Excerpts from Chapter Six about Awakening:

In ancient Greece at the time of the birth of Western civilization, there was a center, a place of wisdom. This place was the oracle in Delphi, which was the place where people came to seek insight and guidance. Upon the oracle was written “Know Thyself;” to know yourself was regarded as the most important insight—the height of wisdom.

  The old Greeks asked the same question that Rene Descartes asked again more than two thousand years later: Who am I? To know who you are is to know your true self, and as Descartes wanted to point to the essence of our being, so did the Greeks, desiring to guide the way to this same center of our existence.

   Consciousness—to be aware—is the first state of being. It is our first experience and that which exists before anything else. It is the core of our existence, and the essence of our being. Knowing this center of our being is thereby the meaning center of existence. This the Greeks understood, and their most holy place was dedicated to answering this question. 

    This is also what we found in the Bible before, where Moses asked who is God and God answers: “I AM WHO AM.” Thereby, God is “HE WHO IS” or “being itself,” which is the answer to the question. God is the center of being—the essence of existence. And with the highest wisdom telling us to know ourselves—the question; who am I becomes the key in our search for Truth and the nature of God.

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Not knowing who we are—having an identity crisis—was called “homelessness” by philosopher Martin Heidegger. In his Letter on Humanism, shortly after the Second World War, he said that, “Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world.”After experiencing two world wars, it is easy to understand his inability to “locate man within being,” as regard to being human. He explained that to be human can be understood as that “in which the essence of man preserves the source that determines him.”

   Being, in its essence, is already illuminated by truth, which cannot be said about the creation of concepts and ism’s. If we are to find truth, we need to look into our essence and the light that preserves us as the source of our identity. This light is the light in enlightenment, and it is by this light that we find who we are, our home and true identity.

   As we saw in the chapter on religion, the God of the Roman Catholic Church did not want Adam to eat the fruit of the Three of Knowledge. To the ancient Greeks, the Gnostics, and the Eastern world, this would seem suspicious: What sort of God is this? Unless Adam was completely untrustworthy there would be no reason to withhold the truth from him, since this would lead to his destruction. To the Gnostics self-ignorance is ”a form of self-destruction,” because “whoever remains ignorant, a creature of oblivion, cannot experience fulfillment.”

   History showed that not only Adam was untrustworthy, so too was the God of the Church. The atrocities committed by the ‘only true church’ by authority of this jealous God are unparalleled in history, even by the Roman Empire itself. This was why Luther reformed the Church.

   The reformation was the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, not only because Adam was now free from control, but also because he was now able to read the Bible himself, which Luther had translated. By being able to read for himself, Adam could now eat the fruits from the Three of Knowledge and begin to see for himself.

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   In today’s complex world many forces are competing for control of our minds, and therefore, having an identity can sometimes seem more difficult than letting this world make us one through conditioning. The Gnostics explained that without having an identity a person is “being driven by impulses he does not understand,”and this is what happens when we let other people, or the world around us, make our identity for us.

   This is the relationship between our subjective experience of ourselves and the way we experience the world ‘outside.’ Inspired by Sartre’s essay on stickiness, Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger explains that what makes our identity is a slime that sticks to our true identity. The slime that makes our identity possesses us by crossing the boundary between our identity and it:

When I believe that I possess it, behold by a curious reversal, it possesses me…If an object which I hold in my hands is solid, I can let go when I please; its inertia symbolizes for me my total power…Yet here is the slimy reversing the terms; (my self) is suddenly compromised, I open my hands, I want to let go of the slimy and it sticks to me, if draws me , it sucks me…I am no longer the master…The slime is like a liquid seen in a nightmare, when all its properties are animated by a sort of life and turn back against me.

   What makes the slime stick is what in the East would be called attachment. It is by attachment to projections and imagination that we create an identity that is not our true identity. This is how we experience an identity crisis when we finally have made ourselves an identity that subsumes our true identity.

   The way out of this crisis is to know our true identity and hold on to it. Recognize your  identity and do not let the slime stick to it: “If I dive into the water, if I plunge into it, if I let myself sink in it, I experience no discomfort, for I do not have any fear whatsoever that I may dissolve in it; I remain a solid in its liquidity.”

The East holds the longest tradition of enlightenment and in going beyond the brain. Here teachings on enlightenment have been passed on for thousands of years. The Bhagavadagita explains about enlightenment, and building on this tradition, the Buddha is known as the greatest teacher of enlightenment of all time. In Buddhism, enlightenment can be explained as the liberation from our thoughts. Instead of being our thoughts, we shift perspective to watching our thought—we are observing our thoughts without identifying with our thoughts.

   Enlightenment is the liberation from thought identification to thought observation, and this is what it means for the brain to get out of its own way. Beyond the brain and its thoughts we experience that we are still there, and this experience is liberation—the experience of our true nature.

   To explain this, a mirror is often used as a metaphor for the mind, or consciousness. Our mind is an empty mirror in which thoughts occur as reflections. We are the mirror. Our thoughts, as reflections in the mirror, are our subjective self, or ego. By observing our thoughts we can see that these reflections come and go in the mirror, but when we watch closely we find something behind these reflections that is clear and stable. This is the mirror—our true nature. 

   Knowing our true identity, we can observe the reflections as they change from pleasant to unpleasant thoughts and back again, but since we no longer identify with the reflections we have now become liberated from them. This simply means that we are no longer controlled by our thoughts.

   We now control our thoughts, and can select positive and happy thoughts, instead of negative and unhappy thoughts. This is enlightenment and freedom from our thoughts, which leads us to the essence of our nature. This was what the Buddha taught, and all his 84,000 teachings can all be condensed into one line: Recognize your essence.

   As we learn to control our mind and practice mindfulness, we discover our true identity more and more fully. We find that our true nature is positive and loving as the mirror is clear and bright. The Buddhists say that the mirror is empty—not in the Western understanding of nothingness, but empty of thoughts. As quantum physics tell us that space is full of energy, so too, is the true nature of the mind full of unborn and unlimited possibility. We could call this unborn and un-manifested reality quantum superposition in which everything is possible.   

   A movie projector is also used as a metaphor for the empty mind. The empty mind is the light of the projector in which the film (our thoughts) is projected. In other words the empty mind projects awareness onto the thoughts within our mind. By going really deep within the mind, we can discover that all we truly are is the clear light of the projector, and we can observe that the film is not created by us, but by the outside world as reflections in our mirror. Thereby, we can see how all the reflections are really impersonal—the only thing personal is the light behind the reflections. The reflections are karmic patterns in the world outside, but here inside, we are free to see beyond this game of life and let the light of our mind shine through it all.