A major part of this requires us to look at our own experience in a really new and radical way. It requires us to look at ourselves, and what’s motivating us, through the lens of the authentic self, and the lens of the personal and cultural ego. When we identify with these different perspectives, and really break it down together, we can see that how we see and relate to the world is always influenced in an essential way by the nature and quality of these perspectives. We went around the class and honed in on what’s it like to ‘be’ the authentic self. There is no fear or self-consciousness, losing a sense of time or any limitation, a burning desire to create something new and positive and ecstatic drive to really do it. We all could relate to this experience for sure. We all had our own flavours of it, in different talents and interests for example, but the drive to create, for example, was fundamentally the same. And then looking though the lens of the personal ego we all shared the view of limitation, a sense of unease, subtle (or not) victimisation, and their being a problem with life and us in general. The more we talked and looked together through these lenses in this way, the more clarifying and fascinating it became.

When we started to became more aware of these different parts of the self as cultural structures and cosmic forces, the next part of the teaching makes if clear that we, as an individual, choose which part of our self that we put our attention on, and in doing so, manifest as ourselves. It does take time to set this context, but this is essential for us to know why we meditate. It becomes much clearer then what we are doing and why we are doing it. After going into these distinctions together, and knowing the absolutely overwhelming power of our conditioning, we can see then how important it is for us to be able to consciously not respond to our experience when we choose to. This is why we meditate – to release us from the grip of ‘being’ our experience unconsciously, and to gain more and more space and (some degree of) of objectivity about it. And it is a subtle thing to get, because we have been trained to make it all about us and how we feel. Everything is drawn back to ourselves as a post modern person, how we are doing, how we want it to feel, and what this means about us. This point is a big one! And we then started to see that our ability to do this in mediation directly relates to us being able to let go, not respond from unwholesome motives we can now see clearer, and take responsibility for ourselves in life at all times – and this is creating a new culture in real time!

A very fascinating point came up in the middle of the class where we started to look at notions of heaven. For most of us who are post modern, educated, sophisticated and relatively well off individuals, this notion of believing in heaven, or a place in the future or when we die that will be our salvation or final resting place seems quite absurd or at least not relevant. Interestingly this was the sense in the room when we started. But what was revealed, as we looked further is that we each actually did hold this belief even if we weren’t very conscious of it. A lady brought her authentic experience of feeling trapped in own her body a lot of the time, with a sense of not really knowing the way forward, and just doing the best she could do…and as she was speaking about it everybody in the room could totally relate. It was revealed that our version of heaven isn’t a place with angels, but in a dearly and deeply heal belief of a time in the future where we wouldn’t feel so trapped, and where we wouldn’t experience confusion and unpleasant emotional and psychological states. This is OUR version of heaven. I think that this has provided some good food for contemplation, so that all of us in the class can look into this in ourselves during the week to deepen and enrich our understanding of this.

We ended up the evening discussing and looking into how the 14 billion year evolutionary process that we are a part of produced the experience of human cognition and consciousness as part and parcel of the process itself moving forward and complexifying.  Andrew Cohen, in one of the teaching videos in the course, explains beautifully how we as human beings at the start of the 21st century are the very edge of the universe waking up to and realising itself. This, understandably, proved to be way too much for us all!!…And was a great point to end the class. I am very much looking forward to continuing next week with everybody!