May 2, 2014 Friday Afternoon, Emerald Isle Retreat on vipassana and the akashic field and other Q & A

Vipassana and the akashic field practice.

Aaron: Good afternoon, and my love to you. (sitting indoors with rain) Our afternoons on the beach have fizzled this year! The weather is unpredictable. We'll have to teach you all how to really go deep into the akashic field and work with the weather, with the clouds and sunshine. My original intention was to do some pure awareness practice out there on the beach, and talk about how pure awareness and the akashic field connect. We've talked about that before.

We have mundane consciousness, that consciousness that arises with contact from the everyday mind, the mind touching a sense object and mind consciousness arising. It can be a very clear consciousness, but there's still a sense of an observer. Pure awareness comes from a much more spacious place.

I think of consciousness, mundane and supramundane consciousness, not as opposite ends of a pole, but as one progression. Up at the top we have the conscious mind function, and as you drop down past the conscious mind, you begin to access awareness. My point here is that you cannot enter the akashic field from the place of mundane consciousness, there has to be some access into pure awareness.

What I was going to do on the beach was to have you, from consciousness, sitting close by the water, feet in the water, water just gently lapping at your feet, noting breeze, touching, but very much from a mundane conscious mind. Then open into awareness. Come back to conscious mind, go back to awareness; do it a few times. And then I was going to have you get up and perhaps just dance a bit. Take hands and move around out there on the beach. We did an element dance one year where some of you waded into the water, the sun, the earth. How does it feel? How does it feel to be the wind from the place of consciousness-- me, I'm going to be the wind-- and there's a somebody doing it? How does it feel to drop down into that level of awareness and simply be one with the wind, move with the wind; be the wind with no sense of self or separation?

At this level of awareness, one can move into the akashic field. Now, one cannot say, “No, no rain!” from within the akashic field, because the farmers need the rain. The personality self is not doing this; you are co-creating it. But you move into the akashic field with the intention to co-create that which is for the highest good of all beings, and invite something, and it's very interesting to see what can develop.

Barbara was sitting on the beach very open, resting in pure awareness, very much in the akashic field, watching the birds, and then from a very deep place, she simply invited the presence of a bird. No harm to it was intended, just sharing of energy with it. So she sat there for 5 or 10 minutes, and there were birds alongshore and so forth, and one of them kind of cocked its head at her and just walked right up to her feet, very intrigued by the energy he felt coming from her, and he felt nothing separate from himself coming from her.

These are ways we can learn to play, and I emphasize the word “play,” in the akashic field. It can't be a manipulation. She was not manipulating the bird, saying, “Now I want to prove something, so you come up close to me.” She was not manipulating the bird to say, “Come up close and I'll catch you and put you in a cage.” Just, “Let us connect more deeply if it's appropriate for you.” And invite it.

I'd like to see you get an experience of that within the akashic field, how we can invite deep connection with each other. If the rain stops, there is a game we can play in the pool, where it's warmer. We'll see what happens to the weather in 10 minutes...

These are things you can do on your own, though. So if we can't do it here in this hour with the group, you can take it down to the beach later today, tonight, tomorrow, or at home, and play with it. Do you have squirrels in your back yard? Just sit on the deck. You're not holding a nut out to him to entice him. Just sit there and send energy to that creature. Send love to it. Invite contact with it. But you might want to specify, “Come only up to 5 feet from me. I don't want you on my lap.”

One year, a long time ago, Barbara was meditating on a beach, very deep in pure awareness, very much in the akashic field, resting in non-separation. There was a dog loose on the beach. She was so deep in pure awareness she was not seeing “dog,” she was just aware of movement around her, breeze, some small waves lapping gently on the shore of the lake and so forth. The dog came up and looked at her. It didn't sense any separation of any sort. Finally it lifted its leg and peed on her lap! She was just an object.

My point here is to help you understand - I'm saying this very precisely - the power. Not your power, the power. The power of love. The power of the open heart. The power to manifest that which is for the highest good.

I think of this most skillfully used in a situation where there is a lot of chaos, angry emotions, turmoil. One person walking into the center of that and just sitting has the potential, I'm not saying will shift, has the potential to shift all of that anger. It's not always going to happen, but it can be very powerful when it does.

