Awake in This Life

At some point on the Path, we find that we are in an unsettling place where our minds begin to realize that they don’t have the capacity to take us any further. It’s as if the small self has been busy extending a board over the side of the ship of consciousness, but at some critical point the small self suddenly recognizes that it is the one who must walk this plank. This realization is devastating to the small self, and yet the reality of deep spiritual work is that Awakening to what is forever beyond the small self can’t be understood by the small self. Stillness helps us have the experience that points us directly toward this Knowing. This Knowing is an infinite opening of wisdom rather than a contracted compartmentalization of intellect. It’s not a conceptual understanding, but instead a readiness for the spiritual bloom that comes from a radically different relationship to our conventional circumstances. Unfortunately for many of us who are deeply interested in the intellectual aspects of spiritual work, Knowing this flowering blossom has nothing to do with an intellectual or mental connection to anything. Rather, this precious bloom has to do with letting go of everything even remotely related to the mind.

The Witness arises at the point where the Awareness meets our surrender to whatever is going on this very moment. Our letting go into and from this witnessing perspective allows for enlightened presence to flow spontaneously from all aspects of us. We then become, as some have said, a presence that offers an appropriate response to all circumstance. Maintaining this presence means that we simply commit to an intimacy with our lives. Each time we notice ourselves caught in thought, which is merely the ego reading a script from the Stage of Mind, we can simply witness that activity without judgment. This is the Path.

On the other hand, if there is judgment mixed into any of our experience, we are veering off the Path. Judgment creeps into our experience when the ego starts to act as the unattached Knowing of the Witness. Our clue that this is happening is the recognition of resistance in our bodies. Resistance, or negativity, is the sign that the effortless grace and defenselessness of the Witness has given way to the ego. The ego can never be an impartial, disinterested observer since its reason for being is to protect and preserve its own sense of command and control of everything that goes on in our lives and in the lives of others.

How plugged in we are to this unattached state of Knowing depends almost entirely on the depth of our practice of stillness and how this stillness informs each moment. As we’ve discussed, tremendous support can come from teachers with integrity as well as a community of spiritual friends. Ultimately, however, Awakening totally depends on our commitment to becoming fully aware of all that moves in our conscious awareness. This practice never ends, because as long as we are participants in the life and death experience, there will always be more to which we can open ourselves, as well as more we can release.

With this point in mind, I should point out that as I’ve traveled, I’ve met some amazing spiritual masters but I haven’t met any people that were fully “cooked.” The most profound people that I’ve met were always living the recognition of the deepest aspects of Spirit intentionally as they existed in the world of form. In other words, while they all exhibit signs of deep peace, they are always on the lookout for their own clinging. This is why we call the journey along this Path “practice.”

Our Path to Enlightenment in this very life is repeatedly offering to support us. We only have to be willing to let go of our attachments, especially the ego’s attachment to itself. Awakening is never relative to what and how much our egos can manage, understand or know about the practice. In fact, it is better to put the emphasis on “not knowing.” An Awakening depends on the small self’s ability to let go of what it thinks it knows. It’s not about collecting anything or getting anywhere, but rather about dropping everything and being still. Awakening is only relative to our ability to neither grab nor avoid anything that arises in each moment. Because of this, getting to the Summit has precisely nothing to do with the ego’s role as the “attached knower,” and precisely everything to do with relaxing as the empty, unattached Knower, the Eighth Sense, or Witness. Form evolves, Emptiness doesn’t. Enlightenment consciously opens our experience of form’s constant evolution to the still Knowing of Emptiness in each moment. Living from this place changes lives, including our own. On the other hand, if there is an allowance for ego to determine what is and what isn’t Enlightenment, then there is no Awakening, but only more delusion disguising itself as Truth.