The Awakening Guide: A Companion for the Inward Journey (Companions for the Inward Journey Book 2)

by Bonnie Greenwell

  The clue, of course, is consciousness, known as awareness in the human body. Awareness appears to be fused with our unique and separate set of human experiences; therefore we believe we are only that unique collection of feelings and memories and have lost the remembrance of being simply the vast and radiant awakeness that shines through us.

  The awareness that shines through you is the link to the consciousness you are.

  Awareness Has No Identity

  These are just words, and awareness cannot be contained in the world of words. It hears words, as it does all sound, notices thought and emotion, and feels all movement, taste and touch. It experiences them all without judgment, preference or demand. If awareness could be labeled with any qualities at all these would be: peace, compassion, wisdom, love, unconditional acceptance, happiness without a reason. These terms are useful only to help you notice when it is inclined to make itself felt in you, because it is much more, and much less, than any of these labels. Perhaps it is more true to say these qualities have the possibility of reverberating through a human form that realizes itself as awareness. Our body/minds can be used in those services. It happens also that these capacities come through spontaneously in unguarded moments in many lives before realization occurs, and offer some balance to all the intense mental and emotional drama that preoccupies the species.

  Consciousness experienced as awareness, and the energy flows known as the subtle body are the underlying and invisible glue that hold the body/mind in stasis so that it can live out its allotted days in a physical form. Through these channels move the senses, thoughts, intelligence, and emotions that support a feeling of separateness and location in a physical body that exists in the vastness of space and time. Because the body is time-bound the mind creates a belief in a time-line. Within this human creation what could it mean to be spiritually free?

  Perhaps it is simply to be free of the conditioned mind, the belief in separateness, and all of the psychic accumulations of the separate life acquired along the way. Energy and awareness will continue to hold us together, even as our perception of life transforms. Some have said it is also to be free of thought, and it is clear a mind awakened is quieter than it was before.

  This does not mean you become a babbling idiot unable to hold a conversation, let alone a job. On the contrary, when freed from the constriction of conditioned thinking it’s possible to receive intimations of a more encompassing wisdom, and see each situation in a fresh and creative way. Freed of the contractions of self-importance and the need to protect an identity, one can be in the moment without any requirement or expectation, and therefore see more of what is true, what is needed, and how it can be met. It becomes possible to move from love and trust without demanding a particular result. This is the embodiment of freedom.

  Until recent years when spiritual teachings have become more widely available, it has seemed that unraveling the mystery of what we are has been a deep and secret occupation only available to natural mystics. Even today the average person is rarely inclined to question the ego-structure long enough to pursue intuitive Truth, or has been taught to believe Truth is only to be found in intellectual or academic circles, and is related to proof of physicality. We are a culture addicted to the reasoning of mind, naively believing our choices are being made intelligently, even when they consistently lead to inhumane actions that cause suffering, personally and collectively. We repeat old and dysfunctional actions over and over again because we think our thoughts can be wise and right, even when full of judgments, fear and a desire for personal gain. In this process we create more and more thoughts that will cause suffering and stay in the mind-field of the collective societies long after our bodies are gone. We could call this planetary karma.

  What the Sages Say of Freedom

  The sages who have gained freedom have reported universally that we cannot think our way into it, but must turn awareness into itself, and discover our true nature.

  Let go of attachment to your self as a conditioned identity, and question who you were before this conditioning arrived. Stop questioning with intellect and give up your faith in someone else’s explanation, and instead go directly for the remembering and the experiencing of your own true nature. It has to be somewhere within you.

  It is not a great difficulty to find the Truth if you simply look in the right place, with pure longing to know. It is not difficult because it is right here and now. This awareness that underlies everything is always exactly here, now, in this present moment. It is this present moment. It is never anywhere else. That is why the only thing that truly needs to happen for awakening is absolute stillness.

  If even for a moment you let go of every thought, feeling, desire, and concept of how you think things ought to be, and you return to the open innocence and stillness you actually always have been, you may have a glimpse of what is real and eternal. Admit you do not know who you are. If you put aside all your ideas and thoughts about yourself, using no terms related to the body or the beliefs or the emotions, what do you sense you are? What do you know that no one ever taught you or caused you to experience, and you never read in a book? What is intrinsic? What is your nature? Not what does your mind think about it, but what do you know directly, right now?

  It may feel like falling, or losing your balance. It may feel like dissolution. It may feel unnerving or disorienting to the mind at first, because mind is accustomed to operating from the well-worn grooves of your conditioned experience. But this is a passage into this moment, into the fullness of what you are.

