As she and I sat facing each other giving voice to our experience of the moment, I became enraptured in a vision of a world made of liquid light. In this world of light golden ribbons of stardust seemed to be falling continuously from invisible heavens. The light was bathing everyone in luminosity, or rather we appeared as beings of pure luminous form. I was held in rapture for a few precious minutes witnessing this world formed of liquid light.
I had no thoughts about it, but afterward I realized that I had been gifted with a poetic image of a new world, not as it already exists but as a future possibility that has not yet been manifest.
Once I experienced how sitting face-to-face could open up portals to profound spiritual revelation I immediately saw parallels to my individual meditation practice. These two practices and the depths they open are different but related. The connection between them, as I said earlier, is that both rely on our willingness to give up control of our experience and allow revelation to overtake our hearts and minds. allow revelation to overtake our hearts and minds.
In meditation, while sitting silently on a cushion, I strive to simply allow whatever is present to be there. My goal in meditation is to be with reality exactly the way it is without manipulating or controlling it in any way. As I sit, I keep letting go of all of the subtle habits of manipulation and control, and I drift ever closer to perfect union with what is. The ultimate consciousness of deep meditation is one of absolute unity—a oneness in which we disappear. If you are fortunate enough to experience even a moment so deep, you discover the liberating truth of who you were before you were born—prior to your existence here in this body, living this life, in this world.
Practicing meditation in this way is like removing your hands from the steering wheel and your foot from the gas pedal while driving down the freeway. If you are successful in letting go, you discover the way things are when you are not controlling and manipulating. You discover the truth. And in this discovery at a very a deep level you have the opportunity to give yourself over to mysterious spiritual energies that initiate a process of awakening within you.
Two decades ago I stepped out of a fairly traditional life and reassembled myself around a spiritual commitment to a community and a teacher. For twenty years I devoted myself more or less exclusively to spiritual attainment with very little distraction. My energy during all those years was devoted to my own ever-deepening awakening and my efforts to mentor and teach others in support of their awakening. In the space of this chapter I cannot begin to share the full extent of the spiritual experiences I was blessed with during that time. One of the foundations of my spiritual practice was meditation, and through that practice I experienced energetic openings and spiritual breakthroughs beyond my wildest dreams.
I have experienced the sacred grace of having any sense of limitation fall away. In this experience of spiritual liberation it is as if you had been wearing a lead suit all of your life. It is a mental straight jacket made up of all your ideas about what is possible and what is not. In the instant of liberation it simply drops away. Suddenly you find yourself blissfully free of constraining beliefs, not knowing what is ultimately possible, and compelled by the call of a wide-open future.
During long retreats I have had the opportunity to spend days, weeks, and even months absorbed in meditative unfolding. Many of the awakenings I experienced had the power to dislodge the source of my awareness from its habitual attachment to the mind and body. I have abided for days in states of constant consciousness through periods of both wakefulness and sleep; experienced the energy of Kundalini coursing through my body with white light pouring through the top of my head; and had the grace of merging with others in shared states of collective higher mind that animated all of us.
These experiences and many more have left me certain that reality will always be bigger than I can imagine. I know that we are not ultimately restricted by the limitations of the mind and body, and as long as we continue to surrender the openings and awakenings will go on forever. There is no end to the mysteries of the inner life.
As with meditation, the goal in Mutual Awakening is to be with reality exactly as it is, except this practice is done with another in a spontaneous and immediate flow of shared experience rather than an individual experience. As you look at your partner and repeatedly answer the simple guiding question over and over, it can initially feel artificial and forced. At this stage of the practice you are still drawing mainly on your intellect.
If you continue to let go, you will begin to find that you forget the person in front of you, and you forget yourself. Your attention is drawn to something that is emerging between you. What arises is not appearing outside of you, and yet it is not arising inside of you exclusively. As your experience of the practice grows, you begin to attune to the shared space between you and your partner.
As you continue to let go, words emerge from your mouth more and more spontaneously. They seem to be describing your experience as quickly as you are having it. The intellect is no longer the source of what you are saying. The words emerge from a deeper source of your being, and you realize that you are saying things you never could have imagined before.
Often in Mutual Awakening practice what emerges is poetry. I have found that if I follow the words as they emerge and avoid the temptation to adorn them with meaning, I can follow the trail of spontaneous utterances into new worlds of possibility.
When you go deeply enough into the practice of meditation, you eventually realize that there is no end. You can follow that practice forever into deeper revelations. The same is true of Mutual Awakening practice. It never ends. You and your partner move into ever-deeper openings and realizations. And because you are together the space you are exploring is inherently relational. You do experience a kind of oneness, but it is a oneness that includes you both. You find a oneness that holds relatedness.
Teaching with Patricia Albere in the Evolutionary Collective has opened another source of awakening in my life, and this is why I am so compelled by our working partnership.
I believe in all sincerity that what we need right now is real evolutionary partnerships. We have all grown tremendously through work that we have done on ourselves. We have realized so much. And now we can only go to the next level by coming together in everything that we have realized. The next opportunity for a major leap in development will be found in a level of mutuality that we can only achieve together. When we express our deepest nature with others who are doing the same, we create a new way of being human.
As teachers, Patricia and I are committed to cultivating an emergence of this level of spiritual solidarity. I am aware how rare it is to find teachers who truly want to work mutually, especially if they have been trained in different schools and lineages. I have worked with other teachers in parallel—sharing a platform but doing our own thing. Patricia and I share a commitment to pioneer the possibility of coming together in a mutual surrender that becomes the source of what we teach. The teaching that we do in the Evolutionary Collective emerges between us, not from us.
Working with Patricia and the other extraordinary people in the Evolutionary Collective has initiated a new opening in me and given me a new understanding of what is possible for all of us. I am honored to have the opportunity of this book to share this opening with you.