I have found that when you move often in life you miss some of the most exquisite and real experiences of life's rhythms and changes. Natural cycles of development, arising and subsiding, go largely unnoticed and the delicate play of life becomes hard to detect.

You are what you give attention to

Sit and contemplate a puddle of water quietly and silently after the sun has risen. Stay with the puddle until it is no more. Gaze gently and lovingly into the infinite sky and watch slowly as the interlaced compositions of cloud before your eyes fade into endless blue.

If you sit long enough with the puddle of water or the cloud something curious happens. As any serious meditator knows you are what you give attention to. Thus when you center yourself in anger and resentment you become an angry resentful person. Conversely when you give attention to love and happiness you become a loving happy person. And so on.

Sitting then contemplating the puddle or the cloud, you become aware of the fading, disappearing quality of life. Your life begins as some aspect of the mystery, mysteriously you arose here in this place at this time. Labeled and identified you began your life, your exploration of life, your separation from life, your division of the unity of life. Progressively you learned about life, its foibles, its excitements, its insecurities, and its wonders.

Among so much unknown

Life became yours or you became life's. You discovered purpose and fulfillment or the promise of both. Life perhaps took you over or perhaps you felt that you held it in the palm of your hand. Other people empowered and inspired and led you or perhaps you were isolated, alienated, and alone, unhappy and questioning, bewildered and awkward, among so much unknown.

Your way led you to some expression of this self, this being who you had become, who you were confirmed as, identified as, even as you refined his or her stance in the world with opinions, preferences, sharing your character and personality, making some impression, some imprint here. Here I am you felt... here I am, along with the accompanying sense of whether or not that matters and if so how did it matter, why did it matter, and to whom did you matter?

You may have sought meaning, you may have sought purpose, you may have felt valued, validated, or not... but like the puddle or the cloud you were fading, disappearing from your very first breath. From the very first breath at the start of your life you were in wonder at life, but also in wonder at death. For death is inherent in life. Just as the first note of the aria presupposes the last note that will end it, just as the first ray of sunlight in the morning begets the sun slipping beneath the western horizon, your first breath extended, reached, and related to your very last breath, when, breathing out, expiring, you, like the puddle or the cloud, have passed away, out of existence, out of being here in this world, out of temporary relative consciousness, into infinity.

Is that it? you sometimes ask... others or yourself. Is that all there is? A brief in-breath and a long out-breath with some action, some possibly pointless activity in between, making no particular difference, leaving no significant impression, when, like ants, we simply toil and act until the life is squashed out of us. What happens after death? Or perhaps we mean after life. What happens when our little puddle-cloud life dissipates, atrophies, and subsides into nothing... perhaps nothingness itself? What will have counted? What will have made any difference? Why, who, what, and how are we here... if at all?

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #185

All is Consciousness. You are Consciousness. I am Consciousness. Everything arising is Consciousness and everything not arising is equally Consciousness. There are no gradations and no contrast, no relation, and no comparison. It simply IS.

To seek Truth... which is a synonym, synonymous with God, the Divine, Great Wisdom, Enlightenment itself, Consciousness, Reality, and so forth... to see Truth you must not look anywhere. You must not retreat inward, neither be distracted outward. Both, you see... are seeking. Both are seeking and seeking is not being with Truth as it is.. Truth is here... Truth is now... Truth is eternal. There is nowhere that Truth can hide or be concealed. In every small place, big place, everywhere and nowhere, Truth is arising, present and eternal.

To dissociate from Truth we have learned to withdraw, to become inward, to meditate, contemplate. But really it is closing your eyes with all the meaning attached to that. People closed their eyes to the rise of Nazism, to the catastrophic effects of the invention of the Hydrogen bomb, to the psychological damage inflicted by pedophilia. People close their eyes to great beauty, to visions of joy, to unbearable longing. Closing your eyes is all this and more; it is your dissociation from Truth.

It is no better than the associative disorder of beguilement and fascination in the outside world, identifying, projecting, transferring, colluding, and all the dynamics of confusion and ill effect of distraction in the outer world.

Your natural state is neither in nor out. Your natural state is everywhere... and nowhere.

Progressive, accruing, cumulative practices are relevant to the process of psychological uncovering, to the revelation of your true nature. To engage in your natural blossoming as an individual human being in this world at this time, practice in the therapeutic-healing modalities you choose to convey yourself from psychological remedial conditions into the present challenges of the stage of maturity you find yourself in.

Spiritual practice or sadhana however is not and is never progressive, accruing, or cumulative. There is no road to Truth. No cunning ploy to achieve the present state. No distance between here and there, between you and yourself.

