Wake Up Consciousness E-Book

Frank M. Wanderer

• Herausgeber: #Tudatosság.Könyvek Kiadó
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 233

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

“YOU ARE AN IMMORTAL BEING, WHO IS LOST IN THE WORLD OF ISOLATION, AND NOW IS DESPERATELY SEARCHING FOR ITSELF.”

Frank M. Wanderer Ph.D is a professor of psychology, consciousness researcher and writer, author of several books on consciousness. He is Hungarian, doesn’t speak English well, so his books and articles are translated. His works are published in popular websites as Wake-up World, The Mind Unleashed, Spirit Science, Waking Times, The Mind Journal, Enlightened Consciousnes, Sivana Spirit and so on.
With a lifelong interest in the mystery of human existence, Frank helps others to wake up from identification with their own personal history, the illusory world of forms and shapes, and to find their true Self in Consciousness.
This book is an anthology, a collection from his most interesting writings.

Leseprobe

Frank M. Wanderer Ph.D.

Wake Up Consciousness

A Guide for Spiritual Seekers

Foreword by Prof. Kriben Pillay

Authored by: Frank M. Wanderer PhD

([email protected])

Edited and published by: Ervin K. Kery

([email protected])

Translated from Hungarian

(c) 2018 Frank M. Wanderer Ph.D

ISBN-13: 978-1540873040

ISBN-10: 1540873048

BISAC: Self-Help / Spiritual

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission from the publisher.

(Email: [email protected])

www.consciousnessbooks.cf

www.frankmwanderer.com

“You are an immortal being, who is lost in the world of isolation, and now is desperately searching for Itself.”

Frank M. Wanderer Ph.D is a professor of psychology, consciousness researcher and writer, author of several books on consciousness. He is Hungarian, doesn’t speak English well, so his books and articles are translated. His works are published in popular websites as Wake-up World, The Mind Unleashed, Spirit Science, Waking Times, The Mind Journal, Enlightened Consciousnes, Sivana Spirit and so on.

With a lifelong interest in the mystery of human existence, Frank helps others to wake up from identification with their own personal history, the illusory world of forms and shapes, and to find their true Self in Consciousness.

This book is an anthology, a collection from his most interesting writings.

CONTENTS

Foreword

There is a great deal of literature emerging in the English world today around the subject of nondual spiritual awakening. These range mainly from the utterances of teachers transcribed from their teaching contexts or written by them, to Western interpretations of traditions from the East. There are, however, very few writers who have both a background in academic psychology and who, themselves, are awakened. And while I may be mistaken about this observation, there are probably even fewer writing in this field in Hungary.

Frank M. Wanderer (a pseudonym created for the English reader) is the one Hungarian voice that has emerged in recent years who fulfills the rare role of both academic and authentic inquirer into consciousness, and this present book is a testament to his achievements in this road less travelled.

Wake Up Consciousness is not a difficult book to read. It avoids academic jargon and speaks plainly and clearly, but more importantly, covers an immense amount of ground in setting forth the nature of awaking and the psychological filters that prevent its realization.

The author shows us precisely how awakening is misinterpreted, and what it really is. And from his scholarly work, provides some evidence for its increasing prevalence in today's world. Moreover, and no doubt from his own direct experience, the author devises a real-time activity to make us see the difference between what we think we are, and what we really are - a most difficult task for writers and teachers of nonduality because of the strong identification with thinking as being the locus of 'me'.

The written exercise to see one's self image, presents a mind-turning visual metaphor to show that we are not the words that make up the image, but the white space of the paper that holds it all i.e. we are fundamentally the pure consciousness in which appearances arise.

This is a wise book, with subtle clarifications made for minds that can easily get lost in abstractions or generalizations. But it is also fearless in its wisdom, debunking with great insight the current seductions of positive thinking, the Law of Attraction, higher levels of consciousness, and the like, where these obsessions are nothing but spiritual materialism in its grossest form.

The author shows us what mindful meditation really is, and how it breaks open the doors of the Matrix to bring us home to what is, but not without first providing insights from the field of psychology into the nature of the egoic structure that resists giving up its hold on the mind. It also echoes the great Krishnamurti's call for the mind to be put in order before we can traverse the pathless path.

I recommend this book as an honest guide to the much needed revolution of consciousness.

