do not then transcribe with as much detail as possible what you can remember from the interactions.

Step 6: Take note of the following two questions.

How did you feel when you played the role of the seeker?

How did you feel when you played the role of the enlightened sage?

Sometimes it is useful to make a table of comparisons when asking these two questions. Please do so. An example may look like this.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 118 Seeker Role Sage Role Uncertainty Wise Curious Calm Agitated Poised Unclear Clear Frustrated Smiling Needy Confident

The above is just a guide and there may well be a number of positive aspects to the seeker role than is indicated in the table. In general however, the sage role tends to bring out the more positive characteristics.

Once you have identified as many characteristics as you can from both those roles, begin to compare them.

This exercise is particularly useful to determining where you are coming from to where you are going. The characteristics of the seeker role demonstrate to you where you are coming from. The characteristics of the enlightened sage role demonstrate where you are going or what you are actually working towards.

You could actually draw an arrow through some of the characteristics that you find. For example, if uncertainty appears you could look towards it opposite to gain some insight into what you really want from life.

Certainty Uncertainty

Certainty and uncertainty then becomes a vehicle of exploration where you would examine the role of certainty in your personal experiences. If you look deeply enough, you will almost always find that certainty is used as a means to overcome anxiety. For example, when we don’t know or are uncertain, we tend to get anxious over this and look towards alleviating the uncertainty through the acquisition of knowledge.

We might turn towards books or gurus or counsellors or friends, or we might turn to what we think is a higher self, an inner child or we may pray to God or Buddha or Allah. Usually we can find an answer in one form another through knowledge and then the uncertainty and related anxiety is relieved. It is a

119 Edward Traversa temporary relief however, because the next time we become uncertain in life, anxiety will appear again, we will take our hit of the knowledge drug and round and round we go.

We do not typically deal with the primary anxiety and become comfortable in uncertainty. We do not typically hold our ground and explore this realm, rather we tend to move away from it, by acquiring knowledge, trying to develop a more peaceful mind or pill popping among other things.

Is this not so for you? If it is not then dismiss it completely and move on and find something that is relevant to you. But if your life is a bit like this, a constant merry go round, then you may just want to stop for a moment and examine where you are and what you would like to move too.

In case you have not noticed as yet, you already are capable of being the thing you would like to be. All it took was some simple role playing, so that ability is not beyond your reach by any means. Much of life is about acting as if. Act as if you are happy and more happiness appears in your life. Act as if you’re more peaceful and more peacefulness appears in life.

It may seem like your acting or being disingenuous at first, but then you should question your current role which is entirely a fictional act, even though in experience it feels real. I am not denying that from an experiential perspective it feels real enough, but what I am questioning is how that experience of a particular role manifested.

If you examine closely enough it feels real and genuine because you have become so used to acting and reacting in a certain way. This pattern of action and reaction then becomes identified with and pretty soon it feels like you. That is where the feeling of it being genuine stems from.

When ever we step outside of that role and challenge ourselves it is so unfamiliar it seems like it is not us. Often we take drugs or alcoholic for this very reason, so that we can feel free or uninhibited. If we have a one night stand and feel guilty about it, then we attribute it to the effects of the alcohol or drugs and we say that wasn’t like me at all.

Of course I am not saying that is the only reason people drink and take drugs, there are many impacting factors involved here. What I am attempting to convey

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 120 however is a notion that a fixed role or rigid way of operating in the world is not who we are.

What you could focus on as a means of enquiry is how this pattern formed, what is keeping it intact, what is preventing some loosening of that rigidity and so on.

Once one is clear on those things, then one can look towards techniques that break up that pattern. This very role playing technique is one such technique. If you are depressed then play the role of someone who is joyful in life.

Learn from that role. What did the role entail, what things might one do if one is joyful, what emotions would be present? Then put them into action in your life.

One does not jump straight from depression into enlightenment. Rather one must work through the depression so that the energy can become unfrozen and used effectively in the pursuit of the discovery of self. The challenge then for the seeker is to not get stuck on relatively being happier if discovery of real self is the goal. There is nothing wrong with being happy, it’s a worthy goal, but enlightenment isn’t a happy self, it’s no self.

Another of the primary things you should focus on is your underlying beliefs about how an enlightened sage is supposed to act or feel. Often this is an indicator that you are seeking a special or elevated state of human functioning. In other words there is an underlying belief that some characteristics are indicative of enlightenment and that others are not. Psychologically, what you are denoting is a picture of an ideal self, which is often buried deep within our unconscious.

An ideal self however is not no self. There is a great chasm between the two, where one is geared towards the development of positive or special states of human consciousness and the other does not have attachment to any state of human consciousness. To clarify, from the perspective of no self all states are special for lack of better terminology. From the perspective of an ideal self only some states are special.

The other thing that should be readily discerned from the experience is how malleable a person really is. In one role, certain characteristics form, in another role, often different characteristics form. Yet the same person is playing both roles.

What tends to happen in human experience however is we tend to become fixated on one side of the table and define our identity from that perspective solely. In

121 Edward Traversa other words the role of the seeker becomes identified with and in time a rigid pattern of behaviour forms.

I am not suggesting for a moment that we should not seek, but what could form the basis for a good inquiry into our personal structures is to look towards the manner we seek, what patterns have emerged from that seeking that are now identified with, what underlying attitudes are implicit in that seeking and so forth.

There is another obvious connotation from this role playing. It is a simple observation, but one that is readily lost on many. Both roles are just that: roles. One role does not have more validity than the other. We could say we have become more comfortable or identified with playing one role over another for one reason or another, but that it is more valid or genuine is another thing altogether.

The roles in themselves are not you. This should be remembered.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 122 Thoughts

Thoughts are like fingernails once integration has occurred. They are always there, ready to be noticed when the occasion arises, but not noticed as much.

123 Edward Traversa Finding Truth

What would be a truth realization?

It would be the paradoxical realization that there isn’t any truth and yet all that there is truth. Now that sounds all mystical like and full of contradictions I realize but just perhaps it is not as silly as it first sounds.

There is no truth in the sense that all concepts, including the concept that there is a tangible physical existence, is relative and subjective. Yet ego is in a constant search for these relative truths and when seeking enlightenment proceeds on the assumption, that ego can come to know truth through the acquisition of knowledge or wisdom. When we are seeking we are inclined to add to ourselves, sometimes this is pretty obvious, and at other times it is very subtle.

The experience of enlightenment (It isn’t really an experience, but no words will suffice, so be it) is in stark contrast to this because in the experience itself there no relative truth and there isn’t anyone to experience relative truths. We cannot even say it is a union between man and God, rather it is known that man doesn’t exist, except as a projection, a thing of God’s imagination that emanates from God (absolute).

To grasp this concept think about when you dream. The characters in the dream proceed on the basis that they exist and consequently the dream seems to have a life of its own. But when you wake up the characters are known to be part of your dreaming imagination. The characters and symbols within the dream have no real life of their own, but emanate from you. All the symbols in the dream are aspects of yourself and in this way you are playing all parts of the dream simultaneously.

In a similar vein life as we think we know it is but a dream. While the characters in the dream that we call life have no real existence, the dreamer that dreams the dream exists. If it were not so, then we wouldn’t be able to think, feel, have sensations and experiences.

The truth then can be conceptualized as existence. Truth exists in other words. It

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 124 is only when we attempt to define the truth through limited egoic processes though that we find ourselves right back in the land of Maya.

For example, if I say the absolute is existence, then we are prone to think of the absolute as something that is tangible. Existence after all implies that existence exists. If it exists it can be found is the underlying logic there.

But the term existence comes from ego and is relative and is why questions surrounding the nature of the absolute form. What does it exist as? Is it love? Why does the absolute do the things it does and so on.

Yet something that is intangible and ineffable is there and is clearly revealed as the source of all things from which life as a dream flows.

It doesn’t matter in the least to you that you cannot define it at that moment, because you are not there as a human being, but you are there as the absolute. We are prone to thinking of the absolute as something that thinks, much in the same way that we think and tend to ascribe that thinking process as intelligence. Again that is just ego trying to wrap its limited mind around something that is not limited.

Even if we say, well nothing exists, then that in itself is saying too much about the absolute and isn’t even remotely correct. Something indeed does exist, it’s just that we cannot define it in any sense of the word; we cannot say it is existence, or truth or love etc. Any concept applied to the absolute is Maya and is why there has never in the whole history of humankind been a single word that is not rooted in Maya. But again it doesn’t mean that something is not there, it just means it cannot be defined, even in terms of I am awareness.

One of the fallacies going around in spiritual circles is to intellectualize this whole thing of truth into a thing of no truth. No, no no. Truth exists; it’s the only thing that exists. Regardless of whether it’s definable of not, it doesn’t make it less real. Now a lot of people claiming enlightenment will try and intellectualize truth as a non existence thing. But if they are doing that, the fact that it is a non existence thing is also paradoxically a thing in itself since no existence is relative to existence.

125 Edward Traversa So what is the truth then? It’s a thing that cannot be stated here and the only way to know that is when the absolute reveals itself to the absolute as the absolute. Then the whole question of truth doesn’t matter, since you as the absolute is the only reality. A reality we cannot define true enough, but a reality nonetheless.

That would be a truth realization, without the concept of truth applying and without anyone there in terms of human form, to experience truth.

Makes your head hurt I bet!

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 126 Yes Miracles do Happen

Wonders of wonders, the grandest miracle of them all!

I over cooked the Christmas turkey ☺

First time for everything...

127 Edward Traversa Being in My Presence

Over the past few weeks I have received a few requests from people who wish to be in my presence. A lot of “gurus” will proclaim that the only way to get enlightened is through lineage and by being in a presence of an “enlightened one.” Bask in the glory that is I or sit at the lotus feet of an enlightened one, that sort of thing…

First that is counterproductive to enlightenment as the focus is on the guru and not self, where all the work needs to be done. In other words if you’re looking outward then you’re not looking inwards. Which isn’t bad as such, but if you’re seeking enlightenment and want to get out of the rut of seeking then it isn’t useful to you.

