Permanent Pure Awareness
Many people in the Inner Greatness Optimizing family are starting to have more and more experiences of being in Pure Awareness more and more of the time. And everyone is inspired to continue to do the Freedom Practice and IGO sessions to continue the fastest possible attaining of living in Pure Awareness all the time.
Because I’m seeing this in more and more of my dedicated students, I naturally want to support you to reach this goal as soon as possible. There is no greater goal to have in this life than to liberate yourself from the limitations and suffering produced by staying stuck in illusions of separateness.
Eckhart Tolle rightly says that there are two things that you need to get rid of in order to experience spiritual enlightenment – The 2 things are what he calls the pain body and the ego.
The Pain-body
The pain-body means all of the unresolved emotional pain that is stored in the body due to the deep conditioning of emotional suppression that everyone develops during their pre-verbal years as an infznt.
Everyone gets emotionally overwhelmed many, many times when we are very young. Nobody likes it. And everyone develops the habit of suppressing their emotions in an attempt not to have the awful experience of being emotionally overwhelmed. This results in keeping the incomplete experiences of the unresolved emotionally painful energies held in your body. This is what Tolle is referring to as your “pain body.”
I don’t think that there is actually a “pain-body,” but what this means is the collection of emotional energy patterns that in Inner Greatness Optimizing, we call IN Technique energies.
These emotional energy fields feel like they are inside of your body, and they are like tight knots or balls of energy. We call them “painful/internal emotions,” And we use a Pure Awareness Technique called the IN Technique to resolve them.
This technique teaches people how to do the opposite of what we are deeply conditioned to do. We learn to get close to the emotional energy and to feel the central strongest part of its energy field. This is the opposite of emotional suppression. It quickly completes the incomplete experiences that are held in the body and thus systematically gets rid of the “pain body.”
The Ego
Tolle calls the ego the false sense of self that is made up in the mind. This means that everyone makes up a kind of self-definition based on all of their memories, the stories about everything that has happened to them in their life as well as the things that they expect to happen and fear might happen. All of these stories together give people the feeling that who they are is the sum total of all of these experiences.
We know from physics that everything is made of energy. And each of these stories is made of energy and has its associated energy field. The energy fields of these stories are referred to in Inner Greatness Optimizing as “reactive/external emotions.” Their energy fields feel like a cloud or aura of energy that radiates out into the space around you and surrounds and engulfs you. They are quite different than the pain-body internal IN Technique emotional energies.
The technique that is used to resolve these reactive/external emotional energy fields is called the OUT Technique. Because the cloud or aura of energy of each of the OUT Technique emotions surrounds and engulfs you. You are inside of it, and you are looking out at the world through the energy field of the emotion. It colors everything, kind of like having emotional dark glasses on. You see the world through the energy of your emotion. So if, for example, you are angry about something, everything is tainted by this anger. As a result of this, you might feel anger and even express anger at someone or something that was not the original source of your anger reaction in the first place.
These energy clouds are the mechanisms of what is called identification. That means that the energy cloud makes your emotional reaction seem very real. It makes it feel like that emotion is just a natural and real part of who you are in that moment. So the ego is the sum of all of your identifications that are held in place by the energy clouds of the emotional reactions to the stories that you make up about all of your experiences, expectations, and fears.
The OUT Technique extracts you from these identification, creating energy clouds. During the OUT Technique, you take your awareness outside of the reactive emotional energy cloud into the surrounding quietness, which is your own awareness. That awareness is the essential nature of what you truly are. And when you cross over the outer boundary of the reactive emotional energy cloud in that moment, you liberate yourself from the illusion of the identification.
The OUT Technique is therefore the first systematic process of getting rid of the ego. This is a major breakthrough for the field of spiritual development.
Both the IN and the OUT Techniques are easy to learn and do, and they resolve the emotional energy fields quickly and completely.
Illusions of Separateness
Both the pain body and the ego are therefore composed of emotional energy. Due to the early conditioning of emotional suppression and due to the process of becoming identified with your stories and having them become self-defining because of their engulfing energy clouds, most people don’t know how to get rid of these emotional energies. Therefore they live their lives mainly within the illusions that these emotional energies create.
These illusions are called the Illusions of separateness because, in both cases, the absorption in or avoidance of the emotional energy gets in the way of experiencing Pure Awareness and therefore keeps you locked in your pain body and ego.
The Differences Between IN and OUT Technique Energies
Many of the IN Technique energies are more obvious than the OUT Technique energies. They tend to be more painful and are, in a way, more easily identified. Everyone also knows what the OUT Technique energies feel like, but they do tend to be a bit more diffuse and, therefore, somewhat subtler than the IN Technique energies.
