Tag: awakening

Practice…and Beyond

Photograph © 2019 Peggy Kornegger

Remember the old joke about the tourist asking directions in New York? “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice, practice, practice.” That answer could also be given to the spiritual question “How do I get to the enlightened state?” Practice—a lifelong commitment to finding peace of mind and God. Your practice becomes your life, and vice versa. And yet it is not until the practice softens and becomes a relaxed inner flowering rather than a rigid outer striving that everything shifts. The virtuoso pianist and the devoted meditator discover the sound and light within them, not on an external stage or altar. Carnegie Hall and enlightenment are not destinations; they are experiences.

Only when we let go of the need to arrive somewhere do we find that what we were looking for existed already, right in front of us. Dorothy traveled over the rainbow to Oz only to realize that “Home” was in the faces of those she loved…and in her own heart. The enlightened state, too, appears to be over some distant rainbow, yet what if it exists inside us? We only have to deepen our awareness to feel its expansive presence. This deepening is the softer sense of practice, the spiritual sense.

Growing up, we are taught that if we practice enough, we will achieve whatever we focus on with intent and purpose. Practice is seen as a repetitive routine that leads to a specific goal, like playing a musical instrument well. This meaning has a certain truth; if we practice anything diligently enough, we can achieve proficiency. But there is a step beyond proficiency that can only be reached by an almost indescribable surrender wherein we become the music (or the meditation) itself. In spirituality, diligent meditating does not necessarily lead to enlightenment. Ultimately we have to let go of trying and open to something greater than ourselves. In this opening, practice falls away, and there is only spirit. The experience and the experiencer are one.

When you come to realize that God is within you, then that awareness literally opens your eyes to the truth of who you are. Beyond practice is grace, in music or in spirituality. You become one with the flow of life, and you begin to flow yourself, whatever you are doing. You see the divine light within you that is reflected in the world around you. In every person and in every thing. This is enlightenment. A state of being, not a state of practicing.

Master musicians and spiritual masters share one attribute: connection. They are connected to something greater than themselves, and that is what lifts them into a state of pure being—oneness with music or oneness with God. This is the future of all of us who were born on the planet at this time. Our destiny is to softly step beyond the edges of practice into a life of awakened presence: spirit embodied in form, fully aware of both our humanity and our divinity. In any given moment, we can shift our awareness into this peaceful space of expansive perception. It’s not as difficult as it may seem. It just takes practice…and then letting go of practice.

Your Compassionate Heart

Photograph © 2018 Peggy Kornegger
You have one. We all do. It just gets covered over with a protective shell of fear about your own survival. Or it is buried and forgotten in a busy and sometimes frantic daily life. We get lost in our own worries and concerns and forget about the others we share the world with. We lose sight of the fact that everyone else around us is living lives very similar to our own at the most basic level, beginning with birth and ending with death. Yet isn’t life about more than that really? Aren’t we greater than the events of our lives? Isn’t there a thread that ties us together, in spite of our differences?

That thread is compassion. We were born with a compassionate heart, and it is repeatedly awakened whenever we experience someone else’s pain or joy as our own. Today, on this planet, there is a quiet but universal awakening occurring in which we are finding the compassion deep in our hearts. At times of crisis or catastrophe, the shell of self-protection breaks open, and we feel deeply for our fellow human beings, often giving money, food, clothing, or whatever is needed to help. We feel that way too when we share in someone else’s happiness or good fortune. Our compassionate heart is always ready to shine its light of love outward. It’s a natural part of being a human soul in physical form. That’s why we are here, really: to become aware of our individual separateness as an illusion, and oneness as the greater truth.

Selfishness and lack of compassion are habits. Ones we learn from a very early age in this culture. We are frequently taught that when someone else wins, we lose, and that “on top” is the best place to be. In spite of countless spiritual or religious teachings about love and sharing with others, the overriding voice of this society insists “look out for yourself” and “don’t let anyone else take advantage of you.” It becomes a habitual trigger response to the world, and you lose your connection to that thread of compassion that ties you to other beings on this planet. And to your self as well. Because if you don’t love and have compassion for yourself, you are incapable of having it for others.