Secondly that creates a cult worshiping mentality where dependence on the guru abounds. In case you didn’t realize dependence is bondage. Not so good in terms of getting to there where there is actually already here.

I can guarantee you that I radiate no holiness or nothing that will energetically get you enlightened through being in my presence. And if there is a perception of that by someone, then that is only their projection onto a physical entity which of course cannot be the enlightened thing.

That doesn’t mean I don’t come into contact with people in unusual ways at times, people occasionally seem to run across me in mysterious ways. For example a few months ago I was sitting in a park reading some science fiction and a lady who is now one of my students asked me what I was reading. We struck up a conversation and she explained she had just finished reading the Power of Now and was trying to explain to me what enlightenment was. Now what are the chances of that happening? Not great.

But that had and has nothing to do with what I radiate. I don’t radiate love, I don’t walk around with a stupid grin on my face and I don’t do magic tricks, at least not publicly ☺ It’s just that a series of synchronous events led the person to me and me to her and so we each play our part as directed by the absolute.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 128 The danger there of course is to assume that because you have crossed my path you are destined for enlightenment. Highly unlikely and more than likely is only an indicator that you want to perceive yourself as special. And just like me, you are no more special than that blade of grass over there. That’s a tough thing for a human being to learn. We have a high emphasis on individuality as a mechanism to feeling special, so it’s no wonder the world comes crashing around you, when you start to grasp the concept that you’re not special and it is impossible for you to be chosen. That’s hardly going to be a popular message in a world where the vast majority wants to be special.

On the other hand, being in my presence does have some practical value, but be clear this has nothing to do with what I radiate or what I don’t radiate. The value there is I can obtain a lot of information that I cannot obtain through emails, chat or this blog. This is a highly impersonal format which doesn’t necessarily mean others cannot find it of some value, but the truth of the matter is that those students that see me face to face tend to progress more quickly than those that do not.

The reason being is that often I can pick up subtle cues that go unnoticed in an email or this blog or chat. Being face to face reveals different things such as tonality, appearance, mannerisms, quirks, moods etc. So just through the fact that there is more there to work with in terms of information makes it a little easier to hone in on stuff for people to work on. And of course the opposite holds true they can gain more cues from me.

I also want to emphasize that being in face to face contact is no guarantee that enlightenment will ensue. Ultimately the student must move past the teacher and see that the teacher is just as illusional as anything else. This doesn’t mean a lack of respect for the teacher, on the contrary its usually through the respect of the teacher that one comes to understand that the answer is within and not outside of you. It just means that anyone setting themselves up for dependency type relationships are most likely not enlightened.

A good rule of thumb is if you’re not making progress (ok appearance of progress) after two to three years under a teacher then move on. Accordingly the teacher themselves should also be willing and able to cut the strings after a few years if nothing is really happening.

129 Edward Traversa

In that sense there may be more value in seeing me in person, but not because of anything I radiate. It’s just good old fashioned pointing within.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 130 Life and Living

Life is living us.

131 Edward Traversa Spiralling Inward

One of the better questions I have received of late is what is meant by spiralling inward? It is a good question in that it allows one to make a distinction between working on oneself and when one is diverting oneself from the work. As I went to answer this question I ended up with about 12 pages of written material which would be way too long for here, but will make a nice addition for the book.

I thought I would try and encapsulate some of the things I have written down that people may find useful until the book surfaces which will provide a more in depth examination.

It seems to me that invariably we as human beings are not particularly drawn to looking within. We say we are, but then we tend to do everything else but look within. In part this is a religious hangover particular in the west where we are taught to believe in a god that is external to us. Although I have to say that even in the people from the east that I have encountered that the tendency is to look everywhere else but the very spot we are standing on. At the core of this tendency is fear.

Let there be no doubt that human beings are illusion producing machines where the illusion is driven by fear. In part this is what we have to discover about ourselves and then once that is in awareness we have to plunge deeper to see that fear is an outright illusion.

Now when I say that, I don’t mean that you have to come to know it as an intellectual concept, rather you have to live life without fear and hang the consequences of doing that. And yes there are consequences, for example pressures from family, friends, and society to act normal, where normal is really to live in fear!

There is a great chasm between knowing something intellectually and enlightenment. That is something people don’t readily understand. Which is not a criticism of people; after all I was much the same, it’s just their nature. The question then becomes about how you know you are on track and really spiralling inward.

One of the better indicators is this. Are you trying to figure out God or are you trying to figure out yourself?

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 132 If you are trying to figure out God then you’re externalizing something, in other words hiding from an aspect of yourself by searching outside of yourself. In many religious traditions there is the notion of omnipresence which means that literally God is everywhere. Of course these religions then go on and manage to find places where God is not, e.g. in sin, in bad behaviour, in the devil, in you etc, but that’s religions for you.

God is everywhere and the only way to know the mind of God is to know the mind of yourself. You can analyse other people, other deities to death, but not an inch of progress will be made until you turn inward and firmly grasp that the key is to know thyself.

What does knowing oneself entail? It literally means to plunge into your psychological and emotional processes and make all sorts of connections about how you function in the world. To highlight this, let us use a very common example prevalent among seekers.

Often a seeker will blame God for their woes. It can appear as why is God doing this to me? Why does God allow violence, disharmony in life etc? Why did God create this joke of a life? Things like that put God in the position of a persecutor and the seeker in the role of the victim.

A person who is not on the true path currently will continue this sort of blaming mechanism and continue to act like there is a God there doing this to a me here.

A person who is spiralling inward will look at that process and figure out how it relates to them psychologically. For example, one might make a connection between being victimized in some way by an authority figure earlier in life and see that the notion of God as persecutor is just a continuation of those earlier unresolved emotional and psychological issues. This is how our minds works, we by and large operate unconsciously and the true path is to figure out what is hidden and reveal it.

See the difference?

One is actually an excuse not to work on oneself and the other is actually the spiritual path.

Now of course traditional psychology completely stuffs this up in that it attempts to fix and normalize things as opposed to a real discovery or insight into the true nature of self. But that does not mean that awareness of self is not key.

133 Edward Traversa We can use other examples to illustrate the differences between a seeker using enlightenment as a guise and one is who far more likely to be on the path.

A person meditating on the nature of a flickering candle flame is not spiralling inward. A person who is meditating on the nature of a flickering candle flame and then seeks to understand why they are mediating on the nature of a flickering candle flame and am not working on understanding myself is on the path.

A person who is depressed and continues to go around saying I am depressed, I am depressed etc is not on the path. That is called being stuck in a depressive cycle. A person who seeks to understand the nature of their personal depression from the inside is on the path. For example, seeing how depression forms in mind, where the depressive thoughts arise from, finding ways of alleviating the depression with mind only etc is on the path.

You can try and figure out whether there is free will or not, or you can try and figure out why you are trying to figure out the free will thingy. That is the difference.

The whole thing of it is this. There is nowhere you can look where God is not. Every thought, every emotion, every sensation, every behaviour in the world is God. As such the best place to discover this, I mean really discover this beyond the intellectual concept is to start where you stand.

It is nigh on impossible to understand others if there is no understanding of your internal processes. Yet seekers nearly always look out, instead of looking at their processes. That is the key to spiralling inward, see how you work, see how your mind works. See that you often externalize when you should be focusing on the internal processes.

Then further clear up those blockages, get rid of things that are in your way.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 134 Where Do I Start?

If you are really struggling with where to start, one would do well to examine in depth their relationships with their parents, particularly the opposite sex parent.

Another place to start if you are stuck is to look at control. Look at how you are being controlled or manipulated, then look at how you attempt to control or manipulate.

A great place to examine for those ready is to look at things like intuition, how it arises and functions in your life.

Pay particular attention to the gap between thoughts and examine that as much as you can.

135 Edward Traversa The Secret

A few people have been mentioning the movie called “The Secret” to me of late and have been full of praise for it. My reaction is it is ok, but doesn’t go far enough in that there isn’t a comprehensive understanding there of what is occurring and they are missing the essence of utilizing the gap between thoughts and emotions etc...

So what is the secret? It’s the law of Attraction. The law of Attraction in its simplest terms means you get what you are focussed on. In psychology there is the principle of a self-fulfilling prophecy that has been studied well. You can go to a University library and pull out many research papers on this phenomena.

It works like this, if you have a positive expectation of life, then life will be perceived in a positive manner. Similarly if you have a negative expectation of life, then life will be perceived in a negative manner. What is more, like will tend to attract like. So if you are in an upward spiral and have positive expectations then many things will appear in life that is positive, for example, a better job a more loving relationship. There is value from a human perspective in having positive expectations; there is no doubt about that. This is not particularly mystical, for example if you are confident you are more likely to attract a partner or be successful at an interview than if you rolled up in a state of misery.

Indeed from the perspective of sowing a few seeds as a means to explore the whole creating reality phenomena then the movie “The Secret” has value. For one it introduces a different way to operate in the world. That is not the issue.

The issue is that how and what they present will be very much a hit and miss affair and lacks some real genuine understanding of the process. For one if an opportunity presents itself, you still have to work it at. But more than that, it’s the way that it is presented that reeks completely of a marketing exercise. I took about the first ten minutes of the movie and here are a few things that leapt out to me immediately.

First statement: “They were the greatest people in history. “

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 136 Who exactly where they? What evidence do you have that is the case? I noticed none was presented.

Second statement: “You can be or have anything you want.”

So I can physically be 10 foot tall then just by thinking about it? Or I can increase my IQ by say 1000 points? (IQ is set in granite at a very early age with little variability)

Third Statement: “The law of attraction is the most powerful law in the universe. “

Spin, spin, spin! It is no more or less powerful than the law of Gravity for example. Where is the proof that it is even a law?

Fourth Statement: “1% of the population earns 96% of all the wealth. “

They posit that the 1% know the secret. Funny that not one of the people on the video are in that top 1% earning bracket.

