by Bob Fergeson
First there must be enough trauma or suffering to turn us away from the belief in life as an end in itself. If we are lucky enough to be thrown into the unknown, through sheer desperation or misery, we may find that we emerge ok, that something took care of us. This forced surrender gives us renewed Faith. We begin to trust something greater beyond life and the world of the five senses. This shift in meaning is usually synchronistic with a teacher “ringing our bell”. There is an inner connection established between our inner self and this “God incarnate”, the Guru. Something in us awakens and our head turns towards a new view. The old values of the rat-race and mundane pleasure are no longer enough, and we see our new-found teacher as proof that there is something else worth doing.
Somewhere along here we will begin to see in a real, personal way that we are mechanical, a robot. That as personalities, or egos, we are nothing but accidental associative reaction patterns. We don’t exist. But our heads are locked on this robot, identified with it in an almost absolute hypnosis. This includes inherited and learned states of mind and moods, that are precursors to reaction patterns. Seeing this gives us a shock, and we begin to learn the hard way that no amount of tinkering with the associative pattern will give us real being: the realization that endless analysis of the robot is a dead end. We begin to look within.
This acceptance and the following ability to turn the head inward only comes after every mental avenue has been exhausted. We can no longer place a high value on states such as “happiness”, justified negative emotions, mundane pleasures, or even elevated “spiritual states” or feelings of well being, such as “being a good boy”, a do-gooder, etc. Confrontation, whether in a group setting or from being engaged with everyday life, helps us to see our mechanical nature and the uselessness of putting our faith in its eventual perfection. It also helps to bring up real conscience, which enables us to have compassion for our fellow man, as we see he cannot change either, and is also not a conscious being.
Continuing to go within, as there’s nowhere else to go, we begin to see the value in listening. We begin to develop and place value on the “Listening Attention”. We realize that we don’t know, but that knowledge is available. We begin to hear Higher Centers and value their help. This leads to a return of faith in the inner self, and begins the inner relaxation and loosening of energy knots (egos) formed by implanted erroneous beliefs. Given this new mental freedom, we can see the dualistic nature of the mind, with its penchant for ever-increasing the subtlety of its ego through cleverness. We sooner or later separate from it and thereby realize the observing awareness that is our true self, “This I know is me”, the self that realizes its own nothingness.
This receiving of the experience of ourselves as awareness also leads us to see that this awareness is the same in everyone. We have become Universal after our long lost voyage in the particular and find ourselves back Home, where we’ve always been.