Session Fourteen – After the Awakening

This is a series created from the book “Be Love: A Book About Awakening” authored by Ned Burwell. This series is a guide for people who are seeking a life of purpose and peace told through the life experiences of Ned Burwell. The material is told through a variety of concepts, practices, anecdotes, and experiences. Hosted by Seamus Evely

The Awakening Podcast series was created to give you the tools to live a more purposeful and peaceful life through the teachings of Ned Burwell, author of the book “Be Love: A Book About Awakening”.

Session Fourteen – After the Awakening: At the end of the series we recap about what an awakening is and what life CAN be like. Work towards being love. Put love into your life and everything around it. Don’t live in torment by your past and be brave and accepting of your future. Life is a wonderful gift.

Artwork to support this chapter
https://umatter.ca/2019/02/25/awakening-session-14/

Transcript

session 14: After The Awakening

Positive Affirmation: “With a clear and earnest heart and mind, I direct my will to create peace and harmony in my life and in the world.”

Seamus: We have arrived. This is the final chapter of the series. Here is a question that may be lingering with some of our readers: What is an awakening?

Ned: You have been very patient in getting to this question.

Awakening is the pure joy of realizing our soul. It’s the immediate relief of letting go of our desires and fears. Awakening happens when we discover the truth of who we are and our relationship to the Divine. Most of all, awakening is a gift that comes by the grace of God.

Seamus: When we flip to the very beginning of your quest to shed your old habits, lift the burdens of your thoughts and open your heart, what was your internal experience with your ruthless pursuit to awaken?

Ned: I knew that it was in my destiny to wake up and move forward in this life. By the age twenty, I could clearly see that I was heading in the wrong direction. In my heart I knew I was not living the path laid out in my soul. My internal experience was heavy when I first started to wake up.

When I took vows to be an Ishaya monk, I had to ask Maharishi to be my teacher. His response to me was, “Are you willing to do whatever it takes to wake up?” That’s a big question. I needed to surrender my soul over to the capable hands of the Creator. To find my peace, I had to be willing to abandon everything in my path that was obscuring me from my soul.

The more I have learned to surrender, the lighter I have become in the process. Writing the book Be Love: A Book about Awakening was a relief for me. I was told in my early twenties that I was going to write this book. For the last twenty – plus years, I had been waiting to see if what I was told many years ago held any truth. I didn’t think it was possible I could actually write a book. The most amazing things can happen when you get devoted to your path and pursue it with sheer ruthlessness.

Seamus: Going back to what you said earlier, when it comes to your desires and checking off everything, does that mean that people have to make all of the checks on their desire list in order to become open to awakening?

Ned: No. Awakening comes to everybody differently. I wouldn’t know how awakening is going to land at your doorstep. I found myself at the door of a stranger feeling broken and suicidal. I don’t think that’s everybody’s path. My path is about the pursuit of my purpose, and your path will be the pursuit of yours. There are many roads to awakening, but they all lead us to the same place: into our soul with God.

Seamus: Just a note to the readers: if you are identifying with the content, then maybe it’s the sign that you should be doing something else with your life. Some of us don’t have the sign until later in life, but I don’t think it matters when you get the sign to awaken. I’ve searched high and low for a solution, and none of it clicked with me.

Ned: In our awakening, love is a direct path to peace. This is a common thread that ties us all together.

Seamus: It the book, you said that when you went on meditation retreats you would come home a new person. What did you commonly experience after you returned home?

Ned: Meditation retreats often created mini-awakenings in me. I always felt that I came home a different person. However, the old me and all my habits and routines were waiting for me when I arrived home from a retreat. If we continue on our new path and maintain our new place of consciousness, the old you falls away. As soon as you touch that old you, you give it life again and the new you disappears.

The new you is moving along beside you, but the old you has more momentum behind it. When we have an awakening it’s like we switch off the old us. For example, if you switch off a motor, it still keeps spinning unless it has a brake on it. It can keep spinning long after you turn it off. However, if you turn the switch back on while the motor is still spinning, it comes back up to full speed right away. That’s what happens when the new you touches the old you.

