“Liberation Unleashed further documents an exciting new spiritual activity: online peer-to-peer mentoring, no airline tickets required. This book helps move us from the age of the guru to the age of the friend.”
—Greg Goode, author of The Direct Path and After Awareness, and coauthor of Emptiness and Joyful Freedom
“As Ilona points out in this wonderful book, there was truly a fire started with the Liberation Unleashed movement that occurred several years ago. I remember it well, as many people flocked to the movement in order to cut a path straight to liberation. In many ways, the movement has revolutionized the way people consider liberation these days. The pointing is very direct and leaves out a lot of unnecessary spiritual stuff. I’ve known many people who found it to be tremendously helpful. And the fire of the movement is still burning strong with this powerful book by Ilona. Highly recommended.”
—Scott Kiloby, CEO of The Kiloby Center for Recovery
“In this book, Ilona’s honesty and integrity shine through. In a world of gurus vying for your devotion and money, Ilona’s new book is refreshingly different. In ordinary language, completely free of pretense, she invites you to take a look for yourself and discover whether your assumptions are true. She skillfully guides you through an investigation that may reveal a shocking clarity that you are not what you thought. I enjoyed this book.”
—Joey Lott, author of The Best Thing That Never Happened
Publisher’s Note
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books
Copyright © 2016 by Ilona Ciunaite
Non-Duality Press
An imprint of New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
5674 Shattuck Avenue
Oakland, CA 94609
www.newharbinger.com
Cover design by Amy Shoup
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ciunaite, Ilona, author.
Title: Liberation unleashed : a guide to breaking free from the illusion of a
separate self / Ilona Ciunaite.
Description: Oakland, CA : Non-Duality, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016017899 (print) | LCCN 2016033385 (ebook) | ISBN
9781626258068 (paperback) | ISBN 9781626258075 (pdf e-book) | ISBN
9781626258082 (epub) | ISBN 9781626258075 (PDF e-book) | ISBN
9781626258082 (ePub)
Subjects: LCSH: Mind and body. | Self. | Spiritual life. | BISAC: BODY, MIND
& SPIRIT / General. | RELIGION / Eastern. | SELF-HELP / Spiritual.
Classification: LCC BF161 .C458 2016 (print) | LCC BF161 (ebook) | DDC
202/.2--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017899
18 17 16
Your heart and my heart are very, very old friends.
—Hafiz
This book is dedicated to you.
Contents
Preface
A Little Bit about Ilona
The First Disillusionment
Looking for Truth
Trying Out Some Paths
Deconstruction, Pain, and Peace
The End of the Search, but Not the End of the Journey
A Beginning
Liberation Unleashed
It’s Closer Than You Think
The Word “I” Is a Tool for Communication—Nothing More
How to Use This Book
Set Time for Writing Down Thoughts on Paper Every Day
Quit Following
Your Best Guides Are Fear and Resistance—and Excitement
Be Aware of Distraction
The I Virus
The Symptoms
The Antidote
After the Antidote
More About the Virus
How Do You Know You’re Infected?
How to Remove the Virus
Noticing Is Effortless
Thinking Is Not the Same as Looking
Expectations Are Like Clouds That Cover the Sunshine
Fear Is Sensation
Nona
Recognition
Sacha
Concepts, Words, and Stories Are Not What They Seem
Ideas Are Hypnotic by Nature
The Trick of Language
Language and Labels
Language Assumes a “Doer”
But What If There Is No Doer?
Labels
The Story and the Narrator
The Stories in Our Head
What Happens When You Simply Look?
Lakshmi
Thinking
Belief Is Composed of Thoughts About Thoughts
Thank Thoughts, Don’t Fight Them
Shoulds, Should Nots, and Wants
The Description Is Not the Experience
The Mind and the Heart
What Do You Really Want?
Wanting Control
Wanting Security
Wanting Love and Acceptance
Other Wants
Shanti
Suffering
There Is No Sufferer
Suffering and Acceptance
Resistance and Frustration Are Our Friends
Rowland
Deep Looking
Yes, So Be It
Welcoming
“Thank You” Is the Magic Phrase
Listening Deeply to What the Mind and the Heart Have to Say
Distraction (Again)
Protection
Friederich
Marty
Seven Steps
Step One: Clearing the Path—Meeting the Fear
Step Two: Strip Away All Expectations
Step Three: Get in Touch with the Real
Step Four: “I” Is a Thought—Thought Does Not Think
Step Five: There Is No Separate Self at All in Reality
Step Six: How Does It Feel to Crash the Gateless Gate?
Step Seven: Falling
So What?
