Adult and Aware

When you were born you could not tell the difference between your body and your mother’s. Those little pink things you saw out there were your toes but you had no way of understanding this because there were no boundaries or distinctions at that stage of life. Over time you began to distinguish yourself from your mother; your uniqueness grew until you became clear about where you ended and everything else began.

The discovery process of “not this, not that” that we spontaneously engaged in as infants goes on for about 10 years. We figured out that we were distinct from our mothers and that we could stand up and walk around and explore the world.

Now as an adult your identity is firmly in place. You concluded that you are a mind inside a body and that’s that. You were born, you will die and everything in between is up to you.

Now what? How am I to make sense of my situation? I suddenly show up as an individual in a world I know nothing about with no idea where I came from, which way to go, or what it all means, if anything.

As adults we may have developed emotionally, sexually and psychologically but our spiritual nature went unnoticed. We noticed the bodily sensations, thoughts and experiences but we didn’t notice the most important thing: how awareness makes all our experiences possible in the first place. We only noticed the content of that awareness as if that was all there was to it. Awareness itself gets overlooked in the same way a fish would say, “What ocean?”

The process that enables us to distinguish between our body and that of our mother’s is the same process that moves us to continue to its ultimate conclusion.

Outgrowing Childhood

What is the ultimate conclusion? According to a model of human development proposed by teacher, Adi Da, there are seven stages of life that correspond with the human body. The heart is at the center stage with three above and three below.

The lower three stages address survival, sexuality and personal will. The upper three stages address genius, transcendence of the sense of a separate self, and identification with infinite freedom, love and happiness.

It began with and typically only gets as far as: I am not my mother. I am not my crib. I am not my dog. But when the process picks back up, I see that I am also not my body, not my thoughts, not my personality, and definitely not the materialistic, sub-human identity that the world culture assigns to me.

I complete and conclude the ‘not this, not that’ process when every distinction between me and not-me has been made. I am not the body, I am that which is aware of the body. Big difference! I am the presence of Life which experiences everything without being limited by anything.

Why the Lion Roars

Our thoughts, bodies, minds, perceptions and experiences move through “the sky of awareness” without affecting it in any way. See for yourself. Is your awareness confined to that which it is aware of? Is your awareness confined in any way by what you perceive? Is your awareness free in the way a mirror is free from what it reflects? Is your awareness free in the same way the sky is free of the weather?

This is what Susan and I share at Lion’s Roar Ministry. We each recognize that what we are is not limited by our bodies or our experiences. That does not mean we are now aloof or disassociated from our human lives, quite the opposite, actually. By identifying with, and as awareness, a profound intimacy develops and warmly embraces our humanity.

When I exclusively identify as the bodymindself, I suffer its limitations and am afraid of its ultimate demise, but identification as awareness is deeply satisfying and stabilizing, like waking up from a nightmare.

Our work at Lion’s Roar Ministry is to support functional adulthood (our own, especially}, and to not wander off into the ghettos and slums of sub-human ego-landia. Our work is like a gigantic excavator that digs deep into the earth looking for survivors.

We are committed to supporting each other and our friends in the realization of a truly human life deeply grounded in the magnificence of who and what we are. It is the radiant power of the Living Brilliance that grows us into, and through the seven stages: heartfelt love and communion as our moment to moment experience with that which is alive as all things.

Self-Betrayal

We are the culprits we complain about. We have betrayed ourselves and the natural world which birthed us. We unwittingly collapsed from love by believing the all-too-familiar cultural narratives fed to us. We signed on as voluntary victims and blamed anyone we could find, just like everyone else.

The result? We created a garbage dump of entrenched 360-degree ego madness, built over top of the five core beliefs that totally dominate human relations: the dramatization of rejection, self-pity, abandonment, blame and withdrawal.

The one and only way out of the madness is to return to love, our true nature. The world is dark but not because the sun isn’t shining but because we block the light and don’t know it.

WE have the power.

We blocked it; which means we also have the power to un-block it. We got ourselves into this mess; we can get ourselves out of it.