Watch for your old tendencies that come up, resist the urge to jump onto old behaviours and habits.

Seamus: When someone has an awakening, what kinds of sensations are they going to experience, and how clear is it that they become awakened so that they can stay away from making contact with the old them?

Ned: There is an integration or an adjustment phase when you have an awakening. We have many mini-awakenings along the way that contribute to a much larger awakening. I found that as I began to awaken, my environment and some of the people that I was associating with no longer fit the context of my life.

I have needed to walk away from people at times; I needed space so I could re-evaluate my life. We talked about this in the session about unity. At times it is important to disengage from things that take away from our well-being. This includes friendships as well.

Seamus: Could you talk to us about the path of awakening and growth? In your book you have a diagram to illustrate what the path of awakening looks like.

Ned: The diagram starts with a dot on the bottom of the page. Then there’s a line that goes forward and it turns and goes sideways, then backward and sideways and forward a little bit. It kind of goes all over the place. That’s how I see the path of awakening.

Along the path, there’s sometimes more sideways and backward movement than there is forward. There have been times when I needed to ground and stabilize experiences that I’ve gone through. When I changed some of my beliefs, it put me on unstable ground. If we change one thing in our mind, it can cause several old beliefs to change as well. The path of awakening can be one that moves us both backward and forward. What has kept me moving on my path is my willingness to love myself.

“When we choose love for long enough, eventually everything around us is the result of that choice.”

Seamus: What is the importance of becoming your own source of love?

Ned: Becoming our own source of love moves us into an empowered place. We can meet all our own needs. By learning how to rest in our soul, we enter the heart of love. We not only become our own source of love, we also radiate the love inside us into the world. Your love will attract many people into your life.

My slogan is “Be Love.” The whole concept of Be Love is based on being you, being your soul, being God. If love is God and God is love, then I’m telling the community to be God. That’s who you are. Why would you ever need what you are from another person? That’s the importance of becoming your own source of love. Even the idea of being your own source of love becomes a redundant concept when you know who you are, because you are love itself.

Seamus: The statement “Be God”—could there possibly be a higher sense of self-regard than that?

Ned: That goes to the top.

Seamus: Some people might think, “Well, that’s not right.” What do you say to those people?

Ned: When our mind and emotions no longer have control over us, we find a deeper truth resting in our soul.

Seamus: I think that there’s an expectation placed on us that we’re not supposed to exceed God; this is especially true for anyone who has grown up in a religious household. For many people, God is something you kneel to.

Ned: It’s not that we exceed God, because we are God. It’s not my ego that is God; our soul is. The silent nature in us is made from the fabric of God. The idea that we’re lesser has been a cruel misinterpretation of the reality of who we are. When I was younger I only had the opportunity to attend church on rare occasions. I remember feeling hungry for God when I was younger. I didn’t feel drawn to religion; I felt drawn to God. I would hear things that Jesus said and feel the truth of them. For example, Jesus said, “What he can do, we can do and more.” Why? How could we do more than Jesus? Jesus is referred to as God. So, how could we do more than God if we’re not God ourselves? Think about that.

How does that fit into the paradigm that we’re these lesser little souls that are little sinners? It just doesn’t work.

Seamus: That is quite a statement of empowerment.

Ned: Absolutely. I think people are tired of disempowering slogans that diminish our empowerment. Any slogan that paints you to be less than the God you are isn’t worth the time it takes to listen to it.

Seamus: You say in the book, “Your relationship with the Divine is completely in the moment. It is maintained by surrendering to love.” Can you share a little bit more about what you mean by that?

Ned: When we make love our constant focus, our relationship with God is greatly amplified. Here is an interesting point: while reading this book, you can interchange the word love with God or vice versa, and the message is still applicable. For example, our relationship with God is a completely inward one that is maintained by always looking toward love. Let’s flip it around: our relationship with love is a completely inward one that is maintained by always looking toward God.

Seamus: In your experience with your awakenings, how did they change your needs and wants?

