(This is Part 6 of a series. Go back to Part 5.)
We want to know the truth now in a way that goes way beyond phrases or feelings or success. Not only that, but we realise that even the greatest of experiences won't provide the answer, because even the greatest of them fades, sooner or later. Nothing at all can be held onto.
And if that's true, what am I? Just a meaningless blob on a meaningless rock circling a meaningless star? Just another ant crawling along the shore of life, making its way? What am I?
As said, we really want to know now, in a way that goes beyond answers or experiences or states of mind. All of that is wonderful, but it won't do any longer. We must know the real truth now: Who or what am I?
This is when we begin to observe, just observe, as discussed in Part 3 of this series. We sit down and we become a witness to everything that's going on. We become a deep listener.
A listener to what? A listener to our thoughts and feelings and desires. A listener to sensations in our body. A listener to sounds in the world. A listener, in short, to everything.
This process has been described at a number of places on this website, and it leads to a greater "stage" of happiness, a stage where we're surrendering more and more, where we're letting go of control more and more, where we're becoming choiceless more and more. Does it feel really good most of the time? You bet it does. But that's no longer the point.
As we observe the mind, we notice that the whole self-concept becomes gradually more and more flimsy, and we begin to come in contact with something that was always there, the spaciousness within which all the thoughts and feelings and sensations and desires and visions are occurring.
To use a previous metaphor, it's as if we're standing by the side of the highway watching cars go by. The cars are all those thoughts, feelings, sensations and so on, all the mindstates going by, one after another.
But we can watch our mind for 30 years and never actually awaken, though our life will certainly feel better than ever. Yet liberation may not occur, precisely because "we" are still involved in pushing for something. First we were pushing for success, then for inner well-being, and now for awakening. But we're still pushing.
The separate-self wants to stay in motion because that is how it survives. It will keep us in motion chasing one thing after another: And what about this? And what about that? Like a shark that must always keep moving, the mind stays stays in motion in order to stay alive.
What better way to stay in motion than chasing a "better" life? Or best of all, seeking spiritual outcomes like heaven or peak experiences?
And the little self can use anything: It can and will even use the desire for enlightenment or God. We'll go here and there to seek it. Or we'll sit down and watch the mind so that we can awaken, but the mind can become subtly strengthened by this effort too. Still pushing.
At some point, if we're lucky, we just surrender and, as Adyashanti says, take a swan dive into the unknown. We realise that we never had any control anyway, even though it may have looked like we did.
And now, to come back to our metaphor, we pay more attention to the gaps. We're still noticing the cars passing by, but we're no longer doing so to get a result. And in that surrender we're aware more and more of the gaps between the cars, the spaces between the thoughts and feelings. We become aware of a vast emptiness.
Our awareness, in other words, begins to become aware of awareness itself. We become aware of awareness, not as an object in consciousness but as consciousness itself—or we could say, spaciousness aware of its spaciousness.
As we're "drawn in" further to this emptiness aware of itself, we notice that it becomes more and more vast, or rather, we notice that it always has been vast and now we're becoming aware of it.
There's no agenda anymore; we're nn longer doing anything to achieve some result, not even enlightenment or God. We're just slipping farther and farther into the abyss, into the nothingness that is everything.
And at some point awareness simply wakes up to itself. Consciousness wakes up to itself. The infinite void wakes up to itself. And we perceive that what we were looking for was always that which was looking.
When someone wakes up they discover awakeness peering out through everyone's eyes. Hence the Buddha's statement that when he woke up the whole world woke up. They see the awakeness everywhere. Yet they also see that, except in rare instances, the awakeness doesn't know itself yet in that form, in that person.
The awakeness is like the vast empty sky, innocent and pristine, totally unblemished by all our thoughts and desires and conditionings, completely void of boundaries, qualities or form. So it seems like nothing at all.
And we see "in our bones" that that nothingness is who we are, and that we were never born and will never die because no personal existence is there to do so. There is just the One, the Void, everything, nothing. There is just the Mystery, now perceiving Itself once more.
This awakeness has some interesting by-products, two in particular, though they're actually the same:
—A causeless happiness. A happiness now that has no cause, no end, no beginning. A happiness that is large enough to contain even pain and tears.
—A causeless love. Not for someone or something in particular (though that kind of love isn't excluded), but just love, love for all things, an overflowing of being.
This love and compassion has no distinctions. It loves even those that the little self doesn't like, it loves even those parts of ourselves that the self-concept rejects. It loves even those situations that our ego condemns as evil and ugly. it just loves, It can't help it. It's gone.
This is death, ultimate death, because the "doer" is no longer there. There's nobody left to want anything. And it's also life, ultimate life, life everlasting, life here and now, loving Itself, falling down before Itself, falling into the ocean of Itself.
Now Life does itself—which it always did anyway—in "you" and in "me" and in all things, here and now, shining forever upon Itself.
—jim sloman, 4.9.06
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