What has changed, when awakening occurs? What’s essentially different from how it was before? We’re looking at the underlying difference, rather than the changes it sets in motion, the “expressions” of awakened consciousness — the things getting most of the attention for those seeking it, like a quiet mind, equanimity, the absence of attachment, of suffering.
The deep question is this: what has occurred to enable these changes from what life has been before? It’s that the sense of what you are elementally has shifted. Whereas until now you appeared to be your story, beliefs, desires, problems, and physicality, now what feels like “you” is something entirely apart from all that. Something startlingly impersonal . . . even as it’s felt to be “inside” your body, seeming to move as you move — through space, through the day. While your story and all the rest of what you identified as your very self is now seen to have been manufactured, a compelling mind-made response to reality, now what you experience as real is awareness. The now.
If there is any “you” at all, it’s only the momentary felt sensation of awareness, which includes any engagement with the now as it’s occurring. All else is recognized as the product of the busy mind, which no longer compels, no longer seems real in the way it did before.
What’s different now is the bodied sense of what you are. This is not an intellectual knowing (which may well have been there for years prior, demonstrating the gulf between mental “knowing” and embodied knowing). You now literally do not identify as you all that previously defined you.
You realize a more true “you” already was there. And now it senses itself. It feels so substantial you can’t any longer believe in that old self that tried so hard to wake up.
No wonder it’s so restful. A vast burden has been set down.
Yet (here is the miracle) somebody is still here! Who or what is it that feels the radical relief? That can recognize (and appreciate) the difference between before and after? That travels so lightly now, savoring each moment, as if life had only just now begun?
It’s the something in you — consciousness itself — that always has been alive in you, whether or not you noticed it before. The embodied expression of consciousness — a human being — is noticing and feeling the difference. Even if you did, previously, have occasional episodes of noticing, you didn’t “live there” — till now. Before now, you didn’t “identify” it as being you, your very self, for the mind-generated self kept convincing you of its reality. The mind kept you thinking its production was precious, woundable, worth taking good care of. This self imagined that when those brief moments of peaceful well-being occurred, the self was “having an experience.” (But if you had thought to notice, at such moments, you’d have realized that self wasn’t actually there right then. Consciousness was, though.)
When that useless self has turned out to be unreal — to have always been mind-invented — the deeper, truer “self” is free at last to breathe, to stretch its limbs and move, assuming its rightful aliveness, its primacy. Awareness itself turns out to be what’s real, tinglingly alive. You feel yourself to be finally really here — and the irony is that this occurs in the pronounced absence of what you once defined as “yourself.”
Only now, free of the mind’s enduring impression of a self, has it become possible to experience unconditional love, in the absence of fear and attachment. Because the primary mission is no longer healing or getting-what-you-want or pleasing others (or yourself), nothing is at risk. You’re free to love no-holds-barred, because loving is no longer about “you.” You move with a background, ongoing recognition of uncertainty, the brevity of all things, but because it’s awareness itself doing the moving (not a precious self having density and all kinds of investment), there’s no somebody there to be woundable, needing to be adored or understood, no somebody that can be thrown off-balance or disappointed. There is only this lived, deeply felt moment, this morsel of life, and the consciousness engaging or observing it. That is all that’s experienced as real. Life is being lived . . . but there’s nobody there living it, at least not in the previous sense of a somebody.
* * * * *
Go back to before, when there did seem to be an objectively real somebody. Back to when the inner life of that person (thoughts, uproars, dreams, fears, memories, beliefs) felt substantial and important. That person suffered and wanted to stop suffering, or at least to minimize it. That person ached to have a quiet mind.
Perhaps that person you thought you were also hoped someday to become free of the whole mess — to awaken, spiritually speaking.
Maybe you’re there right about now.
* * * * *
It appears that an earnest seeker can, with sufficient devotion, become free of the familiar self-identification, the constraints of the mind. That through discipline, intention, practice, and inquiry, a seeker can move beyond the limited sense of self, to discover the spaciousness beyond it that is the deep truth of existence.
But these assumptions are failing to look at the primary illusion they’re all based upon, which is the belief that you are the self that longs, that works on itself, that strives to achieve better discipline, to have better meditations, fewer attachments, the self that makes progress or slides backwards.
What typically happens is that seekers use their narrow, mind-made selves to try to change those very selves — to become somehow free of them. As if such a thing were possible!
But this isn’t how it works. The mind-bound self does not become free. It does not find its way to enlightenment. What happens, at awakening, is that you realize there’s something else alive in you, something existing in parallel with the self, something that’s always been here. That something — consciousness itself — is the only substantial reality within. You realize the self you’d earnestly been trying to fix, to discipline or set free — the very self you’d been using to “get there” — never was real. Never could have gotten to the longed-for condition.
You realize a more true “you” already was there. And now it senses itself. It feels so substantial you can’t any longer believe in that old self that tried so hard to wake up.
* * * * *
So here, now, from where you are . . . If you can see this is what you’ve been doing (for decades, maybe), gently recognize the vast effort for what it is. See how it hasn’t gotten you very far.
Redirect your attention to noticing yourself doing this, next time it occurs (and all the times to come, for you can count on it, from long habit, to want to persist). Move your attention from self-judgment and the habitual effort to change (with its assumption that this self is real) to noticing how real that imperfect self appears to be.
Pay attention to what awareness itself feels like, in the body. (It’s awareness that’s become alert to the seeking-and-trying-and-judging energy.)
Notice what awareness feels like, in a moment when all attention is on something (anything at all, even something quite ordinary, like pulling on your shoe). See how conspicuously alive attention feels. Notice where “you” seem to be, at such a moment. (Are you there at all? After all, it isn’t necessary to remember who you are to put on a shoe.)
Pay attention, as you continue to live, to the difference between attending and thinking — between the present-moment engagement of the senses (the body in motion, attuned to the immediate scene) and whatever happens once the mind takes hold of it and makes something of it.
Here’s the rub. The ongoing assumption that “you” are real is not likely to be recognized as (merely) an assumption, both because the self does feel so real and — this is the kicker — because to question its reality is to tiptoe up to a kind of death. The self does not, above everything else, want to discover it isn’t substantial. It doesn’t want to see that it’s not so precious after all, that all the suffering has been based on an illusion. Don’t expect it to be a welcome desolation.
How willing are you to allow that to be?
But it’s useful to watch all this happening. What could be a more vivid indicator of the apparent reality of a “you” — more compelling than its terror of obliteration, the radical reluctance to cease to be?
Don’t bother trying to talk yourself into allowing death to happen. You can’t do it (you’d only be fooling yourself), nor do you need to. What never really lived doesn’t have to die. Rather than “dying,” it simply stops feeling real. That’s the discovery: the thing was only ever in the head.