The Pursuit of Wholeness
In the beginning, there was the Spark. The Big Bang exploded into stars. Stars formed planets. Planets became mountains, trees, and water. The elements birthed amoeba, then fish, then dinosaurs and reptiles. Mammals, apes, and humans walked the Earth. The span of civilizations created your ancestors and then grandparents. They birthed your parents. Then, after eons of matter and energy spurring through time and space, life created you.
How did matter create consciousness? How did the stars ultimately form you, looking up at the stars and pondering your place among them? More importantly: why?
In Truth vs. Falsehood, David Hawkins shares that only Truth exists. There is no such thing as an opposite. “Cold” is merely the absence of heat. “Dark” is the absence of light. There is no such thing as “zero”; it is merely the absence of “one”. Falsehood is the absence of Truth. Life seeks to create life because the Universe is oriented towards Truth: creation is the potentiation of existence, the creation of Truth.
The present moment is all that exists. There is no such thing as the future: it is a figment of the imagination because it has not been created yet. Breathe into this for a moment. Consider that all fears are falsehoods, imagined of a future that does not exist. Fears are lies; they are the absence of Truth. The orientation of the Universe towards Truth cascades into the orientation of life towards presence… When we pause, close our eyes, and be here now, we can feel peace because we have settled into this moment, the very seed of Truth.
In The Subjective Truth & Your Innate Power, we explored the subjective nature of Truth. All of life is experienced through consciousness and each person experiences consciousness uniquely. Wholeness is the experience of oneself completely such that our experience of reality is total and true. When our protective parts relax, when we are present with what is without pushing our feelings away, then we can experience the fullness of conscious awareness. We can experience our internal sense of Truth wholly because we are not pushing away what is from fear, desire, pride, and other falsehoods.
The experience of Wholeness feels like inspiration and flow. We have all felt it before, whether skiing down a mountain, playing a guitar, or in the embrace of a lover. It is when we feel safe to just exist without our imagined fears. Here, our Inner Truth shines forth as a radiant light of creation. The real question is: how can we feel this more?
Every person seeks to believe that their experience of reality is real. When we were told by our parents to not cry as children, we began to doubt our experience of sadness. When we were told that it’s not okay to be angry, we began to distrust our anger. The journey towards Wholeness is the reconstitution of all the parts of ourselves that we have ignored, suppressed, or projected because we have lost the capacity to honor their voice.
The degree to which one suffers is measured by the distance between perception and essence, between truth and falsehood. Perception is colored by the ego, which is the seat of fear, desire, and pride. Essence is the underlying nature of all things: that there is a quality of Is-ness and existence that is neither good nor bad. It just is. To evolve from perception to vision, one must discard expectations and surrender positionalities such that the purity of each thing, event, and feeling can be discerned for the Truth that it is.
Let’s take the emotion of anger, for example. When we feel angry, there is an underlying truth we have not reconciled. If one feels hurt, the ego might say “it’s because I was manipulated” in its position of victimhood. However, the underlying truth may be that one did not clearly express their boundaries and, underneath this, that they compromised their intuition, which is the voice of their Inner Truth. Anger outwards is really an expression of an unacknowledged truth inwards. We are really angry at ourselves.
When we feel anger towards someone, it is because we are projecting our reality onto theirs. We might feel anger when we perceive others acting unreasonably or carelessly. However, they are acting exactly the way they should in their reality. What’s more, they are acting the only possible way they could… any other way does not exist as this is how it is. To deny the Truth of the moment and insist on another reality is what generates suffering.
Anger often originates from righteousness: the egocentric belief that our experience of reality is true while others’ are not. We insist that our perception is true while others’ is false while the truth is that each person is experiencing their own subjective reality. The insistence that one’s reality is more true than another’s ignores the essence of consciousness–that each person is experiencing something true to them and trying their best at all times–and thus creates separateness and suffering.
Wholeness is more than a state of being. It is a practice of persistently feeling truly and deeply. It stems from a value of consistently honoring one’s Self, allowing the beingness of life to exist, and surrendering pain before it becomes suffering.
What happens when we feel something? When we feel anger or shame, love or joy, how do we know what it is we are feeling? Emotions manifest as a felt-sense in the body. It is energy in motion–be it tightness or lightness, contraction or expansion, pain or pleasure–that signals to the mind that here is a feeling. The challenge is that once the feeling in the body seats as a belief in the mind, the ego then says “this is what it is.” The ego perceives the emotion as “shame” or “fear” or even “love” while the essence of it lies in the inner sensation within the body.
When our mind labels an inner sensation as “shame”, as an example, the ego cannot help but judge it. The ego says, “this feeling is bad”, and then may move to avoid or suppress the sensation. The reality is that the feeling just is. The body is the seat of emotions and intuitions. It has no judgments. Some describe shame as a heaviness in the belly. Press your hand on your belly now. Is this sensation “shame”? Is this feeling “bad”? No, because the mind perceives it differently even though the sensation may be similar. The ego misses the essence. The ego is divorced from Truth.
The trick to feeling truly and deeply is to allow the inner sensation of a feeling to just be without judgment or avoidance. You can practice this with a short meditation: close your eyes and envision someone or something you love in a state of joy. Find the sensation this generates in your body. Some might describe it as warmth and expansiveness in their chest. Wherever it is and however it manifests, allow your awareness to focus on the inner sensation itself while letting go of the image of the person or thing that generated the sensation. Cancel any labels, thought forms, stories, beliefs, or images. Instead, continue to move deeper and deeper into this sensation, giving it more space with each breath. What is it like to just be with the essence of a feeling instead of the ego’s perception of it?
Ram Dass says, “don’t pray at the gates; go into the inner temple.” When you say you are “in love”, someone is merely helping you touch that place inside of you that is love. Similarly, this meditation can be practiced on any emotion. Imagine a situation that annoyed you or a memory of being hurt. Can you be with the inner sensation in your body without the judgments or the labels? Universally, as we give space to the essence of the emotions, they dissipate and reveal the underlying Truth: peace, love, and gratitude that lays underneath our protective layers. This is the Self, the Divine within, that all the spiritual texts speak of. This is the seat of inspiration utter through whispers of intuition.
In pursuit of Wholeness, one can simply ask: “am I in a state of suffering or peace?” Peace results from an alignment with Truth and divinity. If one experiences anything less than peace, there is some essence that is being ignored. Where have you chosen to live from fear and scarcity instead of presence and surrender? Where have you attempted to force change instead of relaxed into the okayness of reality? Where have you not listened to your heart?
Every time we ignore our intuition, we weaken the muscle of listening to our Inner Truth. “Trusting oneself” is really the trust of this inner voice: what you are feeling, thinking, and intuiting is real and okay. There’s this saying, “Sometimes my intuition leads me wrong, but it’s the only thing that’s ever led me right.” The very nature of trusting one’s Self is valuable no matter the outcome. Intuition clarifies and purifies as we surrender more and more, including the surrender of expectations of outcomes. Imagine if you had nothing to fear–if you trusted yourself to always find the way–what dreams could your intuition pave for you? What magic could you create in this world?
In the beginning, there was the Spark. Stars bore planets that created life that produced you. The journey towards Wholeness is consciousness seeking to know itself completely and deeply. It is the Universe aimed towards creation, towards potentiating existence and Truth. You are its divine agent. Truth does not need to be sought after. It is already here. We merely need to let go of our protective layers to see the essence of now with vision instead of perception. All you have to do is feel your feelings, surrender your beliefs, and witness the majesty of life as it is.
