You may be thinking about who to call, what to buy, when to get something done, where you want to go on a trip, and how you will pay your bills. You may be fantasizing about sex or love, or some experience you had or you want to have. Or you could be tortured with more abstract thoughts related to self-doubt, past failures, or how no one cares about you, etc. Thoughts, and the emotions they bring up, can galvanize us into compulsive actions, or weigh us down so that we feel frozen in time and space. They are the psychic fuel that runs the life of our personality. They influence our perceptions, and create our reality. They form the shape and image of who we think we are.
When you have had an awakening to your true nature, even for a few moments, you have slipped out of self-referencing long enough to know you are not your body and you are not your thoughts and emotions. There is something else behind the façade. This something cannot adequately be expressed in words and can’t be thought about the way we think about other experiences in life. It is prior to thought. It can only be known in stillness. It can move in the world but it moves like the breeze through the trees on a windy day, without concern, but simply for the joy of movement. We can be this but we cannot grasp it, measure it, increase it or subtract from it. We cannot think our way into it. It is simply present, and we either notice it, or we don’t.
A Basic Misunderstanding
There is a common misunderstanding that spiritual realization will fix your life, or that it will transform you into a better person, certainly one with no more problems. So there is great disappointment in many spiritual seekers, even a feeling of failure when they find themselves returning to old negative thoughts, anxieties about the future, anger with their partners, unhappiness with their work, or painful memories of traumatic events.
The old thoughts and emotions come back in, and when you get caught in them you feel much worse than you did before, because you know they are not real and you know how it feels to be free of them. It feels you have lost something critical, and you re-identify with the spiritual seeker in yourself, working even harder to have a bigger spiritual experience, one that will be permanent. With this you become entangled again in the personal sense of self, and drift further and further back into the sea of conditioning.
But the conditioned separate person you are returning to is not the same as the one you left behind. It now has insight, and a taste of freedom. You are now entering the deconstruction zone. It’s like having seen a model of a perfect house, and then you return home to yours and decide to remodel. Every thought arises like a thousand old relics that must be taken out of storage and moved aside, and you see everything with a new eye. You may get sentimental for a while, hoping to hang on to something, but you see through the power of attachment, the folly of holding on, and its irrelevance to that which you really are.
This deconstruction can become a very painful process, especially when the mind throws in objections and doubts about what you are doing here. Many people do not complete the project, because they find themselves clinging to something -- an idea about themselves, a need to fit into mainstream society, a relationship that is important to them, a belief about God, a history of being victimized, a history of being powerful and influential, an intellectual pursuit, an athletic goal – and their attachment to this prevents them from living fully their realization, from letting it take over their life. They make adaptations, and they hold the spiritual realization as a joyful memory, knowing it has changed how they look at things and enriched their life, but suffering because of the split between living the old life and surrendering to the new. An argument arises between the Self and the self.
The Self, this pure awakeness you are, does not interfere with nor object to how you live; it tends to move wherever your conditioned thoughts take you. But when it has become conscious of its presence in a human body (awakened), it spontaneously initiates a clearing process, so it can move more fully into living. When you check in with your inner world, sitting in silence, letting thoughts drift into the background, you will discover it is always there, waiting patiently and lovingly to be aligned with your life expression. It may do this clearing by activating kundalini energy, a process fully described in my book, “The Kundalini Guide”, or by bringing up all the 1001 things you need to see through as illusion before you will live as freedom.
So all your old patterns may come up to be met, along with random self-destructive thoughts, and even material that seems to be arising from another life. You may find if you try to pick up an old habit or passion you become ill. Adyashanti was a competitive bicycle racer before his awakening, and twice became physically incapacitated for many months, following attempts to return to this old passion, until he accepted he could never do competitive racing again. It wasn’t meant to be his path in life any longer.
You may find yourself very sensitive to negative energy in others, and you know you must end toxic relationships, and even stay away from television and world news for some period of time. If you are using mind-altering substances you may have wildly distorted experiences and physical pains, as if toxins have been released in your body. If you push your mind to study exceedingly you may find it blanking out in rebellion. If you tell a lie you feel clogged up like a dirty sink. Your old way of being is getting deconstructed, and the natural tendency is to cling to what you can, try to take as much as possible with you, and feel insecure about your future. To the extent you hang on you feel worse.
There can be terrifying moments when you feel your mind losing its grasp, your interests fading, and your body doing odd and sometimes very uncomfortable things without your permission. Most people say at some point, “I didn’t ask for this!” and some may even feel betrayed or abandoned by God. The energy that comes up and the emotional reactions to it can have a severe impact on relationships and work and in some cases these personal anchors in the world fall away. Sometimes people in spiritual communities feel a need to leave them, because they no longer hold the conceptual frameworks that are taught. People in lifestyles adopted to please others feel a need to abandon them and try more authentic lives. One woman of 40 describes this stage well.
