Enlightenment or Individuality

We are One Awareness.sunsettuja-camping-june-30-2016-sm-9713

The One reading these words is the One who has written them.

This is the simple answer to question, “Who am I”?

Enlightenment is the recognition of who and what we are. It can be experienced anytime and anywhere. There is no special place that we need to go to experience Enlightenment.

The one absolute requirement though is that we must be willing to give up the illusion of individuality. We experience human life through the senses of a human being. But that does not mean that we are that human being. We are also not an individual soul. That also is a misidentification.

You are not an individual.

Every struggle ever seen in history can be traced to the misidentification of a being thinking that it is an individual human. Every struggle in a human life can be traced to that same misidentification.

As we peel away the layers of individuality like those of an onion, we experience more peace and bliss. The more we peel away, the more intense these experiences become for the personality. We can be distracted by these extremely pleasant experiences and get stuck there or we can continue to peel away the layers until there is nothing left.

For the individual personality, ego, there is nothing more terrifying than death into nothingness. No time, no space, no emotion, no thoughts, no individuality.

The Buddhist Heart Sutra puts it extremely well;

The body is exactly empty,
and emptiness is exactly body.
The other four aspects of human existence
feeling, thought, will, and consciousness
are likewise nothing more than emptiness,
and emptiness nothing more than they.

All things are empty:
Nothing is born, nothing dies,
nothing is pure, nothing is stained,
nothing increases and nothing decreases.

So, in emptiness, there is no body,
no feeling, no thought,
no will, no consciousness.
There are no eyes, no ears,
no nose, no tongue,
no body, no mind.
There is no seeing, no hearing,
no smelling, no tasting,
no touching, no imagining.
There is nothing seen, nor heard,
nor smelled, nor tasted,
nor touched, nor imagined.

There is no ignorance,
and no end to ignorance.
There is no old age and death,
and no end to old age and death.
There is no suffering, no cause of suffering,
no end to suffering, no path to follow.
There is no attainment of wisdom,
and no wisdom to attain.

 

As the individual reads these words they can be frightening. But let’s look at this from another perspective. The individual personality is like a drop of water. If the drop of water falls into the ocean it is no longer an individual drop. It is the ocean. When the ocean throws itself against a large rock it appears to split itself into tens of thousands of individual drops. The drops experience individuality for a moment and then merge back into the ocean.

The merging of the drop into the ocean is inevitable because the Ocean of Awareness is Reality and the drop is merely an illusion.

The One readingbaltic-sea-glass-tuja-camping-june-30-2016-sm-0823 these words is an Infinite Sea of Awareness, Consciousness, expressing Itself as infinite personalities in infinite forms like water drops. The Sea of Awareness has attributes that cannot really be described in language because language is finite and the Sea of Awareness is infinite. We can experience these attributes but describing them in language is next to impossible. If I were to make the feeble attempt to put words to these attributes I would have to call them Peace, Bliss, Love, Acceptance, Home, Wisdom, Intelligence, Fulfillment, Joy, etc. But these words barely come close to describing the Infinite Sea of Awareness. They actually do It a disservice because the individual then chases after these attributes. So, for instance, when the individual experiences great peace it believes that it has found what it is looking for and then makes the pronouncement that, “I have found peace, I have found enlightenment!”

It is good when someone finds peace or love or joy in their lives. But this will always dissolve and the personality is then left with the task of ‘finding’ it again and again and again in a myriad of ways. These pleasant emotions are transitory and can be just as distracting as the unpleasant emotions like pain and anger and fear. Neither swing of the emotional pendulum is permanent or real.

Only Infinite Awareness is unchanging. Only Infinite Awareness is Real. Only Infinite Awareness is Permanent.

The Infinite Ocean of Awareness is expressing Itself in an almost infinite number of forms in an almost infinite number of realities for Its own purposes. To attempt to understand these purposes is an impossible task for the individual. It can become extremely frustrating and even depressing for the personality. The drop of water cannot understand or comprehend the ocean until it merges back into the ocean.

The search for fulfillment, happiness, love, peace, etc. take a multitude of forms. Humans seem to be willing to do just about anything, pay any price, to find what they seek. It has always been this way and will always be this way. It is the nature of identifying as an individual.

What is the alternative?

Truly, when we surrender and just Be the Sea of Awareness, Being, the human personality does what it is supposed to do without stress or machinations. When we give up being an individual the individual functions perfectly. Like the autonomic systems in the body, physical reality moves forward perfectly.

There is so much more to say about all of this but it is time to try it for yourself. I hope this writing inspires questions and also inspires you to try surrendering into Awareness. Use some of my guided meditations if you like. Feel free to write to me to ask for some guidance. I have done this myself and it is Real. I would not have written all of this if I had not experienced it myself for a long period of time.

If you like try working with this guided meditation: Walking Into the Light

Remember;

The One reading these words is the same One who has written them.

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© 2016 Jon Shore

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