Professor Kriben Pillay

Graduate School of Business and Leadership University of KwaZulu-Natal Durban.

South Africa

I.

THE AWAKENING

“Awake from the stupor of the identification with your thoughts and desires, and then in the motionless space of Consciousness, the insane, the forever changing world, will be tamed into a wonderful game.”

Are you Awake?

Recognizing yourself as Consciousness is independent of all the activities of the mind. This recognition will only come if you have had some experience of the deeper dimensions of Mindfulness.

The Dimensions of Mindfulness

What does it mean to be mindful? When the notion of Mindfulness is mentioned at a conversation, people often tend to confuse it with being awake. Mindfulness is, however, not identical with being awake, since being awake is only one dimension of Mindfulness. It is the outermost dimension of Alertness, its surface only. Three dimensions of Mindfulness may be identified.

The surface, that is, the outermost dimension of Mindfulness is when the focus of attention is open the widest. Being Mindful then means that now, in this very moment, with our eyes closed (or open) you pay attention to the processes of your inner world (bodily sensations, the stream of your thoughts, the shifting of your emotions), and the external world surrounding you (noises, scents etc. from the direct world around you). In such an instant you only focus your attention on what takes place in that very moment.

From the aspect of another, deeper dimension of Mindfulness, it is a quality of your consciousness when you cease to evaluate, qualify and control the experience affecting you at that particular moment (disregard the functions of the mind) and, at the same time, you give up all your desires to control events. You have no expectations in connection with the given moment, you accept what is taking place, without making judgments, what is wrong and what is right for you.

The deepest dimension of Mindfulness is a state of Consciousness the most important characteristic feature of which is the presence of the observing Consciousness, the capability of Sight. In this state of the Consciousness we, as an external spectator, view what is happening inside and around us, and we do not allow these events to take us with them, to affect us deeper. There is a virtual space between you as the contemplating Consciousness and the experiences affecting you. This space enables you to avoid identification with your experience and to look at that experience as an external spectator. Mindfulness is, at the same time.

You Live in a Dream World

Allow me to draw your attention to an apparently surprising thing. If I told you that now, when you are reading these lines, you are in fact asleep, you would certainly believe that I have gone mad.

You are awake, you are concentrating your attention to reading, and you are aware of your environment as well. You can see the furniture of your room, you can hear the call of the birds from the nearby forest. You are also aware of your thoughts and emotions, too. How can anyone claim that you are asleep in this very moment?

Naturally, you, just as everyone else, sleep at night, and yes, sometimes you see dreams while you sleep. But now it is daytime, you are awake, so how could you see dreams?

You Imagine a Whole World Around Yourself

I believe, however, that you do not only sleep at night, but also at daytime. I believe that in your present state of consciousness your greatest illusion is that you think that you are awake. I believe that in your present existence your greatest illusion is when you think that you are alert. What I see is that in your present state of consciousness you are asleep, and at present you are dreaming, and what you see and hear are all parts of your dream.

Your nighttime sleep is only different from your daytime sleep in that in the night your dreams are less active. During the day you imagine a whole world around you, and you play an active role in that dream. Your personal history takes place in that world, and identifying with that world shapes your personal identity.

At present you are dreaming that, as a part of your personal history, you are reading these lines while you identify with the role of the spiritual Seeker, and you are outraged by what you are actually reading.

The question may arise in you as to why I claim that you are asleep and dreaming now. Well, from the state of consciousness that I call Mindfulness, I can see that you are asleep; you believe yourself to be a separate Self, you are a captive of the works of your mind.

The Reasons of Your Sleep

The reason for you sleeping is that you are not Mindful, only awake. Only one dimension of Mindfulness is present in you. Although you are able to focus your attention on your internal emotions and your environment, in your present state of consciousness you are still powerfully identified with your mind and its functions.

You are therefore drifting on the stormy ocean of your thoughts and emotions day by day, and the space necessary for the emergence of a contemplating Witness is missing from you. You still identify with your thoughts and emotions. These generate the dreams of the Mind, in which you live as a separate self, and try to find the ways of safely navigating your life on the stormy sea.

Experience the Deeper Dimensions of Mindfulness

When you experience the deeper dimensions of Mindfulness you stop and at the same time you exit from your personal history and give up searching. It means that you divert your attention from the world of forms and shapes, and you no longer wish to find yourself in the world of forms.

