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Updated October 18,
2012
You suspect that there is more to this life than the status quo of mundane human habit patterning and cycling.
The process of waking up that follows is best explained as a process of disintegration followed by a process of reintegration.
This sense of separateness becomes utterly unbearable.
Going about your life in
the usual way, in attempt to fulfill the longings themed around the
common sense ambitions of status quo humanity, seems pointless. You
feel dreadfully unfulfilled as a result.
Whether inquiry is prescribed to you by a teacher or guru or whether it arises spontaneously from the depths of your dread makes no difference.
And this procedure of inquiry begins to necessarily dismantle whatever sense of security you once had in your old ways of thinking and being in the world.
You begin the process of
disintegration - the picking apart and scattering around of all you
thought you were and all you believed to be true. None of it holds
up, and you feel a mess.
But if you've reached the
point of no return, your awakening is almost guaranteed in
this lifetime (barring you don't physically die before the process
is complete).
99% of the time, people will fight tooth and nail to conjure up an old familiar sense of self. You will almost certainly to put tremendous energy in propping up the lie just to try to feel a sense of being secure or grounded,
The driving force of this
resistance is none other than fear - primal, pure and
condensed...
Contrary to what you may believe about courage, its expression is not emotionless or stone cold.
The expression of courage, in its most basic form, is surrender. But again, this surrender is probably not what comes to mind when you first think of it.
You probably see a frightened soldier hiding behind a mound of dirt, bullets whizzing by, raising and waiving a white flag. But that's not the kind of surrender that positions you for awakening.
The type of surrender that is the expression of true courage is a willingness to experience whatever comes, eyes wide open, unflinching.
When the activity of aggression as the expression of fear is finally realized to be pointless, corresponding to feelings of utter exhaustion, one may - if they are so fortunate - choose to turn and face their difficulties head-on...
This is what allows the
disintegration process to complete itself.
But in either case, you know that the necessary response is the same.
There's only one option left:
During this final stretch (although you may not even know it is the final stretch) there will be times of peril and times of peace.
Sometimes you will feel as though you can get through anything this world (i.e. your mind) throws at you, and other times you wish you never would have undertaken this path in the first place.
But you walk on. There's no going back.
The moments of peace along the way provide just enough nourishment to sustain you as you travel straight into the unknown. You can't see more than two feet in front of you at any given moment, but you are becoming acclimatized to the uncertainty.
Your tolerance for
ambiguity and mystery is steadily rising. Things are getting
better...
Neither can there be intention of non-intention, for even THAT gets in the way.
The way it happens, the experience of it, is not the same for everyone, and so there really isn't any reason for me to describe any particular experience in detail. But when it happens you will know.
What can be said about the final disintegration is that it is a dying before death. You will die that day, but you won't be dead. And having died, you will no longer fear death - at least not for your own sake.
At this point you are no
longer sleeping. The eyes of wisdom are flung wide open. You wake
up...
The finality of disintegration is not to be denied, so the newly awakened is not deluded.
And yet, there is a tendency of the newly awakened to try to take up residence in the All, to plant their feet in the Abyss, as though their personality could be an adequate expression of the ineffable Reality they realized they are.
When the sense of separateness is disintegrated and Reality is apprehended, there tends to be an ever-so-subtle contraction of the remaining tendency toward identification, which is just enough to delude the individual into thinking,
When you first awaken, this will likely occur.
It's nothing to be
ashamed of, as it is almost entirely unavoidable. Few, if any, have
traversed the path of awakening and not fallen victim to this subtle
duality that remains after the disintegration process.
But this begs the question,
You traversed the treacherous path of disintegration, whereby you faced your fears and ended the activities of aggression and replaced them with courage and surrender once and for all!... or did you?
If you know anyone who has awakened and fallen into the, "I am the All," trap (which, like I said, happens to nearly all of those who awaken), you'll pick up on some of the dismissive ways they respond to "worldly" concerns.
They may appear calm and collected most of the time, and make statements about how they just don't get why everyone is so upset about the economy, or their sick grandmother, or their tooth pain...
When you occupy this point of view, it feels like you're invincible.
The funny thing is that this position cannot be sustained forever.
Your newly inflated ego will become increasingly frustrated with others for not recognizing the Truth. You wish they would just leave you alone, or that they would just snap out of their delusion so they would stop bothering you.
And it's here that, if you're lucky, you'll notice that you are once again resisting life as it shows up for you.
You are expressing an unwillingness to experience whatever comes, which is the expression of that same cause which put you through so much misery in the first place...
You thought you had rid yourself of fear, which is what allowed you to take on this new Universal point of view as, "I am the All."
But a seed of fear
remained, and now it has grown into another obstacle that must be
dealt with in order to reach a truly complete and unshakable
awakening.
But, the path of awakening is such that it doesn't have to make sense. You must accept that the process of disintegration has truly come to an end (because it has), and that there is only one way to finish the job.
That is, embarking on
the path of reintegration...!
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, this is the most necessarily activity at this stage.
In allowing yourself to care as a human being cares, you directly face your fears pertaining to going back into a life that resembles what you thought you had escaped from.
But there is no escape.
There never was...!
You must return to your body, to your human relationships, to your job, your spouse or significant other, your kids, your neighbors, your daily chores and responsibilities, and you must do so with fully engaged presence.
It will hurt at times, and it will be pleasurable at times.
You must learn to let go into pleasure as well as pain. You must allow yourself to get attached, to have an opinion, to have wants and needs.
In doing so, you will be scared that you are simply putting on the same old chains that bound you to a life full of suffering and despair, which you set out to escape from in the first place.
But you will not know the difference between where you started and where you will find yourself again until you walk the path.
It's true that the process of reintegration following disintegration leads to the stabilization of a natural, ordinary awakened state.
But there is a danger in disclosing this information, and there's a clear reason why some traditions and teachers have elected to remain silent about it.
The reason is simple. So simple, in fact, that I might suppose that it's implied in the context without any further explanation.
It's too important to miss, however, and so there is a strong motivation to share it with anyone who may not be picking up on it, or perhaps just doesn't want to believe in the truth of it.
There's something of a
moral imperative of the awakened to shed light on the dubious errors
in judgment made both by awakened individuals of less
sophistication, skill, or care, and also of those who will have a
difficulty beginning the journey on the right foot due to the
confusion that arose due to hearing too much, too soon.
The teacher might tell you,
And that, my dear
friends, is complete and utter bullshit...!
But you can't transform by simply hearing a description of what the end result is like, anymore than you can read the menu instead of eating the meal and feel that your hunger is truly satisfied.
If you're going to wake up, and to really apprehend just what it means to be integrated, whole, and ordinary in the most profound sense,
You must die-before-death before you can be reborn for the last time.
Only then will your
human life realize the expression of the truth that this is how it
has always been.
I sincerely hope this essay is helpful for those at all stages of the path.
If anything, it may help
you not to
sabotage yourself along the way...
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