By Marcio Ribeiro
Feb 27, 2014
By Marcio Ribeiro
The Principles of Consciousness course provides us with the potential of understanding life from a non-dualistic perspective. Vedic philosophy stimulates in us the idea that the concepts about ourselves, others, and reality that we carry through our lives have been instilled into us by our educators since birth. However, this information isn't the absolute truth for our experience.
The search for this truth is individual. My drive with this course has always been towards honoring the individual's own search. What his interests are in discovering himself through the process; a process where he questions what was given to him in the form of beliefs, and understands that it couldn't have happened any other way, due to lack of questioning beforehand in the chain of events. All in all, the only absolute experience we have is, by definition, that all there is, is consciousness. This consciousness that animates all parts and all dynamics, on the inside as well as the outside, macro and micro, has always fascinated me since early on.
In BodyTalk, Innate doesn't hold any religious or spiritual connotations, but simply carries a factual aspect, which is that life is constantly seeking balance. Everything in life is dynamic, chaotic, and yet always strangely in balance. For example, death is observed at all times during the day, including as the day dies in order to become night. Thus, in life there is death, and in death there is life. The Taoist philosophy orients the human being in the search for this balance within manifestation, as opposed to living in the pathological dualistic pattern. At some point, the individual's experience takes him to looking inward, as the outside light no longer shines enough for him on a deeper level within. But if his observation is led by an attempt at control, then once again, the light fades.
Ultimately, I believe the work through the Principles of Consciousness course allows for the individual to understand that he is the light that shines on the inside and on the outside, and that he has never been anything but light. The sum of his experiences has been nothing but light, without any control. It is so because he was never designed for control, but for experience, and the gaining of understanding over those experiences until that transforms into wisdom. Just as the metaphor of the ocean and the wave, he remembers that he has never stopped being the ocean, and ocean is all he will ever be. But he must express his individuality as a wave with a name, with an ego. Simply that and nothing more. For being, is all there is to experiencing life.
Marcio Ribeiro is an AdvCBI currently teaching primarily in Brazil and Singapore.