Maybe many of you have read spiritual books and heard similar teachings from enlightened beings that speak about the truth of who we are which is pure consciousness but what does that really mean? I have realised through my own experience and research that we are not our personality. The presence that looks out from behind your eyes right now is pure consciousness and not an individual separate person. Our mind will create a thought that surfaces into our awareness but it is a random thought rising out of the pool of consciousness. The same goes for our emotions, they are felt to be who we are but this is only because we have chosen to identify with this one emotion or thought and think it to be all that we are. This is like a wave thinking it is separate from the entire ocean.
It is all about where we choose to place our awareness. When we read a fictional book, we may get so immersed in the story and feel what the character feels but when we put that book down we return to our experience once more; our own perceived reality. We understand, that was just a story and not our reality. Life is exactly like this only we’ve forgotten we are not the character in the story, we’ve forgotten that we are the one who is reading the story. We are the one who is observing the story and we are also the one who wrote the story. This is our story of our life as a human being on Earth.
So we are now in the process of awakening to the realisation we are not the character in our story. We created our body and our mind so we could experience life through this vessel that we have believed to be all that we are. We are consciousness seeking enriching experiences to learn and grow from. There is no good or bad, from this perspective of the observer because it has all been born from love. Consciousness is pure unconditional love. Just as the fictional story is not real, this life is simply an illusion, designed to create certain soul experiences for growth and learning.
When we suffer it is because we have believed our total identity is a bunch of thoughts and emotions but they do not belong to a separate personality. This is why those who walk the spiritual path such as the monks, seek to remove from their life anything that reinforces the idea of personality. They seek to identify with the immense pure consciousness of existence rather than a separate personality. This pure consciousness spills beyond our bodies to encompass all that we see and experience. We are not separate people at all. This is just the illusion. When we look at all our belongings and we look in the mirror at our body and then add on our thoughts and our emotions, we add depth and dimension to our story of me. Our story is not the truth of who we are but a construct of our mind to make sense of our experiences. The mind tells us this event is happening to a person called me. However our mind is limited and so our story becomes distorted and therefore our perception of our reality is also a distortion of our truth, which is always, love. Love created us, love watches over us, we are born from love and we will return to love. The only time we do not experience love is when we identify with our mind.
We are the creator of all that we know and experience. The personality we identify with will shrink from such a claim but when we choose to focus our attention inwards and seek to know that quiet strength that lies behind the loudest and noisiest bunch of thoughts and distractions, we will discover through experience that we are much more than our mind and once we discover this we will step fully into our power and strength and return once more to the freedom of pure consciousness.
The road to awakening to this reality is a harsh one. The mind that we have identified with for so long will fight hard to stop you realising this truth. You may experience losing a great deal and face a depth of fear that will surprise you. You may also experience depression for a time as you lose interest in what you used to enjoy for a time. Ask yourself during these moments “Am I really falling apart or are these just a bunch of loud random thoughts with emotions that create the illusion of me?” You may at times fear you are going crazy but it is just your mind trying to stop your self enquiry, the mind will get louder and the fear will get stronger the closer you come to the realisation, you are not this personality but simply pure loving consciousness from which everything you experience arises from. Don’t give up. Don’t identify with or fight the mind, accept and love all that is because this is stepping into consciousness awareness.
I feel that the time has come when we must realise we are not our thoughts because we are in a process of radical change and transformation that is a natural part of our human evolution. This transformation is pushing us all to find another way than letting the mind drive our lives. This push is extremely uncomfortable and will only increase in intensity if we keep avoiding this self enquiry. Many of us seek to escape mental suffering and perhaps we place such ideas as enlightenment as a goal that is too high to reach. Yet this realisation can be made, if we stay self-aware at each moment that we suffer. It will be experienced as a gradual awakening. We need to return again and again to the realisation that we are not our mind until it becomes our practice. Through this practise we can free ourselves from the intense suffering of depression, anxiety and insanity that is so prevalent on our planet.
We are not the one who suffers. We are not our thoughts. We are not our emotions. We are not even this body. We are the quiet stillness that lies behind and observes our lives. We are the creator we seek love from. We are the light and the love we so desperately long for. It is not found in that bottle of alcohol, sex with a random stranger or that sugary treat, it is found within us once we finally make the choice to let go of avoiding what so desperately wants to be known. Love is tapping you on the shoulder. Let go of the fear of the unknown, release the mind and turn around and meet it and step into your freedom, then keep doing it over and over again until consciousness is your pure constant state of being.
by Zeina Zeitouni
theunseenworld 