Andrew: Peace and love everyone. My name is Andrew Hewson. I’m a spiritual teacher. I’m here with my friend, David “Davidya” Buckland. David is an author. He has a blog, Davidya.ca. He also has a book, “Our Natural Potential.” And in both his blog and his book, he explores the unfoldment of enlightenment and how that shows up in the midst of daily living.
David and I have been exploring this same subject together over the past year, having various conversations surrounding topics that we feel are relevant for those that are in the midst of this process.
So today we’re going to be discussing purification and the unfoldment of a collective transition that we both feel that we are in the midst of currently. So thank you so much for being here with me today, David.
David: Well, thank you, Andrew. It’s a joy to have another conversation.
Yeah, there is quite a transition taking place in the collective. And we’re seeing a lot of drama on the surface, climate change, politics, the pandemic, inequality, these exaggerated polarities going on in all these different areas of life.
But it’s really important that we understand that we’re in a rising age. This isn’t an indication of the collapse of civilization or something like that, which has happened before over even one of these issues. But in the current time, we’re in a rising age.
It’s like the tide is coming in, the ocean is rising, and that lifts all boats, because we’re in this together. Consciousness isn’t a unique thing created by a specific biology; rather, it’s a collective thing that we share, and we’re each expressions of that.
This process of transition has been going on for some decades. It began to really be felt in the 70s when many people took up more effective meditation practices and it accelerated a lot about 14 years ago when some of those people who had been meditating for many years began to awaken, as well as other people, with a good path. And it’s accelerated again about four years ago.
And even about a year and a half ago, we’re now seeing things unfolding in people’s experience that haven’t been really talked about by spiritual teachers for even hundreds or even thousands of years. It’s pretty significant. Some of what’s unfolding is quite significant.
But along with that process of unfolding, quite beautiful flowering, there’s a lot being pushed to the surface to be healed. It’s useful to understand that we don’t store our stress in a personal body, so to speak, there’s a little bit of that. There’s certainly, we can find when we’re purifying that there’ll be sensations in the body indicating a release.
But a lot of our baggage we store in the collective. It’s together, it’s in the environment. Nature tries to purify to some degree, sometimes through storms and other kinds of events. But there’s a lot going on in the collective.
And all this rising consciousness is almost like an enforced healing going on. And it’s really valuable if you recognize that’s what’s taking place. Because if you don’t, then you run into issues with pushing back against it, or resisting, or getting into the drama, and engaging all of the surface dynamics.
And this just makes it much harder for people going through this process. It’s kind of like one of my teachers, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, he used to talk about it as a phase transition. And you give the example of boiling water. Just as the water is about to boil, it goes through this transition point called roiling, where the water gets really agitated and then it settles into a boil. So the roiling is actually more agitated than the boiling when the water is transitioning from fluid to gas.
So there’s this kind of roiling going on a little bit in the collective. So it’s really important to understand what’s purification. We can sort of look at things taking place. And for example, if we’ve gotten used to paying attention to how the environment is responding to what we’re doing, we can use that as a signal to indicate what’s being supported, what’s the right direction, what’s not being supported, what’s the wrong direction. But that can get a little muddy if there’s a lot of purification going on.
So then it becomes important to recognize what’s leaving what’s being rebuilt, what’s relaxing, what’s opening, what’s contracting. These various dynamics are taking place behind the scenes, behind the stirring up that we might be feeling in the body, in the emotions, in the mind, in the ego. Just to being a little bit, if we’re able to, just to step back a little bit and and just observe and then we can use the intellect and say, okay, what is this? What’s driving this? Desire for drama. What’s letting go? What’s arising? You know that there’s, being able to discriminate what’s going on just a little bit better can really help our process. And then we’re supporting this unfolding and we’re engaging in it rather than trying to fight it or battle with it.
I think it’s also important to note that this isn’t about concepts. These are things that we have to learn through direct experience, by paying attention, by noticing, and by reflecting on what we’ve experienced. Some people find journaling, for example, to be valuable when you’re going through a rough patch and to get a sense of perspective.
A: Yeah, very beautiful. I find that one of the most helpful understandings when it comes to looking at purification as a concept that I use, surfacing. And what surfacing points to is this recognition that there’s material that is present, that is unseen. It’s, it’s sort of like the hidden past, we might say. And the past, the so called past is hidden in the present. And it is the accumulation of impressions, unresolved experiences, a layering of residue.
And there are two different primary directions for this residue, we might say. There’s the direction of re-accumulation or re-condensation, where the material is stratified in that limited identification and it moves to restructure. It moves to continue out of a survival-oriented intelligence. And then there’s another possibility, and that’s for there to be enough openness and enough willingness for that material to move in the direction of resolution, to move in the direction of evaporation, of being converted, of the resistance surrounding that being released.
