My Whole Being Evolution Journey
by Rod Taylor
.
Awakening Path
Throughout a long period of my adult life, I eagerly sought enlightenment. I practiced long meditations twice a day, attended lengthy in-residence meditation retreats, studied spiritual and self-development books, pursued evolutionary lifestyle choices, and taught meditation practices and spiritual knowledge.
My path brought significant subtle inner experience, but it wasn’t bringing me all the way to my goal of awakening. In the mid-1990s, after well over two decades in this pursuit, I came to realize and then accept I wasn’t going to accomplish my spiritual goal in this lifetime. Yet I continued to stay involved in the same type of things that had brought me deep inner experience because I still loved to do them and they provided upliftment and balance. I also engaged in many additional processes for spiritual refinement as well as for emotional healing that I wanted and needed. However, I no longer expected they would get me to my ultimate spiritual goal.
In 2003, I came across Saniel Bonder and the Waking Down in Mutuality community. I found their ideas intriguing and yet there were aspects of that teaching which seemed to me to contradict important truths that I had learned on my spiritual path. Things like how to reach enlightenment and the nature of enlightenment that I understood came from 5,000 years of respected Eastern spiritual traditions. Nevertheless, something in the Waking Down perspective caught my inner attention, and I jumped into it as an open-ended experiment.
Awakening Self
I received deep personal support from teachers and mentors in that work and I learned how to become increasingly connected with all aspects of myself. I healed emotionally hurt parts of myself and eased underlying feelings of unworthiness. I came to more fully recognize Consciousness as my fundamental nature and I experienced Consciousness drop within my body.
Then in May 2005, after a year and a half in that work, I had my conscious embodied Awakening. I realized my undivided, non-separate wholeness with all that is. In Waking Down terms this was referred to as a second birth awakening and in Trillium Awakening this is referred to as Whole Being Realization — Consciousness, Embodiment, and Mutuality. Paradoxically this awakening simultaneously includes knowing my infinite embodied nature in oneness with all that is and my finite, limited nature of individual self. I discovered the Wholeness of myself in the midst of sometimes-messy, everyday, real life, with no separation.
With that shift, my lifelong spiritual search came to an end – not as an intellectual conclusion, but as an internally felt sense. I no longer had a spiritual yearning; that place in me had now been fulfilled or completed. However, it turned out that this shift was not the end; it was the beginning of a whole new evolutionary stage of life – a stage in which the limited finite aspects of myself would have opportunity to be more fully seen, held, and integrated within my wholeness. My individuality had more access to healing, evolutionary impulses, and connecting deeply with others. And my interest and enthusiasm for new knowledge and processes that enhance my integration and personal unfoldment seemed more openly accessible to me, without any inherent need now that they lead me to some further ultimate realization. Personal challenges would arise, awkwardly or uncomfortably at times, while simultaneously I could experience a profound foundation of wholeness and wellness. I sometimes found myself affected by influences of past wounding and other times I was stirred by awareness of my infinite nature, with my open recognition of both these aspects of myself supporting my increasing experience of Wholeness.
I continued to work with teachers in this work, attended retreats designed for post whole being realization, and facilitated peer mutuality groups in my local community. I became a Mentor of Trillium Awakening in May 2006 and a Teacher of Trillium Awakening in October 2007 (called Waking Down in Mutuality until the teachers’ association renamed itself Trillium Awakening Teachers Circle). In both of these roles working regularly with Trillium Awakening students in personal sessions, and as a teacher developing and delivering workshops and retreats, I found myself deepening in my awakened nature, growing in trust in the evolutionary movement of being, and clarifying my understandings of the unfoldment of whole being realization.
It was surprising and satisfying when one day in May 2009 I realized the oscillations of awareness between my infinite nature and my finite nature, that naturally occur during the initial years of integration and reconfiguration of whole being realization, had now ceased. I had landed in a stable, unshakable, triadoxical ground of freedom, trust, and interconnectedness. While surface oscillations in the flux of day to day life, personal circumstances, and conditions of my nature would continue, the stable ground of this Whole Being Continuity Realization, became lived as the seamless flow of whole being awakened life.
Evolving Awakened Self
In September 2009, this integrated continuity emerged into the fullness of Whole Being Heart Realization. In contrast to earlier stages of my path where I had recognized Consciousness emerging in the area of my head, and then later experienced a shift into embodied Conscious awareness, I now also knew Consciousness as having its seat in my heart – not as an emotional feeling in an energetic heart center, but as the truth of universal conscious awareness seated in my heart. This awareness allowed my finite personality preferences or discomforts to coexist with the experience of my open heart in which all people and all things live and are held in unconditional love. The awakened heart nature reverberated through the cells of my body and became known by me as embodied core love. And my interpersonal emotional love became open, expanded, and flowing to, from, and with all of creation.
