Stage 8 - Emptiness in Connectedness

Imagine a loud, high-pitched tone has been ringing in your ears for your entire life and then suddenly one day it stops. The silence would be deafening! The nothingness would actually be “something” and it would be welcomed. There would be a sense of freedom, peace and gratitude for the space that just got freed up inside you. You would probably feel like, “Now that it’s gone, I have the capacity to focus on so much more!” You may even feel empty, yet simultaneously connected to some new things within you.

The high-pitched sound would have taken so much of your focus just to normalize and live with it. How much more energy would it have required to pay attention to anything else? Imagine all the energy that was simply tied up in dealing with the noise, even when you had nothing else to attend to. There would be so many other sounds that would have gone undetected or unnoticed. And there would be a world of sounds that you would have found important, just because they were the only other things you could hear them above and beyond the incessant pervasive din.

Just think about how many patterns you would have developed in your life just to deal with that sound. Everything you did would have had some modification to it. It would have been the only way you knew to do things. And now the sound has stopped. Life as you knew it has changed completely. It’s easier. Less effort.

Is there a sense of loss? Maybe a bit, since you had a whole life built around that sound, even though it was obnoxious. Is there a sense of gratitude? More than likely! And imagine all the new rhythms within you that you would be able to perceive now that you are no longer distracted. Many things from your life, that had been required so you could cope with the sound, would drop away and such a world of possibilities would open up. Beforehand, there would have been no opportunity for anything new to show up because all your attention had been taken by that sound. Now, suddenly, wonderfully, you are free to choose where your attention goes.

Stage 8 is much like this. Your identity or “sense of self” is much like that irritating sound. Your whole life has been completely built around this identity; however, it is actually a distraction from who you really are. You are so used to it that you find it normal and think it is reality. But the fact is, this identity is based on staying safe and protected. When we are in a defended state, we cannot hear our true self for all the noise. We find importance in things that do not support our true nature and we often entirely overlook or neglect the things that really matter.

At the end of Stage 7, we discharged the energetic pattern and all the junk that kept us attached to this sense of self. In the Stage 7 SRI exercise; we did this by making the sound that matched the energetic resonance of the defended self until it was no more. What was left was a sense of accomplishment, peace and connection. This is what happens & what we feel when we move into Stage 8.

We find ourselves so full of space—so open and connected. We notice a new rhythm within us that was there all along, only we could not previously feel it. We search for that rhythm and we are awe-struck and grateful to find that it is everywhere we look. We find that everything we need is right in our path. It’s not a coincidence. This is how the world works. We find connectedness within our emptiness.