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Essential Point:
You are the looker, not what’s being looked at. Yet, as the light can’t shine on itself, how do you look at the looker? This is the fundamental conundrum that has prevented billions of people all over the world from Knowing themselves. Through Transcendence of all that you are not, you Realize you are the Awareness itself, not what is being made aware of.
This is to say, you are Pure Awareness.
Overview:
When everything you think you are is stripped away, all that is left is who you really are, which is pure Awareness itself. Let’s see how through an exercise in deduction.
Imagine a scenario in which you suddenly lose everything that you Have and Do. All of a sudden, you have no job, no house, no Relationships, no money, no possessions, no titles, no responsibilities, no obligations – you go from having everything and doing everything to having nothing and doing nothing. Imagine it all goes away. Put aside the “practical” concerns of this scenario for a moment and just imagine it. When you lose these havings and doings, do you cease to Exist? Are you still Alive? Who are you now? What is still here?
Okay, let’s keep going with this.
Now, in addition to losing everything you have and do, further imagine a scenario where you have also lost all of your sense Perceptions – now you can no longer see, no longer hear, no longer touch, no longer taste, no longer smell. All senses – gone. When this happens, are you gone too? Do you cease to Exist if your senses disappear? There is “something” that you intuitively Know as “you” that is still here, is there not? You’re still “Alive” after all, aren’t you?
Let’s go deeper. Keep stripping.
Now, in addition to the total removal of your havings, doings, and senses, imagine that you have also totally and completely lost all functions of your Body so that it has no use to you. You can’t move it, use it, or do anything with it – it’s as if you have No Body, as if you were No-Body. Who are you now? What is still here? What hasn’t Changed?
Keep going…
At this point, all that you can really say that is left is your Mind – the vast indescribable vacuum of still Spaciousness in which things randomly appear and disappear. In this case, you could still say that you are your Thoughts and Feelings, to which I’d say if you think of a tree, are you now a tree? And when that Thought of a tree disappears into the nothingness from which it came, do you now cease to Exist because the tree is gone? And if you then feel angry because some one cut you off in traffic, is your Identity now “anger”? And when that anger you feel calms down and eventually disappears, have you now disappeared too? Of course not, you are neither the Thought of the tree nor the Feeling of anger, for you cannot Exist in one moment and then cease to Exist in the very next.
So you can quickly discern that you are neither any of your Thoughts nor Feelings, for they tend to leave as quickly as they come, like clouds floating by in the sky. What is most important to realize here is that the so called “Thoughts” that you are not include those Thoughts that make up your so called “Past and Future.”
The memories and anticipations that may arise are simply other types of transient Thought forms that only Exist within the confines of the Mind. These may be reoccurring or persistent Thought Forms, but they are nonetheless makings of the conditioned Mind that are ultimately subjective and impermanent – they’re still clouds. So you must also remove the mental concepts of Past and Future from the potential list of things that you could be.
So, who are you now? Now that the contents of the Mind are also removed from the list of possible identities, who are you now? Who are you when absolutely nothing is left? Awakening is the realization that this question is also the answer – nothing is all that’s left…and in your Essence, that’s precisely what you are – Nothing. You are no thing. You are not any piece of content in this World of Form but instead are the underlying formless structure through and in which all content is enabled and housed. You are the no-thing-ness out of which all things arise.
And what is nothing other than the Awareness of no-thing in Awareness, which is the Awareness of Awareness, which is Pure Awareness, and what you truly are. As deduced, the True Self was, is, and always will be pure Awareness, regardless of whatever Egoic delusions make you think otherwise. It cannot be anything else. This is the Essence of Self-Realization, in which you Transcend the illusions of self to come into Self. You transcend the world of Form to see yourself as the Formless.
This deduction process further highlights how Identity crises, tragedy, or other collapses of Form, all of which can be generalized as Suffering, ripen you for potential Spiritual Awakening. In most cases, when you’ve truly suffered enough you stop identifying with the everchanging pieces of Form that swirl on the surface of your Life situation and instead identify with the never-changing still Essence of the Pure Awareness that underlies it all.
This is what it fundamentally means to “Awaken,” and it is the next stage of Human evolution.
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