Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
awareness. And I'll say really? How do you know that you lost
awareness?
WIZARD: [Laughter] Who knows that?
NIRMALA: Right, the only way they can know they lost the
awareness is if they were aware of the change in their experience,
that they're calling the loss of awareness. So awareness is a
fundamental quality of our Being that we cannot lose. And there
are other ones like oneness; oneness is a fundamental quality of
everything. Also aliveness is a fundamental quality of everything
that exists. And then another one that's really fascinating is
emptiness, space. Space is a fundamental quality, everywhere you
go there's space. I challenge you to find some place where you run
out of space, where there is literally no space.
TRIP: You know, your writings are filled with little gems, I don't
know how many are original to you, or how many aren't, it doesn't
really matter. But I just love reading your stuff. And one of the
little gems I picked up last night was that you said, "Surrender
isn't something you do, it's something that happens to you".
WIZARD: Yes.
NIRMALA: Yes, that's just a clearer understanding of surrender.
The expansion of awareness is like gravity, it's the default. If you
stop holding your arm up in the air, then gravity takes over and
your arm naturally drops. The surrender, the expansion, is just
what happens whenever we stop. And so it's not actually
something you do, you don't have an expansion muscle. You have
lots of contraction muscles: things like thoughts, and fears,
judgments, and doubts, and worries, and hopes, and wishes, and
desires. Those are all our inner contraction "muscles", they're all
the things that we do in order to contract awareness, in order to
focus and direct it. But when we stop, whenever anything stops
our mind, whenever anything stops that activity, the expansion
just naturally happens, just naturally occurs.
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