Spent my Saturday with Timothy Freke and about 20 other wonderful folks interested in awakening. The day was billed as, “A Guide to Enlightenment … and Beyond” which is the subtitle of his latest book, How Long Is Now? Tim delivered in spades.
(I am just now reading the book, so expect a book-report later.)
We gathered at the Unity Church at 2222 Bush street in my hometown of San Francisco. The place is wonderfully un-churchy and felt more like a town meeting hall to me. As we filed in and paid out monies we were asked to fill out name tags for ourselves, and for Tim. Took me a second to realize I should not write “Tim” on the one for Tim. 
The first sight I got of Timothy was his backside as he was bent over fiddling with his iBook, setting up the playlist for the day. That, and his amazingly colorful striped socks, set an appropriate tone for the rest of the day. Other people started filling in seats, and to my relief there was a lot of embarrassment and shy tension missing from the room, which is something I have come to expect from these sort of gatherings. It is like people come in with guilt on their sleeves fearing all their foibles will be exposed, or that they are inherently inferior to who they are seeing. I was glad that appeared to be missing for the large majority of the group. Tim also engendered a strong feeling of community and camaraderie.
Tim kicked things off with a few jokes and a guided meditation to get in touch with our deep motivations for being at the seminar. He then led us in a bit of getting to know each other. This was facilitated by each person talking a bit about what had brought them to the workshop, the order being determined by Tim randomly drawing our duplicate name tags from a bowl which looked like a Tibetan singing bowl which Tim explained with a big grin was just plastic.When it got to be my turn I was surprised to say that the motivation I had uncovered for being there during the meditation was, “For the joy of it.” (And, to see Tim’s socks, which were amazing!)
Tim then dug into a few of his basic insights. He led us into a deep experience of living from the one mind, waking up to the true nature of self, or what he calls “lucid living.” To whit:
- Life is a mystery. Tim’s tag line here is usually some variation of, “When you really look at it, you come to see very quickly that we don’t have the slightest idea of what this is.” In good modern spiritual adventurer form, “this” refers to reality, life, existence, the whole kit-and-kaboodle dating back to (and before) the big bang. We come up with lots of great ways of conceptualizing and speaking about what this is, but we don’t really know. All we do know is that something came from nothing, we don’t know how, and here we are. Getting in deep relationship with that mystery is part of what lends a child-like enthusiasm, joy, wonder, and wisdom to the spiritual endeavor.
- There is only now. This is one of the focuses of Tim’s new book. He made a lot of funny jokes and impersonations about someone trying to live, NOW! Always ready to jump, desperate to get into the now, perpetually missing the obvious point that they are already there and can never be anywhere else.
- Polarity. Tim also talked about holding opposites. The old concept of you can’t have a left without a right, or an up without a down. He talked about these as polarities and not paradoxes, putting for the definition of polarity as matched pairs that cannot possibly exist without each other. This converts seeing these opposites as an either/or situation into a both/and one.
- That brought us to the concept of Lucid Living. This is one of Tim’s cornerstones, and his working definition of awakening. Sometimes when you are in a very convincing dream you wake up to the fact that you are dreaming and enter a state of lucid dreaming. The dream doesn’t end, but you realize that you are the character in the dream, all the things in the dream, and the dreamer – all at the same time. In just that way when you wake up to your true nature you enter a state of lucid living where you realize it’s all a dream, you are a character in the dream and the dreamer at the same time. You are all of this.
- Lastly, when you wake up to lucid living, or as Tim also calls it being Deep Awake, you realize that all is one and open to a vast all-encompassing feeling of Big Love.
Taking the above points in pocket, life them becomes a matter of living with the polarity of this individual little dream character with all its foibles, flaws, achievements, greatness and banality and the true self which is the backdrop/ground/form and function of all that is.
Tim led us through several experiential exercises to get a good taste of what it can be like to live lucidly, seeing with big love the one self that is behind every form we encounter. He put us in pairs by drawing names randomly. These experiential exercises used sight, touch, and hearing in turn to let us feel through the forms using those senses to the one self behind each other. After each exercise Tim reminded us that the very cool thing was that, “That’s what we are doing all the time. We just don’t notice it.” After each exercise there was a lot of opportunity to share how the exercise had been for each person. Tim was very good at both keeping us on a general track, holding space for the talk to not get too far off line, and letting everyone have as much time as they needed.
Tim also spent some time debunking the idea that awakening suddenly means everything is perfect, rose smelling, and without pain. Reality is a polarity, and with joy there will always be sorrow. With gain there will always be loss. With life there must always be death. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, in Tim’s words, “That’s what makes all of this so wonderfully poignant.” This all continues, as it always has, before and after one wakes up to an experience of lucid living.
We took a break for lunch, and I shared some thai food with a lovely couple from Los Vegas who may be moving to San Francisco soon. Yay for new friends!
Tim ended the day with a group gratitude experience and a circle of holding hands. For me the whole thing skirted the edge of too-hippy-dippy, and was full of life, truth, wisdom and love.
Here are some of my personal “take aways” for the day:
- Be a story teller, not a story carrier. We all have stories. Tim mentioned during the workshop that if we stopped having stories we’d wither be unconscious, or dead. I agree. You can’t be a person comporting in the world without a story. It strikes me though that a lot of us sleep our ways through life just repeating the stories we have been told. We carry these stories around with us. “My father was a Christian, so I am too.” When you wake up to life a bit, you have the great opportunity to be a story teller, and story maker rather than just a carrier.
- Love = Unity. Tim mentioned that when he had his initial experience of oneness at the tender age of 12, a huge pervading feeling that all was actually love came over him. I agree. I think that in a way that’s what Love actually is, unity. When we feel love for someone, or something, or some situation it’s because we see the oneness that we share. Our separations drop and we are absorbed, literally, in (and with) the other who is no longer an other.
- Willingness to speak of, about, and as enlightenment. This is a big one. If you have had an awakening experience, to whatever level, you need to speak about it. There has been way to much garbage and baggage piled on what that means. It’s been made so special and so rarefied that almost no one is willing to claim their own experience of it. It’s also been couched in cryptic, confusing, and contradictory language. That all need to be cleared up, and awakening needs to be brought out in the open and shared. It needs to be taken out of the hands of a spiritual elite, and placed firmly back in the hands of everyone who has access to it, which is everyone. I am not in support of the idea of losing the importance of awakening in a free-for-all, but I am passionate about it being made widely available. Only in that way will a change on a global scale ever be made (whether in this lifetime or some other.) If you’ve had an awakening, at all, you should feel able to speak about it. I don’t think that means constantly pushing it in everyone’s face (which would be a disaster), but embodying your experience, keeping open abut it, and being willing to discuss it is a very positive thing to do.
- Lastly I like the idea of a wide scale Sangha United by Purpose. Tim is starting to do this with his Alliance for Lucid Living project. That may not be everyone’s personal style, but I really like his ideas of open sharing groups that meet in support of each others growth and exploration of what awakening means in our lives.
Whew! As you can see the workshop made an impression. I am in communication with the director of the Alliance for Lucid Living, and look forward to helping to get a local group going strongly. I’ll let you guys know how that progresses.
I’d love to hear any thoughts you guys have on lucid living, awakening, big love, or… anything else really.
Cheers!
Tags: Atma Vichara, Distinctions, Inspirational
