The Phoenix Arises in 2011

I am not the perfect embodiment of everything I say.

"Run fast from anyone who says they know all of everything. The fact is, no one can ever claim a patent on reality."

Therefore nobody should be considered an "ultimate" expert on anything.  With all that said....

...One of my readers, Mark S, rejoins us again, with another question. 

Mark asks, “What do you become clear and awakened to?”

“You become awaken to your true nature—to what is you. You become a light, but the light—by becoming light—becomes awakened to itself as a light. You become a light unto yourself. What you awaken to, which is a specific effect of the brilliant drink, is that your nature itself is pure preciousness itself, the utmost preciousness that there can be. So you realize that your nature is not only luminous and brilliant intelligence, but that it is precious. You see and appreciate now the sense of preciousness of Being, your essence, the substance of your consciousness. It is this preciousness that awakens, it is this preciousness that wakes you up, and it is this preciousness that you awake to. This is the preciousness of Being, of Essence, and the preciousness of what a human being is.” ––A.H. Almaas

It seems common for us to expect that spiritual teachers (and I make no proclamation of being one) must have traveled a certain path, or length as to have earned the right to confidently assert whatever they are confidently asserting.
 
I don't find this to be always true.

I'm not meaning to discount the distance I have actually traveled (which is a fair amount by my own measures)

Remembering that this is my personal awakening.

I will continue to stress to my readers, that the words I use represent my truth. I advise all my readers to use these words to form questions for their own awakening.

Step out of your box and push the envelope in ways that may transcend all of us.

An Anon reader asks, “Is there a map?”, “If so, what path did you take to arrive at an Awakening?”

Maps are not necessarily the territory they represent, and there isn’t a particular map, or path, or even length of time, that has us all arriving at an Awakening. You must understand that it would be partial if anything, that I would try to map into paths some type of direction towards an Awakening.

The manifestation of Pure Being is the experience of an awakening.

“One merely wakes up and becomes more cognizant of the true nature of reality. It’s an awakening to the presence of something that has always been there, and known to be there, but has been ignored.”

Your Pure Being (spirit/soul) is informed by the ego –which is asleep.

The ego is nothing more than an idea that each of us has about ourselves. The ego a very influential illusion. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity will prevent you from any awakening.

The Ego is the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do.

For example:

You’ve probably noticed the word AMBULANCE written backwards on the front of a vehicle so that a person seeing it in their rear-view mirror can read it. When you look into a mirror, what you see is backwards, too. Your right hand is your left, your eyes are reversed. You understand that this is a backward view that you are seeing and you make the appropriate adjustments.

Do not confuse reality with the image in the mirror.

The ego-idea of you is very much like the mirror example, without the adjustments. Your ego wants you to look for the inside on the outside.

The outer illusion is the major preoccupation of the ego.

The ego-idea has been with us ever since we began to think. It sends us false messages about our true nature. It leads us to make assumptions about what will make us happy and we end up frustrated. It pushes us to promote our self-importance while we yearn for a deeper and richer life experience. It causes us to fall into the void of self-absorption again and again, not knowing that we need only shed the false idea of who we are.

You will remain asleep as long as you continue to search externally.

This is why enlightenment is called awakening –your soul awakes to the evidence of your brilliance.

For me, the experience of awakening operated within two dimensions ––simultaneously.

One of which I can identify as a "Psychological Awakening" , which would be similar to someone being waking up from a long sleep. I define it in my blog title –Arise from the Illusion—from the dreams, and from all the sufferings of ignorance.

A psychological awakening to me, would mean that I now see the truth and awaken from the lies and the ignorance that I had been surrounding my life. So in order to wake up to your true nature, you must let go of your ego, and see what and who you are, instead of what you thought you were.

The second dimension of awakening is "Phenomenological" (an observation of a conscious experience through judgments, perceptions and emotions –its paradigm relative) which I sometimes joke and call it my “rude” awakening.

