MysticMag has the pleasure of encountering Timothy Conway, a deeply enlightened spiritual guide whose journey began with a profound spiritual awakening at the age of 16, leading him to a lifelong devotion to sharing the truth of Infinite Open Awareness. With a rich background in various nondual and mystical traditions, Timothy has studied under many of the world’s leading sages and saints. He has spent decades teaching, writing, and offering spiritual counseling, emphasizing the realization of the Divine within everyone. Based in Clarkdale, AZ, Timothy continues to inspire and guide those seeking spiritual awakening and profound inner peace.
Timothy, can you elaborate on what it means to live an enlightened life, embracing all-encompassing love, compassionate service, and freedom from ego? How can one practically achieve this state in daily life?
Sarah, perhaps we can start with a simple two-fold definition of “enlightenment” as being 1) lightened up or liberated from the heavy load of selfish obsessions; and 2) illuminated by the Clear Light of God.
And in daily life, this can mean allowing all sorts of functioning to flow through us without creating the heavy sense of “me, the doer.” We shift into the old Chinese Daoist sense of “actions spontaneously happening of themselves by the Power of the Dao” or the Hindu, Christian, Sufi, or Jewish mystical attitude of being a lightweight and/or hollow instrument utilized by the Divine Spirit.
And all sorts of beautiful virtues and pragmatic functioning flow much more easily.
It’s so helpful to deeply realize how the Divine Reality or Self, the unborn, original Identity, is always already our True Nature, otherwise none of these worlds or beings could exist or function. It is this stupendously True, Good, Beautiful (Satyam, Sivam, Sundaram) God-Self that powers all our empathy, love, compassion, service and blissful freedom… and dissolves all the temporary hindrances to expressing these.
THIS great Reality—so intimately and immediately Who We Really Are—is the Dreamer of “daily life” with all its apparent complexities and challenges, as well as beautiful connections and epiphanies.
Notice how this Supra-personal Self is the Host or underlying continuity and context for the rather insubstantial personal self, which disappears nightly in dreamless sleep as well as in states of rapture, meditative samadhi, anesthesia, or coma. The personal self is incessantly changing, coming and going, but THIS Supra-personal or Meta-personal Self always abides as the Unchanging, Unmoving ONE.
So, we can all inwardly relax and expand beyond or recede back from the narrow, constricted “me-my dream” and allow Self-awakening to this awesome Self of all selves. For this Divine Self or Infinite Life is what is always already animating our lives. What other Power could there be?
How does one awaken from the me-dream? By getting deeply curious about our unchanging Identity, THIS immediate Reality, always HERE at zero distance and always NOW. We can notice that this undefined open Awareness freely abides as Source-Reality at the beginning of every arising-passing moment.
In other words, in each moment there is a largely unconscious construction of a limited sense of “myself-and-environment.” But what are YOU (the unborn spiritual Self) timelessly at the beginning of each moment, before and beyond this constructing of a limited, changing self-sense? YOU are the changeless, timeless, unconstructed Self.
This glorious Divine Self or Absolute Host Awareness is prior to and beyond the dynamic play of universal consciousness, in which the personal consciousness or soul-self is a precious yet limited “viewpoint.”
I’ll emphasize that Divinely-emanated personhood is indeed precious. We need not fall into depersonalization syndrome nor disparage these individual selves or viewpoints. They are the miraculous “instruments” (gazillions of them in the multi-level Kosmos!) through which the Divine poignantly undergoes the grand adventure of “soul-ular evolution” through lifetimes of pain and pleasure within the physical and subtle realms of existence. (Just as the God-Self has unfolded cellular evolution over billions of years on Earth and who knows where else….)
Yes, the countless myriads of souls are the poignant costume play of this single Divine Spirit / Self / Reality, the One appearing as Many, while always remaining only One.
This ever-free and oh-so-powerful Host Awareness allows the body-mind-ego consciousness to be amazingly functional and virtuous in daily activities, and can heal all kinds of trauma, phobias, addictions, low self-esteem or inflated egotism.
So we can intimately trust this great Power since, after all, this Power is already doing our perceiving, thinking, sensing, breathing, moving about, circulating fluids, digesting food, and carrying out all other functions—including the metabolism of the trillions of cells in these bodies, and on a subtle level connecting souls with different bodies (physical and subtle) over lifetimes.
The website features a vast array of eminent spiritual leaders from various traditions. How do these figures collectively contribute to our understanding of enlightened spirituality, and what common threads do you see in their teachings?
The authentically holy (whole / wholesome) adepts, sages, and saints have stood as gorgeous living monuments to what happens when we relax the constrictive self-sense and allow the narrow identity to be opened up and suffused by Divinity. These genuinely holy “instruments” of the Divine have manifested resplendent virtues of loving-kindness, empathic compassion, joyous good cheer, unselfish generosity, patient understanding, unfeigned humility, and colossal equanimity because they so deeply know, trust, and rely upon the Divine Source-Substance of us all.
