Thomas Hübl: Welcome to Point of Relation. My name is Thomas Hübl. This is my podcast, and I’m happy to invite you again into our wisdom series. And today I want to speak about wisdom traditions or in general, the spiritual teachings, the mystical teachings, the wisdom traditions, and what they provide us with, what are different buckets of practice that I think are important as buckets to have in our life, and that we can harvest the fruits of various practices. And so of course there are many, and today I want to talk about three. One is the mystical teachings teach us a lot about awareness, and I will speak a bit about awareness. So awareness. The next part is movement, the impermanence of life, of things, of the process. Everything’s moving, everything’s moving all the time. Some things are moving very slowly, some things are moving very quickly or fast, everything’s moving.
And we’ll talk about that too. And then a big bucket of spiritual teachings deal with ethics, the ethical code of living. What is that? And how does the practice look like to develop a more and more aligned way, but aligned with what? So we need to look at those. So I want to start off with awareness. So usually our wisdom traditions teach us a lot about, of course, mindfulness. But what is mindfulness? Mindfulness is the infusion of awareness into sense perception. And sense perception means my internal sensory input. So what I feel within myself and how I feel also within myself, how I feel the data of the so-called external world within myself. And so when we infuse awareness into perception, or when we synchronize awareness with perception, that’s mindful. I can be mindful with my breath, my body sensations. I can be sitting mindfully with everything that’s arising in me, and I can also cut my tomatoes, my cucumbers, mindfully, or do my work at home or my work in general anywhere mindfully. So I’m really with what I’m doing.
But what’s happening is I’m with the data flow that informs me about what I’m doing because everything I know, I know internally, not only cognitively, everything I feel about myself, everything I feel about you is movement, is data. There is only data in how we experience the world. And so relating is a massive data exchange. Even the stagnation of patterns in our relationships are also data. And so when we infuse awareness into perception, which is data exchange or data flow, that’s the first step into being more aware of what happens, what is happening, what’s here. And also it is the first step of feeling more present. When we are present with our body sensations, the flow sensation through our body, our emotions, mental movements, the relational perceptions, it’s more present. And so that induces usually a deeper sense of space. I feel more spacious and I’m able to regulate my nervous system better. When I can relax my nervous system into deeper relaxation states, I have more space. With more space I can reflect more, I can digest more, I can integrate more. Integration is learning.
I’m more in my social engagement zone. So I’m also bringing the quality into all relationships. And as I deepen and commit, in many ways, to my meditation practice space deepens. I see wow, inner spaciousness has a depth dimension, and the deeper I drop into that depth, that depth becomes more and more magnetic, more and more still, more and more here. So there is a deep sea of possibilities that very deep meditation states melt into. And so the whole world of information can rest in silence. And there is one more step that we will call absorption, to get absorbed in the source, non-dual awareness. And so the different layers of what I just described are layers of awareness. And every deeper layer helps me to transcend the me that I was identified with before. Suddenly it’s not the camera, it’s in front of the camera, not the one that looks, it’s within the one that looks.
So there’s spaciousness, there’s awareness, embracing the content that’s arising. And subject-object transcendence is a deep path, it’s a deep path of inquiry, of practice, of different states of meditation. And it’s amazing as awareness and is also obviously the awareness of something, of the world and the universe arising. And that’s one bucket of deep exploration. Obviously. The next bucket is that what we are exploring, which means the movement of life, the development of life, the evolution of life is movement, creation, creating life is movement. It’s not the world has been created, the world is being created. It’s not that we have been created. We are being created. It’s happening, it’s happening now.
So the deep creative process of life, the Tao gives birth to everything as Stephen Mitchell translates the Tao Te Ching. The Tao nourishes everything and the Tao absorbs everything back into itself. So the Tao or the immanence of the divine is in everything that’s moving, the agency, the divine agency, and the divine creative process is in everything that’s moving. And that movement is sacred, that movement is the essence of life. And so the wisdom traditions show us on the one hand that because everything is moving, everything is moving through. So it’s the impermanence of form and the impermanence of everything that exists and the capacity to be as and in that flow, that’s more and more letting go and allowing life to flow through us and being in the river of the intelligence of life.
And so there is an inherent intelligence, everything is flowing. We are in a river and we are swimming, we are in a river and we are swimming. Both is true. So there is a movement anywhere, and we are also swimming in that movement, and we’re navigating within that river not to into rocks and other things. So we are swimming, so it needs both. But when there is more stagnation or trauma or hurt or shadow, then often we don’t feel the original movement anymore. So many things become a personal movement, a personal effort. I need effort to get somewhere because I don’t feel that life also carries me. I have to swim. And the water of the river also flows anyway and when our systems open up, when our bodies open up, our emotions open up and stagnation re-enters or gets restored. That’s why healing is the restoration of the original movement. And restoration doesn’t mean it goes back to what it was before. Restoration means it becomes something new. When we restore our trauma, we become someone new that we don’t know yet.