When it comes to surfacing, it’s also important to recognize that there’s a significant portion of the population which isn’t interested in collective transition or, you know, the possibility of healing or even the concept of purification. These things just do not even come onto the radar for them. And in certain, you know, circles and groups, such as those that would be watching a video like this, it’s a common understanding. It’s something that’s often discussed. But there can be a misperception that everyone has this understanding or that everybody sort of should at least be thinking along these lines. So when we look out at what seems to be going on in the world, a lot of that is is within the realm of experiencing that just really isn’t interested in, you know, conscious awareness and the potential of sort of recognizing a more fundamental aspect of our of our nature.
That being said, for those that are gifted with the grace of being able to experientially recognize what surfacing is pointing to and how we can be with that in a more effective and efficient way, there is what we might consider to be an impersonal responsibility, a responsibility that doesn’t belong to us as separate, so called separate individuals, but to the truth of that conscious awareness that we are all communing in together.
There’s a responsibility to face what hasn’t been faced, and to be willing to look at those things that haven’t been looked at, to be willing to allow those things that haven’t been allowed. The human experience is one that is conditioned into not allowing a lot of things, trying to not allow things.
D: Yes.
A: And that is a part of this accumulation of residue. And now as you pointed to, there is enough clarity for many that there is the ability to consciously and attentively allow this material, that perhaps before there just wasn’t enough clarity to really address that.
There wasn’t, we were not in a position to adequately be with that material. There wasn’t enough power, there wasn’t enough support. It’s not that it wasn’t there, but that we weren’t aware of its presence.
D: Or our ability to take a step back from it.
A: Yes, exactly.
D: We were a little too much in it.
A: Exactly, yes, that’s what we felt like we were. And still when this stuff comes up, we could say that it’s stratified in me-ness. And so it has the flavor of, you know, me, oftentimes contained within it, even when we do not feel like we are a me anymore.
It’s the residue of the sense of being a me. And this material is, as I said, it’s actually stratified in that limited level of identification. And so it has a movement to survive in a certain sense. It has a movement to want to express itself in the field of action, to come into being in a way that perhaps seems to attempt to solidify some sense of doership or ownership or authorship.
And the possibility of observing that material prior to its movement into behavioral expression is something that we all have access to.
We all have access to being able to recognize when something is arising in our experience. And even sometimes when it does come into behavior, when it does come into verbal expression, just seeing from that silent space, the emergence of that material. And as you said, looking at it, seeing where it’s coming from, what it’s motivated by.
D: Yeah, in the Bhagavad Gita they talk about that in terms of action, that at first we realize afterwards, “Oh, I did it again. I got caught up in it. I vented in this way or whatever, however it arose.” And then there’s the tendency for it to arise, or noticing to arise during.
We begin to act and then we realize we’re doing it and then we have a choice to steer it and stop or whatever. And then at a certain point when the awareness becomes clear enough, we reach a point where just the impulse arising becomes conscious, and then we can work directly with that impulse before we act it out.
And the thing is though, we tend to be in different levels of clarity in different parts of our life. We may find, for example, that we’re quite alert to our dynamics around work, but much more caught around certain kinds of relationships. Or, you know, we’re pretty clean with relationships, but get into trouble around topics like money and possessions or whatever.
And so it’s just each of us has kind of learning to do in different different areas. And it’s also valuable to recognize that one of the things that’s taking place with the Awakening is there’s a lot of, typically after we wake up, there tends to be a period of accelerated unpacking going on, where we clear a lot of this that hasn’t yet been seen, rises to, we kind of create this big open space and then what’s unresolved rushes into this space to be seen and resolved.
We kind of burn through a bunch of stuff and we start to reach a place where there just isn’t the monkey mind the same way and a lot of the background drama and you know of emotions and so on like that settles out. We might not even recognize we have that until it settles, but that stuff settles out a lot and then we’re basically just dealing with what arises in the cycles of time, where some event comes along and it triggers some history of whatever type of experience and then there’s something there to be healed and so on.
And then over time there too, we settle in more deeply still into that collective value, then we start to become like a washing machine where we’re processing the collective as well. It becomes more and more collective and less and less personal on that level and so we are able to contribute to the whole, to the collective in that healing process. And so it’s not just our job to clean up our stuff, there’s also a collective group thing that’s happening as more and more people awaken and then become well established there, that they process more and more of that collective stuff.
