Awakening in Wholeness

Interview

Gazing, Heart Awakening, and Awakened Life!

An interview with Rod Taylor
by Eduardo Sierra for Mutuality Matters Issue #10

Gazing

Eduardo -- Initially, I was uncomfortable with gazing. It seemed so intimate and heck, you don't have sex in public right? Now I see it's a mysterious communion we share through the eyes from the heart. At last year's Transfiguration Retreat, I was gazing with Rod Taylor, he's a Waking Down in Mutuality teacher from way up north in Canada. First I was relaxing and wondering what form God might take in Rod; we'd not had a chance to relate before. Even though it was only a minute or two our gaze quickly went cosmic; I found myself in a timeless space. I remembered what I'd read about the eyes being the window to your soul, and that your soul is eternal. No wonder I felt like I was looking into eternity! The experience was mind-blowing, and afterwards I asked Rod how it had been for him. He said it was very strong and then went into a fascinating rap, with nifty little terms and very clear understandings about the nature of gazing. But, I didn't have my voice recorder going! So we promised to pick up our enthusiastic exploration of gazing at a later date. We talked November 15, 2008.

Eduardo: It was an amazing experience for me Rod, when we were together at the last Transfiguration Retreat (TR), in one of those medium-sized groups, you teachers were up front and we were all gazing. I have a certain kind of antennae for brightness, for radiance embodied as the filament lights up. You and I had met briefly a few years earlier at a previous TR but only had a small chance to get to know one another. In that moment of gazing I found it went really quickly from a sort of personal level to a transpersonal level, then beyond, into the eternal! So anyway there was some of that going on in our gazing and that totally fascinated me and compelled me to approach you afterwards. I wondered if we could pick up that thread now?

Rod: That'd be great.

Eduardo:So what happened, in your opinion, when you and I met at a recent Transfiguration Retreat, when we were gazing and it got so deep?

Rod: One thing I feel is a deepened, empowered quality about gazing in groups like that. When you have quite a number of teachers gazing with quite a number of people gazing back, it creates a deeper environment of transmission than I feel anywhere else. So that's one thing. Another is that within that deepened experience I am individually able to reside more completely in that wholeness of our Being.

Eduardo: Um hum, yes, beautiful!

Rod: In the gazing setting... there's an attention to that space and that place that people naturally find themselves deepening into. There is a quality of holy stillness or silence that becomes noticeable when you're being totally present with whole=Being.

Eduardo: I can dig it.

Rod: Gazing is a way the other person is able to open and connect. I say it that way because sometimes people will feel like, you go here and this teacher is doing such and such to me. It's so valuable for people to realize that this is their recognition, their realization. It's a setting in which there's a teacher connecting deeply with whole-Being within them, and in gazing is open and available to seeing and connecting with the student, and the student seeing and connecting with the teacher. That is the transmission or the resonance that is going on.

Then some people will find their personal stuff coming up. For example, they may feel unworthy, or perhaps angry towards their father, etc. It's appropriate to recognize it is not the teacher doing that, it's the resonance of Being that allows personal material to come into the light of awareness.

So likewise, a profound experience of the infinite may emerge during gazing in that deepened inner connection in resonance with the other. In the gazing experience you and I had, in that deepened space, we had an opportunity to allow the experience that our resonance in Being offered us in that moment.

Eduardo: Right. This matter, that you can gaze deeply into a person, finally into their soul, and you can see that the soul is eternal; do you get a sense of these dynamics?

Rod: Yes . . . during gazing I feel a strong sense of the ground of Being, which is in its essence a field of love, emerging within my heart and enlivening me from the soul level up. In gazing with the other, I experience this enlivened soul level of my being connecting with the soul level of the other, in love. It feels to me like loving the other from the inside out.

Eduardo: Cool. Say more about the heart.

Heart Awakening

Rod: About six months before that Transfiguration Retreat, I had a deep clarification of the condition of heart awakening that this embodied, non-dual (Second Birth) awakening really is. I had been aware that Saniel Bonder, founder of Waking Down in Mutuality, used the term “heart awakening,” but I wasn't clear what that meant after my awakening. Second Birth felt like a whole-being, whole-bodied awakening. There was no separation between me and anything I experienced. It was me arising in the pool of consciousness. But I wondered what did he mean by using the term “heart awakening?”

Then later I experienced a couple of significant shifts that answered that question for me. In the second deep shift I realized that consciousness had its seat in my heart. When people in traditional paths talk about awakening, it will often tend to be an awakening in the area of the head, as a head-oriented seat of consciousness. Well, I had been living in the embodied, awakened condition and I knew the seat of my consciousness was not located in my head whatsoever, it was actually whole bodied. However, in this more recent realization, it became crystal clear that this whole bodied awakening had its seat in my heart. And in that realization, it was clear that there is nothing outside of consciousness, therefore there is nothing that is outside of my heart. Everything exists within my heart.

Eduardo: Big Heart eh?

Rod: It was such a surprising realization. It occurred for me when I was in China traveling with a Qigong teacher's group in the high mountains on the China side of the Tibetan border. I had just spent the previous day hiking in the most beautiful place up to about 10 or 11,000 feet high. Afterwards, my body was feeling traumatized from strained breathing during a whole day of hiking from 10,000 to 11,000 feet. It was cold, damp weather, below freezing and it was snowing, and my whole breathing system and my body was very strained.

