Awakened Life
An interview with Rod Taylor
by Eduardo Sierra for Mutuality Matters Issue #10
Eduardo: What’s your sense of things since your Second Birth awakening? What is awakened life about?
Rod: For me there’s a key contrast between living individuality, the way we’ve understood it in first life, and living Being in Second Life. In first life, there are considerations like: what are you going to be when you grow up, what are your personal goals in life, how are you going to resolve a difficult life situation? We tend to make decisions for the future that are reflections of our personality preferences combined with pressures of circumstances and beliefs. In second Life, after whole-Being awakening, those factors meld together with deeper inner knowing and confidence in Being, to support decisions and directions that are naturally arising in us and that feel deeply right.
Nowadays, whenever I ask myself, “What am I going to do?” the response is often, “I don’t have a clue!” And that’s the right answer for me, because there is a real shift from, “what am I going to do?” in which my mind needed to figure it all out, to “I’ll know when I know and I’ll let you know then.”
In Second Life, some of the old habits and frameworks of our finite individuality that determined our decisions and directions in the past, may still exist and need to have their space in order to integrate in whole-Being awakening. In realization of embodied non-dual awakening, we can still simultaneously be aware of our finite individuality, and feel confused about how these dimensions of our self work together. Then we go through an integration process in which shadows and old frames-of-reference get digested and integrated into whole-Being awakening. The more this integration unfolds, the more there’s the sense of Being living in, as, and through me. My experience becomes less and less distinguishable as differentiated aspects of non-dual awakened consciousness and finite personality; it is just all that is; with life increasingly integrated in wholeness.
Sometimes I sense there’s a need to keep up with what’s naturally going on in my life, what’s naturally emerging in my life circumstances. My finite individuality may feel distracted from or resistant to certain things in my life based on old limiting preferences or opinions, when actually the circumstances emerging in my life are just what I want or are what are most needed by life in general. It takes time to get used to that recognition and to surrender to living Being. It is not separate from who I am, so I get to choose what I personally want to do, but what I’m choosing isn’t different than what’s naturally arising in me.
Eduardo: There’s some kind of harmony!
Rod: Sometimes I feel like I’m choosing – like I’m standing on the bow of a big ship that is my life moving forward and I imagine I’m there leading the way; then at other times it seems like there’s no choosing – like I’m sitting in the back of the ship of my life and I’m just there along for the ride. As we live more in the flow of whole-Being life, we can step forward and take initiatives we feel emerging in us. When we recognize that the impulses we feel in us are not different than who we personally are, and are not different than Being arising, we get to really live our dharma; we get to live our whole-Being purpose on earth.
Eduardo: Um, now that must equate to a certain satisfaction, or fulfillment, no?
Rod: Yes, exactly. It’s the fulfillment of Being expressing, not being out of alignment with or separate from, but just Being. It can take years in awakened life for that to become clearer, trusting more and more, knowing that more and more.
Contact Rod:
http://www.awakeninginwholeness.com/contact