As for the common thread in their teachings—back in the mid-1980s I wrote a 550-page doctoral dissertation on these convergences. (You can read the Overview and key chapters 1, 2, 5 here: https://www.enlightened-spirituality.org/Conway_PhD_dissertation_on_optimal_well-being_spirituality_and_psychology.html ) Suffice it to say that these “free beings” teach the absolute primacy of the Divine Identity or True Nature (Atman/Brahman, Buddha-Nature, Dao, God, Allah, YHVH, Great Spirit, etc.), and the real possibility of allowing all those aforementioned sterling virtues to live in us and through us for serving sentient beings.
The concept of Divine Reality as both transcendent and immanent is a central theme on your site. How can individuals cultivate an awareness of this dual nature in their spiritual practice?
Happily, there’s no actual duality here—the Divine Reality or Host Awareness is beyond all beings and yet is entirely within all beings as the all-permeating ONE, the awesome Reality being everyone and doing everything.
To elaborate: authentic transcendence is to realize in purest intuitive contemplation the fundamentally formless nature of Divine Reality prior to all phenomenal forms. This truly pristine, all-transcending Spirit or Divinity or Godhead (the classic term from Christianity’s most sublime theologians—Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas, et alia) is the great “No-thing-like” Source of all “things.” This Divine Identity—being so perfectly, formlessly spiritual and transcendent as this I AM THAT AM—is utterly free to be immanent as the very Heart-essence or Substance of all phenomenal worlds, beings, and events.
This is what happens to so many thousands of the world’s sagely and saintly mystics: the glorious Divine Reality opens them up to our formless Source nature, usually realized in a profound absorption we term nirvikalpa samādhi or formless contemplation, an ego-free, object-free rapture. And after one or more utterly “emptying-opening” realizations of this formless Divine—this “Groundless Ground” of utterly simple, subtler-than-subtle, absolute Being-Awareness— the mystic’s expanded personal (and even transpersonal) consciousness freshly arises again to include perception of formations and objects, i.e., the beings, relationships and events of the manifest realm. But now these phenomena are realized to be the “Divine Forms of the Formless,” happening in universal consciousness like a Divine Dream.
In the Chan, Seon, Zen Buddhist traditions of East Asia, there’s an old saying to sum up the stages of awakening: “First there are mountains and rivers. Then there are no mountains or rivers. Then there are mountains and rivers.” This saying describes a sequence of moving from dualistic, multiplistic, egotistic perception into a phase of sheer transcendence beyond all forms (“no mountains, no rivers,”) and then allowing forms and beings to return for the consciousness, but now non-dually perceived without the alienated subject-object split.
Sarah, you ask, How can individuals cultivate an awareness of this transcendent-immanent Divinity? By relaxing and receding back into our essential, undefined Open Awareness or Clear-Light Reality. And then it’s obvious that all formations are evanescently appearing and functioning by the Grace-Power of THIS formless Divine Reality. Life becomes like one big lucid dream in universal consciousness. We’re aware that everything, no matter how good or evil, “beautiful” or “ugly,” is a stupendous karmic-dream in the Heart-Mind of the Divine.
Nondual spirituality is highlighted as a significant aspect of the site. What are the key principles of nondual spirituality, and how does it differ from other forms of mysticism or religious practice?
Most of what gets called “spirituality,” “religion,” “mysticism,” and “magic” is dualistic—presuming the existence of a distinct, separate self or “me” who should be doing an assortment of practices in order to obtain or attain a goal state of experience, and/or a deeper relationship with a more-or-less phenomenal Deity, who is regarded as a separate being or object, a remote “Him” or “It.”
Everything in this scenario tends to get reified (“thing-ified”) and rigid. Falsely absolutizing dogmas are insisted upon about merely phenomenal things and processes. Dysfunctional cultic thinking and behaving, along with abuses of power, can and usually do easily arise in such dualistic contexts.
By contrast, authentic nondual spirituality, which I discovered repeatedly since the early 1970s to be the essential Way and Teaching of the world’s most illustrious and venerated mystics ancient and contemporary, female and male, East and West, is not dualistic or dysfunctionally cultic.
Sarah, permit me to reproduce the opening 500 words of the prefatory webpage introducing the “Nondual Spirituality” section of my website (containing many essays), which will clarify numerous aspects of nonduality:
Nonduality holds that ultimately there is only this One Divine Reality (call this God, Brahman, Ātma-Self, Buddha-Nature, Dao, Spirit, Awareness-Isness-Aliveness or whatever you like), with no fundamental, essential separation between God-and-world, God-and-soul, soul-and-world, or soul-and-soul. There is only THIS REALITY, formless, shapeless, colorless, soundless, stateless, yet paradoxically and simultaneously PLAYING AS all forms, shapes, colors, sounds and states of the myriad worlds and gazillions of beings populating these worlds. In short, there is One Reality doing everything and being everyone.
