June 29, 2013 Saturday Evening, Trainings Workshop
Co-Creating from the Deep Spring of the Akashic Field
(Because of rain we have changed our schedule; no campfire. We began the evening with a guided meditation and some exercises, not recorded)
Aaron: I’m asking if they could feel the spaciousness. You always have the choice, but sometimes you are so deeply conditioned that you forget you have the choice.
At the next workshop we’re going to practice with some of the exercises in non-violent resistance that Barbara learned many years ago. How to work with others who are agitated and find the place of clarity and love in the self, and invite that from others rather than getting caught up in their agitation, and how we do that. And specifically, how we enter into the akashic field to do that. So there’s one level of doing it from the ego, which can lead to some wholesome results but also some mixed results, and another level of doing it from this place of pure awareness, which watches the ego as an object without getting caught up in its stories.
I’m not going to go into that tonight. We may do some of that tomorrow. But I want those of you who are newer to meditation to have a chance to settle deeper into the practice, practicing at home this month so you’re ready to come back and go deeper from a deep experiential place, not just from the brain.
May I ask, how many of those of you who plan to be part of the whole four weekend series have no vipassana experience other than the little bit that we did today? What I’d like to do, if it’s suitable to you, because this is such an important part of the work, is to offer some added vipassana instruction, I know Deep Spring offers a session in August, but I’d like to see you get this before then. Barbara and I will need to talk about it with some of the others, to set up perhaps a Saturday morning up at Barbara’s cabin for the 5-10 of you who would benefit from this, to come out for a few hours on a Saturday morning and we’ll just work with vipassana practice. Do those of you who have no vipassana experience feel that would be possible for you? How many of you could do that? (most) Okay. Please make sure that we have your names… (details on scheduling not transcribed)
Moving on, then, to questions.
Q: If there aren’t any questions, I’d like to hear a story about one of your lifetimes where you used akashic field work.
Q: I wondered if you could say something about the relationship between dzogchen and the akashic field.
Aaron: We introduced this a bit at the beginning of the day today. Dzogchen is a practice from the Tibetan tradition. It has two levels, trekchod and togyal. The trekchod is the practice many of you have done with me at the June retreats. We have not labeled it as trekchod, just “Pure Awareness Meditation,” sitting eyes open, resting in awareness, feeling the spaciousness and luminosity, a sense of joy. Perhaps as you sit thusly, suddenly there’s a bee buzzing around you head. Contracting comes. So Awareness observes the object and sees how it is just one more expression of the unconditioned. Trekchod means, in a sense, cutting through. We cut through the idea that there’s something separate or “other than” out there. We ask the question, “What is it?” “Is there anything other than? Anything here that’s not an expression of the Unconditioned?” It may not be a pleasant expression, but I don’t have to separate from it. We just keep reminding ourselves of the possibility of non-separation, and as soon as the contraction and fixation on that as a separate object dissolves, there’s spaciousness again and the pure awareness mind reopens.
When this practice becomes stable– and some of you have done it as a formal practice, some of you have simply done it intuitively in your lives, never having met it as a formal practice. – This is something else we can do here. How many of you have never been introduced to this in a formal way? Okay, perhaps another Saturday workshop! Or a lovely way to watch the sunset from that “Ahhh…,” spacious awareness.
The togyal practices are much more restricted Tibetan practices, restricted because they acknowledge the true power you have when you come into this space of pure awareness and co-create from this, what the Tibetan tradition in the English translation calls All-Ground. or a variation of the All-Ground called primordial purity. There are a lot of visualizations, of gods and goddesses and flowery beings and so forth. For me who come from more simple traditions,, they don’t really feel necessary, nor do they fit with the simplicity and clarity of the vipassana practice. So I simply prefer to use the term akashic field, which is basically the same thing as the All-Ground. It’s the place where mind rests before anything has arisen.
In the meditation I asked you to visualize that barren plane, nothing growing, dark cloudy sky but no water, dry earth, no sun. What happens as you add the sun and the moisture and the seeds? What seeds are you going to grow? Vicious thistles? Thick thorns? Sweet apples? What do you choose to grow? I’m not opposed to you growing the thorns. Look at the rose; it has the flower and the thorns. What is it you choose to create, or more emphatically, to co-create, as a community, as a society, as a country, as a world?
