Purpose
deeper realization through personal experience
Purpose
The Center is an outreach of our monastic Order, The Little Creek Monastery. We provide the Center as a modest service to assist fellow seekers in their studies, understandings, applications and realizations along the inner path of Harmony.
The Center’s name
Prior to founding the monastery in 2012, we had a website known as Eternal Awareness (EA), dating back to 2005. In 2009, we added The Center for Eternal Awareness, which together with EA evolved into our future monastery. The Center served as a public-facing essay and discussion forum.
Origin
The Eternal Awareness name itself originated from the Bhagavad Gita. In the story, we find our hero Arjuna consulting with his charioteer Krishna, who he eventually discovers is Lord Krishna, Lord of creation and master of the entire universe. Krishna, in one of his first rebukes to his student, tells Arjuna that his main problem is one of perspective. That he needs to see things from a higher point of view, from the vantage point of eternal awareness. Until he gets to that point, and until he can get to a genuine realization that there’s a far bigger game afoot, well, further discussion of anything of consequence is relatively futile.
About these essays
In 2009, EA hosted a series of web-based discussions, which dovetailed with live, in-person weekly courses being held at Great River Institute (GRI). The initial catalyst for the event was The Art of Giving series of lectures.
In GRI’s Jiu Jitsu school, the Art of Giving is a set of four (4) universal principles that are studied in the second degree black belt curriculum. In the case of the lecture series, the Art of Giving principles were introduced to a wider audience, not solely to Jiu Jitsu students.
Our web-based hosting occurred under the auspices of The Center for Eternal Awareness. We helped facilitate weekly teleconferencing of attendees from across the United States and from the United Kingdom. During each subsequent week, we provided follow-up summaries and hosted live chat discussions of the previous weekend’s seminar.
The Center also hosted many other online discussion groups. Scott Walter, Sensei, participated in many of these forums. EA edited and published the GRI documents provided on this site, and the monastery continues to host these important essays. We view our role in preserving these essays, at least in part, as one in which we provide a digital time-vault moving forward.
What is The Center for Eternal Awareness?
The Center for Eternal Awareness exists to help us realize — not simply believe — that we are eternal beings, now.
We’ve considered a reboot of the Center’s name from ‘Eternal’ to ‘Greater,’ or perhaps something like The Center for Deeper Consciousness and Awareness, in part to convey greater inclusiveness, and in part because not everyone is interested in the so-called eternal aspects of consciousness. But we’ve stuck with the name because consciousness research by GRI and others, along with personal experience, has continually taken us in the direction of substantiating claims of past lives, as well as awareness that our current lives appear to be a part of a greater continuum.
Whether you consider an eternal perspective a worthy pursuit or not, nothing beats a higher perspective. In that context, there are universal principles involved in these teachings that you may find helpful. In our opinion, any student of deeper awareness or consciousness can find meaningful benefit here, but it takes study and many of these articles are not necessarily fast reads.
Krishna’s advice to Arjuna was sound: reach for the highest perspective you can find.
Trail scouts, wayfarers, vagabonds and hiking guides
We are everyday people living regular lives. We don’t claim to have the answers. We are on the trail along with everyone else. But along the way we’ve experienced and seen some things, including spotting some helpful trail markers.
The monastery and The Center for Eternal Awareness are like base camps, where we show up to report to fellow travelers what’s further up the trail. We know that there’s more than one trail up the mountain… and that there’s more than one mountain.
Thank you spending time here.
