perspectives
monthly articles

The articles in this section are changing periodically. Their aim is to emphasize an aspect of the Awareness Intensive process or more generally aspects of what is usually referred to as 'the path'.
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Towards Living our True Nature

The path that leads to Living ‘my’ True Nature is indeed taking two ‘aspects’ that may seem contradictory or far apart at first glance but which I am finding more and more to be in reality very much connected and interlinked. To me they work hand in hand and I see them as complementary on this path towards oneness, towards my true nature.

One aspect of the path is of using what is happening for me in the present moment and following its thread to access the root feeling that calls for being taken care of, thus enabling a profound healing to take place.
The other aspect of the path is of using what is happening for me in the present moment, letting it be as it is and bringing the attention to the one who is experiencing this, remaining in rooted in the experiencer and furthermore, allowing the awareness of it all to take over.
It might seem strange to walk concurrently these two different aspects of the path yet my experience is that they actually serve the same purpose: dis-identification from non-reality and rooting oneself into that space of ‘pure or naked awareness’ of the ever present moment.

I have found that both aspects are of dis-identification and as such are healing and leading to more clarity and sanity. Using both of them in this complementary way makes it possible to step out of the mind and connect with the vastness, the oneness that we are.

Centuries old spiritual teachings and modern science are now merging into the same proposal; as our body-mind develops we grow out of the ocean of oneness. We acquire and develop - through traumas, conditionings and self-created belief systems - a sense of identity, an ‘I’ that takes us each day further and further away from our real nature, from our source, leaving us with a longing for ‘another world’. With this very longing the ‘search’ starts…. And this ‘search’ only ends when we come to the realization that ‘there is nowhere to go’, that we are already complete and contented.
This does not necessarily means that one is living in oneness at this point, but it for sure means that ‘searching’ is over.
The illusion of separation has ceased.

And this has been my experience in this self-enquiry training that I took recently. Searching has stopped and a sense of being complete, whole, has naturally emerged. For sure this ‘being complete’ was there before but something was preventing me for perceiving it.
Much is left to do as far as anchoring or rooting myself in this oneness, yet what feels like a ‘huge step’ has been taken.
I should really rephrase the above like this. What is left to ‘do’ is to allow the oneness to take over. In that sense nothing to do, just allowing. It is like allowing the current to flow, rather than trying to make it flow. Non doing is the key, just participation, a willingness to let it happen.

Or, as Basho framed it: ‘Sitting silently, doing nothing and the grass grows by itself’.

In this training the emphasis was very much on ‘alignment’, what in Awareness Intensives we call ‘intention’. Alternatively one could use the expression: ‘being with the flow’.
Alignment and intention seems to carry a notion of ‘will’, of ‘will power’, of something that I have to intentionally ‘do’ to ‘be in accordance with’. In my view, ‘Being with the flow’ does not seem to carry this willful aspect, but rather a ‘surrender’ aspect. And when one is ‘being with the flow’, a space of acceptance is naturally created. Probably what Osho was so often referring to when he was talking about ‘non-interfering’.

Right now I’m very much in contact with a space of gratefulness within me. Gratefulness to those who recently helped me along this path that leads towards living my true nature and further to existence itself or rather to ‘That which Is’ is probably the right expression of what is happening. And with it comes a natural desire to surrender to ‘That which Is’.
This, ‘That which Is’ seems in my view to be the ‘real’ master, the formless master. To me, Ramana Maharshi, Osho and all enlightened beings are or were simply a pure expression of ‘That which Is’ ….as they were all abiding in ‘That which Is’. 

‘Too many steps have been taken returning to the root and the source.
Better to have been blind and deaf from the beginning!
Dwelling in one's true abode, unconcerned with that without –
The river flows tranquilly on and the flowers are red’.
Excerpted from Chan master Kakuan – 'The 10 Ox herding pictures'

Namaste to you all
Rakendra