By Claudio Medel
While traveling through Cashmere an old boat man once told me, “Never try and balance your two feet on separate boats. Keep both your feet firmly planted on one Shikara boat. This way you will never slip and fall into the water.” I obviously never paid attention to him until the day I was drowning in a lake of my own making…
So finally after decades of spinning way too many plates, I’ve come to the conclusion that to merge all my passions into one company is the only way my wondering soul can stay firmly planted in one creative endeavour. To create a brand that gives me the opportunity to merge my love of design, curating and spirituality is what Evoka is all about.
Below is an essay I wrote a few years ago while doing a master’s in transpersonal psychology. To understand the philosophy of Evoka there must be a clear definition of the essence of our motivation at the seed place. This essay provides the spiritual and scientific background needed to comprehend our philosophy.
The essay is scientific in nature, so I’ve added a few pictures here and there to make it easier to read ; )
The Science of Meditation and Time
The mind experiences time in a past, present, future linear timeline. Judging people places and things into good and bad moments leads to a fearful mind that runs away from past traumas and needs a future for salvation (Tolle, 1997). Pleasure and pain is the personal sensory perception of time that creates a lifetime of suffering. Pleasure becomes like, need, becomes greed and pain becomes hate, anger and violence. Both define the ego’s experience of linear time and the only way to transcend ego is to transcend both pleasure and pain concluding in a non-judgmental state of present moment mastery (Damasio, 2010).
A healthy ego is needed to begin with, one that accepts self and is defined by the highs and lows of our judgmental ways. Few have ever risen above this egotistical condition because the prescription is so hard to swallow, only the committed few, who have accessed a diligent and single pointed focus can grasp. What is needed is an intensity of focus so veracious that thought is ultimately schooled out of the pleasure/pain reaction and evolves into a non-judgmental compassionate state of present moment acceptance (Tolle, 1997).
An egoless state defines the transformative progression from the judgmental linear experience of time to the non-judgmental transcendence of present moment timelessness. Science articulates this awakening with just how time and matter unite into a conscious moment. Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein gave the world the theory of general relativity: Time is relative to speed and distance through space, rendering every moment in time a snapshot of an ongoing infinite present moment. Super String Theory has described the nature of matter as entangled energy: From atoms to stars the building block of the universe is an energetic entangled wiggling string (Green, 1999). We can go deeper into the rabbit hole with a new paradigm that suggests that all life is conscious, not just the human species. Using brain-imaging technology, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi put forward Integrated Information Theory IIT, explaining that all life experiences the world subjectively to varying degrees. Even single cell organisms are now conscious (Huffington Post). When we absorb quantum physics inference on matter and time, and now combine it with IIT – The standard for the consciousness model is collectively universal, energetically one and exists in an infinite present moment.
Consciousness, rather than being an epiphenomenon of matter, is actually the source of matter. It differentiates into space-time, energy, information, and matter.
Deepak Chopra
So if consciousness is united, why are we constantly judging and fighting with time? Antonio Demasio argues that Neuroscience and psychology have surmised the human conscious experience down to its core dysfunctional state.
Judgement begins with sensation at the reptilian instinctual hub of the brain, gets an emotional hit at the mammalian limbic hub, and finally becomes a judgemental thought at the rational human hub. Judgement begins at sensation and stress becomes the egotistic outcome (Demasio, 2010). Dissecting the Triune Brain into pieces give’s man the engine, a subject observing an object, but never the experiential wisdom of present moment union. Only consciousness can ever study consciousness (Osho, 1995) and so our biology needs training in order to merge the three evolutionary sub brains into a cohesive peaceful union.
A compassionate, non-judgemental psyche ends the ego’s pleasure/pain condition and the only way to transcend the ego’s sensory delusion of judgement is to retrain the senses where judgement begins (Hart, 2011). This was Gautama Buddha’s unveiling to the world. Through mindful observation of thought and sensation, he discovered the nature of the suffering mind and gave the world meditation as the prescription (Kornfield 1993). When asked what is enlightenment? The Buddha said, ‘The end of suffering.’ To meditate is to teach the subconscious to be at ease with change by allowing the moment to be. The reptilian mind’s language is that of the senses and so the instruction is based on the pleasure/pain sensations that are experienced while sitting still and trying not to think. The itch will pass. All things change and to understand this at the sub conscious level is the sensory retraining (Hart, 2011). It is not an intellectual game. It is a core level experiential teaching that transforms the sub conscious mind by holding onto a paused thought stream while focusing in on the itch that persists.
