not knowing how close the truth is
we seek it far away
– Hakuin Ekaku
I began writing this essay just before I had the big shift, but most of it was written during the couple of years that followed. Putting it in words has been part of the integration process for me.
Waking up from the dream is to realize Truth experientially. It is a transcendental release that takes one completely beyond anything the mind can imagine. In my experience, this is followed by a lifelong journey of unification, visceralization and harmonization. This downwards movement of liberation I call Love.
I will try to describe this paradox here ... and the words will inevitably fail.
Unknow
Awakening is a spontaneous cessation in which that which was before assumed to exist is seen as non-existent. In a sudden flash your original nature lays bare. Strikingly simple yet endlessly profound, inherently awake radiance reveals itself.
That-which-is-not is an innocent cognitive error, elusive and hard to detect as it lies at the foundation of perception. It is the assumption there exists a me-subject, and something that is not-me. All other beliefs that generate the experience of duality rest on top of that root premise.
Initially a sense of ‘me’ — knowing that ‘I exist’ — is very subtle and undivided. It appears when self reflective consciousness begins to function around the age of two. In fact, this reflective movement of consciousness is what self is, a platform for the psychological self that enters the game a few years later.
Self is a verb
Psychological self is a solidification of the pure sense of 'I exist' through conceptualization. As soon as we begin to process reality with language consciousness gets entangled with thought and narrative. An imaginary entity is — spontaneously — fabricated and identified with: self reflection lands on ‘me’ that appears as someone solid and separate.
In other words, self is a verb; a process of self-referencing interpretation.
Without ever consciously choosing it entanglement with thought becomes a way of being, an isolating experience of nagging dissatisfaction. This may appear as a vague, persistent sense of lack, not-rightness, or struggle underlying the everyday conscious experience. Only when the perceptual distortion evaporates do we realize how alienating it was, in comparison with the natural ease that comes with awakening.
I invite you to directly look at the self-referencing mechanism and see it for what it is, how it divides the experience and generates the illusion of separation. This is a deeply personal and intimate discovery. To directly encounter the constructed, non-substantial nature of separate self is a life-changing revelation. Strangely, sometimes life remains outwards quite the same; something shifts in that which is looking.
Empty Clarity
Awakening is effortless immersion in open boundlessness. Its astonishing immediacy dissolves the apparent solidity of self and the world, as well as all divisions within the experience.
Awakening tends to happen when we are not trying to make it happen. However, certain conditions seem to make such accident prone. One of the universal features of realization is natural childlike openness. A child relates to their experience with open curiosity, free from expectations or presuppositions. This type of pragmatic innocence is at the core of the direct approach.
Seamless totality
Awakening is clear-seeing that destroys the false sense of separation. The seer, the seeing and the seen are naturally one indivisible occurring. Self-referencing takes a pause, and nonduality is unveiled in the gap. It shines forth, as it were.
This is so fundamental to what you are that once opened it can never really close, even if it appears to do so. Your true nature is centerless sky-like vastness with almost shocking intimacy. It shines in the experience as seamless totality.
Awakening may come with energetic byproducts, but your true nature itself is something utterly neutral, empty of all qualities. Mysteriously, this pure no-thing-ness is the source and substance of all phenomenal flux.
Awakening cuts through identity
There are various ways in which people leap into nondual lucidity. Having made that leap, you may grok these experiential glimpses are nothing more special than any other passing phenomena as all experience is nondual by its nature.
It is natural to delight in the clarity and joy that comes with a sudden sense of boundlessness. But holding on to an immersive experience as something more godlike than everyday mundane perception is just another way to reinforce artificial division. Your original condition is all-pervading, knife-edge lucidity. Attending to this is living realization.
Awakening cuts through every nest of identity, and it is exactly the identity that fixates on experiences and generates the movement of seeking, pushing and pulling. Just consider this: Truth transcends all experience, and all experience is nothing but Truth. As long as we dismiss uncomfortable sensations as ‘not-It’, or secretly cherish profound realizations as ‘this-is-It’, we are banging our head against the gateless gate.
