Living from God-consciousness by Miranda Macpherson

We begin our 8-module journey together by exploring what God Consciousness IS. How do we open beyond mere conceptual understanding of our underlying unity to experiencing it directly? How can abiding in the non-dual condition help us integrate our personal and collective shadow? How does this help us find the peace and wisdom to live authentic spiritual lives and be of benefit to our world?

At the core of absolutely everything is God… a love so total that it embraces everything, including your ego and its distortions, while beckoning you to come home. Tuning into this love and unity provides a powerful inner platform from which to grapple with our deepest challenges — both personal and collective — with spiritual maturity. It asks that we surrender our fixed perceptions, open into the mystery, and humbly let all the blessings and challenges of life spark our growth.

Miranda will introduce her feminine, integrated approach to non-duality that embraces both transcendent purity and our relative humanity as part of the same whole.

In this module, you’ll:

• Discover how ego relaxation stops the war against yourself, prevents bypassing, and supports a settling into your true nature
• Receive the transmission that invites you to experience your underlying unity — an individual but inseparable “window pane” of God
• Recognize your limitations and how to bring more precision and potency to your practice
• Embrace your challenges as gateways into deeper wisdom through the practice of holistic inquiry
• Expand your capacity to open, soften and allow rather than contract and close
• Melt your projections, defenses and tantrums against love

Living from God Consciousness calls us to the practice of unconditional acceptance — of both the transcendent ground of our being that is always pure, always free and unchanged, and the relative dimension of our personhood. This means accepting that we’re all simultaneously inherently perfect and works in progress. Unconditional acceptance helps us anchor in our unity, while excavating the places where we might be caught in patterns that create suffering for ourselves and others.

Acceptance helps us walk an integrated path that is simultaneously one of Being and Becoming. This protects us from subtly hiding out in spiritual positions to avoid meeting that which we do not fully understand. Acceptance helps us open into the paradox of our divinity and humanity so we can live it as one integrated stream. Through acceptance, Grace can transform our emotional reactivity, drawing us to ever deepening wisdom. At peace within, we can respond to our personal and collective challenges; and our actions can birth more unity rather than further division.

In this module, you’ll open to:

• Accepting even the difficult things as part of God (without bypassing or conceptualizing) and being grown by the forces of your life
• Understanding the difference between acceptance that opens us and resignation that subtly closes us down
• Finding peace with the paradoxes, clarity to discriminate the different levels of reality, and wisdom to act appropriately
• Embracing the presence of acceptance as a dimension of Grace
• Welcoming the all-embracing space of loving awareness that invites everything to come home to integration, including your ego

The greatest challenge in embracing everything as part of the Divine is the instinct to judge “this is good” and “this is bad.” Judgment is the instrument of separation, dividing our consciousness into many separate parts, disturbing our peace, distorting our relationships, and leaving us feeling fragmented. This primary activity of our ego drives so much of our automatic thinking processes. Yet every time we identify with a judgment, automatically assume its reality, and act on it, we enact separation from our own true nature, from all beings, and from the Absolute. It is literally how we recreate duality moment to moment.

Miranda will explain the “splitting” defense that’s a driving force of the unconscious mind. We’ll see how the instinct to split off “the bad” to protect “the good” begins in infancy and develops into thick layers of division in our minds, and how splitting is powered by rejection, initiating a cycle of grasping and rejecting that keeps us bound. You’ll discover how you enact unnecessary separation, what you might be demonizing in the name of spirituality, and how to use objective discrimination while opening your heart to yourself, others and the world.

In this module, you’ll:

• Understand the nature of ego judgment, and how it shields the mind from objective clarity
• Discover what you tend to reject the most and why — and how to unlock the life force energy within this rejection so it can be harnessed for awakening
• Intercept the cycle of rejection, grasping and checking out that keeps you from being at peace with yourself, others and life
• Overcome your fears of opening your heart to whatever you had demonized as “bad”
• Become a deeper embodiment of true compassion in the world

Living from God Consciousness asks that we bring all parts of ourselves to the light of awareness. By hiding nothing we become transparent to the transforming power of grace. So many spiritual giants of all traditions have stumbled painfully with distortions relating to money, sexuality and power.

Deep spiritual practice often flushes up to the surface more primitive ego structures. Human beings all have three primary instincts — the drive to survive, the drive for pleasure, and the drive to belong to a tribe. Since these drives are so powerful, they’ve often been viewed as troublesome forces that pull us away from the spiritual life. Hence, many traditions have counseled celibacy, repression or renunciation from the world. This forced attempt at transcendence has at times encouraged a split, often feeding a painful sense of shame about our undeniable human drives. Repressing these forces as well as yielding to them indiscriminately has led to great suffering for individuals and whole communities.

Miranda will present an integrated approach to working constructively with your raw humanity, so that you navigate the classical blind spots of the spiritual path with wisdom.

In this module, you’ll:

• Understand the three primary forces of your humanity and their impact on your awakening process
• Examine how these instincts manifest in their purity, and how to recognize if you’re caught in their grip and being led away from truth
• Inquire into the places you get lost, and compassionately forgive the ego forces obscuring your vision
• Experience your instinctive drives coming into balance and harmonizing with your cherished spiritual intentions
• Recover your sense of wholeness as a divine human

Our journey thus far into God Consciousness has brought us into greater intimacy with our own shadow, and a deeper understanding of the shadow elements we meet in one another and in our world. Without dismissing our relative human difficulties, we lay all we’ve encountered on the altar of true forgiveness. In humility and prayerful willingness, we offer up any remaining hardness, rejection, hatred, anger, hurt, betrayal or shame to the deepest chamber of the heart. We let Grace lead us into the pure realms beyond human emotion, beyond right and wrongdoing. There we rest in the mystery of the heart-cave, whereby Grace can come home.