Stopping is the consequence of a shift of attention within your Consciousness. Stopping does not mean the stoppage of your mind, as you have assumed previously. Some of the spiritual teachings suggest that stoppage is equal to emptying the mind, usually through various, forced exercises. The mind will, naturally, stop, but you will not need to impose it on yourself by spiritual exercises, as it will be the consequence of the shift of attention in your consciousness.

How does this shift take place? It is not something one is able to force or impose upon them; no effort is capable of achieving that. It is an experience that simply happens to you. That is when you experience something from the deeper dimensions of Mindfulness.

This is not something that may only occur to the chosen few. It has happened to almost every human being, including you, a few times. You were not alert enough, that is why you failed to realize what was happening to you. At the moment when the shift of attention is taking place Mindfulness emerges. A space appears in you, you have the ability of seeing, and you may contemplate what is happening to you as an external observer.

Then, like in a flashlight, you see and recognize the reality of your existence, that is, you are not an illusionary small self, but a Consciousness free of forms. That recognition is not the result of the analytical work of the mind, but of a series of realizations inspired by the inner quiet. These realizations can be best compared to seeing (that is why various spiritual teachings refer to such people as Seers) and it works like a revelation. That is what I call the power of Sight.

Though the moments of Sight are rare in the life of a person, they are available to everyone, who is aware of them, alert, and pays attention to them. The level of your Mindfulness is therefore what determines whether the experience is a real turning point in your life, or the Sight is blurred, you fall back to sleep and continue dreaming your personal history.

Sight brings you the experience that stoppage is an inactive moment of the mind the, silence between thoughts. In that silence you experience consciousness without forms, and you may recognize that you are in fact a Presence without thoughts. In the moments of Sight you recognize the activities of mind, and you no longer follow them. You recognize the simple fact that with the help of the mind you are not able to reach beyond the mind.

By experiencing the deeper dimensions of Mindfulness, the capability of Sight, you also recognize that you are fully independent of the mind, you are but a witness of what is happening in and around you. Once you have ceased to identify with your mind, you immediately experience that fact. That is why you should detach yourself from the mind, and stay in the position of the eyewitness. That is the state of spatial consciousness, in which the light of Consciousness, Presence shines out bright.

The Signs of Spiritual Awakening

When you are reading these lines, you are in fact asleep, you would certainly believe that I have gone mad.

You are not Present

What is the evidence for me that you are now asleep, and as a citizen of a dreamland you dream that you are awake?

First, that you are not present. To be present means that you are fully alert, attentive, and conscious in the present moment. Whatever you do, you do that fully consciously; you focus your entire attention on that particular activity.

Or, do you feel free to declare that you are present in every moment of your life?

The case with you (and with the majority of people) is that you are not awake in the sense described above. You are careless most of the time, as a large segment of your attention is bound by dealing with events of your thoughts, events of past and plans for future and your own self. Psychological time therefore displaces the moment of the present, or subordinates it to past or future.

You therefore perform the overwhelming majority of your daily activities mechanically. Your attention only becomes more intensive when you meet someone or deal with something who or that you find interesting, or useful in some way. Or the opposite: the person or thing may do harm to you in some way.

You Live in a Separate World

How deep you sleep may depend on how realistic you find your dreams, how much you identify with your identity embedded in your personal history.

The less alert you are, and the deeper you submerge into your dreams, the more isolated, solitary and individualistic you will become.

Every sleeper–including you–has a separate world, only those who exist in the state of Alertness have a common, shared reality. All those different and separate worlds are created by the mind, which generates the state of separateness: the Ego, which appears as the focus of our identification with our thoughts and emotions. Thus everybody has a separate identity, personal history, individual world view and methods of action.

Sometimes suffering wakes you from your sleep, but then you hasten to return to it, and start a new dream, a new objective in life, new ideals, passion, ambition that confirms your connection with your identity, rooted in your personal history.

The Signs of Awakening

In these days it seems that identification with the forms and shapes is becoming more and more superficial in an increasing number of people. In these people something from the deeper dimensions of Alertness appears to emerge.

With the appearance of the deeper dimensions of Alertness, a gap is generated in you between the world of forms and shapes and the world without these, that is between ”I am this and that” and ”I am.” One of the signs that you are on the way towards awakening is when you begin to feel your current, limited existence, bound to your Ego, is of very poor quality, and you begin to suspect that there are deeper, more profound mysteries behind your life.