It is the sense of being awake, clear, and bright, as if your head is above the clouds and you start seeing everything as it truly is. You are in a much better viewing area, so to speak. It’s not only a matter of awakening to some truth; it is a certain state of Being.

You actually and literally experience the evidence of your brilliance. All at once you are the awareness, the brilliance, and the eternal, –all simultaneously awake and in the presence of the Now.

“That is what Brilliancy does when it explodes in the brain. When it explodes in the perceptual centers, it is a sense of waking up in Essence. We’ve seen Brilliancy in many ways—as intelligence, as synthesis, as completeness, and so on—but now we are seeing it in terms of actual enlightenment. You are awake not only because you have an insight about something, but also by the fact of being the state of awakeness. You feel as if you were a light bulb. You are actually awake, and everything is awake. All your senses are bright and open and clear. You are an awakeness that is awake to everything. This awakeness is also you, your very beingness, the very substance of your soul.” ––Essence of Intelligence

Could it be possible to map out an awakening?

I don’t think so, because an Awakening is relative to an individuals Being, which exists in a infinite number of dimensions. We are all engaged with all levels of Being simultaneously, with some levels being more engaged than others in any given moment.

We are waves of electrons in an ocean of abstract potentiality.

Maybe the map your looking for is found within these words. My hopes are that these words somehow ignite an awareness in your own process of awakening, so you can honor your reality.  

The Paradox of an Awakening can never be mapped.

I find it difficult to hold both sides of a paradox in my writings. Mark & Anon—I hope I was able to answer the question(s) without pissing you off again, because in your opinion, I spoke an incomplete truth.

I'm going to keep reminding my readers that keep in mind, this is my truth…for right now—and I’m not completely attached to it.

I would reach out and say that an Awakening should be synonymous with one’s depth, evolution, awareness, and experiences.

I believe there are many levels of awakening, enlightenment, and self-realization which lends itself to the understanding that the presumption that one who had awakened was a highly evolved human being, and possessed a tremendous depth of insight and understanding, is not necessarily true. 

It's true that a certain minimum amount of personal development must take place for each stage of awakening to be possible. But the minimum isn't much, and awakening shifts don't automatically match predetermined ideas of depth or maturity, nor do they necessarily say much about how "evolved" a person is.

Always question the merits of an awakened person's perception, and never assume the person is highly evolved. I am not meaning to suggest that I myself am a highly evolved person (whatever that means).

This is my attempt to communicate to you what I have experienced in my own spiritual awakening.

I hope that you can create your own maps, indeed with several paths for you to journey and explore, which will undoubtedly bring to your doorstep the realization and embodiment of who and what you are.

May you awaken to fullness of your realized Being.

"One important point I'd like to stress.  Do not confuse an awakening with complete bliss. Contrary to popular opinion, recognizing and owning your own awareness is not going to make you permanently happy or solve all your problems."

What it will do is provide you with the safety to allow yourself to wake up to the uncomfortable truth of human reality.

Always know that nothing is just "divine" or 100% "spiritual"; Being is One, and so everything is everything. Everything that exists is both spiritual and material, perfect and imperfect, happy and sad, absolute and relative, permanent and impermanent. Including, of course, you and me.

At the core of your Being, you are both free and enslaved. You are the universe, and you're just this flawed and mortal human being.

You are both "higher self" and "lower self".

I often joke with an old friend, that being enlightened, or awakened isn’t necessarily a good feeling, and at times I wish I could go back to sleep.  Not everyone is destined to be awakened.

Its the constant creation of us that yearns for the search of "better than this" , which is the essence of any spiritual quest.

In closing, and in plain simple words....In order to awaken, you must change, first by letting go of the ego, and embracing the real Being that you are.  If you want to awaken, you must be prepared to accept your own wholeness, including the parts of yourself you don't like. Stop throwing your own experience away by comparing it with all the hopes, dreams, and ideals you've been clinging to.

Let go of the dreams, and arise from the illusion, and wake up.

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