The Conscious Awareness Path I teach using yoga and Voice Dialogue

The hardest thing to get our clever minds and good intellects around, is that Consciousness is not a thing but a process that is constantly in a state of flux never static.  This poem, pretty much sums up the path and is from Portia Nelson’s “There’s A Hole In My Sidewalk“:

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters

Chapter 1
I walk down the street.There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  I fall in.  I am lost… I am helpless.  It isn’t my fault.  It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2
I walk down the street.  There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  I pretend that I don’t see it.  I fall in again. I can’t believe I am in this same place.  But, it isn’t my fault.  It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter 3
I walk down the same street.  There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  I see it is there.  I still fall in … it’s a habit … but, my eyes are open.  I know where I am.  It is my fault.  I get out immediately.

Chapter 4
I walk down the same street.  There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  I walk around it.

Chapter 5
I walk down another street.

There are three levels of Consciousness:

1. Awareness - here there's a developing of the Witness/Observer state - this can deepen through practices such as meditation and Voice Dialogue.  Here we can step back and observe with a sense of separation from the inner and outer worlds and see our actions and thoughts as parts of us but not by any means all of us.

2. The experience of the Selves/energies within life iteself.  We are at our deepest essence, fluid, flexible, vibrational beings living in a vibrational universe - the micro and the macro making up the whole. Our journey is to live a material embodied here and now life; to learn through relationship, to grow through challenges, to breathe through uncertainty, to trust and connect to a universal intelligence beyond the fears of the mind and ego and to stay connected to the whole and our part in that - being aware of the mind and thoughts and beyond the mind and thoughts.   We develop subconsciously certain "Primary" Selves as we grow up eg. if you were in a family where maybe there was tension and conflict you might have found developed a good "Pleaser" Primary Self that helped you to become accepted by your tribe.  Or if you had parents with strong Competitive/Achieving Primary Selves you might have taken that on too as a Primary Self or taken on the opposite "Disowned" Self which would be a Primary Self not interested in competiting and achieving.

3. The Aware Ego Process is the 3rd level, which is based on learning to stand between these opposites of Selves/Energies  (the microcosm of the macrocosm of the duality in life), whether that be the Spiritual:Non-Spiritual; the Dynamic/Achiever:the Couch Potato; there's an alchemical shift as we learn to hold the tension between these opposites that provides a sacred space and an unfolding to rebalance and integrate these opposites so we become more whole.  This process is best encouraged with a facilitator who can help hold the energetic space between the opposites and in that helps strengthen the Aware Ego process for that person.  In that space, over time, comes a surrender to what my teachers, Drs Hal and Sidra Stone call the "Organising Intelligence".

This Organising Intelligence, might be seen similar to the Atman referred to in yoga philosophy. However, this is more of a Spiritual perception and the Organising Intelligence is separate from Spirituality.  It requires that we embrace spirituality, as is required by our own faith and destiny, but it equally requires us to embrace all of the energies required for living a successful life in a body on Earth - to sit between the two worlds and be able to connect and embrace it all.

Hal talks of The Organising Intellignence that "wishes each of us to fulfill our own desitinies in the same way that an embryo becomes a baby and then grows into adulthood and then dies and rejoins the energy 'out there' again and goes through a process until it re-enters in another life.  There is a blue print for this kind of evolution and there is a blueprint for each of us in our own evolution.  Tapping into this blueprint gives life an entirely new meaning."

What is Spirituality then?

Spirituality Is a belief and experience connected to the worship of deities: Gods and Goddesses in all different ways and forms.  These energies are sometimes referred to as Transcendental and Divine - beyond this world, beyond the physical and material existence.  From this came a duality: the divine vs the limitations of the physical with all its base needs, passions and emotions.  Voice Dialogue gives us the ability to talk to the Spiritual Self in us all and connect to these Transcendental Energies without losing the bodily existence and experience of the Earth Energies.

Earth energies - these are connected to our physical body, personality, psychological make up - the way we develop our primary selves and how we live and relate in the world.  Again Voice Dialogue gives us the space to be able to dialogue with these Earth energies so that both our Spiritual Self and Earth Self is available to us.

What is the Soul?

The soul is seen by Hal as "A mediating energy that has been hard wired into human beings".  It is an energy system, an on-going process that lies dormant in us until it is awakened by some event, inner or outer, to call it into the transformational process.  It's job is to build a bridge between the reality of our physical being on the one side and our transcendental nature on the other side.  Originally this would have been seen as the mediating energy betwen our phsyical vehcie and our spiritual energetic system  The Soul process never turns us against the living of life on the planet.  It is a "brilliant piece of consciousness software conceived by the Organising Intelligence to help embrace and build the bridge between these two realities".