The End of Belief
On through...
Intro:
Originally a shorter version for someone who has no ideas at all about non-duality, not familiar with the term, yet her inner instincts, deeper calling, or may I say soul, is clearly reorienting her sense of self, over and over, towards what non-duality is all about… Not intellectually, but instead honestly, genuinely, heart-fully…
I also see from some of the ways she is carrying forward that other similar callings continue to reach her where it matters… Again not as conceptual/intellectual frameworks, but as a direct, alive and felt experience in her heart of hearts…
One of the advantages perhaps of not being too overly conditioned by what are increasingly becoming more and more conservatively influenced and institutionalized mainstream educational systems and media outlets…
It is so curious how a lot of self-identified spiritual and non-dual people do not really understand the distinctions pointed to below… They still attempt to capture the possibilities of spiritual clarity, non-dual awareness and freedom with intellect, puzzle-solving addictions, repetition, obedience to “authoritative” dictates, and even memorization, as if this spiritual non-journey is a two dimensional activity similar to a jigsaw or crossword puzzle, a spelling bee, a mathematical problem, a science or engineering conundrum, a martial art, a trip to another “place,” or even maybe some of the more popular board and video games…
All and similar attempts to understand what are primarily metaphysical ways and terrains, which are totally imperceivable, unimaginable and unattainable via such efforts, have been shaped and determined for the most part by collective and constant social and economic pressures, conditioning starting from before birth, materialist educational systems, and corporate owned media…
The following essay is of course also intended to be grasped by the mind, but its true invitation is for the actual “believer” in, or may we say the awareness behind and prior to “mind,” to actually become willing to “fall” through all these words…
As if what’s here next is a sort of meaningful, multi-featured, articulated and thoroughly metaphorical “cloud” that is not separate from the believer, a cloud they are being called to “understand” by NOT grasping, and instead by letting in some possibilities of a reflection of the very same awareness they also are, all the while as they allow themselves to keep falling on through… With no-knowing what might be discovered...
On through…
——
Beloved One,
Actually we are never in control... We do have an ability to influence things though, by the way we orient ourselves, respond to our circumstances, engage other people, perceive other critters, and relate to what I’ll call the larger world around us both human and natural…
What some indigenous North American peoples call “All Our Relations”… AND THEN, most importantly, also noticing what it is that we are actually believing about whatever appears to be happening...
The way sailboats and old sailing ships both connected with and at the same time adjusted their sails to the winds… Before mankind began to invent means to separate our human endeavors and activities even from our planet’s most fundamental winds, or we could say the breath of Earth… The collective and extremely extended results of which we are now presently seeing all around us, in spades… But that is a different conversation…
Here the wind, or planet breath, and our relationship to or orientation with it, is a metaphor for a core part of what is being pointed towards throughout the rest of this essay…
In essence, we call to ourselves what we believe... Individually AND collectively… This with the understanding that most of our beliefs, and most especially by the time we become adults, have become unconscious conditioning… In other words held onto conditions, habits and/or contracted, distorted, disoriented and disturbed energies in our bodies, most often experienced as emotions, feelings, sensations... And even physiological circumstances for a lot of us… Some of that energy moves around even moment to moment, and some of it, in myriad contracted ways, hovers deep, waiting to be stirred up by each of our lives’ always shifting and changing circumstances…
When a particular circumstance triggers one of those contracted emotions, sensations, or energies, our experience will also conjure up old, relative (related), and so very often unconscious/half-conscious ideas and mental constructs, now dressing themselves as current circumstances and appearances, along with perhaps some more recent memories, to explain, defend, and/or isolate (distance) ourselves from this current experience, or what seems to be happening… In other words to give us some reasons and internal imagery for what we are now believing as a result of our very own thoughts and feelings, about our experience… With all these inner as well as outer projections often supported and reinforced by a great deal of fear and angst…
Yet NONE of what we are conjuring up, in any circumstances, is really about the current moment… No matter how similar or “familiar” some of it may seem… NOR is any of it true, as in real… All of this conjuring is sourced from what is merely a storied “past” that we are continuing to hold “in place” through unconscious/half-conscious mental constructs and felt beliefs, mostly in the form of memories, energies, contractions and disturbances within our minds and bodies, or body-minds…
These “beliefs” that we hold in our body-minds are the only things that can or will, ever, whether it be for a moment, awhile, or a lifetime, seem as if they are “chaining” or “imprisoning” our souls… ‘Soul’ being a term of convenience here, so don’t hang up on it…
In order to become free of the past we must begin to understand that there is a distinction between what we are typically conjuring up, daily, hourly, moment to moment even, and what our present circumstances actually are… Which means we must also begin to be able to recognize when and as we are conjuring, and then (want to) learn how to really question what it is we are right now believing that is making all this conjuring possible…