The End of the Search, but Not the End of Our Exploring
Some Things Change Quickly, Others May Take Longer
Don’t Hold On to Anything
Pass the Message On
A Note of Gratitude
Afterword by Elena Nezhinsky
—Elena Nezhinsky
Preface
Dear Reader,
Are you looking for something? Do you wish that life was different, more joyful, and free? Do you feel a longing for something—even though you may not know what that “something” might be? Are you on a mission to improve yourself, or are you looking for the way to end suffering? I was looking for answers, too, and what I found was so surprising and simple that I have to share it with you.
A Little Bit about Ilona
I was born in Lithuania. For the past nineteen years I have lived in England. I am happily married to a man whom I met when I was twenty-one. He was a tattoo artist when I met him. I learned the craft from him and became a tattoo artist too. We have a little custom-tattoo studio. I enjoy drawing on skin, creating beautiful designs, and meeting people from every walk of life. If you would like to see some of my tattoo work, you can go to www.mantas-tattoo.com.
The First Disillusionment
Once I was a little girl, and I believed in Santa. I also believed in a magical fairy friend and a little devil named “Number 13” who could make things happen for me. I think I was about seven when the first illu
sion crashed. My friend Sandra told me that Santa was not real and that it was my parents who put the gifts under the Christmas tree. I wanted to cry. It was unbelievable, and I argued with her for a bit. She insisted that my parents had lied. I couldn’t believe it, but she was right. This was big. The magic world was breaking down and I saw that parents lie. I could not believe that they had tricked me. The whole illusion, that Senis Šaltis (the Lithuanian name for him) came and left us all these presents, had been so convincing. With one look at reality my belief in magic had been shattered! And it was gone for good. Since then, no one could possibly convince me that Santa is this guy who lives at the North Pole and brings presents to all the good kids all over the world on one magical night. Yeah, imagine that!
Time passed, and I grew up and picked up beliefs about everything. Some of them seemed quite magical, including new age teachings about the Higher Self and so forth.
Looking for Truth
The searching for the truth started on one magic night in 2002. I experienced silence of the thinking mind, a sweet sense of being, contentment, peace, and feeling at home. That magic-mushroom trip was the beginning of my journey to find home. I wanted to reach that state again, where all was felt as one, stillness, just being, and the sweetness of bliss. I then spent several months searching the Internet, just like Neo in The Matrix, looking for clues, reading all kinds of stuff, and wanting to understand what had happened. A lot of anger came up. I could not believe that no one had told me about this state of being.
To tell the truth, I was a lazy seeker. I read a few books but never went to any meetings, retreats, or groups. I had not heard of satsangs, had never met a teacher or a guru. I was alone in this search most of the time; at one point I had a friend who would talk about spiritual stuff and share thoughts about books that I read. I liked the authors Osho and Richard Bach.
Trying Out Some Paths
I loved experimenting with different modalities, especially sound healing, binaural beats, Holosync, and so forth. It was easy to get into deep states with the help of technology, particularly as I did not have the patience to meditate. I would put headphones on and let the frequencies take me away. Most of the time I just fell asleep. I tried many things for fun and exploration.
It took eight years and many bumps in the road for me to arrive at Jed McKenna’s books about spiritual enlightenment and the search for truth. I read all three of his books in two weeks during Easter of 2010 and got a real shock to the belief system. Jed catapulted me out of hypnosis. By “hypnosis” I mean following other people, looking for truth in what others were saying, believing this and that, and trying to fix my beliefs as if that would give me a happy tomorrow. As Richard Bach says in his book Hypnotizing Maria, a suggestion accepted is hypnotism. I accepted suggestions from everyone and everything around me: friends, parents, media, school, university, books, movies.
Deconstruction, Pain, and Peace
Then I realized that I had no idea that I had no idea. I thought I knew things and could make the universe dance to my own tune. I tried to believe in my ability to control, but somehow deep within it felt like a lie. What a sick joke.
The deconstruction of my castle of bullshit had started. I was looking at concepts and finding nothing but beliefs about beliefs and thoughts about thoughts—lots of them—all built up to form that castle. I was doing as Jed McKenna suggested, writing it all down, looking at what I knew was true. I was slowly coming out of the fog of following others and learning to think for myself, to see more clearly.
Some four months of deep depression followed: crying almost every day, seeing the hopelessness of my condition and of the condition of humanity, facing lie after lie, attacking belief after belief, seeing how everyone I knew was in a trance of suffering and hoping for things to change for the better. This was a painful time. Facing the fact that no belief is true was not easy, but it had to be done. I could not stop at halfway anymore. Beliefs about truth needed to go. Truth needed to be seen, recognized, felt, and known deeply. Only then, only when this initial deconstruction was done with, could I relax.
