“Connecting with the spirit inside you is not something that happens once and for all. It is a slow and gradual process, in which you connect, disconnect, reconnect…
Gradually the focus of your consciousness moves from duality to oneness. It re-orients itself, finding that eventually it is drawn to silence rather than to thoughts and emotions. By silence we mean being fully centered and present, in a state of non-judgmental awareness.
There are no fixed methods or means to get there. The key to connecting with your Spirit is not to follow some discipline (like meditating, or fasting etc.), but to really understand – understand that it is silence that brings you home, not your thoughts or emotions.
This understanding grows slowly as you are increasingly aware of the mechanism of your thoughts and emotions. You let go of old habits and open up to the new reality of heart based consciousness. Ego based consciousness inside you withers and slowly dies.
Dying is not something you do; it is something you allow to happen. You surrender yourself to the dying process. Death is another word for change, transformation. This is always so. Death is always a releasing of the old and an opening up to the new. Within this process, there is not one single moment in which you “are not,” i.e. in which you are dead by your definition. Death as you define it is an illusion. It is only your fear of change that makes you fear death.
You are afraid not only of dying physically, but also of dying emotionally and mentally during your lifetime. But without death, things would become fixed and rigid. You would become the captive of old forms: a worn out body, outdated thought patterns, limiting emotional reactions. Suffocating, isn’t it? Death is a liberator. Death is a cascade of fresh water that breaks open old, rusty gateways and propels you into new areas of experience.
Do not fear death. There is no death, only change…
You realize on deeper and deeper levels that there is truly nothing to do, except to be. When you identify with your beingness, instead of the fleeting thoughts and emotions that pass through you, your life is affected immediately.
Pamela Kribe, From Ego to Heart, Part 4
There is one thing which, if understood in depth, can greatly accelerate the transformation of consciousness from duality to wholeness. It lies in the attitude of allowing things to be exactly as they are—and this requires wisdom. What is often called “doing through non-doing” may be the most difficult thing of all, because it is based on the most elusive kind of effort: to be aware and present in the here and now. To see reality as it is, free from the distortions of desires, expectations, and ideas of how things should be, and at the same time not to remain passive, but to take the appropriate action—the action that arises from that place within you where inner conflict has dissolved and you simply know what needs to be done.
At times I come close to this state, but more often I lose it. It is exactly as Pamela Kribbe writes: the connection with Spirit is neither a linear process nor a short one. It is a long path of dying, in which there is very little we can actively do, because this kind of transformation does not arise from ego-will. And old habits do not die easily.
Silencio: Palacio bordado
Moreover, as we strive toward the silence of presence, we are struck down by its complete opposite—a relentless crowd of thoughts. I call them, for myself, “the herd of bulls in my head,” because I stand no chance of stopping them and am simply knocked over. To calm myself, I tell myself they have come “to plough the field.”
And that is exactly so—but only because I see in this the play of duality and the work of alchemy. In the chaos they bring, I see the destruction of the ego-mind and the gift of confusion.
The next step is to be patient—truly, unbearably patient—until something new begins to take shape out of this chaos. A mind capable of holding both sides of duality at once.
Eventually there comes a moment when patience turns into something else. You stop running away from what you dislike and discover that the place where you have stopped is the place you were always seeking. It is that narrow passage through which you enter the present by not resisting what is there. There is no longer any need for patience—you have arrived. The irony is that everything continues to be exactly as it has always been, yet something within you has already changed. Radically changed.
Some reach the state of silence through the practice of meditation. I reach the state of silence with the herd of bulls in my head—and through suffering. Through crucifixion and the hope of resurrection. Through the helplessness of being unable to do anything about the black hole in my mind. I arrive at the point where I can no longer make decisions with the mind—whatever I think seems equally true. And from this impossibility, from this helplessness, I fall into silence.
That is it: for some people, the path to silence passes through meditation; for me, it passes through the herd of bulls that leaves me powerless.
This is very painful. But it is so only at the beginning—and only if you do not know how to use the bulls to plough the field. After that, you are surprised to notice that it even begins to give you pleasure. You laugh at yourself—at how foolish you were, telling Life how it should be instead of getting to know it and exploring it.
You begin to enjoy yourself as you continue to make the effort of awake presence and wise non-judgment. Knowing that every step forward means dying, because that is the way the new is born.
And so, “the ego withers and slowly dies.”
For me, this is the most important insight of everything said above—what truly characterizes the fourth stage of the processes of spiritual transformation in Pamela Kribbe’s book presented earlier (a stage called “Opening to the Spirit”).
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