Another sign of your awakening is the permanent restlessness, rooted in an unconscious desire. This desire comes from an ancient, long forgotten centre of your soul, from the deeper dimensions of Alertness.

The Ego lends a form to that unconscious desire by directing it towards an external objective in the world of forms and shapes. The objective is to become as perfect as possible within the limits of your external circumstances. You wish to include the stabilized, allegedly permanent Ego in that perfection as well. Naturally, you intend to achieve that goal some time in the future.

The mind, with which you currently identify, is full of currents and streams: thoughts and emotions come and go all the time. This is your present state of existence. The first signs of the deeper dimensions of Alertness loosen the glue of your identification with the mind, so you will be able to gain more and more experience of the free spaces of the Consciousness, and you recognize that you are not an isolated, small self, but the Consciousness itself.

Recognizing yourself as Consciousness is independent of all the activities of the mind. This recognition will only come if you have had some experience of the deeper dimensions of Alertness.

Suffering as a Wake-Up Call

The question may have occured to many of us: ”Why do we need to suffer so much in our life, why is there so much suffering on Earth?” As if the whole world has conspired against us, almost everything causes suffering to us. We suffer when we are ill, we suffer when things do not work out the way we like or plan. We suffer when we have lost something; we have lost our money or we are left by a loved person. We suffer when we are not loved, not appreciated, when our performance is underestimated. We suffer when we see our loved ones suffer and we are unable to alleviate their suffering. We could go on a loing way, continuing the list of things causing us suffering. On the other hand, there is so little joy in our life. What sense does all this suffering have? Does it have a meaning at all? Or is it just a bad joke of an evil universe?

Our Own Heaven

Let us imagine a life free of any kind of suffering. It is easy to imagine a life in which we do not suffer, where we are healthy, everything we do is successful, when all our wishes are fulfilled, everybody loves and respects us whoever we meet. In this private heaven of ours we could be happy.

But there are 7 billion other people on Earth, who share the Earth with us. Would they also be happy in our imagined heaven? Would they also escape suffering?

We cannot be fully certain about it, as in our isolated existence we are not sure, and can only guess what makes other people happy. In our isolated state we always use our own experience as a starting point, and assume that what is good for us must be good for others as well, and others suffer from the same thing we suffer from. Extending this logic makes us believe that once we no longer suffer, other people will also have a good time in our imagined heaven. The reality is, however, that the earthly heaven we imagine, and which is free of suffering for us, would cause a lot of suffering for a lot of other people, and would be even a real hell for many.

The seven billion people living on Earth today would create seven billion different and separate earthly heavens if they had a chance to do so. They are in an isolated state of consciousness, and though there would quite a lot of similar heavens, they would still be different. A common feature of all these heavens would be, however, that suffering would be present in every one of them.

The Deeper Sense of Suffering

We must conclude, therefore, that suffering–no matter how much we would like to avoid it–is a part of the life of every single human being. When we are suffering, we never say that “my body is suffering,” but we say that “I am suffering” or “my heart is broken with sorrow.” Suffering is ours, because we ourselves are the suffering itself. And we suffer because we identify with the suffering.

Our daily sufferings point out to us that suffering as such is the result from our turning away from the Miracle and our identification with the separate state of consciousness.

It is only possible to understand all this when the intensity of our identification with the body and the psychological Self is weakened a little bit, and we are–even only for brief periods–able to step out of the small prison of our thoughts and mind, and enter the endless space of the Consciousness.

Suffering in that sense is the wake-up call that prevents Consciousness from finally sinking into the dream of separatedness. Suffering is what actually stops us from finally and irrevocably identify with a body and a personal identity.

When we place our sufferings in the light of Consciousness, we no longer try to run away from them in despair, and no longer dream of a heaven free of suffering. We are now aware that oure sufferings are in fact our helpers and they may accelerate the process through which the Consciousness wakes up in the body we formerly and mistakenly considered our own.

