A person sits under a tree.  They decide to meet the truth of themselves and by doing so, meet the truth of the universe at large.  They come face to face with their own ego.  Their consciousness pierces through their unconsciousness.  Eventually, we call them enlightened.  The first enlightenment is an individual enlightenment.  The Buddha may have been awakened, and yet the reality is that in the very next town, there was still a man who lived at the mercy of his ego.  And next to him, another man, and next to him another man.

This proves to be a conundrum for the Buddha.  It proves to be a conundrum because one of the universal truths that he has awoken to during his enlightenment is that ALL IS ONE.  And so, he sees that as long as there is a single being in this universe that is not in a state of enlightened awakeness, he cannot be fully enlightened and fully awake.  At this point, his own enlightenment is dependent upon awakening the world and his path becomes the path of the teacher.  He uses the people who are not awake to reflect to him the aspects within himself that are not awake.  He teaches people to become awake so that united consciousness can become enlightened in its totality.  This is the secondary enlightenment.  The awakening to the fact that individual enlightenment is not true enlightenment, only collective enlightenment is true enlightenment. 

The problem with teaching from an enlightened perspective is that it is a perspective that is inaccessible to most people who are not in that transcendental perspective.  Just think about parents losing a child and a guru coming in and saying “there is no death” or “everything is perfect”.  Instead of that creating awakening, it is going to enhance the opposite.  It is going to cause pain.  It enhances the distance between the two perspectives instead of closes the gap between the two perspectives.

Essentially, after a person has experienced a first enlightenment but before the person has experienced a secondary enlightenment, the perspective of the enlightened being can become a kind of narcissistic bubble.  It can be a reality that only they, themselves inhabit.  A perspective only they, themselves can access. A perspective that makes other people feel alone, not good enough, like they are failing, lowly, and stuck alone in pain that they should be able to get out of, but can’t.  For the teacher to teach, he or she cannot teach from a narcissistic bubble.  He or she cannot teach from a frequency and perspective that is too far beyond the personal perspective and frequency that the person they are teaching holds. 

This doesn’t just apply to enlightened teachers, this applies to everyone on earth.  To grasp this, I am going to have to topple a pillar of spiritual principal for you today.  I’m going to have to pop a spiritual bubble.

Most all spirituality is nothing more than a giant coping mechanism.  This should scare you because the ego itself is literally in and of itself a coping mechanism.  This means, most spiritual practice in fact ends up fueling the ego, instead of our essence.

At face value, all spiritual teachers call for change.  They call for the change from unloving to loving.  The change from imprisoned to free.  But most spiritual teachers, teach you how to cope with the world.  The self-help and the spiritual field is littered with this pollution called “coping”.  I am no exception to this rule.  Much of what I teach you is coping techniques.  These tools are useful.  They are helpful.  They can be life changing.  But there is something beyond them.  There is something better than coping.

It is a universal truth that if you shift what is within, what is without will change in perfect alignment with it.  And I am expected (in accordance with these higher dimensional truths) to look at you and say that there is nothing wrong with this world.  But I have one observation and one question after observing this world.  The observation is that everything we eat, every action we take, every decision we make, every relationship we get into, every retreat people attend is done so that we can feel better.  Every minute of our lives is spent clambering to feel better.  The question is where are we and what kind of world is this that we have created if every action we take is an action to try to feel better in it?  What kind of world have we created if we have to teach our children how to cope with it? 

The dream that will not die in the person who has had a secondary enlightenment, is the dream of changing the world into something that people don’t have to cope with.

One of the pillars of spiritual practice in the world today is the pillar of positive focus.  It is a coping strategy that works.  We know that this is a law of attraction based universe.  In a law of attraction based universe, what you focus upon, you get more of.  If you are negatively focused, you get more negative.  So, to have a life that feels good, you simply take control over your focus and focus positively.  This creates your reality.  It creates your reality into what you want it to be regardless of others around you. 

