THE HEALING POWER OF 'INTEGRATED BEINGNESS'
HOW UNDERSTANDING OUR CONNECTION TO THE COSMIC REALM CAN HELP US ACHIEVE A MORE EXPANDED AND ABUNDANT LIFE.
Our connection to the cosmos.
In the last 2 episodes of this podcast, Understanding the mystery schools of ancient civilisations and Doubting Plato, I spoke about our individual connection to the cosmos as an important principle / concept when seeking substantial personal growth and lasting transformation.
Due to its nature, this concept can be quite abstract. Therefore, I wanted to take some time to dive into it deeper:
· What exactly does it mean to be connected to the cosmos?
· How does one experience it?
· And how does it manifest in a form in which we can experience in our physical realm?
In this episode I explain the concept I refer to as “Integrated beingness” which I see as the integration, union or meeting point two worlds which govern our existence: the physical world of form, and the etheric, spirit world of we often refer to as ‘universe’.
This union is important because achieving it can be very effective in allowing us to live a richer, fuller and more purposeful life, reaching a state that I refer to as “the expanded self”.
To demonstrate this concept practically, I begin by sharing a personal experience, one of the darkest moments of my life.
The healing darkness
In 2007, I began to run a business which, like many start-ups, had been a rollercoaster, experiencing many highs and lows.
One of the lowest moments of the company’s story, and of my personal life, came in December 2013 when the business overwhelmed with work, yet riddled with crippling and interminable cash flow issues caused by delayed payments by important clients, nearly shutting the business down.
As payday of December 2013 quickly approached, I became aware there were not enough funds to pay employee salaries. This devastated me. I had become accustomed to sacrificing my own salary numerous times, understanding that a business owner takes risks and those come with sacrifice.
But knowing that the problems of our business would affect the livelyhood of the hardworking members of my team paralysed me with fear.
Then came the blessing in disguise.
As part of a 1=year personal development program, I was due to head into a spiritual retreat at the time which meant I would be offline for 5 days. I raced and raced trying to sort the problem before going away and there was no solution in sight.
Knowing I wouldn’t be online during this time was like watching a car crash happening and knowing there was nothing you could do about it. Something told me I needed to participate in this retreat.
I was right.
Of the 5 days, 3 full days (day and night) were spent in a deep practice of a body of work called Continuum movement, a breath, sound and movement practice allowing us to connect to what they call the “cosmic anatomy”.
I had no choice to immerse myself deep in this practice, ever further away from the realm of reality in which I was desperate to find a solution to this situation.
These days were intense.
Immersed in darkness, we continuously followed breath and movement sequences which allowed us to reach a state in which we moved beyond the realm in which we commonly live into another realm, labelled the cosmic anatomy.
In this field, time and space didn’t exist, strange hallucinations appeared, as well as images of what seemed to be the past and the future, all woven in as one.
Days and nights were one, and the group of men seemed like one breathing body moving as an expanded whole, at one with everything else.
We emerged from this practice, to a cold snowy December day in Berlin,
Having returned to reality, I began to realise it was time to face the situation I had left behind, unsure what I would find.
In the situation I was in, I didn’t even have the funds available to pay the few hundred pounds for the retreat. A friend and fellow participant offered to help.
On our trip out to the cash machine, his card didn’t seem work. Rather than experiencing any distress, I heard a voice telling me to try mine, which was odd as there should be no money there.
I did, and by sheer miracle, money emerged, meaning salaries had been paid.
As I investigated further I found a mysterious, substantial, sum of money had appeared in our account, which I later identified as a mistake from a client which who we were due to start working with in the coming months.
They mistakenly paid us instead of another supplier, and had emailed saying we could keep this money as an advance payment of the work to be executed later on.
This amount was enough to pay the salaries and hold us long enough for things to turn around.
Could this all have just been luck? A coincidence?
I had a deep knowing that this apparent miracle had been a product of this 3-day dive into the waters of healing cosmic darkness.
Beyond saving us from an apparently inevitable car crash, this experience began a difficult personal exploration process which I was able to weather with the help of my newly available abilities for introspection: Abilities which allowed me to turn a situation of near bankruptcy into a rich and purposeful situation of lasting abundance, which I am still thankful to be experiencing today.
An understanding of cosmic healing
I have always struggled to understand exactly what happened in those 3 days.
Over the 6 years since this experience my life has transformed at an exponential rate.
I have worked with various teachers, experienced various practices, been initiated as a shaman, and completed various trainings which all exposed me to different ideas of multi-dimensionality which all seemed to share a common chord.
Mapping how I perceive all these parts coming together explains the work I do and the meaning of practices such as this podcast, in a way that I hope will be easy to understand.
I had always thought of the cosmos as a place far away, a wide mysterious expanse which I later realised we can access it via certain specific bridges.
What later became clear to me, is the principle of integrated beingness, which is the dance between the cosmic anatomy and what we call our physicality, our form.
Learnings from Sages and Saints
My exploration was nurtured by teachings from various religions and philosophies.
With Buddhism I understood the power of our thoughts on the shaping of our physical experience.
With Taoism I learned about the play between the world of form and non-form.
With Christianity I spoke about the connection between heaven and Earth and the human being’s connection to its ultimate potentiality, demonstrated by its incorporation of Godliness.
Information was then passed on to me by various teachers who shared their own teachings, often shaped by their own transcendental experiences.
I deeply resonated with these as I found myself experiencing massive growth as a result of the practice.
Learnings from Science
Then from a scientific perspective, one of the basic, foundational principles is that everything is energy, which was proven by quantum physics, more specifically by Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein’s Special theory of relativity.
Even the smallest nucleus of an atom is only energy.
