I can tell you as someone who did not follow a teacher or guru and didn’t know much about any of the methods involved in awakening that the central core of the event of nonduality and the enlightened state involves a union within the self with its many parts.

In many methods this takes the form of silent meditation, or “just sitting” and being quiet. This, though, is not always enough, and I think our understanding about enlightened states has progressed enough that we can begin speaking to this process in a more updated way.

There is this quality of mind that must be allowed to take center stage and without it, most of all methods will relax you and might provide you with some interesting effects and some insight into your consciousness, but it wont lead to a more illuminated or enlightened state. You could meditate for years and never find this thing we call awakening.

What I can tell you, if you are trying to find it, is that this capability is already in you. It is in every person. In Buddhism they rightly describe this as the Buddha within. We all have Buddha nature. This is not a man or any person, but in our innocence we might tend to think it is. No, you are the one who has it….but you need to learn how to discover it. The way this is done is by allowing instead of doing, and this runs counter to how many people think things in life should be done. To do this, to allow, involves meditation, but this meditation is best when it silences the left brain, the part that is most active in people all across the world.

We have developed this way and it has resulted in a silencing of the left brain. What you want is a practice that will help to keep the left brain occupied with something. Give it something to do. It is like a man in a way; he always likes to solve problems and thinks this is the way of the world, making things right again. It is also the verbal part of your brain and is thus the part that chatters on and on. You hear a lot about this as being a challenge to many who are seeking to meditate. But meditation itself involves hours of practice punctuated by brief moments of success. This success involves silencing the left brain so that the power of the right brain can come forward. You see, for as capable as the left brain thinks it is, it is really only designed to deal with linear tasks, point A to point B kinds of things. It does not have the sense of the ineffable that is in your nature. To do that, the left brain needs to be trained to be quiet for longer and longer periods. This is hard to do. However, the brain is open to being trained and you can train your brain to do certain things. By having a meditation method that keeps your left brain doing something, which is really keeping it quiet and not nattering on about all the things you need to do, you begin to open up the brain so that the right brain powers can begin to come forward. It is important to note that the right brain is the part that focuses on the present while the left brain focuses on the past and the future. Together, they make for a good marriage, but until awakening, the marriage is very one sided, you see. What you want to do is to silence the left while letting the right come into focus more. The experience of enlightened states is marked by this sense of an expanding present. There is a reason for this, and it is all physiological at its root, but the body serves the consciousness that drives the whole experience. In order to know that higher consciousness you need to have both online and functioning together. This is what awakening is. Many say it is just the feminine or Shakti (right brain) but the two parts were made to work as one and the right brain has a very hard time navigating a physical world of symbols like words and numbers that are used to communicate externally (while it can communicate psychically).

The right brain, which is the center for awareness of the infinite in us, is the nonverbal part of the brain. It does not think the same way as the left, so when you have it working in the beginning, you might not even be aware that it is operational. Its focus is so broad that it can be present and it can feel as though you are standing in a vast emptiness. It can be there and you wont even know it sometimes. You have to spend time in this nothingness long enough to learn how this part of the brain works. The problem is that we are so used to thinking with our left brains that the moment something happens that is right brained phenomenon, we shut it off just by engaging the left brain. I know how this sounds. I know it may sound preposterous to you that it works like this, but in the beginning it does. You are slowly letting the “woman” in you to come out and express herself. “She” is truly the genie in the bottle. She is vast and when you first feel her it can be scary. She has another form of ego which is truly a cosmic sense of self which is very different from the ego mind the exists in the left brain. But it is with “her” that you will be able to begin perceiving thins more as they are in a broader context, and that context is what is often referred to as cosmic mind. Her focus will be so broad that it wont seem like it is a focus at all, but you will need to let that part of you express itself. If you can allow this part of the brain to express itself through any number of phenomenon that it can produce without dragging in the left brain, you will be well on your way to developing a greater balance in your consciousness and how it was always made to operate.

I found that by putting my hands together in a prayer position and placing my (left brained) attention on my hands and where they touched, that this was enough to begin giving that other part of my mind time to come forward. Now these things happen incrementally, so having dream like phenomenon happen at first may not be the final destination, but it is a good place to start because big things come from small things. You can imagine or pretend that you see that all divisions begin to drop within you, and whatever you imagine that feels most natural is fine, no matter what it is. What you want is something that YOU can relate to. Having your hands in this posture also establishes a circuit of energy in the body that helps with establishing greater unity between the left and right brain. Have you ever wondered why so many cultures all across the world will use this posture of hands together in prayer or meditation? It is because it works, it helps to center your energy and it helps to establish a cross current between the left and right brain. Think of it as a way of bridging the gap that exists between the two hemispheres, except this is being done with your hands. This is in truth what the Hindu call a mudra (of sorts). By doing this you allow your mind to be focused on this very simple thing, which is your hands together. If your mind wanders, just put it back with your hands together. The point here is you are learning to still your mind, which is no easy task. To this end, breathing can help. We know that by breathing in slow deliberate breaths, you can send a signal to your body that you are calm. This is one of the most potent ways of getting into the autonomous nervous system portion of the brain. Breathing is the one action that the body does that we have control over, so by using slow breathing in and out with pauses at the top and bottom of each breath will help you to further relax. The trick is not to fall asleep, and yet being so relaxed that you could fall asleep is a very good place to be. The more you practice, the better you will be at not falling asleep. The mind thus learns through repetition. By repeating this daily, you can get your brain in the habit of this exercise. You will find with time that instead of taking ten minutes to get fully relaxed that you can sit down and in a few moments be at a place that might have taken you much longer in the past. This is progress!

