You might have noticed that awareness is an integral component of who and what we truly are. Where we are, it is, and where it is, we are. The time usually arrives when the task at hand becomes to deepen our level of engagement with what is true. The reason is that if you’re undergoing an experience of awakening on the level of awareness and mind, you are only seeing part of the experiential component to awakening as a whole.
There’s something else asking to be attended to in waking up that is really indescribable, but in order to distinguish the process from concerns directly pertaining to awareness and the morass of mental constructs, I will refer to it as the heart. It isn’t really the physical heart, and it is not separate from any other aspect of awakening, but we are limited by language in this enterprise.
A person can undergo an enormous existential shift as a result of awakening at the level of what we call the mind, the ego or the reflexive self. It can have multiple effects that may take years to settle. During this time, you may not even begin to realise there was anything behind awareness in the subtle emotional body.
This is the heart, waiting patiently in line to wake up.
It contains and encompasses the entire energetic history of our choices, values, and relationships. This encounter can be confusing to those who have awakened from mind, especially since the ‘awareness’ aspect of you often has to spend so long coming to an even keel after seeing through all of its various beliefs and illusions.
Awakening from mind can be disillusioning, disarming, and liberating. Sooner or later, however, it does become plainly obvious that waking up only at the level of mind is not a full expression of who we truly are all the way in. I don’t mean to sound mysterious about it, but this is just something that arises in you, in some form or another.
This whole process is really all very straightforward and natural. It is just that we have invested so much of our life energy in surrounding ourselves with that which is not natural that it becomes confusing even trying to look toward the sun to find the light of day.
The ‘modern’ problem, seemingly going back at least as far as anyone can recall, is that nothing is clear anymore. Somewhere along the way, we humans have collectively lost our clarity of vision (that is, if we have ever had it). We don’t know who we are, we do not know the nature of our own deepest being. If that were true, conflict at any level would no longer be possible.
More than ever before, the focus of society is in feeding distraction, exacerbating differences and normalizing the role of conflict at every level.
Identification with anyone or anything is being aggressively encouraged globally. The consensus version of knowing who you are approximates to ‘I am resolutely fixed at these points of identification’, which is actually about as far removed from understanding our true nature as is humanly possible. This is the new benchmark of insanity, and its continuation is only possible if we delay remembering our true nature, at which point the conditioned insanity of identification is retired.
True to form, the Earth is faithfully showing us outwardly what our children are set to inherit, which is a polluted world, both in the sense of our environment and our encultured values. The modern world is a realm of rapid influx of refuse, mental and physical, and we have all contributed as consumers. To at least clear this debris from our inner world, we need to begin by acknowledging that which is true, beginning with an understanding of ourselves.
In the case of mind, this is a new world altogether to become accustomed to when you realise that you inhabit a living reality and not simply a screen of thoughts, beliefs and other projections.
The illusions of the heart are much more subtle energetic confusions than those of the mind, and ask of us an even deeper commitment to inquiry and examination than those of the mind. You can be brightly awake and grounded at the level of mind, and at the level of the emotional body, you can still very much experience the ongoing throes of confusion and separation.
For example, you may be well aware that who you are is not limited by your beliefs or thoughts, yet still experience wounding from spurious comments about you, or you still may experience emotional dysfunction with your close relationships, even if your feelings go unspoken.
Often, the initial entry into awakening leads us to be even less likely to address our own feelings. This doesn’t all settle automatically; it is for most of us a very gradual process of sifting through old energetic cycles and gently reminding ourselves to disengage. You can delay heart-centred awakening forever, and most people do.
I think there are a couple of reasons for this.
When you have experienced a lot of suffering, it can be relatively expansive and liberating to suddenly realise your freedom from mind, therefore it can be quite a welcome fit. In this regard, awakening can allow is to go for a very long time insulated by an imaginary wall from the neck up.
With the awakening of the heart, however, truth is asking us to return headlong into the heart of the emotional disturbance when this is what awakening from thought promised to relieve. When we awaken from the dream of separation at the level of mind, we are very tempted into living life in a withdrawn and detached kind of way.
Ironically, in some ways, awakening from mind can shift us even more into our head than we were before, just without all of our usual thought identifications. This is an easy way to get stuck, at least in the beginning. Once you have had a taste of freedom from separation, it looks at first as though you are separate from separation – a strange illusion, to be sure.
People caught in this phase will often come across as emotionally detached, dispassionate, and even quite routinely dismissive of others thoughts and feelings because the default attitude becomes ‘everything is just an illusion’. The opening stages of awakening make it look like this is it, the end of the line.
After some time, this new version of things begins to stagnate. This is because the realization is fundamentally incomplete. You don’t just have an awareness asking to be awakened, you really have an entire soul or psyche waiting to be attended to, including mental and emotional realms, and multidimensional energetic systems that aren’t referenced anywhere in modern maps of western psychological literature.
The soul is so complex that it is literally unknowable through external conditions. It can be experienced, but it cannot be contained or subjugated.
We have a collective tendency to occupy so little attention within the space of our own energetic environment. This is why emotional attachments and fixations return again and again, even in what appears to be ‘awakened individuals’. There is an entire inner galaxy of energy waiting to be met by this awakened awareness, and none of it is resolved until we allow that remembrance of our ground of being to settle down into our heart space, the most aggressively knotted and well-armoured of all energetic spaces.
You wouldn’t believe what is down there.
When you really get to know yourself in the quiet reflection of solitude, it can be as astonishing as watching the birth of a universe being renewed in each moment. The filters of our thoughts and expectations make these kinds of revelatory experiences uncommon except in often extreme cases. You really don’t need to die to become more intimately acquainted with the truth of who you are. It can happen in this life, in this moment. Look deeply for yourself and see that which was never born and that which never dies.
Remember, I’m not presuming to announce the truth here- this is all merely a manner of speaking intended to evoke a response in the form of a direct inner reflection on your part. This is all pointing at something important within all of us, and available at this moment.
The expectation here should be to start out very small.
Even broaching the question of whether you ever feel things that are difficult to name or pin down conceptually is a significant beginning. Your dedicated peeks into the unknown, like someone learning the skill of navigating in the dark, will eventually result in glimpses that become irreversible and life-altering. You will not be able to verbally share the depth of your experience with others, nor will you ever feel you need to.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
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