The Natural State of Being is The Basis of Compassion.
I pulled up to the beach at La Jolla Shores. I remember feeling my life was blessed. Here I was in the middle of a work day, having a cell phone session with Dove and watching the surfers riding their wave sets. I called right on the button of 11 AM and Dove answered saying:
Dove: This is a very auspicious time for you to call. It is 11 in numerological years, of the 11th month, the 11th day, the 11th hour, and soon it will be the 11th minute. It is a doorway.
Jon: I am letting go of an old identity after what I experienced last week. It was an experience that I am calling my "St. Francis" experience. I was seeing the squirrel and the tree and the little boy on the tricycle and everything else pulsating as part of one thing. It was a palpable transcendent state, and I was as much a part of it as the other parts. What was that Dove?
Dove: I would say that is what love is: feeling greatly loved and not alone.
Jon: I felt the futility of trying to get to such a place by my mind. What you said to me and the timing of your saying it to me, ushered me into that heightened state of awareness. It was fully, and I mean fully, a mind-body-spirit, all-at-once experience. It was like being born or something.
Dove: And it was so from the beginning. It’s like all of you showed up and you were the last one to get clued in to all of what's happening.
Jon: Precisely. It was another layer. It was like a big pulsating energy soup where everything hangs out and always has.
Dove: It was an orientation. From my subjective aspect, such experiences have felt like being the last to know, as if, “oh, this has been going on forever.”
Jon: All week I have been remembering that park experience: literally seeing something greater, and that I am part of it too. It’s spilling into my ordinary awareness, like after-effects.
Dove: It doesn’t end with that experience, and it is natural to want more. It is often described as returning home, discovering the real home, and there is lots of lingering identification with not being there. You are going to this place and there is more of it coming.
Jon: That experience in the park was strongly familiar, even though it also seemed like a new experience. I also have a yearning for it.
Dove: Longing for home wouldn’t be there unless there was a previous familiarity. There is no attraction unless there was an original place. Your happiness is the natural state of the soul. That is who you are, and all things being equal, who you are is happiness. Everything that is not that has the potential of being released because it doesn’t belong to you. There are ways of sorting these things out, letting go, and not stepping into what is not you! If you are not certain who you are, then you might go with whatever presents itself. If you know who you are, you just make the natural choice knowing that you are fine.
Jon: I feel like I am acclimating into some new way of being: like in the park and the "St Francis" experience.
Dove: What you are acclimating to is yourself and that you are actually part of nature. Everything about you is part of nature. Even from the moralist/dualist place, a tree just is. Can a tree be wrong? Is that even an applicable question? It simply is. Even the thoughts, observations, and conversation are in such a zone. All mental attitudinal observation just is. There is no need to apply a right or a wrong to it, burdening it with right or wrong. Therefore the whole judgment thing, is it even valid? It becomes a neurosis, a tyranny of judgment that ensnares people. It is based on a lie and is a way for us to feel that we are not enough. It is toxicity and the result is, even in subtle ways, that we can feel we are not enough. Even the electrochemical nature of thoughts is just a part of nature, a subtle alignment with nature. Why is that any different? It simply is.
I sat in the truck watching the surf roll with the words he was saying. There was nothing much to say and everything to listen to. It was like my ears were being filled with a telling I had always needed to hear: it was that I was part of nature. Words were rhythmically flowing from Dove, along with the surf sounds from the ocean right into me in synchronicity. So, I was just silent and taking it all in and madly writing it all down. I was far to busy to be saying much of anything and he continued telling:
Dove: So, we are looking at a way of releasing judgments and a context for forgiving ourselves and “letting ourselves off the hook.” We are talking about a criteria for compassion that we can direct back at ourselves, and then see ourselves in the light of compassion. Think of yourself as a toddler where you say, “Oh, look at you - you got yourself all messed up and wrapped up, and you didn’t even know it.” As you are looking, you see that the little one can’t really do wrong. In fact, what they are doing is cute and adorable. So, if you are throwing a tantrum, flip into the lens of what’s happening to you when you throw a tantrum. You get to the point of saying to yourself, “oh, isn’t that adorable,” where you hold yourself in a place of no judgment. Let it play out and witness the truth that “I am about to pull some real humanness”. It doesn’t declare any of it is wrong. It reinforces the “is-ness.” You have set up a laboratory, to house the observational phenomenon. Your life, your work and constellation of personalities in your circle is a complete laboratory. You can run tests that are authentic and true, and you can take notes on your reactions, as information. So for example at Jenny’s birthday party, you were feeling that the people she invited were all going to be boring. At that instant you could say, “Oh look at John, he’s pouting, afraid he might not get his way. Isn’t that cute, he’s being adorable again.” The whole idea is that all this is observable. Your own soul set up this experiment and a whole system where a laboratory can exist. In the park we set up a vortex, set up a space, and opened a dimension through the quality of the focus.
