I'm Beside Myself

How can you ever die? If you died, where would you be and what would you be doing? What do you suppose your first thought will be when you're dead? "Now you've done it. Y'up and died!" Or maybe, "So this is what it's like to be dead?" Now, just who is thinking these thoughts? If you are at all conscious of being dead, you must not be dead. If you are totally unconscious, completely unaware that you're dead, then you must not be there at all. When consciousness is there, then I am there. If consciousness is not there, I am not there. I must be consciousness - the one thing that can never die. Sure you're going to lose your body, and your mind (if you haven't already), but who needs a body and mind to be alive? Those are just the vehicles we use to travel around the physical plane in. Your personal mind, the intellect, isn't the mind. It's the interpreter of The Mind, your spiritual consciousness. The one that never sleeps, pauses, or switches off.

Imagine a man who spent his whole existance in a car. He thought the car was his body. He called the car "me". One morning he lost control of the car and ran it into a pole. It was totaled and the engine was . . . dead! You happen upon him and he's weaping, still strapped in the driver's seat. "Are you alright," you ask? "No I'm not alright! Can't you see I'm dead!"

Well, this silly person will need to be shown how to open the door and get out of his vehicle. Some equally silly people are convinced that their human form is "me" and identify with it in the same manner. But your body is only a vehicle you ride around in. You even say "my body" the same way you say "my car". Who is this who calls it "my body"? Someone who isn't the body, but is using the body. My car, my body. What about the intellect, the personality and all our thoughts and emotions that we call "my mind"? Who is saying, "my mind"? Someone who isn't the mind, but is using the mind. The mind belongs to you, but who are you? Are you spirit? Spirit as in, some deeper self beyond the intellect and personality? Don't you also say, "my spirit"? Who is saying that? Is there an even deeper identity that is observing the spirit and commenting on whether it is heavy or joyful, or whatever?

My car. My body. My mind. My spirit. Who is this observer?

There is a Watcher behind all things. After you have looked at all levels of self-awareness from the outside, walked away from the wreckage and said, "I am not a car. I am not a body. I am not a mind. I am not a spirit. I have a spirit, but I am not a spirit", then you must ask, "Who is this Watcher who has no eyes? Who is the thinker who has no intellect? Who is this being that is invisible, yet alive?" All things have passed away. Anything that you could label as yours is now part of the scenery. All that's here watching and listening is pure awareness. The one who sees, can never be seen. If all that the Watcher created was suddenly uncreated, awareness of the nothingness would still be. You would still be. You have never been separated from the eternal Watcher. You have replaced full awareness with the local awareness of your human awareness. It's as if you were standing on a hill looking out to the horizon all around you and suddenly a stone building fell on you and you were trapped inside. A tiny light broke though the wall from a small hole in the stone. You looked through the hole and saw a spot of blue sky. This is what it's like being trapped inside a human form. The intellect is as much a stone barrier as the body. With most of our awareness occupied with form, senses and the conditioning of human identity, we can no longer see the infinite Self that we once identified with. Someone who was born inside this stone fortress with only a hint of what lay outside, would believe that reality was a stifling cell with no escape. One might believe that the blue sky and vast expanse of heaven was only attainable after death.

This stone body and mind with it's false identity was made to be torn down. Humans are so deep in the trance Adam fell into, they only detach from their vehicles in their dreams. Upon awaking, they declare that the dream wasn't real, and now they see the world as it is. Mesmerized with being human, they even foresee their human form wandering around the heaven or hell they have imagined. They picture their god in human form, and many expect to shake the hand of Jesus in the afterlife.

The body is going to be wrecked along the highway in time. The life force will leave it and it will no longer be you. If you think it is you, you believe it is possible, in fact, inevitable that you will die. You believe that when the body is dead, your stone cell will be dismantled and you can fly away to the horizon. But what if you realize that this body is just your car?

With awareness of the true Self, you can dismantle the illusion of the physical self, while you are still in this body. You must unlearn lifetimes of conditioning that have made your self awareness solid and indisputable. We believe the lie of the senses. Our eyes tell us that we are sitting in this chair, that our skin is a certain color and that we are indeed good-looking. Our fingtips tell us that we are solid, the table and chair are even more solid, and that this is an indication that what we sense is real. Our eyes are only cameras that transfer energy to our brain and change the energy signals into colors and shapes. If our eyes were the eyes of an insect, we would see a totally different world. Would the world have changed? Or just our perception of it? If we were blind, would the energy of the world disappear, or just the colors? The energy is outside our bodies, but the colors are created inside our mind.