As we touched on in previous conversations, there is the tendency to be better at healing stuff that we’ve had, we have familiarity with. Yes. For example, you know, if we dealt with a lot of loneliness in our life and we’ve cleared that stuff ourselves, we have a facility for clearing that. And so we’ll tend to notice loneliness coming up in the collective and processing that, or it might be grief or anger or whatever our specialty is. It can be all of the above to some degree as well.
But it’s just as the collective is lifting all boats, the collective also takes on a healing role too. We still have to deal with our stuff, but there’s a lot more collective support for that process. Because the attachments and the hooks, you know, that’s still our job, but the mass, so to speak, is getting gradually lessened.
Not that there isn’t still quite a lot there, but the, I’ve seen a number of examples that illustrate that just the flavor, the refined kinds of experiences that are taking place now, that requires a clarity and settledness in the collective that wasn’t there earlier on.
So there is examples of how, as I touched on earlier, there’s these openings to things that haven’t been experienced for a very, very long time by humans, I don’t believe. And that’s not possible unless there is that clarity and purity that’s rising in the collective. And we’re just at the beginning in many ways that way.
A: Oh yeah, just scratching the surface. Yeah, that’s along those lines. There’s yeah, there’s definitely things that are unfolding that are hard to find in scriptures, you know. It just is, there’s not a lot of material out there on some of the stuff that is, that is blossoming forth. It’s really miraculous. I just going back to a couple of points you made that were really valuable surrounding like different areas of human experience.
I found that there’s like a natural intelligent movement into different degrees of contrast. So one of the things that we’ll notice is that there tends to be kind of a sense of stability and clarity, but perhaps it is referential to our specific context, you know, where we’re, whether we’re in a relationship or not in a relationship, or whether we have had little, you know, little social interaction or lots of social interaction or whatever the case may be.
And so when we are sort of in this spontaneous movement to be in alignment with the whole, generally the body tends to find its way into different degrees of contrast, so that it touches into areas that were previously untouched. And that means that we’re really becoming willing to encounter the so-called uncomfortable or those things that maybe before seemed outside of our realm of familiarity. Because it can be very easy to find what seems to be a comfortable place that feels pretty well resolved, but it’s not necessarily the most evolutionary in its nature and it’s not necessarily supportive of unfolding higher contextual modalities or stages of enlightenment and different degrees of refinement so on and so forth.
D: Yeah, so there’s nothing wrong with being in a place like that for a period of time.
A: Oh no, of course not.
D: Don’t expect it to be permanent.
A: Well, I mean classically I think, you know, in the, in speaking of kind of density and the rising age, you know, in past centuries it was actually considered preferable to find a space like that and to stay there. And it was even, you know, that was very, that was suggested and supported and there were whole systems that developed sort of, direction towards that possibility and a lot of kind of escape-based strains of spiritual unfoldment that, you know, that recognized that perhaps the so-called world was just too, there was too much going on to be sort of dynamically involved and really make progress. And of course, that was not the whole case. There were definite, you know, strains of spiritual expression, which were very dynamic and included all kinds of different things.
But I think generally as a whole, there tend to be more renunciation. And now, and a lot of us have those, the residue of those renunciation tendencies, you know, sort of karmically speaking.
D: I’ve had that myself.
A: That’s another thing that we’ll have to encounter, you know, the attraction to that and, you know, different attractions and aversions and so on and so forth. But, you know, for many of us now, we’re in the household lifestyle, and it’s something that is dynamic, it’s engaged, not necessarily involved, but it’s engaged, it’s willing, it’s present and dynamically active.
And in that, there’s these degrees of contrast that we can encounter and touch into different areas that we didn’t even know were there. You know, we could feel like, oh, no, that’s not there. And then just a simple conversation or a trip to, you know, wherever we go and something is revealed. And it becomes this discovery when we have this understanding of purification and surfacing and what I call transmutation as kind of like a baseline support and a recognition of a part of the dharma of a human incarnation during this time, then it’s not an issue. It’s something that is, that’s welcome. And we can also recognize that this material is fuel. It’s something that, when it’s digested properly, when it is allowed and the resistance is attentively released, actually ends up showing as a greater bliss, a greater vibrancy, a greater clarity, and a greater radiance.
D: It has a polishing quality as well, which increases the clarity and the refinement of a process too.
A: Yes, exactly.
D: And it’s important too, I think, to understand that there’s a great intelligence to this process as well.
A: Oh yes.
