Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Awake or Asleep?

Are you awake or asleep? Of course I mean in the mystical sense. What is it to be awake, or asleep? And how can we tell? And if we're asleep, how can we wake up?

To be awake is to be aware. To be aware is to be in and beyond consciousness. If we are aware of the diversity that is the Cosmos, then we are in consciousness. If we are simply awareness itself, then we are beyond consciousness. If awareness itself, we are both conscious, and unconscious, and yet neither conscious, nor unconscious.
What does this mean spiritually, or mystically? To be asleep in the mystical sense is to be ignorant, and further, what we experience within consciousness is a mere dream of our own making. What is the difference between experiencing consciousness as in a dream, and being aware in conciousness as awake? The difference is in identification. What do you identify yourself with? Do you identify with the things of consciousness, including body and mind, as well as the world? Or do you identify yourself with something else, like awareness Itself?
Consciousness will be there, but this may either be our dream, or consciousness in awareness, which is a display of the very manifestations of the Real. When we know the Self, and have abnegated ourselves, then we will be aware, awake. Otherwise, we will be in a dream. This is not to say that the world is unreal, though in the absolute sense it is, because only God is Real, as He is pure Being, and all else is inference only. We project onto consciousness our inferences, and our thoughts, or mentality, and this becomes our world. And, with personal, or soulish (selfish) identification with the things perceived in consciousness, we have our dream.

What awakens us is gnosis, or direct knowledge, perceived without the mediation of the rational mind, though perhaps occuring in intellect/mind/nous. The means of gnosis may vary widely, but such knowings are the means of waking up, because we thenceforth become aware, and we can observe consciousness as such, without identifying with the things of consciousness. Why is this so important? Because, things considered apart from their Source, become an abstraction, and unreal, insofar as these things are existent in and as Being.

Of course, this is why for us to awaken to Pure Being, even the I Am, is to awaken fully, because we will be completely aware of what Is, identifying only with That, and not with the things contingently dependent thereon for existence.

It is in this way that we are awakened, seeing all things clearly as they are and have their existence in the Real. Any thing less, considered as independent from the Source Who is Being, is to continue on in our slumber.


Peace.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Indeed. For all that which is to be experienced is made available by the infinite that is god- Through the all that is the as the consciousness of god, space and matter manifest.

It is of our own design, what we perceive and how we perceive these things dictates how we think about them and those thoughts become our behavior, attracting events, people and lessons to us.

If we ignore the place we have in this creation, we will still be creators, but blind to our dictates and responsibilities to self. As we will begin to blame our external situation on everything else, while this only feeds the internal problem of denial and avoidance. WE MUST SEE beyond what we think, beyond what we want to hear and beyond what we would like to see, to THAT WHICH IS!

Only then, from sound judgment of the subjective self, in objective awareness of our relationship to all else within our realm of consciousness and experience, can we become awakened co-creators of the dream-world around us. Then we shall see there is no such thing as objectivity, and nothing can be written off as coincidence.

Anonymous said...

Only through Gnosis we can really be awaken. The world, as Jesus said, is only a corpse. You have to see with the "nous" or spiritual mind. What we considered reality is nothing but a bunch of electrical and chemical reactions inside our brains. Shut down those reactions and we either die or become catatonic. Can we overwrite our brains? Can we see with a vision that does not depend on our physical eyes or a brain to interpret? According to Jesus in The Gospel of Mary, you see through the nous or mind which lives between the soul and the spirit. It most be such a hard thing to do that some of the disciples didn't even believed Mary(Magdalene) could do it. Plus Jesus also mentioned that after having experienced such a vision you will "be troubled" and "grieve a great deal". So it seems that the real reality is something very hard for us human to handle being so used to have our brains showing us only what we want to see, so to speak. Until we put on "the perfect person" everything remains in the world of speculation.

Leon said...

Thank you, Yangpile, Gnostic Woman, and Alena.

Your comments are much appreciated.


God bless you all.