CONNECTEDNESS
To what do you wish to be “connected”? Other people? Why do you want to feel connected to other people? Have you really seen people? Do you even know what they are?
One level of reality: you are connected to other people, also to plants, animals, stars, you name it. You are connected. Be quiet. Be alone. You can feel it.
On another level of reality: you are other people, stars, cats, juniper trees, hydrogen gas…you are all of it. Be quiet. Be alone. You can feel this, too.
On another level of reality: you are beyond all. This is very hard for Sleepwalkers to get to.
When you are awake, you can access these levels simultaneously. However, I don’t feel anything like “connectedness”. It’s the false self that feels connected or separate. Being awake, in my experience, leads to a kind of clarity where you just see things as they are. So I see that I am connected, that on the next level I am all that is, and then I am also beyond that.
I don’t know if this is the best way to describe it, but try this: I am a woman. At no point do I long to feel like a woman. No mater what I’m doing, that is what it feels like to be a woman. I am a woman making a pie. I am a woman digging a ditch. I am a woman dressed as a man. I am a woman strapping on a dildo to make love to another person, I am a woman painting her nails. I am a woman giving birth. I am a woman stuck in traffic. I am a woman. At what point is it possible to not feel like a woman if you are a woman?
This is a very typical issue with Sleepwalkers. In the dream, you separate things that are inherently inseparable. In the Dream, you can be convinced by some clever teaching or some line of logic that you are All One. But then you don’t feel it, and it leads you to seek and chase the feeling, when really what you need is the clarity of knowing…then the feeling is not an issue, is never sought.
Get this: if you know it, you don’t seek to feel it. If you don’t know it and don’t feel it, you seek to feel it (when knowing it is what you need). When you feel it once in a while, kind of accidentally, then you again, seek to find that feeling, when really the feeling is irrelevant and the clarity of knowing is what you need.
You are convinced that you know it, but don’t feel it, when knowing it is inseparable from feeling it. They are not two things. Your longing to feel it means you don’t know it.
Also, you can feel it from time to time. You can have these moments when you feel the bliss, the oneness or whatever, and then it goes away. It’s like a bout of “spiritual” hicoughs. But you got the momentary feeling without the clarity of knowing, so it can’t last and is in fact, incomplete in so many ways. It’s borrowed, not owned…and partial at best.
Once you know a thing, truly, you are inseparable from it and don’t seek it. In the Dream, they are separate. Everything is separate. And you want to put them back together, but you can’t really do that because the separation itself is not real. You can’t fix a problem that doesn’t even exist.
Another issue is that you believe that if you felt the connectedness, it would feel good. What if it doesn’t necessarily feel good? Do you still want it?
LOVE
Here’s another Dream concept. Love. It’s a bit of sticky business, to be sure.
On one level: you love people, animals, plants or whatever. It’s personal.
On another level: you feel a general love for all, regardless of their characteristics or what they are to you personally.
On another level: you are love, as is every manifested thing. The idea of giving or receiving love, needing love, loving…these are seen as fantasy. If there is nothing else, if every manifested thing, if every manifested force, if everything that can be perceived by you is made of only love and nothing else…
Being awake allows you to access these levels simultaneously. Though many can experience difficulty accessing the level of personal love because that is really deep Dream illusion.
That last level is mind blowing. This is not part of the Dream. In the Dream, you will say, “But what about Hitler!” (he’s such a perennially useful trope) You see suffering and cruelty everywhere, and you believe this is caused by an absence of love. You believe that the spiritual quest is the answer to this apparent lack of love. You believe you are separate from love, that you need to connect to it, channel it, get some, give some, whatever. You need to love people who’ve done terrible things. You need to be a saint. You need to breathe in hate and exhale love. On and on. From the level of All Is Love, this is simply hilarious, ego-perfecting behavior.
Not being a dick is just common sense, not really a “spiritual” thing. Your persona-self is judgy, brutal, ruthless, sadistic, petty. So sure, get that under control, but it has nothing to do with love or enlightenment.