We’ll open through the fears that such depth of forgiveness can evoke, honoring our humanity while compassionately walking together into the light of our indestructible innocence, our unchanging unity as divine beings. We offer the vision of absolute love to everyone, and to the most hidden parts of ourselves, allowing miracles to resolve all grievances.

In this module, you’ll:

• Discover how true forgiveness dissolves the lens of guilt, hatred and projection, dissolving the inner violence that distorts your vision and wreaks havoc in our world
• Forgive your taboo emotions such as hatred, anger and envy, and lovingly contact the spiritual poverty underneath them
• Journey through the six stages of forgiveness, both as principles to support your release and as a practice of spiritual transformation
• Let the presence of true forgiveness restore you to inner peace, whole-heartedness and right relationship to one another
• Contact the heart-cave Ramana Maharshi spoke of as our true home, our unified Reality that shines undisturbed underneath the emotional heart
• Rise above the impossible sufferings of the world to come home into the heart-cave and into the transforming grace of divine love

The path of awakening invites us out of limiting patterns, fears and hurts to greater healing and wholeness while also inviting us into boundless love, awareness and unity. Waking up out of the trance of our separate “me story” helps us realize not only that God exists but that divinity is our very nature.

Yet often we experience reality through the filter of numerous boundaries, patterned by our history, our ancestral lineages, culture and possibly impressions from other lifetimes. On the ordinary human level, boundaries can support healthy interpersonal relating as well as clarity with time and commitments, yet when it comes to entering into deeper dimensions of unity, these same boundaries can become impenetrable barriers.

On the other hand, affirming “I am That” can nurture a dangerous arrogance. Authentic entrance into the non-dual state asks that we surrender our spiritual ambition. By Grace we can start to experience that everything we behold is our self. Our vision is unified, and our countenance is love. We taste sweet humility, freedom and reverence for all beings, which makes us naturally love and serve one another as our very self.

In this module, you’ll:

• Bring to light the subtle mental boundaries acting as unnecessary glass ceilings on your experience of self and reality
• Recognize where you are in the dimensions of awakening to the Divine, with the Divine and as the Divine
• Understand the distinction between healthy boundaries and the wise application of Boundless experience
• Discriminate between subtle bypassing and authentic expansion of consciousness
• Enter more deeply into the non-dual condition of unity, letting the direct experience be your teacher

Authentic non-duality helps us understand that our relative human experience and the absolute transcendent dimensions of our being are not two separate things, but a continuum. Equanimity is the virtue that helps us embody this truth as a lived reality. It helps us meet both the content of our experiences — our changing emotions, thoughts, relationships, phases of life — and the boundless space in which all content is happening. Inquiring into both dimensions helps us to meet the full spectrum of life’s ups and downs while not getting lost in the drama.

The primary block to equanimity is our subtle attachments and fixed positions, especially our spiritual ones. Seeing and smiling at these empowers us to advance spiritually, letting the guru of life enlighten us into ever deepening wisdom. Equanimity brings us the possibility of peace independent of the circumstances of our lives. This perspective helps us take a deeper seat in our practice, bringing maturity, grace and perspective into our functioning.

In this module, you’ll:

• Meet the full spectrum of your experience — both its content and the witnessing awareness of the content
• Liberate your blocks to equanimity: your fixed positions, assumptions, filters and the meanings you give to your experiences
• Discover how grounding yourself in the unchanging I AM presence gives you greater perspective and peace within the inevitable ups and downs
• Cultivate the virtue of equanimity itself by elevating your awareness of supportive practices, the traps to be mindful of, and how to rise every time you fall
• Become “kindhearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king” (Lao Tzu)

Together we’ve taken a deep dive into the underlying ground of unity that’s the fundamental nature of everything and everyone, and faced things within ourselves that many spend lifetimes avoiding. Your willingness to explore both your transcendent depths and your most raw human places naturally begins to birth not only personal transformation but also a deeper understanding of the human condition itself. This is such a gift to our world.

Authentic awakening helps us experience our interconnectedness with all other beings and our planet. It seeks to translate fully into the way we speak, think and act, respond kindly to suffering where we find it, and stay grounded in our practice so we can walk wisely through our daily lives.

We’ll explore such questions as, What causes divine action? How do we live in the world but from a consciousness not of it? Miranda will share a simple practice of asking-listening: discriminating and then being obedient to our inner knowing amidst daily life.

In this module, you’ll

• Begin to take a deeper seat in your ongoing practice of inquiry, meditation and devotion
• Find out how you can embody the gifts from this journey together going forward in your life
• Be given guidelines for inspired action, so you’ll know how to tune into the silence, enter into a receptive state, then ask and listen
• Understand how to discriminate inner guidance from subtle delusion by employing a simple checklist
• Discover how to practice God Consciousness in your daily interactions, enabling you to see through the appearances and the personality to the unified ground of Being — and how this helps call forward the highest in others as well as in yourself
• Find out what to do when you get caught up in an ego knot or derailed by the unexpected