The ongoing saga of The Fourth Awakening, the non-symbolic mind that frees us from the delusions of our co-created reality

Jeffrey A Martin and Rod Pennington have just released the next installment of their The Fourth Awakening saga.

http://www.fourthawakening.com/

The first book was a simple yet hard to put down story based around the idea that some individuals in the world right now are experiencing a leap in consciousness. The beauty of Martin and Pennington's slant on this is that it takes the idea out of the sole domain of religion and describes it in ways we can all relate to. The premise is that mankind has gone through a series of awakenings. Without going into all the details lets just say that one such shift was all about language, the beginnings of writing around 3100 bc that led to the rise of civilization and religion. The current shift is into a mind capable of non-symbolic consciousness, literally beyond words and iconic pictures. They hypothesize that the non-symbolic mind is capable of much including creating its own realities and achieving many of the unusual powers usually claimed by advanced yogis.

The second book built on this and was called "The gathering darkness." Not quite as earth shatteringly thought provoking as the first book but still lots in it. None of these books are expensive in fact you can actually download the first one free off the website above.

In The Fourth Awakening Chronicles 1 is a very short add-on to the other two. I gather it's gotten a bit of flak for being too short but it is still worth the 99 cents US for the ebook. What particularly stood out for me was how the guy they were there to interview, a gambler named Wooten, described how his mind had been since his non-symbolic aka enlightenment moment. It was like all the thoughts were gone. The constant mental chatter had disappeared and hadn't come back. They term it a lack of 'self-referential thought'. Wooten explains that before this happened it was like virtually every thought he had was involved in reinforcing his concept of self. When asked how that effects his ability to function he explains that he can still solve problems and discuss things like politics but there is no 'me' behind it. He also says that the loss of the 'me' had liberated him, lifting a great weight from his shoulders. Every moment had become new and exciting. With it had come a great calm and peace. Outwardly there was no discernible change apparent to his friends and family, unless he talked about it, then they thought he was crazy.

I love these books because they go along way to explaining what has been happening for me. There is plenty of non-dual stuff out there but a lot is focused on religious practices you must do to get there. There isn't much from a secular point of view, outside of some leading edge neuroscience. I liked the fact that the guy in the above story was a gambler and that it had happened to him out of the blue although probably as a response to his need to 'read' people in card games.

So this is what I've been thinking about - enlightenment for the secular. Ritual is comfort. Reverence opens the heart. Symbols engage the mind. Mantras help deflect the mind and create vibrational effects. Faith shapes our personal experience of reality and helps us to change how we add to the co-created whole. Religion came about because it was the killer software application of its time: a pattern, a set of systems and tools that worked at a time when we were transiting from the world of magic to the world of science. Magic, religion and science can still have their place as support structures and practices but in a post symbolic world it will be our ability to engage with both form and space (the unmanifest and non-symbolic, the blank page) that will take the world into a new stage. The ancient Greeks used no space between their words, they left the mind to break it up. We use space creatively to do this for the mind and give more blank space on the page to allow our minds to roam and reflect. I can't yet envision what a world beyond word and symbol (a totally blank page) will be but I do think it will be unfettered by such things. As we move away from black and white stereotypes and categories we will unchain our minds from the personal vision of the universe that now imprisons us. To quote Tenzin Wangyal: Mind is empty. Emptiness is clear light. clear light is union. Union is great bliss.