When we look at the handful of potential seeds, which ones are you going to put into the ground? Can you see that if you plant this one, it will bear this fruit? That one will bear a different fruit. What is it you wish to co-create? If another country across the world is being violent, threatening, are you going to meet that violence with violence? That’s one seed. Are you going to meet it with a passivity or helplessness? “Just steamroll over me.” That’s a different seed.
Are you going to meet it from a place of deep compassion that truly sees that country’s pain and fear and the level of consciousness they’re at, and responds appropriately, as you do to the three year old? She’s having a temper tantrum. She’s hitting you. “No, you may not hit me.” You don’t throw her out the window. You hold her in your arms. But you prevent her from hitting you until she calms down.
When we go into the akashic field, the value is that from that ground – because you are resting in pure awareness, it’s not you, not the ego, not the everyday mind, but this pure awareness – Awareness Mind can see the possibilities and the fruits of those possibilities.
One simple example. There’s a plant that grows by the shore of the lake, purple loosestrife. It was imported from somewhere. Somebody thought it was beautiful. It’s not just here on this lake; it’s everywhere. It’s what they call an invasive species. It’s taking over all the native species because it’s strong and becomes dominant. So, on the one hand, somebody brought it in thinking, “Oh, it’s beautiful. Let’s plant this.” But they did it from the ego that said, “I want this pretty purple flower here,” rather than from the akashic field and the clarity that sees, “What are the wholesome aspects and the unwholesome? If I plant this, what are the results going to be?” If I plant kindness, what are the results going to be? If I plant hostility, what are the results going to be?
If I wish to plant kindness but I’m feeling angry, what do I do with that anger? I cannot deny it. I cannot act it out. That which is aware of anger is not angry. I open my heart to the human experience of anger and I rest in that spaciousness that is not angry, with no denial of the anger. I do this from within the akashic field. From this space, I am able to respond appropriately, with compassion; able to say no appropriately, when needed; able to see the long-range results of what I’m offering out.
Now, I can’t control all of those results, because there are many other factors besides me. But on the whole, my experience of many lifetimes has been that if what we offer out is based in the loving heart and the intention to non-harm and is wholesome, it bears sweet results, maybe not short-term, but long-term. If what I offer out is based on the contracted heart—fear, the ego wanting only for itself– it bears unwholesome fruits.
So this is a long answer to your question. Basically there’s no difference, we’re simply putting it into an accessible American format.
Barbara worked her way through a very beautiful text called Circle of the Sun, a restricted Tibetan text. You may have received parts of that in your course pack. It was optional reading, offering some of her work with it. There were a lot of Tibetan words in the original text. It took a lot of explanation. She was working with it with her Venture Fourth student group, and I said let’s simplify it. This is what led us, several years ago, to try to find a way to share these teachings in a much more accessible way.
Some of you have no dzogchen experience and we were happy to provide some, because the basic trekchod practice is extremely helpful. However, most of you have experienced resting in Awareness, even without formal practice. Is there anybody here who in adult life or as a child has never lain on a hillside and just watched the clouds go by? Just resting in awareness. That’s it. It’s not everyday consciousness; it’s different. When you rest in that way, there may be some imagination, “Oh, that cloud looks like a castle. This one looks like a flower.” But there’s no story of “That castle, is somebody up there going to shoot at me?” The mind doesn’t go into these kinds of stories. There’s just an open spaciousness, ahhh, resting in that spaciousness. This is “The View” of trekchod. Then the meditation stabilizes the View, until you are able to carry it into the world as the “Action” phase. If we had ten weekends together, I would ask people to be stable in this practice before we begin. To be inclusive seemed more important, and to trust that your life experiences will fill in the gaps and we will practice as we move forward..
So we cultivate that pure awareness mind. We cultivate the vipassana mindfulness, noting what arises and how we react to what arises. Noting the mind and the body. We find the spaciousness wherein we can respond appropriately. If the ego does this, and says, “No, I’m going to be good and respond appropriately,” it’s not going to work. How many politicians do you know who’ve said, “I’m going to be good. I’m going to get it all right.”? And they have so many opposing views. And they’re all acting from good intentions, but also from their egos.
So this practice is to help you drop below the ego level. This is why we did that human knot. Could you feel how, when you relaxed into the group consciousness, you could unwind? But if the ego said, “Oh, I know what to do,” it just made the group more stuck. Could you feel that? (yes) So this is what we’re learning about.