At any rate that is a function of how society is structured. It’s called capitalism... In communist countries it’s called greed. Actually it is called greed in all societies.

I like this next one the best:

The modern day people that know this “secret” just happen to be the very same people making a living from speaking on the new age circuit?

Could there possibly be a connection between being on the video and increasing the sales of their own products, books, and seminars etc?

Get the picture, this movie is a marketing exercise. And that is the problem; it isn’t straightforward and borders on the deceitful.

That is a pity, because there are sections in the movie worth watching. As I said before if you can hold a positive expectation in mind, which also includes clearing

137 Edward Traversa out any unconscious junk that is in the way, then within reason, positive things will occur in life, provided you act constructively at the opportune times.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 138 Startled Response

Just clearing up another misconception. When it is said that one who has awakened has no fear what is meant by that is the story of fear collapses. For example, I may be walking along minding my own business and a dog jumps out of nowhere and startles me. That startled response is a normal physiological reaction as it pertains to human functioning.

What does collapse however is the whole story of the dog shouldn’t have jumped out at me; I shouldn’t have reacted. None of that takes any prominence in mind, and the most likely thing to happen is a continuation of the walk without even thinking / worrying about what just occurred.

Now if you can apply that to everything where fear is concerned then you start to get an idea about no fear.

I mentioned this because one of my students told me a story about a Buddhist monk who was enlightened and reacting as in a startled response to some prank the monk’s students devised in order to scare. So the monk reacted, big deal...

139 Edward Traversa Shadow Aspects of You

The gem of you is the unknowable, the unbelievable, the mystery beyond mystery. It is the living truth of you, the thing seekers are searching for whether they consciously know it or not. That they are searching is a relatively good thing, but often how they are going about the search tends to lead them away from truth. This is often because we attempt to answer the questions we pose in a philosophical or fact based manner.

Facts or beliefs are not truth however. They are just descriptions of something, where the description is not the truth of whatever is being described. An example of this may be when a female asks a male if the dress makes her look fat and the male replies "no it is the fat, which makes you look fat.” The female then gets very upset.

His statement is not truth. That is only a subjective opinion and indeed if the male were to look deeper into his psyche, he might begin to see that there is another layer of relative truth there. For example, he might see that perhaps he knowingly had hurt another person in his attempt at being truthful, and as such there is another relative truth there. He might begin to investigate why he had knowingly engaged in a hurtful manner to another human being, and in doing so he may discover something much more intimate about himself than a trite remark that he passes off as truth.

The spiritual path is much like that. It is a grand uncovering of self by digging further and further into self, with the kicker being that if enlightenment ensues then there isn't an individual self. But let us not put the cart before the horse and get into no self, etc., and instead focus on discovering by uncovering as many layers of self as we can. Since the topic is about gender and spirituality, this is what I would like to discuss today, with a view to allowing yourself to become more conscious of what is hidden.

Most people have very fixed ideas about gender and spirituality. That is not a criticism of people; it is just a statement that relatively speaking is generally true. If you're seeking truth you must first discover your fixed ideas and then remove what is untrue about them. As such I am not particularly interested in entering into a philosophical debate about gender differences and spirituality. Rather it

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 140 seems to me that it may be more beneficial to give some experiential exercises that may help you pursue this topic on your own accord.

Before I do that though, I would like to be very clear that what is presented below should not be viewed as the be all and end all of a path to enlightenment. There are many ways to plunge on into self and this is just one way to uncover some of the hidden aspects of who you take yourself to be. Add it to your bag of tricks in the act of uncovering true self by all means, but be aware that no technique in itself leads to enlightenment.

Given that, here is a technique that I have found useful over the years to break up rigid patterns of operating in the world. I learned this technique many years ago when working as counsellor. It spawned from an associative dream technique, which conceptually could be thought of as projective word association technique. Since then I have adapted the technique to apply to many areas of life, and quite a number of people have found it a valuable tool in their own journey. That may not be the case for everyone, but some people may find it helpful.

Often a seeker is drawn to the mystical, which is OK as an investigation, but all too often it is an excuse for not dealing with the problems of life. Most if not all problems are brought about by some form of conditioning that has become ingrained in psyche and frequently becomes unconscious. Our journey is to undo the conditioning by any and all means necessary. Meditating on a candle in the hopes of a better life isn't going to cut it in this regard. We actually have to deal with the problems as honestly as we can and not avoid them, even though often this is a very hard thing to deal with. Something that is perhaps worth remembering is that to know yourself isn't to distract yourself with techniques that avoid the problems of life. Rather you want to delve more deeply into the nature of the problem, and the best way to do is to uncover what is originally hidden.

As such the best we can do is to start by unravelling the psychological, emotional, and physical processes and how these have led to a conditioned life. We often find that when these blockages are cleared surprising things can happen, which can lead us further on the path until hopefully one day there is no path left.

A word of advice before beginning: what is presented here is psychological technique by nature, so perhaps a good place to start is to check out if you have biases or attitudes towards this? In my experience western psychology has much to offer on the spiritual path, as much as eastern disciplines, but we all too often

141 Edward Traversa overlook the western because the eastern sounds a little more mystical or profound. What I would say about both though is they often shore up the illusion of the individual self as opposed to allowing oneself to undo as much of you as possible.

The first part of the technique is to look at the question itself. Is there a different path to spiritual contentment dependent on one's gender?

In using this technique, what we need to do is take the key concepts from the question. I would particularly look at the terms "spirituality" or "spiritual contentment," "gender" and "dependency" from that question. In the following I am going to use the term gender by way of example, but in reality you would repeat the exercise with each term in that question. In this technique the "term" or "word" is employed as a symbolic representation of something deeper that is often unconscious to us. Part of what we are trying to do is dig a little deeper than the surface level we normal operate on.

Here is an initial exercise that may start to help you question your beliefs about gender, etc.

Begin by thinking about the term male and list ten qualities that immediately come to mind. Do the same for the term female.

Then tense up your body as hard as you can and repeat the exercise and see if some different qualities come to mind.

Try its opposite by relaxing your body as completely as you can and again list out the qualities that come immediately to mind.

What may be good to note at this point is that often different words or images are aroused from different bodily states. If that is the case we can then begin to question our beliefs about gender, maleness or femaleness. We can do the same with the terms spiritual contentment, spirituality, dependency or anything that strikes you as important about that question.

We can expand this exercise further by including different emotional states. For example, remember a time when you were particularly sad or depressed, and feel that as much as possible in the present moment. What happens to the list on gender now? Are different words or imagery conjured? Try it with a time when you were happy, even blissful. Does it change again? Try it with the other words and see what happens.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 142 If there is something consistent in the lists regardless of your state of your being, then that is indicative of a very deeply held belief. This is OK. But typically not everything is what it appears to be, so let us delve deeper.

If you are a female, go back to your original list for males and look at the ten words you have listed. If you're male, look at the original female list you created.

Repeat each word in mind and note which words seem to affect you the most at an emotional or physical level (bodily sensations). Usually you can get two or three such words from this exercise. If not, repeat the words again slowly in mind until you notice an emotional or physical reaction. The reaction does not necessarily have to be a negative response. It is more important to recognize a reaction, be it positive or negative, rather than trying to deliberately look for negative responses. In terms of physical sensations you could look at your breathing rate, any fidgeting, any shift in posture, any sensations felt in the body that were not there before you said the words in mind. It may even be useful to get a friend to observe you or video tape yourself in order to look for subtle cues of these sorts when working on the physical aspects of this aspect. Little shifts in the body or posture can often be a rich source of investigation.

You should arrive at having two or three words in your list. You could continue this exercise many layers deep, by listing out ten words from the two or three words that affect you at some level and repeating the process. Usually thought one or two layers deep is sufficient enough to grab a hold of some underlying issues.

The next step is that for each remaining word in your list write down its opposite connotation. For example, we may attribute the word soft or softness to female. We would then look for associations that denote it’s opposite. Perhaps the word hard may come to mind as its opposite association. Then think upon the important females that have appeared in your life, particularly your mother, important lovers or sisters, and ask yourself how have they been hard on you? Also ask how have you been hard on them?

The next step is to get a very good definition of what hard may mean as it pertains to you. Not a dictionary meaning, but an experiential meaning. For example, does the word hard mean critical? Exactly and precisely what does this word mean for you? If it is a criticism, then journal as much as you can about how you relate to that criticism. How did it make you feel back then? How does it make you feel now? Is the feeling the same, is the intensity the same. Can you

143 Edward Traversa see a connection between the past and the way you are interacting in the world in the present day?

Other questions you could ask are as follows. If you could change things about them or you in relation to them, what would you change? What regrets are there? Is there any guilt or shame or anger involved there? Please feel free to expand and add questions as you feel fit in this exercise. What is presented here is more of a guideline rather than something written in granite.

If you find that there is something unresolved there, then congratulations. You have uncovered an unconscious attachment. That is a step on the path, where there are likely to be many steps of this nature while seeking. If so then it is likely that there is a deep seated attachment there that needs to be dissolved. If not then it is likely that the question itself or the symbols of the question are not particularly relevant to you. You can ask yourself what would it take for those emotions or physical sensations to dissolve? In this respect never make it to involve the other person. For example, if you feel betrayed do not make it that you need to hear an apology from the other person to let that emotional pull go. Make it up to yourself.

I tend to find that active deep breathing techniques, combined with some acupressure, work well in releasing energetic blocks of this type. I would also use writing in conjunction with those techniques. Writing tends to get things out in the open where you can more readily see some of the issues that are involved without being too caught in the emotion of them. What is worth remembering here is that what works well with one person may not work well with another! Part of the challenge of the seeker is to find something that works for them in terms of bringing awareness into the issue and then discovering something that works well for them in releasing the issue. In general though, the above mentioned things tend to work reasonably well for many, even if it is just a starting point for them.

