Live the Continuous Experience of Wholeness
Tom Stone
Live the Continuous Experience of Wholeness
Copyright © Tom Stone, 2012
All rights reserved.
Smashwords Edition
Published by: Great Life Technologies, Inc.
1941 Cassia Road #201
Carlsbad, CA 92011
(760) 277-5801
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.
Contents
Escaping the prison of identification
The Three Central Core Dynamics
Looking for Yourself Where You Are Not
Resisting Feeling Things Fully
Introduction
The process of having a spiritual awakening is something that has long been considered to be either a lengthy and arduous process or a spontaneous event that occurs somewhat mysteriously. Both of these notions about spiritual enlightenment come from either a lack of understanding about what true spiritual experience really is and/or commonly held misunderstandings about how to access and maintain such genuine spiritual experiences.
Some people have spontaneous spiritual awakenings and they experience a genuine state of living in a continuous experience of wholeness all the time. However, it's one thing to have the experience of living in pure awareness or wholeness all the time, and it's another thing to understand the mechanics of how to get there. This is because when you have a spontaneous spiritual awakening, it doesn’t necessarily come with the manual that explains how you got there or how others can get there too.
One of the well known people who has shared his experiences of having a spontaneous spiritual awakening in our modern times is the now famous author Eckhart Tolle. His writings about what the state of living in wholeness all the time is like in his various books like the Power of How and A New Earth are beautiful and eloquent. It certainly appears that he indeed has had a genuine spiritual awakening. He and others who know what living the continuous experience of wholeness is like often describe the attributes of being in this state beautifully. As Tolle correctly expresses in his writings, there are two fundamental things that need to occur in order to be able to live in a continuous state of wholeness.
One of them is to resolve what he calls the pain body, which is the collection of stored emotional pain that we've not been able to process and complete. The other thing that is needed is to extract yourself from being identified with stories that comprise what is called the ego. The ego is the false sense of self that is made up in the mind. This is when we are getting a sense of who we are from the stories that we have made up in our mind about the past and our projections of what things may be like in the future.
Because most people don’t have the internal reference of the experience of their essential nature that is their own Pure Awareness they look for a sense of who they are from their life experiences. The most likely candidates are things that have been around for a long time. At least there seems to be some sense of stability to the stories about events that have happened and to the hopes and aspirations about the future.
The cumulative “database” of all of these stories about our life experiences, all of our memories, hopes, dreams, projections, aspirations, fears, worries, anxieties, disappointments and so forth serve as at least some kind of internal, self-defining reference when the experience of what we really are has been evading us.
Tolle’s observation that the ego and the pain body comprise the two things that get in the way of living in wholeness all the time appears to be quite accurate. My own observations are similar but it seems that something more is needed. Seeing that the barriers to living the continuous experience of wholeness are the ego and the pain body is valuable. But I believe that we need to take the understanding yet further and provide deeper knowledge about the how – how to efficiently resolve the emotional pain that comprises the pain body – and how to come out of the insidious grip of identification with all of the stories about our life that make up the ego.
Since the early 1990s I have been pioneering a new field called Human Software Engineering or HSE. HSE provides some new and penetrating insights into the real underlying causes of human problems.
In the development of HSE I was fortunate to discover that the basis of human problems lies in the accumulation of two databases of what I call not-useful emotions. These two databases of not useful emotions can be called Identifications and Incompletions. Identifications are the components of the ego. Incompletions are the components of the pain body.
Identifications
I have observed that every identification, every story that is a part of the ego, has a subtle (or not so subtle) “emotional charge” to it. The emotional charge is a field of energy. These energy fields of the emotional charges of our identifications are like clouds or auras of energy that radiate out from the body into the space around us engulfing us. We live and experience life from inside of these cloud-like fields of energy.
Because we are inside of these clouds of energy we look at the world “through” them as if we had on a pair of dark glasses. Looking through an energy field creates a kind of tint or coloring to everything we experience and makes it seem like the stories that we are identified with are very real.
Constantly seeing the world through the clouds of these self-created energy fields seems to be the mechanism of identification. The seeming realness of the stories and associated energy fields lock us into believing that the stories are real, even though they are only made up in our mind and don’t exist anywhere other than in our mind.
There are two kinds of identification stories. I call them projections and expectations.
Projections are the stories about things that we are afraid might happen (or not happen) in the future. These stories create the energy fields of our fears, worries and anxieties.
Expectations are the stories about what we think we want to have happen or not happen. In order to understand what expectations are we need to make a distinction between expectations and intentions.
Expectations are stories made up in the mind. They are hopes, needs, wants, and ideas about what we think would be good for us to experience or what we want to avoid experiencing.
Intentions are quite different. Intentions are perceptions of things that are coming but we are not in direct proximity to them in time and space yet. You might think of intention as “remembering the future.” We have these rememberings of the future frequently but we are also deeply conditioned to negate or doubt these experiences.
