The Path of Awareness; or, The Awareness Game
The decision to go through Ascension publicly flows from association with the growth movement, consciousness raising, the awareness game, etc.
I was an unemployed workshop junkie and I needed a job so I created one. I’ll go through Ascension publicly, Lord, if you take care of the rest.
If I’m maintaining awareness of myself as my bottom-line commitment, I don’t want to be living in fear every day. I need you to take care of the details, Lord, and I’ll take care of the transformational transparency.
Self-Awareness Isn’t Narcissism
So what am I doing of a day? Honestly? Consistently maintaining unbroken awareness of myself, as much as humanly possible. That’s the bare truth, garnered from watching myself over many years.
Doing so isn’t a frivolous exercise. It isn’t narcissism. In the past century, critics called us the “Me Generation” and the path of self-awareness, a path of self-absorption, selfishness, navel-gazing, etc. It was no such thing.
Maintaining unbroken self-awareness doesn’t preclude being aware of others. The situation isn’t either/or. It gives rise to compassion by expanding our horizons, showing us our strengths and weaknesses, and opening our hearts. It leads to selflessness and selfless service.
Beyond all our temporary bodies, who we really are is this awareness. Awareness is the Self. Awareness is God. And the purpose of life is to become fully aware of our essential identity as God – or Godsparks if you like, firebrands plucked from the burning.
Remaining aware of ourselves is perhaps the most valuable thing one can do, short of removing the obstacles to awareness (core issues and false grids). However we find that bestowing our awareness on these issues and grids turns out to be the very way to eliminate them.
Self-Awareness is a Path to Enlightenment
Self-awareness gives rise to bliss. After all, the closer we get to Self, the closer we get to God. Similarly, I’m told, the more aware we are, the closer we get to God.
However to say “I am awareness” is for me only intellectual knowledge. For it to be actualized, it has to be up to realized knowledge. Intellectual knowledge is like eating cardboard and expecting to be nourished. Cardboard is, after all, made from plant matter.
Unbroken self-awareness is a path to enlightenment. I hear the sages saying:
Al-Ghazzali: “Knowledge of self is the key to knowledge of God, according to the saying: ‘He who knows himself knows God.'” (1)
Ibn Arabi: “To know God is not an easy matter, until one becomes a knower of one’s self.” (2)
Change Raises Things to Awareness
Self-awareness leads to one dscovery after another. One thing I discovered recently is almost too unbearably embarrassing to share. But the secrets we’d die hiding? In the awareness game, sharing these “withholds” produces the greatest benefit. Our personal power is tied up maintaining our deepest, darkest secrets.
What we find, when we share them, is that the bands of tension supporting our emotional holding patterns loosen and our awareness and personal power are freed up again.
My discovery was that, until now, I’ve thought of myself as a person who likes peace and doesn’t want a lot of change. Please keep it stable around me. I need to know where my toothbrush is.
And now I see that that’s an inaccurate appraisal of me. The truth is I love change.
Look at it: A relationship ends, all my core issues are raised, a heart opening occurs, a boulder of an aspect arrives on my doorstep wanting in – and these are just the major events.
Toss in financial uncertainty, medical matters, running a blog, designing a global gender-equality project and creating a foundation to endow it – all that must be enough to put a man six feet under from stress. (And it’s only going to get busier, the Boss says.)
But, even though that’s so, the times at which I’m really at loose ends are the times when nothing is happening.
That is telling.
Change provides a backdrop against which the ways of the self become visible and can be known. It’s when they get disturbed that we can see them backlit, as it were, and watch ourselves respond to them or use them over and over again.
Out of the hubbub of adapting to change, we come to see what was impeding our awareness and our love. Once we see them, once we raise them to awareness, the solvent that awareness is begins to loosen and eliminate them.
Introvert
Unbroken awareness of the self is in and of itself a meditation – an active or dynamic meditation.
It’s the favored practice of introverts like me. What I regard as events are internal. I’m not very much interested in interacting with large numbers of people in the external world. I don’t want to attend parties or hang out in a bar or watch the game together.
Archangel Michael has assured me that I don’t have to address large crowds, offer workshops, or administer projects. He assures me that I can remain a writer, which is where my joy lies.
Stephen Bassett offered an excellent example of an admirable extrovert in action, at Disclosure Vancouver, but that’s not a path I’d choose. I want the focus to stay on the self.
I predict I’ll design and start a lot of things but I won’t end up running them. Administration is an extrovert’s art. After an hour or two of meetings, I feel insane if I don’t have a period of quiet reflection.
I Have a Ringside Seat at My Ascension; You, at Yours
Ascension is happening in here and I have a ringside seat – and the only seat, well, save for my guides, the Boss and the Mother. And the General and seven other robust gents. It’s actually quite crowded in here, come to think of it. At least, they’re silent partners … so far.
I love the bliss that results from maintaining awareness of the self. Everything else I’d throw overboard, but not awareness of the self. In fact it’s the one thing that I can’t throw overboard. It’s always with me, even in death.
It’s the one friend who never leaves. After all the guests have departed, there’s my self-awareness waiting at the door, ready to welcome the next thing together.
Let’s see. Bliss attaching to an awareness that never leaves. Bliss-Awareness-Being Absolute. Sat-Chit-Ananda. Is that not a characterization of God?
I leave off typing, put my head back and fall into unbroken stillness. I love this path.
Footnotes
(1) Al-Ghazzali, The Alchemy of Happiness. trans. Claud Field. Lahore: ASHRAF, 1971; c1964, 19.
(2) Muhyideen Ibn Arabi, Kernel of the Kernel. trans. Ismail Hakki Bursevi. Sherborne: Beshara, n.d. , 3.
“To attain enlightenment without seeing your nature is impossible.” (Bodhidharma in Red Pine, trans., The Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma. Port Townsend, WA, Empty Bowl, 1987, 9.)
“My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself.” (St Catherine of Genoa in Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy. New York, etc.: Harper and Row, 1970; c1944, 11.)
“Without first knowing yourself, how can you know that which is true? Illusion is inevitable without self-knowledge.” (J. Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living. First Series. Bombay, etc.: B.I. Publications, 1972; c1974, 20.)