The Final Jolt

We believe we're separate creatures, and we know the creature's existence is threatened every moment. What will death bring? We don't know, so we latch onto beliefs and repeat those beliefs as a mantra whenever the subject of death passes through our awareness: We will continue on forever in the Happy Hunting Ground, in Paradise, in Heaven or our molecules will gracefully disperse back into the cosmic soup or we will slip placidly into the comforting oblivion of dreamless sleep. But those beliefs don't really eliminate the underlying fear; they merely provide distraction, like sticking our fingers in our ears and singing or talking loudly when we don't want to hear something someone is saying to us.

We believe ourselves to be individual human beings, irrevocably separate from whatever created us and from other human beings. No matter how close we get with another person, we never approach absolute knowing. And we feel even more not-one with whatever created us.

Our self-beliefs for example, that the self is a separate entity; is somehow dependent on a body that was born and is going to die; is or has an individual consciousness; is limited, changing, vulnerable, uncertain cause psychological turmoil and suffering. Like the amputee's phantom limb pain, it is phantom-self pain. Panic attacks (fear of dying or going insane, which reflect the fear of losing the phantom self) and clinical depression (based on the conviction that something that's necessary to our happiness is not possible to attain) are extreme examples.

Have you ever stopped to wonder how it is that we know we're conscious? Our self-consciousness indicates a mirroring effect that's already taking place in the mind. It's as if there's one part of us looking outward and another part of us that's looking backward, aware of the part that's looking outward. But what does that backward-looking part of us see? Nothing -- no entity, no Wizard of Oz making things happen -- an empty, boundless, changeless, aware non-space.

We have a feeling of what we are. Sure, that's our bike, our car, our toes, and so on, but we feel we're essentially something deeper than those things. We feel that we're what's aware -- aware of external things but also of inner things such as thoughts and feelings -- and also, somehow, mysteriously self-aware.

We believe mightily that we're a separate, isolated entity attempting to know an unknown self -- as if we needed to look into a reflection of our eyes and, in that mirror image, see a reflection back into our "real eye." The hang-up is that we can't conceive of direct seeing without an intermediary. We can't conceive of seeing without a separate seer doing the seeing. We can't conceive of our self as not being a separate seer. How do we get beyond this phantom-seer pain?

Looking for the self, we need to notice what we're looking at (i.e., what we're aware of) and continue looking at it until we see, intuitively, what its relationship is to us. To do this systematically, we begin with more exterior objects like bikes, cars and toes and move inward to thoughts, feelings, and beyond. Doing occasional credo exercises to identify our current beliefs about what we are, or what we become identified with, provides us with ongoing material for investigation. All the while, we compare what we're looking at to the feeling of what we really are: that which is aware, which we sense (intuit) from the mirroring aspect of awareness itself.

Letting go of faulty self-beliefs may cause some jolts, but if we persist we will get down to a final faulty self-belief and a final jolt will leave us with a recognition of direct seeing and absolute knowing.

~ From an article by Art Ticknor