Judgement always breaks union with the present and so the path is to work on how to actually observe thought and sensation without judgment (Hart, 2011). This eventually opens the gateway to the unconditioned self, the self that is boundless of time, free of thought, in the moment, fearless and quiet. In the beginning of meditative practice we experience an uncomfortable head noise misery. Pleasure/pain sensation and wild racing thoughts are the mind’s natural state of ongoing suffering. This is why so many people give up on the practice. Science tells us the importance of mindfulness training (Huffington Post) but only a minority ever engage in it. We are all creatures of habit and the initial dedication to create habituation is where most fall short. By focusing in on breath and sensation daily, thoughts are finally schooled into a paused state. Once experienced, mind will for the first time encounter the peace and connection that exists when awareness transcends the linear experience of time.
Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it. Eckhart Tolle
The work retrains the sub conscious reaction from pleasure/pain to accepting what is. The first step is to recognise our wild insatiable mind. When we sit in silence all distraction is removed. We sit face to face with all our addictions, all our limitations and sufferings. There is no escaping the wild unconscious sensory mind. ‘Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It’s a way of entering into the quiet that’s already there – buried under the 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day.’ Deepak Chopra. The more we work with the practice, the more intimate the practice becomes, exposing all the mind games that used to take centre stage. The suffering mind begins to lose its grip, what was once full of desperation is now surrounded with a spaciousness that follows the desperation so intimately that it ceases to exist. The heart’s love surrounds the desperation. There is a calming, a soothing. A compassionate state now resides over what used to be suffering. (Kornfield 1993)
Imagine consciousness as a clear blue sky and thoughts as the suffering clouds that come and go. By observing the clouds, consciousness extends a pause in thought and becomes the sky. There is no self in the pause, no I, no judger, no actor in the past and future illusory games of the mind. You simply are, there is breath there is sensation. Identity is paused for a moment of blissful presence. Finally awareness recognises self not as the maddening thoughts that run rampant but as the united energetic bliss that is. A timeless gap in thought breaks the thinking ego’s reign over mind and a conscious aware egoless presence is awakened. Mind absorbs the pause and in so doing acquires discernment of an egoless state. Energetic bliss is irreversibly acknowledged, in actual present union not within a dualistic thought that’s read a book about the Buddhist analogy of the sky.
If you can resist the impulse to claim each and every thought as your own, you will come to the startling conclusion: you will discover that you are the consciousness in which the thoughts appear and disappear.
Annamalai Swami
Pausing thought takes time to master but as soon as we experience it, we now understand the bliss of the pause, the bliss of being in energetic timeless peace. We now have the keys to unravel consciousness. All we need do is continue with the practice. As focus deepens thoughts cease to run rampant. When the head-noise simmers down, it’s like clearing the static off the TV set. Once the static is gone there is stillness, a quiet calm that allows the senses to come alive as though for the first time. Thought and sensation merge into a paused united reverence that creates an intensity of focus that inturn heightens the sensory experience had. A tingling sensation envelops the body and quashes all itches, aches and pains. Once the focus can stay on sensation for extended periods, the tingling amps up like a radio dial elevating awareness into ecstatic transcended sentience that actually experiences the quantum vibration of life. We are all vibrating entangled energy and when focus is trained to explore at this depth, the experience is transformative.
A calming stillness that surrounds the judgmental head noise is now experienced and the prerequisite that leads to transcendence is determined by the level of love, dedication and tears, the meditator is willing to put in. We can now turn to science to access the highest levels of devotion. NLP Neuron linguistic programming is the science that teaches how to use the ego’s pleasure pain response to our advantage. Creating a thinking mind that is addicted to where we wish to head, producing the necessary chemical addiction that completely transforms the neuroplasticity of the brain. Granting the initiate the necessary habitual lifestyle that remains focused on the task.
The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors.