Jon: The quality of the focus was so precise. Your words and your timing and your seeing me were so true. My changing to a new "container" or archetype is coming naturally and experimentally through the witnessing. It is not from some thought, demand or grasping at straws that someone else or some system or guru has. I remember a book called "If You Meet the Buddha on the Road Shoot Him." I am enough.
Dove: You are evolving out of "The Fool" archetype, the one that can be everything and nothing. It feels like you are stepping, though you may not be aware of it, into being an authority in a good way. Authority tends to connote power for the ones who misuse it. But you are experiencing building an authentic connection to Source, to what’s naturally happening. There is an authenticity and certainty that lends a natural authority. People unconsciously recognize it in you, and they feel they know you. It’s like plugging into where natural authority is. I know that experience because people naturally respond to me as an authority. They feel that I seem to know what I talking about and hear things they have never heard of before. They say “Okay, I’ll give it a listen.” What I say resonates and people can feel it. Jon, it’s like you are graduating from "The Fool" archetype and the theater and the drama of living through the mask. You are engaged in putting the mask down, not even needing a mask or wanting a mask. It’s just time to put the mask down. So the question comes up “Who are you then?” From my internal position, when I feel like the authority, it’s natural. It’s like when people very naturally accept me as a Shaman and put that label on me, I say to myself, “Oh, okay then, for now.” To a degree it feels like a sub-archetype. People need to look at me through that lens. It’s like a kaleidoscope of other people’s lenses. All this shamanic stuff is happening around me, and that’s OK; it just is. Archetypes are like facets, like lenses which are plugged into Source and shine through others. Even those identities, I don’t necessarily latch onto. It becomes less of a static identity. It just happens and there is no reason to utterly fixate on, or identity with a lens. If you do, then you unplug. Therefore it’s about allowing lenses in other peoples projections. That gets back to the feeling of being the last to know. It's like, “oh, is that what they are saying about me.”
I sat in the truck listening and absorbing, in a way a toddler does, wanting to hear it again and again. It was like a big drink of water in the desert. There was so much to take in, and it just kept coming like the surf. I just focused on keeping up with it all and getting it down on paper. I could read it and sort it out later. This was like gold to me. As I am writing this refrain now about what was happening in this session then, I can see that he was tying the ends together of what I refer to as my "Saint Francis" experience with my ordinary life. I was hearing what I was wishing to hear so many years ago. Dove continued telling me:
Dove: After a while it gets easier. You can pick up on things earlier. For example, if you sense anger, you know underneath it, is fear. Basic understanding allows you to step into a compassion mode with an awareness that is bigger than the “hissy fit.” You will have picked up on a subtler level the fear, and that the fear is about the fear of not being heard or seen. So by witnessing, you are giving a positive experience of being heard. It is like an antidote, going in as a deep witness. It diffuses the anger, like pulling the plug or cutting the wire of the bomb. It is the power of the witness: they know that they have been seen at a deeper level and have just been held in compassion. Human reactivity all goes back, or arises from, the crib. Anger comes from fear of not being valuable, which comes from abandonment and a feeling of existential lostness. It is terrifying. The art of being able to witness, in the blink of an eye and to the point that one's very presence shifts it, is the expanded space where I live most of the time. To be the "authority" is to be the creator of your own reality. I have become more and more the co-creator, to the point that when others experience me, there is no difference between the creator and the co-creator. That has been my history. The image of this from scripture is “I am the living water. Drink of me and thou shall not thirst.” For example, in the desert when one comes across a natural source of water, one just goes for it. Usually the source of that water is not that readily available. There are springs in the desert where water is found underground in the dark. Not going for that source of water is akin to what Carl Jung referred to as the “failure to meet the shadow.” The shadow is a natural phenomenon also, and bringing more light to it is about consciousness. It’s a very natural choice to move into as one begins to wake up.
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