![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.meditationmag.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Freedom-Ocean-photo.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nUNIVERSAL LAW & THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATENESS<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What is the nature of the Life Force? Does this Life Force\/Light\/Spirit\/Grace have a Law?\u00a0 I ask you to consider that the Universal Law is Freedom. As water \u201cwants\u201d to flow and spread, energy wants to be free, unbound. To align with the Law of Reality we must have our guard down, feeling<\/em> whatever is arising in and around us.\u00a0 When we feel free, our bodies register a wide range of potential feelings; happiness, love, peace, humor, and strength. And the feelings we typically don\u2019t like; fear, anger, sorrow, self-loathing, shame, guilt, loneliness, hurt, when felt freely, are felt for what they are \u2013 simply energy –\u00a0 to be allowed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Quantum physics also has proven there is no separateness but only the illusion of such. The word \u201cego\u201d is Greek in origin, and means \u201cI.\u201d Feeling ourselves to be individuals, and where the illusion of separation is reinforced by language, an egoic consciousness arises that is rooted in the false sense of separation and threat. Our human bodies are also binary. We are either opening in any given moment, or contracting. This contracting, coiling, putting up walls, reflects that we are feeling threatened. But if there\u2019s only Life Force, only Light, who or what, if anything, is actually being threatened? I read words on a paper from the licensing board and immediately my body tightened and my mind raced. I was out of touch with Reality, buying the ego machine\u2019s false perception of threat. Sitting in front of my TV, listening to words, eager and open to learn from a spiritual master, I had a very different experience. Yet, there were no significant outward differences. In both cases I, my body, was still arising in an ocean of Life Force\/Light. In the former, I was like a sponge in the ocean refusing to be saturated. Where\u2019s the intelligence in that? Staying with the sponge metaphor, my enlightened master shared that in the enlightened state you no longer identify with being a mortal sponge but, now fully saturated and allowing the currents to freely flow, you identify as being the eternal Divine ocean itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Few beings have ever been graced to learn to live perpetually with their guard down, uncontracted, enlightened.\u00a0 Those few have been the most free and loving among us and who have the most to teach us. As my spiritual master expounded, the ego is not an entity but an activity – neurotic and addictive seeking and avoiding.\u00a0 As we consciously and subconsciously contract, and thereby obstruct peace and the sense of connectedness to Love, we neurotically and addictively seek comfort, pleasure and security, as we simultaneously try to avoid challenging feelings. We don\u2019t recognize painful feelings as simply unthreatening energy, so we haven\u2019t learned to deeply relax and feel freely all emotions.\u00a0 Or even harsh sounds or a cold wind in our face for that matter.\u00a0 A baby screams and cries and we wince and contract, reflecting that we perceive the noise as threatening.\u00a0 A cold wind hits our face and we brace ourselves, as if the wind is threatening and bracing will somehow help us stay warm. All ego-driven activity arises from and creates suffering. And when we allow the ego\u2019s perspective to rule our mind, the mind is the thief of happiness.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n What have we gotten ourselves into by being born?! Day one, the ego machine is also born. We\u2019re afraid, we feel threatened, and we want comforting. Until we learn to transcend the ego, our lives are emotional patterning and perceptions created during our lives as infants and toddlers. We feel pain and discomfort, and we seek relief. As children, we experience fear, sorrow, loneliness, rage, shame, and guilt, and we wrongly conclude that these feelings are bad, threatening, and should be avoided or escaped. We create our emotions and when we don\u2019t like what we feel, we react by trying to escape them through our addictive and neurotic seeking. Our refusal to be responsible with our emotions is suffering and has been at the heart of every insensitive and irresponsible act. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is our inherent birth right to be free. What\u2019s required to be free?\u00a0 The ego machine pursues happiness, wants to be free, but the very pursuit is suffering\u00a0 and will always be fruitless.\u00a0 My first spiritual master once said, you cannot become happy, you can only be happy.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we are relaxed, open, undefended, we literally feel better because our nervous system is uncoiled. In this disposition we are light-hearted, capable of freely giving and receiving love. We think more clearly, are more creative, and can gracefully respond to our challenges.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n My first spiritual master also declared that it\u2019s not a question of whether there is God. He said there is only God. And that God\/Love is found \u201cin the feeling of being.\u201d The profundity of this cannot be overstated, nor can the difficulty of mastering the capacity to feel freely under all conditions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are two basic modes of being: the conceptual and the perceptual. In the conceptual mode we are in our heads, thinking, left brain active, abstracted from reality. The conceptual mode is useful when calculating, designing, and strategizing. But humans tend to be extremely addicted to engaging life from this mode and have a hard time disengaging and dropping into the perceptual mode. The perceptual mode is when we are living in the state of feeling<\/em> awareness, senses open, grounded, responsive. We sometimes consciously or subconsciously give ourselves permission to be in this state when we are bathing, enjoying music, dancing, meditating, doing yoga, relaxing on a beach, laying down to sleep, or engaging in sex. Most of my clients approximate they spend less than an hour a day in the perceptual mode. Typically, humans rarely sit still, rarely enjoy deep relaxation, and have no clue how to experience profound calm while feeling deep hurt, shame, anger, sorrow or fear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The perceptions rendered from the ecstatic spiritual experience I first described revealed: there is only God\/Light\/Love, there is no separate Creator, freedom is a choice, and that any sense of threat arises from buying the ego machine\u2019s lies of separation from Love.