ESSENTIALS

NEW ESSENTIALS WEBINAR

Don’t miss this opportunity to be with a master teacher.

In this new 11-week webinar, Richard will be your host and guide in an enlightening exploration of the Essentials of consciousness and spiritual development. This webinar is an expansion and clarification of the 2022 Essentials Webinar. You do not need to have participated in the previous webinar and if you did attend the first Essentials webinar, join again and touch a timeless and ever-new place in your own understanding.

Each session is 2 hours. Each will begin with a short dedication ceremony. Richard will present a particular Essential of the work through discussion and with extensive guided meditations and visualizations. There will be a break to shift the energy into the body with movement or voice play followed by time for questions and discussion. 

Richard transmits this teaching as he has done all his life with precise languaging that respects intellect but directly activates the heart and feeling intelligence. Don’t miss this opportunity to be with a master teacher. You don’t just hear words, you feel them alive inside you, you feel your mind expanding and your heart opening. 

Essentials is presented in a sequence that is in some ways arbitrary, but which follows the progress of Richard’s lifetime of evolving understanding.  Each Essential will contribute to your understanding and practice, together they are a revelation of life’s deepest potential. 

2023 DATES TO BE ANNOUNCED

The Zoom sessions are limited to 24 people to allow the opportunity for personal interaction.

All sessions are recorded so that if you miss a session you can catch up in your own timing.

More instructions upon registration.

What are the essential insights, steps, practices, life choices and actions that lead to a life heartful and filled with joy?
How do you answer the call of the awakened mind and heart
within you and in service to Life?

THE 11 SESSIONS

Session 01 The Big Picture and the Big Questions
Session 02  The Aware-Self Process – Taking Your Seat
Session 03  Consecration – Self-Awareness, of course, but In Service To What?
Session 04  The First Assemblage Point of Consciousness
Session 05  The Mandala of Being Model and Practice – Stopping Mental-Emotional Suffering

 

Session 06  Feeling Literacy – The Art of Body-Centered Awareness
Session 07  The Imaginal World – Discourse and Guided Meditation
Session 08  Dreaming and Symbolic Reality
Session 09  Heart Intelligence
Session 10  Third Consciousness – Relationships as Spiritual Path
Session 11  Summary: The Moral Ground and Closing Ceremony

01  The Big Picture – and the big questions

Consciousness and spirituality are the metaphysical foundations of the beingness in human being. The two are linked in a single path which begins with learning to turn your awareness inward toward your mind and sensations with curious gentle attention.  As Jung said, “Those who look outward dream; those who look inward awaken.” But awakening unfolds in a much larger context than most spiritual traditions embrace, particularly because of continuous progress in science. 

Science looks outward but it tries not to dream. It is the art of precise empirical observation to study objective, physical reality. Science, particularly neuroscience meets spirituality and consciousness because we are living organisms with a brain and body without which there could be no consciousness. 

In this session Richard will broadly discuss science, spirituality, and consciousness in terms of how each addresses the big questions: Who are we? What are we? What is a life well lived?

02  The Aware-Self Process – Taking Your Seat 

The Aware-Self process is the essential foundation of all consciousness and spirituality. In Richard’s teaching you metaphorically take you seat in the ground of Awareness. This ground is not a place or a state; it is a decisive relationship to yourself. The instrument of this relationship is attention. Taking you seat is a declaration, “Here am I” by which you consciously affirm your readiness to bring attention to whatever is present in your being. It is the quality of your attention that determines the reality of what you experience. If fear is present, fear is the teacher and you, or rather the quality of your attention, are the student. Gradually, as you learn to touch any disturbing perceptions, divisive thoughts, or threatening feelings like fear with curious, gentle, and less conditional or strategic attention, these seeming obstacles release back into your own loving life essence. Reality is not a given, it is a condition of your attention. As Richard says, the Law of the Present Moment is, “As you touch is how you are touched”.

03  Consecration – Self-Awareness, of course, but In Service To What?

Meditation and mindfulness can, in the words of John Cabot-Zin, make you a “better assassin.” This questionable outcome depends on how prominently your ego-driven purposes contaminate your awakening self. There is pure, original, unchangeable consciousness, yet no matter how close you approximate that transcendent awareness, the existence of your ego is nonetheless always involved and will be more or less prominent. Diminishing its negative influence is key in the awakening process.

To do this your self-awareness practice must be consecrated to some unwavering principle. For Richard this consecration is to Love. From the moment you consecrate the agency of your self-awareness to love Love itself, you become a disciple of all the ways you close your heart and fall away from Love. As you consciously choose to relax that contraction a whole new current of aliveness begins to live within you. 

04  THE FIRST ASSEMBLAGE POINT OF CONSCIOUSNESS

This session will overview the process of consciousness development from infancy to approximately 8 years old. The emphasis will be on how you (everyone) unconsciously must create the 1st assemblage point of consciousnesses – a self-system that each of us knows as me or I, as in “I think”, or “I feel”. The belief that you are a separate self and that your ever-changing states are who you really are is the fundamental mistake, also called original sin. But ego is neither a mistake, nor a sin; it is a necessary stage of consciousness development. The tragedy of the human condition is not evolving beyond this stage.

