Well Being with Don Oakley Don Oakley

Recognizing your true nature (aka awakening) is immensely liberating. But it is not the end of the journey. We may be awake to the timeless nature of our essential beingness but, paradoxically, it may take some time to learn to live from that realization. Embodiment is the process by which the thoroughly conditioned body/mind learns to live from the unconditioned vastness of our true nature. It is a process of increasing subtlety and wonder.

What we call the normal waking state, many spiritual sages have called the dream state. We assume that we all perceive the same external world which we take to be real and objective. The perceptions themselves are not illusory; it is the stories that we tell ourselves about what is happening where the distortion occurs. That distortion is dreamlike in that it is only happening in our own heads; Others are experiencing a different inner narrative. It is this dreamlike narrative that we wake up from.

Most people meditate to either quiet the mind or to experience some non-ordinary (“spiritual”) state and, of course, we all get to choose what we want. However, if your objective is to discover the truth of your being for yourself in your own direct experience, then these two common goals of meditation will lead you astray or, at best, delay your journey. Why? Because they deny the presence of our essential beingness in this moment. They deny in the here-and-now that which we seek, in favor of finding it in the there-and-then, which has the curious attribute of never existing.

Surrender is often talked about in spirituality as a possible future event - well down the road. It sounds admirable, but we're not quite sure what a surrendered life looks like. But surrender is not actually something that we do, or can do. It can happen, but any effort to surrender is inevitably tainted with self-interest. One day, however, we may discover, to our great surprise and relief, that which is already surrendered. That which receives everything, but which doesn’t grasp onto anything.

This brief guided meditation is a direct pointing to your essential beingness. It uses the body as the entry point which bypasses the normal thinking mind and allows us to relax into direct perception of sensory awareness. From there it is far easier to notice the "pure" awareness, that which notices whatever is appearing within this field of consciousness.

Spirituality doesn’t have to be complicated. We only need to get one thing right. If we get this one thing right, not as a concept, but as a felt-sense, full-body AHA! understanding, then Life makes sense. If we don’t, it doesn’t. This one thing is being pointed to in every way imaginable in the hope that, one day, it will be seen one time. And one is enough. As it is said in Zen, “One lamp is enough to dispel a thousand years of darkness.