THE CENTER FOR ETERNAL AWARENESS
Promoting deeper realization through personal experience
Purpose
The Center is an outreach of 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 re-purposed EA as The Center for Eternal Awareness, a web-based publishing venue for a series of essays presented by Great River Institute. Once the monastery was established, the Center was transitioned into a public-facing learning 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 an incarnation of Lord Vishnu who is the 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, then further discussion of anything of consequence is relatively futile.
About the essays or teachings of Great River Institute
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 lecture series.
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 beyond GRI’s Jiu Jitsu students.
The monastery’s web-hosting occurred under the auspices of The Center for Eternal Awareness. We helped facilitate weekly teleconferencing of attendees from the United States and from the United Kingdom. During each subsequent week of classes, we provided follow-up summaries which included hosting live chat discussions of the previous weekend’s seminar.
The Center has hosted many other online discussion groups. Scott Walter, Sensei, participated in many of these forums. EA edited and published the GRI documents that we have provided on this site, and the monastery continues to host these important essays in our free online archives. The monastery views our role as helping to preserve these essays, a digital time-vault.
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 Awareness’ to ‘Greater Awareness,’ 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 our founder’s personal experiences and realizations, have continually taken us in the direction of substantiating claims of past lives, as well as awareness that our current lives are 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 GRI’s 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 all 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 its associated Center for Eternal Awareness are like base camps, where we show up to report to fellow travelers what’s further up the trail. As pathfinders ourselves, we know that there’s more than one trail up the mountain… and that there’s more than one mountain to climb.
Essay Categories
The 29 essays below are provided courtesy of Great River Institute (GRI). For further information, please contact Great River Institute directly. The essays are by Scott Walter, Jiu Jitsu Shihan and master teacher. He is the founder of Great River Institute and of Great River Jiu Jitsu.
Essay categories
The Art of Giving — 7 essays
Reconciling Our Separation from the Oneness — 8 essays
Truth — 8 essays
Being — 2 essays
Spiritual Schools, Study and Education — 2 essays
Questions and Problems — 2 essays
More EA essays and articles can be found here.