On the Mystery of Being , livre ebook

“Good news! Non-dual consciousness and radical embodiment are not mutually exclusive. Maybe you, like I, have known this all along; known it in the cells of your own holy body, touched this truth in the depths of silence, live it and teach it and forget and remember it. This collection of luminous essays points us beyond language to the undifferentiated field of being that turns out to be nothing less than Love Itself. Enter.”
— Mirabai Starr , author of Wild Mercy , and translator of Dark Night of the Soul
“In this glorious compendium of thinkers who live and work on the frontiers of the art and science of consciousness, we have a book that opens portals to worlds that astonish while advancing the human mind and spirit. For in these pages, we are met with numinous knowledge and priceless wisdom from those who have ‘been there.’ Here, too, is the paradox of living in a biodegradable space-time suit and being the universe in miniature. Ultimately, these essays constitute a kind of a text for those who have ‘consciously’ enrolled in God School! Thus, what you read here both inspires and signals a new and possibly saving agenda for the human species and the Earth we dwell upon.”
— Jean Houston, PhD , chancellor of Meridian University, chairman of the United Palace of Spiritual Arts, researcher and teacher in human capacities and social artistry, and author
“ On the Mystery of Being is a testimony to the courageous and openminded spirit of inquiry that characterizes the Science and Non-Duality community.”
—Rupert Spira , teacher of Non-Duality and author of several books, including The Nature of Consciousness and Being Aware of Being Aware
“Human civilization will only survive if we are able to create communities whose members do not find happiness in excessive material consumption, but in relationships among each other and with the entire community of life. This book of many voices shows beautifully that Maurizio and Zaya have created such a community.”
— Fritjof Capra , author of The Web of Life , and coauthor of The Systems View of Life


Publisher’s Note
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books
Copyright © 2019 by Science and Nonduality
Non-Duality Press
An imprint of New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
5674 Shattuck Avenue
Oakland, CA 94609
www.newharbinger.com
Cover design by Helena Zingarella
Acquired by Elizabeth Hollis Hansen
Edited by Tony Kendrew
Copy edited by Teja Watson
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
To all the burning hearts who dare to dream the immensity of life, question the limits of knowledge, and surrender to the mystery of being!