D: It’s not like we’re jumping into a garbage pit or something like that. It’s more there’s a, almost like a schedule to the unfolding going on and there’s an intelligence to the purification process as well. Yes. And sometimes we can get something really big that can seem almost overwhelming, but because of that intelligence in the process, it’s never going to be more than we can handle. And if there is, if it does turn up to that point, then there are natural switches in there that’ll moderate it. And, you know, certainly there can be an intensity and a resistance to that intensity, and that increases the sense of overwhelm perhaps.
But it’s our own resistance that’s creating that, it’s not the experience itself.
A: Yes.
D: And so there’s this kind of trust that’s developed over time as we go through this process, and then, and that allows us to surrender more deeply, and to go into bigger and bigger places of this. And it’s quite astonishing really what’s possible, because when you’re able to you know, expanding consciousness and expand the heart into its full universal nature, then it can hold the suffering of all humanity. Yes. All at once. Yeah. And not be overshadowed.
Yes. There is profound power in the grounding. Yes. In an unfolding enlightenment.
A: Yes, and it can hold that suffering without suffering.
D: Yes.
A: And that’s a part of what enables that to do so. Sometimes there’s this idea that suffering is, you know, kind of denotes some sort of status or something in terms of spiritual realization. But, you know, that’s a, it’s not necessarily the most helpful idea and definitely not how it shows up experientially. One of the things that you said surrounding the intelligence is just so vital and important. We always receive proportionally what is appropriate to our degree of clarity and power. So as we are recognizing the truth of our reality as conscious awareness, conscious awareness is recognizing itself, waking up to itself, realizing itself, and passing through these different qualitative recognitions of its own infinity. And there’s different degrees of power, there’s different degrees of clarity or subtlety, we could say, and that supports a depth of proportional dishing out of material. So we receive that material in alignment with that. And having that healthy self-honesty, which enables us to see is this like something that’s out of proportion? Or is it just the resistance?
D: [unclear] is out of proportion.
A: That’s right. So, you know, I’ve found that willingness, willingness is such just, I mean, such a profoundly important word, like what it points to. And there’s actually a sweetness in willingness, a sweetness in the willingness to surrender. And as we, even after there’s no sense of there being any kind of separate doer, author, thinker, or mover anymore, that willingness can still taste the sweetness of itself. So it just begins to taste the sweetness of itself.
And as you said so beautifully, that correlates with the heart sort of being cleansed and cleansed and opened and revealed in its fullness. And so that sweetness of surrender actually becomes a nectar that our infinity is sort of drinking, drinking, it’s drinking its own nectar of willingness as it is expressed through the humanity.
D: Beautiful.
A: Yeah, and then that love, you know, that just continues to, it’s amazing because there’s this some, you know, there’s an idea that has crystallized and in various ways surrounding kind of like, you know, love is love. There’s, that’s love. And then peace is peace. And then there’s like, you know, bliss is bliss. But no, these, all of these, which I would consider these to be different sort of aspectual reflections of infinity. All of these have an infinite ability to seemingly increase in their intensity. It’s amazing. There’s no end to the potential depth and intensity of these aspectual reflections or qualitative recognitions of reality.
D: Yeah, and we can have this experience of what feels like, you know, ultimate peace or ultimate love or whatever, and then there’s more.
A: Yes.
D: And it keeps on… the Upanishads actually talk about that too. There’s a I don’t remember the exact…
A: I’m familiar with the verse you’re talking about. It keeps going.
D: It talks about, yeah, a hundred times the bliss of this is this, a hundred times the bliss of this is this, and each of them ends with, and the enlightened seer or whatever. And it just, you know, it just continues to unfold.
A: Yes. Yeah, so we learn then that it’s always, it’s complete, yet perpetually in process. So it’s the sense of completion, it’s not coming from lack. And, but it’s also at the same time, in the fullness of this completion, you know, it’s perpetually in process, and that’s where it’s savoring its own sweetness and tasting that, yeah, that divine deliciousness if you will.
D: It’s kind of funny too, over time with the blog I’ve written about the heart in different ways and then I’ve tried to do the summary articles and it’s like how many different hearts are there? You’ve got Anahata heart chakra, then you’ve got hridaya, the high heart chakra, which is kind of like a higher octave, and then you’ve got, you know Divinity filling the heart and layers and layers of the way the heart, we try and embody that because there’s just so many layers of it, in reality you know, when we try and embody that then there’s you know that requires layers of it too.
A: Yes, yes exactly. So the in from the collective perspective then there’s a certain portion of the population which is more equipped to sort of engage in and be with what we’re talking about.