The key to stepping out of your conditioning and awakening compassion is patience, with others and with yourself: patience as a daily practice that is cultivated with each conscious breath you take. This opens the door to peaceful loving relationships in all parts of your life. It may take time to reverse the collective trend toward mistrust and separation, but it is possible if we are patient and committed. The kind and gentle child who lives within us is just waiting for acknowledgment and encouragement. Each time one of us is generous or caring in word or deed to another on this planet, we are shifting the energy for all of us. In that shift, the silent message is: “You are not alone.”

Compassion is the reason you were born: love creates life. Divine love and compassion created the universe and lives in your very cells. When we open to the compassion within us, we find the true meaning of life. It’s not about money or fame or accumulating possessions, as we are so often told. It’s about sharing love with others. It’s about generosity of spirit. Caring for self and others with equal gentleness and understanding. Compassion is a circle really. And we are all part of it, at the deepest level. The love you give returns to you and fills your compassionate heart with joy, overflowing into greater and greater expressions of love in the world.

 

Upside Down and Backward

Photograph © 2018 Peggy Kornegger

When I was a child, I used to lie on the living room rug and gaze up at the ceiling, imagining it as the floor. I pictured how it would be to live in an upside down house and walk from room to room stepping over the doorway arches. My partner Anne used to do the same thing when she was little, even though she grew up in an entirely different part of the U.S. Is this something that all kids do, or just a coincidence? I found myself wondering if it is a genetic code within us for novelty and reinvention, which somehow gets lost as we grow older. How do we keep our vision of the world fresh in an adult world that teaches us that physical reality is solid, unchanging, and that facts and predictability are the basis for living a safe and orderly life?

At an early age, children often aren’t interested in order and rigid perceptual rules, unless they have had it already instilled in them via parental fears. What if, at heart, we aren’t either? What if our souls really want imagination, improvisation, and exploration? The element of surprise. After all, we came to this extraordinarily diverse and beautiful planet to live our human lives fully and completely. Who wants to live it in a box of repetitive, expected events and experiences? I’ve always intuitively felt this way. That’s why I’ve moved and traveled so much in my life, from coast to coast and continent to continent. Every time I went somewhere else, I saw the world with fresh eyes. I loved it. I still do.

This move to Florida has been particularly powerful. Literally everything has been tossed up into the air. Anne and I are beginning anew in a different state, a different home, and a different climate. North to South: upside down. I continually feel as if we have crossed into another dimension. Everything unknown. Each day I see something new. The flowers and birds are unique. Even the sky is different—dramatic and ever-changing weather patterns and clouds in an infinite number of shapes, sizes, and colors. We are acutely aware of the new world we are experiencing and what a gift it is to see every detail of life as if for the very first time.

I don’t want to lose that feeling. Last evening she and I reversed the direction of our walk on the nature trail around our community. We did it “backward,” and it felt like a completely different experience. Even in a month, our eyes and brains had acclimated to our surroundings. By changing direction, we flipped the “predictable” switch in favor of “unplanned.” It was exciting to spontaneously and consciously choose the new in a relatively familiar situation. I realized that I can do that at any given moment. A small shift in your inner vision can have a huge impact on your outer experience. Life is, after all, a reflection of your inner state of being.

This morning as I walked the trail by myself, I was very conscious of all that was new to me: the butterflies, lizards, dragonflies, purple beautyberries, orange canna lilies. It was thrilling just to be outdoors on this bright sunny morning. Halfway through my walk, I heard thunder in the distance and realized there might soon be another sudden Florida rainstorm. I watched one half of the skies darken and the other half stay sunny, as the thunder rumbled closer. Then, as I walked in the sparkling sunshine, it began to rain lightly. I stopped and stood there smiling, enjoying the experience of simultaneous rain and sun, the sky divided like a huge yin-yang circle of dark and light. Opposites and oneness at the same time. All my senses were awakened by that juxtaposition.

