I’m sitting here back in my room looking at the spectacular cliffs of Montserrat soaring up outside and I am stunned. I hardly know how to write at this moment. I’ve just come back from a staggeringly powerful session at the teaching hall – it was way up there on the Richter scale - and I feel as if I have been catapulted into a new reality.
“There’s a vast desire to become, too enormous to comprehend, passionate, overwhelming. That’s how God feels all the time about creating the universe.”
What exactly happened? Well, I’ll get to it in a short while as I hopefully force myself to be coherent.
But firstly: Up until now the focus has all been on the timeless dimension of consciousness and basically it is clear from the previous three days, that anyone who puts their attention there will experience the absolute dimension of the Self beyond time.
The simple non metaphysical summing up and interpretation of all this is:
The message of consciousness is that everything is OK
Everything always has been OK and always will be OK. It’s the answer to the perennial question ‘Who am I?’ and it’s been our experience: fullness, completion, lacking nothing. We have been tasting the tremendous confidence and indestructibility of the absolute nature of consciousness.
But this is not the whole picture because it leaves out the world and it leaves out human beings. In a new post-postmodern spirituality (there must be a better way to say this!), this unity or oneness experienced in consciousness would have to become the foundation and ultimate reference point.
The other half of the picture is: How do we as human beings manifest that oneness in the relative world? It’s up to us to become a conscious agent of that oneness in the world; the task is to make that singularity manifest.
Now Andrew launched into a passionate and searing exposition of this “other half of the picture”:
“The mythical God fell out of the sky and reappeared as consciousness itself”
It’s only very recently in human development that we could recognize that which had always been seen as an external object, as now being a non dual singularity in the one who realizes it. From the mythical God who was an external object of devotion, we have gone through the secular and materialistic post modern culture to finding God again. This is a very radical turn around to say the least! Andrew speaks with great passion:
“As consciousness, the formless God only wants to be. But when he/she/it takes form, I call it the evolutionary impulse. There’s a vast desire to become, too enormous to comprehend, passionate, overwhelming. That’s how God feels all the time about creating the universe. It’s almost an agonizing state as it’s never fulfilled. It’s a compulsion to create the universe and it is intense. The project has barely begun. That’s why, without the unmanifest nature, God wouldn’t be able to bear his/her passion to create!”
OK, powerful mindblowing stuff – but you may think, what has this all got to do with me?
Well, the thing is, what was being conveyed in this tidal wave of a talk from Andrew, is that this is all about us – about me, about you. Suddenly it’s no longer cosily my life, when I begin to let this in. “My” life doesn’t make any sense from this cosmic perspective. This life is for a much vaster purpose – for the evolution of consciousness. And it’s not abstract. It’s a shocker to realize that the surge of inspiration and passion that this evokes in me, is none other than this impersonal evolutionary impulse itself. I can’t keep God or the evolutionary impulse safely at a distance. To paraphrase the old war enrollment poster:
Consciousness needs You!
When God becomes manifest, that’s what Andrew calls the authentic self – or the cosmic or universal conscience. It’s an impersonal function of consciousness which is a passionate concern for the evolution of consciousness.
Andrew continues in a similar vein and leaves me completely blasted, barely able to walk back to my room at lunch time.
In the afternoon people follow up on this theme now that we are embracing the world and humanity as well, and not just abiding in unmanifest consciousness. How the enlightened self engages with the life process is the big question?
Or more directly and close to home: What happens when the retreat is over and I open my mouth?!
Abiding in the ground of being is not an end in itself in evolutionary enlightenment. It’s the ultimate relief from the past, from all our wounds and trauma and our fear and doubt. But it’s a means to an end – which is about awakening to the authentic self and participating fully in the life process. This is the post-post modern version of religious sentiment i.e. “Thy will be done.”
Walking back from the teaching hall, the world looks different, intensified with new meaning, as I gaze down from the promenade to the vast vista of the river far down below the mountain. Even the towering and improbably shaped rock faces of the mountain above seem to vibrate with life.
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