Secrets of Spiritual Happiness

Secret #7 -- Cultivate Dual Awareness

 

    

 

By Sharon Janis

 

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A seeker once asked the spiritual teacher Poonjaji, "Does enlightenment mean that you are always happy?   When you get angry, are you peaceful, happy and blissful inside?"

Poonjaji's response was:   "Happiness is permanent. It is always there. What comes and goes is unhappiness. If you identify with what comes and goes, you will be unhappy. If you identify with what is permanent and always there, you are happiness itself. Anger is one of my good friends. He is always there when I need him to transact some business. He is very useful. He does his work without disturbing me and then stays away till I need him again."

Part of this journey of spirituality and spiritual happiness is to train ourselves to look at events more through the uplifting eyes of our clear and powerful spiritual mind, and less through the eyes of those aspects of mind that create turmoil inside ourselves and in the world.

Instead of living mostly in the world of limited appearances, with just a few rare breakthroughs into deeper understanding, we can learn to live in the expanded awareness, viewing the world of appearances from that elevated perception.

This shift into greater awareness is generally a gradual process.   It's not so easy to completely turn off one part of your mind and turn on another, except in the rarest stories of beings who underwent massive spiritual enlightenment breakthroughs all at once.

One helpful technique for moving into the elevated perspective is to cultivate a dual awareness.   If some event causes your "lower mind" to freak out and respond in ways that are not conducive to spiritual happiness, you don't have to be stuck there alone, without your higher wisdom.   You don't have to accept that experience of lower awareness as the reality du jour , simply because you are experiencing it in a particular moment.   You don't have to wallow in turmoil until you've attained some sort of ultimate enlightenment and become free from all possible negativities. With dual awareness, you can include the blessed vision of your wise soul in your perception and experience of any events, including troubling ones.  

With dual awareness, you can watch the same circumstances from two different angles.   One eye may be on the nitty-gritty details of a situation, while the other eye sees the supreme consciousness that creates, guides, and exists as the spirit of everything.   For example, you can experience and express your opinions about worldly events without being torn apart by gnawing anger or stifling frustrations.

With dual awareness, we can learn to live in this world, while still seeing beyond the illusions of this world.   We are in the world, but not of it .   With dual awareness, we can have the best of both worlds - spiritual and material - rather than always feeling unbalanced on one side or the other.

The practice of dual awareness allows us to respond to events in our lives on the level of those events, even while our awareness is not limited to those levels. Each of us has an individual mixture of personal and karmic ingredients, therefore these various levels and combinations of lower awareness and higher awareness will be unique for each person.

With dual awareness, if someone does something to offend you, you may feel some anger or upset, and may express what you are feeling on an ego-based level of "I can't believe YOU did this to ME!"   But then, after - or even while - making your point, you can retreat into the higher spaces of spiritual awareness - whether through meditation or just your own remembrance and intention - and, from there, use the pure energy from that ego-based emotion of anger, fear, or love, to propel you even further into the realm of faith, acceptance, wisdom, and spiritual happiness.   With an approach of spiritual awareness, everything becomes grist for the mill of even greater spiritual awareness and spiritual happiness.

This practice of gaining access to our higher vision during challenging times helps us to become more patient, less reactive, and more spiritually happy.   Instead of living an aggressive life and getting into brawls with each challenge, we can enter a level of spiritual maturity that keeps us strong and clear, regardless of what does or doesn't come our way.

Ultimately, we may reach a point where there is simply no more room for anger or blame, regardless of what others may have said or done.   From an elevated perspective, everything is a great gift of life - whether it appears to be pleasant or unpleasant, fair or unfair.   The delineations of "good" and "bad" exist only on levels of awareness that are prone to judging, desiring, and fearing, and not on the levels of expanded spiritual awareness.  

Of course, a certain amount of judgment is necessary to exist and act in this world.   This is where the idea of dual awareness comes in handy.   With dual awareness, you can remember your supremely contented inner Self, even while acting in accordance with the outer circumstances of your life.   You can use your mind to judge each situation that comes before you, while still maintaining a higher, spiritual flow of awareness.  

Deep within yourself, you discover an ever-present flow of blissful, universal divinity expressing perfectly as you, as me, and as everyone else - all together, and all at once.   This experience is the foundation of spiritual happiness.

 

 

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