Meditation as inquiry is also excellent in this regard. I tend to find that meditation works more effectively once something is bought to consciousness. So try not to disregard meditation. As I said earlier, you want to bring as much weight to bear on the issue at hand as you can.

So far I have mainly discussed the negative associations, but what happens if you discover that you have some positive associations as well?

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 144 The answer is to let go of them as well. For example, let us assume you have a deep association with love as is normally conveyed by society. That is an attachment just as much as guilt or anger or any other negatively perceived emotion is. In fact you may discover some interesting things about yourself when it is stated that something as noble as love has to be released as well.

More often than not a deep seated fear is revealed. For example, what is frightening to you about letting go of love? You may find that it is a fear of uncertainty at the core and if pushed further you may find that love is often used as a vehicle to gain a subtle form of control over self and others. What seems noble at the outset can often be a disguise for something else. It is also important to note that it may not be a fear of uncertainty; it may be something else, for example a fear of non-approval by others and so on. Try to not get locked into thinking it has to be one thing and one thing only. It could just as well be a whole cluster of issues involved there.

I would also like to make it clear that it is not the task of the seeker to become emotionless or loveless. Rather it is to see the true nature of emotions by uncovering what is at the core of them. That is the gist of this technique, to try and get a deeper understanding of what is occurring for you unconsciously. When you begin to do that then you experientially start to appreciate how your mind works and how others peoples' minds work.

Which bring us back to the original question. It isn't that important to answer that question unless that question is of particular relevance to you. It may well be for you as a female or male that there are gender differences, but these are only relevant if they affect your life at an intimate level. In other words don't let the question be at that general level of intellectualism but rather make it something about you. Then perhaps you may start to see that you may well have to do things differently from the next seeker and the next or perhaps you may have to follow the leads of seekers before you. It doesn't really matter which as long as that, in some way, it ultimately becomes about you and only you, which is not meant in the selfish sense of that phrase. It only means that you have to figure out what the question means for you personally and what you can discover from it about you in the most intimate way possible. Then you can start to remove the untruths in your life. You cannot remove untruths if they are buried deep in psyche. Know thyself.

145 Edward Traversa On a final note, use this technique in other areas of your life, particularly emotionally charged areas and also when you have dreams. If you have a dream, then take the first sentence of your dream. That is always what the dream is about, and then just use the same format presented here, which should culminate in a deeper and more intimate understanding of you. Which of course will also have to be undone ultimately until nothing of you as an individual self remains.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 146 A Silence Koan

A reader of this site recently sent me this short story that I thought I would share with you. Here it is:

Once upon a time, a student went to a great sage to ask about the meaning of life and how to attain the direct experience of the Highest.

He asked his question, but the sage gave no answer. He just sat there.

Again, the student asked about how to find and fulfil the Purpose of life. Again, the sage just sat there.

The student tried different words, and appealed with great emotion. The sage just sat there, as before.

Finally, the student became frustrated, and blurted out, in an angry tone, "Why don't you answer me!"

The sage smiled, and said, "I have been answering you, but you were not listening. The answer you are looking for is to be found only in Silence."

147 Edward Traversa Sheep

Readers Question: With negation does one stop being a sheep or just fully understand ones nature as a sheep?

Negation can lead to understanding your nature as a sheep, that pretty much you have followed the crowd for the majority of life. Once that is fully understood then the tendency is not to follow others but follow your deeper desires. I am not talking enlightenment here, just really healthy psychological functioning and that’s as good as thing to shoot for as anything else.

So at this level of optimum psychological functioning, your less bound by the expectations of others, but still bound by your own internal expectations. Much better way of operating in the world.

After enlightenment then that’s sort of another level again, you’re really not doing anything for yourself; rather you’re doing what is indicated in experience. Here you are completely not tied to society’s rule, which doesn’t necessarily mean you go around breaking them, but if you did it’s of no consequence to you internally. Equally you are not bound by your internal expectations or motivations. You do whatever the absolute wants you to do, which can be manifested in a number of ways, for example unusually high recognition of synchronicity. Which doesn’t make it more important or less important, since ultimately you are always doing what the absolute wants, but it seems to me once awake, then your dream changes and your operating at a different level to those asleep.

Like someone once said to me, I am dreaming I am awake, some dream that they are dreaming and others dream that they are asleep. Not turtles all the way down, its dreams all the way down; just different varieties of dreams...

So at these two levels there is an experience of greater freedom and less restraint. But ultimately as human form since you have no choice in anything, not even the socks you put on in the morning then well you guess the rest…

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 148 No One Home

There is no one here,

No you.

No me.

There is no universe, no multi-universe.

There are no two things, three things or more.

There is but one,

This is what you are.

149 Edward Traversa Insight Meditation and Releasing

As I mentioned in a previous post I have been getting some emails from readers of the TAT forum regarding my recent article there on Discovering the Shadow Aspects of Self there are a few questions related to that and I will answer each in separate posts as I think they may be valuable for seekers.

One of the questions revolves around insight mediation and how they have not heard it described in that way before and wished me to elaborate. Let’s make this a practical exercise so people can test it out and hopefully derive some benefit from it on this path.

Before I start, let me be clear that often delving into this type of material can be very painful and bring up lots of negative feelings. So in a lot of cases it is no walk in the park. Nonetheless, if one is ready to get through all that, then they may find what is listed below as helpful.

To understand this let’s look at how traditional methods both western and eastern tend to approach a problem. In general they fall in three categories, cognitive and emotional and physical.

An example of a cognitive approach is a focussing on a problem. An emotional one is geared more towards getting in touch with feelings and a physical one typically has to do with the manipulation of muscles or something physical like working with breath for example.

Now each has a part to play in understanding self and no one is saying that they don’t, well at least I am not. But what I am saying is that most only produce superficial change, where one problem seems to be gone, and in a years time another problem perhaps a bit different in manifestation but similar at its core level pop ups. This is generally true for both the eastern and western traditions.

The way I view the problem is that they are not truly taking a holistic approach and bringing it to bear on whatever needs to be unblocked or cleared. I know lots of eastern teachers and western psychotherapists say they are, but in reality they are not. They are not because they are attempting to treat the thought, the emotion, or physical sensation, and not looking at what is behind these things. Let us look at a common example to illustrate that many people could apply to

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 150 their lives. I’ll pick relationships as currently a few people are struggling with that aspect.

The typical route of insight meditation is to bring the unconscious to consciousness. But even here more often than not a seeker is looking at the wrong thing. Imagine a couple that are consistently fighting over money. It doesn’t have to be money, it could be anything, sex, household chores, parenting issues, a partner working too much or anything really, but let’s use money by way of example. The important thing is that it’s repetitive in nature and consistently pops up in the relationship.

As I have said before on this site one way to think about that relationship is to think of it in terms of who controls the distance. That is the unconscious dynamic at play there, but to the couple caught up in that situation, it appears to them to be about the money. So their insight will tend to revolve around what money means to this relationships, what the relationship to money is, how money seems to affect the relationships and so on. Of course there will be an attempt to try and solve the issue of money and sometimes indeed that issue of money is solved; sometimes through some creative insight or a different approach to the problem etc... Yet even though the money issue is solved, invariably and after a period of time they will start to fight about something else in the same repetitive manner.

The spiritual quest is similar in that there may be many insights along the way, but practically speaking there has been little progress. This is because the real issue is not being dealt with. To drive this home let us go back to this imaginary relationship.

There are three types of relationships in the world. One in lay terms is a distance / distance relationship. The other is a pursuer / pursuer relationship and the final variant is the distance / pursuer relationship. The final variant is by far the most common, with about 85% of relationships falling into this category. Let us focus on that one.

In this type of relationship there will be one partner wishing to solve the problem as quickly as possible. This is the pursuit role. Here they will be saying things like we have to communicate more, we have to spend more time together, we have to talk this problem out, we have to do this and that etc.. Usually it is with some urgency and they will always be the ones pushing for more intimacy in the relationship.

151 Edward Traversa The other partner by contrast will be more laid back and be wishing to put things off. So they may say things like, “I just want to relax”, “let’s talk about this later in the week”, or they may say,” get off my back” or go for a long walk or give the silent treatment when confronted.

Obviously in both roles there are lots more examples that could be given but that should be enough to provide the general flavour.

So here we have a couple engaged in this rigid and repetitive behaviour that to them seems to revolve around money. Being the “spiritual” people that they are, they try and meditate by trying to see what the money issue is. But they aren’t really looking at the underlying issue which is of course not what they fight over, but how they fight.

A good question to ask yourself if you’re caught in this situation is what am I not seeing here or how am I fooling myself. If the couple were to genuinely ask this they may begin to see certain things.

The pursuer for all their talk about wanting intimacy may come to recognize that when it comes to intimacy it scares the socks of them. How could they determine this? Simply by looking at how the fight goes.

The pursuer starts by saying c’mon we have to work at this relationship, we have to be more intimate etc. Without failure, this will evoke the same reaction in the distancer, which of course is to distance. Though the pursuer is saying they want intimacy, in fact their behaviour keeps things exactly the same as always. The distancer too also doesn’t do the relationship any favours. Rather than meeting the pursuer half way or compromising in some way they react as they always have reacted, by creating more distance, which in turn raises the anxiety level of the Pursuer, which in turn causes them to apply more and more pressure on the distancer and round and round we go. Pretty soon we are in the midst of a full blown massacre. Ok maybe not quite that dramatic, but it generally escalates to pretty intense levels. So the issues they should be trying to gain insight on is not money, but fear of intimacy, why the need to control the emotional distance in the relationship, and why the power struggle.

Getting to the core of a problem in this manner is half the battle. But only half...

The next step here is to go behind the fear of intimacy. What is useful is to look at early childhood relationships and see how this same pattern, perhaps with a

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 152 different variant took place then. Who was the pursuer in your family, who was the distancer, that type of thing.

One then through further investigation may begin to see that in fact they are repeating a particular set of behaviours learned in childhood. Important here to think about the impact on you as child, for example, how did you feel when your parents or your siblings or any adult figure that was important to you fought?

