Awakening to Wholeness - List of Articles
These articles are selected excerpts from the book Awakening to Wholeness by Lee Bladon.
It is recommended that the articles are read in the correct order.
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It has been said that "we are spiritual
beings having a human experience". The Self is the
transpersonal/spiritual element; the mind, heart and body are
the personal elements; and the field of pure awareness (soul)
unites them all into a Human Being. The false-self is our
concept of "who we think we are" (i.e. a separate individual in
a physical body). The ego is the network of distorted beliefs,
reactive emotions and conditioned behaviours that protect our
false-self and help us to function in the world.
The personality
is a blend of authenticity and ego. Our true nature expresses
itself through them both, in varying proportions (depending on
our current mood and our overall level of development).
The Authentic Personality is the true and unlimited aspect of
our personality – the parts that are not bound up in ego
structures. It is Self-expressive, radiant, generous,
compassionate and loving. It comes to
the fore when we are relaxed, present, sincere and speak from
our heart. The Ego Personality is the inauthentic,
limited aspect of our personality – the parts that are bound up
in ego structures. It is self-centred, repressed, greedy,
fearful and critical. It comes to the
fore when we are tense, shallow, superficial and egotistical.
Before we can permanently enter the
"authentic" world of our true-Self we need to neutralise the
"inauthentic" charge of our false-self. This is achieved by: (1)
Becoming Self: Dissolving our (inauthentic) ego structures to
allow our (authentic) essential qualities to unfold so that we
can embody more of our true nature. (2) Being Self: Aligning
with our true-Self to actively encourage our essential qualities
to unfold so that we can express more of our true nature. It
also develops our association with our true-Self, so that
someday we may come to realise that this is who we truly are.
A human being is not a single entity; we
are composed of several different yet fully integrated
components. Each component (Self/soul, mind, heart and body) is
an independent consciousness yet they are all integrated and
work in harmony, much like the different parts of a car all work
together to get us from A to B. The Self is the driver (or at
least it should be) and the mind, heart and body are components
of the vehicle that carry us through life. Each element has
perceptive (yin) qualities which allow us to perceive our
environment, and expressive (yang) qualities which allow us to
interact with our environment.
Life is a constant search for happiness but
we rarely find anything that lasts. We are all looking for the
same thing but we are going about it in different ways. We are
all looking for happiness in different places, but all the
different places share one thing in common – they are outside of
ourselves. When we look outside of ourselves for happiness, our
level of happiness will go up and down like a rollercoaster in
response to external events. We can never achieve lasting
happiness while we continue to look outside of ourselves because
we can’t control what Life sends our way.
Whenever we want something, we generally start suffering. We tell ourselves "I will be happy when I get what I want".
We are basically telling ourselves that we cannot be happy or contented until we get what we want.
We believe that getting what we want is the only way we can end the discomfort of wanting, and if we believe that, that is what we will experience.
The happiness that we associate with getting what we want
actually has nothing to do with getting it – we are happy and
contented because we don't want anymore. We have incorrectly
associated happiness with getting what we want, but actually it
is "not wanting" that makes us happy. We are happy because the
burden of wanting has been temporarily lifted.
Our destiny is not the product of our past
– our past actions do no not propel us into the future; our past
actions hold us back and impede our development. It is the
potential energy of what we have chosen (our intent) that
creates our destiny and leads us through life. Will is not free
if it is bound by the effects of our conditioned behaviours.
Will is only free if we have sufficient conscious awareness to
use it in a considered manner. Without conscious awareness we
cannot respond, we can only react. Ego structures are the
primary cause of our bad karma; i.e. they are responsible
for the "bad" behaviour that generates bad karma. Ego structures
are the mechanism through which we experience the effects
(consequences) of our bad karma; i.e. our unnecessary suffering
is the result of our ego structures getting triggered.
Presence is fundamental to personal
development and spiritual development. Presence requires our
awareness to be present spatially (right here) and temporally
(right now). Presence requires us to "be" – right here, right
now. It should be easy to just "be"; it is our natural state
after all, but it is far from easy. We have spent decades
practising "doing" and have forgotten how to "be". Effective
healing and reintegration requires the soul's presence to
intimately connect with the exile, hole or ego structure.
Put simply, it requires taking the "healer" (the soul) to
the "patient" (exile, hole or ego structure).
Meditation is practising presence; it is
practicing present-moment awareness; it is experiencing what is
arising without any judgement or agenda. It is as simple as
that. Hundreds of books have been written on how to meditate but
they are largely unnecessary, because meditation is not
something that we "do" – meditation is pure "being". All it
requires of us is to stop doing everything and just notice what
is occurring, within us and/or without. It is that simple, but
it is not that easy.
We are all suffering from mistaken identity
– taking ourselves to be someone we are not. The goal of
psycho-spiritual development is to correct this mistaken
identity; not to strengthen or improve our false identity. The
self that we think we are does not exist; it is a figment of our
imagination. The self that we think we are cannot awaken – we
have to awaken from that false-self in order to realise our
true-Self. When this occurs, we realise that we have always been
our true-Self.