And then there’s another, and when we talk about the collective, one of the things is that the mind tends to have an idea that there’s like this fixed sort of collective, you know, like there’s a collective out there. But within the collective, there’s such a range and all different soul groups and all different kinds of levels of conscious experiencing. And although there is a general sort of consensus collected, there is this wide variety that’s constantly fluctuating. And so what it’s really referential to is the field. It’s the field of conscious experiencing.
And that field of conscious experiencing is what appears to be moving through that transition into a greater clarity. And so whatever is appearing that field of conscious experiencing is automatically included and everything is appearing in the field of conscious experiencing.
D: Yes, I kind of use the term “nested” when I’m writing about it on the blog. It’s all kind of nested. Every object has its own space of consciousness and many objects are built of sub-objects.
I mean the human body is a classic example. We don’t tend to think about it, but our body is made up of trillions of cells. Each of those cells is its own life form. And then those cells are grouped into clusters, making up the skin or the liver or the fingernail or something like that. And there’s layers and layers of, and then they have the larger thing and then there’s the body as a whole.
And when we have this consciousness of a me that is whatever it is, and then there’s sort of the consciousness of ourselves as an American or a Canadian or a Brit or whatever, and, or maybe part of a race or part of a family tradition or ancestry or part of a profession or, you know, this is my Alma mater and, you know, there’s all these kinds of things, or this is my house and my property. Property itself has a kind of a consciousness and it’s all these interactive layers all in so many different ways, all playing a role.
And all through that is this whole, there’s this movement to sustain, to keep things, keep the structure in place so that we can live and grow through that. And there’s the movement to grow, to evolve through that process. And it’s just an incredible amount of intelligence is required for both, just for it to be.
It’s just amazing when you start to see the mechanics and all these layers in your own experience. Just to see, like the principles themselves are really simple, but the complexity of its expression is so vast and so profound, and yet all of it has this flow of those principles in action and unfolding. And when we can let go of our attempt to control and resist and soften all that, then we can step into that so much more. And then what that does is it allows life itself to support us and the natural movements we have within towards more, towards growth, towards enjoyment, towards peace, all of those become much more supported. I mean, if we’re resisting and trying to hold on and trying to control the environment, we’re basically acting against this massive intelligence that’s trying to support us.
We’re kind of like, we’re behaving like the child having a tantrum in the grocery store when our mother is trying to support us the whole time.
A: Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly it. And one of the things that can go along with that tantrum is the expectation of others to have a similar attitude or demeanor towards this understanding. So that’s kind of what I was getting at before when I came off track, is that it’s about understanding the different levels of conscious experiencing. It’s not possible for things to be other than they are, and when it is, things are other than they are.
Everything is unfolding in this spontaneous perfection. So there can be this tendency to kind of watch the news or look at other groups and you know from perhaps having a spiritual practice or you know being concerned about the the possibility of a collective transition and saying how can they be doing that what, why can’t they you know see that this is important, why are they acting like this or whatever the case may be, and it just becomes another form of separation, it becomes a subtle spiritualized way of, you know, kind of judging or critiquing the environment, when the most mature possibility is for us just to turn around, the subjectivity to turn back around on itself and to see that everything that seems to be going on out there is right here. And if in day-to-day life there’s the willingness to observe what’s arising in this experiencing and to take note of that and to allow that and to really dig in to some deep honesty surrounding that and be willing to heal and face these things in our own experience. And that’s the greatest measure that we could ever give to this seeming world, you know?
D: Yes. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah, and it allows us to be here to show up in a way that most people aren’t yet.
A: Yes.
D: And it takes time. It’s a process.
A: Yes.
D: We’ve been doing this for a very long time, and so it’s an undoing that doesn’t take anywhere near as much time. That’s the magic of it, too. If you’re actually completely present with what’s arising to be seen, then it can be, it can resolve in a few seconds quite often.
Sometimes there’s a really big one that takes a bit more, but a lot of it is just, it just needs to be seen. And once you’ve seen, it’s like there’s a piece of the experience that’s incomplete. It was seen as too much at the time, or there was, it required more time to process, and didn’t happen at the time and was put aside, and put aside and, and then resisted and so on.
And now that it’s coming to the surface and we give it that attention, it has the opportunity to just complete. All it needs to complete and then it’s dissolved. It’s done. It’s balanced. The balance is restored.
A: Yeah, there’s a path that I teach called the four pillars. And the first pillar is observation. And, you know, it’s recognized that observation isn’t something that is done, it’s something that’s already a given for experiencing. And through a certain intention or willingness that observation begins to recognize different layers of experiencing as they’re surfacing.