\u00a0 It was also evident from the experience that there is no separate someone that is \u201cRobert\u201d that dies with this body.\u00a0 It was equally evident that there is no place of hell, nor eternal damnation, and that the \u201ckingdom of Heaven IS here on Earth,\u201d (as it is everywhere) as there is ONLY God\/Light.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ego machine is perpetually dramatizing one way or another \u201cpoor me\u201d and \u201cscrew you\u201d – blaming, complaining, manipulating\u2014and angrily, despondently, and fearfully never believes it has enough of what it wants or thinks it needs. It has become starkly evident that only we create all of our own emotions, and that we create any suffering associated with our emotions and thoughts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Grace is perfectly operative. In the best and worst moments. How could it be otherwise when all is Light?\u00a0 In our happiest moments, in the moments we feel love in our hearts, when we feel most free, the Truth is being affirmed: that all is Light\/Love.\u00a0 In our worst moments, Life\/Grace is showing us via our pain, that we are missing the mark, we are clinging, neurotically seeking and avoiding, presuming separation from Love, reacting,\u00a0 not responding. In these moments, we are in our heads, feeling threatened – refusing to freely feel whatever there is to feel<\/em> in our bodies and around us.\u00a0 I once read that a politician who died of cancer said that his cancer was a miracle. He expressed that it took facing death to reveal to him how hateful and afraid he\u2019d been, and that in the course of dealing with cancer he finally learned to give and receive love.\u00a0 A powerful lesson for all of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grace \u201cwants\u201d us to be happy, no matter what we require to \u201cget it.\u201d Life presents all the opportunities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Not long ago, late at night, I found myself dripping with shame.\u00a0 I\u2019d just learned that I\u2019d inadvertently been very insensitive to a friend.\u00a0 All my spiritual understanding was being tested \u2013 though I knew there was no \u201cTester.\u201d\u00a0 My spiritual master\u2019s words were recalled, \u201cGod is found in the feeling of being.\u201d\u00a0 He literally meant that feeling is the portal to communing with Spirit. \u00a0 With my body tight as a knot, my heart burning like a red hot coal, and my stomach aching, I leaned into the task of embracing my master\u2019s instruction to freely feel the intense shame.\u00a0 I lay in my bed, sweating, hands on my heart, and began to breathe slowly and deeply, accepting the hellish discomfort, affirming Love\u2019s presence and that there was no threat.\u00a0 The feeling of shame intensified as it expanded throughout my body. For probably an hour or more, I radiated with shame. I had to maintain tremendous focus throughout this process, by observing what was going on and not buying that I was a victim to it or that it was too much to feel, or else I\u2019d knot up again in agony. \u00a0 Then slowly the shame morphed into intense waves of energy flowing from my extremities. All sense of good, bad, positive, negative was gone.\u00a0 It was just pure Life Force.\u00a0 About two hours into this ordeal, I felt the tiniest feeling of love in my heart.\u00a0 It took discipline not to attach to it or focus on it and I continued to breathe, relax, and allow my body to stay in the state of feeling awareness as it maintained its feeling connection to the bed and my surroundings. The Love expanded and within about half an hour my body was radiating Love through and out every pore. My master\u2019s words were proven true.\u00a0 Had I gotten impatient with Grace, not understood what Grace is, and\/or doubted my capacity to stay with the process, I would have continued to suffer by being at war with the shame I had created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d discovered I couldn\u2019t think my way to freedom, love, God, or happiness.\u00a0 It is a feeling matter. A life-long practice, and Grace rules. \u00a0 We can only learn what It reveals and teaches.\u00a0 The greatest beings, past and present, those who most exemplify love and freedom, are Grace\u2019s greatest gift to humankind.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n I placed the video into the VCR, pressed play, and sat on my couch with my scruffy beautiful mutt at my feet. An American spiritual master, Adi Da Samraj, began speaking, clarifying the nature of ego, the origins of humankind\u2019s self-created suffering, and expounding upon the Divine Reality in which everything is arising. A few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":315,"featured_media":2681,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psychology"],"yoast_head":"\nTHE ACT OF SUFFERING<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
CONCEPTUAL VS. PERCEPTUAL<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
THE TRUTH FREES & OFFENDS<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
A FEELING MATTER<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.meditationmag.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/feeling-free2.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nRobert Hirsch, LCSW \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 copyright 2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
Robert Hirsch has been the student of two American born spiritual masters.\u00a0 \u00a0 Since 1990, he\u2019s had a private practice as a therapist in the Seattle area. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 He can be contacted at hirschcounseling@gmail.com<\/a> \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"