May 2015 UVic Spiritual Awakening Meetup

It was my pleasure to host another Meetup at UVic on spiritual awakening this week. The theme was “Non-Duality: The Illusion of Separation and other Non-Dual Perspectives”. Fifteen Awakeners attended. The topic is a fairly challenging one for me, but I was happy to share my current understanding, and pleased to be conversing with others who shared their insight and questions. We started with an audio clip of Alan Watts speaking about duality, the Hindu concept of God as the one true Self, and the possibility that both the world and we as individuals are simply projections in a cosmic dream being dreamt by a “cosmic dreamer or actor”. We discussed separation, both why it seems like such a substantial aspect of our experience, but also why such a belief may be a false premise, an illusion. I shared how, despite our experience of seemingly separate static objects, in reality individual objects are actually unfolding processes that are all intrinsically connected to other processes, ultimately all being part of what might be called the total process of the universe. Our bodies and minds are not separate from this total process. This is something I’m just coming to understand myself, but the basic truth of it seems undeniable to me. We also touched on the primacy of consciousness, the ego, and the witness state talked about in many different spiritual teachings. We read a simple but powerful quote on stillness by K, which I’ll share at the end of this post, and finished with a Mooji video called “Beyond the Concept of Oneness”, which was much appreciated by a number of Awakeners. This is the last Meetup to be held until September. This last year has been a very eventful one for me in many ways, on both the spiritual front and also where relationships and the nitty gritty of the human experience are concerned (it’s all the same thing, really). This Meetup has been a very valuable experience for me, and I hope to continue it in the fall, as a part of my own evolution and as a way to connect with intelligent and interesting individuals. JR “A still mind is not seeking experience of any kind. And if it is not seeking and therefore is completely still, without any movement from the past and therefore free from the known, then you will find, if you have gone that far, that there is a movement of the unknown that is not recognized, that is not translatable, that cannot be put into words; then you will find that there is a movement which is of the immense.” J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life