New Book Group

... and California Retreat

Hi Folks,
I’ll be starting up a new inquiry group, exploring my latest book, Everything is the Doorway (see sample chapter below). It will run for 8 weeks from August 4th to September 22nd and will meet each Tuesday from 10-11:30 am Pacific time over Zoom. There is no cost for the group (donations accepted). To register or for more info, just email me (john@johnastin.com).

There are still some spots available for the two-day retreat I’ll be doing (together w/ Dena Evans) in Santa Cruz, California, October 3-4. If interested, just drop me an email.

from the chapter, “Already Dissolved…”

The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit root, “yuj” which means to yoke or join together, to reunite the individual with the absolute reality. But here’s a question: Has separation ever actually occurred? Let’s look at that assumption and see if we can actually find any support for it.

Typically, we imagine that we’re somehow circumscribed—we’re here and there’s a whole world over there, a world that’s on the other side of us. But feel the presence of experiencing, right now, the presence of being or aliveness, and ask yourself: Do you find anything other than this feeling of aliveness?

If you venture out to whatever you imagine exists outside of the circumscribed you, what do you find? Don’t you find more aliveness? As you travel through the space of the world you think of as existing outside of you, don’t you always find this sense of being, of aliveness?

For a moment, just feel how the being of you is already completely, 100% dissolved in the sea of life itself. Feel the way in which there is only life here—the miracle of existence. Notice how whether you’re feeling what you think of as yourself, or you’re feeling what you think of as not yourself, you’re always feeling life, the one taste of everything, the taste of aliveness.

Notice that as far as consciousness can go, it just keeps finding life, the life that’s looking through our eyes and the life these eyes are beholding. What’s looking and what’s being looked at—one thing. A single aliveness.

This inseparability is what we’re always feeling. Each thought that arises, each sensation that appears, each emotion that occurs, every memory we might happen upon—all of it the movement of this one life.

We’ve never been extracted out from the totality to become something other than the totality. Nothing’s ever flown out of the whole to exist autonomously and separately, because there’s only the whole, this totality that is everything.

Nothing can escape it…