Beyond Information: The Path Of Embodied Wisdom

Hi,

I'm Bassem.

Thank you for joining me.

I suffered a stroke recently and I'm still recovering from it.

I feel pretty good.

I'm in good spirits.

My body is quite tired though.

I'm being a good boy,

Doing what the doctor tells me to do.

I have had high blood pressure for almost 30 years.

It just sort of ignored it.

An optimist to be sure,

To a fault in this case,

Thinking that everything will work itself out,

The body will fix itself.

And generally speaking,

It has worked out that way for me.

I don't remember the last time I went to a doctor.

It's probably 35 years ago when they told me I had high blood pressure.

Anyhow,

Thank you for joining me today.

From this lovely summery Sydney afternoon,

I'm feeling very peaceful.

My energy feels calm inwardly.

When we turn our attention inward,

We begin to discern the subtle machinations of our biology.

This internal feeling,

This internal frequency of peace.

How are you feeling?

What's going on in your world?

Today's conversation,

Beyond Information,

The Path of Embodied Wisdom.

And the description that I wrote for this,

Information alone cannot transform our life.

Explores the crucial difference between intellectual understanding and embodied wisdom.

Is there a difference?

The body's wisdom and the mind's intellectual knowledge are very different.

I think today would be nice to explore this at some length.

So,

What is the difference between the intellect and embodied wisdom?

Those things that we seek in our life,

Security,

Peace,

Well-being,

Joy,

Happiness,

Contentment,

Are all products of the body's wisdom.

Accessible through the body,

Not through the mind,

Not through the intellect,

Not through imagination.

Abstractions,

Reason,

Logic,

Rationale.

And yet they are directly discernible through the body's fundamental reality.

If we would but align.

Ideas are one thing,

While actual embodied experience is an entirely different thing.

Ideas are abstractions of registering reality through a middle man or middle woman,

If you will.

Ideas are interpretations through which we look at the world.

You may think of them as programs that allow us to experience reality according to those programs.

Imagine,

For example,

You're on a mountain wearing orange-tinted lenses.

The orange-tinted lenses condition the reality that you're looking at.

It doesn't mean that reality is orange.

So when we register reality through the intellectual mind,

Through information,

We're looking at the world through that prism,

Through that perspective.

So between us and between the real world,

There is this idea that acts as a filtering lens.

And mostly those ideas and those programs through which we're looking at the world are conditioned.

Inheritances that we receive in early childhood.

It brings up the question,

Well,

What must the real world look like?

So this gives us a sense of what I mean by intellectual knowledge.

We are experiencing reality indirectly,

Not directly.

Isn't that amazing?

Apart from the rare experience when something happens to us through accident,

Perhaps,

Or through shock,

We never experience reality.

Those who have experienced the real world are very few and far in between.

To contrast this,

I want to share with you an idea of the various states of consciousness that might illustrate.

It is said that there are various states of consciousness that the human can experience or know.

The first state of consciousness is the state of sleep.

And as we all know,

Sleep is characterized by dreams.

And the second state is what we call the waking state,

Which is the state that all of us are in.

And this state of waking is characterized by thinking.

So dreaming is to sleeping what thinking is to the waking state.

And then there is a third state,

And that state is called the state of self-consciousness.

Not self-consciousness in the psychological sense.

Self-consciousness in the sense of being inwardly attuned to the internal flow of energy and rhythm of life,

Coursing throughout the body.

And this third state of consciousness is characterized by being.

So the waking state is characterized by thinking,

And we could say also doing.

This third state is characterized by being.

So the first state is sleeping,

Which is characterized by dreaming.

The second state is the waking state.

It's characterized by thinking and doing.

The third state is characterized by sensing and being.

Now most of us think that we know something about the third state.

But actually this third state is extremely rare.

Certainly many of us during the second state experience the third state of sensing and being,

Just like when we're sleeping we might momentarily awaken into the waking state.

Similarly in the waking state it happens occasionally that some of us awaken to experience the third state of sensing and being.

And increasingly more and more people are nearing waking out of that second state.

In the same way that if you're sleeping you're nearing the time when you awaken out of that first state.

Similarly we're now at the dawning hour when many will begin to awaken into the third state.

This third state is also characterized by a reversing of attention,

Of focus.

In the second state of waking our awareness is external.

It's divided through the five senses,

Nose,

Eyes,

Ears,

Taste and touch.

But in the third state the attention awareness,

The five senses,

Are not outwardly pointed.

The attention has U-turned inwardly.

And as the attention awareness U-turns inwardly,

As occurs in meditation,

That which was divided into five undergo a kind of fusion.

They become one.

As they inwardly turn they become one.

And the entire body becomes a supernal organ of perception capable of perceiving beyond the physical.

The third eye.

When the attention awareness U-turns and settles within,

The entire body becomes capable of perceiving beyond the physical.