The following questions can be helpful in inquiring into the fundamental mechanism of identity. What is it that is grasping in one direction and pushing towards the other? Can I experience it directly? What is that seeking movement avoiding to feel? What are the beliefs associated with what is being avoided? What do I believe that is lacking right now in order to feel at peace and fulfilled? Can I experience it somatically, as directly as possible? Are there any emotions associated with it? Is there any repression around those emotions?
Abiding Awakeness
I define awakening as a shift in perception in which the locus of identity moves from psychological processes to ineffable unknowability. It is not really possible to say what your true nature is. It cannot be known because it cannot be objectified. It knows itself through not knowing.
To have an awakening experience, no matter how profound, does not automatically mean this shift will occur. Abiding awakeness is usually preceded by a resolute intention of actualization. The shedding of the layers of identity begins when we genuinely want truth, on its own terms. This may show up in various ways, but essentially it’s about entering the Unknown.
Looking in retrospect, the awakening impulse has a driving force that goes way beyond the initial recognition. Awakening shows a possibility of a radically different way of being, but in no way guarantees it. Yet I would claim that if awakening is genuine, once seen, it cannot be unseen. At one point it just takes fully over. Oftentimes this is an unfolding that takes place over several years, and can only be seen for what it is after a certain tipping point occurs.
Every perceptual shift is followed by integration
First we recognize innate nondual awareness, stabilize in effortless abiding, and dissolve all identity into it. The primary awakening then expands to all arising phenomena: there is nothing ‘other’. The movement of thought, emotion and sensation is recognized as vibrant texturing of empty clarity, resolved back into its origin. Lucidity permeates all experience until there is no more agonizing forgetfulness of your true nature. As awakening expands to absorb all that it encounters it is seen and felt that everything has the nature of your innermost awareness.
The amount to which awakening is embodied is what distinguishes the determined folk in this field from the hobbyists. Every perceptual shift is followed by integration, during which unresolved experience, repressed emotional material and trauma often surfaces to be seen and felt in the light of awakeness. This is crucial and cannot be avoided.
I would say the clarity of embodied awakening is directly related to the thoroughness of emotional work we engage with. One of the classical pitfalls on the path is premature transcendence. The immaculate nature of pure awareness transcends the bodymind condition, and it may at times feel like most of our psychological issues have magically evaporated, or that they simply no longer feel problematic. This type of liberating disintegration could be called waking up from life, and it can feel quite peaceful.
For awakening to blossom to its full expression, however, a complementary movement is called for. As Life wakes up through you liberation expands within the relative human experience. Old rigidified thought and behavioral patterns can now be encountered from the perspective of totality. A mysterious, never ending act of alignment and coalescence begins.
Ceasing to cherish illusions
Ultimately, awakening is ceasing to cherish illusions. If we are genuinely interested in truth all our core beliefs must be uncovered, examined and questioned. And just consider: if you happen to be a spiritual person, your most cherished beliefs are likely found in your spiritual views.
Self structure tends to assume increasingly all-inclusive and unified forms, until it is so diluted to the whole of experience that it may feel like it is almost gone. It’s quite easy to notice painful I-thoughts which generate instant friction with reality, and thus call for attention. It takes uncompromised sincerity to detect the subtle ways the identity may fixate at the later stages of awakening.
These subtle fixations may show up as experiential insight, but then solidify into a position. They arise from a need for safety associated with the illusion of certainty. If we practice within a lineage they may show up as expectations derived from the tenets specific to that tradition. They are nothing but elusive tendencies to control the experience which numbs the raw aliveness of not knowing, often connected with emotional bypassing.
Examples of such positions are “I am pure awareness”, “All thoughts are untrue”, “There is no self”. These insights serve a liberating function if applied as antidotes. But if they are misunderstood as ‘the truth’ they end up binding us. The obscuring mechanism of identity can hijack any realization for its own purposes. It really is a superbly magnificent power which tends to sometimes fill me with almost ecstatic repulsion and awe. Do not despair; if you are genuinely devoted to truth you will be able to see through your delusions.
