Awakening sense

innocent questions

'Who are you?' and 'who am I?' seem such innocent questions.

Innocent but lethal, as they bring out the uselessness of ego-mind's attempts to answer them.

That makes them a kind of trick question.

Even more than that, if wholeheartedly pursued, they point to what ego-mind most dreads and seeks to avoid.

Meaning its own nothingness?

What our ego-mind most treasures and depends upon for its very lifeblood is that we continue thinking and believing that is what we are, and that this cosmic collaboration continues. Without our nurturing, it's like a deer frozen in the headlights, at a complete loss.

And that loss leads to what?

Possibly to our complete gain.

boiling it down

Doesn't spirituality boil down to the question 'who am I?'

It's the perennial and constant question always asking itself.

So it's primarily a mental process...

A total process that's far from abstract...a process that's the basis of everything we experience.

You mean it's what creates our experience?

It's what creates creation and what realizes it as well.

If the question is 'who am I,' why do you often repeat that we're not who we think we are?

Because we think we're many different and separate beings. It reinforces the story that keeps the dream of separateness alive and well unless one's tipping point is reached. Perhaps the world as each one knows it finally gets top-heavy and collapses under its own weight.

Maybe we're closer to the cliff's edge than we think.

Maybe we'll wind up stumbling over it, arriving at the Beloved's threshold and experiencing the presence of Self as more real than all of our dreams.

mental maneuvers

It seems awakening is catching on more so these days.

Where there's smoke there's fire. Even the world's crude turmoil can be a sign of awakening, or at least initial resistance to it.

But can't all this become another fad?

Awakening is no joke, nor is it arrived at through mental or psychological maneuvering.

Can't these procedures help prepare the way?

They may give a taste of freedom from the slavery of the conditioned mind. The confusion can be in how dirrerent approaches are labeled, if they become ends in themselves. What's important is making room for the overriding urge to awaken to Self that invokes a current of longing so intense that it swallows up all incoming distractions.

What about a direct route that bypasses sprititual strife and striving?

That's fine so long as ego-mind is truly short-circuited. When we get out of the way there's an entirely new impetus, a new sense of one's nothingness before the grandeur and mystery of what we truly are.

take your pick

Doesn't the idea of serving the Beloved just lock us in to duality's limitations?

Not if it inspires love's longing for union.

So this service serves a purpose...

Yes, but the motive comes from the urge to awaken that pushes us along our destiny's path. It amounts to truly knowing and feeling that our life is not our own.

Then neither is our will our own?

The more self-willed, the more delay to awaken to Self. Meaning that after a certain point the only real will is the will to awaken. The good news is that the more effaced of our self-image, the more the Beloved's presence pervades our lives.

OK, what about just focusing on Self, our state of true Awareness, or whatever one may term it?

Can't go wrong either way. Such awareness will bring ego-mind in tow, turning it around to align itself to support that state, becoming less of a barrier.

So in this context we can orient through created self to the Beloved or toward self's true identity as Self, either way.

We can, through our awakening-self, create a new center of gravity, a new state or base of operation that can look either way---throught the eyes of the servant longing for less of limited self and more of the Beloved's love, or through focus on presence of Self, however that may be arrived at.