And yet the internal experience and quality of life and aliveness is very different to what I once experienced at earlier points of this lifetime. Life has dramatically shifted from something to be lived and shaped out there in the experiential or ‘material’ world to something that is wholly internal and energetic. In my experience all of life is ‘internal’ and not reliant on what the mind deems as ‘external’ and all is One, interconnected, interdependent, cocreative.

Even when engaging from the conditioned personality the observer in me knows that I am not just that. Any Identifications with body, personality, and mind have profoundly weakened which allows for a different kind of engagement with life. An engagement liberated from the fetters of attachments to narratives, concepts, opinions, preferences, and what is key: free from enslavement to separation consciousness and duality. Creating a more peaceful flow of experience, and more sustainable presence.

Being less identified with the personality/self liberates me from futile strivings for status, validation, and other vacuous ego fodder. It fades the need to consume, distract, avoid, or assert the will in other ways on external realities that seem unacceptable or inconvenient.
Normalized obsessions with cultural conditioned values (fame, wealth, looks, success, etc.) are transparent in their futility and emptiness while the desires and delights of my soul are illuminated in their value and nourishing quality (community, kindness, cooperation, creative play, love for knowledge and knowing, etc.). Knowing that I am an expression of the Self – unborn, undying, all-encompassing and yet empty – releases any need to prove my/self, be special or different from ‘others’ as they are equally part of the One/Self.

And from these shifts in experience and knowing new questions and quests beg to be explored and lived:

Which role and path is given to this expression of Self?
How do I best balance receptivity with creative participation?
How do I participate in life in a way that turns my knowing and abilities into a service to All That Is?
Which residues of conditioning and misperception are holding me back from harmoniously and joyously flowing with life? And how do I release them?
Which mysteries of existence are waiting to reveal themselves through my experience?

I still experience triggers that regress me into states of forgetfulness and blind identification with the conditioned personality and her narratives about life. Experiencing my/self as struggling to find my way out of these immersive dream states, yet I thankfully remain a lucid dreamer, equanimous in the knowing of the true nature of being and the impermanence of experience.
Years of self work and shifts in consciousness allow for more trust, patience, and compassion in engaging with aspects of trauma and shadow expressing through this body-mind and other body-minds in my experience.

I can see and laugh at the absurdities the conditioned self creates and shadow boxes, while being compassionate and loving of all being and experience. Which in turn cultivates deeper and more encompassing compassion, kindness and understanding for others.

Being a mystic to me means being a student of existence and life, observing the human state with all its psychological dynamics and limitations, living in awe of the mysteries of life, in the joys of moving between consciousness levels, having a playful and creative approach to life, and delighting in the magic unique to embodiment.

Art by Unknown

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Every move onwards is initiated by a need for what the new is about to gift me and the knowing that the old has become irremediably dissonant to my being. Followed by a phase of in-betweenness where two incongruent belongings push and pull at parts of me to a point of unbearability, which finally results in my surrender and releasing of old self, identity, labels, attachments, and sometimes even people as the new unapologetically takes center space in my life.

The surrender period is preceded and suffused with similar sensations and feelings as disillusionment and emptiness come with. A phase where I began to taste the Void, in a minuscule dose at first, and in exponentially growing extents as the repetitions and decades rolled by. It is only in the past few years that I started to recognize and know the Void, befriended her and became aware of the sweetness of her nature and gifts. From being in, and in time communing with, the Void something new begins to take form and become part of my embodied experience. Lately it has become a negotiation of form as the new proposes a form for itself and awaits patiently my embodied co-creative response in order to either choose a new form or begin to weave itself into the tapestry of my life.

The loss of identification with a relationship, group, identity, label, or self perception is a bittersweet process where feelings of fear, loss and grief lead into moments of bereft solitude which transform by and by into an expanded sense of freedom, possibilities and gratitude.

These processes in their internal, and rather non-physical, nature are often not accessible or understood by others, whose life and soul path is not laid out to take the twists and turns mine seems to thrive on. All that is visible and accessible to them is a change in me, my behaviors, my loss of interest or engagement with things we once shared, and sometimes even a cooling in my affects. I sometimes struggle with the same things myself. And yet experience has taught me the best way in dealing with such shifts is to accept them and fully surrender myself to what wants to be.

I have no words or answers to give to others, or myself for that matter, which will explain the above process in a way that makes it more palatable or graspable for those who lack personal experiential knowing of this. I can attempt to explain but it seems inevitably to falls short and leave both sides disappointed or confused.

In time I have come to accept my being and the eeriness of my life as it is, after countless repeated inquiries into it (is it avoidance? A bypass? Or some other form of pathology?) and tries to go against my inner guidance to hold on to the old and paying dearly for it. Mind you, this is no defeatism, just the hard won wisdom of accepting life as it is and no longer trying to make it fit concepts human minds created.

This is part of what has dis-identified me from many social contracts, conditionings and expectations still alive in the majority of humans. This, amongst many other things, has let me know Reality (the creation of the One/Consciousness) extends far wider than our (western) thinking and conditioning allows us to perceive or even think possible. It has taught me to become warily aware of the stories we humans tell ourselves about the nature of existence and reality. And it has nurtured a yearning for more engagement with the fabric of Reality instead of the virtual constructs of the mind we mistakenly call reality. But that is a whole different universe onto itself.

I feel myself journeying through another of these shifts, which has been stretching over a few years now. A shift that has kept releasing self concepts, beliefs, narratives, identifications, alignments with groups, people to the point of feeling untethered, unattached, unallied, impartial, detached, and mildly disinterested in the fabrications of the human mind from a sense of vastness, oneness and balance. In this eerie in-between space between the old and whatever new is birthing through us, the inner tribe has been torn between wanting to hold on to the common ground shared with others and being pulled by Spirit into new dimensions of being, perceiving and engaging with life from less distortion and with more of Reality. If you will the later is to me like water to a thirsty traveler traversing the heat and barrenness of the desert.

Currently I find myself reposing in the Void – she has become so familiar I sometimes forget I have yet to step out of her to really play and co-create with the new. The ongoing shift seems to have a different magnitude and therefore the process of negotiating a form of whatever is coming in is slower and for the first time feels like a co-creational process shared with other souls, which takes attunement for coherence and is probably why it is taking years.
To say I am curious and excited to know what is being co-created and with whom would be a stark understatement. I sense that part of the souls I am co-creating with are not yet part of my human experience, while the identity of those who are might surprise me, and yet others feel like non-physical kin to me (ancestral, star).

Giving up on trying to want to make sense of it with my human mind, or worse trying to know the timing and next steps to it gives me peace and the spaciousness to play within this current experience. And it supports me in holding this internal flux Reality while engaging on the human dimension with stagnant dynamics, things, places, and patterns which feel immaterial, illusive, and anachronistic to me.

Life remains magnificent and strange in its exquisitely mysterious way.

Art: Gold Couture II by Design Fabrikken

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