Also, the OUT Technique energies of some of our identifications are not at all as obvious as the more concentrated IN Technique energy fields. This means that oftentimes people have a little bit easier time learning and using the IN Technique. The OUT Technique sometimes takes a bit longer to get the hang of it. Also, because of the nature of identification, people often don’t tend to think to use the OUT Technique because they are so used to being identified with the OUT Technique energies that those energies just feel like a part of who they are.
So sometimes the progress of getting rid of the OUT Technique energies and therefore getting rid of the energy fields that are creating your ego can be more challenging than getting rid of the energies that create the pain-body.
The LOCATE Technique
Fortunately, we have a special way of finding any of our emotional energy fields if they are hidden due to suppression or identification. The LOCATE Technique teaches you how to go into the background of silence in which your thoughts are occurring and then to tell your body to show you a specific emotional energy field you are looking for.
In the background of silence, there is nothing in the way of allowing yourself to feel whatever emotional energy field the body shows you. So you can indeed find and resolve both IN and OUT Technique energies no matter how obvious or subtle they may be.
Permanent Pure Awareness
What this means is that often some additional guidance is required to help you to understand what you are even looking for when you want to find and get rid of the energies that are creating your ego. In order to facilitate this, IGO has a special program called the Permanent Pure Awareness Training.
The permanent Pure Awareness class is included in the One-Year Fast-Track program.
This includes such things as:
- Identification with being an individual
- Identification with your thoughts
- Identification with your body
- Identification of your relationship with your partner
- Identification of your financial status
- Identification with your sense of life purpose
- Etc.
There are many, many more. And in the Permanent Pure Awareness Training, we make sure that you get rid of not only every identification that you have in common with everyone else in the program but also with any individual identifications that are causing you individual illusions of separateness and keeping you locked inside of your ego.
In addition, the program also makes sure that there are no IN Technique energies that are keeping you locked in your pain body.
Therefore the Permanent Pure Awareness Program is designed to allow you to really get rid of both the pain body and the ego. It is a systematic program, and as with all IGO programs, it accesses the innate wisdom of the body by using muscle-testing/intuition testing to find whatever energy needs to be identified and resolved in order to truly live in Pure Awareness all the time.
Two Levels of Experiencing Permanent Pure Awareness
Level 1
Pure Awareness Is Always Present
There are two levels of living in Pure Awareness all the time. The first level is when enough of the pain-body and ego are gone, you never lose the experience of Pure Awareness. This doesn’t require that every single IN and OUT Technique energy be gone.
Think of it like this. If it is a partly cloudy day, but there are few enough clouds that you can always see blue sky, then you have continuous access to seeing the sky even though some clouds are still there. This is like having enough of the IN and OUT Technique energies gone that you experience Pure Awareness as continuously present even though you may still have some emotional energies that partly cloud certain aspects of your experience.
When you reach this “partly cloudy day” level of experience, you make an important and powerful change in your state of consciousness. The things that were keeping you caught up in the false sense of being an isolated individual are gone enough that you shift to having an experience that what you truly are is the universality of Pure Awareness.
This is a major shift in your state of consciousness. You come out of the illusion that you are an isolated individual, and you see that this was indeed just an illusion. You directly experience that your true nature is limitless. This is typically experienced as a kind of waking up to knowing your true nature for the first time. It can be and usually is quite a profound awakening experience.
Level 2
Completely Living and Enjoying
Pure Awareness All the Time
As you continue to clean out the remaining “clouds” of IN and OUT Technique emotional energies, the presence of the limitlessness of Pure Awareness becomes clearer and clearer until it eventually becomes like a clear blue sky. Now you don’t see blue sky. That’s just an analogy. But the lack of clouds on a day when there are no clouds in the sky at all is a perfect analogy for what Living and Enjoying Pure Awareness All the Time is like.
This doesn’t mean that you don’t ever have emotions. There are both useful and not-useful emotions. You still have useful emotions, and you may even have fleeting moments when some not-useful emotion comes up, but you will be so skilled at resolving any such emotion that even if one presents itself for whatever reason, you will resolve it immediately thus very quickly returning to your “total blue sky” status.
This is a different level of consciousness from the first level of having Pure Awareness Present All the Time.
Getting There
Some students of IGO have, at my recommendation, undertaken the project of using LOCATE Technique to tell the body to show them any energy that would get in the way of living from Pure Awareness all the time. However, either they have not continued with this process thoroughly enough or, for some other reason not completed the project and so still have some habits that keep them from living in Pure Awareness all the time or from fully Enjoying living in Pure Awareness all the time.
The result of this is that I observe that there are still patterns of behavior from the deep conditioning, particularly of identifications, that keep people from really fully enjoying the highest level of development of their awareness that is really possible for them.
In fact, some of these patterns really get in the way of the effectiveness, enjoyment, and success of many things in your life. And because of the nature of identification, you don’t even realize that this is happening. But these things do make your life much more limited than what is really possible for you.