Now we are starting to integrate some of the emotional elements of what is transpiring. Pay particular attention to similar childhood feelings and feelings while you are arguing with your partner. That is a part of insight meditation too. Name the emotion, define it. Usually it is a cluster of emotions rather than one thing. The insights then start to grow, you have the cognitive aspects out, and then you have the emotions out. What started off as one issue now brings out a completely different set of issues that were giving impetus to that repetitive behaviour.

Then you could start to notice the physical aspects. How does your body feel when this fight occurs? You can integrate that too and that becomes another insight. On some occasions this is enough for a person or couple to work through their issues but often it is not, which brings me back to the original point I wanted to make about insight mediation. It can also be used as a primer to release blockages.

All of the above needs to occur first, but once you have it out in the open like that then you can release it. See it isn’t that you’re adding insight to your repertoire of tricks, or that you’re adding to a definition of self, or building revelation after revelation, it is that you’re using insight meditation to bring something out into the open so that you can get rid of it entirely. You want to obliterate and destroy the thing completely so that it is completely a non issue as opposed to coping with an issue. Subtle but important difference.

Contrast that with what you have been told about insight meditation and you will find that it is very different in practice and application. One is geared towards adding things; the other is geared towards the removal of the thing. It is the latter we want and it is the latter that most people do not focus on. How can we get rid of something then? Remembering that we have done all of the above, don’t discount that please, the first thing you want to do is find a place where you will not be disturbed.

153 Edward Traversa Then ensure you have minimal clothing and that the clothing you do have on is very loose and comfortable and won’t distract you. I would also suggest buying some ear plugs so that outside sounds won’t disturb you and making this an eye closed process. The main point is to keep distractions to an absolute minimum. What you will have to get accustomed to, is oscillating between experiencing things from a first person perspective and then looking at them objectively from an observer perspective. The observer perspective doesn’t have to be a full blown dissociative experience, it’s just a means of being able to check in to see what is occurring in experience without getting too caught in any emotional or physical or energetic reaction. Hopefully this will be clearer as I describe the exercise. Begin by closing your eyes and thinking about your problem. Here you want to relive it as best as you can. Make a note of how problematic it is in your life. You could use a scale of 1 to 10 if that helps.

Then you want to start to get behind things. In order to do that start paying attention to your body. You may notice that as you are thinking and reliving the problem in mind that somewhere in your body there seems to an unwanted thing. It could be represented as a tightening feeling, a tug, a clinging, muscular, or skeletal tension, mild discomfort, or pain. It can be anywhere in the body, but common areas are the stomach, the chest, neck and upper back. At this point you’re really more focused on the physical sensation so once you have a hold of that just hold it in consciousness for around 30 seconds to a minute so that you become more fully aware of its presence.

Next step is to connect the cognition and the feelings with this physical presence. What is the predominate thought or feeling there? You can tell when it resonates when the physical presence begins to be at its most intense. You could think of it as a game of hide and seek, where the closer you are to finding something the warmer you are. Same thing here, you go through the predominate emotions and thoughts until you hit the spot where it seems it’s most intense. It’s not necessarily the first thought or emotions that pop into consciousness that is important here, rather the one that resonates the most. Again hold this in consciousness for around 30 seconds to a minute. By the way that 30 second to a minute thing isn’t rigid, it’s just a guideline. The more important thing is to gain a real sense of what’s occurring. So if it takes longer then so be it.

One more observation to make and then we can begin to let go of it. Behind the physical sensation and all its emotional and psychological associations is energy and we want to be able to bring this into awareness. A simple way of getting a

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 154 feel for that is to just focus on your hand. Let’s say a finger on the hand. Then focus attention inside the finger until you perceive something that may come across as a tingly sensation, or perhaps a warm sensation. It’s usually something along those lines, were there is this perception of something inside the skin or muscle or bone that seems alive in some way. What I mean by alive is that it appears to have energy of some sort.

We need to do the same thing with our identified trouble spot as it appears in the body. We want to dig at the energetic level as opposed to the physical structure, though that too is part of it. I often say go inside the feeling or the thought or the sensation and what I mean by this is to try and intuit the deeper energy that resides there.

What is occurring there is that the energy there is blocked and what we want to do is give it a kick start and move it along so that it can pass through you. So rather than thought / emotion / physical sensation we have this model of thought / emotion / physical sensation plus energy.

Again keep this awareness of the energy in consciousness for around a minute or so. Do not try and change it just be aware of it.

Hop into observer mode, did the awareness of the energy transform the uncomfortable feeling? You are on the right track if that uncomfortable feeling becomes more pleasant in some way. It’s always experienced as more pleasant so that is your guide. Keep switching from observer mode into the first person state and back again as a means to check if any change is occurring there.

If there is no change, then lets help it along a bit. Here you can use breathing techniques. You may want to look up some yogi or Taoist breathing techniques here to help you along if you’re not used to breathing properly. On the in breath, take the breath into the centre of energy and let it reside there momentarily, on the out breath let some of the energy go out with the breath. At first particularly if you’re not used to this just imagine that’s what is occurring. As you practice more you will gain a much finer sense of the subtleties involved here so don’t worry too much about getting it right, it will come.

What you are looking for is that pleasant shift. So if you’re starting to perceive that the blockage is becoming pleasant you’re on track. Repeat that over again as many times as you can until a pleasant sensation forms.

155 Edward Traversa Huh bet you thought I was going to leave it at that pleasant level sensation!

We want to get rid of that too. Why? Because we don’t want blockages, be they pleasant of unpleasant, blockages obstruct period. Secondly we don’t want to form an attachment.

So release on the pleasant sensation too in the same manner. Let it go, by breathing it out. Or if you find something else that works particularly well for you use that. Do not get caught into things necessarily being one way as that only promotes rigidity. What we are aiming for this time, is the same feeling we have when we make a tight fist and then relax it completely. That’s what that part of the body should feel like. No obstruction there, just everything flowing along nicely in a relaxed manner.

With smaller problems you will find that the problem tends to go away pretty quickly. So for example, that money issue may only take a few days to resolve. The deeper underlying issue of fear of intimacy or control or power etc may take a lot longer, anywhere between one to three months. But once you have it to the point where it flows along in that way and there is no blockage there, and that is your experience over a period of time, you are completely done with that issue. Remember you are not done with every issue, but you have chopped of one of the hydras head. Possibly many more to go, but at least one has been slain.

In summary then the process is this, use insight to gain awareness about the unconscious issue. Use insight to see how the emotions, the thoughts, and sensations are entangled. Then use insight to see how it relates to the past. Use insight to start to bring attention on the energy blockages. Then release... Repeat this process, until it has completely diminished. The integrative part is that your using a more holistic framework than typically used in teachings and as such you’re more likely to let go of stuff for good. Even at the cognitive level for example, you’re not so much focussed on the thought as you are on what is the energy that drives that thought and it’s the energy that is central to all this and often is not paid attention to. That’s one of the reasons why this technique helps a lot of people.

In terms of the uncovering of the shadow aspect article, you could use that technique described there to surface the unconscious stuff, and then apply some of the going deeper into the energy and releasing technique outlined here.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 156 Usual caveat applies, this is not a panacea, it is just one technique that others have found useful on this path in terms of uncovering and then letting go of blockages. Will it get you enlightened? Hell no! But it may just let you take a step further...

157 Edward Traversa Elaborating on Distance

A further elaboration on distancing in relationships after some email were received recently.

The reader’s question:

"You took an insightful, but large leap from money as expression of intimacy issues, but I get it. It is a relationship issue at core. The bigger leap is the noticing of the pattern pursue/distance. How did you get there? Is this experience, or is there some universal that works this way?"

That’s experience that came about in part through my training, counselling couples and observation of couples and also in part of being in counselling myself.

It is not a universal law in the same sense that say the law of gravity is, but it is a fundamental principle of dysfunctional relationships. So while a couple may be outwardly fighting about money there is always an underlying unconscious dynamic pattern there if that fighting about money is repetitive and ingrained. An odd occasional fight about money doesn’t mean there is something deeper there; it is only when it’s a repetitive behaviour that it’s a sure indicator of that.

Even in healthy relationships that principles applies, it’s just that couple typically manage the distance in a more mature and constructive manner. Usually these couples are reasonably in touch with what is going on internally.

The leap isn’t as large as it may seem. It depends on what you are observing. As I said if you focus on what people are fighting about then that tends to stay at the level of the money. If however you observe how they fight then a pattern emerges, e.g. she says this, he feels that, he behaves like this; she reacts like that and so forth...

One way of looking at it, is that most people would look at the money as being the problem. I would typically discount the money, and look for distance, anxiety, internal reactions of the couple and so forth. The only reason I mentioned the money dynamic in the previous article was to denote a typical scenario that couples may fight about. But in practise I would not be focussing on the money, that’s almost a superfluous issue that is more like a symbol for deeper issues. It would be the deeper issues I would be focusing upon from the outset.

How can you apply this to your life? First put the money or whatever the issue is aside. Look at the dynamic in terms of control with a particular view to how control is used to manage anxiety. If a person has a need to fix the relationship then and there and cannot manage to hang on for a while till things settle down, then you know there is an anxiety issue at hand. Their pursuit of resolving the issue then and there is their way of coping

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 158 with anxiety. The same applies for the distancer, if they have a habit of putting things off then that is their mechanism of coping with anxiety. Both people have the same issue; it is just that they cope with it in different ways.

Part of the discovery process then is to make that coping behaviour more conscious. In essence what you are doing is mapping out that interaction. For example, when a partner says a certain thing, how do you feel? And when you feel that way, how do you typically respond? And when you respond in that way, how then does the other person respond? Why may they be responding like that, what do you think they may be feeling then and so on? Ask your partner to do the same thing and then check back and forth with each other about feelings and reactions. Look at it terms of who is distancing and who is pursuing and it should become apparent that there is something else going on aside from the money issue or whatever the issue seems to be.

