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 The Path of Spiritual Breakthrough, 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.
Welcome everybody, welcome to Spiritual Biz Chat for Spiritual Biz Magazine, I am your host, Kimberly Maska, and today we have joining us meditation and awakening teacher Jeff Carreira. Jeff, welcome and thank you both for being with us, how are you doing today?
JEFF CARREIRA: I’m doing great and before we start please let me thank you for conducting this interview and giving me the chance to speak about spiritual life and my new book.
Excellent! As an awakening teacher, how do you define a spiritual breakthrough? And what was your spiritual breakthrough down the path to your current life’s purpose and work?
JEFF: A spiritual breakthrough is a spiritual experience that takes us beyond what we have ever experienced before. It is also an experience that leads to a distinct change in how we see ourselves and the world, and how we live our lives. I would say an experience, regardless of how powerful, that doesn’t lead to a significant change in how we perceive and live, is not a breakthrough.
I have had many breakthrough experiences, although about six over twenty years were the most deeply impactful on me. One that I wrote about in the book happened during a meditation retreat when a few of us in discussion groups learned how to allow ourselves to be overtaken by a source of intelligence that existed between, above, and beyond everyone in the room. We had an experience of collective consciousness in which we had become part of a larger being that was coming through all of us at the same time. Our meetings continued night after night, and we experienced a unified field of collective intelligence emerge between us.
I felt as if I had seen the possibility of a new human world. I had seen that we are not separate, we are connected in a larger life, and if we are willing to unite, we can begin to see with new eyes and act in harmonious ways that would have felt impossible before.
All kinds of spiritual experiences are beautiful and powerful in their own ways. How was this spiritual breakthrough different from other types of your spiritual experiences? And in your expert opinion, how is the transformative power of all of our spiritual experiences determined by how we interpret and make meaning out of them?
JEFF: As I mentioned I think that the distinguishing characteristic of a breakthrough experience is that they transform us. The breakthrough is a breakthrough into a new way of being, a new identity, a new life. I am not sure that there are experts in this domain, but in my experience, I can tell you that I have seen many times how two people can have identical spiritual experiences, often on the same retreat, or under similar circumstances, and they will describe the experience using very similar language, and yet one person’s life is changed dramatically by what they experienced and another’s is not changed at all. You might feel that the deciding factor had to do with the power or depth of the experience, and that is undoubtedly also true, but I believe that the larger factor is the conclusions that each person came to as a result.
One person might have concluded that they had seen the Divine and now had a sacred mission in life. The other might have concluded that they were having an LSD flashback. These two interpretations lead to very different results. This is fundamentally why I wrote the book called The Path of Spiritual Breakthrough, because I wanted people to realize that how they interpret their breakthrough experiences is just as important as having them in the first place.
To expand on this subject… with those spiritual experiences comes the paradigm shift. So, can you talk a bit about this shift and how it is revealed to us?
JEFF: A paradigm is a set of assumptions that we hold about reality. Everything we experience is filtered through and shaped by these assumptions. To put it simply, the paradigm we exist within creates a closed loop. It tells us what is real, it shapes our perception so we see what it tells us to see, it limits what questions we are allowed to ask, and it dictates what answers we can take seriously. Once you are in a paradigm it is very difficult to get out of it. One of the only things that have the power to break us out of a paradigm is an unexplained experience that shouldn’t be possible – and that is another way to think about what a breakthrough experience is.
The new paradigm that so many people see coming is one that will take us from an assumption of separation to a recognition of unity. We will see that everything is connected as one living reality. When we look around at the world we won’t see a collection of separate things we will see a living universe manifesting in and around us.
Let’s talk universe… Jeff, you teach in your practices that in the most profound sense our own spiritual liberation actually frees the universe. What do you mean by that?
JEFF: In a paradigm based on separation this doesn’t make much sense, but in a paradigm of unity it is an obvious conclusion. In separation, we see ourselves as the source of our own consciousness. It is awesome that somewhere inside us our consciousness is constantly being generated. So when our consciousness becomes free, we ourselves are what is free.
In unity we see that our consciousness is not coming from us in isolation, we are part of the universe and so our consciousness is ultimately born in the universe. If we become free, the universe is free. We are a part of a living universe, in the same way, that our eyes are a part of us. If my eyes cease to function I don’t think that only my eyes are blind, I am blind because my eyes are part of me. If a human being is spiritually liberated, the whole universe is free because a human is part of the universe.
Is there a final message you want to let our readers know? Or just any last little words that you have for them?
JEFF: What I want people to know is that reality is vastly larger and more mysterious than any of us can imagine and yet we can all open to that vastness in our breakthrough experiences if we pursue them wholeheartedly. And if we carefully examine our spiritual breakthroughs and draw the most transformative conclusions about them, our lives will change tremendously for the better.
Thank you, Jeff, very much! It has been such a pleasure chatting with you today!
JEFF: Thank you!