After my father died I had a crisis of faith, but I pushed it aside and went off to graduate school, planning to become a CPA like my dad. But inside I felt I had lost a relationship with God, and I still had a deep longing for Truth so I began reading spiritual books and meeting different teachers. Soon I became involved in an ashram, and started chanting several hours a day. My energy changed and I felt completely absorbed in meditation and lost all interest in school. My husband had difficulties with this and left me, and this cut me off financially and socially from the life I had known. I felt I had no ground and although I stayed on the path it began to feel like my life was collapsing around me. I had blissful experiences one moment and terrible grieving the next. Then my teacher was exposed for sexual relationships with students and I was devastated, feeling there was no one to trust. I felt utterly alone when I left the community and yet my inner pull deepened and I continued to sit in meditation several hours a day. About a year later I found a Tibetan Buddhist community and there I learned to practice compassion, and completely surrender and trust my deepest Self. One day I realized great openness and peace had entered my life, something not related to what was happening externally. I would sometimes feel flooded with love. It seemed I had lost my life, but I had found it. Eventually I returned to school to study psychology.
This process can be very severe at times, but this is not inevitably so. Many people navigate this transformation with relative ease. The variations can be due to many factors including how grounded, healthy and authentic the personality and lifestyle were before awakening, psychological openness and flexibility, the level of understanding about the process, the support system, the rigidity of a belief system, the reactions of people in the family system, whether old traumas have been dealt with in therapy, and possibly karma brought in from previous lives.
The H
ell Realms
I once was in a ten-day silent retreat, held in a beautiful Tibetan Buddhist temple in the Santa Cruz mountains. But almost everyone sitting in this deep and nurturing environment felt as if they were on fire. They would report sitting through meditations with painful thoughts, old traumatic stories and shameful memories coming up over and over again, and described themselves as burning inside. They called it being in “the Hell realms.” When awakeness and love stay present in the face of an arising painful story this is exactly how it feels, as if you are standing in fire, waiting for the energy to pass through, which it will if you are willing to fully meet it. You cannot turn away. We can’t spiritually bypass our history by escaping to some ethereal blissful place whenever it comes up. We have to meet it with full presence until it is transmuted. Then it loses its power to impact us.
When awareness is no longer entangled in personal identifications our energy and thoughts become more immediate, related to what is here and now. A thought that once seemed important to “me” becomes irrelevant, seen only as an activity that drifts by, but does not have to be followed. There is no concern about keeping an “I” in place, protecting an image, or having an opinion in every situation. The mind becomes quiet, and the body relaxes as internal division falls away.
This experience of clearing is not psychotherapy. It does not mean you have to dredge up every old past indiscretion or piece of suffering and remove it from your system, or reframe it, or emotionally work it through. If you do this, you are only strengthening the ego that wants to fix you or make you better, and the position of the true nature is that there is nothing wrong, nothing to fix and no experiences that were ever real.
Spiritual clearing happens spontaneously, with issues coming up that reflect places the psyche is still held in identity, so that they can be swept out. The deep Self knows what to bring up and when, and doesn’t need you to decide for it. When a problem arises, you notice it, and that is the time to address it, if you are seeking freedom. If it is old and sticky issue that does not fade away when fully faced, such as memories of child abuse, or grief you cannot get through, or a stuck place in your marriage, then you may choose to do therapy around it. The human part of you may need an empathetic and healing ear, or some releasing, before you can relax into stillness, and live at peace. You may also need to resolve certain life issues, such as work or relationship, or underlying conditions of anxiety or depression. Waking up may change your perception of a problem but it doesn’t automatically solve dilemmas in these areas.
Learn to listen deeply to your inner promptings, and lean in the direction they suggest, whether it be to try something and see how it works, get guidance from someone else, or simply follow your heart’s desires. This will provide a new way of working and living that is focused on the now, and help you to be alive fully with what is actually happening, and this is awakeness or spirit living itself through you.
The function of deconstruction is to bring the freedom you touched during your awakening into your body, and to allow it to pervade your ordinary life. It is not about bringing you to some rare and untouchable place, devoid of human feeling and contact. It is about living your humanness and your awakened spirit comfortably in each moment, without the overlay of conditioning and contraction that colored your perceptions and limited your movements. Freed of these limitations you see the flow of life in a new way, recognize your relationship to the whole of it, and have access to wisdom that is not contorted by any personal agenda. There will come a time when only the footprint of the house of “me” is there, and something new can inhabit the space.
