The Background
In this piece I write specifically for those interested in leadership from a spiritual perspective. I had a strong spiritual background nurtured by a Catholic Christian upbringing. However, from the time of adolescence until deep into my adult life, the background of my experience was depression with occasional moments of peace, love and joy that would eventually disappear leaving an apparent baseline of depression as my default experience.
I wrote this piece below as a way to communicate a profound shift that happened in the quality of my life and my leadership from within a framework of an already deep Faith.
In this series called, Leading from a Nondual Perspective, I use experiential language, an approach familiar to scientists, especially physicists, but an approach that would be comfortable to those from many Faith traditions both East and West and to atheists and agnostics. Here however, I will use the more familiar language of Faith, Faith based directly on experience.
The Transition
The transition from the journey to God, to the journey in God. The word God here refers to whatever understanding we may currently have. Ultimately, the Source of everything and everyone is a mystery. Most religions provide a spiritual path that points its followers toward the Source, the First Cause, the intelligence and love behind the Universe.
However, for many truth seekers there comes a point when something seems missing. A hunger that our current spiritual path is not meeting. A feeling that there is more to this mystery than our current spiritual community is offering.
The Desire
It is the desire to move beyond the journey to God, to the journey in God. It is the desire to go beyond the understanding and experience of God as ‘Other’. There is a hunger for the end of psychological suffering that accompanies the belief in being a separate ‘me’.
Most of us have an intuition of an underlying oneness to reality. As I began thinking for myself, desperate for an end to the long dark night of depression, questions arose such as these. If God is the underlying reality of everything, then it doesn’t make sense that there is a ‘me’ separate from that Reality. If God is omnipresent, then there is no room for a separate me alongside God. If there were a reality alongside and independent of God, then God would not be God.
If God is the ever-present underlying reality of everything and everyone, then this ordinary awareness, reading these words right now, must also be God’s Being. There can be no separation.
That was the beginning of the journey in God for me…. It began as I opened myself to the possibility that this ordinary awareness, IS God’s awareness, God’s Presence.
This awareness that perceives my thoughts, my feelings, my actions, and my dreams at night when I am asleep, must be God’s Presence. For me, that understanding was a revelation and yet when it happened, I recognized that I have always known it!
This is not denying the value of the journey to God because that understanding also helps to undermine the ego. There is less psychological suffering, however, the belief to be a separate self is still present. In my case, there was a longing that could not be fulfilled from within the paradigm of separation.
The Path
The direct path or nonduality non-dual understanding is not a religion. It is an understanding that arises from experience. It is an investigation into what we are, not from hearsay or reading, but from our own direct experience. There are expressions of it within all the world’s religious traditions and there are those living from this realization who remain active within their Faith communities but their experience and understanding have moved beyond the mainstream message that is typically preached.
When we have lived for decades believing to be separate, it takes time to unlearn the habits of thinking, feeling, relating and acting. However, as we live from this new possibility in all aspects of our lives, those habits begin to dissolve and new habits take their place.
Notice the freedom from worry, guilt, shame, and resentment knowing there is no separation because we share this same Divine I AM-ness. Notice the absurdity of the feeling ‘I’m not good enough’ over our failures. Notice what this does to any resentment or blame we may carry toward ‘others’ or ourselves. Notice the difference it makes in our relationships, knowing we share the same sense of ‘me’ regardless of the content of our lives. We are Divine beings at our very core.
Over time we begin to stabilize in the peace of our natural state, a peace that is beyond the mind.
The Shift
The belief that humans have awareness is the core of this misunderstanding. Even when we first became open to the direct path, in most cases we still assumed humans are conscious. We assume humans are aware and that awareness is a property of being human.
As Max Planck, the founder of Quantum Theory, wrote, ‘I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.’
A significant shift takes place once we recognize, only awareness is aware. Our knowledge of awareness, is awareness’ knowledge of itself. Awareness is the one that is aware…the one that knows itself and the world…When we are open to the possibility that this awareness, that through which each of us is aware, is the only awareness there is, something is profoundly different.
With that understanding or at least being open to it, begins the journey in God.
The Good News is, even if we believe ourself to be something other than what we are, sooner or later, what we are will prevail.
We are always, already and for all time, all right. Our very being is happiness and peace…. That’s what we are, even when an old habit, a remnant from separation, temporarily veils it.
So, what does this have to do with leadership?
When we recognize all beings as God’s Presence, our leadership is transformed.
The Note
Devotion, worship and prayer are not inconsistent with this understanding for with it there naturally arises the experience of humility, gratitude and awe. The one giving thanks, the thanks being offered and the one to whom it is offered, are one. The experiences of beauty and love are celebrations of this underlying Oneness. Meditation and other forms of contemplative prayer are resting in and as God’s presence.
We are the knowers of our human experience, aren’t we? What then is the human being? As Rupert Spira so effectively put it, ‘the human is a temporary localization of Infinite Self-Aware Being.’
From this perspective, all sentient beings are instruments through which God sees the world as Him/Herself. We are God’s presence here and so is everyone else.
The Activity (Proposal)
See what it’s like this week open to the possibility that the awareness reading these words right now, is Divine, is God’s very awareness.
