Awakening sense

AWOL

Initially we're absent from Real Self with leave, apparently with its blessings. We busily lead our lives fully occupied with doing or avoiding our 'duty.' 

If our hectic doings absent us from waking up, no problem. There's a method to the madness (see koan 3 and 4). 

At some point awareness creeps in, often disguised as a suspicion and often dismissed: that all is not as it seems. A restlessness surfaces that something's missing. At some point it hits us that we're in a sleep state and asleep to Self.

When our sleep state starts losing its power over us, cracks appear in the cocoons of our well constructed lives. We become uncomfortable with our AWOL status, absent from Self without leave. A new inner activity calls for waking up.

A new movement begins, the movement of awakening's pull.

A longing springs up for submission to awakening's arresting force.

We start sensing our unique pathway to the threshold of inner treasure.

high octane

Different 'foods' fuel our life voyage, each more vital than the next. Ideally all work together helping us unravel the story behind our life story.

First the food we eat, the 'regular' grade: keeps the basic machinery running. It fuels our activities allowing each to work out one's life script in practical ways. 

Then the 'plus' intake: electric-like current absorbed from air and nature. It operates through a refined circuitry, a kind of solid state energetics. This unlocks new layers of creativity evoking the muse's visit. As a result our life script is enlivened and more animated.

'Premium' nourishment: inner resource, solar-like radiation. We inwardly receive this unseen living light, critical to life, moment by moment.  It's rhythm like the sparkling of a running stream is awakening's dance.

It supplies the motion of love itself. It reveals the key to spiritual treasure and invites companionship of the Beloved's Oneness. How then could transformation of our life script not come about?

digital ego sway

The ego-mind, the personality, has certain digital earmarks. It's like one of countless dots on a TV screen yet part of a larger field or picture (see digital).

It can operate in a very sophisticated way, but inside is on shaky ground. Hopping from one synapse to another works well for managing information, but cuts off the root of life-energy's flow. 

We skip from one thought to another. One thought at a time, keeping and making time; no room for the timeless. Here illusion's building blocks thrive: plus and minus, zero and one.

Like alphabet blocks they spell words leaving trails of frozen meaning. Their crushed crystalline surfaces reflect mind's mirrors, our pictures of the world. Surrounded by this maze of circuitry, digital ego keeps processing away.

That's ego's way, that's ego sway.

Eventually the processing slows down and the transparent becomes apparent.

Eventually the light of awakening's glow begins to register on mind and impact on heart.

 

Self: faces/phases

Some descriptions of the terms self and Self:

• Unconscious Self....inert ground of being; bedrock of creation, basis of cosmos; inactive, unawakened; in deep sleep not dreaming, not hearing, not seeing, not knowing what's going on, yet Source of all that is (see koan 1).

• conscious self (ego-mind)...busy as a bee; acting out the dream that stems from Unconscious Self's stirring; conscious but unawakened; awake to the world but asleep to Self; very active but tiny sphere of action; starts solving problems but winds up with more; troublemaker but indispensable to growth of consciousness; role not to awaken but to step aside (see koan 2 and 3).

• transit self/transitional self....aspiring; spiritual workhorse directing efforts/preparations to awaken; gets inklings of inner garden; starts waking up to Self; starts seeing the nothingness of anything; manages interim between self and Self consciousness; feels the pull of awakening and hones skills to defuse whatever interferes with it; beginning of harmony of mind and heart (see koan 4).

• Conscious Self....shining; conscious and fully awake; regaining and reclaiming Self's glory.

However strung together these are four phases of faces of OneSelf. They're interconnected like stages of a collapsible telescope.