We aren’t used to doing nothing, but this is what you need to do. Focus your mind on your hands. If not that, then be silent and be comfortable. There is no magic in holding a yogic pose, I can promise you. There is no honor in making yourself feel pain or discomfort, this will only forestall reaching your goal.

To help to explain what I mean when I ssy that the left brain is so dominant to the point of acting as a brake against the right brain, it is helpful to watch the TED Talk by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Her talk is about what happened when she had a stroke in her left hemisphere one morning while getting ready to go to work. As the stroke spread and shut down her left hemisphere, she list her ability to communicate verbally and to read words and even the keypad on her phone. What happened next was that she began to experience a sense of expansiveness, a feeling came if how everything was interconnected. She entered into a state of sammadhi. She understood, as a neuroanatomist, that the right brain handled the perception of our cosmic nature. It was a huge breakthrough for her and for me, I was able to confirm that the sense that I had that awakening was tied to the right brain in consort with the left now working together in greater balance. It took a stroke for Dr. Taylor to see this, but you don’t need to induce a stroke to help bring this part of your awareness forward. You just need a meditation technique that can busy the left brain just enough so that it is stilled. I know how this sounds. It sounds contradictory. In truth you are giving your busy bee left brain a very simple task that tricks it to become as quiet as possible long enough for the quiter nonverbal mind to have room to experience itself in your waking consciousness. By activating it in this way, which is allowing waking consciousness to use it, you are able to provide a means for you to use your mind more fully. You are rewiring your brain so it can be used much more efficiently. Her video follows.

If you study kundalini you will see that the ancients imagined it as a twin energy that rises, establishing itself along the spine and into the brain, moving through and piercing each of the seven major chakras as it goes up (and sometimes down) the spine. What we see is a demonstration of both energy currents in the body and the nervous system being impacted by this new “wiring up” of the system. It happens automatically, you allow it to take place. It results in establishing a “new mind” state. These two currents of energy, called Ida and Pengali are called the Shakti and Shiva, but they correspnd to these two different hemispheres that feel like opposites so that many, including myself, think of them as like female and male. While there is no real gender in the brain, this often opens people up to being aware of their greater being beyond the body and in the physical, as having been both female and male in other incarnations. This awakening thus can open you up to a greater awareness of who you are and who you have been. It is courtesy of allowing the right brain to become more active not in a shallow surface way, but in a much deeper way that is as cosmic as it is physical. The yogis if the past just didn’t have our understanding of neuroanatomy or someone who could make the connections that this is about the brain until now. What I am describing is a way to experience whole brain thinking, feeling, and being. It is best to find yourself in an environment that will support you in this change because it can result in symptoms that can be missidentified as mania and psychosis. If you are an overly mental, rational, and controlling person, I would strongly suggest that you not try to awaken this but instead work on softening your reliance on your linear modes of thinking because the energy is so strong that it can unsteady you. I have personally seen people awaken who should have done more soul searching and preperation before awakening.

Doing this is the first step. It is possible to awaken very quickly, it is also possible that it will take some time. The conundrum is that if you think you know what you are looking for then your preconception can color your experience and it will derail your efforts because this is something you haven’t experienced before. Having a clear mind is best, but it also means not knowing. That’s tricky: how do I know what I am looking for if I don’t know what it is?

It isn’t so hopeless because what you seek is so fundamental, so basic, that it’s in everyone. It isn’t like I am asking you to find the lost grail, I’m pointing out that the grail is in everyone! What this meditation does, or can do, is it acknowledges that cosmic mind is the result of a continuity, a circuit that has been created, where before the circuit was disconnected. This technique joins the opposite wires in your brain and brings them together in such a way that a powerful and enduring union, a completed circuit, exists. Once done, other disconnected parts of you begin to come online. You experience an immediate connection with and an awareness of the body that hasn’t existed before, a sense and awareness of your energetic inventory. The energy that is being produced in awakening automatically begins shedding trauma and releases stuck emotion (if you don’t resist its energetic program). Things might seem hard at first, but this is the healing from your own insanity, your neurosis. You can feel sick at first, but this is like stirring up the toxins before they are cleared away (and it’s a good thing). In time, things get easier as the mind returns more fully to its natural state. Allow this energy to do its work.

It is also possible that you have a much calmer simpler form of awakening, which usually involves a deep awareness of how everything is connected and one, without the more fiery shedding and healing energies of kundalini. My observation is that some people come with more baggage while others may have already done this work in a prior life, which results in a calmer simpler process. The fiery power of kundalini helps to move the baggage, setting it free from the body and mind. Your system will automatically respond in such a way that one of these two polarities enters the scene (and this is along a spectrum so there are a range of possibilities or combinations of these two).

If the idea of something working in you whose will feels stronger than your own upsets you are scares you, this path isn’t yet for you. If you can learn to cultivate surrender and the faith that everything works out in the end, then this is the mindset most needed for the journey into awakening. Again, being overly rational, mental, or always wanting thinfs known or figured out, are all warning signs that more work needs to be done.

Remember, you are providing space for a new arrangement to flower. Like planting a seed, you need only water it (meditation) daily. This is, afterall, superconsciousness we are talking about. It knows what its doing. 🙂

>>> Check out for the next post where I give you an incredibly simple tip that has the power to bring forward your greater awareness quickly as part of waking up.

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