The depression ended at last and, finally, I felt at peace. There was an emptiness, a not knowing, a not believing anything about anything. I could no longer say the words “I believe” in a conversation because I knew it was all a lie. It was so obvious to me that the word “believe” holds a lie within it: be-lie-ve. I could no longer share lies disguised as sacred truths. Questioning beliefs felt like ripping pieces from myself. After cutting many lies out of the system, one last step remained.
This is when I found the online forum called Ruthless Truth, created by Ciaran Healy. The one message there was, “There is no you, look!” The directness of the message was striking. The conviction of people on the forum seemed odd but made me curious. In unison they were all saying, “Just take a fucking look!”
So, I looked…
It’s so obvious. There is no separate self at all—it’s all one! One movement of one life, one reality, one this. Not even “one,” just this. There is no separate avatar inside this body driving it, no ghost in the machine. Just life. Just this immediate experiencing, flowing freely, plain and simple.
And that was it. For a moment I felt astonishment. The first thought that came was, How did I never question that before?! The absence of a self is in plain sight, and yet it is the least obvious thing to question. I didn’t receive a cosmic download or hear an angel choir with this realization. No bright lights shone in my eyes, nor did I receive a medal for achievement. I smiled, felt disbelief at how simple it is, and one more magic fairy tale fell away.
I scratched my head and thought, Wow! No more belief in separation from life, from the source. No more delusion about Ilona running the show. Ha! No one is driving the show. The show did not stop, it was seen as just happening. The line was crossed. Then, the falling started. More beliefs came up and went, then even more and more. The most precious truths seemed the hardest to relinquish, but somehow, all the clearing became effortless as I realized that holding on to ideas and concepts is of no use.
The End of the Search, but Not the End of the Journey
The journey carried on, but the seeker was no longer there. Well, she never was there, just some story that was being told over and over again that was believed to be the truth of how things were.
Months went by and I noticed how searching had dropped and how opinions—mine or anyone else’s—no longer mattered. I noticed how everything was the same old, same old, but at the same time it was fresh, intimate, immediate, and raw. There was a sense of freedom, sweetness, and joy that arose. For some months I lived in bliss; I was high on life. I could not sleep but felt rested, I could not eat but felt full. I felt a lot of energy.
A Beginning
I still had the sense of a mission, that something needed to be done. This did not drop away. I started writing the blog Marked, Eternal, sharing thoughts about this newfound freedom and inviting readers to look, for themselves, into their own experience. With my dearest friend, Elena, I was stirring the pot in some Facebook groups, pointing to non-separatedness, and encouraging people to take a look, using what we call Direct Pointing.
The Direct Pointing method consists of a dialogue between a guide and a seeker. It is a process of looking at what is with no requirement for prior knowledge or years of seeking. The guide poses very specific questions to the seeker in order to focus the attention on the experience of the present moment. This triggers what we refer to as “crossing the Gateless Gate,” an instant in which the illusion of a separate self is seen through. A shift in perception happens. People who have crossed the Gateless Gate may become guides and pose to seekers the same questions that they themselves once tried to answer.
It wasn’t just Elena and I who started Direct Pointing, there was a group of us from the Ruthless Truth forum who were passionately ringing wake-up bells and whistling, inviting people to simply look.
People started writing to us in priv
ate. We had many e-mail conversations in which others came to see the absence of the entity “I.” (All those conversations are published on my blog.) This process was exhilarating, exciting; it felt revolutionary. Each time someone else recognized the absence of “I,” it felt like seeing it for the first time, again and again. That was really heart opening. It still is, as I have never stopped working with people, pointing to no self.
Liberation Unleashed
In September 2011, with help of Elena Nezhinsky and Ciaran Healy, Liberation Unleashed (LU) was created as an independent sister forum to the now-defunct Ruthless Truth. LU came to life with a big bang. On the night the website went live, Elena’s house in New York burned down. The launch of the forum seared an extraordinary memory in our minds—how much fire there was at the beginning of this movement, how much burning intensity for truth and compassion for fellow humans searching for the way out of suffering. It felt as if a mighty wall had been breached and that there was a crack in the foundation. There was finally a way to make a difference, a real change in human life. It seemed that this change in perception would open up the doors for so much more. All we did was point. We held up the Exit sign and made a noise, knowing that those who had ears to hear it would come and look for themselves. And they did.
I have had hundreds of conversations with people from all around the globe over the past few years. Some saw the illusion of “I” quickly, some not so quickly, and some were not ready. Each individual’s process was unique, and it took as long as it took. I have continued pointing since the launch. I’ve integrated it into my life as a daily, routine job. I hold live meetings and group sessions in the town where I live. All of my work is on Marked, Eternal and the LU forum, including the recordings of my meetings with individuals. It has been quite a journey, and I am enjoying every minute of it. I feel immense gratitude for everyone involved in this unique project. Thank you, too.
Liberation Unleashed Page 1
