Week #8: Bridging the (apparent) Gap

When we first start off exploring our true nature, we take ourselves to be a person who is identified with her/his thoughts, sensations and experiences, i.e., we take ourselves to be the felt, mind-created, seemingly separate sense-of-self. Then, we experience the felt-sense of Awareness – the stillness, silence and peaceful expansion of awareness – and we begin to accept the reality of awareness as our sense-of-self. But it appears that awareness “comes and goes,” and our seemingly separate sense-of-self comes back into the foreground of our life, and the sense-of-self-as-awareness recedes into the background, and there appears to be a gap.

The gap can produce conflict, e.g., when a person dumps on you with an inconsiderate or rude comment, you blow up at them and then say to yourself: “Why did I just blow up in anger at that person? I should have been able to deal with his inconsiderate comments with equanimity!” Can you see that, in this statement to yourself, you are sustaining an identity – a pre-defined sense-of-self? That sense-of-self takes the inconsiderate comment personally. This can only happen if thought produces a story of how ‘you’ are being hurt (insulted, demeaned, etc.) by these words, and that this person should not have made these comments to you (you didn’t deserve it, etc.). Then comes your reaction, which is based on another story of ‘you,’ and you may retaliate with anger or slink off into a corner and hide.

This whole scenario played out according to conditioned thought structures of perception, interpretation and reaction; there was a habitual identification with (belief in) these thought structures as ‘you.’ Examine these thought structures and the feelings they produce. They are there now only because of habit and, most likely, were created to protect a story-based sense-of-self of the past. Acknowledge that you are still identifying with that sense-of-self who feels she needs to protect herself, or still feels not-enough. Why acknowledge it? Because it’s obviously already there, and it’s still wreaking havoc in your life! Acknowledge that there are story-based thought structures that produce a sense-of-self that feels not-enough, or incomplete, or separate, or isolated, or mad at the world, or a victim, or a know-it-all, or who is ‘different’ – whatever the conditioned story is. Acknowledge with gratitude of clear-seeing that each story-based sense-of-self came into existence as thought’s (mind’s, ego’s) way of helping you to survive in the world! And acknowledge that, when seen from the perspective of awareness, of Presence, these apparently real and solid senses-of-self are, in fact, only thought structures, without any substance of their own apart from what you feed them when you identify with them as ‘you.’

Acknowledge them, and in the spaciousness of awareness (with equanimity), allow them to dissipate and dissolve. Or, you could take this thought-created self into you with compassion, absorbing it completely with your acceptance, thus neutralizing its energetic need for an apparently separate existence. Allow the felt-sense of awareness to be more and more your identified-with sense-of-self – a sense-of-self that is here and now, not pre-defined and conditioned by past stories. And the next time someone dumps on you with inconsiderate or demeaning comments and you feel the conditioned reaction rising up, shift your focus immediately into awareness and see the lie of the stories of ‘you’ of the past and feel the Truth of you, now. And watch the supposed ‘gap’ gradually dissolve!

"A person's true life is the way in which she puts off the lie imposed by others on her. This is a matter of being, and not of becoming. The lie can not become the truth; the personality cannot become your soul. And striving towards the truth is nothing but creating more confusion. The truth has not to be achieved. It cannot be achieved, it is already the case. Only the lie has to be dropped. Recognize the fact that, as you are, you are a lie. Manipulated, cultivated by others. Striving after truth is a distraction and a postponement. It is the lie’s way to hide. See the lie, look deep into the lie of your personality. Because to see the lie is to cease the lie. No longer to lie is to seek no more for any truth – there is no need. The moment the lie disappears, truth is there in all its beauty and radiance. In the seeing of the lie it disappears, and what is left is the truth."
–  Osho Zen Tarot