"Consciousness is due to the interaction between yourself and others and is proportional to that interaction.  Therefore, you must not hold onto yourself saying, “I can’t talk because it may make me look bad.  They would think that I’m something I’m not.” 

"Presentation is the secret to greater consciousness, and consciousness is proportional to the degree of interchange between you and others.  That is why, of course, we set you up in an interchange situation, a dyad.  But you must interchange in it.  Take your chance.  Maybe they will hate you.  Maybe your reputation will be reined forever.  So what?  Your passion for the Truth should be more valuable to you than your reputation, your ego."
Charles Berner
Enlightenment and the Enlightenment Intensive (Volume 2)

Listen
Audio: What is Enlightenment? 
includes Yoah and Charles Berner’s audio...

Registration and interest is being taken for the
2019 Enlightenment Master Training Course
with Yoah Wexler, PhD.
The video excerpt below is from one of the on-line modules
of the Enlightenment Master Training.  It is a lecture by Charles Berner.

You are already enlightened.

Teachers of spiritual liberation and enlightenment throughout the world and throughout the course of human history counsel that you are already enlightened. 

The difficulty is that though you KNOW who you are, you may not be conscious of it.  There is a difference between knowing who you are and consciousness of who you are.

It's similar to this example. At THIS moment, before I bring to your attention, your birthday or where your car is parked or what you had for breakfast, you are not conscious of that.  Though you probably KNOW those things, that is, your birthday, where your car is parked and what you had for breakfast but you were not conscious of it .  In a similar way you KNOW who you are but you are not conscious of it.

Reflect on that for a moment or two and let it sink in.

When you participate in the Enlightenment Intensive your attention is systematically and consistently focused on bringing who you are into conscious direct knowing by your fellow participants regularly requesting that you reveal to them who you really are.  

It's quite profound and simple.  It's the potency of the Biblical phrase, "Where two or more are gathered in my name".

As Charles Berner noted, it would be relatively easy to contemplate who you are "if you didn't have a mind."  But it's precisely because you have a mind that it can be immensely difficult to bring your knowingness of who you are into consciousness because the mind gets in the way. 

What is this 'mind' that gets in the way I hear you asking. Berner explains that the mind is the place where all kinds of "ideas, experiences, feelings, traumas and memories" about yourself are stored".  These stored ideas and impressions originate from those experiences in your life that you haven't fully understood. They arise from the psycho/social/cultural environment that you were raised in which socializes, conditions, trains and habituates you to think one way or the other about who you are and what life is. This brings about identifications with various personality traits.

For example, the residue of various experiences get stuck in your sub conscious or conscious mind like that time when you were only four years old and your father startled you when he screamed at you or when that cute puppy dog bit you or that school teacher or priest touched you and made you feel strange.  It's these sorts of experiences which are too intense for you to integrate or understand that become stored in your mind.  Also stored in the mind are experiences like being told you are fat, short, ugly, smart, stupid or that life is a struggle or that you'll never be as good as your brother or sister.  It may be experiences like growing up being told you are superior to others because of your religion, wealth, social status, skin colour, sexual orientation or family origins. These and countless other experiences are stored as impressions in the mind.  These impressions fill you up with lots of things about who are that you haven't fully understood or that you haven't been able to get understood by other people. They fill you up with things that you think you are but aren't.

When you contemplate who you are the mind will bring up all these ideas and impressions about who you are that you are identified with. And, as Berner says, there might be a lot of ideas about yourself that you have not understood which results in various degrees of confusion, uncertainty, un-clarity and emotional disturbance. 

"That's why," explains Berner "it takes years and years of solo contemplation to try to find one's way through the morass of the mind."  Berner writes, "In the classical techniques of just contemplating, the aspirant gradually burned out the mind.  If you stared at a rock long enough it would dissolve away.  It would take staring for a long time, about four hundred billion years or so. Breathing on a rock would gradually wear it down a little faster by wind erosion.  Running water would make it go a little faster.  Taking a hammer out and smashing it or pouring chemicals on it might dissolve it away in minutes.  So there are different rates at which you can dissolve away identifications, confusions, traumas, and vested interests that are contained in the mind that make the mind stick and hold on."

If solo meditation or contemplation gradually burns out the mind is there a way to speed up the process of enlightenment, that is, of bringing consciousness to the activity of directly knowing who you are?

Yes, Berner explains, "the most powerful means to dissolve the mind is through communication…"  

At the Enlightenment Intensive this principle of dissolving the mind through communication between individuals is taken full advantage of.  When you contemplate who you are and then communicate what you become conscious of to another the process of enlightenment is accelerates.  This is the power of the Enlightenment Intensive and the Enlightenment Technique. As Berner says, "When the things in the mind are communicated, they dissolve and vanish out of the mind to the degree that they are received and understood by another individual."

