StagesOfAwaking

Fantastic

Dharma Mindfullness

• Purpose of the Direct approach is to evoke a spiritual awakening of your essential nature, beyond the mind. This awakening fundamentally changes who you take yourself to be and how you experience reality.
• Stages of awakening:
  • Most of us take ourselves to be a separate someone. Localized in time and space and identified with the body and life history. We identify with a narrative, we take it to be who we really are. and perpetuate it. Most of us never question this identity.

• Spiritual awakening is the direct discovery that you are not who you take yourself to be. Instead you are the timeless presence, the always already awake awareness in which life unfolds. You're not an object, a thing, or a person. You are the eternal subject, which can never itself become objectified as a separate something or someone.
• Series of Stages (Sometimes collapsed to a single experience, but for most people happens over time)
• Not always in this order, but most common scenario

• 1st Stage: You realize that you are not your thought and feelings, you are the one that is HAVING these thoughts and feelings. (See this with basic mindfulness, which gives distance/space from the contents of your mind/experience) See the contents as occurring to you. "I am the meditator who is aware of my experience.

  This is still an identity as a separate someone. (ie: a meditator)

  Many meditators dont move beyond this.

• 2nd Stage: You begin to wonder about the nature of the meditator. Who is the one who is aware? Can I find it? Can I locate it, objectify it, pin it down ? Eventually you realize that the meditator simply cant be found. There is no separate someone meditating. Instead there is this limitless, boundryless openness, which is vivid, awake, aware and cant be objectified, pinned-down or localized in any way.

  Once you see this clearly the sense of being a separate someone starts to loosen its hold on you.

  At this stage, the practice is to keep returning and resting in the openness beyond the mind or identity.

  This realization is the sudden breakthrough they call Kensho in Zen The locus of your identity has shifted irrevocably: instead of being an object with a substantial existence in time and space (as you took yourself to be before), now you know yourself to be the ultimate subject of all objects. Pure awareness or subjectivity in which experience unfolds.

  Here again, many people are satisfied with this realization and their investigation stops here.

  However this realization is still dualistic. On the one hand, you are pure subjectivity – boundry-less, openness. And on the other hand, there are all these objects that come and go in the openness. And You still haven't penetrated into the non-dual nature of reality.

  Now that you have recognized the emptiness or non-objectivity of self, you can direct your awareness to the nature of reality. How solid and substantial are these seemingly separate objects in front of you and outside of you?

  Conventional view is that everyday objects are solid: but solidity itself is just an experience. And experience is made up of awareness. Without awareness there is no experience. Awareness is what makes experience possible. If you look closely, at the nature of your experience, you will see that there is no reality that can be known, beyond you awareness of it.

• 3rd state: Emptiness. A world that exists for you – the only world that you can know – is your experience of it, which is made of awareness. That which is looking and that which is looked at, are both nothing but awareness. In this recognition duality resolves into the seamlessness of subject and object; self and other.

  Inside and outside. Gazing with shear awareness into shear awareness.

  this is the non-duality to which all the great teachings and teachers point to.

  This recognition cuts through any remaining sense of separation. There is just this, one without a second, expressing itself in this multiplicity of forms.

  Its all just waves arising and falling on the ocean of being. Once you realize you;re the ocean, you are no longer lost in the drama of being a separate wave arising and passing.