My family moved to Canada from Finland when I was five. I clearly remember an experience that started developing from this time, where I could see an unmoving sphere, or bubble, of comfortable light, or consciousness, that surrounded my body. If I moved my hand outside this safety net it looked somehow darker and I would draw it back to safety. In this space, I always felt that I could do no wrong since I was just flowing along without making any effort.
As I grew older this experience expanded and remained abstract for many years. I, of course, thought nothing of it, even though it was obviously a very basic aspect of my existence. When I was about eight or nine years old, I started experiencing what can only be described as a mixture of intense energy and overwhelming happiness. Every day I would have to leave the house and run/walk around the block for several hours until it was manageable again.
I would have long, grand insights that I felt completely unable to express out loud, along with apparently extended physical abilities, foresight, and streams of vision that I could not explain. The school I was attending at the time insisted that I demonstrate these physical abilities on stage; no one, including me, could understand how I could jump so high. People felt that I was in the air just a little too long for my own good.
I noticed in high school that I never actually fell asleep at night and that nights and days just blended together uninterruptedly. This went on for years. When I would wake up in the morning I felt like I was falling asleep and when going to sleep at night I would seem to wake up.
When I was a young adult I started Transcendental Meditation, and then my personal experience really took off. I started first intuiting—then hearing, and seeing—the subtle fabrics of the quietest levels of my own consciousness: pure abstract knowingness, from within its own nature, revealed its unified, wonderful structure of wholeness.
About 30 years ago, I began to hear the hum of existence as layers of knowledge. I could see the divine heavens; I started experiencing the relationships that rendered everything experienced as one unified wholeness of multiplicity. And ultimately how, even daily life, far from being the football field of turbulent change, is nothing but the greatest expression of divine-to-Absolute-self-awareness.
And yet here we all are, essentially no different from each other. Nothing much changes. My experience is that all this is true for everybody. The “sphere of consciousness” around me as a child, is still there but has expanded to include all the different layers of my awareness.
Book: The Landscape of Enlightenment: With Doors and Windows to Our World
Websites:
Other interviews
- 2nd BatGap Interview with Harri
- 3rd BatGap Interview with Harri
- Harri Aalto, in Panel Discussion on Refined Perception
Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group.
Interview recorded 3/22/2014
Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.
YouTube Video Chapters:
- 00:00:00 – Introduction and Response to First Interview
- 00:05:01 – The Ocean of Consciousness and its Fluctuations
- 00:10:00 – Recognizing Consciousness
- 00:15:21 – The Speech of Enlightenment
- 00:19:34 – Unity of Pure Consciousness and Daily Life
- 00:26:07 – The Mechanics of Creation and the Nature of Consciousness
- 00:31:58 – The Continuum of Consciousness
- 00:37:26 – Infinite Intelligence in Creation
- 00:42:54 – The Continuum of Consciousness
- 00:47:36 – The Illusion of Subtle Layers
- 00:52:46 – The search for the self
- 00:57:43 – The Value of Experience Within the Self
- 01:03:10 – The Structure of Consciousness and Pure Consciousness
- 01:07:16 – The Silence of Pure Consciousness
- 01:12:24 – The Evolution of Consciousness and the Presence of God
- 01:18:04 – Connecting with the Growth of Love
- 01:23:31 – The Reverberation of Pure Consciousness
- 01:27:36 – The Function of Memory and Consciousness
- 01:32:30 – The Resonance of Truth
- 01:38:04 – The Universe and Consciousness
- 01:43:27 – The Question of Free Will and Determinism
- 01:48:44 – The Elephant Analogy and Overcoming Personal Challenges
- 01:54:29 – The Function of Subtle Levels of Creation
- 01:58:50 – The realization of being everything and writing a book
- 02:01:52 – The Potential for Self-Realization
- 02:05:33 – The Joy of Exploring the Possibilities Within Pure Consciousness
- 02:09:50 – The Unfolding of Experience
- 02:13:15 – Embracing Different Perspectives
- 02:17:17 – The Experience of Pure Consciousness and the I-ness
- 02:21:27 – Concluding Remarks
- 02:24:59 – Wrapping Up the Podcast
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