So most people don’t have a clear distinction between expectations and intentions and can’t easily tell the difference. Part of the problem is that both expectations and intentions are typically formulated as thoughts. But even though they share the similarity of being structured as thoughts the origin of each of these types of thoughts is completely different. Intentions are the perceptions of what is coming. Expectations are made up in the mind and are stories about things that are not going to occur, as they exist only in the mind and nowhere else.
Contrary to popular belief, repeatedly affirming one’s expectations doesn’t bring them into manifestation. If something only exists in the mind and not in reality it is not possible to coerce the universe into bringing it about. This is the missing distinction in the movie – The Secret that encourages putting your attention on what you want rather than what you don’t want or what you fear might happen. Certainly it is good to not dwell on your fears but it is not possible to stop doing that simply by deciding to stop. There is too much emotional charge to the stories that generate the expectation thoughts and this charge typically is stronger than our will to not have such thoughts and we end up having them anyway.
Being able to make the distinction between intention and expectation and not waste your time and life energy trying to force the universe to show up according to your will results in a lot less struggle and suffering in your life.
What is needed is to learn how to experientially come out of the grip of the energy field of an expectation or projection and in the process bring your awareness into direct contact with Itself. Your awareness is that part of you that you use to experience everything. It is the essential nature of what you really are. There is no more essential aspect of you than your awareness as it is that aspect of you that makes it possible for you to have every experience that comes to you. What could be more the essence of what you are than this?
Incompletions
The other category of barriers to living the continuous experience of wholeness all the time is the database of not-useful emotions that make up the pain body. These are called Incompletions because each of them is a pattern of emotional energy that is a response to some intense experience that we had in the past and the emotional response was so strong that we just could not fully process it. This is our emotional baggage. These are the old emotionally painful and traumatic experiences that we just don’t want to have to feel, remember or deal with.
As such we attempt to archive them and stay as far away from them as possible. The accumulation of these unresolved traumatic painful experiences form what Tolle calls the pain body. I prefer to just refer to these painful experiences as simply a database of emotionally painful energies stored in the body. The idea of a “pain body” creates the impression of something that we become identified with. And indeed we do. Many of our old emotionally painful experiences have been with us since early childhood and they seem like they are a part of us. But this is just because we are deeply conditioned to avoid them and are not trained in how to efficiently complete the experience of the energy fields of these old pains. As a child we were easily overwhelmed by the experience of these intense emotional energies. We became deeply habituated to avoid them at all costs. They form the basis of addictive behaviors. We take our “drug of choice” in order to “self-medicate” and avoid having to face and feel these old painful emotional energies in our bodies.
What I will be sharing with you in this book is what it would take to actually be able to live the Continuous Experience Of Wholeness. I was very fortunate to have a spiritual awakening myself in the summer of 1997. After many years of practicing Transcendental Meditation I was quite familiar with Pure Awareness as I normally experienced it every day many times during my meditations. But I noticed that even after 30 years of meditating I would still sometimes get caught up in the grip of emotion and the experience of that beautiful infinite, expansive silence of Pure Awareness would get over-shadowed by the emotional energy. In 1997 I was very fortunate to discover a process of doing the exact opposite of what we are deeply conditioned to do. We are deeply conditioned to go away from the intensity of the energy of our emotions. What I was fortunate to discover is that if we go the other way, not away from the emotional energy but instead go right to the heart of it and feel down into it until there is nothing left to feel, we free ourselves from the emotional energy and re-establish the direct experience of Wholeness, Pure Awareness.
It was after practicing resolving a number of these painful emotional energy fields that I had the experience of going into the silence of Pure Awareness and having the sense of who and what I am shift from the illusion that I was an isolated individual to the reality that what I truly am is the infinite expansiveness of Pure Awareness Itself.
The technique that I used to resolve the emotional pain that freed me to be able to live the continuous experience of wholeness I call the CORE technique and I am going to teach you how to do this technique in this book.
The CORE technique is a technique for completing incomplete experiences. This is the pain body stuff, incomplete emotionally painful experiences from the past. I discovered it by seeing somebody do something similar to it. Then over the years I have refined it and made the description of how to do it both simpler as well as more precise and effective than what I originally saw.
The first time I did the CORE technique, the emotional energy that I felt into was anger. Underneath the anger was a layer of hurt so I felt down into the center of the intensity of that energy field too until it was also gone. Underneath the layer of hurt was yet another layer of emotional energy, a kind of sadness. So I felt into that until it too was gone. A fourth layer then revealed itself, a feeling of loneliness. After feeling into the center of intensity of the loneliness until it too was gone I found myself in the field of silent awareness that I was quite familiar with from my many years of meditation.
By the time I got through the last layer of this feeling of a loneliness all that was left was the experience of wholeness, just the experience of pure awareness, and I thought: “Wow, this is incredible, there's a way out of the grip of emotion and the way out is IN. I’m going to get really, really good at this. Every time I get caught in the grip of emotion I’m going to do this.”
