THE AWAKENING EXERCISE

So many spiritual paths are very effortful. Chakra Yoga, Kriya Yoga, Patanjali You, Kundalini Yoga, and even Bhakta Yoga with all its sturm and drang of weeping, pining, lonEliness, followed by relief an great happiness.

Robert's spirituality is not really effortful at all: just immerse yourself into the totality of your experience as consciousness and lose your identity as body mind, thereby becoming the Manifest Self, Brahman.

There is one simple but incredibly powerful exercise that helps you realize this new identity as consciousness itself instead of your body mind.  Robert mentions it all the time in his talks but I will expand upon it a bit.

This exercise will not work if you wake up five minutes before you have to be up by means of an alarm clock. 

There can be no alarm clock used because it tends to stun you into awakening.

When you awakening in the morning, be aware of the process.  What happens and in what order?
For most, at first there is awareness of the world, then the mind awakens too, and at that moment you realize that you are, that you exist and the world exists separately from you.

But try this.  Instead of getting up, stay in the sleepy state as long as you can, and try to watch yourself go back to sleep reentering nothingness.  When you come awake again, watch the process of the arising of consciousness in you. 

Practice this for several months and the process of the arising of consciousness in you will slow down and you can watch every detail.

You begin to see the beginning of the awakening process where an inner light arises within the dark, moist, and very peaceful emptiness within, arising from your gut and flowing upwards into the brain. Once it hits your brain, your ordinary consciousness and mind appear.

But this has to be noted. YOU have witnessed the arising of consciousness arising out of your original state of that dark, most, and all-comfortable emptiness. You are witnessing the experience of beingness before consciousness and mind arises into the waking state, which makes you realize that consciousness comes to you.  You already are prior to the arising of consciousness.  You witness its arising, and after it arises, your body, your sense of existence, and the world all arise simultaneously.

This marks the totality of your Manifest consciousness, your Manifest Self, Brahman, and you are that.

You are aware of your body.  You are aware of the world. 

You are aware of space, both inner and outer, and you are aware of your own presence, your own existence, your I Am simultaneously. All are experienced as objects within you as the totality of consciousness.

Yet all of this Manifest Brahman has rising out of that rich, moist, darkness, that nothingness which is you before the arising of consciousness.

In meditation too, we go to the same place of nothningness, but in meditation, the nothingness is not dark.  It is indescribable because you go to a place where the mind does not exist, and thus this place has no characteristics, no form or name, no description.

How much simpler and effortless can spirituality be?  No huffing and puffing, no full Lotus, no visualizations, or guiding prana, no reading of the Vedas or Gitas. Just watching and being your self. It is all on you.