In This Episode…

Awakened consciousness is none other than our own true nature. It’s never anywhere but right here. You can’t get to it somewhere in the future. The part of you that imagines it’s somewhere in the future will never be ready for it. So, let all of that go and give yourself to your meditation always with the fundamental position that this is it. This is the moment of awakening.
—Craig Hamilton

In this episode, Craig explores one of the great paradoxes of the spiritual path.

While spiritual practices like meditation can help prepare us for awakening, true awakening is about recognizing that the essence of who and what we are is already enlightened.

Craig explains how this transformative realization can shift your relationship to spiritual practice, allowing you to stop pushing your awakening into the future and embrace your true nature in the present moment, right now.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s approach to meditation, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at: FreeMeditationWorkshop.com

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

One way of looking at spiritual practice is to see it as a set of exercises that get us more prepared for spiritual awakening. There are many practices we can do that will cultivate our character and our inner world. We can practice to refine our mind, our feeling states, and our whole inner being. This will align us more deeply with higher consciousness or universal consciousness.

If we do enough of that preparatory work, eventually higher consciousness can burst through because we’ve gotten everything that’s stopping it out of the way, and so it will just show up. And there’s a truth to this that underlies a lot of the spiritual practice that people have done for millennia, which we also do.

Practices that Prepare Us for Awakening

We can do practices to cultivate our concentration, our ability to focus our attention. Many of us look at our inner world, and we see that it’s just a disorganized, chaotic mess. The inner stream of consciousness, our mind and attention, jumps from one thought to the other. Emotional reactions overtake us and we get swallowed up in them.

Anyone who’s really studied the human mind and the human psyche sees that it’s a swirling, chaotic mess. We’ve all experienced what it’s like to have a stormy inner world with a lot going on inside us. So it helps to do these practices that teach us how to be more focused, more centered, less distractible, and less reactive. We’re better able to hold that swirling chaotic mess and not be in reaction to it.

People who research the mind have also observed how we often have a tendency to sit in negative states and focus on the negative. So we can do practices to try to reverse that, focusing on positive things or qualities. Many spiritual practices are designed to get us to imagine beautiful, resplendent deities that are filled with wisdom and compassion. By putting our attention on them, we can cultivate that wisdom and compassion within, aligning with the higher parts of ourselves.

Another example is doing chanting practices that are designed to take us to a higher vibration, so in a similar way we’re aligning with a higher vibratory level. There are thousands of other practices that we do to prepare and make ourselves more fit for spiritual awakening.

This whole dimension of spiritual practice, of meditation practice, has benefited humanity immensely. Doing these kinds of practices has truly prepared us in some ways for awakening.

The Confounding Truth of Spiritual Awakening

But there’s also the confounding truth of spiritual awakening. Any time we truly awaken, even briefly, what we discover is that our awakened nature—our true nature, this profound, sacred, universal consciousness at the essence of everything—is who and what we already are.

Nothing we could ever do could generate, cause, or give rise to that awakened nature. Enlightened consciousness itself is the very consciousness that has been having our whole experience for our entire life. We just didn’t realize it. We didn’t see it. Our awakened nature is called our “true nature” because it’s what is really true about us right now, whether we know it or not and whether we’re aware of it or not.

Discovering this for the first time is arresting. It often takes our breath away. We realize, I’ve been looking everywhere but here. I’ve been searching everywhere but right at the very nub of the perceiver, of the experiencer, of the person I actually am. I thought it was outside me, and now I realize it’s closer than close. My true nature is the very knowing that I am. It’s the very experiencer that I am. It’s me, not in the sense of my life story, but the me who’s been experiencing my life story. The sacred essence of the cosmos is that — I am that.

Was All That Practice a Big Waste of Time?

When we make this discovery, often people immediately think, ”All the spiritual practices I did were a big waste. They didn’t have anything to do with this. They were actually taking me away from it because they were based on the assumption that I wasn’t already here. They were rooted in some idea that I had to do something to get somewhere else where I wasn’t already abiding, and if only I had stopped insisting from the start that there was something missing from this moment, stopped insisting that I was not the one which I’m seeking, maybe I wouldn’t have wasted those decades in doing meditation practice and retreats and workshops and everything else I did, because the truth has always been here, and it’s always been the same, and nothing I really did had anything to do with this.”