And then there’s a pillar of contemplative supplication. And this is where there’s a prayerful attitude, an attitude that is appreciative and then and also willing to receive deeper levels of clarity, deeper levels of truth. And in that is this suggestion for writing daily. And this writing is not like journaling in the sense that it’s specifically, intelligently sort of geared towards the breakdown or just the impersonal owning or the sort of clinical observational noting of the material that has arisen from a non-controlling space. And that sort of also begins to bring greater clarity and allows for deeper insights. And then with that is what I call transmutation.
And transmutation is the conversion of this latent energetic condensation that is expressing itself as these, you know, these emotional reflections and psychological impressions and mental movements and behavioral expressions. And when that energetic condensation is attentively allowed, then it actually converts. And that’s where I mentioned the understanding of it being fuel before. So we’re able to actually just be with that. And some of it may feel like it needs to be just held for a while.
One of the tendencies can be for there to be like a wanting it to kind of process through or get through here, get out, you know…
D: Get it done.
A: Get it done, right. And from this kind of conversion perspective, it’s actually nourishing to, for it to be here for as long as possible, in a consciously attentive way. That means that there’s no movement to control. It’s relaxed, it’s softening in, releasing the resistance around something. And at the same time, not pushing it away, not trying to manipulate it or manage it. And then in that, there is this conversion, it’s actually a conversion in bliss, because this material is condensated bliss, it’s bliss, that appears to have been fragmented or sort of concealed within itself, we might say. Yeah.
And so that bliss begins to reawaken or re-enliven through the conscious attentive allowing that shows up in the possibility of this human nervous system. And then that supports and cushions even more of that coming up. And it becomes this, this toroidal flow, you know, and then as you said earlier, it begins to include these collective layers. And it’s referential to what’s appropriate, you know, in the context of our individuated impressions, and how that relates and all of these different things. And, you know, in higher stages, it can be very obviously collective and relates to our body not being linear anymore, and recognized as being infinite and the only body and those kinds of things. So there’s all kinds of refined possibilities there as well. And then the fourth pillar is service. And really, the first three pillars that I went over are the greatest service possible, you know, because in these, in facing this material, in allowing this material, that translates into the whole field of human activity. But there’s also the willingness to be of service wherever it is seen, you know, wherever it is recognized.
So you were just saying something that kind of brought that forward and also this recognition that there’s a lot of support here on this planet right now at this time. Also in the sense that there are certain incarnations that are here, a significant notable number of incarnations that are here as a support, yeah, that are here as a part of this sort of transition period.
And it’s not important to kind of, you know, differentiate necessarily, but it is something that is noteworthy and recognizable at a certain point.
D: Yes.
A: Yeah.
D: Yeah, and looping back slightly to, another one of the ways I frame it is that we can have things that are incomplete that just kind of come to the surface and complete. But quite often they’ve come to the surface before, before we were ready to deal with it and our response was to resist it. Yes. To try and push it down. And so that can, depending on how we are with it, that can add another layer to it. Yes. And so what tends to happen for some of the big stuff over time is is they have a whole bunch of layers.
A: Yes.
D: But when they first start to surface, we kind of peel off a layer, sometimes they describe it like peeling an onion. We peel off a layer and then it comes up again and we peel off another layer and then it comes again and we peel off another layer.
And it kind of goes along until we finally get to the core. So it kind of seems like it keeps coming up over and over again, but it’s not exactly. If we’re not resisting the process and we’re allowing it, we are healing those layers of resistance. And then at some point we get to the core and the core has, I mean, the core can show up in different ways.
Sometimes it can be so incredibly dense. It’s almost like black energy, you know, ’cause it’s been so compressed and so repressed for so long. Or it can be just like a really intense, sharp bit of, usually you can kind of tell ’cause it’s been in there and repressed for so long, it has an extra oomph to it, extra contrast, extra charge, extra energy to it.
And so it can be kind of like this more intense wave of relief and when those go, that can be like taking a load off your back ’cause when you’re carrying this stuff around, it’s not exactly in the body per se, but it kind of like it has hooks and subtle associations that tie it to us in a way.
And it behaves like a shadow or a filter over our experience. Even though we’re not conscious of it at all, it’ll still create a certain biases.
A: Yes.
D: The way we respond emotionally, the way we respond conceptually, and so on like that. These are kind of these big shadows. So they’re quite impactful. And there’s the same thing as there in the collective as well. Beautiful. Collective things about, you know, the way say the French resisted a certain kind of experience or expressed it a certain way and left a historical experience unresolved. Perhaps the French Revolution or elements of the Second World War, or whatever, can be there in the collective as well.
And people purify bits and pieces of that over time, or their relationship with it, or their ancestral ties, or however that’s unfolding. There’s a huge variety of potential ways this stuff can show up. But the key is just to allow it, not to engage it, but to be as impersonal, as you mentioned, as detached, as just observing, just seeing it as we can.
