Only by awakening can you know the true meaning of that word.
Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you awaken you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life. Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness. Awareness is conscious connection with universal intelligence. Another word for it is Presence:consciousness without thought.
What is the relationship between awareness and thinking? Awareness is the space in which thoughts exist when that space has become conscious of itself.
Your inner purpose is to awaken. It is as simple as that. You share that purpose with every other person on the planet-because it is the purpose of humanity. Your inner purpose is an essential part of the purpose of the whole, the universe and its emerging intelligence. Your outer purpose can change over time. It varies greatly from person to person. Finding and living in alignment with the inner purpose is the inner purpose is the foundation for fulfilling your outer purpose. It is the basis for true success.
Humanity is destined to go beyond suffering, but not in the way the ego thinks. One of the ego’s many erroneous assumptions, one of its many deluded thoughts is “I should not have to suffer.” That thought itself lies at the root of suffering. Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness ( the awakening) and the burning up of the ego. The man on the cross is an archetypal image. He is every man and every woman. As long as you resist suffering, it is a slow process because the resistance creates more ego to burn up. When you accept suffering for yourself, however, there is an acceleration of that process which is brought about by the fact that you suffer consciously. You can accept suffering for yourself, or you can accept it for someone else, such as your child or parent. In the midst of conscious suffering, there is already the transmutation. The fire of suffering becomes the light of consciousness.
The ego says, “ I shouldn’t have to suffer,” and that thought makes you suffer so much more. It is a distortion of the truth, which is always paradoxical. The truth is that you need to say yes to the suffering before you can transcend it.
If the egoic earth drama has any purpose at all, it is an indirect one: It creates more and more suffering on he planet, and sufffering, although largely ego-created, is in the end also ego-destructive. It is the fire in which the ego burns itself up.
“ One day I will be free of the ego: I will awaken.” Who is talking? The ego. To become free of the ego is not really a big job but a very small one. All you need to do is be aware of your thoughts and emotions-as they happen. This is not really a “doing,” but an alert “seeing.” In that sense, it is true that there is nothing you can do to become free of the ego. When that shift happens, which is the shift from thinking to awareness, an intelligence far greater than ego’s cleverness begins to operate in your life.
You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.
In Zen they say: “ Don’t seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions.” What does that mean? Let go of identification with your mind.Who you are beyond the mind then emerges by itself.
An essential part of awakening is the recognition of the unawakened you, the ego as it thinks, speaks, and acts. When you recognize the unconscious in you, that which makes the recognition possible is the arising consciousness, is awakening. You cannot fight against ego and win, just as you cannot fight against darkness. The light of consciousness is all that is necessary. You are that light.
A large part of many people’s lives is consumed by an obsessive preoccupation with things. Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel. You can value and care for things, but whenever you get attached to them, you will know it’s the ego. And you are never really attached to a thing but to a thought that has “I,” “me,” or “mine” in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego, and who you are, the I Am which is consciousness itself, emerges.
Many people don’t realize until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are. In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless. In the last moments of their life, they then also realize that while they were looking throughout their lives for a more complete sense of self, what they were really looking for, their Being, had actually always already been there, but had been largely obscured their identification with things, which ultimately means identification with their mind.
For some, the awakening happens as they suddenly become aware of the kinds of thoughts they habituallly think, especially persistent negative thoughts that they may have been identified with all of their lives. Suddenly there is an awareness that is aware of the thought but is not part of it.
The return movement in a person’s life, the weakening or dissolution of form, whether through old age, illness, disability, loss, or some kind of personal tragedy, carries great potential for spiritual awakening-the dis-identification of consciousness from form.
On the new earth, old age will be universally recognized and highly valued as a time for the flowering of consciousness. For those who are still lost in the outer circumstances of their lives, it will be a time of a late homecoming, when they awaken to their inner purpose. For many others, it will represent an intensification and culmination of the awakening process.
However, as your awareness increases and the ego is no longer running your life, you don’t have to wait for your world to shrink or collapse through old age or personal tragedy in order for you to awaken to your inner purpose. As the new consciousness is beginning to emerge on the planet, an increasing number of people no longer need to be shaken to have an awakening. They embrace the awakening process voluntarily even while still engaged in the outward cycle of growth and expansion. When that cycle is no longer usurped by the ego, the spiritual dimension will come into this world through the outward movement-thought, speech, action, creation-as powerfully as through the return movement-stillness, Being, and the dissolution of form.
To love is to recognize yourself in another. The other’s “otherness” then stands revealed as an illusion pertaining to the purely human realm, the realm of form.
When another recognizes you, that recognition draws the dimension of Being more fully into this world through both of you. That is the love that redeems the world.