This is a common realization or response to revelation or awakening.

In fact, this response has led a number of spiritual teachers throughout the ages, and many contemporary spiritual teachers as well, to denigrate spiritual practice and say, “Oh, call off the search right now. Any spiritual practice you’re doing is part of the delusion, part of the story that you’re not awake. Your practices are always pushing the truth of who you are into the future, instead of stopping and embracing it right now.”

That position has led to its own set of problems, because for most of us, a single moment of recognition or discovery of the truth of who we are and how things are is not enough. I won’t say it’s not enough in absolute terms, because it’s always enough in a more fundamental sense, but most of the time, we’re not ready to embrace it. We’re not ready to accept it.

And for any part of us that thinks we’re not ready, or that awakening is something that will happen in the future, that part of us is never going to be ready. So let’s just leave it behind now and just embrace this now.

The Enlightenment Paradox: Practicing To Awaken

I hope you can see the paradox. We could call it the enlightenment paradox. The challenge here is that, from one point of view, practice is always a postponement of awakening. Yet, from another point of view, if we don’t practice something, if we don’t take up a conscious effort to embrace the truth of our inherent freedom, and give ourselves to it with intensity, with everything we have it’s probably only going to ever show up in fleeting glimpses.

Why?

Because the momentum and habit are so strong. We have a habit of assuming the present moment is not it, of looking somewhere else and rejecting this moment in favor of an imagined better moment in the future.

At its essence, enlightenment or awakening is a transformed relationship to all experience. It’s a transformed relationship to being alive, to being conscious, to being a person. Awakening is an utter reversal or turning over of the paradigm.

How To Accept Your True Nature Right Now

Our true nature shows up in very noticeable and predictable ways, and so we can undertake accepting it as a conscious meditation practice. When we really do the practice, we will find that the practice is no longer an obstacle, because we’re no longer practicing pushing our awakening into the future.

We’re practicing accepting our true nature right now. We’re practicing embracing the fullness, wholeness, and sacredness of this moment as it is right now.

We practice bringing our attention to that universal consciousness. We practice accepting, embracing, and noticing that this consciousness itself is always here. It’s the only consciousness there is. So we practice not making the error of relating to it as my personal consciousness that inhabits my little life story, but instead seeing consciousness and relating to consciousness as it really is.

You don’t have to remember to bring everything I’m saying right now to your practice, because the practices themselves reinforce everything I’m laying out. If you take them as they are and you give yourself to them, they inherently reverse the habit of un-enlightenment while reinforcing the habit of enlightenment or awakening.

But it’s also very easy in any moment of any practice to start to relate to practice as something else. Even with a practice like this, you might start to think of it as, “Okay, I’m going to do those practices, and hopefully I’ll have a powerful experience of awakening. Then maybe the experience will be so powerful, it will start to permeate the rest of my life.”

So you may be sitting here with an expectation of something happening, of getting somewhere, of experiencing something different than what you normally experience and hoping that that will transform you. We can even engage practices that are designed to do the opposite of that in this way, without realizing it.

We’re Here to Sustain Awakened Consciousness

The fundamental orientation that I invite us to always hold—and really inquire into as well—is noticing how all this works. You have to pay attention to what we’re really doing and how it’s all working.

We’re here to sustain awakened consciousness. Awakened consciousness is none other than our own true nature. It’s never anywhere but right here. You can’t get to it somewhere in the future. The part of you that imagines it’s somewhere in the future will never be ready for it.

So, let all of that go, and continue to let all of that go and give yourself to the practices always, with the fundamental position that this is it. This is the moment of awakening and not a special experience I’m trying to have. Awakening is simply the embrace of who and what I really am. And there’s no other place to get to than this place.

So our guiding inquiry is: how do I engage with my experience right now, in a way that no longer pushes my awakening and freedom into the future?