May 14, 2007. During a Realization, no mind stuff—no self—was present to reflect an empty and boundless One Awareness. From a description of a personal account: "A glimpse of the Absolute forever ended my inability to solve the awareness-awareness problem. It was a massive awareness-identity problem solved with finality."

- Paul Constant

Read the full account of Paul Constant's Realization in the SearchWithin.org download area.

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Retrospective

Recently, a friend and earnest seeker commented on the blog postings and the seeming dichotomy in Awareness. The following correspondence encapsulates Paul's travails...

From: S.
Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2009 8:00 PM
To: Paul C.

Paul -

My takeaway from your blog post is that the Awareness appears to be willing to cooperate with the ego in allowing itself (the Awareness) to be dichotomized.

The process does no damage to the Awareness, and the process is strictly impersonal, like a fold in a blanket, the two parts of the blanket that touch having a conversation and an agreement that an entity exists, consisting of the area of contact. The conversation is imaginary and confined only to that small area. To change the metaphor, as if the walls of water around a bubble talk about the bubble being an entity, when in fact it is not.

Anyway, I appreciate your stuff.

S____

From: Paul C.
To: S.
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2009 6:53 PM
Subject: RE: dichotomized awareness

Hi S____ -

Thanks for the feedback on the blog posting. It is my hope that readers will look past the personalities and words and feel the agonizing involved in the struggle to See.

Before mid May 2007, I had a false (albeit, rapidly disintegrating) belief that I could control or focus my awareness. I had a conviction that my individual awareness was the "real me." Or perhaps better said, in the preceding years I believed that I understood the dichotomy between awareness and everything-that-was-not-me. However, in retrospect, this was an impossible task because the mind was using its woefully inadequate apparatus to characterize the unassessable. I didn't know it at the time, but this "outside in" approach was doomed to failure.

In the years after meeting Rose, my mind cleverly constructed a paradigm whereby a cataclysmic breakthrough was needed to penetrate the Absolute. I believed that the Absolute was beyond or behind me, a separate dimension upon which a glimpse would forever lead to Paul's Enlightenment. In short, I believed in "I." But Awareness simply is. Prior to mid-May 2007, all my attempts to describe it were products of the mind -- thinking that it could solve the riddle -- striving to make sense of its own reflection in the mirror and that which watched it. As Bart said, "The degree to which you do not exist cannot be overstated." There are no individualized awarenesses that die or glimpse the Absolute. Look not at the mirror. The dream of entering, finding, or becoming something is false.

I am interested in your perspective…

Paul