Point of View

Student: How does looking at the world with absolute awareness differ from the way you used to see, and how has that affected your relationships?

Barbara: What I am able to perceive all around me no longer carries the baggage of meaning, no longer carries the taint of bad memories, or interpretations that were made out of old belief systems. I simply see. I don’t come to any conclusions about what I see, nor do my perceptions lead me to emotional drama.

Now, taking this into the context of a relationship means that I love and accept people as they are. I am not guided or influenced by my need to change or control others, which means less suffering for me. I don’t manipulate, or judge. The most important thing to emphasize here is learning how to accept and appreciate yourself as you are, so that self-rejection doesn’t lead to inevitably rejecting everyone who offers you love.

I can best explain this by saying, seeing things from an infinite perspective rather than from the perspective of “a woman” with “a history”, or a memory of bad experiences, with a convoluted belief system. These are two completely different ways of perceiving the world.

Student: What is your mood as someone who sees things exactly as they are?

Barbara: I would just say, light. As in not heavy, not burdened with expectation. Not fraught with frustration or disappointment. You could say, every little revelation on this journey gives us a feeling of exaltation. By the time we come to recognize ourselves as light, there is no disappointment, there is simply absolute awareness.

Student: Does this mean that you don’t care? Or that you don’t have a moral compass? That you are apathetic about the world, or that you have lost your sense of adventure for life, because there is no drama?

Barbara: All of these questions reflect an old belief system that says that “I care very, very much, but I am not going to let you see how much I care.” In this case, it means that I am not invested in the outcome, I am not invested in the way things are, the way things occur, and therefore I don’t give myself an excuse to feel bad when my expectations are not met.

What most great spiritual traditions indicate, is that when we believe in the idea of morality, we have to contend with the idea of immorality, and from my point of view morality is an allegiance to truth, not an allegiance to ideas about human conduct. And, of course, society’s ideas of morality are specific to any given society.

Student: Many people have tried to live a moral life, a saintly life, or for those who have followed eastern religions, a life of serenity or peace. Is the way of life you are speaking of attainable by everybody? What message would you give people who are looking to get from where they are to where you are?

Barbara: Part of our present belief structure says that you can’t achieve anything except through some kind of pain or discomfort, without extreme discipline or without alienating ourselves form the world at large or those we love.
Spirituality means life, and the way to attain a greater spiritual awareness and appreciation is really as simple as ending the struggle to be what we are not. We have spent a lifetime trying to adhere to rules of behavior and religious dogma, or to adhere to society’s idea of human behavior and morality.

We don’t have to exert a physical or mental discipline in order to get there. All that we have to do is to stop trying so hard to be what we are not, what we have been taught to be, or what we have tried to teach ourselves to be.

By undoing a system of beliefs that tell us what we are not, the natural result is to be what we are, which is the messengers of light and embodiments of love.