This leads to a further understanding that our Physical universe is only a denser part of a much greater field which is immeasurable and invisible or undetectable to our traditional senses.
Researcher Joseph Selbie in his book, ‘The physics of God’, calls this field the Energy-verse, a term I love.
A series of famous and very significant studies called ‘The double-slit experiments’ gave birth to a few very valuable concepts:
· The wave-matter duality
· The intelligent observer paradox
· Locality vs non-locality
The wave-matter duality
In the double slit experiments, tests on light shows that energy, therefore everything around us, can be either in wave form or in matter form.
It also indicates that everything is essentially in wave form until it is perceived by an intelligent observer, in which case it becomes matter.
It is further understood that the form of this matter is shaped by thought, expectation and belief.
Locality vs non-locality
The proven fact that everything is wave until it manifests into form leads us to the concept of Locality vs non-locality.
Locality is the reality which is manifested in form, a 3-dimensional physical realm of form, in which we exist physically in which we experience things day to day, in which everything materialises.
Non-locality is the realm in which there is no time, no form, no limits: a 2dimension, non-locality which is a sort of holographic version of our selves.
What bridges the two is our consciousness.
Nobel prize winning scientist Werner Heisenberg, who was at the helm of all these studies, used the name ‘Potentia’ to define the realm behind matter which had no measurable form.
Continuous recreation
This leads us to the possibility that in fact in every moment our entire universe is destroyed and recreated, and the only thing making it what we perceive it as is our own expectation of its appearance.
One of the most fascinating bits of research I came across, also mentioned in Selbie’s Physics of God, is extensive research of people with MPD, Multiple Personality Disorder.
It has been demonstrated extensively that people with MPD have the ability to physically change their physical form, ie: the appearance of their eyes, scars, marks, and other physical attributes, various times per hour depending on which personality comes through.
This means that our physical attributes, and in fact everything in the physical world, is influenced by the non-local field in which exist our thoughts, beliefs and expectations.
As the universe is compose of this local 3-dimensional physical field and the non-local 2-dimensional field, so are we.
As human beings we have access to both worlds, both are interdependent on each other, affecting one another. The physical form will transition while the 2-dimensional non-local form will continue on.
So, if we all have this access, why do we get sick, suffer? Get in debt?
Why do we seem to be unable to ‘control things’?
Our life experiences which arise in the form of trauma, inherited patterns, or other will lead us to hold deeply-rooted beliefs and thoughts in the realm of our 2-dimensional non-local field, inhibiting our 3-dimensional reality.
For lasting and significant shifts to occur, changes need to happen in the invisible dimensions in which everything originates.
While all of us can be aware of the idea of this ‘invisible realm’, not all of us have the ability to function in this realm, an ability people such as Joseph Selbie and one of my main teachers Kenneth Ray Stubbs calls ‘Knowingness’.
According to this idea, what differentiates us from saints, sages and other miracle workers is that very knowingness.
As I became trained and initiated as a shaman, mainly through the training with Stubbs, I began to develop my own abilities for knowingness: enabling me to support others in transforming their lives.
Intention and manifestation:
So how does this relate to specific ideas of intention and manifestation known as ‘The law of attraction’, popularised by books such as “The Secret”?
My experience of manifestation and intention is not limited to asking for something specific and hoping for it to happen, but rather consciously working towards the resolution of deeply rooted beliefs and issues at an energetic level, the level of the non-local realm. When changes are enabled in this realm, beliefs shift and life transforms. Dramatically. Often in ways we could have never anticipated when intending with traditional methods.
It is therefore not about intending a specific result but nurturing a potent field in which the truth can arise in the form of miracles.
How?
The more time one can spend in the non-local realm the more likely he/she is to develop “functioning” and “knowing” abilities in it.
Regular practices which take us out of the local physical realm and allow us to spend time in the non-local realm do so (such as my 3-day dive in the waters of healing darkness).
This seems to be what the benefit of Ayahuasca, the traditional South-American hallucinogenic tea-drinking ceremony which enables us to experience the dissolution of our form, allowing us, by default to access a space of non-locality.
Meditation and stillness can allow us to disconnect from 3-dimensional “cultural” noise. Though often our minds can get jumpy, chaotic thought patterns distracting us. Therefore, practices which allow us to distract the mind and take us to an delta, alpha, theta state, such as breath and sound work, or the type of practice I present in these podcasts.
Regular work with a teacher who is highly developed and who has the ability to share knowingness abilities with you in a way that your own can be developed.
If intense work with a teacher or a retreat into darkness is too much for you, we can make softer, yet still significant changed such as spending more time doing work and hobbies which connect us to our purpose, spend more time connected with nature, engaging with art, or anything else which comes from a pure and heartful source, in favour of spending time in city centres, shopping malls, using social media, other forms of digital media, or anything else which is a condensed version of the cultural form.
In conclusion
So how does any of this explain what happened in my 3-day experience in a healing darkness practice?
I tend to see the financial roller-coaster experience of my business as a manifestation of my deeply-rooted unresolved beliefs, mostly stemming from past experiences, inherited patterns, cultural beliefs and the gift of past life karma being played.
I realised I inherited patterns which existed in my family, that abundance can be achieved but it can also be lost, yielding destructive situations.
There were also some important realisations about my lack of self-love which was being played out in these situations.
By 2013, at the time of this experience, I had already been doing personal work for 3 years and had engaged on 1-year self-discovery course, of which this workshop was part.
I learned there are no shortcuts to this work.
I believe the 3-day dive described earlier was instrumental in triggering a path of deep change, but it was a seed planted which needed to be nurtured. Along the way we are continuously asked whether or not we choose to accept the invitations presented along the way. Whether we decide to step further into consciousness and develop the many dimensions of ourselves.
It is this multi-dimensional living that can change our lives.