The next morning we were sitting in the bus, going to another location, and I was ruminating about my old habits of thinking. A remnant of an old idea I had was that you go to the mountains for spiritual experience, and I had had some of that uplifting attitude before coming to these mountains. And now here I was, feeling my whole body heavy and worn out from this breathing discomfort, and I'm thinking, boy this is a big contrast to what I'd been expecting.

Then, I realized that I'd been focusing on the discomfort of my body, while of course, I'm also always awakened in consciousness. Somehow, with the feeling of my body being physically weakened like this, in contrast to that as I tuned into consciousness I was able to recognize the subtle seat of consciousness was actually in my heart. Then I immediately realized that everything was held within my heart, nothing was excluded. I was in a country of a billion people, and my heart includes all of them, too! I realized that this is my nature within my heart, and of course there isn't anything outside of that. It was a beautiful recognition that brought understanding and experience about the nature of unconditional love.

Nowadays, after that realization, even if I feel crabby with someone, there is no denying that I'm still fully holding them in love in my heart.

The personalized heart, the heart chakra, can kind of open and close, based on what is going on around a person. This heart awakening, it is not specifically the heart chakra. It is the seat of all Being, of all consciousness. It doesn't open and close, it is the realization of whole-Being awakening.

Eduardo: oh, nice!

Rod: So, if I'm standing in a line and somebody cuts in front of me and I'm feeling grumpy towards them, it doesn't in any way displace the love that holds them. When I realized the seat of consciousness was within my heart, I also realized the fabric of consciousness is Love. It wasn't an intellectual idea; I was surprised to realize, oh! it is undeniably all Love. That is its nature. It isn't an emotion, where you're trying to feel something toward somebody. It isn't an emotion. It's a condition. It's the fabric of 'What Is,' the nature of 'What Is.' So that's different from the traditional view of the heart in which people feel the personal and emotional quality, which is of course very beautiful, but this is the ground of Being itself seated in the heart which is holding all that is in this fabric of love.

Eduardo: Isn't it like Einstein said: the heart is the master and the mind is the servant, only we have it backwards in the West?

Rod: That's a beautiful recognition. So often the common teaching is: do your best to be more loving. However, heart awakened love isn't something that you try to do, it's your nature and the nature of everyone and all that is; it's who you are. With this in mind, in the deepened opportunity to gaze with another in a group, the nature of love is the field in which the gazing is occurring and the experience of this is delicious!

Awakened Life

Eduardo: What's your sense of things since your Second Birth awakening? What is awakened life about?

Rod: For me there's a key contrast between living individuality, the way we've understood it in first life, and living Being in Second Life. In first life, there are considerations like: what are you going to be when you grow up, what are your personal goals in life, how are you going to resolve a difficult life situation? We tend to make decisions for the future that are reflections of our personality preferences combined with pressures of circumstances and beliefs. In second Life, after whole-Being awakening, those factors meld together with deeper inner knowing and confidence in Being, to support decisions and directions that are naturally arising in us and that feel deeply right.

Nowadays, whenever I ask myself, "What am I going to do?" the response is often, "I don't have a clue!" And that's the right answer for me, because there is a real shift from, "what am I going to do?" in which my mind needed to figure it all out, to "I'll know when I know and I'll let you know then."

In Second Life, some of the old habits and frameworks of our finite individuality that determined our decisions and directions in the past, may still exist and need to have their space in order to integrate in whole-Being awakening. In realization of embodied non-dual awakening, we can still simultaneously be aware of our finite individuality, and feel confused about how these dimensions of our self work together. Then we go through an integration process in which shadows and old frames-of-reference get digested and integrated into whole-Being awakening. The more this integration unfolds, the more there's the sense of Being living in, as, and through me. My experience becomes less and less distinguishable as differentiated aspects of non-dual awakened consciousness and finite personality; it is just all that is; with life increasingly integrated in wholeness.

Sometimes I sense there's a need to keep up with what's naturally going on in my life, what's naturally emerging in my life circumstances. My finite individuality may feel distracted from or resistant to certain things in my life based on old limiting preferences or opinions, when actually the circumstances emerging in my life are just what I want or are what are most needed by life in general. It takes time to get used to that recognition and to surrender to living Being. It is not separate from who I am, so I get to choose what I personally want to do, but what I'm choosing isn't different than what's naturally arising in me.

Eduardo: There's some kind of harmony!

Rod: Sometimes I feel like I'm choosing - like I'm standing on the bow of a big ship that is my life moving forward and I imagine I'm there leading the way; then at other times it seems like there's no choosing - like I'm sitting in the back of the ship of my life and I'm just there along for the ride. As we live more in the flow of whole-Being life, we can step forward and take initiatives we feel emerging in us. When we recognize that the impulses we feel in us are not different than who we personally are, and are not different than Being arising, we get to really live our dharma; we get to live our whole-Being purpose on earth.

Eduardo: Um, now that must equate to a certain satisfaction, or fulfillment, no?

Rod: Yes, exactly. It's the fulfillment of Being expressing, not being out of alignment with or separate from, but just Being. It can take years in awakened life for that to become clearer, trusting more and more, knowing that more and more.