But what happens then?  What happens then is that you create a narcissistic bubble for yourself.  You are in a state of positivity.  Your life may be going wonderfully.  But you could be living in a world with people who are living in hell.  Those people may be your friends or family even.  Why do you care?  If you’re feeling good, why do you care if other people are unhappy?  After all, the only reason you care is if seeing them unhappy, makes you feel unhappy.  So you want them to feel good so you can be happy.  This way of going about your life is only possible if you have not yet awoken to the reality of oneness.  It is only possible with an ego that is running your life.

Now what if you looked at this situation through the lens of oneness?  If there is a person in the world who is feeling joy, that is you feeling joy.  And also, if there is a person in this world who is suffering, that is you suffering.  You cannot be in a little individual bubble of joy while they are suffering without creating a fracture or a split in yourself.  You cannot be in a bubble of suffering while others are in joy, without creating a fracture of a split in yourself.  So, you have just damaged yourself by doing this. 

For the sake of this episode, I am going to address the people who have cut themselves off into a positive bubble.  I’m going to address their strategy because this is what many spiritual methodologies advocate for.  People who have cut themselves off into a positive bubble reality can tell they are damaging themselves by doing this because of the way it hurts other people when they bring their happy bubble into other people’s realities, which are realities of pain.  If you’re this person, you have created a clash of realities, where each person is alone in their reality.  But it doesn’t matter to you, because you are the one who feels good.  I should say, you will feel good up until the point that your happy bubble makes people feel not heard and not seen and not felt enough and therefore alone enough that they will leave you because of how much better it is to be completely alone than alone in the physical company of someone else.

There is a terrible story about a group that was in the practice of this positive focus so as to create a narcissistic bubble reality.  They were all collected together and during the break, one of them fell down and couldn’t get up.  For nearly five minutes, no one went over to help the man get up because none of them wanted to include injury and falling in their reality and attract the same thing into their life.  Their humanity was lost, as was their connection to each other, as was their awareness of oneness in that moment.  And all of that was a result of their practice.     

There is a belief that being in a purely positive, feel good perspective draws people to you.  But this is not always true.  If people are feeling negative, it splits you apart.  It repels you.  It makes you not a vibrational match to them.  It creates the opposite of integration.

So my question (which goes beyond the first enlightenment) is: To create your own happy individual reality through your focus (which you can do), is that so good to do?  Or are you missing that everyone is you?  If everyone is you, does it do any good to leave everyone outside of your own bubble of pleasure so that your single embodiment can feel good?

If you accept that everyone is you, your own happiness and joy and also expansion from that point forward, must accommodate other people.  The narcissistic happy bubble reality can no longer feel good to you.  And it is at this point that you are being called to integrate polarities.   

Awareness and true consciousness is about being able to hold space for polarities.  Many primitive spiritual practices encourage you to make space for only one polarity in your embodiment.  People who walk the path of positive focus to create your own reality do not often use this practice as a tool in specific circumstances.  Instead, they use the tool for the totality of their life.  They polarize themselves.  They lose access to awareness and therefore awakening because their perspective can no longer accommodate negative.  Enlightenment is not possible from this perspective.

Positive focus can be a brilliant tool and it can be a dangerous tool.  It is especially dangerous if it disallows us to accommodate, see, hear, feel, and understand other people’s reality.  In this respect, it can be just as dangerous as negative focus.  It prevents us from accessing eachother.  It prevents us from connection.  It prevents us from actualizing oneness in this world and therefore collective enlightenment.   

Polarizing one’s self is in fact a state of denial.  It is a state of denial because to go into one polarity, you have to deny the opposite polarity.  You have to deny negative to focus solely positively.  You need to deny positive to focus solely negative.  And to be clear, the point of spiritual evolution is conscious awareness.  For conscious awareness to exist, we need to accommodate both polarities.  We need to accommodate other people’s realities.