Living whole being heart realization became the underpinning for an emerging discovery of my inner existential core as a trinity of Consciousness–Being–Universal Love. In September 2014, this inner dynamic truth, which I came to recognize as the creation-point of my existence, became the conscious embodied ground for my Whole Being Fire of Life Realization. While fluctuations would occur in the locus of my perspective during the ongoing integration process, this realization brought a quantum shift from being a realizer, to being Being; from conscious in, to conscious as creation unfolding.
From the perspective of the alchemical fire of life realization, the lifelong path of self realization and awakening was complete and whole. It was therefore remarkable in May 2017, to be seated in this stabilized fulfillment of self, Source manifest as the fire of life in my form, and then to have the distinct, separate realization of ‘No Self’. No Self at my inner core was simply Conscious as Emergent Source – Infinite Consciousness, Infinite Being, Infinite Love. Self awake as the alchemical fire of life was true, and ‘no self’ was also true. The whole being realized self didn’t need to be protected, defended, or justified – it was a fundamental truth. Simultaneously ‘no self’ was true, without need to justify or make sense of it. While this Whole Being ‘No Self’ Realization was initially accompanied by some confusion, it soon became comfortably lived as a stage of being Awake as Self–No Self. Two truths simultaneously known and lived.
Sacred Awakening
Living the paradox of ‘Self–No Self’ was illuminating and enlivening, and it was also logically confusing. Yet, there was no need to do anything, nor was there actually anything to do about this fundamental truth. Self relaxed into living this dual truth in the ongoing flow and fulfillment of whole being life. This innocent surrender eventually gave way in March 2018 to the grace of realizing ‘Self – No Self’ as a continuum of ‘Source, beyond form’ to ‘Source, ever present in and as form’. This became Whole Being Sacred Essence Realization – the knowing, experiencing, and feeling of Sacred in, as, and with, all that is.
The Sacred as knowable, observable, and feelable became the norm. Sacred as atoms, one’s cells, the dynamic between everything, always Source and always all. In Sacred Essence Realization, sacredness is in all, present as all, and interconnecting with all. It was from this ground of realization, that in October 2018 the unimagined grace of realizing Sacred Heart of Self emerged — the seat of the divine, the sacred spark of life, seated in the center of the chest, as a trinity of Sacred Heart of Life—Sacred Fire of Creation—Sacred Source of All. Conscious as Sacred Heart of Self became the inner core essence of Whole Being Sacred Self Realization that simultaneously clarified.
It was very moving to discover that this stage of the ‘whole being paradigm of conscious embodied realization’ included realizing the divine in human form as oneself, as each other self, and as all levels of self in creation. Sacred love became identified as the impulse of life, the nature of creation, and the interrelatedness of everyone and everything throughout creation.
Sacred Wholeness
Ongoing stabilization, integration, and refinement of whole being sacred self realization over an extended period of Sacred Transformation, ultimately brings human evolution to fulfillment in the realization, being, and living — in, as, and with all Creation.
It was unexpected and deeply moving when in August 2019, my awareness of Conscious as Sacred Heart of Self opened to the realization of Sacred Heart of All as the truth at the core of creation.
In March 2020, a remarkable realization of Golden Sacred Singularity emerged with clarity in me in a defining moment. This was sacred conscious–embodied–creation perceived as sacred golden light, in sacred formless form, with sacred singular love as the unity at the core of creation.
This further enlivened the Sacred Transformation stirring at the core of my sacred self realization, culminating November 2021 in Whole Being Sacred Wholeness Realization — Sacred Source known as All, Sacred Fire experienced as All, and Sacred Heart felt as All.
This realization brought an additional evolutionary transformation from living personal Whole Being Soul Fulfillment to discovering Universal Sacred Soul as the underlying truth of Self. With this shift, the stage of Awake as Conscious Sacred Wholeness became established in consciously living the singular universal truth of Sacred Source Awake as All—Sacred Source Manifest as All—Sacred Source Heart of All.
Ongoing Evolution
This process of whole being evolution continues endlessly unfolding through awareness, experience, and integration of unfinished, evolving personal aspects of myself; through increasingly feeling and expressing loving mutuality in individual and collective conscious relationships in my life; and through growing insight and refinement in recognizing Source expressed in, as, and with all aspects of creation.
It is thrilling to be on this journey of awakening in, as, and through the field of existence and to discover the cognitions, revelations, and scriptures of past generations now illuminated in conscious embodied realization of Source: Conscious as Sacred Awareness—Manifest as Sacred Being—Interconnected as Sacred Love.