Questions for Sage: Conscious Living

Question: I have seen many of your posts on mutual friends facebook pages. I follow your blog as well. I have to admit, you seem to live in some other world of love, peace and harmony. So many of your posts speak of a type and degree of acceptance of other people's flaws, unconditional love, forgiveness and such, in a way I don't believe most people are capable of. Do you believe most people are capable of the things you seem to speak about so frequently?

Sage: Thank you for your question. I believe it is a good one. Its also one I get fairly often. To jump to the chase, yes, I believe all people are capable of unconditional love, compassion and empathy far beyond the confines of anything I have ever written. Just the other day I placed on this blog a quote from spiritual teacher Adyashanti. Perhaps you saw it. The quote was, "The biggest barrier to awakening is the belief that it is something rare."  

I realize you have not asked me about "awakening" or have you? I would have to say that living from a place of deep or even approximate unconditional love is probably a pretty good definition of awakened or conscious living. I often use those two phrases interchangeably. So really you are asking me if people can awaken. And so once again the answer is an unqualified yes. 

When it comes to awakening and living a conscious life there are literally dozens of books out there on the subject. There are probably hundreds in fact. Maybe even thousands. So there are many people who have something to say about this and there are probably just as many techniques and approaches as there are people and books about it. 

One of the things that seems to be a big hindrance to awakening or conscious living is the various "stories" we tell ourselves. Most of us have many egoic and longstanding stories about what we believe is real for us such as, "I am not lovable," for example. If we do not believe we are lovable it becomes very difficult to believe anyone else is truly lovable or deserving of love or is an expression of love, etc. And if we do not believe any of that, reconciliation, forgiveness and true acceptance of others also become near impossibilities.

One spiritual teacher out there who appears to be doing some good work around teaching people to identify their stories and then to have them deeply explore the truth, the relative truth, the relative non-truth or the complete non-truth of them is Byron Katie. If you click on her name there in that previous sentence, you will be taken to her primary, international website.

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