Jeff Carreira is a meditation teacher, mystical philosopher, and author who works with a growing number of people throughout the world. As a teacher, he offers retreats and courses guiding individuals in a form of meditation he refers to as The Art of Conscious Contentment. Through this simple and effective technique, he has led thousands of people in a journey beyond the confines of fear and self-concern into the expansive liberated awareness that is our true home.
As a philosopher, Jeff is interested in defining a new way of being in the world that will move us from our current paradigm of separation and isolation into an emerging paradigm of unity and wholeness. In his books and lectures, he explores revolutionary ideas in the domains of spirituality, consciousness, and human development. He creates courses and programs that encourage people to question their most foundational experience of reality until previously held assumptions fall away leaving space for a dramatically new understanding to emerge.
Jeff is the author of numerous books including American Awakening, Philosophy Is Not a Luxury, The Soul of a New Self, Paradigm Shifting, and The Art of Conscious Contentment. Find more about Jeff on jeffcarreira.com.
Below is an excerpt from Jeff’s book ‘The Path of Spiritual Breakthrough’.
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The interpretation that I’m about to share will give you a fundamental sense of how I have come to see reality. I am not sharing it because I know it is true. I have no doubt about it, but I don’t want you to take my word for it. I want you to explore it. Take it for a test drive and see how it fits.
I believe that the conscious awareness that we all experience as our awareness is actually coming from the cosmos itself. We are part of a conscious universal being in the same way that our eyes or our mouth are a part of us. We are not a separate thing that exists in a dead three-dimensional space, we are not even a separate thing that exists in a living universal being. We are an aspect, a feature, a living part of a living universe. We are not separate from the world around us, we are a part of it. We are not separate from reality, we are part of it. Our thoughts about reality are part of reality. The way we understand things to be is a part of what they are. We are not aware of a universe that is separate from us. Our awareness does not even belong to us. It belongs to the universe.
Right now I am looking at my computer screen while I type these words. I’m looking at the screen with my eyes, but it is not my eyes that see the screen, it is me that sees it. My eyes are a part of me. If my eyes were removed from my body they would not see anything. In the same way, the universe is experiencing through me. I’m not having this experience, the universe is having it. I am the organ of perception, not the perceiver. This is how I interpret myself in the cosmos. This is not congruent with the paradigm of scientific materialism which understands a human being to be an organism that exists in a universe that it is fundamentally separate from.
I also want to say that awareness is not something that exists in the universe in any way that could be considered separate from it. Awareness is the very essence of the universe. At the most fundamental level, we live in awareness. We imagine ourselves to be an organism that is aware because it has awareness. We believe that the awareness we have is a part of us, a characteristic of us. We naturally apply this understanding even to the idea of a living universe and so saying that the universe is aware might still sound like there is a physical universe of three-dimensional space that has awareness as a characteristic. That is not what I mean. The universe is awareness. There is no universe separate from awareness. This makes the universe more like a dream. My interpretation of reality tends to be philosophically idealistic. I see reality as fundamentally mental, not material. It is like a dream. What is a dream made of? Awareness, consciousness, and experience, nothing more. A dream is not made up of atoms, molecules, rocks, and other stuff. A dream is made out of pure experience. I believe that reality is also made of pure experience.
I started on the spiritual path for personal psycho-spiritual reasons. I was motivated by a desire for personal freedom. I wanted to transcend the constraints of limiting beliefs and emotional patterns so that I could realize my full potential as a human being. As I progressed along the path of awakening I discovered the larger life of the cosmos. The spiritual experiences that I had, some of which are described in this book, revealed to me that the universe had a life of its own and that I was a part of that. I saw that the cosmos wanted to live through me. It wanted to gain access to the world of time and space with me as a vehicle. I saw that the spiritual path was not about my liberation as an individual and separate human being, it was about the liberation of cosmic awareness through me, into the world. At this point, I developed a passionate desire to get out of the way so that the higher Self of the universe could find its way to the world through me.
I believe that the promise of spiritual life is the realization of our highest potential for bringing more love and goodness into existence. None of us knows for sure what that life will look like for us, but if we surrender our lives to the energy that animates the cosmos then that source of compassionate wisdom will optimize our lives. The challenge we face in living a spiritual life is that at the start we are already surrendered to something else – the fears, desires, and concerns of the separate sense of self and the paradigm it was conditioned by. Our experience of ourselves and the world is shaped by the deeply held beliefs of the current paradigm and those beliefs must be uprooted, reevaluated, and ultimately revised or discarded in order for us to liberate the cosmic energy that flows through us.
We have not been trained to see the universe as a living conscious being. We have been taught to see it as a vacuous expanse of empty space filled with material things. And we have learned to see ourselves as a physical organism that has itself become consciously aware. These materialistic assumptions about ourselves are foundational to the dominant paradigm. These beliefs limit our potential because they act as filters and lenses that determine what is possible and what is not. These assumed limitations are exactly what the love and wisdom of the cosmos want to be liberated from. The universal source of energy that animates your being wants to express its full potential. Our own personal desire to live our full potential is a reflection of this universal desire for wholeness. We reflect the universe’s passion for fulfillment like a mirror reflects the light from the Sun. Our spiritual passion is not ours alone. It belongs to a universal being that wants to be free and unimpeded. We are that being.