What is the value of Truth and how can we learn to prize it and arrive at Truth? Let us end this discussion with the words of the master, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa, uttered when he is unable to relinquish truth, his means to realization, even to the Divine Mother:

It is said that truthfulness alone constitutes the spiritual discipline of the Kaliyuga. If a man clings tenaciously to truth he ultimately realizes God. Without this regard for truth, one gradually loses everything. If by chance I say that I will go to the pine-grove, I must go there even if there is no further need of it, lest I lose my attachment to truth. After my vision of the Divine Mother, I prayed to Her, taking a flower in my hands: "Mother, here is Thy knowledge and here is Thy ignorance. Take them both, and give me only pure love. Here is Thy holiness and here is Thy unholiness. Take them both, Mother, and give me pure love. Here is Thy good and here is Thy evil. Take them both, Mother, and give me pure love. Here is Thy righteousness and here is Thy unrighteousness. Take them both, Mother, and give me pure love." I mentioned all these, but I could not say: "Mother, here is Thy truth and here is Thy falsehood. Take them both." I gave up everything at Her feet but could not bring myself to give up truth.¹

1 The Gospel Of Ramakrishna, p312     

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #184

There is no inner and outer in Reality; it is merely a product of dualistic thinking. You see day and night, male and female, so there must be inner and outer. The mind will divide even an atom... with devastating results, as we know... why not inner and outer; there must be... but inner and outer of what? What really is inner and what really outer? Where's the middle, the divide, the separation? Yes, you guessed it, it's our old friend the ego-"I" again and since there is no ego-self... you guessed it, again, no inner or outer.

Being outside is an escape from your inner world; being inside is an escape from your outer world. Whichever one you lean toward and practice, something is being missed obviously. True spiritual practice is not closing your eyes and attempting to withdraw from outer reality. True spiritual practice is not being beguiled and fascinated by the outer world and distracted from the inner world. True spiritual practice is being one with Reality itself and Reality is not divisible and not two.

Once the motivation, the reaction, the withdrawal and escape from Reality have been understood, along with the fundamental truth itself of this divine self-sourcing Reality in which nothing arises, nothing is divisible or separate or withdrawn or intimate in any way other than the indivisible, un-separate unity of Consciousness, you may approach Truth itself as Truth, Truth sees Truth, you see yourself, you and Truth are One.

Here in the twenty-first century we need to undergo a massive re-think. We must think past our habits, our assumptions, and our expectations. We must ask radical questions: is it really spiritual practice? Is it really spiritual at all? What is required? What is necessary for my psycho-spiritual unfolding to take place? What is Love? What is true wisdom? And what is Truth?

Amid the untruths, the manipulations, the indoctrinations, and the dogmas and lies we need to shed sentiment, confusion, and habitual thinking and directly apprehend, discern and discriminate. We are a long way past settling for half-truths, misconceptions, and downright lies. People not thinking for themselves and the masses allowing themselves to be blindly led is how the world has wound up in the present state of irresponsibility and ignorance. It  is wonderfully in our power to put an end to conflict, poverty,  and suffering of all kinds if we start within and work as responsible human beings to dispel the darkness and the ignorance within ourselves! This is paramount; this is vital. You and I are the world, the world of manifestation as you see it, witness it, and interact with it. Inside you I defy you, I challenge you, to witness all the glories and all the ills of the world about you.

This is not withdrawal from the world or a division of inner from outer. On the contrary, it is understanding and practicing the two perceived arenas of inner and outer as one and directly apprehending the truth that there is no separation, not two. As you kill and maim and create orphans and disenfranchised beings in your inner world, so the outside world does the same, because it is the same.

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #183

In spite of the indoctrination of thousands of years, in each wondrous, individual human being there still lies a spark. This spark is greater than the spark of decency to do the right thing, to behave in the right way, to be moral or religious or selfless or self-sacrificing and all the apparent virtues you and I were taught to aspire to. We were taught to aspire to being good, conformist, acceptable, handle-able, tame, domesticated, and to forsake our wildness, our impulses, our ability to feel powerfully and express creatively and be individualistic, even anarchic. The spark I am speaking about is the spark of self-referral, of natural and whole intelligence, heart intelligence, intuition, higher instinctual nature, inner wisdom, authenticity, compassion, and love. These are not merely beautiful descriptions and they are not qualities for society to commandeer, to kidnap on our behalf and then feed back to us in a processed, sanitized form whereby we cannot go too far, too distant from the proposed "norm" of the normalizing society that—and please open your eyes and ears to this—has no interest whatsoever in your essential well-being, in the health and manifestation of your essence, since your becoming self-referring through contact with your essence makes you ungovernable, unsafe, a liability. You become uncontrollable, volatile, while the society is based on power dynamics, on subjugation. Slavery is not abolished, violence and prostitution, unhappiness, conflict, despair, and unthinkable struggle and misery are not something our politicians and our governments are fighting against in our name, in the name of the common human being, in our interest. On the contrary, the powers that proclaim they are acting in our interest are causing the harmful present situations in the world, both directly and indirectly, because they are concerned about world economy, world power dynamics, superior power, acting out of fear, creating the very enemies that we are then indoctrinated to fear and, as anyone with an inkling of understanding of how to control the masses must know, fear is the most powerful weapon they have, so fear and desire are used to control and turn people into puppies.