This Unborn, Infinite-Eternal Divine Reality is in fact YOUR REAL SELF and EVERYONE’S REAL SELF… the True Self of all selves…. Right HERE (closer than the mind, closer than the eyeballs, closer than close) and right NOW (before one can even think about THIS Self). You cannot and need not make an object, a perceptible or knowable “thing” out of THIS FORMLESS SELF, just as the fingertip need not touch itself and the eyeball need not see itself to function splendidly. You simply and non-objectively ARE the Nondual Self, no need to make an object-like “thing” out of your essential “no-thing-ness” Nature as the Source of all things, beings, processes. You are Open, Absolute Awareness.
On the relative, functional, pragmatic level, we make useful “dualistic” distinctions between you and i, him and her, helpful and harmful, justice and injustice, etc., but on the absolute level of WHAT REALLY IS, realized through the most sublimely profound Divine Intuition (our authentic Knowing-by-Being), we find no dualism, separation or alienation, only THIS ONE (NONDUAL) REALITY.
This Absolute Being or Open Awareness has no “rival reality” that can compete or interfere with or occlude This Supreme Truth… so, to repeat, this Reality is YOUR TRUE REALITY right HERE, right NOW. Even the so-called “ego-mind” cannot interfere with or diminish WHAT YOU ALWAYS ARE: the Open Awareness, Changeless Isness or Groundless Ground in which everything happens—minds, bodies, worlds.
Hence, anyone who sincerely explores the timeless self-inquiry, “Who am I?” or “What are we?”—will discover the unspeakable wonder and beauty of Who is really here and What we really are: infinite Spirit poignantly including and permeating (not trapped inside) a finite body-mind-soul or personality.
Our Real Nature is Unlimited Being manifesting the “dream” of limited experience as a human being.
By Divine Grace, we find, as all true mystics worldwide have found in opening up to nondual spirituality, that Pure Awareness or Spirit, prior to the rise of the egocentric “me,” is the supra-personal One transcending yet permeating this personality. This is to awaken from the plight of selfishness to the Reality of Self-Fullness. It is to “lose one’s life” for Eternal Life, as Jesus invited. Or, as Paul said, to know that “in Him [this Divine “I Am That Am” Self] everyone lives, moves and has their being.”
In short, THIS One Reality, Self or Awareness is Who we really ARE, and Who everyone really IS. In the Divine Party of One Pure Bliss, we love, cherish and celebrate this transcendent Single Self immanently within all selves.
(Excerpted from https://www.enlightened-spirituality.org/nondual-spirituality.html )
So, in brief summation, nondual spirituality is inclusive and non-divisive. Also quite gapless, immediate, direct and unconditional—there’s no question or dilemma about finding God or Spirit in some future time or other realm or psychological state through a reified regimen or practice. The true Aliveness of God is always omnipresently and infinitely HERE, always timelessly and eternally NOW.
Many people struggle to integrate spirituality into their everyday lives. What practical advice or steps would you offer to someone looking to deepen their spiritual practice while managing the demands of modern life?
Well, each person has the awesome Self-shining Divine Spirit as their true Guide, their inner Guru. So I’ll not presume to do more than share a few counsels….
For starters, it helps to get really, sincerely curious about how it just might be the omnipresent God as the Supra-personal One you are always meeting in interpersonal encounters and experiencing every moment of your responsible mundane life as a person! You’ll sooner or later clearly see and feel that this true God-Reality, Dao, Brahman, Spirit is the single Power animating your life.
You’ll be wonderstruck, never bored, over the fact that anything is experientially arising at all in this miraculous Kosmos, and you’ll be full of empathy for the inner reality of each sentient being. These pointers give new meaning to the old twin commandments from the Torah and rabbi Jesus: “Love the Lord thy God with all your soul, heart, and mind.” And “Love thy neighbor as thyself/Self.”
Along the way, meditative mindfulness of breathing really helps promote inner calmness and strength—starting with breathing from the diaphragm then up into the chest. (Abdominal breathing allows the parasympathetic nervous system to prevail over the “fight-flight-freeze” stress response of the sympathetic nervous system, which is tied in with shallow chest breathing, and which can easily get triggered by the complex demands of modern life for most people.)
And it works wonders to view things lightly, yet sincerely, like an oh-so-poignant Divine dream-drama or stage-play. For, in truth, this is the factual situation of our lives: Divine Being is dramatically, magnificently playing as each and every dear being, in a process of awakening self to Self.
Salutations to this Self of all selves,
this Clear Light Divinity
shining in the eyes and hearts
of everyone we meet….
If you would like to find out more about Enlightened Spirituality, please visit https://www.enlightened-spirituality.org/
