CONSCIOUSNESS BIO
cover art courtesy of:
Kimberly Mok
collectivepsyche.com
Songs of Non-Separation: teachings on consciousness and spirituality is the culmination of a lifetime’s work of formal study, practice and devotion, an exegesis of experience rending the rainbow costumes of cognition into the inter-awakedness of consciousness.
Borne of a journey of deep adversity, commensurate with a deepened austerity practice, and fidelity, his work invokes the supernal understanding of awakening in that moment that is every other. Distilled from thousands of pages into a core collection of radical teachings, the book includes chapters, which Bien calls ‘songs’, on meditation (‘To know no mind’), geopolitics (‘Pax Egoica’), philosophy (‘Dialectical Immaterialism’), mysticism, quantum physics, lovers and Love, amongst a myriad of multidisciplinary contemplative talks.
His principal teaching is the practice of inventory; the imperative of awakening to the deeper understanding that suffering teaches greater suffering, and so unveils the gift of suffering, in the numinous of non-separation itself.
He advocates a higher not hierarchical consciousness, in what he calls the ascendant self, borne of the fidelity of an awakened practice, and the ordinary occasion of grace. Through his writings, music, epigrams and explicit teaching, his work has travelled the world, shedding light on the monolithic nature of mind, illuminating the indigenous self, the mind no longer in diaspora from the heart.
One of his most radical realizations is “the revelation that to say thank-you to one’s deepest suffering”, is both the most difficult journey and greatest gift one can ever learn, and a definition of prayer. Through the practice of meditation, birthing the understanding of what he calls “volition born of non-volition”, the unknown becomes known when the knower disappears, all questions answered when the questioner disappears; truth arising not as ideation, but as reality, when the seeker disappears, and so the eradication and illumination of self-identification, as liberation.” In his own words “You are the instrument of your practice”.