awakening from awakening...

It is very true that before we awaken, we really believe that we are exclusively and only these bodies and minds with a human personality that we experience as having our name and walking around the planet bumping into things and other people!

We then awaken and realize that we are not JUST that, but on the deepest level, we are the pure consciousness that is aware of that body/mind and all the people and things it is bumping into!

You will note the word "just" here. Even in the initial awakening to pure consciousness, we are often missing the entire truth. Many people's awakening seems to them to be an awakening to realizing that they are NOT AT ALL this body/mind and that they are exclusively the pure consciousness.

But in fact, THAT is not a balanced way of seeing reality either! Because we were completely out of balance for so many years, thinking we were nothing more than a body/mind, often, after a first awakening, we allow the pendulum to make another extreme swing from one polarity to another.

We go from..."all I am is a body/mind that goes around encountering the seen universe" to..... "I am not AT ALL this body/mind with a human personality".

Both views are only seeing one aspect of who and what we are and are ignoring the seemingly "other" aspect. We are personal and impersonal at the same time. The personal/impersonal polarities are not really polarities at all, but are more like opposite sides of the same coin.

You can't really separate them from one another. They are a perfectly seamless, non-dual whole. That's why I sometimes talk about an "awakening from awakening".

The initial awakening is an awakening to the pure, cosmic consciousness, the silent observer and watcher of all that arises and ceases. The awakening to this cosmic,pure consciousness is very necessary and important. But if we stay at this stage, we are in a very clear duality, albeit a very seemingly "spiritual" one.

This duality is on a much more subtle level than the one where we experience ourselves as simply a body mind and nothing more. We now see that we are actually pure consciousness. But we see this pure consciousness as entirely separate from all it perceives. And so, we must awaken from this awakening to pure consciousness and realize that we are not ONLY the pure consciousness, but are also all that is appearing and disappearing within it.

THIS is the real and comprehensive non-dual understanding. This is sometimes called "God realization".

Most awakenings we hear about these days are mistakenly being seen as an end of the journey, but they are actually a beginning of it. They are not an "arrival" to the destination but a "setting out" for it...

Francis Bennett