A: Yes.
D: To be with it and allow it to arise in our awareness. It’s kind of like the difference between watching a recording, you know, watching our television or something versus stepping into it.
You know, we can just watch it and then we just bring that quality of consciousness to it and then it allows it to complete and to resolve.
A: Yes, yeah, all amazingly beautiful points. In using kind of segueing from that television example, a lot of times watching the news is something for folks, you know, where they tend to get kind of immersed in the material or discouraged or frustrated or whatever the case may be. And it can seem like, oh, you know, it’s the news, it’s what seems to be going on out there, that kind of is the source of this. But one of the most helpful understandings is the understanding of reflection. And it’s essentially recognizing that the nature of this field of conscious awareness is reflective. And it’s not so much about what seems to be going on in the news necessarily, but what the news is reflecting back within your awareness, as you said. So, we can, everything becomes a part of this reflective reverberation of the evolutionary purification of conscious awareness within itself. And you beautifully pointed out as well that some of this material is going to be piecemeal resolution.
It’s not something that is a one and done kind of a situation. And having an attitude that’s kind of just, that isn’t looking for an end, I found, I find it can be very, very helpful. It’s when it’s for its own sake, when it’s healing for its own sake, yeah, when it’s out of just the commitment to be with for its own sake, out of of the willingness, for its own sake, then we don’t get wrapped up in kind of expecting or anticipating when this is going to be over.
Is this the last bit? And, you know, that can be, it can be helpful to take note of that sometimes, but, you know, generally speaking, it’s what, you know, just to be with it as it is, without concern about how much longer or how many times or whatever the case can also be very, very supportive.
D: Yes, good point. And then another thing about the news too, it’s useful to be aware of in the broader sense, just from the context of how it’s evolved, because news is shifted into this 24/7 thing. And so a lot of it has become opinion and projection, what might happen. There’s a huge amount of the news is they’re talking about what might happen and projecting it. If they do this, if they do this, if they do this. And it’s not even really news at all in that sense. It’s not what has happened, it’s just that ego tendency to project into the future. And they’re just, you know, a living example of that.
And the other part of it is because of modern communication technology and so on, they need to fill in this space and so they’re reporting on things that they never used to bother to report on. I mean, they’ll report on a traffic accident that happened, you know, hundreds of miles away or, you know, the other side of the world and before you never would have heard of it. It was, you know, it happened certainly, but so there’s an advantage to this diverse, being aware of what’s going on. But really, like you said, it’s not really about this event or that event and whether you should have done something or it shouldn’t have happened or that kind of thing. It’s more about being aware of the collective dynamics that’s taking place in that broader, you know, there’s a call to be, you know, the climate crisis is calling us to be a little more, you know, fair to the earth, not be dumping pollution and so on into our home and, you know, take care of what takes care of us, to be stewards of Earth rather than to be treating it like a garbage dump, you know, so on like that.
Just to be more mature in a certain kind of way. And so it’s a call for being present to what’s unfolding rather than… Because the mind, when we’re attached to the ego, the mind tends to be looking for what’s wrong and who’s to blame.
A: Yes, yes.
D: And the ego, I mean, the news has kind of, has kind of favors this lowest common denominator value of the news and has become focused on what’s wrong and who’s to blame.
A: Right.
D: And they kind of concede, they try and report positive news and people don’t care or they’re not interested in the good things that are happening because that ego needs to find what’s wrong and who’s to blame.
A: Yes.
D: When that softens, that need falls away.
A: Yeah. It’s a supply and demand situation.
D: Yeah.
A: Because the news is supplying what, as a part of the purification that we’re talking about, as a part of the servicing that we’re talking about, that fear and that impulse to control expresses itself not just through the news but the watching of the news. So that’s why I was saying that the real step in maturity is observing what’s going on while you’re watching the news. It’s not necessarily about what is going on in the news but what is your motivation for watching it. You know, is it, is there something inside of you that likes the the fear and likes the, feels like it can control something or that it wants something to talk about, some drama, as you said.
So it’s kind of like the attraction to the drama of it, but we have to have this real sincere willingness to be able to see that and to own it, you know? And it’s so easy to make it about all these seeming things that seem to be going on out there, but it all reflects back to what’s going on here. So there’s no separation. There’s no sitting up on this sort of like hilltop looking down and say, look at all this stuff going on in the world, how can this be going on and they should know better than this or whatever.
Because then that very sort of separation is a part of what is expressing itself as all that material, you know.