The exhilaration of opposites is available to us at all times, and we can hold them in our awareness—an inner yin-yang—in order to immerse ourselves in the full spectrum of life’s experiences. Upside down, backward, forward, inside out. Choose the opposite path, the new activity, the unheard-of option. Every single one is an easy-access restart button for your consciousness to keep you open and expansive, mindful and soulful. A fully alive human be-ing having an absolutely amazing experience here on planet Earth.

 

 

The Experience of God

Photograph © 2017 Peggy Kornegger
God is everything. Yet within that everything, God has many aspects of being, from formlessness to form. At the center of the universe (actually before the universe became the universe) is just Source energy, pure potential. In some teachings, this is called the absolute, or “I.” It is the precursor to the Big Bang: out of nothing came something, out of absolute being arose relative being, or “I Am,” wherein God becomes relatable, experiential, as love, as consciousness. When we on the spiritual path feel divine love, when we expand into conscious awareness of something greater in our lives, we are experiencing the “I Am” at the soul level.

The next aspect is “I Am That,” in which we as humans identify completely with our physical forms, personality selves, or egos, and forget our divine connection. Forgetfulness is the common state for humanity at this time. In forgetfulness, we get caught up in all the polarities and dramas of human physical life on Earth. Our minds, emotions, and bodies are our primary experience, and the soul takes a backseat, often completely overlooked. This also is God, but it is God forgetting that it is God—something we all experience before we awaken again into the “I Am,” the love we came from.

In the collective awakening that is happening more and more on this planet, we reconnect with our souls, with the God within. This is the primary experiential focus for many of us who have incarnated at this time—to expand in awareness from “I Am That” to “I Am” and finally to “I.”

My own life has taken me through all three aspects at different times. Most of my early life was spent in “I Am That.” I dropped much of my socially created personality when I left my small-town home at 18 and went away to college to “find myself.” I spent years exploring “who am I?” and “why am I here?” I often felt lost and in despair during this self-exploration because I couldn’t really see beyond the Earth plane. I was on a spiritual quest, but I didn’t know it as such. I found meaning and a new kind of self-identification within the breakthrough experiences of my generation in the late 1960s and 1970s—flower-child consciousness and political activism. Belief in Love defined my life and informed all the experiences I had at that time. It was a period of awakening, but at a beginning level.

Many years later, I began a conscious spiritual journey, which eventually took me to “I Am,” experiencing God, or universal consciousness. This occurred in my own spiritual practices (meditation, yoga, programs with inspiring teachers), in Nature, and eventually I found that divine connection existed within me at all times. These were powerful moments of bliss and joy, when tears streamed down my face at the all-encompassing loving Godness that filled me. I began to live more and more from my soul (and my heart which is the entry point to the soul) instead of my personality or ego. My fears around infinity and death gradually began to be replaced by trust and surrender to something greater than my single human life. Yet, there was more.

I am only now beginning to touch into “I,” or the absolute. I experienced it once years ago at the very start of my work with Panache Desai, when in an individual session, he took me there. More accurately, he accessed that state within himself, which opened the door for me to access it within myself. It was a completely emotionless state of peace beyond peace. This was infinity, on the other side of any fears my mind could invent about it—because there was no mind, no me. There was nothing. I remained in that state for hours, with no desire to do anything but rest in the experience. It made a huge crack in my previous level of consciousness, and deeper awareness began to trickle, and then gradually stream, in. Because of this crack, I was able to experience God in ways I never had previously.