Tony Robbins
There are many tools available to help keep the focus on track. Intention must remain throughout our days if we are to access a true shift in consciousness and so creating a sacred space becomes an important factor in keeping the mind motivated. All spiritual persuit focuses in on intention. Intention is how the mind awakens, so too intention is the alchemical ingredient necessary for a mundane space to morph into a sacred temple for awakening. Intention is how a table becomes an alter, how a building becomes a house of worship, how a piece of art or jewellery becomes an accessory for spiritual empowerment. Holy men and women, monks, nuns, priests, healers, rabbis, aesthetics, vicars, sages, and gurus have all used mandalas, rosary beads, paintings, kippers, crosses, mala beads and a whole range of other accessories to enhance the experience of their practice.
The ritual that sets the intention is the elixir that morphs all mundane objects into sacred reverence because of the hours, days, months, years spent in a state of devotion within these settings. These spiritual accessories enhance the quality of consciousness because the object itself becomes energised by the intention that surrounds it. This is why we all ‘feel’ a certain way when we enter a holy place. It’s not the bricks themselves it’s the decades of intention that creates holiness.
Using NLP, ritual intention settings and harnessing the power of sacred objects for prayer and meditation all add to the much needed habituation of the mind so as to help keep the focus on track. Once we dedicate to the practice, consciousness begins to reach deeper levels of mindfulness and ultimately becomes razor sharp, amplifying sensation and merging our physicality into an energetic vibration that takes over all sense of self. Consciousness now travels into even deeper states of awareness where stillness comes to life by actually sensing the energetic realm that is, creating a state of rapture that ultimately transcends the experience of time. One minute of pure ecstasy can feel like hours and yet hours in this state can be experienced in a moment. The transcendence of linear time into a united timelessness is actually experienced. Not a mental game of thoughts, but a true experiential learning of energetic matter at the Quantum Planck Scale. The sensations experienced here are pure union. A joy so deep that pure bliss is the natural state the cosmos exists within (Osho, 1995). People think this is the reason to meditate, but on the next sit the aches and pains are back and we find ourselves wishing for a paused unitive ecstasy but experience a pondering disconnected misery instead. Here meditation unravels its final layer. No mater the experience, the student remains equanimous and finds a peaceful resolve for the moment had (Hart, 2011).
To meditate is to intuit the compassionate summit of consciousness way before our rational cognisance is ready to enact it. To experience the absolute, in energetic bliss and egoless union, even if only for a moment, affords our intuition the absolute wisdom of the compassionate summit. This wisdom shines a light on the suffering head-noise so bright that we become determined to seek out this summit of experience in our day to days altering the linear experience of time forever more. A wilful determination to meditate is now activated, ultimately unravelling a paused mastery of the still point. During these lucid timeless rapturous moments consciousness expands into a quality of love and compassion the likes no thinking mind can comprehend (Osho, 1995). We then open our eyes and are back to full time judgmental thinking but have gained a transformative insight into the power of now and so try our best to enact that same compassionate frequency with our collegues, family and friends. We take what we learn during meditation and then use it to observe the nature of time throughout our life.
Time is both an internal subjective experience of the present and an ontological external experience of the cyclic season at hand. The work is to remain in internal present mindfulness while accepting the external present season. By accepting the cycles of life we come back to the still point that is always the now. We move from the season of our present suffering to the poetic truth of the timeless ever-present moment that is. Winter is needed just as much as summer for life to exist. Without one we would have no knowledge of the other, and so to have mastery over time we must include the feast along with the famine. A great practice is to try and catch thoughts that separate any physical form (Tolle, 2001). Observing matter as united is extremely difficult because our senses have already described matter as separate. So the job is to use our intuition to focus on matter at the quantum level. Life form is a great place to start. Focus on the essence of what the life form actually is. Yes it is a tree, yes it is bark and the rings of wood, but it is also the atoms and the quarks and ultimately it is a symphony of energetic entangled vibrating strings. By focusing on the quantum truth of the tree we find our conscious awareness coming to a quiet place of timeless being that unites to the un-manifest energetic vibration of life. Drop into this aliveness. Focus on the dimension where everything is energetic. Look at your hand in front of the tree and intuit the energetic dance between the two entangled forms. Now focus on the body, intuit the dance of energy that is making you breath and keeping you alive. When consciousness unites with energetic matter, a timeless quality surrounds the moment of experience.