I dedicated myself to doing just that. Every time I would find myself getting caught up in the grip of an emotion I did the CORE Technique and resolved it. It only took a few months to resolve enough of these emotional energies so that I shifted from experiencing myself as an individual to experiencing myself as the Totality. When this happened I must have laughed for a full five minutes at the huge cosmic joke that I had ever thought of myself as an isolated individual. It was an amazing experience unlike any other in my life and fortunately it's never gone back to how it was before.
So when I write to you in this book about living a continuous experience of wholeness I am writing to you about that because I've been living in that state since 1997; that's my everyday reality. Now this doesn't mean that I don't have emotions or I don’t have a whole range of human experiences, but those experiences don't overshadow the experience of the wholeness. So I just want you to be aware that what I’m writing about in this book it’s not from theory, it’s from my own practical experience.
One of my other books is called The Power Of How. In the Power of How I explain what the missing ingredients are that are not in Tolle’s The Power Of Now. As beautiful as The Power of Now is, because Tolle’s experience was one of a spontaneous spiritual awakening, he doesn’t provide precise and simple guidance for “HOW” to resolve the pain body and the ego.
I was fortunate to not only have the experience of awakening to the continuous experience of wholeness but to be blessed with the clear understanding of exactly how to complete the incomplete experiences that comprise the pain body and how to extract yourself from the energy fields of identifications in such a way that you are, in fact, no longer identified with the stories that create the ego.
As a result when you no longer have enough emotional pain to form a pain body and you no longer have enough identifications to keep you trapped inside of the energy fields that create the ego, then the natural consequence is that you begin to live the continuous experience of wholeness. This is the most direct, fastest and easiest way to gain the state of spiritual enlightenment, spiritual awakening that I know of. It is much faster and more efficient than simply feeling the whole field of the emotional pain. That’s OK but it's not efficient. It takes a long time and most people get discouraged before they resolve enough of their emotional pain to be able to then wake up to the reality of their essential nature. The CORE Technique teaches you how to resolve emotional pain (Incompletions) in the most efficient and effective way so far discovered. The SEE Technique teaches you how to extract yourself from the stories that comprise the ego (Identifications). I'll explain why this is so in detail as I give you the guidelines for how to actually do the CORE and SEE Techniques later in the book.
So the knowledge in this book is coming from my own personal experience which is why I'm able to write to you from experience rather than theory.
The other thing that I mentioned at the beginning of the book that people have as a barrier to living the continuous experience of wholeness is that there’s a broadly held belief that to gain spiritual enlightenment requires long practice of austere procedures. This wide-spread belief is so common simply because the proper understanding of how to access Pure Awareness and make this state a permanent reality have not been readily available. As a result people have been essentially using the wrong tools for the job. When you use the wrong tool it’s like trying to dig the Panama Canal with your bare hands. It’s going to take a long time and not be very fun.
One of the reasons that people have been using the wrong tools is due to misinterpretations of ancient descriptions of the state of Pure Awareness. For example, in some ancient Vedic texts it says that in the state of Pure Awareness there are no desires. And indeed this is true. In Pure Awareness there is nothing but Awareness itself, no thoughts, no perceptions, no needs, no wants, no desires. It is just a state of awareness being aware of itself.
But when people have read about this state and seen that in the state of Wholeness there are no desires, the misinterpretation was taking the ends as the means. People thought that if they just get rid of desires then they would have the experience of being in Pure Awareness. This has lead to all kinds of austere practices involving attempting to get rid of desires. It has also lead to people adopting reclusive and austere life styles in valiant attempts to gain enlightenment.
This doesn’t work. It’s getting it backwards. In Pure Awareness itself there are no desires. But when your awareness is grounded in Pure Awareness permanently you still have desires but they don’t overshadow the experience of the awareness. The experience of desires is different. You’re not attached to them or identified with them.
So now with the development of the Pure Awareness Techniques it is possible to not only directly experience Pure Awareness quite easily with the GAP Technique, it is also possible to rapidly cultivate a state of living the continuous experience of wholeness using the other Pure Awareness Techniques primarily the CORE and SEE Techniques that you’ll be learning in this book.
About Wholeness
Just think about what wholeness means to you.
Now thinking about wholeness will only give you an intellectual understanding of it and if you haven't actually experienced wholeness, then you don't really know what it is, because to really know something you have to have the direct experience of it.
For example if I had a strawberry and you had never ever tasted a strawberry before – just imagine this – and I sat there and talked to you for an hour describing the taste of a strawberry, would you know what a strawberry tastes like? The answer is obviously no; you wouldn't, because you've never actually experienced it. If I gave you the strawberry and you took a bite of it, now all the description of sweet, tart, juicy, little crunchy seeds, now it all makes sense, because there's a direct experience to correlate the explanation to.