Enlightenment and the Enlightenment Intensive (Volume 1), 
by Charles Berner; edited and compiled by Yoah Wexler, PhD
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1492267546

Enlightenment and the Enlightenment Intensive (Volume 2) 
by Charles Berner; edited and compiled by Yoah Wexler, PhD
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1492263281

Relating and Spiritual Consciousness: Communication, Love and Relating Dyads by Charles Berner; edited and compiled by Yoah Wexler, PhD
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1518696287

Knowing Your Self: 100 Self Awareness Exercises 
by Yoah Wexler, PhD
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1490339434

Dear Fellow Travellers on the Road of Enlightenment and Love,
It’s been about a week since the 2019 New Year Eve Enlightenment Intensive completed.
I trust you are doing well and integrating into your daily life the depth of self realization you uncovered at the retreat.

Relating Dyads are a powerful tool for improving ​communication,
listening and understanding.    
Learn how to do there Relating Dyad Practice here.
​

​Knowing Your Self: 100 Self Awareness Exercises 
by Yoah Wexler, PhD
​
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1490339434

A poem from Gitesha:

WHAT I AM
I am
The loving presence in all things.
In total harmony.
Bright Clear Unassuming
The feeling of being separate- is gone.
Everything seems to be happening by itself... somehow.
The sorrows, the burdens, the complications, 
that are so central to ordinary life,
are no longer there.
Now there is free space, it’s open.... It is a Miracle!

In loving awe of the divinity of us all,

Running away or cowering embeds the fears deeper into the body/mind.
Facing the fear and communicating what you are conscious of
helps to empty the mind thus leaving you with
​the Truth of who you are.

​Dear Friends,

Please join us for the 40th Annual Intensive, led by Jason Nathaniel, October 24th - 27th at Isis Oasis in Geyserville CA.
Everyone is welcome.

The Enlightenment Intensive combines contemplation with communication in a powerful process aimed at direct conscious knowledge of truth. Over the past decade, Jason has been actively involved in taking, staffing, and mastering Intensives.
He offers a Love Intensive each year in northern California and leads with a freshness and authenticity that have earned him
a devoted following.

For more information about Enlightenment Intensives, please visit: http://highsierra.org/ei.html

Isis Oasis, where the Annual Intensive was held for many years, is about an hour's drive north of San Rafael, easily accessible from both SFO and the Santa Rosa airports. Amenities include a large swimming pool, new hot tub, comfortable double rooms, spacious dorm areas with adjoining baths, and good chairs for sitting.
Tuition is on a sliding scale from $375 to $650, which includes your lodging, bedding and towels, delicious vegetarian meals, and the Intensive. Please plan to pay at the highest level of the sliding scale that you can afford. This will allow others who need to pay less the opportunity to attend. Origin is a 501c3 non-profit, and those paying above the base price will be making a tax-deductible donation to support the scholarship fund. 

You can reserve a place, sponsor someone, or donate to Origin at https://www.paypal.me/originintensives;
or mail a check to Origin, 40600 Hwy 49, Calpine CA 96124. 
For questions or more information, please email origin@highsierra.org. 
We hope to have you with us for the 40th Annual Intensive!
Love,
Osha

Come to the
Enlightenment Intensive
in your local neighbourhood and
Click Link
to ​check out these books on Amazon.

​https://www.amazon.com/Charles-Berner/e/B00IRCAD3M?ref=dbs_p_pbk_r00_abau_000000

The CD has two audio tracks. Track 1 is an audio teaching on how to do the Relating Dyad Process. Track 2 is a 40 minute Gong Timer that sounds a bell every five minutes. This CD Gong Timer is used when dong the Relating.

​www.amazon.com/Yoah-Wexler/e/B001K8N1UM

The mind is a mixed blessing. It has some good features and some bad features. Without the mind, at least in the beginning, we wouldn't be able to be conscious at all A good feature of the mind is that it provides a tolerable indirect way of relating with others. Yet the mind is a curse because it tells us things that aren't so. It is both a friend and an enemy. In total, the mind is more of a curse than it is a blessing. Still, without it we would not get to the place where we can be liberated from the mind and have true consciousness rather than partly true consciousness and partly false consciousness. So in the beginning the mind is a necessary evil, but in the end it must go.

The Mind, Chapter 1; The Mind, The Brain and You. (unpublished)
​Charles Berner

​Amazon Books by Charles Berner
​https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=charles+berner+&rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Acharles+berner+