3 Turning Points During Awakening

Today, it is clear for almost every spiritual seeker that we live in the era of awakening. However, what is the awakening is most misinterpreted. Many people think that awakening and enlightenment is the same, it's a single-time event: it's happening for once and you are done! On the contrary, the truth is that enlightenment is a process that is actually a series of awakenings. Let's take a look to the three most important turning points during awakening:

Awakening from Identification

Every waking moment of our life fits a personal history with our own Self in its focus. Our life can only be interpreted within the framework of that history. The reason for that is that we identify with the voice of the Ego, the narrator of our own story, so closely that our personal history becomes the foundation of our entire life.

What does this identification mean? It means that we identify with a form (e. g. our name) that originally did not belong to us (we are all born without a name), but through identification this specific form has become a part of our existence.

A closer look at that personal history will, reveal that our internal story consists of a fabric of experiences and thoughts. Thoughts that explain our experiences, thoughts that we believe and with which we identified, thoughts that will thus provide the foundations of our self-determination.

Our personal history keeps us under its spell, in a hypnotic state in which all our attention is devoted to the inner voice and story it tells. In this way we give up our alertness, the world passes by us, because we only concentrate on the elements of reality that appear to confirm our personal history. We therefore lose our grip on the deeper dimensions of life. The deeper dimensions are present in our life, but we lose contact with them because of our lack of alertness.

The question may arise in us whether we are really identical with our own personal history, or perhaps we are more than that? Everybody has some vague suspicion that our personal history does not reflect reality, we are in fact at a deeper level than that.

When everything is apparently all right in our personal history, we achieve our goals, we are happy, and the vague suspicion vanishes entirely in us, and our identification with our personal history becomes more powerful. There are, however, moments in our life when nothing appears to succeed, so we are unhappy and we suffer. The suspicion then reinforces in us, and we tend to believe that we are more than the cluster of thoughts that constitute our personal history. We realize that we are more than mere thoughts.

If we become aware and conscious of our own personal history that we are telling ourselves, we have a chance to wake up from the hypnotic spell of our personal history. This is the first major turning point in the process of awakening.

Awakening from Ego

When the Consciousness identifies with a form, the Ego appears. The Ego always means some sort of an identification, self-determination (I am a man, I am a father, I am an Englishman, I am Christian etc.) The Ego therefore rests upon our identification with things that are important for us ego.

The Ego is the central figure of our personal history, based upon the past and looking into the future. The components of the Ego are thoughts, emotions, memories (with which the person identifies as "my story”), fixed unconscious roles and collective identifications (nationality, religion, etc.). Most people completely identify with these components of the Ego, and for them no self "outside” of this exists.

The identification of the Ego with things (object, the person’s own body, way of thinking) creates the link of the individual to various things. The Ego (and thus the spiritually unconscious person) experiences his/her existence through the possession of various objects. The satisfaction provided by the sense of possession is, however, short, so the individual usually carries on the pursuit for new objects. There is a powerful motivation behind this activity of the individual, a psychological demand to obtain more, the unconscious sense of "not yet enough,” and this feeling surfaces in a want for more. This want is a more powerful driving force for the Ego than the desire to possess. The uneasy feelings, recklessness, boredom, stress and dissatisfaction are all largely the products of the dissatisfied longing for more.

The thoughts such as "it’s mine,” "I want it,” "I need it,” "it is not enough,” belong to the structure of the Ego. The content of the Ego changes with time; it is replaced with new contents. No content is, however, able to lastingly satisfy the Ego as long as the structure of the Ego remains in its place. The individual keeps looking for something different, something that promises a greater satisfaction, making the sense of self of the individual more complete.

The Ego intends to elevate the forms (including its own form) to eternity, which is impossible. This intention of the Ego will be the source of all sufferings, because its world of forms and shapes shall collapse like a sandcastle after a while, until death snatches away the last of the forms: its body from it. It came empty-handed from Nothing, and that is how it is going to return there. The only treasure it could take along with it is its wakefulness, but the Ego considers that worthless in the world of forms and shapes, as it was not a means of increasing the power the Ego

The Ego is not bad, it is simply unconscious. Ego is the deepest dream of the Consciousness. If an individual is able to notice and observe the functions of the Ego, he or she will be able to transcend it. In that case, the individual who has been looking for a more complete perception of the self will recognize that it has always been there, but the functions of the Ego—identification with objects and thoughts—has pushed it into the background. One of the ways of transcending the Ego is not reacting wholeheartedly to the ever-changing kaleidoscope of thoughts and emotions, but concentrating on the alert consciousness in the background instead.