Our Essential Nature and Awakening

Becoming aware that is more to you than meets the eye. Interesting expression, meets the eye. Not believing that there's more to you than the physical body and the thoughts that go through your head and the emotions. Not a belief that there's more to me than that. But knowing that there is infinitely more to me. And I'm talking for every I here. Knowing that there's infinitely more to who I am than what meets the eye and what goes on in my head as thought or in my body as feelings or emotions. If you don't know that directly, real knowing, not knowing about something, but knowing, then you'll just inhabit the surface reality. There's a philosopher, Ken Wilbur, has the expression flatland. I don't know if he coined it or borrowed it from somebody else, but it's a good word. You inhabit flatland. There's only the horizontal dimension to your life. Then there's no depth. And that includes thought. And that's a very impoverished existence. If you cannot feel or sense. It's not a feeling. Let's use the word knowing. If you cannot know your own depths. Not as an occasional high that you experience at a retreat or after meditating for a long time. And then you go. And then the moment you go back into your daily life, it's gone again. But to know that continuously. A little analogy, or we could say a visualization. It's what I'm saying now is going to be halfway between an analogy and a visualization. That could be helpful is to imagine yourself, the person that you are on the surface of the globe. Which in a way, you don't have to imagine. It's actually you are. You exist on the surface of a sphere, a globe. And that's where your life happens. You run around the surface. Some people stay in one small spot on the surface. And others move about the surface a lot. They go around to different places. So you exist on the surface of this globe. And your reality is what you see around you on the surface. You look around and things happen there. Your life happens there. And then there's a little bit of below that which can be perceived on the surface. There is the activity of thought. It's a little bit below the surface, but it really is still also a surface phenomenon. So you exist on the surface of this globe. And everybody else that you see. And every other life form that you see running around or not running around on the surface is a totally other. That's where the word other comes from. It's not you. There's another. Every human being you could have a human being next to you on the surface and it's the other. You don't really feel any true connection with that person because there's a distance between you and that person. There's a separation. Now let's say this person that exists on the surface derives his or her life, the life that animates this life form from the center of the sphere. And this person, who is perhaps only aware of the surface of the sphere, is not aware that he or she derives his life and is connected with, is only an outer expression of a deeper life that originates within the center of the sphere. Because he or she doesn't know that. Because what happens on the surface of the sphere is so hypnotic or seductive and there's so much going on. And continuously the attention is drawn to the surface phenomena. And then another thing happens, and then many things you need, because as the little surface entity, you feel very incomplete. You feel there's something very important still missing in my life. You may be familiar with that feeling or that belief, there's something missing here. But the surface entity looks around the surface to find what's missing here and continuously reaches out on the surface to grasp at something that hopefully will make him or her feel more complete. So there's that search for that. But there continues to be this underlying sense of either in some entities it's felt as there's something wrong, it's not quite right. Hopefully at some point in the future when I have explored more of my surface reality, it's going to be right. There's something not right, or there's something I'm not complete. And this is an underlying feeling that the majority of the population on the planet has a sense of lack. And even if they become wealthy, it's still there. And also a sense of fear. You feel threatened, feel threatened by other entities that are moving around the surface. What do they want? Oh, there's another one coming. And this always completely other. So that sense of separation. But occasionally you grasp at another and say, I want you to complete me. It's called falling in love. And after a while you realize that doesn't work either because it's short lived. And then you realize one morning, that's not the person I married. What happened? Totally different person is suddenly here. Something again is fundamentally wrong. So the wrongness comes back. No matter where you go and what you do, that sense of there's something missing or wrong always sooner or later, and usually sooner creeps up on you. And so because you don't know that what really would make your life feel complete and whole and remove the fear would be knowing that the life that you are comes from a very deep place that far transcends who you are as this surface, temporary surface reality. So, and this is where really any spiritual teaching even might use different terminology is about that. And to some people the realization comes without any spiritual teaching. Because they are so frustrated by their surface reality that somehow suddenly their attention goes deeper. So here you are connected with deriving your life from the center of the sphere without knowing it that the life that you are transcends the form reality. So we could differentiate between your form reality, the person with a name and a history and a body, and the essence reality, which far transcends the person. If you know your essence reality, then the form reality is far less problematic. You are no longer then a problem to yourself. If you don't know who you are in essence, you are inevitably a problem to yourself. You create a world of the way in which you experience the world is problematic. And you create a world of problems for yourself. And then of course, you do it to others too. You can't create problems to yourself without creating problems for everybody around you. So you become the source of the problems in the world, not the solution. But you're accusing others that they are the source of the problems in the world. So let's again, this kind of visualization that you are on the sphere and suddenly your attention moves from sense perceptions and from thoughts to a deeper place. And that is easily done when you allow thought activity to subside. And the consciousness that usually would have been absorbed by thinking is suddenly free to realize its own depth. You become still. And as you become still, you become aware of your own depths. When I say that, it sounds dualistic, but this is only because we're using language. It's not so much that you become aware of your own depths, really. There's not two here. The depth that you are is becoming aware of itself. And that's what we call self realization. So there are many ways in which this can be pointed to. I sometimes say you become aware that you are spacious inside. You're not just the stuff in your head. And that does not make up your true identity. Whatever goes on in your mind, you become spacious as the mind as there is a gap between two thoughts, for example, or right now, when there isn't really very much to think about. Suddenly you realize there is something else to who I am. Although I cannot analyze it in any way, I can only sense it as my own aliveness I can only sense it as my own essential beingness. Sa.