And this state is as different from the waking state as the waking state is different from the sleep state.

So it's not just spiritual knowledge.

I know some things intellectually.

That's not it.

Because the third state is characterized by cessation of mind.

There's no thinking.

Thinking is replaced by sensing,

Direct perception.

And it is here where the real world begins to be perceptible.

Because the real world is causal.

We're not looking at the results.

We're looking at the cause,

The energetic makeup.

It's like when you're sleeping and you accidentally wake up,

You're capable of seeing the real world or the non-sleeping world.

It's not anything weird or mysterious.

It was always there,

But you were sleeping.

You had your eyes shut.

And in the second state,

Occasionally through shock,

You accidentally wake into the third state.

You open your inner eye.

You also perceive the real world momentarily before you go back to sleep.

You're simply seeing what is already there.

And then there's the fourth state.

It's very rare.

It's called objective consciousness.

So we've got sleep consciousness,

The waking consciousness,

Self-consciousness,

And then we've got objective consciousness.

What might this fourth state of objective consciousness be characterized by?

Union.

Oneness.

Absence of individuality.

In the third state,

The individual still exists.

But in the fourth state,

There is no sense of self.

There's no doer.

All there is,

Is totality,

Expressing through this instrument.

And so the attunement of the individual is now introverted,

And it's become aligned with the universal.

So there is no individual.

And there's no difference between subject and object.

There's no difference between what is seen and what is seeing.

And in objective consciousness,

The risk of going back to sleep so to speak,

Is not there.

One is fully awake,

Truly awake.

So these are the four states of consciousness.

We can't say very much about the fourth state,

But we can certainly speak about the third state,

Because more and more people are beginning to breach that threshold.

Many are beginning to awaken from the so-called second waking state.

It's like sometimes in sleeping,

Some people can have lucid dreaming.

Similarly,

In the second state,

It's possible to have lucid waking,

When suddenly you begin to discern that the life that you are apparently living is also a kind of waking dream.

And it's only when the intellect subsides that the real world appears.

As long as we're wearing the glasses of the mind,

We cannot see the real world.

And no,

The mind is not an organ that we are born with.

Isn't that amazing?

I hope you don't feel like you have been thrown into the deep end.

This is a conversation that I've been paving the way for,

In a sense,

For four years.

And this is the last conversation in this series of the past month.

Joy says,

Can you expand a little bit more about the fourth state,

Please?

From the second state,

We want to know about the fourth state,

Because the question comes from the second state.

Our normal state.

The real question is,

Can you speak more about the third state?

Because we cannot access the fourth state.

Because the fourth state is not accessible through effort.

The fourth state is given by grace.

So it might come,

Let's say,

For example,

Through a stroke.

It might come through an accident,

Where the ego self,

The individual identity,

Is largely diminished.

It becomes opaque.

It's like when the clouds start to thin,

The sky naturally appears.

The fourth state is not accessed through our effort.

It's by grace.

It's given.

The third eye,

When it is turned outwardly,

It divides into five.

And when it is inwardly you turn,

It returns to its pristine state.

So the third state,

We begin to experience the world through being,

Directly through the body,

Not through the mind.

Not through the program,

The intellect.

That doesn't mean the mind ceases to function.

On the contrary.

The mind now,

Which is a powerful tool of experience,

Becomes in service of being.

The five senses that were external are now connected to the internal reality of the body.

And it is this joy of being that is now motivating the mind's activity.

Your plans are now motivated by joy instead of lack.

It's like conditioning.

Instead of fear,

There is the understanding that you are a being of tremendous power,

By virtue of your divine essence.

And so you walk with God everywhere and in everything that you do.

Your eyes are looking outward,

But you are looking through the sense dimension of your being,

Filled with the ecstatic experience of your cellular reality.

Awareness becomes dominant.

In the second state,

Awareness is in the background.

In the third state,

Awareness moves to the foreground.

So the background becomes the foreground.

And the body consequently calms.

You come out of fight or flight,

And you learn to function in this blissed-out state.

So it's the internal nectar now driving and motivating your living.

And this is what embodied wisdom means.

The internal bliss is coloring the way you're looking.

You know when you're in love?

Everything you look at looks like it's,

Oh,

Oh,

Oh,

Oh,

How beautiful.

Potential,

Possibility,

Security,

Daring,

Courage.

Oh,

No problem,

No problem.

Suddenly all problems disappear because your perspective and your perception is now being tainted by the chemical of love.

Similarly,

Now the bliss of being taints your experience.

You stabilize in that state.

You learn to exist and function in that state.

You begin to live through this experience of ecstasy instead of the experience of drama.

Oh,

Why is the world like this?

Why can't people be different?

Well,

In the third state,

There is no drama.

The intensity of drama is replaced by intimacy of being.

May all beings be happy.

May we come out of suffering.

Take care,

My friends.

See you next time.