What happens to you when it dawns on you that what you are is more than your mind and its ideas of itself? When you discover the Awareness or Consciousness that you are, how does it change the way you live?
Since thoughts aren’t the interpreters of reality, they will become less important to you. It could also become more obvious to you that they’re false. Either they’re false because they’re only verbal representations of Reality, or they’re false because the thought itself is a lie, if examined closely. Until the moment when you experience that Awareness is what you are, thoughts have been primary in their importance. They define you, others, the world, and Reality. Now they become open to testing and challenging.
“The stock market is going to crash today.” There’s one thought that some might have been thinking just yesterday, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost over 400 points. With that thought, there will likely have been a jolt of adrenaline and a very unpleasant bodily response. However, was this thought really true? No, the market’s going up right now, one day later.
“This coffee is too bitter” is a thought I just had drinking the decaf by my side while writing this post. Okay but, what does ‘too bitter’ mean? Isn’t it just a subjective opinion, rather than a truth that I need to defend? Is the thought something that needs defending? No.
“I’m a nice guy” is another thought, and this time it’s a thought about my supposed fixed ‘self.’ However, it’s not always true, so why would I want to defend the thought when someone challenges it or thinks I’ve treated them badly? Wouldn’t it be better to consider it just a description of a temporary set of behaviors, rather than the ‘truth’ about ‘me’?
Even the thought ‘human civilizations are only 10,000 years old and before that time, we were all hunter-gatherers’ which has been the basic premise of modern archeology and anthropology has already been proven false by the discovery of relics that date back hundreds of thousands of years. So, is this academic thought absolutely true? No!
Once you understand that Awareness is the underlying truth of what you are, all other thought-based truths can be deconstructed. In the end, we give up certainty about nearly everything…and it’s part of the deconstruction and dissolution of our false sense of self and everything else, that is the trajectory of the Enlightenment journey.