Thoughts and Feelings are Real: The ‘Self’ They Seem to Produce Is Not
My own awakening was facilitated by a school that, as small as it was, split into two factions a few years back. In the school, we were taught that we didn’t need to perfect the ego in order to awaken, we just had to see THROUGH it to the Ground of Being that we truly are, in order to awaken. Then we could integrate the Pure Awareness with ego, thought, others and the world.
I’ve gone back to write on one or two of that school’s FB pages and I incur disagreement with my premise that the ‘ego’ is not real. After all, people say, thoughts are feelings are real, although temporary and ephemeral. They do occur within the inner space of the bodymind. I have no essential disagreement with that or with the appearance of 3D reality. If I cut my finger, I will bleed, after all.
I do disagree with the premise that because thoughts and feelings are real, the ‘ego’ they create is somehow real and permanent, and with the premise that the ego holds an essential and fixed identity. My own personal experience is that the personal story winds down and basically disappears over time.
Literally, one day I was walking the dog on the usual tree-lined road and realized ‘I am not thinking about problems anymore; I am not my problems.’ A few years later I was able to watch the whole ego identity arise around a mind-generated problem and then pass away as soon as I questioned the basis of that problem and that ego After that occurred, I began to understand that what’s left after the transformation that began with the first awakening to Awareness is Awareness Itself. Awareness is then free to spontaneously produce action, thought, emotion, speech, response, relationships, creative projects or whatever it wants through the vehicle of this bodymind that it also is.
To call that spontaneous expression of Awareness a ‘self’ and treat it like it is a fixed ‘entity’ that needs to be protected and defended with certain words is both erroneous in the great Enlightenment traditions and in my own experience. To cling to ego as important or worthy of being defended is understandable but, seems to be ‘halfway up the mountain.’ Go further.
May all who read this awaken in this lifetime: it is possible!