D: Because that’s one of the ways the ego justifies itself. It’s like, I’m right, you’re wrong. And so, yes, and so it looks for justification of that position. Yes. And that’s, yeah, it illustrates it right there. And, and that, but that’s so divisive, right in there. It’s saying, you know, everybody else is other, if you don’t think like me, you’re wrong, you know, and all that kind of, and we’re all in this together.
It’s not, there’s no, there’s no separate person here. We’re all part of the one.
A: Exactly. And it can use spirituality as a part of that. I mean, we’ve seen that obviously like in religion, but even non-religious spirituality can be used as a part of like, you know, subtle forms of separation and these kinds of things. So it’s the willingness to see where it, because it’s facing the darkness in our own experience, you know, what we see is the darkness out there isn’t as out there as we thought it was.
And when we’re willing to face and resolve that darkness here, then the way that we see the darkness out there totally transforms, it totally shifts. We’re seeing the innocence of it.
D: Yeah.
A: Yes. Yeah.
D: It’s a beautiful thing taking place. It can be hard to be really honest with ourselves and to see what we’ve been contributing to the collective.
A: Yes.
D: But it’s a necessary seeing and once that’s seen through, then it falls away, because it’s not just this automatic program running in the background blah blah blah blah blah, reinforcing itself constantly.
It begins to be seen through and then it loses its energy and it stops, it stops and the monkey mind winds down. And then those qualities we were talking about earlier, about peace and happiness and love become much more present because there’s now room. There’s room for them. When the noise settles, then there’s room for them.
So it’s a challenging part of the process sometimes, but it’s an important part and it makes such a difference in quality of life over time. Because enlightenment isn’t a goal in itself, it’s just a platform for experiencing life. And it’s the beginning of a better quality of life. And not just for you as a person, because that’s really not what it’s about, it’s about raising the whole.
Yes. So that shift allows you to contribute so much more. Yes. To the whole. And it’s through many, many, many of us that the whole is risen.
A: Beautiful. And it is the whole that is enlightened. Yeah. Yeah.
D: Yeah. It’s the whole that’s waking up.
A: It’s only the whole that can be enlightened.
D: Yeah. The person never wakes up. We wake up from the person.
A: It can’t be owned by anyone. It’s not for a gain. It’s something much sweeter than that. It’s something much more fundamental. So there’s one more concept that I’ve found to be helpful that I call divine displacement. And it kind of relates to what you were talking about in the beginning with these just beautiful depths of of recognitions and refined experiences and so on and so forth that are taking place right now that really there isn’t a lot of context for even scripturally and the reality of pure Divinity being clearly cognizant of its own truth and its own radiance and to just ever increasing degrees of depth, even on a daily basis, through multiple bodies simultaneously, on this planet, is really profound and as that radiance and as that brilliance is more clearly cognized and realized, through the appearance of a human physiology, then that displaces deeper and deeper levels of darkness, deeper and deeper levels of dense, unresolved, like you said, kind of black material. And that so, you know, the light shines brighter into the back of the cave, you know, and that means that that stuff is seen more clearly, and it kind of stirs it up. So it’s a simultaneous oneness. It’s not causality, because there’s not two things. It’s the same radiant divinity that is revealing itself and displacing that material within its own infinite expanse of light, yeah?
And so it’s, there seems it, right now to be this kind of really, really, like great contrast, right, because there’s these just miraculous, refined, brilliant recognitions and experiences. And then at the same time, the darkest of the dark kind of sludge and residue is also coming up. But it’s the same in divine displacement, that’s one and the same thing. It’s the same process, you know.
And that’s the part of just the great gift of our time, you know. If you can see it as a gift, it may not always be easy to see, but by grace we see it.
D: Yes, yes. Yeah, if the washing machine is working overtime, sometimes the churning of the machines, you don’t always recognize the light.
A: Yeah, I find that, you know, it more and more it is, you know, it’s immediate, particularly when we that’s kind of been something that has been dipped into, you know, regularly.
And so there’s an understanding of the intelligence, experiential understanding of the intelligence, it does become more like immediately familiar, recognizable in the immediacy of that, of the surfacing or the transmutation or the purification that’s going on.
But initially, it can be retrospectively that we have that, you know, the recognition that it was grace and everything was unfolding perfectly. Yeah.
D: Beautiful.
A: Beautiful. Well, I feel like we’ve covered quite a bit, and, do you have anything else that you’d like to add or?
D: That’s good. Good.
A: All right. Thank you so much for talking with me, David. And we always give all glory to pure Divinity.
D: All glory to pure Divinity.
A: Thank you.
D: Thank you.