Hey all,
My Dad is a very clever engineer, rational thinker. I grew up on discovery channel. I always thought religion was pretty silly. People just following doctrines and stuff. My "religion" was observable science.
Though I did like to read about philosophy. And just explore different ways of being. I began to read Jiddu Krishnamurti, who I thought was very thoughtful, very observant, and ... not brainwashed. I had a lot of respect for him. He thinks for himself. I just found myself listening to him quite a bit though not really understanding what he was saying.
When I was 17 I took three hits of LSD. There was a moment in that experience where I felt like a veil fall away. Everything Krishnamurti was saying suddenly made sense. Perfect clarity. It's difficult to describe, but it's kind of like if you're in the shower, and you're holding a bar of soap, and you squeeze it, and it just slips out of your hand.
But it was like my ENTIRE identity slipped out of my mental grasp.
In that moment, I started laughing hysterically, because I saw something so profound. Something that was completely beyond words and beyond description.
I just remember repeating to myself, over and over again, "God is Love! God is Love! It's INSIDE-OUT!". There was something about a cosmic joke. Like life is a giant cosmic joke. A big practical joke God plays on himself to forget himself - sorta thing. God being the sort of universal intelligence of all of life, not a guy in the sky.
Then there was something about the seeming veil between me (you could say my consciousness) and the world outside me dissolving. And I saw that everything in the universe was happening together. In that moment, all of creation was unified - or something. It was like, there was ONE mind dreaming the world. I saw it clearer than I can see my hands in front of me right now.
But when the LSD faded away, I was left with only an echo. I was left with the words. And I had no idea what they meant. There was no life in them. It's like when a dream fades away and you're desperately trying to remember but the more you think of it the more it slips away. It was like I opened pandora's box and found the secrets to all the universe, and then it shut. And I couldn't figure out how to get it open.
That was 10 years ago. Even though that experience changed my life, I never really understood it.
...until last year...
For the intrepid explorers:
I didn't realize this, but for pretty much my entire life, I had always believed that to know something, you needed to be able to think it through. I didn't understand there was a way to know without thought.
You can call this type of knowing seeing. Seeing bypasses the intellect completely. It has nothing to do with the activity of thought. It's almost like there's a part of you that transcends the intellect that knows things intuitively. But when the activity of thought is chaotic, that knowing recedes into the background.
But what you can see is determined not by your beliefs, thoughts, and ideas, but by your level of consciousness. As your level of consciousness rises, you are able to see more.
You see I had been trying to understand what happened to me intellectually. Playing with all sorts of different ideas, philosophies, but I was always playing with ideas at the same level of consciousness - for years. And because I was always playing with ideas within the same level of consciousness, I couldn't actually see anything new. I was just repeating the old, or slight variations of the old.
My life changed massively (for the better!) when my level of consciousness went up. I was able to be more compassionate, think clearer, and feel so much more peace. And see aspects to this mind-boggling experience we call human consciousness I never would have believed I had access to. Kind of like plugging into the internet after being offline for a few decades.
When I talk about level of consciousness, I'm not talking about like ascending to the clouds with Jesus. It's a very ordinary thing. I just wasn't aware of it. So I hope to help you become more aware of it. It's an ordinary thing, but if it unlocks an extraordinary ability we all have built into us.
Think of it like this... when you're angry, you can feel a sense of constriction. It washes over you. When you're relaxed and at peace, it's like that sense relaxes. This is ordinary.
Imagine when you're arguing with someone. You feel tight and constricted. You're caught up in storm of angry, judgmental, defensive thoughts. In that experience, it makes sense for you to defend yourself.
If you step away for a bit and allow the mind to settle, your level of consciousness expands, and things just occur to you. You begin to see them in a different light. Your thinking hasn't changed, your level of consciousness did. Because your level of consciousness changed, you were able to see more.
This may sound stupidly simple. But if you see that your level of consciousness affects how you see life moment-by-moment, you can actually intentionally allow consciousness to expand (as it does naturally) and see more, and more, and more.
This is what I call an insight. An insight is literally a sight from within. It hits you as an obvious "how did I not see that before?" and the answer to that is always: because I wasn't at the level of consciousness I am right now.
Each of us has within us the capacity, within our own consciousness, to see the secrets of life. Not to speculate, to see.
I want to share the insights that have happened to me from allowing my consciousness to expand. I was able to see again, after 10 years, sober, what "God is Love" and "It's inside-out!" mean.
But be aware, this is merely an echo. The ideas I write here are just echoes of what you can see from the level of consciousness where this is all so obvious. Let me be clear on this: the intellect will never understand the following statements. But you can still see the facts they point to when the mind is clear. And so in a sense writing this is completely pointless. Because if we can understand it, it means we're already at the level of consciousness where it's obvious. But I'm doing it anyway.
1. It's inside out
It's inside-out refers to the fact that our experience is coming from within us, not "at" us from the outside. Each of us is experiencing life within our own consciousness. And it's through the formless energy of thought that we experience world around us. In that sense, we are all living inside of our own thought-created reality. Thought is not a camera. It does not capture facts out of the world and process them on consciousness. It doesn't perceive. Thought projects.
Listen to this statement and see if you can see the truth of it. And if you don't see it, throw it out the window and never think of it again.
You are not living the feeling of circumstances. You are not living in the feeling of the world. You are living in the feeling of the thought that happens to be passing by consciousness. Thought is your creative freedom. The freedom to see creation in whatever light you choose. And experience it as if it was outside you.
Our eyes aren't windows into the world, they merely take thought and project it outward. What appears to be outside us, what we see, hear, and believe about the world is but our own thoughts projected outwardly.
Nothing can scare you except thought.
Nothing can upset your innate peace of mind except a thought.
When thought settles, you return to your natural state of peace of mind, and you enter into a beautiful flow with life.
2. God is Love
This is the highest insight I've ever had, and I still have trouble putting this into words. In this instant, and forever, there is unfathomable beauty and love that can be found. And that love is so strong that it draws you to it. This seems utterly nonsensical at lower levels of consciousness. It seems like a pipedream. But it's not. It's a real thing you can experience it. You don't have to pray, you don't have to learn a religion. In the silence of your own mind, your consciousness expands, and you will see it. All the love we seek outwardly is actually the love that's hidden within our own consciousness.