Ned: I want more for others than what I need for me. My needs are met in life. Luxury things don’t really appeal to me. I’d rather have experiences that are purposeful. My awakening has shifted my focus. I’m more interested in spending my time serving people. That’s become very important to me; my path is to give without need. I’m an ordained minister, and my ministry is love. It’s not built on concepts and beliefs. Any of these concepts and beliefs that I have projected throughout this entire book—you can collapse them all and just go with one thing, and it’s love. If you could erase the whole thing and just go with love—that’s my ministry. There’s no religion or purpose higher than love.

Seamus: I think John Lennon was on to something!

Ned: John Lennon is one of my idols. The music that he was producing had a message of love in it. Lennon had a lot of great ideas.

Seamus: I think this is kind of a rhetorical question, but how important do you think it is for other people to experience love?

Ned: It will be important when they make it a priority. If you were to try to force someone to experience something, that would be controlling. I only know about what’s best for me. Even with all my ideas and the things I have shared in my writing, at the end of the day, I only know what’s best for me.

Seamus: In the last chapter of your book you share the idea that “what you hold is what you become.” How long must we hold on to love before we become it?

Ned: We already are love. This concept that whatever we hold is what we become helps us stay more anchored on the path of love. If we hold our focus on the path of love, that’s what we become. Therein lies the importance, if you believe this to be true. I don’t think the question should be “How long must we hold on to love?” I think it’s a matter of how many things we are holding that are not loving. By letting go of all the things that are not in support of love, you’re able to tap into your true potential.

Seamus: You mentioned that the true self in you has no preferences, wants or needs. Why is so uncommon for people to let go of their wants?

Ned: It’s the mind that wants and needs. The reason why it’s so uncommon for people to relinquish their wants is that a great deal of society is still caught in the desires of their mind. They don’t have a relationship with anything deeper within themselves.

Seamus: There’s another quote here that I’d like to bring up, and it reads, “The true self is not singular; it is found in all of humanity.” How is this?

Ned: What ties us together is the fact that we’re all made in the same image. The soul has no distance between you and anything because the very nature of the soul is rooted in God. In the book I Am That, by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, there is a line that says, “There’s no distance between masters.”

When I read that, my whole body tingled. It struck me as a great truth. This concept opened my mind. I began to realize that if there’s no distance between masters, who are the masters? My soul is a master; your soul is a master; Jesus is a master. So there’s no distance between me and Jesus right now; there’s no distance between Buddha and me. No distance between you and me. So when we realize that, we realize there is no distance between us and the true self is not a separate unit that’s experiencing life.

We realize that we are all experiencing one collaborative life. We are connected by a big long string: if you pull on one side, it’s going to affect the other side. The importance of waking up is that when I wake up, I affect the other side of the globe, and you do the same.

Seamus: I like how you phrase your relationship with your body. You say you’re “riding your body.”

Ned: The body is a transportation device. I don’t see this lump of flesh as who I am. I’ve come into this body but I’m not of it. I’m in this world but I’m not of it. I say to people all the time, “I’m riding this body like a chicken.” I’m not my mind or my emotions, and I’m also not the body.

Seamus: How has your personal awakening changed you and your outlook on life and other people?

Ned: My personal awakening has radically changed my life. I’m flying towards a new vocation and my purpose today is much different than it was five years ago. I’m waking up and people are waking up around me. I love it. I absolutely love watching the ripple of my awakening in others.

There’s an old saying that goes, “If you’ve started, you’d better finish. If you haven’t started, probably better not.”

If you’ve started this path of awakening, pour devotion into your path. Pour devotion into every person you meet. When you get in front of 

somebody, love that person. Love them the best you can and love yourself. Watch how your devotion electrifies the earth around you.

Beyond Awakening

My awakening has been an invitation to surrender to God while I live God’s will in my soul. Devotion begets awakening, and awakening begets devotion. What is next is not nearly as important as what is happening right now. And the most important thing in life is the spirit of love. With love, we shall no, be afraid. With love, we shall not be tormented by our past. With love, we shall not be trapped in our body. With love, we shall rejoice in God. For with love, life is made perfect.

Seamus: Do you have any parting thoughts or final words that you like to Ned:             Be Love…