We are not going back to how we were before we were hurt. We are stepping into someone or some aspect of ourselves that we don’t know yet because it includes the wisdom of the healing journey. The fact that we needed to invest energy into healing ourselves doesn’t take us back to square one. It gets us further down into someone that restored and matured through the healing process into a new version of him, her, themselves. That’s amazing. So healing adds something, healing means I become a psychoactive remedy in society. And that is a powerful process. So restoring the stagnations, restoring the past that is stuck in repetitive patterns, the trauma that is unseen and has all kinds of effects and symptoms in individuals, in family systems, organizations, in the world. That’s where the wisdom traditions teach us a lot about liquefying the past, integrating the past as now as presence, so that we are receptive to the future.
But the future is not tomorrow, but the future is the higher consciousness that is being born in the present moment. So through restoring the original movement, we bring the question in the answer, but we also bring the past and the imaginary future together as this moment. And here, the true future can emerge. That’s what it means to enter an emergent life, to live an emergent life, to live a life of inner guidance. Some people say it’s a life of inspiration, creativity, agency. So the bucket of healing and the bucket of restoring, the bucket of river, of the original movement and intelligence and creation is I believe, a second big quality of the wisdom traditions. And the third one is ethics, is remembering more and more the flow of light, feeling more and more the flow of light, feeling the intimacy with life.
And the more I feel intimate with life, the law of life or the inner order of life, or the law of the universe as the Tao Te Ching says, there are four great powers, man, earth, universe, and the Tao. Man follows earth, which not always happening, that’s what we are dealing with. But man follows earth and earth follows the universe, and the universe follows the Tao. And the Tao follows only itself in Stephen Mitchell’s translation. So there is a trajectory, there is an inner order to the universe and living in alignment with that inner order or this divine law.
We experience flow. The deep flow state is that all our nervous system is immersed as that river, as that inner order, if we violate or if we have been born into the after effects of violations of the inner order, which is pandemic in our world, then we have some confusion. In some areas our GPS doesn’t work, our compass doesn’t work, then needle is turning. Should I do this? Should I do that? Is it right? Is it wrong? What’s good? What’s not good? What’s good or bad? So when those questions come up, we feel how it feels that we are not immersed in the river, in those areas we are not getting wet from the water that flows through us, the river that flows through us. Where we are open, we don’t have those questions. We feel, we sense, we are immersed. Our GPS works, I feel, yes, next step and the next step and the next step.
And so the law is closely related, obviously to the movement of life, but it shows us the more we need an external law as a regulation to tell me how I should live, the law and the action are not any more unified. When the law, the inner order, and my actions, the way I speak, how I act in life, how I participate in society, how I’m in relationships. If the law is not true with the action, the law is inherent to every action. That’s why the more we need to talk about ethics or morals, the more distant we are from the divine law, the closer we come to the inner law, to a sensing, a feeling, an embeddedness within that inner order, the less we need to talk about. Because the less we need external regulations to live an ethically sound life.
And that’s the practice, refining the way we speak, refining the way we interact, restoring hurts, restoring transgressions that happen in everyday life, reowning transgressions in our life, repairing relationships, reflecting upon our life, seeing where we unconsciously participate in stuff. Less and less talking about people or about life, but talking from life, talking from the relationship, not about the relationship. And so the coming in, coming home, being more grounded in life in ourselves and in our ecosystem, means that the law is less externalized. Every time there is trauma, a part of life has been externalized. And with it, we lose the sense of connectedness to life. And that creates a sense of separation. So returning to a deeper restoration, a deeper sense of ourself through healing is the reowning of the divine law. But that’s my commitment because where I can feel it and where I have questions, these are the areas of practice.
Instead of trying to not have those questions or try to answer them quickly, let’s answer them profoundly, which means when something happens in my life here that is difficult, that I can take the needle and the thread, go instead of just trying to solve it now, goes, okay, what’s actually deeper down in my being that this moment is being experienced as a challenge? And once I can get to the root of it and I bring it up into this moment, that’s coming closer. Something heals, the question that that separation, should I do this or should I do that, how can I deal with this challenge, the question and the answer become not true. That’s the true answering of a question in our life that we experience is challenging. So we go to the root and that way of deepening, because it’s a deepening, is amazing.
And that’s of course not only just an intellectual process, that’s a deep experiential process, but I’m surfacing the root cause of separation in my life. I’m surfacing more of it. I’m integrating the past that I have been born into. I’m integrating the challenges that my ancestors couldn’t resolve and they handed it over to me or handed it over to you. We are the ones that can integrate some of the past and turn it into present, turn it into the unbroken is-ness or fabric of life. And if that’s our commitment, if that’s our living prayer, if you become that living prayer of practicing awareness, the restoration of the original movement, the coming closer and closer to the law and the action become not true.
If you have just these three buckets of presence and practice, then I believe we have very powerful tools to deepen, evolve, and unify life through this lifetime. And I think that’s an amazing, of course, individual contribution, but that’s also always a collective restorative process. And so I wanted to invite you a bit today into these three buckets, and maybe at a later point we can expand more on wisdom traditions. But I think that there is a lot of power in exploring these three buckets and seeing also, how much does my practice participate in all three. So I hope that’s illuminating, and I wish you a lot of insights in practicing deeper, and I’ll see you soon.
