If all of life is a mental construct, a waking dream, what would it be like to awaken? Who awakens? Awaken to what? Thank you in advance for your response.
Regards,
Anand
Dear Anand,
Having laid some foundations in my recent responses, I will try to be a little more economical in my response to you.
All of life is not a mental construct. A mental construct (that is, thoughts, sensations and perceptions) appears in and is made out of that which is truly and eternally alive, consciousness.
Anand: Who awakens?
Rupert: Consciousness is always already awake. Or, more accurately, awakeness or awareness is one of its ‘qualities’. (Beingness and happiness are two of its other ‘qualities’.)
This consciousness ‘from time to time’ takes the shape of a thought which imagines itself (consciousness) to be limited to a particular body. It is as if you were to dress up as King Lear and by doing so forget that you are Anand.
With this thought, consciousness seems to forget its own unlimited nature and seems instead to become a separate entity, a person. Once this identification has taken place, most of our thoughts, feelings and activities come from and express this belief and feeling of being separate, localised and limited.
Because the happiness which is inherent in the knowing of our own being is lost when we forget our own being, the apparent person that results from this identification is in a perpetual state of unhappiness or seeking. In other words, it is the apparent person that is unhappy, that is seeking, that wishes to awaken to his or her true nature.
However, this ‘person’ is itself the apparent veiling of its own true identity (consciousness). The person cannot awaken, because it only exists as the thought that thinks it. How could a thought, an illusion, awaken? King Lear cannot awaken, because King Lear is simply a costume that Anand wears. Can a costume awaken?
You, Anand, are already awake. That is, you, consciousness, that is seeing these words, is already and always awake, only it has lost itself in objects and thereby seemingly forgotten its own self. All that is required is to ‘remember itself’ again.
What you call awakening (or remembering) is the clear seeing of your true nature and, as a result, the clear seeing of the non-existence of the separate person. That which is always awake is always awake. That which is not awake can never awaken.
Awaken to what?
To itself. In other words, what seems to be something called ‘awakening’ to the apparent person is for consciousness simply to be as it always is. Therefore, we might say that awakening is consciousness’s direct recognition or remembrance of its own being. Anand is the name that is given to that experience. You are that.
I might add here that what is sometimes referred to as ‘awakening’, ‘enlightenment’ or ‘understanding’, which is always sudden (but not necessarily instantaneous) is, in most cases, followed by what could be called ‘self-realisation’, in which the experience of the body, mind and world are progressively realised to be permeated by and saturated with the luminous, self-knowing ‘substance’ of consciousness.
As you know, your name was given to you to remind you that you are the happiness and the peace that is inherent in the knowing of your own being. This happiness, your true nature, is veiled when you fall asleep, that is, when you imagine yourself to be a person.
Remain awake as that which you eternally are: Anand.
With love,
Rupert