The door is opening wider now to that fathomless, directionless, experience of absolute potential, where God is not even a definable entity. In a recent immersion retreat with Panache, I found myself “lifting off” into that state, like a hummingbird spiraling upward into invisibility. Here there is no language, no recognizable signposts to point to, so when I “return” (actually, there is no return because it is ever-present, the source of everything), I can find no words to describe it. A woman at our retreat called it the place of “no God”—in other words, God before God is seen by us as God. And it’s not frightening because fear doesn’t exist. As I said, indescribable.

These are the states that great masters throughout time have spoken of and, seeing into the future, told us: “All this you will experience, and more.” I have no idea where I am going on this journey; every bit of it is beyond my human “understanding.” It’s a Great Mystery that I am here to experience in its eternal expansion through formlessness and form, emptiness and fullness, potential and presence. In all honesty, the “I Am That” in me at times still fears the nothingness of the “I” and wants only the loving comfort of the “I Am.” Yet my soul knows they are all God, all one unified ocean of energy and light within me and all around me. Separation and fear only exist in my mind.

Losing Heart and Having Heart in Troubled Times

Photograph © 2017 Peggy Kornegger

When you “lose heart,” you become discouraged and lose hope. When you “have heart,” you keep your faith and trust in spite of the odds. We are living at a time in which both of these options present themselves. The shadow side of our collective consciousness in the United States is coming to the fore, and we are seeing people fiercely hanging on to privileges and prejudices as if their lives depended on it. In truth, it is their identities, their egos, that depend on belief systems based in hierarchy and entitlement.

The 1% believe they have earned their place at the top of the heap and that those they have stepped on and profited from in order to get there are losers and leeches. Minorities and immigrants are targeted as threats to an elitist, white-male status quo. The exact opposite of the values of democracy and equal rights that this country is supposedly founded on. Of course, those founders were also white, male, and many were slaveholders, so the underside of American “freedom” has always existed.

When the rest of us look at this scenario, our hearts are tested. Will we lose hope or will we keep our faith that the imbalances will eventually right themselves? To paraphrase (and update) Thomas Paine: these are the times that try human souls. Can generosity, compassion, and loving-kindness eventually prevail in a society like ours where the accumulation and hoarding of monetary wealth and material possessions, as well as the oppression of entire segments of the population, is so widespread? Classism and racism overlay our so-called democratic society, to say nothing of sexism.

Everyone’s consciousness is affected by this skewed worldview. Many with more don’t want to give up what they have in order to assist others who have less. The media promotes consumerism and the lifestyles of the rich and famous, as if these were behaviors to aspire to. The artificially created “need” to buy and keep buying invades our daily lives. Unless we make a conscious decision not to participate. Unless we choose sharing over greed, caring over selfishness, simplicity instead of overconsumption. Unless we choose to live from our hearts and not our conditioning.

All the extremes and polarities are being displayed in full view of the world. The advent of  a belligerent, self-aggrandizing approach to life is pervasive. There is an increasingly harsh and ruthless holding on to privilege, often accompanied by hatred of all those who stand up for their rights as equal citizens. Yet, there is a hollowness to these defenders of entitlement. Their hearts seem to be empty, their minds filled with delusions of superiority based on money and power. Appearance is more important than truth. But there is only so long they can maintain that facade. Their extreme behavior is the death rattle of an outdated paradigm, doomed to disappear like the dinosaurs.

Hope for the future lies with those who are, everywhere on this planet, now awakening to a conscious awareness that sees unity and commonality, not separation and divisiveness. People whose lives are lived heartfully and soulfully in deep connection with their fellow beings. Generosity of spirit prevails. You don’t hear as much about these individuals, because the media tends to focus on disaster and destruction instead of imaginative and inspired alternatives to power and elitism. But they/we are out here, and we are not going away.

Even though at times the odds seem overwhelming, we mustn’t lose heart. In having heart, in living heart, we open the heart of the world to greater compassion and caring so that eventually everyone, every soul on this Earth, can step out of separation and live in oneness. A critical mass of love and kindness has the power to shift everything. You never know when even the most recalcitrant of dinosaurs will have a change of heart. In the long run, hate can never “trump” love.