The main effort with the practice is to transport this timeless united experience into the here and now. Once the mind is trained to accept a united moment during meditation, we then focus on accepting the hurricanes of life as the cyclic yin/yang moments of life. Hurricanes are jackpots for the self to unravel. During the hurricane the self is so deep in the misery that the jackpot takes years sometimes decades to unravel (sometimes never) but when consciousness is trained to include all seasons, the jackpot can be grasped much faster, so much so, that as the hurricane begins to blow consciousness can instantly come to ease because time is no longer needed as the antidote. Time is now present. Compassion now surrounds the season, the mind accepts because it has figured out the power of the jackpot within the hurricane. Both are now viewed from the same vantage. Consciousness finally integrates entanglement and views all cyclic moments as necessary, creating a peacefully accepting state that finally unites with time.
Time remains the same the only difference is the quality of consciousness we bring to the moment. With dedicated perseverance the mind is ultimately trained to observe from an energetically united spaciousness and so can remain equanimous with the cycles that produce the pleasure/pain experience (Tolle, 2001). Compassionate observation surrounds the suffering timeless still point. The fearful thinking mind now transcends the illusion of separation and unites to the underlying energetic ocean of vibrating strings that we then see as a tree, as a river, and also as that menacing neighbour. Now a compassionate union is always present, during the bliss and during the hurricane. Consciousness finally transcends the egotistic experience of linear time and travels into the universal experience of timelessness.
We are all entangled energy that exists in the infinite present moment. And we are also separate mammals fearing the external and needing guidance. This is the conscious conundrum we face. Mentorship and guidance now becomes an absolute necessity and the most comprehensive path, the clearest energetic tuition man has, exists within the Hindu Religion. The energy centres are a spiritually conscious course of action that introduces the fearful thinking mind towards the exact steps of induction that leads consciousness out of its biological dysfunction and directly into the non-judgemental summit.
What you will find as you work with each centre is the progressive step-by-step nature of consciousness. The energy centres begin with survival tendencies move to love at the centre and progress into unity consciousness. We all need to become intimate with each centre and work towards finding balance with each. Taking the necessary action to balance ones life and unite ones mind is the work and the energy centres provide the clearest map on the road to awakening.
Meditation alone will not work. We are mammals and as such we need to empower the fear. The energy centres teach a timeless empowerment that was true thousands of years ago and remain true today. Meditating on the energy centres and creating an intimate intention around each, that then empowers action on each, is how we transcend our mammalian nature.
With the energy centres as your guide, now meditation becomes the software that instructs acceptance into our unconscious biology, an instruction for the conscious mind to intuit our timeless united is-ness. Meditation is not an exercise in accepting the external it’s an internal transformation of the subconscious where judgement begins. With diligence the mind will transcend the boundaries of self into moments of transpersonal union. The real life experience then becomes one that is grounded in union, a consciousness that sees through the judgement of like/hate and instead focuses on a united compassionate resolve.
Experiencing union internally begins the unravelling nature of mind. Once deeply rooted in the practice, all moments become a mindful observation of acceptance. Ultimately the summit of compassion is experienced when union is always present. Meditation is the shadow boxing for this compassionate truth to be experienced in everyday living. It is the necessary training so that when we step into the ring of life, we can begin to hold our own understanding of a universal consciousness that ultimately becomes one with all and so accepts all moments of experience with a fearless state of compassionate love. The parables of Christianity expose this essence best. Jesus’s intimacy with the present moment resolves the psychosis of linear time where the egotistical pleasure/pain sensory reaction transcends into the united summit of compassionate love. Love for the pleasure and compassion for the pain is to be perfectly equanimous with the imperfections of life. Conclusively united with time and matter. Intimately present, intimate with the loving joys and intimate with the compassionate sorrows is a mind that has unravelled a meditative state within all moments of encounter. A consciously united, non-judgemental state of present moment being that intuitively surrenders to the timeless present.
References:
Damasio, A (2012) Self Comes To Mind: Constructing the conscious brain
Green, B (1999) The Elegant Universe
Hart, W (2011) The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bobby-azarian/post_10079_b_8160914.html
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-science-behind-mindfulness-and- meditation_us_59677a0de4b07b5e1d96eda1
Kornfield, J (1993) A Path with Heart: A guide through the perils and promises of a spiritual life
Osho (1995) What is meditation?
Robbins T (1991) – Awaken The Giant Within
Tolle, E (2001) The Power of Now: A guide to spiritual enlightenment