  The greatest joy to be found in human experience is this discovery of the true Self, the recognition of that which is our source, and has sustained us eternally, and is actually what we are. It is the true source of the sense “I”, before anything personal is added to it. When we slip from personal lives into impersonal source every cell in our body rejoices in the remembering. It cannot be described in language, but only known in silence.

  There are many paths that may drop us into this source, this mystery of ourselves. Some are abrupt, and we may have no idea where we are, so the opportunity of realization is lost. Some are painfully slow, and we come to believe we need many lives of preparation. But it does not take many lives to find the Truth of what is here now, although it may have taken many lives to be ready to look, many lives to tire of the training. The true value of a spiritual guide or teacher is when they point us to the Truth, and insist we find it in ourselves. The value of a spiritual practice is to make you ready to fall into the Truth when it is exposed. We become entranced by our dreams of separateness (just as we are engaged in dreams in ordinary sleep) until we step out of them and see, “Oh, I was just pretending. I was playing that game for a while.”

  Waking up does not end the mystery of life, but enhances it. Even when we know ourselves as cause and creation, how it all manifests is so far beyond the limits of our human understanding that there is a never-ending unfolding, as long as we are willing to be still. Instead of puzzling over it, we become the mystery ourselves.

  Chapter 3

  The Spaciousness of Mind

  One of very first tasks of the newborn, awaited anxiously by parents, is for the eyes to come into focus and become aware of objects. The baby enters the world, in due time looks into the mother’s eyes, follows movement about the room, notices the colorful toys above its crib, and locates itself in the place where it will receive the grounding for its human experience. The infant’s awareness is coming from spaciousness and void into an orientation with form.

  It is not long before the world is crowded with forms, along with names, functions, expectations, disappointments, desires and losses. Every child grows up and takes for granted the world of form, and the world of spaciousness is abandoned without a backward look, until he or she begins to question the nature of dying, the possibility of life without form again, especially without the form believed to be “myself”. To wake up in the spiritual sense is to reenter this spaciousness wi
th the full capacity of an adult awareness, and, as a wise old Zen patriarch said, “To know your face before you were born.”

  If you sit in stillness long enough, you will discriminate between the world of form and the ground of space. Look about the room you are at in this moment, and your eyes and thoughts are likely, by habit, to fall upon the objects there. But look again. How could they exist without the space that created the room with its field of emptiness?

  You may have noticed the beauty of this at times, such as when moving into a new home, in those moments of simply appreciating the potentiality that lies there in the empty rooms, the possibility for creating something new. For this, you need space.

  Likewise, look out the window. Which is the greater, the objects or the space? No matter the scene, however intense the noise and clutter something greater, that we label space, lies behind the appearance, the sounds, the smells and all else that is arising. Just a glance will tell you that there is no ultimate boundary out there, no distant wall in the sky that is the edge of the universe. Space continues far beyond the capacity of mind, and no one who has moved beyond the limits of the earth has yet suggested there is a boundary out beyond the stars.

  Can you even imagine an end to space?

  If the entire universe, as well as our personal world, is created in the territory of unending space, how could it be that our little private interior world is created any differently? When you sit in the silence for a long time, and turn inward to notice the interior activity of mind, emotion and sensation, you will eventually become aware of the awareness itself, the very spaciousness inside the cells, living as presence within you. All of the motions of thought and response arise from nothing, and make appearances in the same spaciousness that is the ground of the forms in your room, and the forms in the universe. How could there be more than one spaciousness? And how could the space within one person be any qualitatively different than the space in another?

  A most sacred question of inquiry is, “What is this spaciousness?” It is not a question for thought, because as soon as thought arises one is back into a form, the form created by all the life experiences woven into your personal pattern of thinking. Unlike the brain, which has the density of a relative form in the world, thought is a subtle form of vibration moving in space, and could be called a subtle object. You experience spaciousness when you release the attachment to the forms of objects, whether gross like the body or subtle like thought, physical or energetic, and simply fall into the background of formless space within your own body. You must become it in order to know it.

  Imagine yourself to be the spaciousness in the room you sit, instead of the object, your body. Then go within and be the spaciousness that sits within you, instead of the subtle objects, which are the thoughts and emotions of personal identity. Is there any difference between the two spaces other than what they hold? When you sit as this space, marinating, as it were, in its infinite beauty and potentiality, you will discover how love, wisdom and life itself arises out of nothing. This is awakening.

  What About the Mind? Will it be Lost?

  If you are attached to your thoughts as the arbitrators of your life you probably should not be reading this book. To know your true nature is to see through the limitations of the personal collection of knowledge you have thus acquired. Of course, your knowledge is useful for many things, but these are the relative skills you have learned. Thoughts are woven into a particular paradigm or way of holding information that is limited by your personal history. Since 8 billion people on the planet have uniquely varied experiences, and discriminate differently about what is important, there is much conflict in human dealings, and humans are capable of destroying their world, even ignoring their own basic physical needs for health and a safe environment for their children, in order to have domination over how others think. This is the limitation, and even the insanity of mind.

