Here we continue the thread begun with the Three Rooms and First Nature.
John: The first nature is based in the lower self. It deals in fight or flight and the mind-ego. The second nature starts off slowly, beginning as an inner movement that seems separate from the outer sense of things, and it comes across as awareness. This awareness can, at first, actually feel destabilizing because of the set patterns and routines a person adopts in their lives. This energetic unfoldment seems to be trying to get one’s attention, in spite of all the distractions of the outer world. It may begin as simply as questioning one’s goals and priorities, and wondering if there’s more to life than meets the eye.
So one’s basic physical nature will resist this deeper insight. It doesn’t really fight too hard, but there is a struggle as a new balance needs to be found – a higher balance. It is a slow waking up. Because this insight doesn’t come through via the usual senses, it’s not always clear what to do with it. The mind-ego tries to put it into some standard context, but it won’t fit. And when it doesn’t, the mind-ego still tries to pigeonhole it in one way or another, which isn’t truly accepting it or making it a part of oneself.
So the first nature struggles with what to do with the insight. The emergence into the second quality, of recognizing that there is something else astir in one’s nature, can have this disruptive effect, to the point where one may try to stop it or to deny it.
In my experience, I can feel the shift in me to a point where I start to perceive the unperceivable. It affects me at night as an energetic that blasts through my separate ideologies. I experience its aliveness when my mind-ego is quiet. This inner aliveness overrides my normal feelings of being distinct and separate from the rest of creation. I’ve come to know that because of the way it’s able to affect my physical being. This subtle aliveness is able to hear, dialogue with, and relate to the world that I am in.
Well, actually, first it relates to my sense of beingness, and then it becomes the world that I’m in, which is the third state. It relates to my beingness if I’m able to hear it stir or sense its subtlety come alive. But to begin with, it is just a faint inner voice that is linked to the heart and followed by the breath. I follow it with the breath as an unconscious inflection.
We take our breath for granted; we do not realize that a conscious awareness of the breath would be to follow this inner voice with every undulation, in and out. I haven’t yet gotten to the point of using the breath to cycle this inner awareness consciously. The best I’m able to do is note the way my heart opens and closes a bit. When my heart opens, awareness of this inner listening center is possible. When I am reactive and overwhelmed by the million things of the outer world, it drowns this awareness and my heart closes. So then I am shut off from the access, and the potential to access, this inner awareness.
The inner voice offers a kind of peacefulness, but it also has a guidance center, too.
But that is more of the third nature.
