Day Three

Getting too Real?!

Only two days have passed and it feels like we’ve been on this extraordinary journey for weeks. Each day we meet together with Andrew for 2 or 3 hours in the morning and then again in the late afternoon for a similar time. He usually takes questions and hears from people about their experience, and then he has an uncanny ability to draw out what is deepest and most significant in each person’s accounts. Even after seeing him do such things for many years, it still stuns me to see how we are transported during each session to a depth that I would hardly believe is possible – and yet it is only our own experience that he is helping us to express.

One striking thing which has just occurred to me is that often we all sit quietly for an hour so before the dialogues, and there is a very powerful meditation. There is pin-drop silence and you can feel the unusual degree of awake relaxation in the hall and no one is nodding off. Yet Andrew hasn’t even mentioned the word ‘meditation’ so far. No one has asked what to do in these long silences or about how to meditate. Such questions obviously are not even arising. It’s quite amazing the more I think about it.
Often Andrew will give some meditation instruction during retreats, but here there is no need. The depth of immersion in consciousness means that we are all naturally in meditation in this collective field.

Today we continue to look more into the absolute dimension of consciousness.
It sounds abstract when I look at the words I’m writing now, but here in the retreat this has become very real and experiential. Almost too real it appears!
The ecstasy and miraculous ever-new qualities that people were talking about have been tempered today it seems, by the recognition of the implications for our lifes of what we’re seeing. To experience the absolute nature definitely has consequences. Someone expresses that it is a challenge to be serious and that it inherently carries with it an obligation to transform.
A man admits, “Going from the relative to the absolute dimension of reality makes me scared. What should I do?”
Andrew surprises more than a few by replying that fear can be good. It’s good to be afraid of the Absolute. Traditionally it was a virtue to have fear of God. People get so dull that they have to be scared in order to wake up. He tells the man that it means he is alive and in touch with the real and that it is not a problem.This dialogue seems to somehow burst a bubble of unspoken collective inertia in the hall and allows an outpouring of interest and passion at a deeper level.

Various people express how seeing the absolute dimension of consciousness is the most real thing they have ever experienced and is a reference point for everything. The conviction we have in this absolute dimension changes everything. It is a fulcrum point for core level transformation and destroys our existential doubt and cynicism.

Andrew clarifies how once we’ve recognized in our own experience that the deepest truth is absolute, the relative nature of the self is pulled towards the absolute nature of the self. It puts tremendous evolutionary tension (here meant in a wholly positive sense) on our developing humanity, to reach towards its absolute nature. The absolute nature is the attractor of the self to the self. The authentic spiritual life is to bridge that gap.
The goal ultimately is to redefine the absolute so that it would become the context for life and a new post-post modern context for religion or spirituality: one that is not based on a belief, but on direct non conceptual recognition. A vision of human society as it could be, comes into focus – where by establishing this ground together, we could create an utterly new context for life. On that note, the session ends.