241010 My Spiritual State

[Audio] Welcome to another videos of Francois' Ventures Into Awakening! Today, we will explore how I currently feel about my spirituality state..

[Audio] As I mentioned in my previous video, this channel is as much to share my experiences in awakening with others to potentially help them as is it for myself to document my state of spirituality in order to align my Ego with the Source. It actually took me a few months of hesitations to decide to just put down in writing my spiritual development. The reason for this hesitation is that I had seen many instances where spiritual teachers and leaders clearly explains that all the lessons, notes, books, that we typically accumulate on the spiritual path only addresses the Ego. To me, Papaji summarized this concern the best when he said the following,.

[Audio] All your books, all the time lost in learning different languages! Are they any use for conversing with the atman, with the Self, for speaking to yourself? None of that leads anywhere useful. The atman has nothing to do either with books, or with languages or with any scripture whatever. It is – and that's all..

[Audio] I totally agree with what Papaji said. On the other hand, I believe that in order to access the Self, the Ego needs to be aligned or trained as a cooperative interface to the Self or else the Ego can obscure the Self. Unless you experience some kind of Ego Death, an interesting subject that I will address in a future video. It is this belief of Ego alignment requirement that convinced me to write down my spiritual experiences and share them on this channel. The second reason, is that throughout my professional career, I have learned that when you act as a teacher and convey or explain new ideas or concepts to others, which you can refer to as students, that you, the teacher, can also learn something new about the subject by responding or understanding the point of view of the students. Note that as I use the term teacher generically here, and I am by no way implying that I am a spiritual teacher. On the contrary, I am simply a student of spirituality trying new approaches to learn new experiences and sharing them..

[Audio] We are over eight billions people on this planet, and that number does not include any of the other life forms present on this Earth! Obviously, we are all different for an innumerable number of reasons, but I think there are 2 basic processes that are the cause for why all these reasons exists. The first process is that the brain learns and develop by continuously experiencing or recording of inputs from our body five sensory systems, what can be call the training data. Evidently, everyone experiences different training data due to social and physical environments, location on the planet, period of existence, and many more reasons. For members of the same family the differences in the training data are probably somewhat small or at least in the same neighborhood, while the differences of the training data can be monumental for people living in different countries, cultures, social classes. The second process is how the brain itself processes this training data, the brain being the processing machine. All our brains have the same basic construction or capacity, but how the neurons final interactions or connections are made will be different from one brain to the other. I have noticed that two person can be at a given instant in time and can essentially experience the same sensory inputs but will arrive to two widely different conclusions of what happened! It is not that one person is correct, and the other is wrong. It is simply that they have different brain with different interpretation, and we need to respect that fact..

[Audio] Similarly, as far as spirituality is concerned, we are all at different stages of awakening. Depending on the book or theory or spiritual teacher or leader, the number of stages can vary widely. As I mentioned before, there is no correct or wrong answer, it all depends on your personal history. For me personally, I prefer to use the term levels instead of stages and I believe there are 3 levels of awakening. Level 0 is when you have no idea of what awakening is or even interested by it at all, in other words, you are fully immersed by the Ego in the "illusion". This is the level that I experienced the first fifty-eight years of my life and the level where much of the population is. Level 1 is the very beginning of awakening where you sense or know there is something more to this life than just the material world. This is the level that I am currently at. For short periods of time, I can observe my thoughts, and I can simply stop my thinking. Note that this awakening seems to really be a process that requires practice. At the beginning I could only stop my thoughts barely for a few seconds at a time, now I can stop my thoughts for slightly longer time, but I have not reached the minute mark yet. Part of the problem is probably my Ego that is monitoring my progress too close and somewhat interfering. Some people call this interference by the Ego, the Spiritual Ego. What I have also noticed is that a lot of people, who are not identified as spiritually oriented people, seems to be around level 1 or at least behave that way. I have seen countless videos of various life coaches, inspirational speakers, therapists, and more that gives general life advice that resonates extremely well with spirituality. This for me, kind of show that spirituality is innate or intuitive for humans, even if they are not aware of it. How much and how did they acquire that knowledge is obviously different from everyone, but in general I would say they simply use their common sense..

[Audio] Level 2 is the awaken people. These people are rarer in the population and typically are the one that turn into spiritual teacher, leader or guide. There are quite a few on YouTube. I do not pretend to have seen them all or even tried to identify all of them, but here are a few of my favorites that I found; Eckhart TolleLouise KayAngelo DiLulloRupert SpiraBeau NortonElizabeth HancockJulia non-dualitySam GowSadhguruTeal SwanJulia Kristinaand Mooji. If you are not familiar with any of them, please take the time to visit their respective channels and I am sure you will find something helpful or at least interesting There are also multiple older spiritual leaders that were from the pre-internet age and therefore do not seem to have a specific YouTube channel of their own, but older recordings of them made for TV or Radio can be found on various YouTube channels. Those are; Alan Watts, Papaji, Neville Goddard, Krishnamurti, among others. Also let not forget the hundreds to thousands of year-old stories and scriptures that can be found all around the world. By the way, on a side note, I think that giving a centralized point of access to information that would be otherwise disparate and being able to access it from the comfort of your own home, is the beauty of YouTube. Note that for any information that you get or find anywhere, it is up to you to decide or evaluate how this information is truly relevant for you personally and if you should ignore it or not. As I explained in the previous slide, we are all different with different history, so things that are true for someone can be false for someone else and nobody is necessarily wrong, even if everyone's Ego will disagree with this last statement! In conclusion, it is important to note that spirituality is a process. Even if you think you are at a certain level or stage, you can momentarily revert to a lower level or stage because of the Ego reactivity that can be sometime surprising and violent. In conclusion, it is important that you persist and continue your quest for the betterment of yourself and indirectly humankind..

[Audio] Once again thank you for watching this video until the end. As always, please click the like button and subscribe to my channel if you find this video interesting and would like to see others like it. Also please add any comments or suggestions below! See you next time!.