  But if all we know is the conditioned mind, and it appears to be our only tool for mastery and survival, pleasure and accomplishment, we can be terrified at the potential for losing it in the service of exploring our true and open consciousness, the mind of spaciousness. It feels like death to step out of the personal version of mind, and into the impersonal wholeness of mind as space. But until we do this we are stuck living in the limitations of personal conditioning, which means we bring separation and suffering into our thoughts and into our world.

  Last night I experienced a huge storm with pounding wind howling about my home, keeping me awake. I could feel the energy of fear licking at the small mind, reminding me that a tree could blow over, or the windows be blown out of the house. Huge storms bring vulnerability. And I remembered that throughout time humans have endured storms, often hovering in basements or corners filled with fear, and that young children universally seem to become afraid when the night winds blow and howl at their doors. My human reaction was ancient and universal. I imagined Native Americans in ancient days gathering in tents to wait out the storms on this same land where I live, and early pioneers in homes much less durable than mine, building fires to keep away the freezing cold of winter. And then I knew I was not the body/mind but the spaciousness in which it lived, and I slipped into the space of the storm, as if I were the wind blowing through the world, and it was all one experience, that is, the experience of One.

  The stories of our lives are like these storms, each pounding through with its collection of drama, fear and mystery, some more dramatic than others, some causing great damage to the forms in which we live. If we want more than a taste of the spaciousness of awakeness, and are drawn to live as this vast openness it invites, we have to become one with our stories, and then let them go into the boundless space of our true nature. The story about “me” must become like a small and distant passing cloud that holds no threat and no interest for us, but is nonetheless included in the wholeness of universal experience. We then are able to accept with equanimity the vehicles we are given in which to live, including their histories, and although we cannot avoid occasional pain, we are no longer inclined to suffer over it.

  Does this mean we have lost our minds? That is only the fear of the mind. It means we live from a new reality with fewer limitations, allowing compassion and wisdom to arise from the depths. We are no longer housed in psychic boxes of personal identity. We may move and look the same, but the need to be in control or have life unfold according to our personal plan has fallen by the wayside. We are able to live in the moment, in the now, where presence always moves freely. Mind has become spacious, not actually losing anything important it needs to know, but making it accessible only when needed. It has been thoroughly cleansed, like your closet when you are moving out, and only the most current and necessary items will be carried on.

  Self-judgments, the inner critic, anxieties, insecurities, demands, wanting for things to be different – these energy patterns no longer hold themselves as thought forms in the spacious mind. That is what makes one free. When you experience it momentarily you know immediately what it is like to live free of yourself, and still live. It is glorious when you are open to it, and can be disorienting when you are caught by surprise and unprepared to be there.

  Once tasted, this spaciousness is like a magnet drawing you back, but over time much of the old conditioning that created you as a separate identity will resurface, to be seen and included in the whole. Most people who have awakened and felt unlimited for a brief time will experience the return of a limited mind, and can spend months or years facing these limitations before stabilizing in an awakened consciousness.

  The Open Mind

  The spacious mind can only be open and receptive, and has no tendency to shut itself from experience. This spaciousness is always present within you, allowing you to learn and explore the experience of human life. It is the spaciousness that is living your life, through the uniqueness of being located in a particular place and time in your body. It is the personal conditioning that has closed it off, blocking its rece
ptivity and capacity to appreciate all that arises in its presence.

  The human vehicle has obvious limitations, and as we grow up we learn to apply this understanding and become a particular person with specific problems, opinions, concepts, nationality, race, economic needs, emotional needs, and compulsions. The separate mind divides things into “mine” and “others”, right and wrong, male and female, happiness and sorrow – the list is endless, isn’t it? It is impossible to think a thought that does not have an opposite thought. Yes and no are intimately connected, like two sides of a coin.

  The open or spacious mind comes before this human pattern of thinking, and so it has no tendency to divide and separate. This openness rests evenly on all things, and sees beyond their appearance and into their natural state, which is the same spacious openness. One who is awake can see that only awakeness exists, but it has been clouded by misconceptions and mental activity so that it can enjoy the great diversity of experience, forgetting its true nature. This is the reason that ancient Indian scriptures call the world an illusion. The relative world is created by our thoughts about it, which are only the energies of sparking synapses arising from stored impressions acquired from our personal and cultural experiences. It is this dependency on the past that makes moving forward so slow, for we carry not only our personal story but the past of our culture and civilization in our patterns of thought, until we awaken out of them.