(This is Part 2 of a series. Go back to Part 1.)
The thing about awakening that's so fascinating is that it's so mundane. In a sense, it's extremely ordinary. It's just our natural state, really, before we got all identified with our opinions and beliefs and judgments and feelings. And it's not that someone who has awakened doesn't have feelings, thoughts, etc.—though it must be said that the volume is greatly reduced. But they're not identified with them, attached to them. As one master put it, we're no longer "picking them up."
Forging an identity is a natural occurence; it's something that's quite essential in one stage of things, and we all do it. It's how we learn to navigate in life. It's how we learn to socialize, how we learn to make our way, how we learn to succeed—however we define that.
The thing is, most of us spend the rest of our lives further solidifying and polishing our precious identity. By actual measurement, a huge proportion of our thoughts are about this "I." More and more accretions pile onto our identity until it becomes far more solid than an icecube. It comes to seem as natural and "truthful" to us as our breathing.
And yet it's all false. All those accretions, all that solidity, all of that polishing to become "better," more "successful," more "spiritual"—all that has nothing to do with our true nature. And deep down we're aware of it, because we sense this subtle dis-jointedness about life, even when we're very successful at it, even when we've arranged the motions of our life to be very pleasant.
So in Stage 3 of this non-journey we begin to see that further accretions to this identity, no matter how successful or gratifying or "spiritual," won't fundamentally change this disjointedness. It can't, because the deep-down disjointedness is coming from the identity itself—the very thing that we spent so much time and energy building up.
In Stage 3 we begin a deep search for the truth. Now we're no longer interested in further accretions to the identity, much less being or appearing "spiritual." We're no longer looking to be comforted by various emotional and mental consolations. Our search is no longer about feeling good or being successful, not even being successful on some spiritual plane.
Now we just want to know the truth; we want to know what reality actually is, we want to know who we really are. Not some idea about who we are, not some belief about it, but the actual reality. And we become willing to follow that search for the truth wherever it may go, wherever it may lead.
Sooner or later in this quest we discover that we're going to have to pay serious attention to the workings of our mind. We begin to glimpse that it is all the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, judgments, reactions and so on of the identity that are themselves the veil or screen hiding something else that is much deeper and more profound than any possible set of beliefs or feelings about it.
Now begins a process of observing the movements of one's mind, doing so in the same friendly but dispassionate way that we would observe a flock of birds flying across the sky. Instead of buying-in to or acting out our sacred beliefs and feelings, we begin intently noticing them instead.
And it's not that we discard our thoughts or anything like that. Imagine!—the identity is going to will to get rid of the identity! Not possible, not going to happen. Indeed, beginning to realize that the "I" is not in control and never was is part of the process.
Anyway, in that process of simply observing them, thoughts gradually begin to discard themselves. And they do so because they're receiving less and less energy—we're no longer giving energy to the productions of the mind by believing in, attaching to and identifying with them.
(This is the end of Part 2. Go to Part 3.)
—jim sloman, 11.20.06
|