Often couples will swap roles within a relationship, where for example, one partner is pursuing sex and the other is distancing in this regard. The partner, who is distancing in sex, may well be pursuing better communication.

One way to map out distance is to use a relationship gram. What you will need is a blank piece of paper and a pen or pencil. Do the following:

1. Symbolically represent yourself on the paper. The symbol can be anything that comes to mind.

2. Symbolically represent your partner on the paper.

3. Symbolically represent your mother.

4. Symbolically represent your father on the paper.

5. Symbolically represent your best friend.

6. Symbolically represent siblings.

7. Symbolically represent children if you have any.

8. Symbolically represent any other significant people in your life. Here you are looking for one or two people aside from the above that have impacted on you greatly.

Once you have that down, see if there are people you would like to be closer to or further away from. The people you would like to be closer to use an arrow to indicate closeness, and the people you want to be further away from use an arrow in the opposite direction to indicate more distance.

Then look at the piece of paper. How spaced out are the relationships? For example, if you’re in the centre and your mother is in the top corner as far away as possible, then that

159 Edward Traversa indicates a great deal of distance. If all your relationships are spaced out as in a lot of space between you and others that mean you operate in relationships from a distance. If they are really close together that is more indicative of enmeshment relationships where the boundaries are not that clear.

Then look at the size of the symbols. Who has the largest symbol, which has the smallest symbol? This can indicate who has had the most influence in our life. If you are the largest symbol then that can indicate an over exaggerated sense of self importance. If you are the smallest symbol it may indicate that you don’t think enough about yourself and consider others people’s emotions or thoughts to be more important than yours.

Who do you want to be closer to and who do you want to further away from and what is preventing that from occurring?

Then look at the symbols themselves. Let us say you drew a circle, a pyramid, a house, a square. You could use the shadow technique discussed in the TAT forum and see what comes out of that. You might then enquire into why that particular symbol for that specific person.

For example, let’s say you drew a shape that was not that clear. You might then ask, are you unclear about that person’s role in your life? Or is the person unclear in how they relate to you. Perhaps they are a person who seems to not have a clear direction in life and so on.

Ask your partner to do the same thing if they are willing and then compare the relationship gram. It is frequent for one partner to have a spaced out relationship gram and for the other to have a relationship gram where the symbols are closer together.

You could then see how their mother is placed in relation to them and see how your mother is in relation to you. Are there differences in spacing? How did these differences come about for you and your partner?

Get the idea?

A thing to consider is that westerners tend to draw themselves in the middle of the paper. Asians by contrast will tend to draw themselves in the corners of the paper and in comparison will be smaller symbols when representing self than westerners. This is because there is greater emphasis on independence in western cultures, whereas in a lot of Asian cultures family takes precedence over independence. So you might also want to take into consideration the cultural factors.

Of course doing it by yourself is not going to be as revealing as say doing it with a professional psychologist who has some expertise in projective techniques, but nonetheless, some interesting material can be found on your own when you use this mapping technique.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 160

You can also increase your skills and awareness in this area by doing the same exercise with willing friends and swapping notes. The more exposure you have to different patterns and what they may mean, then the more likely it is that you will be better able to understand you own symbols.

161 Edward Traversa Silence and Stillness

Silence in the context of awakening is not the absence of sound.

Stillness in the context of awakening is not the absence of movement.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 162 Facets of Purity of Intent

Ok this one is another of those long pieces. Seems I am drawn to write longer pieces for now, but on a less frequent basis. Such is life...

Let us take a step back and revisit the notion of purity of intent as I think many people are confusing purity of intent with hard work and they are not quite the same thing. A caution to begin with: I will be outlining some of the strategies I used early on, in this path. This in no way is meant to convey a recipe of some sorts that will apply to all people. What I am trying to do, is to convey some of the complexities involved and from this perspective then it can be useful for others to see how a person engages in a process of discovery. It should also be remember, that this was early days stuff, and as time progressed other things took prominence, different understanding and insights appeared and so on. By no means was this a finale / solution, rather just one of the many points on the path. Keep that in mind please.

The first point I would like to make about purity of intent, is that you have to see how or even if purity of intent applies to your life. There is a chasm between hearing this concept of someone else and seeing how it directly applies to your own life. The latter is the one you want.

Which then raises the question of how does one see how it has applied in your life does it not?

To illustrate, I am going to use some of my early notes, but with the caution that if you’re looking for some magical formula you’re going to be sadly disappointed. The real point I am attempting to convey is that as a seeker the only thing of importance is to figure out how purity of intent applies to your life, not mine. Nonetheless there may be bits and pieces here that people may find helpful. Or not. Anyway let’s set the stage.

As I have mentioned a few times in the past, I had come to a point in life where I recognized that nothing seemed to work. As succinctly as I can state it, it was an overwhelming experiential recognition that everything I had been taught and everything that I was telling myself and believed in simply did not work.

Now while relatively speaking that was certainly experienced as true at the time and for some months after, it seemed to me that it was likely I was distorting this in some way. Anytime you’re really down and out you’re not functioning to well at a cognitive level, where everything or nearly everything will be construed in a negative manner.

It seemed to me that even though I experienced this as true in my life, that the smart thing to do was to challenge the assumption that everything in life was a failure. The way I went about it was to examine my life and see if anything had worked in it in the past. Here I

163 Edward Traversa was looking for things that seemed to work consistently and over a considerable period of time.

I should mention that during this period, I was not interested in how others or society defined success, but rather used a simple definition of success. If I had a goal, and it worked for me over a period of time, then that was “success.” Later on I went into the whole success / failure thingy but for now, let’s just stick with these early notes.

I drew up a list with two ledgers, this works, this doesn’t. For the first week or so, everything was on the does not work side of ledger. Then it dawned on me that one of my relationships with my best friend was consistently working well over long periods of time.

Compare and contrast was my next strategy, what was it about this particular relationship that stood it apart from other relationships in life, where other relationships, included former lovers, other friends, work mates, family and so on.

I came up with a word and that word was loyalty. The problem with that word was that it didn’t seem to apply to other areas of my life. For example, on a number of occasions I was loyal to friends and former partners, but that loyalty component didn’t seem to work in those instances.

I was stuck and at a loss to explain how loyalty applied in my life. This went on for a considerable period of time, and I even left it at one stage and went on to other things. Then one day I was reading something about dreams and symbols by Carl Jung and I began to wonder if the word Loyalty was symbolic for something else.

After throwing around a number of different words that may represent loyalty, I stumbled upon the word dedication. You may start drawing parallels between purity of intent and dedication as they are not that far apart. It’s just at the time, I had no concept of purity of intent, and dedication seemed to fit.

Before proceeding, I would like to draw attention to the fact that of being too caught up in one concept, in this case loyalty. Something that a seeker may find useful is to think of whatever they are stuck on as being symbolic of something else. Try throwing around a few different ideas that may represent that original symbol in a disguised form. It may be that a whole wealth of previously unexplored territory comes to mind. Anyway back to what I was discussing previously.

The question of inquiry then became, how has dedication gotten me what I wanted from life? A couple of things came to mind almost immediately.

One was, how did I go from the person that was picked near last when a cricket team was being selected, to being the person that did the picking in the space of two years?

How did I go from writing my very first essay at university which was barely a pass, didn’t have the slightest semblance of correct formatting for an essay, was extremely poor

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 164 grammatically etc, to winning the student of the year award in my post graduate year. That was a period of 5 years all up, but already by the end of the first year I was considered one of the better students in the psychology course. So how did I get to that in a relatively short period of time? That was my form of inquiry in this instance.

By comparing those two instances in my life and plundering through the similarities and differences I was able to discern that in both those instances there was a common thread.

I was dedicated and committed, to the point of being consumed. In the playing cricket example, as a young boy I felt inferior to others in this regard and didn’t like that feeling at all. This led to an interest in becoming a better cricketer. The pattern was as follows:

1. I read a lot on cricket, e.g. how to bat, bowl, place fields, play certain shots, bowl certain types of deliveries and so on. 2. I talked to others about cricket, particularly adults about the intricacies of playing cricket. I wanted to know how I could become a better cricketer. 3. I practiced a lot. Barring inclement weather, family engagements etc, I would go into the backyard throw the ball against the wall and practice my shots. Similarly, I would practice bowling by either bowling at a stump or bowling to my younger brothers. Later I would practice with friends as well.

At university the pattern was as follows:

1. I read a lot about how to write. I also read a lot about how write for each particular disciple. For example, writing a sociology essay is different to writing a psychology lab report. 2. I made an effort to discover what each lecturer expectations were about the essay or lab report etc. I wanted to know what would get me good marks. 3. I practiced a lot.

At first glance it may appear that I had discovered a formula of sorts, but it is a bit more complicated than that.

For example, both of these times in my life involved a considerable amount of work. So working at something certainly seemed to be a component of it. However was it the amount of hard work that leads somewhere? To discern what was going on there, I looked at other periods of my life were I had worked hard, and even at some stages where I was working like a dog.

It occurred to me that in my life, the notion of working harder as leading to your goals simply didn’t apply. Indeed there were periods where I had worked a lot harder than in those cricket and university examples, and all that lead to be was one tired guy who didn’t really get what he wanted.

165 Edward Traversa While there certainly was a component of working in the above examples, over working didn’t seem to make things more successful. Rather they were detrimental in all cases. By that I mean there may be an initial quick reward, but over a period of few years, it seemed to collapse and fall back into negativity.

I had learned something though. Hard work in itself didn’t lead to a more beneficial life. As a consequence that was ruled out.

A lot of things seemed to be like this, e.g., trust, faith, love, compassion etc... By and large they were pretty much in the same category of working hard.

There was something else about those two periods of my life. I enjoyed them! That is not to say that there weren’t moments of despair, periods of insecurity and frustration, periods of beating up on myself etc, but in general I loved the learning aspects, the betterment of self more than I hated the negative aspects.

