I’m learning to ground myself in something deeper. I’ve been reading more of Jan’s book (When Fear Falls Away, by Jan Frazier), and her accounts of luminosity and awakening are bringing my awareness back to this deeper current of reality, as she describes it. Her book is so inspiring. Up until now, I assumed that periods of luminosity had to end, destined to come and go. Finally I’m entertaining the notion that I can return to it and never come back.
I can understand now why this deeper current is so profoundly satisfying, so gratifying, so fulfilling and peaceful. There is a very tangible sensation that in this current, I find myself touching in a very real way everything and everyone, as they exist below the surface. In this current, love reaches its intended recipients, communication succeeds, healing is carried out, and hearts that long to be together come together. All is well, because what we think has gone awry is just a little two-dimensional slice of reality floating on the surface of the mind. Go just a little deeper, and you discover the full context.
Jan repeatedly emphasizes that this is no metaphor. She devotes many pages to describing just how real and conscious the current became for her, and all she did was ask for it.
Feeling profoundly alienated happens whenever I deny the validity of the current. Jan describes it as a deeper reality to which we all have conscious access but rarely explore.
So there is this very real, very clear and overwhelming perception, that in the underlying current, something below or behind thoughts about what we think is happening, everything we’re looking for is accessible, right there, and the only problem is that when we glimpse it, we can hardly believe it, or we have a habit of wanting to see it manifest in the “real world.”
When I feel the ache of wanting circumstances to be different, I’m faced with a choice. Enter this aching in a search for comfort, letting my mind go in circles until settling upon some memory or intepretation that would make things seem right, or sink into this current of which Jan so eloquently reminded me.
When I choose the current, I turn my attention away from the island on the surface and sink below. There, I find bedrock. Solid and glowing.
An excerpt from Jan’s book:
Begin with the idea that there are two realms of consciousness. Don’t let yourself get away with dismissing it as an ideal only, though. It is not a theory. Take a leap, if you must.
The two states of consciousness are real. Everyone has access to them both. I don’t have to work hard to make a case for the existence of one of them, which is ordinary awareness. It is the one that takes in sense impressions, the one that remembers and plans, that draws conclusions, that worries and loves, gets frustrated and jealous, figures out and forgets. This is the state where reactions to events in the outer world take place. It would be hard to ever lose track of that state. It is the other state of consciousness that I’m interested in. It runs like a strem below ordinary awareness. Always. In everyone. It is there. It is a fact; it is substantial. It’s not wishful thinking, or a New Age construct, or a piece of religious dogma. It isn’t dependent in any way on what’s going on in the outer world. It is as real as the other state. Well, it is more real. Vastly more real. It’s your fundamental condition. It doesn’t corrupt, or die. Unlike everything in the other realm.
Everything.
If you experience the stream-below-the-ordinary, however fleetingly, however rarely, you know it is real. You know the relative insubstantiality of the famailiar–which is to say, the insubstantiality of what we normally think of as our lives.
The point I mean to make is that this deeper state of consciousness, this truer apprehension, is a real thing. Most people live their whole lives unaware of it. They go to their graves believing the other condition is the significant one. I can think of nothing more sad than this.
No endeavor in the ordinary realm, however worthy, can approach the value of gaining access to the other. I cannot emphasize this too much. Anything that can be undertaken–any practice or intention, any prayer, any help from any authentic source–to cultivate an awareness of this deep stream of consciousness, should be pursued. It is worth setting aside much for. Even intermittent awareness has transformative power.
It is not as though ordinary life doesn’t go on. It’s just that it ceases to feel ordinary. It’s just that whatever you do, with that awareness underlying it, is radically improved: improved in clarity, in power; improved in its capacity to generate joy, to accept difficult situations…
Life is made already. There is nothing to be done. Nothing need be done to make a life into fruit–delicious, drippy fruit. It need not be given to another to consume. It needs only to be seen. Not even peeled. Just seen, sitting there, succulent, the light shining–not on it, not playing on the surface of its skin, but shining from it, within the very thing. The juice in it not juice so much as light.
Eat it. Let it drip all over you. Walk along and let it dribble behind you, everywhere you go. You cannot touch anything that it does not get all over. You cannot open your mouth that it does not pour out.
