Our theme this time around was about "waking up!" You might argue, “What? Nothing new here!” Well yes indeed, there’s more than meets the “I” when we get up from sleep in the morning!
Our meeting revolved around that very precise elusive moment, that particular day after day point in time that perhaps lasts a few seconds, when I - or whatever you may want to call IT or THAT- seemingly turns into someone with “my" body-mind and “my" story in a seemingly separate world.
For a start, If you thought that nondualists were only a bunch of older people speaking wisely by Ikebana flower arrangements, it's time you “rap it up” with a nobody called by the name of Richard Williams, better known by his stage name Prince Ea, an 29 year-old American spoken word artist, poet, rapper and filmmaker
One of his questions to you is: ” Did you get in the morning” or did waking up happen?
Our experiences of waking up in the morning as human beings - so called spiritual seekers included - vary greatly, at times from one day to the next depending on outside circumstances, our health, our body or mind fatigue, etc… So what is so new/different when "one" has "awaken" to his/her true nature? No one wakes up in the morning for there was no particular one to dream/sleep in the first place! Amazing, isn’t?
We went on reading a text by Ramesh Balsekar that explains this phenomenon and how we can find out how to stop getting tangled into our stories of “I” and “my body” at the break of day.
“In deep sleep, consciousness retires into a state of repose, as it were. When consciousness is absent, there is no sense of one's existence or presence, let alone the existence of the world and its inhabitants, or any ideas of bondage and liberation.
This is so because the very concept of “I” is absent.What happens when the deep sleep, as also the dream state, are over and consciousness appears again? The immediate sense then is that of existence and presence, not the presence of “me” but presence as such.
Soon, however, the mind takes over and creates the “I”-concept and awareness of the body. Actually, it is consciousness which manifests itself in innumerable bodies.
It is therefore essential to apperceive that birth and death are nothing but the beginning and the ending of a stream of movements in consciousness, interpreted as events in space-time.”
And as an experiential exercise, we also watched a beautiful video by Rupert Spira that calls us back to this place and time we cannot possibly ever leave or forget - though it appears we do - this "placeless place" and "timeless time" of seeing which is already and always right here. And more importantly always the same whether in sleep, eyes open or eyes closed: Seeing - YouTube