A story Barbara has told of this comes from long before the days when she had any specific vipassana practice or understood the term akashic field. This was probably 1960, so 54 years ago, in a sit-in in a small southern town. In the restaurant where she was sitting, people had been beaten trying to sit-in. There was a violent crowd outside, angry, with bricks and clubs, and filled with anger. She had no conscious awareness of what she and the other three participants were doing, but they sat calmly in that restaurant, holding hands and connecting with each other, until they felt not only non-separate from each other but non-separate from the crowd outside; deep compassion for all of them. Not trying to make anything special out of it, just holding that space of love and offering to open the door to reflect it back.

After sitting for almost an hour, they were ready. They got up and walked to the door of the restaurant together. The crowd, maybe 60, 70 people were out there, very angry. Barbara and the other three stopped there on the porch, looking out. She tells it that she just felt compassion. She really felt no personal fear, although she knew she could be beaten or killed. She knew she was catalyzing this incident, bringing something to them that they were either ready to work with or not yet ready to work with. And if they were not yet ready to work with it, they would not accept her presence or her energy, and they would beat her. And even one person feeling like that could trigger that for the rest.

Holding that space of energy, she tells us she looked in many people's eyes. Some of them were too ashamed to look and others met her gaze. Her gaze held no malice. Gradually the crowd just parted, and these four people walked down the steps and into the car and drove away.

You have the ability to transform volatile energy from your heart center. This is the heart of the akashic field practice. Your world is in a tumultuous place. There's a lot of dissent and anger. In a paraphrasing of the Buddha's words, anger never transforms anger, only love transforms anger. No matter how much love there is from an ego place, “I'm going to be loving,” it cannot transform anger. It' has to be genuine love that comes from the place where the hearts meet.

One wording of that is simply the akashic field. We don't have to call it that. But coming into this All Ground, I described it as the container that contains everything, light and darkness, stillness and emotion, love and hatred. It's all there. What's going to arise?

I don't know if it's a good metaphor, but I'm thinking here if you go down to the ocean and throw in a piece of cheese on a string, you're probably not going to catch a fish. Maybe catch a mouse!  If you throw the appropriate bait, you may catch a fish. What do you want to draw to you? What are you sending out?

So this akashic field practice along with your vipassana practice helps you to be deeply aware of what you are sending out, of the intention that gives rise to what you're sending out. And if you're sending out a mixed message of this still, infinite, compassionate heart space and the fear, you know you're sending out a mixed message. That doesn't mean you don't try. But when you get results of somebody coming up belligerently and trying to punch you, you know in some way you are sending it out a message that's inviting that angry response.

Some of you have spoken of personal work relationships with very difficult people. What are you bringing into the relationship? The tension of, “Are they going to be terrible again?” or an open heart that invites, that deeply sees the divinity of that person and invites it to come forth? And when what expresses is crudeness, you simply say, “Hmm, not ready yet.” But if their crudeness tries to grab at you in some way, is abusive to you, then from that same heart just say, “No.”

Let's just pause for questions here. (They check the weather.)

(tape paused, possibly 15 min of q&a not recorded)

Many beautiful and differing intentions. The intention for liberation is a beautiful intention. The intention to work to alleviate suffering, as the bodhisattva, working in the akashic field, working from a place of compassion, this is a beautiful intention. They are not separate from each other. If my intention is to reach the ocean-- I'm back there somewhere (pointing), and there's one direct path down to the beach, and another path that winds up to the top of a hill with a view, and you say, “I'd like to see the view and then get to the ocean,” or “I want the most direct path to the ocean and I'll skip the view,” both paths will take you to the ocean. Maybe when you get to the ocean after seeing the view, a lot of people will want to know what the view looked like, and it will help them. There's no better or worse path. What do you seek?

My ideal for all of you is liberation. If I did not believe that complete liberation was possible, literally, in this lifetime, I would not be here teaching. But each of you has different karma and thus a different path to liberation. Whatever degree you attain of that liberation will remain with you if you come into a new incarnation. Nothing is ever lost. Whatever you've learned is part of you and carried with you in the future, so you do whatever you can with it. Whatever shows up, standing in front of you, glowering at you, that famous person, that's your next teacher.

