Awakening sense

falling into place

Spirituality starts making sense as two basic points sink in:

1) We're asleep.

2) We can wake up. 

Without heart/mind  as a starting point our wanderings create more sleep, more imagination. Then ego-mind even uses 'spiritual tools' to get what it thinks it wants.

Turning spirituality into an acquisition leads to bankrupt outcomes. It's parking another dream-car in the garage of ego-mind's dream-house. This increases the odds of not recognizing we're asleep at the wheel.

Seeing our sleep state is one thing, feeling it in a compelling way is another. Then a yearning  can arise: awakening's longing to awaken in and through us.

The result is a stream eroding our resistances on its way to the ocean of Self. It contains a current of intelligence awakening heart's knowing.

Sparks from this knowing ignite into flames consuming our limits and bindings. We're led along a pathway to our inner garden as naturally as the force of gravity.

                                                            

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.

koan 4 (mosquito dreams series)

 

If ego-mind doesn't awaken, what is it that begins to; what fills the job description?

• What begins waking up to the pull of awakening? What has first glimpses, whiffs, intuitions, glimmers, remembrances? What reflects, aspires to, is drawn to the Real? As we value such experiences more a shift begins, a new emergence. 

• Gradually identifying more with this part of ourselves, it becomes the new base of operation: a transitional self or 'transit self.'

• It may not be what fully awakens but it starts to awaken to awakening's true power and beauty. 

• Like a cork floating in the water, it gets pulled under by ego-self but keeps bobbing up facing the sky.     (also koan 1, 2 and 3)