Awakeness is immediate pure openness that does not fixate. It has no agenda regarding the experience. It naturally illuminates everything. This is not always easy, because the core beliefs underneath conditioned behavior hide behind emotional repression and avoidance mechanisms. Inquiring into them takes patience, willingness, and unguarded intimacy.
That Which Cannot Be Simpler
In the matrix of intrinsic spaciousness
Our original face shines like the sun
Its creativity, without bias
Projects everything as light …
– Spaciousness, Canto Thirteen
Knowing that ‘I Am’ is the foundation of the dream. It’s the gateless gate through which the imaginary return to the original state occurs. Your true nature is unborn and undying, but for the felt sense of ‘I exist’ the realization feels like fading into a bottomless abyss. From the perspective of our original wakefulness, however, the cessation is endless homecoming.
“Gone, gone, gone beyond; utterly gone beyond: Awake" (the Heart Sutra). The end of the ‘I Am experience’ is the seeing that it never existed to begin with. Liberation is all there ever was; indivisible completion is inherent to your experience right now.
This recognition is completely mindless. The self cannot sense what is beyond its perception, yet it is possible these words inexplicably ring true.
The stateless state
With universal I Am there occurs a profound unification. Everything is intuitively felt to be made of something ‘same’. Everything is included from the perspective of oneness. Everything is infused by all-pervasive joy. But the stateless state is something prior to unity: something so utterly simple that it’s constantly missed.
You will never be able to express this in words, and there is nothing but it. The unconditioned nature of all conditions is so primary that the possibility of anything being something other is permanently eliminated.
Everything dissolves in mysterious peace that surpasses all understanding. It’s almost as if the terrific dream of entanglement with thought and identity never even happened. It’s almost as if the whole earth shattering awakening was just one meaningless blip in Eternity.
Empty fullness
The need to create identity to manage the experience has been liberated. Everything reveals itself as unique expression of the unknowable vastness. Every sensation is awesome empty fullness — total interpenetration. Reality is awake to itself as the substanceless substance of what is.
The human experience with its imperfections, challenges and vulnerabilities is here just like before, but lighter. There is raw sensitivity and resilience … life moves through vividly unfiltered. Remnants of past conditioning arise from time to time, but can’t attach themselves to anything. There is no self apart from the whole, no world apart from pure sensation. Everything is nothing, strangely inexhaustible.
The challenge in trying to talk about this stuff is that it tends to create expectations of how this may look like or feel like. Unlike spiritual traditions like to suggest, liberation is not a perfected, favorable or special condition at the relative human level. In fact, it is the complete absence of attainment (or non attainment, for that matter) that characterizes the ineffable bare trans-conceptual mode.
Residues of energetic resistance can continue to surface after the self structure drops away. Freedom naturally turns towards that which does not feel free. Anything that it comes in contact with naturally self liberates, absorbs into wholeness. The Infinite moves through everything seamlessly — fiercely — as nothing other than itself. It does feel like an indescribable interpermeation. This self liberating movement of no trace is endless.
Astonishing totality
To conclude, awakening brings an ever deepening clarity of your true nature, without an intermediary of thought, in the midst of all experience. Furthermore, liberation is a deep fundamental release, a root letting go … the end of the ‘I Am experience’ and everything that it comes with. This can happen suddenly, or gradually.
Awakening may initially feel somehow interior and private, even though what awakens has this impersonal, transcendental quality to it. When awakening deepens interiority becomes exterior, which is now strangely interior. There is no more privacy. Inner and outer collapse. Absolute and relative collapse. Personal and impersonal collapse. As the identity structure itself collapses, the most wondrous untruth vanishes without a trace.
The realization blazes like ten million suns, but the you that started the journey will not get to experience it. The you that you think you are dies in the astonishing totality of what is. This freedom is profoundly paradoxical … beyond all opposites, beyond all extremes … and always closer than close.
To realize the Infinite is to lose your inner world.
To lose your inner world is eternal silence.
It is to become the shining.
– Adyashanti
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