Authentic awakening is about integration, balance, wholeness, oneness, unity. And the wholeness of who we are is 100% divine (absolute) and 100% human (relative). This is what the traditional teachings about the nature of the Christ, fully human and fully divine, are actually pointing to in my opinion. This fully human and fully divine statement about the Christ is not just speaking about the true nature of Jesus of Nazareth, one man who lived and taught about the kingdom of God roughly 2000 years ago in the middle East. The Christ is pointing to the true nature of every human being on the face of the earth. This teaching seems to me to point to the wholeness of being in us all. If clarity or enlightenment is about perceiving the unity and wholeness of who we really are, lack of clarity and unenlightenment is about perceiving a division within ourselves and a dis-integration of our wholeness. Unenlightenment is about dividing reality into parts and seeing one part as opposed to the other. It is about seeing the oneness of us as twoness. This tendency to divide reality is one potentially problematic aspect of ignorance that we sometimes call egoor a perception of a separate self, which we all experience with different levels of conviction and can actually be a kind of useful fiction in other ways. When we awaken to the absolute oneness of pure consciousness we begin to see that the sense of division we perceive is not really accurate on the deepest level, and we see that the relative realities we thought were absolutely real and important, are only provisionally or temporarily real and important. But they could still be called real in the sense that they arise and cease in the unchanging, eternal and absolute reality of pure, immutable consciousness and so, are INCLUDED in it. They too are the oneness, the wholeness by virtue of their temporary participation in it. What is needed after a glimpse of clarity about reality, after an awakening to the absolute dimension of the wholeness that we are, is a radical and unconditional willingness to look very honestly at the many ways we still tend to unenlighten ourselves. We need a willingness to look at how, even after awakening, we can get sucked back into the gravitational pull of that aspect of ego that likes to divide the one into the two. For someone sharing with people spiritually and seeking to help them by encouraging them along this path of honesty, sharing can be very difficult at this phase of the journey because one way by which the egoic structure that wants to divide can use , even awakening, to further its program of division, is to focus or fixate exclusively on the absolute level that has been glimpsed in order to divide and separate off from the relative, temporary level that was exclusively known as true before the glimpse. Especially if there has been a past experience or experiences of significant trauma around the inevitable human weakness and vulnerability which is inherent in all relative, phenomenal reality. There is a fairly strong tendency of the dividing aspect of ego to use awakening to exclusively hang out in the absolute view as a means to avoid or deny or ignore the human dimension of life, which may have been experienced as very frustrating or imperfect and undependable in the past, (which of course it is!) A person in this state of denial of the human aspect of their being is going to tend to often say things like, There is no person here. From the perspective of awareness or pure consciousness there is never a problem, therefore there is nothing to do, or for that matter no one to do it. If you are perceiving that there is something to do and someone to do it, you are utterly deluded and ignorant. And while these statements can be seen as true from the absolute viewpoint, they are only one half of the picture of the whole, and cannot stand up as true when divided off from the relative perspective, which still has its own validity. It can be very difficult or nearly impossible to get through to someone who is clinging to this view because they are holding so tightly to a very absolute perspective and denying any other view, ironically probably for many complex personal reasons, and they are not at all willing to look at life from any other perspective. Its a lot like someone who has been living on one side of a beautiful mountain for many years and have not ventured over to the other side of the mountain for so long that they have forgotten what it even looked like and would argue vehemently with someone who describes the view of the mountain from the opposite side. Actually, BOTH views of the mountain seem completely and absolutely true from the perspective of the person looking at it only from that particular view. But neither view is really true when taken separately to be representative of the WHOLE truth about the mountain. So in order to get a more whole and complete view and a more accurate perception of the mountain, one must take in and acknowledge BOTH VIEWS as having their own validity. This is one of the pitfalls and detours of awakening: the tendency to grasp onto this one-sided view of reality that fixates on the absolute viewpoint and denies the relative view as being utterly false or unreal. It is actually this dividing aspect of the ego that is clinging so desperately and exclusively to this absolute view in order to retain the perception of two, but the person doing this is unconscious of this and not seeing it at all. And clinging to this absolute view can also be sometimes used to dismiss, ignore and deny very unenlightened and un-integrated human behavior that can actually end up being very harmful to the person engaging in it and everyone else around them as well. There are any number of sad examples of this in the annals of Neo-Advaita and other non-dual spiritual movements in the US and Europe and India. There are examples of this in the Zen and Tibetan and Theravadan/Vipassana Traditions as well. These kinds of unbalanced aberrations and distortions of Non-dualism have unfortunately served to discredit it and cause scandal and suffering in their wake. They are cautionary tales to remind us of the potential dangers of an un-integrated and unbalanced view of reality
Posted on: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 04:05:13 +0000
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