Chapter Three – From Person to Presence
Chapter Syllabus
- Lesson 11: What is “The Person”?
- Lesson 12: Meaning is Optional
- Lesson 13: Neti Neti with Circumstances
- Lesson 14: Neti Neti with Thoughts
- Lesson 15: Neti Neti with Emotions
- Lesson 16: Neti Neti with Sensations
- Lesson 17: Neti Neti with Beliefs
- Lesson 18: I-AM, without This
- Lesson 19: Beyond Body, Beyond Death
- Lesson 20: Bye Bye, Attachments
Reality Check
Before you continue with Chapter Three, let’s recap:
After having studied and applied the materials in Chapter One (the Introduction), you can now feel/sense/recognize at will:
- Your own existence (the sense I-AM).
- How to recognize and meditate.
- The Presence in things.
- The fact that Presence never changes, even when things do change.
- That there is a Knowingness of Presence (Consciousness).
After having studied and applied the materials in Chapter Two, you can now feel/sense/recognize at will:
- The unobscurable nature of Presence.
- That your not-yet-enlightened beliefs can be easily released by exposing them to the light of Presence-Consciousness.
- That every single experience confirms Presence-Consciousness.
- That even non-recognition rests in Presence, that each Level of Reality has its own relevancies, and that the goal is not to be in a state of permanent conscious recognition of Presence.
- That Now is the only moment, and you cannot be more Now than you already are.
It’s okay if Chapter Two’s realizations still feel somewhat new to you, and require some conscious attention to conjure up. This is natural, and good enough to continue with the third chapter of this course.
By this time, the materials of Chapter Two should be very familiar to you, and close-to-effortless to recognize.
If you feel you have too little of a sense of Chapter Two’s realizations, I suggest you go over the lessons once more and take your time with them before proceeding. There is no rush.
If taking some more time to study the second chapter doesn’t do it for you, don’t hesitate to ask for support and additional clarification or tips in the appropriate Study Group.
That being said: don’t be too quick to doubt your ability to recognize the Presence that is always here. It’s easier than you think. We tend to make the idea about it more complicated than the recognition of it actually is. You got this!
Transcending Person-World-Consciousness
Now that the first half of this course has introduced us to Presence-Consciousness and its most important, fundamental truths and qualities; now that the groundwork is established and there is no way back for us into total ignorance, Chapter Three enables us to significantly loosen up our identification with the person—the body-mind—and its attachments to “the world,” so that we may even more effortlessly feel and know ourselves to be Presence-Consciousness, rather than “a body-mind within a world.”
Chapter Three is a Self-Realization boot camp of sorts, focusing you into a relentless, day-after-day, deepening of your practice in directly realizing the eternal truth of your I-AM.
This chapter is designed, to an extent, to tire you out. Be prepared for this, so that you can enjoy it all the more. You will experience tremendous benefits from this that will stay with you for the rest of your life. This is arguably the most repetitive and practice-oriented chapter in Trinfinity Academy. Give it all you’ve got, and you will walk away transformed, ready to enjoy—that much more effortlessly—all the fruits of the courses to follow.
Yes, Trinfinity Academy is all about making Enlightenment easy, offering it to you step-by-step so you don’t have to be confused about the order of things. But it does require you to exhaust yourself in the form of practice and dedication from time to time, especially in this course, because we’re talking about truly shifting your core sense of self from limitation to God-nature.
Again, this course—and this chapter—lay the transformative groundwork for all the beautiful goodies and empowering realizations to come in the rest of Trinfinity Academy.
This chapter will help you go from feeling like you are a person recognizing Presence, to feeling that you are Presence-Consciousness recognizing the person-appearance—a true shift in identity from person to Presence. Welcome to your ever-more-obvious enlightenment!
A Little Cosmological Refresher and Overview
Let us review a couple of things before we proceed with the actual boot camp.
Most of us have always taken something we’re not, to be what we absolutely are: Awareness has become identified with its perception of the person, which is but a single expression of the entirety of Creation (Presence-Energy).
The Person and the World are ideas, perceptions, creations, manifestations—slices of the greater all-pervasive intelligent God-Energy.
No matter how elaborate, complexly built, or separate a thing seems to be, Enlightenment I, Lesson 3 has shown us directly that it has beingness as its only substance. We realized that nothing of form exists outside of the realm of Presence.
Presence-Energy is the Expression (Creation) of The Infinite One, The Absolute.
Awareness (The Absolute’s Ultimate Free Agent) wraps around Manifestation (Presence) and its activities, like gravity wraps around a planet and its creatures.
With Awareness wrapping itself around Presence-Energy, Creation is now complete: It is, and it knows that it is. And so it can evolve, expand, and experience itself, with supreme intelligence.
Now it can play and perform its honorable duty: to express Infinity as best it can, in as many ways as possible, by multiplying itself into infinite directions and exploring the possibilities of creating in infinite ways, of which you—your body-mind-world experience—is one.
The Person and its self-created dream world are an expression, a manifestation, of the pure, ever-present force that everything in creation is made out of: Beingness-Energy-Consciousness.
Even though the Person and the World are relevant and important regarding their duty to express Infinity, it is indescribably valuable, and worthy of celebration, each time a portion of the whole wakes up to the whole. Each time Awareness of “being a person in a world” wakes up to “Being Presence-Energy,” all of creation is amplified, clarified, and empowered.
In other words, every time you wake up a little more, Creation wakes up a little more with you, since you and “the whole” are not two separate things, but one complete being.
From that point (realization of Presence) onward, “Awareness as that individual” will express itself with less and less allegiance to the idea that it is separate, lacking, isolated, and that it has to fight and steal for its needs to be met.
It will start acting and experiencing itself along the lines of the innate qualities of Presence-Energy, such as: Wisdom, Love, Compassion, Clarity, Non-Separation, Interconnectedness, Fullness, Courage/Fearlessness, Authentic Leadership, Abundance, Satisfaction, Always Already Present, Connection, Eternity, and so on.
Once Awareness wakes up from being a person to this Greater Self-Presence, it starts shifting its placement of self—its sense of identity—away from the perception of the limited, separate individual, and into the vibrational-conviction that “I-AM the Presence of All of Life.”
Awareness stops feeling I-AM-This to be true, and starts feeling that the simpler, but endlessly more profound and pervasive, I-AM is true.
I-AM-This means identification with “this, or that”—identifying oneself with certain individual things within Creation, usually one’s body and mind.
I-AM means identification with Creation—Beingness itself—that which every individual thing depends upon and is made out of.
This chapter is designed to aid your dormant-yet-already-awake Awareness in making this shift, so that it will predominately feel itself to be Presence-Consciousness, rather than Person-World.
This should release you into a state of greater effortlessness, ease, clarity, presence, aliveness, connectedness, fullness, and joy-for-no-reason in your everyday life.
Now, please enjoy—for no reason at all—or just because you exist and you can read this sentence and recognize that you are reading this sentence.
What a miracle life is! 🙂