The Sugar Layer

Leaving the Sugar Layer

By Nicole Daedone

We’ll call it Orgasm; Love, Bliss, Consciousness, the Void, whatever you want to call this “it” that is being heralded by many. We’re calling it Orgasm. Ultimately it is some form of light and heat. It is motion. It is energy. It is a potent, ever present, value neutral force.

If I have a lot of this Orgasm in my body, I have a lot of power in the world. People don’t know why, but they want to be near me. And not only do they want to be near me, they want to do things for me. With the force of Orgasm in my system, I can draw what I want into my life. The problem with this is that, along with attraction, Orgasm activates concentrations of identity, preference and habit in my system; those deep, core things that say "if I have this, then I will be happy, safe, successful, good". With Orgasm, you develop the power to draw those things in. Concentrations like "I wasn’t popular in high school, I want 900 boyfriends," manifest 900 boyfriends walking down the street.

In yoga and meditation, it’s called getting caught in the Samadhi Layer. I'm calling it the Sugar Layer. A lot of people get stuck there and think that it’s the “it” they’ve wished for. But the “it” that they’re wishing for is right behind that. It’s unconditional, value neutral freedom. It’s the ability to surrender everything your conditioned self has identified with, in order to live in alignment with the underlying laws of nature. That’s what the freedom is. That’s Orgasm.

There’s a Twilight Zone episode where a man dies and goes to a Las Vegas-like heaven. He goes and plays cards, and he wins the card game. Then he goes and plays darts and he wins the dart game. Then he goes to find women and all the women he wants come to him. Looking perplexed, he says, “This is heaven?” And the man next to him replies, “Who said this was heaven?”

The challenge of desire is that it wants completion. But the nature of awakening is that it’s never complete. Awakening is a process, because it's immersed in the process-nature of life. If you pull out into the Sugar Layer and stop at having everything you've ever wanted, then you’re out of the flow of life, and the flow of life is what gives everything meaning.

Our tendency, as soon as we get into these bliss states, is to want to hold them. We want to lock down. We want to stick to a pole. We want to go to this really good side, or even this really bad side. But the beauty is that Orgasm keeps us right in the center. Orgasm is an intense force, but it is value neutral. It moves us down the river completely out of control. That’s where all pleasure is located – the deep pleasure, the real pleasure, the gratifying pleasure, not the egoic pleasure that is temporary and actually blocks us from our own life.

When I was little, I used to get high by holding my breath. That was really pleasurable for a while, but it’s not very sustainable. That’s what the Sugar Layer is like. It’s packing everything in a container that covers up your insecurities. But what if you just had a constant flood that was moving your insecurities out? What if you were living in that constant flowing state?

One of the fallacies out there is that we can let anything go. We have a pain that’s stuck in our system and we can’t let that pain go, but we’re told that we should, which of course just adds to the pain. Behind that concentration is an entire history of moments where there was an initial contraction. I begin to open that concentration and begin going all the way backward through it. I don’t know how long it will be until I burn down to the seed, until I get down to the core moment, when I first said no, when I first contracted.

The nature of a seed is that wrapped around it are its emanations -- its pollutants. These seeds actually are our practice. They’re our opportunity to increase awareness, rather than decrease the intensity of our conditions. Our tendency for awakening is to want to decrease the intensity of our conditions so that we don’t have to confront the emanations. But the emanations are our opportunity. Can you stay conscious close to your seed? If you can, then you’ll get freedom when that thing opens. Then you’ll have proven that you can handle that level of energy in the world.

There’s a way where you open one of these seeds, you’re agreeing to a new level of responsibility for care of your external world. The reason why it is so difficult to get into the seed is that you have to prove that your consciousness can handle that level of awareness with other people, and the world.

So what happens is you get this freedom and you get turned on by the freedom, and then you want more freedom. Well, the freedom is the lure to have you be more and more of service in the world. That’s the name of the game that we’re in. I’m just going to give up the punch line. My teachers were casual, "Hey, you’re going to get freedom, you’re going to have fun, you'll get everything you ever wanted…" I thought "Yes! Lots of boyfriends! Wonderful!" They didn’t say, "...And you’re going to wake up every day and you’re going to have 50 people in your head, and you’re going to have terror around how to ensure that you’re in integrity with them, and that they’re actually awaking too, that they’re becoming free too".

I want to make sure that everyone gets that this is not about what you should do – at all. If service is not emanating from a place of true desire then don’t do it. Although, if you do hear the voice in the background, do it. In the same way that there was a part of me that said, I’m not feeling as much as I could in this place, and it looks like there are people feeling more than I am. What are they doing? I came across these people who were orgasmic and they were feeling something I wasn’t feeling. And so I decided to open that domain. If you look at people who are really in service, they are experiencing something that some other people aren’t experiencing. It looks hard and it looks icky, but there’s something that keeps bringing them forward in that. If you can hook onto that part instead of the obligatory, forced martyrdom, and recognize that there is potentially great joy there and let the joy be what moves you forward, then it’s incredible.

There’s a way that we can come to recognize that there is enough for everyone. When I do service, I get to tap into that place where there is no mine, there is no yours, there is ours. We’re sharing an experience together. We’re sharing this Orgasm together in a much bigger way; in a way that can begin to remove the concentrations that are located specifically in the scarcity domain, in the contraction domain, in that part of the psyche. That’s what service addresses.

Each person gets to choose the amount that they want to have. To the extent that you are willing to be responsible for the whole world, you have freedom. The great news is that it’s totally up to you. To the extent that you’re focused on yourself, you’re in bondage. That’s just the simple workings of it.

The good news is that if I’m willing to take responsibility out here, then my attention isn’t in here, in this contracted ego domain. Responsibility is actually the anchor for my consciousness.

In freedom, responsibility is pleasurable metabolization. It feels good to put back out at that point. We do all of this to let go of the sugar, to go into the unknown, to go into the place that you’ve never been in because that’s where life is.