The path to liberation
There are many potential paths to explore in life, as you probably are aware of, this is especially the case today with the countless choices and opportunities at our disposal. Although this multiplicity of paths to explore has its obvious benefits that we shouldn't take for granted, these choices however can also readily become distractions and lead to further confusion and withdrawal for the individual trying to make sense of his/her life.
This multiplicity of choices accompanied with the hustle and bustle of the modern world, most notably the information age and the digitization of everything, can lead to a truly noisy internal and external environment for us human beings trying to live a pleasant life on this planet.
With that said, today and in this course we'll embark on a special kind of path together, a path that aims to cut out most of this internal and external noise caused by the socio-cultural machine. The path of the spiritual seeker to existential liberation.
What to expect from this course
The course consists of seven fundamental modules that are intended to shed light on certain important areas that govern how we human beings function in society. One of the main focus of this course is to clarify how and why we function the way we do and from there to guide you up to a deeper spiritual perspective on yourself and the life that you're living. Entertaining the spiritual perspective shared in this course can cause a radical shift in how you view yourself and the world around you. With that said, the main goal of Liberated is to alleviate psychological tension and stress through direct insight into the nature of your experience as a subjective human being.
It should be noted that what is being offered in this course is a powerful perspective on reality but not an absolute truth. In the end, only you, if anyone, can be the sole judge of what is absolute or not in your existence and experience of life.
The seven modules of Liberated are:
- The separate self
- The nature of consciousness
- The 7 fundamental powers
- The power of presence
- The primacy of direct experience
- Immersed
- Nirvanic insights
1. The Separate Self Exposed
First and foremost, you’ll be introduced to the concept of the separate self, a seeming entity which lurks about in each of our minds. Although the sense of being a separate self feels like an entity it is more accurate to refer to it as a mental process, a complex set of mechanisms in the brain that "hijacks" consciousness and tricks it into thinking that it is separate from the rest of the natural world and universe. You'll learn more about what the sense of separate self is, how to identify it in yourself and how to understand your natural state of consciousness (presence) in relation to it more clearly.
2. The Nature of Consciousness
In this course we'll discuss two main ways of looking at consciousness and its contents, namely the spiritual and the materialistic way. One is direct, the other is indirect, one is based on logic, science, deduction and theory, the other on direct experience, meditation and presence. Again, only you can be the judge of which perspective is the greater or truer one at the end of this course. In a nutshell, the spiritual paradigm proposes that your physical body and the universe itself arises in consciousness while the materialistic paradigm proposes that consciousness arises in an pre-existent material universe. Both paradigms have their strengths and weaknesses that we'll discuss in detail.
3. The 7 Fundamental Mental Powers
Consciousness is the foundation for all experience, but what rules and laws govern how and what we experience? I've found that there are seven fundamental mental powers or features which make up much of your subjective reality which you need to contemplate on, namely attention, will, interest, desire, belief, identity and imagination. In this course you'll learn more about each fundamental mental power and how to free them from the tyranny of capricious impressions which the socio-cultural machine puts you under, all the while harmonizing these mental essentials with the state of presence i. e. your natural state and essential way of being and functioning.
4. The Power of Presence
When you understand the separate self, and the two different ways to understand consciousness and the seven fundamental mental powers that shapes your subjective reality, you’ll be prepared to move from a more personal, limited and contracted state of functioning to a more harmonious and natural state of presence. I've found that presence is often the antidote to the clutch and limitations of the person, which in turn arises from the sense of being a separate self. The feeling of being a person and the sense of separate self are the processes that keep you in the "matrix", in slumber and a mental slave to whatever programming culture puts you under. Living as presence means to shift one's attention to life itself, while living as person essentially boils down to being unconsciously preoccupied with incessant mental imagery and internal & external distractions.
5. The Primacy of Direct Experience
Presence is deeply interconnected with direct experience, in fact they could almost be seen as synonyms. The shift from living as a person through indirect experience to living as presence through direct experience is a very big step towards realizing the effortless nature of consciousness, which will naturally result in alleviating psychological tension and stress, i.e. you start caring less and less for nonsense and noise, which is one of the goals of this course. Direct experience is all about perceiving life through an unfiltered lens, immediate, as it is, as it unfolds, each moment a new. Truly life is revealed as a gift when prioritizing direct experience in your life.
6. Immersed: The Many Paths to Direct Experience
To counter the innumerable distractions of daily modern life and the capriciousness of your psychological monkey-mind, you’ll be introduced to a number of effective ways of aligning your attention and awareness with the immediacy of each unfolding moment. This module will be chiefly concerned with putting what you've learnt in the five previous modules into daily practice. These ways range from how to boost your sensitivity and how to move and breathe consciously to meditation, contemplation and prayer. Immersed is all about you living in presence through the medium of direct experience.
7. Nirvanic Insights
When you've established yourself in the immediacy of each moment through the knowledge and practices shared in the previous modules, we'll top it all off with 12 spiritually powerful ideas and insights that sometimes take a somewhat mystical turn. Now each conscious moment is not only precious and fulfilling to you as an intelligent being, but can also potentially become a bridge and a lens to the divine in you, if any such thing as sacredness and divinity exists. In this final module we go through the various beauties of the spiritual perspective on life and the cosmos through the contemplation of twelve nirvanic insights.
eBooks
Alongside the text, video and audio in this course, there is also a book version of the Liberated course that can be used as a complement to the contents of the course. The book and course Liberated differ slightly but generally cover the same topics.
There are also a number of other resources, namely five relevant eBooks that I've previously written, that you will be able to download as PDF-files for diving deeper into different modules and for later readings. These eBooks are also embedded in relevant parts of the course, like for example from chapters 4 to 7.