Contents
Foreword
Deepak Chopra
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Voices of Contemporary Spirituality
Love and Wonder
Adyashanti
Ordinary Awakening
Gangaji
Closer to Heaven, Closer to the Mud
Jeff Foster
The Magic of Shared Awareness
Sally Kempton
The Essence of the Mind
Rupert Spira
Faces of the Infinite in Everyday Life
Dorothy Hunt
The Wonder of Unknowing
Mauro Bergonzi
Part Two: The Rebirth of Metaphysics
Nondual vs. Scientific Views of Reality
A. H. Almaas
Of Consciousness and Paradox
Jean Houston
Be Blissful
Robert Thurman
The Qualitative Science of the Heart
Kabir Helminski
The Anomaly of Consciousness
Peter Russell
Radiant Intimacy of the Heart
Cynthia Bourgeault
Part Three: Science Embraces Consciousness
A Brief History of Consciousness
Stuart Hameroff
Reality Is Eye Candy
Donald Hoffman
How to Make a Universe
Jude Currivan
Mind, Matter, and Life: A Unified Systemic View
Fritjof Capra
Mind and the Wave Function Collapse
Henry Stapp
Idealism Reloaded: The End of the Perception-Imagination Duality
Bernardo Kastrup
Part Four: The Wonder of Nature
Fundamental Awareness: The Universe Twiddling Its Thumbs
Neil D. Theise
Rethinking the “Dumb Random Universe” Model of Existence
Robert Lanza
The Origin of Life and Consciousness: Lifting and Gifting Our Collective Future
Bruce Damer
Resurrecting Real Magic
Dean Radin
The Mycology of Consciousness
Paul Stamets
The Ecological Initiation
Charles Eisenstein
Part Five: The Body as Teacher
What Are Our Bodies?
Chris Fields
The Essence of Yoga: Exploring Our True Body
Ellen Emmet
The Cerebrospinal Fluid and I Am
Mauro Zappaterra
Lessons from the Body
Larry Dossey
The Body, the Medical System, and Modern Society
Gabor Maté
Cancer as an Awakening Journey
Joan Tollifson
Part Six: The Heart of Intimacy
Reflections on Intimacy
Zhen Dao
Awakened Relating: Being Awake to Our Infinite Nature in Finite Human Relationships
Lynn Marie Lumiere
Intimacy and Keeping the Spark Alive
Michaela Boehm
The Call of the Earth Goddess: Re-membering a Spirituality of Wholeness
Chameli Ardagh
The Ego Cannot Love
Eric Baret
Part Seven: Exploring the Shadows
Developmental Trauma and the Transformation of Anger and Rage
Julie Brown Yau
Healing Trauma as a Spiritual Path: Individual and Collective Dimensions
Peter A. Levine
Mongolian Shamanic Trance
Corine Sombrun
Dreaming the Mystery of Being Aware
Stephen LaBerge
Fifteenth-Century Alchemy and Twenty-First-Century Liberation
Pamela Wilson
Reconnecting to a Child Within
Edward Frenkel
Part Eight: Doorways to Heaven
The Science and Mystery of Consciousness
Pim van Lommel
Grief
Unmani
Three Basic Freedoms
James Fadiman
The Blessings of Brokenness
Vera de Chalambert
The Portal of a Poem
Mirabai Starr
The Human Journey
Shakti Caterina Maggi
Afterword: On the Relationship Between Science and Liberation
Michael A. Singer
Contributors
Foreword
Deepak Chopra
What is the best, simplest, and most useful thing we can say about our existence? This rich anthology of many voices is essentially asking that question. Whatever the goal of the spiritual path might be, or the objective of science, it must be buried somewhere in existence. Where else could it be? But existence seems to be the ultimate Sphinx, keeping an eternal secret about what is hiding inside—and the secret is so hidden that you might not even guess that there is a secret.
Most of us are brought up to believe that existence is nothing more than a blank canvas. But if that’s true, there would be little to say about it. We’d be better off filling in the blank with something meaningful. Seven billion people are born facing an unknown future, so they do the sensible thing; they begin to invent a story about what life means, one person at a time. The experiences they accumulate wind up being part of their personal story. To a creature endowed with free will, it’s a great setup. “My story is unique, and everyone else is free to explore their own uniqueness.”
Only one glitch spoils this setup, but it’s a big one. Using all their intelligence, creativity, family support, social connections, and anything else at their disposal, no one has yet devised a way to rid their story of pain and suffering. Seven billion of us are, in effect, experimenting with the problem of finding happiness, and so far there has been no single discovery—like Thomas Edison’s, which lit up the world—to rid our minds and hearts of suffering.
Yet it may be that people are experimenting not with bad ideas or flawed stories, but from the wrong starting point. The stories begin because we assume that existence is a blank canvas. What if it isn’t? From the blank canvas perspective, “I am” is an empty statement, and life doesn’t get on the road until the sentence is expanded to “I am X.” If you replace X with “a white Western male born of a well-to-do family,” the chances are your story is going to turn out much better than someone who says, “I am a poor black woman in Senegal in the middle of a drought with six children.”
But a few people—by good fortune a sizable group of them have contributed to this book—investigate “I am” without feeling that “X” must follow. What if “I am” is actually the most meaningful thing you can say about yourself? Then you would be looking directly at being, the topic of this anthology. It would be wonderful if being was enough, if existence was not empty, but full of potential, eager to unfold if only we ask it to. In the nondual tradition, which goes back several thousand years, the teaching holds that being is indeed filled with infinite potential. The Vedic rishis who declared “I am That” were pointing not to anything specific, but to a field of indescribable possibilities. These possibilities are not hidden from everyday life. Homo sapiens , as a conscious species, constantly takes advantage of fundamental traits that are sourced from existence itself. These traits include creativity, intelligence, will, desire, insight, love, compassion, and self-awareness.
Once you realize that existence is a conscious state, th