If I am standing on the edge of a highway, wanting to cross, and my mind-body conditioning conjures up some frightening feelings and associated beliefs, because there are occasional cars whizzing by, perhaps because I once got hit by a car on a highway (I did actually when I was a kid), I may never cross… OR if my body conditioning conjures up a feeling of an empty highway and some associated beliefs when there ARE cars whizzing by, I may get clobbered… All of that conjuring is old conditioning, which we are believing simply because our feelings, etc., through long practice, have us convinced THEY, these feelings, and all the old half buried memories and ideas they are associated with and/or trigger, are what is real…
But what is actually real is the highway as it presently is… When we are no longer caught in our conditioning about highways we SEE the highway, and simply cross when it is empty…
It is all these feelings, conditioning and beliefs that we must begin to challenge and question, if we really want to be free… We may even decide that some of our beliefs are helpful, and choose, because we are now conscious of them, to keep consciously supporting, aka nourishing, them…
But we probably will discover (if we carry forward in some of the ways pointed to here) that most beliefs arising from our early lives are no longer helpful, and even that many of them are actually causing us a lot of serious problems as we go about our present lives… At some point when we were younger some of them could even have been helpful… And so we can appreciate them for that, all the while as we also begin to learn how to let them go…
Do understand, “letting go” is just and only this very act of seeing… More and more “purely” one might say… Or in other words, more and more without anything else involved… This willingness to just see, clearly, without any judgements or preconceptions in the way… First awareness of ourself, that we ARE this awareness aware of itself, and then this seeing of all the belief that keeps arising right here in the midst of what we are… Simple awareness, also holding within herself this central, obvious life-affirming question, is it helpful…? Without any otherwise active involvements or judgements… This will, by itself, eventually and naturally burn all hubris and beliefs in separation away… Sort of in the very same way sunlight just naturally burns away the fog…
In this case it is the light of awareness that burns away illusion… Naturally, no effort involved, with our every effort merely delaying the inevitable…
Along the way we will begin to discover that old conditioning, aka all these beliefs that have now gone deep into our bodies as energies, feelings, emotions, sensations and contractions, are no longer even the littlest bit helpful, once they are brought (recognized) into consciousness and we begin to really hold them within that one simple question…
Not fight them, not judge them, not hate them… Simply become aware of them, and the question, now become wordless even, deeper and deeper, always deeper, until beliefs are either seen as helpful, or they simply, slowly and naturally begin to dissolve away, on their own…
If this is kept up, at some point, though not as soon as we might wish, old conditioning comes up less and less… And then eventually rarely... And we begin to realize that we are actually becoming free…
After that even when old conditioning does come up we are just naturally, in these new ways we have become comfortable with, quick to recognize and question, one whole movement, rather than merely and reactively thinking, feeling, speaking or acting… It is quick now partly because we have become familiar with and accepting of ourselves, in all our unique and maybe even still strange ways…
Does this belief help, or not, we act consciously, or not, and its over and gone… One whole interconnected movement within what is always and forever this same ever shifting changing evolving timeless moment, or infinite extension of eternity, source, self…
There is a whole other level of conditioning of course that keeps our heart beating, causes us to jump out of the way when a vehicle is speeding towards us, or when we pull quickly away from a hot object, and that also oversees and integrates all of our various bodily systems… This is of course the innate and natural conditioning we are all born into form through as well as with, and that we do not for the most part ever need or want to question... Nor could we even, for most of it…
Though some of that conditioning can also be engage by our intentions, if we wish... Like breathing for example… Some people can begin a kind of practice with their breath, and may even discover, if they are persistent enough, that there are some deeper physiological and energetic levels of conditioning that we can also engage… Some highly practiced Yogis and similar in the East are able to intentionally slow their hearts and metabolisms way down, for instance…
And yet none of that is necessary for what we are truly here in form for… And those sorts of body practices can also tend to lead many into a deeper trap of the body, actually… Just like overly practiced and educated “non-dual” minds can also tend to lead a lot of people into what is an ever deeper trap of the mind…
🙏🌻
~ John Fridinger
Talent, OR
Spring, 2023
In response
I’ve seldom had beliefs that I didn’t question as consciousness seems to be so unstable to me. I’ve always questioned things I didn’t know about or understand even as a child and even when I was punished for the audacity of the questions and the answers were “Because I said so!” and “everybody knows that”. Those were answers I couldn’t accept. Always searching for something intangible I couldn’t identify. Something, something….. It was a very slow process. I had no formal religious training although I was told by family to automatically respond to people with “Christian”.