Others?

Q: Are we making distinction between going into the akashic field when we encounter a day to day experience that we want to approach, say from loving kindness and spaciousness, versus when you're in meditation in the akashic field, because if you're in the akashic field during meditation, if something were to arise, say a disturbing experience, I would think that I were to note it and let it go versus engage with it. What I'm trying to say is, when we're in meditation, like you said, and you said if you're in the akashic field and you see somebody suffering, if I'm in meditation I thought that part of the vipassana is to note it versus work with it. So I'm confused about engaging with it versus noting it.

(Signer paraphrases question)

Aaron: They are not different. If you notice the suffering, how can you not get involved? It's the kind of involvement. If you become an ego saying, “Oh, I know how to fix this,” you're no longer in the akashic field. Let's say you're a medical doctor and somebody has a bad fall and is injured. That doctor with the proper training can come into this place of spaciousness and clarity; there's no ego fixing, and still use his medical skills. Another doctor without that degree of training says, “Oh, I know what to do.” And maybe he has good medical skills, but he's only working on the personality, conscious mind level. Therefore it does not have the potential for as deep healing. There's some reason why that doctor and that injured person and the other people at the site are all there together. It's a whole karmic web. When he's in the akashic field, he's attending to everything: the child of the person who fell, who's sitting there sobbing, the angry person who pushed the person who fell and is either ashamed or belligerent. Within the akashic field he's holding it all together and attending to the injury. Otherwise it's just one more ego bouncing off the situation and perhaps helping the injured person, but not supporting an opening to clarification of any of the karma.

Q: Now I'm confused about what it means to be in the akashic field.

Aaron: There are two levels here. First, resting in awareness. Resting in awareness, you're at the doorway of the akashic field. You do not necessarily take the next step to enter the akashic field. But you cannot enter the akashic field unless you are resting in awareness. This in relation to what you asked.

Once resting in awareness, I see the whole situation, and there's compassion for all the aspects. This person yelling, “He stole something from me!” The man lying on the ground injured, who says the man who claims he stole something from him hit him with a metal pipe. His head is bleeding. The child is crying. A mob is gathering. Resting in awareness we see the whole situation with compassion. Then there's a choice, a conscious choice to move deeper into the akashic field. With awareness we are always in the akashic field, but to move in from a place of non-self to attend, not just to this one who's bleeding or that one who's yelling, but to all that interwoven net of suffering. To attend to it by holding it, holding all these ripples of distortion, and introducing them to each other energetically, in a sense. Holding them lovingly together.

I think here of a dogfight. You pull the dogs apart. If these are dogs that live in the same household and they started fighting, you're not going to try to drag them off and separate them forever. You pull them off and you hold them with loving energy until they quiet down and are ready to come close to each other again.

Q: So it sounds like when you enter the akashic field, it's like you're entering a different dimension, and what arises is not simply arising from you, from your own, say, personal issues.

Aaron: No, but you are there for a reason. You've been attracted to it for a reason, pulled to it, drawn to it for a reason. How many of you saw the movie Star Wars? Obi Wan Kenobi, his Force: May the Force be with you. He was working within the akashic field. Do you remember a scene when he's on a tower and the guard is walking toward him? He moves his hand, and the guard turns his head. Now, this is a misuse of the akashic field to some degree because he's manipulating, using his power to his ends. But it's still a demonstration of entering the akashic field, only a subtle misunderstanding of how one best works in that akashic field.

I don't want to go into the ethics of it right now. Is this clearer for you? When you get home-- it's spring. Get a small flowering plant in a container. Get two of them as close to identical as possible. Put them both in the same sunny window. Water them both equally. Hold one in your loving attention and envision it growing, envision it thriving, giving joy to it and its giving joy to you. Really holding it in your heart within the field. The other one, treat only from your everyday mind. “Plant-- time to put water on it.” Watch these plants for a few weeks and see what happens. It's a very simple but I think a very clear experiment.

Q: The part I'm still confused about is not getting caught up in the story of wanting to help.

Aaron: Daughter, you have less of a vipassana practice. I'm not saying that critically. But a deeper vipassana practice is an essential doorway to this and you are more of a beginner. So if you want to understand it, the place to start is to deepen your vipassana practice, because within the practice we watch the contraction that comes. Seeing, unpleasant feeling, the subtle aversion, and then the stories, the mental formations that arise, and how we either get hooked or don't get hooked. As one practices with that over and over, one begins to understand that getting hooked is just more suffering. So one uses the vipassana practice in that way. When that is stable, then one can work in the akashic field. Until then, one really can't do it.

So I repeat, this is not criticism. And I honor your being here and doing this work. But one needs to fill in the gaps in one's practice.

Q: If a person is working in the akashic field and entrance into the Unconditioned is possible, I know you can't bring issues into the Unconditioned; is there benefit to creating the intention to help what you're holding in the akashic field and then just going into the Unconditioned?

Aaron: Of course. Any loving intention has a benefit. But watch for any ego that says, “Oh, I need to fix this.”

Q: But there is a second part. If you go into the Unconditioned after creating the intention, is that beneficial?

Aaron: I don't really understand your question. Let me say this and see if it answers. Let's say I have a small garden patch, and certain of my small plants look withered. I dig a little down into the roots and I find there's some kind of an insect eating away at the roots. I hold the intention for non-harm to any being. Now, clearly the conscious self has a choice: I either have to put some kind of pesticide on the roots to kill this creature and then the plants can live, or I allow the insect to continue devouring the roots until the plant dies, at which point, having killed its host, it will go on to the other plants in the garden. That's from a conscious perspective.

Entering the akashic field, I can feel the deep desire for all beings to be happy and to thrive. A place of compassionate intelligence speaks to the insects and says, “You are hungry but you are killing your hosts. When you kill them and kill the next ones, eventually there will be nothing left for you.” So you communicate. You don't communicate with a “You're not as good as the plants, so you get out of here.” You communicate wisdom and love.

Meanwhile, you communicate to the plants, inviting them to send out new stronger, deeper roots. You see that the insects only go that deep. You invite the plants to send their roots way down deep. You might even take a long sharp tool and loosen the soil a little so the roots can go deeper. The insect is one that has to keep coming up to the surface, so they're not going to go deep. So you communicate to both from a place of love, holding the space for the highest good of all beings, and then you just watch and see what happens.

At a certain point, if these are your tomato seeds and you're counting on these growing into good tomato plants and feeding your family of eleven children for the winter, and otherwise you're going to starve, then you're probably going to finally say, “Okay, I'm going to need to kill the insects.” But first you give it a chance, working in the akashic field. I don't know if that answers your question.

Q: No, but it was good to hear!

(discussion among participants)

Q: When you make the decision to kill the insects to feed your family, are you in the akashic field?

Aaron: No, you're in the ego self, and you reap the karma of that killing. But you get your tomatoes. Is there a different and better way?

In her book Living as If the God in All Things Mattered, Michaelle Small Wright talks about going out into her garden to rototill the garden. She realizes with some upset after the first row that she's cut a lot of earthworms in half. This is not acceptable to her, so she says to the earthworms in the next row, “Look, I have to plant my garden. I need to till. Please move out of this row. I'm going inside to get a cup of tea and I'm coming out in five minutes. Please be gone.” She communicates this; she is in the akashic field but she's also speaking from the human's voice, not from fear but from clarity and from love. She goes inside for 5 minutes. She comes back out. She tills, and there's not a worm to be seen in that row. She looks at the next row, and all the worms are there. So at the end of each row she announces, “Now move over, I'm coming back again down this way.” The cooperate. She's working in the akashic field.

Any worms that she does kill, there's no longer unwholesome karma for killing the worms because they were asked to move. And if they choose this as a way to transition to a new form, so be it, that's their choice.

You're working energetically, and at different levels. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work. And sometimes it just depends on how clear you are in the field. Barbara gets mice in her pantry every fall. They come in from the outdoors. She's plugged up the cracks in the walls but somehow they're still getting inside. She says to them, “You must go back out. I'm willing to put some birdseed right outside the house on the ground to feed you. You must stay out of my pantry. And any mice that are left in my pantry I'm going to put out mice poison. You have three days to clear out.” And most of them clear out. A few don't leave.

Q: The things that arise in the akashic field, are they parts of my karma that need to be healed?

Aaron: They can be. Not necessarily. When you truly enter the akashic field, you encounter everything, some of which you have a karmic relationship with and some you don't.

Q: Just to respond with a deep intention to do no harm and open your heart?

Aaron: Exactly. And this is what heals the karma and the repetitive cycle of becoming. What keeps the wheels spinning, is to respond from that, “Me, I want it this way.” Very different to say, “I need the mice out of my pantry. You are destroying my family's food. This is not acceptable.” Said with compassion. Or, “You're in my pantry! Get out of here!” In anger.

Q: It seems to me that one has to have an enormous amount of spaciousness and compassion and all loving in order to stay and work in the akashic field. Yet during our exercises in the pool and on the beach, it seemed fairly simple for us as a group to go there.

Aaron: It is very simple. And it takes dedication, because you are so deeply habituated to work from the ego self. But, have you got anything better to do?

This is it. You want to awaken. You want to live in the world with non-harm to all beings and with love. Then here are different tools that will help you do it. If you don't do it, that's a clear choice, and you reap the karma of that choice. You'll keep spinning on the wheel until you decide, “Okay, this is enough.”

After the retreat, Barbara will send out, it's about 100 pages, the long exploration of the akashic field that I did with her several years ago. You're free to delete it, that's okay. Don't feel guilty if you don't read it, just know, “I'm not ready to get into this now.” But if it interests you, read it and begin to work with it. And when I say to Barbara, “Practice with this,” don't just move on and read the next page,” practice with it. Because this is something that will deepen gradually. It's not an instant teaching. We can't teach it in a week; we can only give the basics of it.

The reason I focus on this at this point, once you have a stable vipassana practice, is that there is such an enormity of suffering and confusion in your world, and many of you have the strong intention to attend to that suffering but you don't know how. The earth needs that attendance, the beings of the earth and the earth itself. So I'm simply trying to provide you with a tool with which you can work more clearly in the world.

Your vipassana practice is the core of it. You cannot say, “Oh good, here's a new practice!” and toss the vipassana practice aside. The vipassana practice is what grounds you and gives you the ability to do this akashic field practice. The combination will deepen over time. So don't expect instant results. But you do find an increasing ability, that you are increasingly, intuitively responsive to the world around you. You pick up things that you would have missed when you were more settled in mundane consciousness. You start to pick up energy gradations from people, from the earth, to really see, like x-ray vision, “Oh, here are my plant roots and here are the bugs. And these bugs are here because there's another bug here.” And this, and that, and how it all goes together. You see the whole web. And then the heart can open. Not with fix-it, but just, this is how it is.. Everything is in conflict. What can I do but bring in love, offer love? And this is the work within the akashic field. So I'm speaking to you here not just as vipassana meditators but as bodhisattvas, truly with an intention of bringing love and light into the world, and of helping to support healing of the earth.

Let us end here.

(tape paused, Barbara reincorporates)

Barbara: He's asking me to point out to you, when I say, “Thank you, Aaron,” it's not just a mechanical response. When he leaves the body and I know he shares something useful, and I feel so much gratitude, that gratitude is part of my connection with him. He doesn't need our gratitude. It's simply, I am just moved that he comes into my body this way and can offer this wisdom and compassion.

(tape paused)

The silence will be broken  tonight through dinner. Please reflect on talking.

Who is talking? Where is the impulse to speak coming from? Is there a somebody that wants somebody else's approval and wants to say, “Oh, look who I am,” or somebody who really is curious and wants to hear what somebody else says? Are you talking, communicating on a somebody to somebody level or a heart to heart level? What allows talking to happen and remain on a heart to heart level, because you come very deep in that heart to heart level.

So enjoy this time, but also be aware, who is talking? That's all.

(session ends)

9