Content With the Smallest Things

When you withdraw from the education, advertising, social norms and mores, ways of acceptable behavior that govern your ideas about relationship and survival, how to live, how to love, how to be, relate, and behave—all the indoctrination you were raised with and taught to believe—you enter an inner space of self-referral. Instead of looking outside to schooling, politics, socialization, conformist groupings, and societal organizations for your reference, you look inside. You become content with the smallest things. You learn to love, to become familiar with self-love, with your inner knowing sense, with wisdom, innate and unbounded. Simple acts and simple pleasures proliferate and blossom in your life: talking to a close friend over a cup of tea, walking or cycling in the forest, rambling in the countryside, watching the sky at night, sitting with closed eyes and taking in the universe, allowing love to flow in and out of you, delighting in your very breath coursing in and out of your wondrous physical form. The pleasures and acts of fulfillment are endless and not one of them has a single thing to do with the economy or the politics of power or anything that your parent politicians who act in your name, for your own good, in your interest, are concerned about. How do you legislate for contemplation? What are the politics of happiness? What sanctions can you put on personal insight? How much money can you make from people who are already happy and not discontent? How can you oppress and subjugate people who possess an inner sense of their own authority?

You cannot make money out of an individual who is self-referring. You cannot exert power over such a person. You cannot indoctrinate him. You cannot control her. You cannot turn them into slaves or into collective, working, functioning automatons becoming insane for society, mad in the name of self-sacrifice and duty and so-called responsibility. Today the statistics for mental disorder are extraordinarily high. Take a look at them. The world has gone mad. The society is infectious. People become mad in response to a mad world. My life, for example, by modern standards is relatively simple, because I have made it that way. I have chosen it. But tax returns, phone bills, mobile phone bills accompanied by money saving options every month to try and digest, ordering plane tickets, credit card statements, bank transfers, internet tasks, emailing, purchasing gifts for occasions proscribed by state and church at Christmas, Ramadan, birthdays, anniversaries, births and funerals, mortgage repayments, purchasing food, maintaining transport with road tax, motor insurance, state required testing, life insurance, house insurance, holiday insurance, paying rent for your house and office, maintaining your property, paying plumbers, builders, serviceman, being available for deliveries, inspections, meetings concerning payments, benefits, social security... when all these on top of your occupation, your career, your job are performed and carried out how much time have you left to eat, to wash, to see your family, the people you live with, dress yourself, organize yourself for the day ahead... how much time is left?

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #182

We live in the World of Three. I call this obvious, simple, relative world the World of Three, because there's always one, another, and something in between. For example, I talking to you and so on. Because we live in this World of Three, responsibility, like awareness and love, seem to incline toward an object. Yet love, awareness, and responsibility are far more than players in a relational dynamic, a billiard ball hitting another billiard ball in a world of determinism along some continuum of purpose and futility.

Nothing Happens Without You

When we allow responsibility to touch us in our heart and our soul, something extraordinary takes place. Instead of being bewildered by the opportunities we might take and the opportunities we might miss to act responsibly, give responsibly, intervene or solve problems responsibly, we reside in the truth of our continuity with not only all that arises but the very Consciousness in which all arises. Rather than being identified with objects in a basket we are the basket and even more and, just a slight step further, we are the matrix in which the basket and its objects arise.

Responsibility is about spontaneity, being your natural self, and Consciousness, but ultimately responsibility is about Unity. You are responsible for everything, no exceptions. Now in this expansive significance of responsibility it means that nothing happens without your participation, your love, your creation, your need and desire, your compassion, your hate and violence, your tenderness and empathy. Nothing happens without you.

I as the other; the other as myself. Ultimately there is no other. Your awareness flies out of the realm of the personal and soars into higher realms, higher powers, a higher perspective.

You Don't Get Out Of Here That Easily!

Now in non-duality, the teachings of non-duality, this soaring, this disintegration of the illusion seems to be the goal. What could be higher than this annihilation of the world as illusion, as falsehood, for the reality of the ephemeral space, the teachings embodied in the formless person residing now in the post-temporal Absolute. Here is the realization of the non-dualists, the spiritual approach that seems to have become so prevalent today.

But you don't get out of here that easily! I urge you to love, live and be in this world. Even if your spiritual practice takes you to the highest climes of Conscious attainment, to the far reaches of space and eternity itself, forsake it all for this world, because you are only here for a short time... a very short time. It would be an act of perfect ingratitude not to enjoy the holiday... to not serve and explore Truth, Joy, and Satisfaction here in the realm of sadness, to not take responsibility for your enormous wisdom, the depths of the illumination you have brought with you here into this world that belongs here, that teaches and transforms and models the divine heart in the form of a human being.

In order to do this, take responsibility. Dispel the veils of thought and other and worldly delusion. Why? Because you are not separate from anything at all. Are you in the world or is the world in you?

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #181