CHAPTER 1
ABC'S OF AWAKENING
What do we mean by Awakening?
We have to be careful with the language we use, becauselanguage has history and baggage. As they warn you at thebaggage carousels in airports, many other bags may look likeyours but aren't. For instance, I used to use the term Self-Realizationto refer to a certain level of awakening. But Idiscovered that the term had too much baggage, some of itancient and some of it modern. Following the consciousnessof the various teachers using the term, it became clear thateveryone meant something different by it. And for studentsof mine who had moved through that particular level ofawakening, as they would interact with other groups or withpeople who had read material from other teachers, it createdall sorts of confusion. So, I had to abandon the term and lookfor new language—not just for that term but also for each levelof awakening. I had to find language that was relatively free ofbaggage but was also vibrationally aligned with each level, sothe new language could help to define the Map of awakeningthat I was being shown through my own process.
The one word I could not get away from, though, wasthe word 'awakening'. Thankfully, it has less baggage thanmost other terms in common use. Of course, other peopleusing this term may still mean something different than I do,but I will define specifically what I mean by it so there is noconfusion.
General vs. Specifics: The word 'awakening' has a general,commonly understood meaning that simply refers to the ideaof waking up out of some kind of sleep or dream or trance.Extended to the spiritual realm, the general concept is that theindividual, separate person or ego we experience ourself to beis really just a dream that our greater self is having, and weare caught in this dream, taking the experience to be reality.In this context, the idea of awakening is that it presents thepossibility of coming out of this dream of separateness andawakening to our greater, true reality.
This general sense of awakening is fully aligned with theway the term will be used in this book. In addition, because theMap presented here will point to various levels of awakening,I will develop specific language to differentiate these uniquelevels, as we go along.
Basic Awakening & the 'Core Veil': The term I use forsomeone's initial awakening, for the first level of awakening,is 'Basic Awakening'. People have all kinds of experiences thatthey like to think are awakenings, but most aren't. Most ofthose experiences are just expanded ego states. Most of therest are simply a momentary taste of something deeper, andthen the moment passes. The Map provides a clear definitionof how to tell a true awakening from one of these other kindsof experiences. Here is a quick rule of thumb: if the descriptionof the experience has the word 'expanded' in it, then mostlikely it was an expanded ego state. The overriding quality ofa true awakening experience is most aligned with the word'empty', for one's familiar sense of self has 'emptied', leavinga space in its place. And if it is a true awakening and not justa taste, then what has become empty stays empty. The senseof expansion, on the other hand, usually refers to an expandedsense of self. In awakening that sense of self does not expand,it disappears.
Here's an example: a student of mine—we'll call herAlice—had a shift of consciousness that stayed stable for overa month. She believed she had awakened, but I was doubtful.At first glance, there seemed to be an emptiness that resonatedwith true awakeness, but my 'spiritual intuition' told me I wasmissing something. A red flag then popped up as she described,among other things, "feeling expanded". So, I looked moreclosely. To understand what I saw, imagine writing the word'I' with an orange marker on a small, green balloon, and thenexpanding the balloon to 100 times its normal size. Now, youwould no longer see the I that you had written on the balloonbecause the letter would be so stretched out it would just looklike odd bits of orange on the green background of the balloon.Alice was like that: her I, her ego, had been so expanded thatit had become almost transparent, making it very hard to see.Yet it was still there, and my spiritual intuition had sensed it.At the same time, I could see that she was actually ripe enoughto have a true awakening, so I worked with her to facilitateit. The moment the awakening happened, her expanded statebroke down, and I couldn't sense that I any longer. I asked herhow she felt now, and she said, "Well ... nothing," in quite asurprised tone. The expanded state and the sense of I in it hadbeen a 'something', and that something was now gone. Thiswas not what she expected, but it was the real thing. Nowshe was awake.
Awakening is never what we expect. This is both becausethe ego expects to be there in the awakening, and becausewith Basic Awakening, you have awakened out of the illusionof who you thought you were but not yet awakened to whatyou are. That comes later, as a deeper awakening. Yet even thedeeper awakenings are never what we expect.
We still need to define what happened to Alice. Whatwas the nature of her Basic Awakening? What happened toher sense of I? To bring this out of the conceptual realm,let's try this: for a minute or so, close your eyes and tune into your sense of I. Notice that there is a sense of I, there is aseparate sense of 'me', and there are lots and lots of I-thoughts,thoughts in which I is the subject of the thought (as in 'I amhungry'). Notice if you can that this basic sense of I actuallycenters in the area of your heart in the center of your chest(not the physical heart). Notice that if you intentionally thinkthe word I you will hear this I-thought in your head; but ifyou connect to the sense of self it gives you and track that toits source, you will be drawn to a place in your heart. This islogical because your heart is where your identity sits. Sinceyour core identity is that of a particular I, its root is going tosit in your heart.
So, I is not just a thought but is an ego center that gives riseto I-thoughts. I has a particular feeling-sense. You can sense itas being present in all your history, in all your mental imagesof yourself, and in the inner story you constantly narrate toyourself in your head. I is your basic identity, residing in yourheart. Now imagine that sense of I suddenly disappearing.The history, the mental images, and the story remain, butthe sense of I in them is gone. That is what happens in BasicAwakening.
Let's look at this more carefully. What is this I-sense thatyou take for granted as your self but which can disappear?It arises from a deeper truth, from a place that is free of egoand self-reference, free of thought and emotion, and free ofthe divisions that the mind imposes on reality. It arises fromthe deepest knowing of what you truly are, from where youare absolutely transcendent of all time and space and form,and yet are absolutely one with the tiniest expression of life,everywhere. That oneness becomes all of life's individual andlocalized expressions, including the particular ego-identity,the particular person that you know as I.
If you think of the deepest reality as the source ofidentity, as Identity Itself, it has somehow localized its pure,transcendent sense of Identity-Without-Self into a localizedsense of identity as a separate someone, a particular 'me' witha particular history.
To facilitate the creation of this localized I-sense, Divinityevolved life forms so that they would have specific constructsin their consciousness that would become focal pointsfor I. These focal points sit in the core of our human andincarnational consciousness, in the center of our heart. Thesense of I that arises there becomes our most basic experienceof who and what we are. Yet because we are not truly separateindividuals—we are that One, the ground of being itself—thecreation of this core identity, veils us from our true nature.Therefore, I call this consciousness structure in our heart,which creates this core I-sense and veils us from our truenature, our Core Veil.
The identity created by your Core Veil is like an ongoingdream. When you dream, images, feelings, and your sense ofyourself arise in your consciousness, and as long as you aredreaming you take this for reality. In a similar way, your CoreVeil generates a sense of I arising in your consciousness, andas long as the Core Veil is doing that, you take that sense of Ito be reality, to be what you are. Yet this I is just a constructin consciousness that can be broken down when 'it is time'.When this happens, the particular I-sense and identity it hascreated disappears with it, and it is like coming out of a verydeep dream. Awakening is the movement which brings youout of the sense of I. Sometimes I refer to the Core Veil as the'door to awakening', since its loss is the first true awakeningmovement.
So, this is my definition of Basic Awakening: Basic Awakeningis losing one's Core Veil, which is synonymous with losing thatcore sense of I in the heart. This is not an awakening to yourtrue nature yet, but rather the awakening out of the illusion ofwho you thought you were. This is what happened to Alicewhen she came out of her expanded ego-state: she lost herCore Veil and her core sense of I went with it. When askedhow she felt, she went to see how her familiar, core sense ofI was feeling, but because she couldn't access that I, all shecould say about what she was feeling was, "nothing". Whereher sense of I had been, now there was nothing there. Shehad awakened out of her false sense of self but had not yetawakened to what she truly was.
It was exactly like this for my own Basic Awakening:one moment the core sense of I was there, and in the nextmoment it wasn't. One moment I knew who I was, and thenext moment, to my surprise, I hadn't a clue, because theexperience matched nothing in my expectations. There was noexplosion, no bliss, no omniscience, no all-pervading oneness;just a quiet sense of natural beingness arising from the heartwith all the old chatter still running around in my head. Iknew the beingness was more real than the ongoing storyabout myself in my head, but there was still a lot of identitytied into all that story—even though the main character ofthat story now seemed a bit unreal. Of course, this confusionwas just my initial experience. Awakening is what it is, but ourexperience of it is unique for each individual. It also changes,of course, as we 'grow into it'. Awakening had happened now,but I still had a lot of growing to do, and part of that growingwould involve dealing with my false expectations.
Coming Out of Trance: Imagine that you are in a theatergroup and are performing a play. To help the performance,you hire a hypnotist to put everyone in a trance, so that theybelieve they actually are the character they are playing. Yourown role is that of a street vendor. At the end of the show, thehypnotist will break the trance. But after putting everyonein a very deep trance, the hypnotist disappears. The showends, and everyone continues believing they are their stagecharacter.
For you, though, your trance doesn't hold as deeply aseveryone else's. At some point, you suddenly see through it.Although the trance hasn't cleared completely, there is now aplace within your consciousness where you have broken freeof it. So, it is as if you are still in the trance, with your mindstill filled with all the supposed memories of that role, as ifthey were real, and yet you know this isn't you. You knowthat you aren't really a street vendor. Yet because of the depthof what still remains of the trance, you can't quite rememberwho you are, and the few images you can recall seem nomore real than the memories created for your stage role bythe hypnotist. You try to explain this to the other actors, andyou try to convince them that they, too, aren't who they thinkthey are, but the memories given to them by the hypnotistsupport their new identities, so they just think you've lost it.And you have—you've lost the core of the trance that keptyou in the same frame as the others.
However, you are not completely free of the trance. Becauseof how immersed you were in it, part of your consciousness isstill in it, and whenever you relax your focus, you start slippingback in. Letting go into the familiar sense of the trance iseasier than doing the work of keeping yourself aware of theunreality of it. You may slip back into it for minutes or hours oreven days at a time. But even while you're seemingly lost in it,something in you knows this isn't real. The awakeness is stillthere, and whenever you choose, you can gather your focusand see that who you seem to be in the trance isn't really you.Unfortunately, even when you recognize this, you still don'tknow what you actually are, which makes the situation thatmuch more difficult. And when you are most clearly seeingthat your trance experience isn't real, you don't understandwhy that isn't enough to just make the whole of it disappear atonce. Yet the residue of the trance persists. It will take Grace,as well as effort on your part, to get more awake.
The Ego's Conundrum
All of the issues in our emotional drama can be viewed asa smokescreen for the ego's larger issue: its ultimate mortalityand insignificance. Although we occupy the center of our ownpersonal story, we live out our lives and then we die. And ourlives are nothing but a collection of memories, desires, and plotlines, all of them ultimately insignificant. All the meaning inour lives is self-created, and even the most profound lives endwith death. All egos sense this, and even though the knowledgeis usually suppressed, it is like a shadow that follows them.The existential weight of it would be overwhelming if the egoallowed itself to take an objective view of its existence. Mostof humanity would be clinically depressed.
So, the ego develops strategies to avoid facing this reality:(1) like a racehorse with blinders, it just focuses on what is infront of it, and/or (2) it continually distracts itself, and/or (3) ituses drugs or alcohol to escape, and/or (4) it tries to convinceitself that fame, or being remembered, or 'making a difference'will somehow give more ultimate significance to its existence,and/or (5) it projects a fantasy of an everlasting heaven, whereit will continue to exist and be happy. For most people, thesestrategies successfully push their existential reality to thebackground, where it haunts them but stays out of the mainflow of their life.
Yet this ultimate issue for the ego is only an issue for youif your experience is that you are this ego. That fact creates theperfect setup, for when the ego runs out of defenses against theexperience of this issue—usually because of trauma, disease,approaching death, or the death of a loved one—its carefullyconstructed web of meaning breaks down. Then, it can nolonger find a satisfying answer within the confines of its ownpersonal reality, forcing it to look elsewhere. And that's whenthe turn in its path comes: instead of only looking to itself, itis forced to look beyond itself. Eventually, it comes to the ideaof awakening. From an awakening perspective, life is simplythe opportunity for the Source of All to experience its ownpotentiality. Every trivial moment is actually filled with Graceand presence. Plot lines don't need to go anywhere; desires donot need to be fulfilled; death is just another experience. If youbake a cake, it is not supposed to last forever; it was baked forthe tasting and eating of it. Our lives, including both our mostprofound and idiotic experiences, including even our deaths,are like that for the Source of All. It all exists just for the tasteof it, for the Divine to experience the potentiality of its owncreativity. As the ego takes in the idea of awakening, it hopesto use awakening to escape from its existential predicament;it hopes to find a way to live from that deeper place of eternalsignificance. Yet it can never accomplish that, for there is noroom for ego in that place. And hence the ego's conundrum:it doesn't want to live a mortal, insignificant existence, but itdoesn't want to sacrifice its egoic existence for freedom.
Your path through this conundrum will be realizing thatyou are not that ego.
