Forget spiritual amnesia, try human amnesia!

Like me, do you want to remember who you really are? Do you want freedom? Do you want to see with fresh eyes, innocent eyes, a world beyond the personal preferences, judgements and limitations of the Ego mind? Do you want to wake up? If you truly answered yes to all these questions, then read on…

(Just to say first, using words like ‘me’, ‘ you’ and ‘I’ reveal where me, this human man typing, who goes by the name of ‘Rob Holmes’ is at! I am where I am. He is where he is. In a process of remembering… Words can be clumsy and un-workable describing this process, but ‘I’ will have a go…)

My passion is waking up and sharing thoughts and experiences with other fellow beings that are also waking up. Waking up from what, you may ask? Waking up from the dream that we are just material human beings on a planet called Earth, floating in a universe barren of life, that life is random and that when we die, that’s the end of us.

Is it any wonder so many humans feel depressed and resort to anti-depressants or worse, they check-out altogether?

The more asleep we feel, the more disconnected we perceive we are from the truth of what we really are, the more we are out of alignment with our true self, the more it hurts! And boy, does it hurt. It’s so painful to forget.

In my earlier years, I felt like a china vase that was slowly being shattered into small, fragmented pieces. I started off as a baby, all knowing and complete. I don’t blame them at all, but then my asleep parents and asleep school teachers started giving me names and labels for all the seemingly separate objects in our world. Then the cracks started forming. The fragmentation began… But how can we reverse this process? Re-assemble, re-unite, re-member? Read on…

Thank God, something amazing is happening across our planet - the frequency of consciousness is rising and like the tide rising, we are all being lifted up. Some people are resisting and clinging onto the rocks as the water level rises – they are quite naturally frightened to let go of their beliefs about what they think they are? And what is more scary to the Ego-mind than losing all worldly possessions?

Losing ourselves.

Who would we be without our stories, without our name, our family, our education, our job, our religion, our beliefs, our identity? That is the big question. Who are we?

‘Only the Ego is born. Only the Ego can die’.

So this morning I was watching a recording of Mooji teaching. I love the teachings of Mooji. He is a student of Papaji, who was a student of Ramana Maharshi. We are all students of course, all linked together in a seamless loop of forgetting and remembering our true nature. It’s like a Mexican wave in a stadium. Once we start remembering, we automatically trigger the awakening in another. One light bulb coming on, turns on another light bulb. ‘We’ unfold and consciousness unfolds too.

In his teaching, Mooji illuminates a path for us - a path to waking up. In some ways it’s so simple and yet the Ego-mind is not easily willing to give up, surrender and disappear. Like a fish taken out of water, the Ego-mind fights for survival.

I am sure you know, that a fish out of water does not die from a lack of oxygen, even though it appears to gasp for air – it dies because, being designed to filter oxygen in the water, it cannot cope with the volume and intensity of all the oxygen in the air. Maybe the Ego-mind cannot cope with the amount of love and light and it fights back. It is not accustomed to ‘being’ love. It’s been so focused on looking for love outside of itself, it cannot cope. It’s a total love overload.

So here is the exercise Mooji describes for waking up. It’s simple and yet profound. Today, it’s having quite an effect on ‘me’, whoever ‘me’ is!

Just as we tend to take our shoes off as we enter a house, Mooji invites us first to sit quietly and leave a lot more than just our shoes as we enter this sacred space.

At the door, leave behind our past. That means our names, our identity, our possessions, our family, our history, our stories. Take your time. Most of us have quite a lot to unload!

Next, leave behind our future. It’s only imagined and almost always a projection of the past in any case. Give up on thinking you know what is going to happen. None of us really have any clue what is going to happen in the future, from breath to breath, it’s all a complete mystery. The future does not exist. We never get there. We live here and now. Always have, always will.

So finally, having left the past and future behind, leave behind any thoughts we have about this present moment. Just notice what Mooji calls the ‘is-nes’ of the space that opens up in this space where there is no past and no future.

To me, this space feels: still, peaceful, timeless, unaffected by anything, aware, all encompassing, all-welcoming, smiling.

Sometimes I cry tears of joy when I re-connect with this space, this presence. I say re-connect, but that’s not true. We are always connected. It’s only our Egoic self that forgot.

After the tears, sometimes I laugh, hysterically! It’s so funny. The funniest joke you’ve ever experienced. It’s the welcome Home laugh.

So Mooji’s teachings, passed on from others who have woken up, is actually quite simple. If being asleep means having spiritual amnesia, then one way of waking up is to have human amnesia.

Sometimes this experience is so powerful, people experiencing a full-on waking up do indeed, for a while, forget their own names and family. (Read Byron Katie’s book, ‘A mind at home with itself’). However, I believe this is just a stage and eventually there is an equilibrium reached, where the Ego-mind is absorbed into the Whole and memories can still be accessed, giving context to lives still being experienced through a human body.

My guides and teachers help me to understand visually, so I drew this diagram to try and show how waking up might look. See if it makes any sense to you. There is no wrong or right place to be. We are all where we are and there are so many paths to waking up. We are each in the perfect place for us, right now.

Wherever you are on this amazing journey of discovering your True Self, I send you my love. We are all in this together and it’s so helpful to connect with this waking-up community across the world.

In your street, village, town or city, you might feel like the odd one out, the fish out of water, the ‘weirdo with the beardo’, the misfit, the sensitive one, the hippie, the radical. Welcome friends. We are the way-showers. Be brave. This is all very natural. It’s how the universe unfolds. It’s how we unfold.

Exciting, isn’t it?!

- Rob Holmes