Richard will discuss the key necessities and vulnerabilities of this essential stage, including the need for bonding, the influence of parents and their relationship(s), and the consequences of childhood trauma on the potential for further consciousness development and our capacity to give and receive love.

05  THE MANDALA OF BEING MODEL AND PRACTICE – STOPPING MENTAL- EMOTIONAL SUFFERING

The ego is a process that ever-resists the present moment. This session uses Richard’s Mandala of Being model to explain the 4 specific domains of egoic-awareness – Subject, Object, Past, Future – that once organized into the self-system we each know as me or I (by approximately 8 years of age) will continuously pull you away from the Now. The model offers a precise and clear process of self-inquiry by which you step away from the endless looping of thoughts and emotions that are the cause of all mind-made suffering. 

Unlike many teachings that try to eliminate the ego, Richard explains that Self-realization is not the elimination of the ego into transcendent consciousness, but rather the bridging of the two in an essential tension that is the basis for evolutionary creativity.

In this session Richard will introduce the Mandala model and demonstrate the self-inquiry process with a volunteer.  

06  FEELING LITERACY – THE ART OF BODY-CENTERED AWARENESS

What does it take to become as literate in your body with the music of your sensations and feelings as you are in reading these words? This segment is about the essential of learning to journey in your body with conscious attention to whatever sensations or feelings are present. It is about transforming feelings like fear, grief, or abandonment, as well as sensations like pain, or numbness, by the quality of your attention to them. Rather than react and try to control them or relieve them – in essence fix yourself which is the ego’s clever way of trapping you in ego – you can begin to touch these sensations with exquisite attention until they transform from terrible blockages to doorways into flowing inner music and aliveness. 

07  THE IMAGINAL WORLD – DISCOURSE AND GUIDED MEDITATION

For as long as there is evidence of human consciousness it seems we human beings have contemplated the transcendental intuitions we refer to as Soul, Self, Love, God, One, Eternity, and Death. It is healthy to be skeptical, but you can’t be cynical. Nor can you be a true believer parroting dogmatic intellectual beliefs. To be fully human you need to bring innocence, thoughtfulness, and originality to your contemplation of these metaphysical intuitions. You metaphorically kneel before these profound mysteries and steadily through a lifetime this essential creative encounter becomes your own song of Life. Your being starts to resonate with a sense of the Natural Order, and you understand the unity of Existence. You are becoming a humble companion to the Great Ones.

08  DREAMING AND SYMBOLIC REALITY

Becoming a student of the Dream World is indispensable to the path of awakening. Richard teaches that while dreams work their magic even if we don’t understand them, rational understanding is not the point of dreamwork; it is about building and discovering another kind of understanding by the intuitive process with which you engage the dreamworld. For Richard, dreamwork is among the most subtle of conscious undertakings, requiring fundamental curiosity and humility. In dreamwork you engage with the stories told by your dreams, enter their symbolic reality, develop a refined intuition of patterns of consciousness, and discover that within you there exists a dimension of intelligence far beyond what we experience in waking consciousness. Willingness to engage the genius in dreams invites a new genius in you. 

In this session Richard will guide you in 3 introductory approaches to dreamwork and explore several dreams offered by participants.

09  HEART INTELLIGENCE

The heart is a timeless symbol of higher intelligence that is body and feeling centered, and deeply grounded in nature. In its least mature stage, the heart connotes a delicious sentimentality and the joy of “falling in love”. It its mystical symbolism the Heart is an organ of the imaginal consciousness that opens pathways for Love’s coherence. It invites a shared feeling of understanding and connection between people without any person ever losing their authentic individuality. Heart Intelligence is a radical transcendental intuition that you are never other than or separate from Love and neither is anyone else no matter how lost they appear to be in their egoic consciousness. 

In this session, Richard will help you understand how to contact and invite your Heart Intelligence especially in the face of life’s fierce enigmas and seemingly unresolvable dissonance. 

10  THIRD CONSCIOUSNESS RELATIONSHIPS AS SPIRITUAL PATH

All the work leads to one fundamental capacity: consciousness relationships. As Richard’s wife, Katherine, often remarks, “the rubber meets the road” in our relationships. Richard will discuss the distinction between transactional relationships and relationships lived in 3rd consciousness. Transactional relationships are subconsciously based in neediness and the underlying question is, “What do I want?” In 3rd consciousness, the question is, “What does the relationship want?”

11  SUMMARY: THE MORAL GROUND AND CLOSING CEREMONY

There is no free will except that to which you bind your heart and actions. Richard will briefly discuss the necessity of our free adherence to a fundamental moral ground. Ultimately, a life well lived must stand upon a moral ground in which you unequivocally bind yourself to a transcendental sense of Truth. There are no longer any excuses – harsh circumstances, stress, consensus beliefs, the corruption of others, or the usual bullshit, “I didn’t know” – a true moral ground rests in essential humility; even survival is no longer sacrosanct. Then as you look into the mirror of Existence, you know your place; you are free. 

The majority of this closing session will be devoted to your reflections and questions. You are invited to a free-ranging conversation. Bring your passion, your confusions, your heartbreak, your vision and aspirations and let us see what our shared 3rd offers to us.