Ok so that’s one more thing that both had in common. That was added to the list. What else was there?

There was an immersion in the respective fields. On both occasions the goal had become so big in my mind that I became immersed in what I was endeavouring to accomplish. It was not at all like, “Ok I have to become so focused, so intent, so determined etc...” Rather the immersion seemed to happen naturally as my interest in the fields progressively grew.

I liken it to doing something creative, where one can be so immersed in the endeavour that nothing seemed to exist outside of that creative endeavour. But that too has a connotation of being at something 24/7 where it wasn’t really like that.

It was more like when I was practicing cricket for example, I was really immersed in that. But I was not immersed 24/7. There were periods were I would do other things, play other sports, simply hang out etc...

It was the same with psychology. There were periods were I would go out to a pub\nightclub, visit friends, see a movie, just sit on the couch and do nothing etc...

As I now understand it these “time outs,” were crucial in the whole scheme of things. A question I often to pose to seekers when they feel they aren’t working hard enough or should be working more is “what makes you think, that rest isn’t part of the process?”

In society, particularly western society, there is this notion of hard work as the answer and when one is apparently “not working” then it tends to produce guilt and consequently a compulsion to work more and more. This suits capitalistic societies to a tee where production is central to the whole economy. But it is a con.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 166 It is like buying a new house, working ten or more hours a day including travel time, sometimes even on the weekend to live in a house that you’re hardly in. When you are in it, you’re too tired to enjoy it, enjoy your partner or children and before you know it your off to bed. Yet the compulsion to pay of the house as quickly as possible is there, usually with the notion that once the house is payed you can then enjoy life. What happens once the house is payed off? A bigger better house of course and the cycle goes on!

That’s not true for everyone, but for a far larger slice of society than anyone cares to comprehend that will hold true. It is the same for seekers; one must see the value of resting and enjoyment as being part of the bigger scheme of things.

That doesn’t mean that you should shirk issues, on the contrary these need to be confronted and it will seem like hard work, often painful work. But when overworking becomes an ingrained pattern which is just leading to exhaustion and fatigue, there is nothing wrong with taking a few days off, doing things you enjoy, providing the mind and body with much needed rest and coming back to the problem at hand a little later. If you are shirking the issue, the clue will be consistently putting off what needs to be confronted. What is also helpful here is to enquire into the nature of resting and why there may be a need as manifested to overwork.

Ok so at this point in my enquiry I also had immersion added to my list of what seemed to work. Another aspect that seemed central was that in those periods, there were also mini- periods were I didn’t seem to be there. Often I would complete a great cricket shot and have the feeling of wow, did I really do that, or where did that come from. It was the same with essays and like, sometimes once the essays were completed that same feeling of did I really write this, or where did that come from, would come into consciousness. The best I can describe it is as a feeling of wonderment. It seemed to me that when I was functioning optimally, I wasn’t really getting in the way as much of the other times when I was really working myself to a point of exhaustion.

I was then able to see how these aspects applied in other areas of life. For example, when a relationship was going well, it seemed that many of the same things were present, particularly dedication to each other, when it was not, it seemed that a lot of what has been discussed was missing.

Also there were other things there that I managed to tease out, but I think by now you should be getting the idea.

I was not couching that in terms of purity of intent at the time, I was using words like immersion, dedication etc, but the words do not really matter. It was just that I had seemingly found a cluster of things that seemed to be interrelated that had worked in my life previously.

A couple of more points before I bring this all back to purity intent.

167 Edward Traversa As you may have noticed I used a compare and contrast strategy a lot in those early days. In no way is this meant to convey that everyone should compare and contrast. It worked for me, and may well work for others too, but equally it isn’t going to work for everyone. Part of this whole deal is to discover what works best for you in a given situation so don’t get too caught up in the method used.

I have outlined a bit of the procedure, but you should also take into account something. I had fooled myself more than once in life. There was no proof that I wasn’t going to be fooled again. Remember that as much as possible. It is important to do so. It was not like I thought I had found an answer at all, it was more like ok this seems to be worthwhile to investigate given the information that I had at the time.

All that this process did was make clearer a working hypothesis that seemed to apply at various points in life. The hypothesis was yet to be tested were the testing is integral to discovery. Testing, refining, throwing out some things, putting in others etc was what I engaged in a lot after that.

Why have I gone into this in such detail? Largely because there is a notion that Purity of Intent is one thing, typically hard work, or determination. By engaging in a notion, it often is a cover up for not examining life, your life. The concept becomes more central than your internal experiences and when that happens, you may as well throw out the board and start again. Internal experiences however are also very misleading at times. For example, the loyalty thing, the experience that nothing works in life etc, where in fact everything ultimately is just fine. Makes it a complicated deal doesn’t it?

The other thing is if we start to examine our lives, then we can start to see clusters of things appearing in life, where these cluster most likely have been overlooked and are worth investigating. A lot of these clusters aren’t going to lead anywhere. Some may though... Paranormal activities was another cluster that appeared in my life that took me down a certain road, where much of that was ultimately dismissed, but there were some very valuable gems among all that. One being losing oneself, which as you may have noted also, appears in the above.

What then is useful is to try and get objective, where objective doesn’t mean overly analytical. Rather it is more encompassing everything you can bring to bear on the problem, which may well include analysis from time to time, but it would also include doing experiential exercises.

With regard to purity of intent, we could say that determination and willingness are central, so much so that in experience it becomes very much like all or nothing, but that dismisses the role of the other aspects. All or nothing also can and often does mean taking a break among other things. That too is purity of intent often without realizing it is.

For example, I know many times in my life and from speaking with others that often the solution comes to us when we take a break. How many times have you worked so hard at

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 168 something, and then got stuck, then in desperation stated something like, “I am going for a walk or going to bed,” then just when you let it go, the answer appears?

The funny thing about all that is we often then attempt to make this rest into work. Rather than really take a break, we unknowingly take a break in the hope that the answer will come to us, which of course means we are still working when we are attempting to rest. A break means a break, not a disguised attempted at a break. To give it up or surrender means to give it up or surrender as completely as one can.

In this sense then the break and the intention of having a break has to be pure. We can say that our general purity of intent is to discover what life is all about, or who am I, or what is truth etc, but that also encompasses purity of intent in many areas.

When enjoyment presents in life, that enjoyment has to be pure. It cannot be half baked where you are pretending to enjoy but secretly worrying about the bills. So you have a general intention to enjoy fully and purely as one can.

Here it is interesting, and brings up an important point, if you’re overly determined to enjoy, you’re most likely going to find that your body is a rigid mess and that is detrimental to really enjoying fully. Purity of intent then in this circumstance is less about determination, but more about finding a place where you can really surrender to the moment. Purity of intent at times is a very gentle and subtle thing.

In the midst of darkness, purity of intent may manifest very differently. There it may well be more fierce, more intense and is probably more akin to how it is usually described. In those circumstances then a fierce desire to really get to the bottom of that darkness, desperation etc may arise and that’s what is called for in that situation. You have to have that too.

When you start to examine life, then you start to see that purity of intent may come in many forms, forms we often miss. Each of these forms has a role to play in the grand scheme of things. As I have outlined previously, something’s in life worked for me at various times. What worked for me in that sort of detail that I have outlined isn’t probably going to work for you.

That is why figuring out life is elusive. The will be some commonalities, like purity of intent or dedication, but how they manifest from one person to next may be very different. Your role in all this is to figure out how it manifests for you and to inquire if it is really beneficial to what you want or not.

In all that try and loosen your grip on purity of intent being this rigid notion, and try and see if it has appeared in other forms in your life, under different guises that you previously weren’t aware of. Try and get a more sophisticated awareness of it, as it relates to your life. Examine when things worked, when they didn’t, try different strategies to uncover all this. Find out what works for you.

169 Edward Traversa If you can uncover that, then one last word of caution: You’re going to get what you want. But what you want is really driven by your unconscious, so be prepared to be surprised and for that all mighty word of FURTHER.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 170 Purpose

This is another one of those ones, where if I had a dollar for every time I heard it, it would put Bill Gates to shame monetary wise.

When people ask me why I am here alive on this planet, I reply for no reason. They will often remark, but your alive therefore there must be a reason or purpose for your existence. Huh says who?

That would be the equivalent of me saying that because my yellow wall is in existence, there are little green men from mars having their way with Michael Jackson.

Now while some people may well wish both were true, neither has any basis in logic or reality.

171 Edward Traversa The Tricks we Play

Yesterday, my friend rang me and said that this woman who had been unexpectedly out of touch, called him to say he was missed and if they could get together for “coffee.” I just want to point to something, we as humans typically do in interpersonal relationships.

First of all why is it that we use the term “coffee” as a pretence for wanting something more? I mean the most obvious thing is that the person wants to see if there is a possibility of a relationship there, so why not stop playing games and just come out and say it?

The answer is of course that people like to be in control, so saying let us have a coffee is a safe way of getting together and testing the waters. It is one of the ways we use to not make a fool of ourselves. Yet paradoxically, we are fooling ourselves, because by playing games like that, we never present our deepest desires and for that matter fears to another and instead present a façade that appears confident, but underneath it all is a snivelling coward that can’t even say, “hey I like you, how about meeting and seeing if we can reconnect” etc..

So meet for coffee instead and present an even falser self instead is the logic here. And then they wonder why people don’t understand them or why no one loves the deeper hidden part of you. How dumb is that?

Here people are hiding aspects of a perceived self and expecting other people to love the part that is hidden, which no one can see!

Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…………….

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 172 To Know or not to Know

A reader’s comment: “To be OK with not knowing would be like giving up on the search, giving up on finding the truth.”

You are assuming that truth has something to do with knowing it in the human mind, where as in fact truth has nothing to do with knowing it in the human mind.

Enlightened sages haven’t said that truth is a knowable concept, what they have said is it exists where the existence is beyond the reach of the human mind.

That is very different to what you portray and desire.