This excluding of polarities goes further than just negative and positive.  It applies to all polarities, including spiritual truths.  Many spiritual people believe that ONLY the higher dimensional realities are real.  For example, the spiritual truth that there is no birth and no death.  The only reality is that we are eternal.  This is true beyond the physical dimension.  But it is also true in the physical dimension that we DO die.  Both polarities are true.  Death exists and it also doesn’t exist.  We can get into the habit of going into denial because we are unwilling to acknowledge lower dimensional truths.  We have no space in our immature consciousness for opposing truths to both be true.  We deny one to make space for the other instead of making space within our consciousness for both.

The other day, I went to see a beautiful garden of waterfalls.  I was next to a group of 8 people who were staring at a colossal waterfall from a platform.  They were in awe at the beauty and wonder of the waterfall.  I was standing there in horror and pain because I was staring at the body of a dog that someone had thrown off of the waterfall.  It was floating in an eddy below the waterfall.  The other eight people were oblivious to the body of the dog.  They could not include it into their awareness.  They were as oblivious to the horror of the dog as I was oblivious to the beauty of the waterfall.

Our experiences and perceptions of the scene were completely different and non-accommodating of one another’s reality.  We were polarized.  Because they were feeling good, they were oblivious to the pain and isolation of being in a different reality.  Pain calls for presence, but no one could be present with the pain because they could not see the pain.  It was outside the scope of the reality they were willing to see.  And the beauty of the waterfall was outside the scope of the reality that I was willing to see.  Awareness and consciousness, a state of enlightenedness would have been for all of us to see, feel and accommodate both the beauty of the waterfall and the horror of the dog.  All would be included.  Awakened consciousness is an inclusive perspective instead of an exclusive perspective.  United consciousness would be united instead of split in this way.  

It is at this point that I will say that in order to increase a state of inclusive consciousness, I strongly encourage you to watch my video on YouTube titled: And Consciousness (The Modern Day Replacement For The Middle Way).  

A sad fact is that if you are polarized, you will attract people of the opposite polarity to you, as a mirror of that which you are excluding from your awareness.  This will make you feel more alone.  If you are absorbed in negative, you will attract people who are absorbed in positive.  If you are absorbed in positive, you will attract people who are absorbed in negative.  And the flip side of this is that we also polarize each other out of our realities this way.  If someone in our lives is in pain and all we will see is pleasure, we cannot see them.  We polarize ourselves into a state where even if we are in the same room, we are in different realities.    

Hearing this example of the dog and the waterfall, can you see which way you are polarized?  Which truth you cannot accommodate?  If you were hyper focused on the dog and could not accommodate the beauty of the waterfall into your perspective, positive focus will bring you further into conscious awareness.  If you were hyper focused on the waterfall and could not accommodate the horror of the dog, recognizing and letting yourself feel negative will bring you further into conscious awareness.  We must learn to be inclusive to the greater whole to achieve a state of integration in ourselves and in the world.  And it is only when we come into that inclusive consciousness, where we have appreciation of the totality, that we can be inspired to right action. 

An inclusive consciousness, a consciousness that accommodates all polarities and all people and all perspectives, leads us to the awareness that often coping with things isn’t a virtue.  Often it is just denial or coping with things that shouldn’t be coped with.  Sometimes it’s just not taking action that needs to be taken.  Sometimes what is really called for is to accept that something is there and to change it.

Once your consciousness can accommodate polarities, let the new question be, Should it be coped with?  If so, use a spiritual tool that helps you to cope with it.  If not, change it.

If you condition yourself to create an individual bubble reality for yourself and not see or feel what doesn’t feel good or look good, you will not actualize conscious awakeness.  You will also not create any world change, which is a big portion of why we all came here to begin with.   Part of why we came here is to bring eachother, and therefore the world itself, into a state of expansion… Because in a universe that is all one, the world in fact IS us.