Oh I guess I’ve meditated but unconventionally, I sometimes while lying in bed just before I fall asleep have had unusual experiences such as seeing faces of people I do not recognize which sometimes developed into little tableau of a family picnicking on a grassy field none of which I’ve ever seen before. A friend who had had similar experiences asked if I would speak to them. I’d never thought of it so I did one night and the picnicking family quickly gathered their things and walked away, looking back as if they had heard something strange.
My most memorable trip was when a friend of a friend in the late 60s, early 70s had a friend who had medical grade mescaline from UCLA. It was a turning point for me. I was drinking tea in a styrofoam cup, staring into the bottom and I noticed how the foam bits meshed tightly in the cup and that same pattern carried on over the cup and carried on over my entire vision. I discovered as I walked the neighborhood that everything I saw was connected, animate and inanimate to everything else. It was amazing and all wonder at how it was all really one. That impression has never left me.
Then I had a somewhat normal life but circumstances and coincidences seemed to always direct me onto a different path than I had planned, like I had no control. (ha ha) I always chose the adventure over a traditional life or what I thought was one. And I got stung more than once.
More and more I learned that there is peace in neutrality. Then a friend gave me some CDs of Abraham-Hicks (oh and before that there was “A Course In Miracles” through Marianne Williamson but I had troubles there as it was so Christian and I had no base on which to start). Sufis, Rumi, Tao were on my beside table. However I felt finally on a narrow path that seemed to be a better fit.
Then last year my world fell apart and I had to finally make a decision and became my own advocate. With the aid of my family, I was alone in a new style of living from what I had known for almost 30 years. I was lost and alone (which was good) during a whole year. Just as I was trying to reconstruct my life, I realized my old life was an emotional sham but also that people are basically kind and honest.
What do I do with that information? Well, I started counseling and names such Brene Brown and Gabor Mate were mentioned.
Finally, I heard from you about Rupert Spira and Bernardo Kastrup which leads to the actual inquiry into Non-Dualism and the philosophy behind it. What most intrigued me was these two men are from t different disciplines but have come to a very similar conclusion about non-duality. I’ve always been interested in quantum theories and knew it was the next frontier where we peel back another layer of ignorance to discover new layers of knowledge. And I’m also an artist and often wonder just where my inspiration comes from and the compulsion to create. I don’t think it is just because I’m neurodivergent. I’ve often read of the historical physic ists like Einstein, Schrodinger, etc. have been mystified by their discoveries and see our existence in a mystical unknown or unknowable way.
So when I saw the videos featuring hours of the Rupert and Bernardo discussions, there came a relaxing of my shoulders and gut. There came a sense of an almost silent aha! It lasted for merely a few seconds and all sorts of questions came up that I feel were distractions from an ego that felt threatened and so it begins. I’ll continue as it glimmers in the distance again but it is there and beckons me to find the answers to these questions as an advocate for the child that always questioned.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I picture myself as a conduit, gathering and sending information, experiences, emotion to what I call the greater universe, the Source, the collective unconscious and releasing old hurts, blaming, judging and all that. I feel I’ve worked hard to release my victimhood and feelings for how damaged my parents must have been to traumatize the child they loved. I’m pretty much in neutral as far as that goes now, although those feelings occasionally raise their head if my emotions are running high. Become neutral as I call it and accept people as they are. I have been “neutral” these past months as I came out of the recent trauma I experienced. I felt I had nowhere to go for solace but myself and as I saw the effects of kindness on those who were broken and unaware, good things happened and soul and body started to heal.
What you are saying is so true for me and you explain yourself in a way is clearer and less intimidating than the discussions of philosophers who have their own language in a way. Even as I write about being neutral, there is tension writhing in my body twisting my gut even though I’ve pretty much stopped reading all the political news from popular media (except HCR but I have to leave her and take a deep breath once in a while, before I come back and finish the letter). I am working on just being aware (which sounds to me like an oxymoron lol) acknowledging what comes up in my mind and I know it isn’t true (“but possible” my fears counter.) Once recognized sometimes the trauma is not gone and reappears as part of my old self but different maybe with only the anxiousness and anger but without direction. I recently experienced this in a therapy session when the therapist asked whether my neutrality might be masking unresolved traumas and I said I had met most of them (e.g., my anger at my mother, resentment for not getting the education I was promised) and her response was something like “really?” as she was watching my agitation through my voice and my body. I can see that there will be traps as I begin to practice Awareness but it lures me on with the possibility of peace and happiness in my lifetime and my creativity erupts with new energy and I get lost in the present moment and find it’s been hours.
I would like to continue our discussions in order to clarify and learn more about how live. I sometimes has a vision of just being aware, not talking, or expressing myself for fear I’ll expose a new unidentified trauma, but I think that’s my mind playing games with me.