Healing into Awakening

Cradle to the Grave

Driving through the countryside today, feeling both young and old in the same moment in the early Fall air, I realized that I felt excited—for one of the first times—to deal with advancing age. A whole new set of problems, difficulties, and opportunities for learning! Childhood brought their own; adolescence, another set of perspectives and concerns, each of them the most important thing in the world. Adulthood, parenting and now, getting old. Entering my seventy-seventh year. That moment in the car, I let go of all the other stages of my life and faced this one, this now, this passing moment with a sense of joy. Here is a recent song I wanted to share with all of you that only the passage of these years could have written.

This episode features a recording of the Foundation for Nonduality and A Society of Souls Community Meeting from March 18th 2020. This opening message from Jason Shulman  can resonate with many during this time in history, and beyond.

I have been a musician and songwriter for most of my adult life. In the last few years, I’ve returned to writing music and composing songs. This song was written a few months before the Covid-19 emergency but it seems to me to embody an attitude we all need to cultivate right now in this time of love and danger. Consider it an adult lullaby with a sidecar of kindness.

Credits:

Written by Jason Shulman

Performed on April 3, 2020

© 2020 Jason Shulman & Great Faith Music

“In true nonduality, we understand that a fish never leaves the water. The fish never comes to the end of the water, even if it is an explorer fish, swimming this way and that. It never comes to the end of the ocean because its nature is to be in the water. The fish and the water are one. As long as we think “Here I am whole, and there I’m not,” we think there is an end to the ocean of self. But truly, there is no end to this ocean.”

-Jason Shulman

Link to purchase The Instruction Manual for Receiving God:

https://www.amazon.com/Instruction-Manual-Receiving-Jason-Shulman-ebook/dp/B003FS0KGS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1EX5W4T9O5MFC&dchild=1&keywords=jason+shulman+books&qid=1585406263&sprefix=jason+shulman%2Caps%2C277&sr=8-1

A guide to this poem (with a little help from Wiki): Avalokiteśvara is a bodhisattva who embodies the compassion of all Buddhas. This bodhisattva is variably depicted, described and portrayed in different cultures as either male or female.In Tibet, he is known as Chenrezig, and in Cambodia as Avloketesvar. In Chinese Buddhism, Avalokiteśvara has evolved into the somewhat different female figure Guanyin, also known in Japan as Kanzeon. The Master the poem speaks about is Ramakrishna, the Bengali teacher who died in 1886. In many ways, he united the dual, theistic path with the avaitic or nondual path. The weeds and the little Rockaway river are all found around my home in New Jersey.

-Jason Shulman

Dear Friends, In this new reading, which is about idealizing the spiritual state and thereby missing the state we are in—which is the only state that actually leads us to freedom—I say Your hands need to be empty in order to receive. Well, that’s true enough for a start but not completely true. Emptying your hands, that is, laying down your previous ideas of what should be and looking at what is, is important. But I would like to add this: even if your hands are not empty, that’s OK. In a sense, our hands can never be empty. We have, after all, a body that holds history in its flesh and a mind and heart that are based on echoes from the past and anticipations of the future. So the point is not to try to empty your hands so much as to know what is in them. When you know your history is in your hands, or someone else’s ideas or path, you are ahead of the game. Only return to yourself as you are is what I would say now.

Every time I see someone succeed along some portion of their spiritual path, I am brought to tears. What does “succeed” mean in terms of a spiritual path? To me, it is not about achieving some so-called higher state; it is not about gaining new powers or equanimity or even only getting insight into a psychological state, important though that is.  Instead, it is that moment when the heart surrenders to what is, when we stop defending against the human condition—even for a brief moment—and find in its vast imperfection and temporality a moment of deep acceptance that is so vast we suddenly feel connected to every other pulsating thing in the cosmos, all the other temporary people, all the mortal stars, all the earth and its creatures. It is in those moments we hear that sweet and bitter song of being alive and the harmonies of gratefulness fill our being. And it starts with being open to our own suffering. - Jason Shulman

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Every one of us who has attempted to walk the road of the spirit has had many encounters with the Great Bear Mother, that implacable life-force that simply cannot take “no” for an answer. All difficult moments in our lives, whether they are with partners and mates, with illness or health, with friends or foes, are actually encounters with the Great Bear. You don’t  have to be a student of any particular discipline to have experienced what it is like to walk into the unknown with all the best of intentions, hoping to gain more clarity and insight into yourself and your place in the universe and encountering what we might call “resistance.” To counter our resistance, there resides in the universe an opposite force that demands, calls forth and insists upon awakening. This force resides in each of us, in that part that is not only personal. In this piece this calling appears as the Great Bear Mother.