Further questions? (none asked)
Okay, a story. A campfire story as planned but without the campfire. Give me a moment to think about it. This is one I’ve told before, but I think it illustrates the akashic field well. I lived in a rural village where the land was hilly; there were plateaus with farmland and trees on the steep slopes going up the mountainside. We had one community well, a deep and clear well. People lived a peaceful life there. Life was good; food and friendships were plentiful. I had a wife and children who I adored, as did most of my brothers, figurative brothers, people of my community who I loved.
Then came a terrible storm, rain driving down for several days; a mudslide washed the trees and the earth down the steep hillside into our village, inundating us. Many people were buried in that mud. It was still raining hard at first; we couldn’t do anything, though we did try. The land was too soft to dig. . After a day or two, the rain stopped, the sun came out and the earth stabilized a bit. Our farms were gone, our homes were gone, our families were gone. Those of us who had been up on the hillside on terraced farmland had literally watched this mud crash down one piece of the slope and cover parts of the village.
We dug out many bodies through the following days. There was despair. We were an isolated village. We were very close, and there were many extended families there, so people lost spouses, children, parents, sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews, and friends. We didn’t want to go elsewhere. Where would we go? But how could we live in this space?
Our well was buried in mud. We could see where the well had been just by knowing the lay of the land, but there was thick mud over and within it. The ego said, “Get out of here. Go.” And some people did leave, although it seemed almost certain they would perish on a journey because there was no place to go. But there was panic; people cannot live long without water.
In deep meditation, I saw the many possibilities. I knew that the sweet water of that well, the fresh underground spring, was still there, it was just buried in mud. If we dug deep enough, we would come to it. The logical mind told me, “Just get everybody out. Go.” Some people were still busy literally digging up corpses to take off to bury. But a few of us settled down digging where the well was, digging down and down and down.
All I could see on the conscious level was mud, but from within the akashic field was the clarity, the deep spring is still there. It cannot be lost. So we dug. As our hole into the well grew deeper, we lowered buckets to one man down in this hole. The buckets were filled and the mud pulled up, endless mud!. We dug and we dug for several days, until finally we were able to clear all of the mud out of the well down to the freshwater spring, which of course was still there.
With sweet water there was hope. We could not save our loved ones, but in truth it was only less than 10% of the community who perished, those living in that one area of low-lying houses where the greatest of the mud had fallen, and who were at home in those houses. We would grieve, but our farms still existed above. We could build new homes. The one thing that we absolutely needed was fresh water, and here it was.
The ego could not have found it. Only by going into the akashic field and knowing the existence of this deep spring, holding the intention to reveal it, could we do so. Yes, there’s a metaphorical aspect to this story, too, although it’s an accurate literal story. How often have you despaired of the deep spring in yourselves, only seen the chaos, the outer voices of turbulence? This is why Barbara and I named our center “Deep Spring Center,” to remind us of the existence of this deep spring and that it is accessible. But the conscious mind often cannot find that deep spring. We have to go into the deeper place of the heart.
If we had simply said, “We’re going to keep digging,” yes, willpower might have uncovered it. “We’ll do it. We’ll do it.” But we probably would have had to dig in 20 different places. By going into the akashic field, we were all able to come together and say, “This is where it is.” Imagine this huge field of mud. How do you know where to dig? It’s here. We held hands in a circle around the area. We asked, just as you did in unraveling yourselves, “Where is our spring?” We went into the akashic field, finding a clarity that knew “it’s right here”. We were all agreed. We just started digging. There was no dissension that said, “No, I think it’s over there.” So we knew we were on track, and we dug until we came to it. Are you willing to dig until you reveal that deep spring in yourselves, that sweet water of lovingkindness, and bring it forth, to quench the thirst of all who suffer?
That is my story. One more I’ll ask if there are any questions. Shall we end here then and send you off to bed, or to your evening? We will see you again in the morning. Just because we’re scheduled until 9pm doesn’t mean we need to go until 9pm. We would have been sitting around a campfire, so instead we’ll simply go home.
Thank you for being present with me today. My deepest love to all of you.
May the work that we do here serve for the benefit of all beings everywhere.
Through our own inner work and dedication, may we alleviate suffering everywhere in the world, with love, so that all beings may be happy and find peace.
Whatever good may have come from our gathering today, we dedicate it out to all beings. Thank you.