The search has nothing to do with a quest for knowledge, it an inward spiral into discovering what it is that constitutes you, and if you cannot figure out why you can’t stand to know something, then you may as well give up now.

Every avenue must be explored, where if you are uncomfortable with not knowing then that, tell you a lot about what is in the way. How you repeatedly cling to the notion of knowledge as a path then tells you how much you want to cling to ego and shores up the indentify. Your inability to let go of this then shores up ego, not diminishes it and then you wonder why ego still has dominance over everything you do. How can it not have dominance under those circumstances?

The price of enlightenment is everything, this includes knowing, this includes clinging to the belief that if you knew then everything would be ok, and this includes the notion, that it can be known in the human mind, to mention but a few.

173 Edward Traversa Deepak’s Illusions

Deepak Chopra is good at giving techniques to live well within the illusion as illusion. However, when it comes to describing ultimate reality he tends to flounder. Illusion can only sprout Illusion. I was reminded of this when someone posted a little bit of Deepak on a forum.

So let’s look at some of the things that Deepak says and then contrast it with ultimate reality. Deepak comments are represented by italics.

When you look at yourself, you see only love.

There is only love (or presence or stillness, call it what you will), no one is looking.

Your purpose in life is to help creation expand and grow

You are expansion and creation in ultimate reality and at the same time neither. Therefore there is no purpose, it is just being...

There is no confusion or conflict with any other person on earth

There isn’t a person on earth in the first place to have conflict with in ultimate reality.

In the deeper reality, you are part of every event that is happening now, has ever happened, and ever will happen

In ultimate reality there is no past, no future. There is only now, where now is not bound by time. Rather it is timeless. The above statement is true as it pertains to consciousness, but not as it pertains to the absolute.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 174 Deflated Self

If you see that emotion and sensation and thought don’t really exist, even if it is just a conceptual level at this stage, then no doubt rather than being inspired you have become deflated.

You have come to the point or coming to the point where you realize that all you’re searching, all you’re seeking was for naught. That everything you do and will ever do is for naught. And that’s got to hurt.

But it only hurts because you STILL have the desire to get the answer. And in this desire there is a subtle hope that you will become better than you and that somehow you can cheat death by knowing the answer. But nothing of you will survive. Repeat. Nothing of you will survive!

Enlightenment isn’t about you as a physical entity. How many times does this need to said? Millions and millions of times because ego will always say well it is about me, it’s me, me, me….

But the fact is regardless of what Ego says, what your thought says, there is no answer to be had, because there is no one there to ask the question in the first place. When it is said truth exists, it doesn’t mean that it exists as a function of knowing the answer, it means that truth is existence and when you are that, and then you are truth…

This truth does not entail questions and answers. And your ego will always want to ask questions and seek answers.

So what is left to do?

Breathe and be patient. Sit as much as you can with stillness. Spiral inwards, keep hacking and cutting away at yourself. Try and stop asking questions and sit with not knowing.

175 Edward Traversa Perception

Realize that perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelt, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience freedom.

Understanding that perception is subjective is a big step forward spiritually. What is seen or heard, touched or smelt, thought or emotion, expected or imagined, past and future, only exists in the mind and doesn’t exist in reality.

If you can manage to whittle enough of yourself away by understanding perception is subjective, then you are beginning to free yourself from the bondage of fear that drives your life.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 176 Negating Patterns

One of the ways you begin to negate is to understand your circular patterns. Here is a technique that you can try:

Try and understand your own circle first. It might be something along the following lines.

Discomfort > Movement > Relaxing > Boredom > Discomfort > Movement > Relaxing > Boredom etc.

So then break it up. Pull it apart. When you are in a state of discomfort which could be anywhere between very mild frustration, to full blown rage, what do you do next?

Do you meditate harder? Do you ask a question? Do you distract yourself, e.g. listen to music or read a spiritual text to try and find the ‘answer’ etc?

What ever you are doing, try and define it as best as you can, really try and narrow it down. Make a journal for a few days and just note exactly what you do when discomfort appears in your life.

Assuming you have the pattern down conceptually, then at least you have something to work with.

Start getting a feel for discomfort. What I mean by that is really become familiar with your discomfort. Write about it, just let the words flow without thought or editing, what does discomfort feel like in actuality? Keep going back to the experiential state of discomfort and keep noting what occurs, until you start being able to hold the discomfort longer and longer.

Now the circle is getting smaller so that you’re spiralling inwards

Discomfort > Movement > Discomfort > Movement > Discomfort > Movement and so on.

177 Edward Traversa

What is happening here psychologically and spiritually is the circle is collapsing on itself, much like a Black Hole. You are using the energy of discomfort to destroy discomfort rather than looking for something external to alleviate the discomfort.

You can do a lot of preliminary work before doing this, eg read up on the malleability of pain, or go the quantum physics route etc that helps to break up concepts, but eventually there has to come a time, where the works needs to be performed at an intrapersonal level.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 178 Rumi and Reality

We are as the flute, and the music in us is from thee; we are as the mountain and the echo in us is from thee.

We are as pieces of chess engaged in victory and defeat: our victory and defeat is from thee, O thou whose qualities are comely!

Who are we, O Thou soul of our souls that we should remain in being beside thee?

We and our existences are really non-existence; thou art the absolute Being which manifests the perishable.

We all are lions, but lions on a banner: because of the wind they are rushing onward from moment to moment.

Their onward rush is visible, and the wind is unseen: may that which is unseen not fail from us!

Our wind whereby we are moved and our being are of thy gift; our whole existence is from thy bringing into being.

~Rumi~

179 Edward Traversa The Divided Self

Here in this world, there is a reflection and all parts are reflected as opposites. Nowhere is this more evident than in our egoic selves. Yet we rarely enquire into the nature of our minds and our human persona.

In psychology there is a field of study known as Ego State Therapy. Basically it explains why a part of you wants to do this and another part of you doesn’t want to do it. It proposes that we are not one self but many selves and these selves have their own distinct personalities.

To conceptualize this think of yourself when you are angry. When you are, you seem to be a completely different person to when you are peaceful. It’s like there are two different people presenting to the world. In fact often there is a dialogue going on inside yourself as if you’re waging a war between two aspects of yourselves. One part may be saying come on don’t be lazy, and another part may be saying I cannot be bothered. There may well even be another part of you saying why am I arguing all this in my head.

Ego state therapy treats each separated self as real personality. Think Dissociative Personality Disorder, which was formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder and that’s how we all work as separated selves. Except for most it isn’t as extreme as Dissociative Personality Disorder; it’s more alike to a milder form of that separation which everyone has.

Ego states isn’t a particularly new concept, the Buddhist have used it for thousands of years and like the psychological equivalent, the therapeutic goal isn’t to get rid of the ego states but rather have them communicate with each other in better ways.

An example would be talking to an angry ego state as if it were a person and asking it what is trying to accomplish and then talk to the state in disagreement with the angry state and ask the same question and then have the states negotiate a settlement that meets both their goals. In these terms then each ego state perceives itself to be validated.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 180 There can also be different voices in your head and that’s quite normal believe it or not. Sometimes the voice may appear to be a woman’s voice, sometimes a man sometimes that of a child; sometimes the voice takes on different tonality and so on… Almost as if there were lots of little people running around in your head. In terms of understanding how your mind works at a psychological level, it is a useful framework to understand. Whenever you are conflicted and have incongruent thoughts its conflicting ego states at work. And typically the ego states are opposites of each other.

If you consider that typically there are lots of different ego states in a person, then it’s not hard to see why nearly everyone is conflicted and how this conflicted and divided self spills over to the world at large.

You could and most probably do have a spiritual ego state. One that likes to think of itself as a guide: the holder of wisdom sort of thing… But it has no real wisdom of its own, and like anything else it has merely acquired knowledge through reading books and being told to be a certain way. In other words it’s merely a sheep following all the other sheep, even though it can bring about peaceful feelings. Feelings that never last of course, because the moment it takes predominance in psyche, other ego states are fighting to get to the top of the tree and be the predominate ego state. That is why it doesn’t matter whether you are angry, in pain or not because at least if these things are acknowledged then they seem real to you. In other words better to exist in pain than to not exist at all is the norm of ego states.

That’s the rub you see… An ego state is predisposed to attempt to be take dominance because it wants to be heard and wants to be seen to exist. Given that, then there can only be moments of respite and moments of anguish from an ego perspective. You may well seemingly “cure” one thing, but sooner or later another will pop up and the internal conflict ensues.

Now why am I telling you all this? Just so you can be just that little more aware of your own internal processes.

It’s actually quite beneficial to sit down and write down all the different voices that go on in your head. Give them names, describe their qualities, what characteristics do they have? And so on… Know thy divided self and then the

181 Edward Traversa cupboard cleaning of the mind that follows via negation is made all that much easier.

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 182 Attachment and Service

How opportune that an email arrived just while I was contemplating writing an article on attachment and service. In the email the essence of the question goes like this, why not use no-mind e.g., intuition, gap to heal yourself.

The answer is simple. This body is not my body. This body exists not in the service of “Eddie” it is exists because it is part of the absolute and as such belongs to the absolute for lack of better terminology.

The course for the future of this body has already been set. As Eddie I am not aware what the course is. There has been no indication of what that course may be in awareness, nor does there need to be.

Since this is not my body, there is no preference for what occurs to this body. It may well be that the very perfect thing to occur is death. It may teach others the value of remorse or how having loose ends and regrets can be destructive to their optimal functioning on this planet.

It may even be the perfect thing that this body has a stroke which leaves "Eddie" in some form of vegetative state. The burden on others having to take care of the body may well be a lesson for them in service and dedication which may be the very thing they need to learn to take the next step.

It could be that the best service of the body is to return to health for ten or so years and finish a few books and teach what I can in that time.

No matter which each will be a perfect expression of what is needed for someone, somewhere, so it does not matter one iota what occurs. It will be all good, even though to some it may appear otherwise.

183 Edward Traversa

The Beginning

Truth Realization: Assorted Works 184