Misguided Letting Go
Many of the teachings about aestheticism and detachment in traditional religions suggest that only sacrifice and saintliness lead to realization. This interpretation is a distortion of the true essence of the experience. Just as a literal fundamentalism can distort the deeper meanings in scripture, these misinterpretations apply the material world model to an interior world. You can be sure that whenever pain and suffering are preached as a method to wholeness, it is the mind, and not the Truth, that is writing the text. Even the Buddha, who practiced aestheticism for six years, threw away this perspective and returned to a middle path before his awakening.
It is not helpful to force yourself to reject anything. A forced celibacy is a miserable state, where sexual activity is repressed but sexual thoughts cannot be. A forced poverty based on a belief system that is righteous, is just as much an attachment as wealth. I once heard a young woman ask a yogi who never spoke aloud, if she should keep silence also, even though she had a two-year old child in the home who wanted to talk to her. Her child needed her language and her relatedness to grow communication skills and security. It is a false perception and confused spirituality that would choose to ignore the obvious needs of the moment like this, yet many spiritual seekers do ignore rational observations, give up things they are poorly prepared to release, or take on tasks that are a high risk to their health and emotional well-being. They may feel guilty when they cannot meet these super-spiritual-ego demands.
Your true nature accepts things as they are. There is no need to tear up your life unless it is not working. Instead, learn to let go of attachments to your thoughts and concepts and old habits. That is the direction in which peace lies. When you learn to live from this place, what needs to fall away will do so naturally, and you won’t care. What is deconstructed in the spiritual process is the interior world: the belief systems, conditioned responses, emotional baggage, lifestyle addictions and self-concept. Sometimes relationships and lifestyles change dramatically; sometimes they do not. What is given up is the illusion of being in charge, and you learn to see what arises and what falls with equanimity. That which is not in line with Truth will fall away.
Chapter 7
Burning off the Dregs
Perhaps the greatest disappointment following a deep spiritual awakening is the discovery of the persistence of mental activity that has the power to tease you back into old and painful identifications.
Just when you begin to feel free of yourself, finding some peace and contentment even in the midst of stress and life challenges, and it becomes clear that your personal sense of separation is simply an illusion, the mind begins to create more subtle traps. You may know your consciousness to be as vast as the sky, and the problems as small and temporary as a passing cloud in the distance, and yet you dive right into that cloud, and become lost in the fog. A single thought held on to has the power to plunge you into cloudiness.
Although many attachments fall away after a spiritual awakening, generally there are a few that persist, and most people are caught by surprise when they find themselves attached to a problem, wounded by a chance remark, or entangled in a new desire that isn’t working out so well. Our minds have so habitually controlled the direction of our lives, our thoughts feel so personally ours no matter what has generated them, that the possibility of stepping free of them is very remote. This is one reason why some spiritual traditions stress letting go of thought, and some have developed elaborate techniques for seeing through thoughts to make them irrelevant, or attempt to stop the production of thought altogether.
The Seduction of Thought
Those who do not understand the seduction of thought frequently get caught in a new spiritual identity after awakening, and are vulnerable to becoming half-baked spiritual teachers, pushing their insights onto others while playing out their own desires for power, control and exploitation. The awakening vision they experienced may have been real, but they are unable to live from the clarity and compassion that true freedom from the personal self generates.
Thoughts are simply energy sparking in the brain. We are energy bundles held together by consciousness, and we believe that our thoughts are the best representation of who we are. This makes it frightening when dark or negative thoughts come in – we think we are crazy or bad to have such thoughts. Spiritual people may have grandiose thoughts of sta
rting great movements to change the world, or being worshiped by others. During an experience of realization it becomes very clear we are not our thoughts. We stand free for a moment, simply presence, noticing all these forms of energy that are suddenly nothing substantial, or even noticing that thoughts have stopped, and we feel the freedom of being detached from them. We are nothing and yet we are life, and this is a breath-taking freedom.
But it won’t be long before the mind begins to sneak back in, telling us this is all great but we can’t give up our attachment to our loved ones, can we? We can’t give up working because we need the income. We can’t give up our sexuality, because it is just a normal human drive, and life would be empty without it. We can’t give up some part of our religion that we really enjoy, because it is so comforting. Soon we are back in the thick of things, along with all the conflicts, desires, sorrow, and suffering we had before, only it can feel much worse, simply because we know what it feels like not to feel any of it, and to let all the exigencies of life roll off our back. And if there have been long suppressed desires and hungers, they especially will return to haunt us, as if to say, “Are you really going to go to the end of our life without living me out? You are free now, to do anything you want.”
Persistent Identifications
The Awakening Guide: A Companion for the Inward Journey (Companions for the Inward Journey Book 2) Page 8