The same is true of animation and the life behind it. The universe is saturated with life. Our animated bodies are containers of life. They are batteries that become charged, wear down and discharge. What sets you free from this cycle is the realization that you are the juice in the battery, not the battery. So much imagery was concocted to illustrate this. Religious types see the soul rising from the dead form and joining God in heaven. Philosophical types see the spirit falling like a raindrop into the ocean of consciousness. The important ingredient in a true appraisal is, that life is going on eternally without any break that might be called death. The consciousness that you are now, is the same consciousness that is universal - everywhere at once. If we don't grasp this, it's because we are looking at the wall of our created identity and can't see beyond it. Those who see beyond the local self, usually see it as "out there". Very few are wise enough to comprehend that "out there" is really "in here" and the shell of the local self doesn't even exist. We are the consciousness that fills the universe, because there is only one consciousness. A tiny portion of it spills out of your human self and my human self, but this is only two strands of a web of awareness that is our true self. In a previous metaphor, we are not the raindrop, we are the ocean that occasionally appears as a raindrop. In the religious metaphor, the soul does not rejoin with God, the illusion that we were ever separate from God, dies when our identity as mind and body die.

This powerful ego-identity that says, "What about me?" is not who we are. It's powerful enough to want to keep it's position and will do anything, say anything and believe the stupidest doctrine, to keep from being deposed. It was the ego that said it was blasphemy to identify with God. The Pharisees were ego maniacs. It was Jesus who said, "I and the Father are one". Today, people who think of themselves as a beloved disciple, sound just like the Pharisees when they say, "These New Age people think they are God. Blasphemers!" Isn't the blasphemy believing you are separate from God? That makes God less than God. Isn't it another ego trip to believe God is the all-in-all, but I'm special, cause I'm outside of God? We have no problem saying we are Love and Love is God, but you can't say we are God. Who cares if you call Life "God" or "Awareness" or "Shirley"? We are Life. We are not some temporal container of it. Therefore, we are all God, we are Awareness, we are the wholeness that includes everything. Did you really hear me? We are not a small portion of wholeness. Wholeness is wholeness and that's it! There are no fragments of wholeness.

How do we destroy this temple that blocks our awareness of the Eternal Being that we are? In my quiet time, along with other ponderings, I have an ongoing mission to spend just a few seconds forgetting who I am. Vin, I mean. I want to have amnesia for just a moment. In that moment the 49 year old Italian son of Anthony, with a history of accomplishments and accumulations will be gone from my awareness and I will be who I am. In fact, there won't even be a "who". I will simply be I AM. Here there is no body, intellect, emotions, feelings of worth, conditioned reactions or past and future dreams. I would just BE. It has taught me just how deeply rooted the imposter is. Not for a tenth of a second can I separate from the human I have created (with a little help from my friends). I see the futility of adding knowledge to this creature so that it can become even more wise in it's own thinking. I realize that to be free of the self that is born and then dies, I need not look for the clues to my true identity. I must instead unlearn who I have become. If I dismantle the stone building of human personality, I won't need to look for the universe that surrounds me. It didn't go anywhere, so I don't need to find it. Does the phrase, "Through a glass darkly" make sense now? I only need to take the filters off my eyes to see clearly. The filters are . . . social and religious conditioning . . . worship of things, positions and usurped powers . . . the sensual reality of the physical realm . . . conjured up images of diety, heaven and hell . . . the illusion of separation between me and you, you and God. There are volumes of filters we look through. It's no wonder we can't see the sky. We can't see past our noses.

As with all matters, the first step in being free from the illusion, is to realize it's an illusion. You now have the awareness that your Self isn't a ghost living in your body, but a ghost that fills infinity. You now know that your spirit is boundless and fathomless as empty space and is not tied to your personal self. With that awareness, the mortar (mortal?) in the stone walls is already turning to sand. With the coming wind, the walls will come down. You are reading this because you desire to know your true Self. That desire will dislodge the filters and show you your limitless being. Be patient. Don't despise the character you are playing. Just knowing you are an actor will give you new freedom to play your role with bravado and finese. Relax in your role and don't be critical of your behavior, capacities or any of your costumes and props (like your body and mind). I may take a very long time to unlearn all the error we've been programmed with.We have been on this stage so long that poor Hamlet believes it it all real and he will actually have to die. You will not die, even though the theater burn down with you in it. You are the Watcher who is behind Hamlet's eyes and behind the camera and who wrote the script and produced the play. You are eternally alive because you are Consciousness itself.

Well, "the world's a stage" is a worn out cliche, but only because it is true. The ego made us forget the reality by making our characters and props seem so real. The ego places more value on nouns and less on verbs. Much of our error in thinking stems from perceiving God as a noun, as a being. God is a verb. God is Being. A being can be separate from other beings. A state of being can be shared by all. When we know God as the life force, we aren't so afraid of being that which God is. Consciousness and Being are the same. If you have no doubt that Being is eternal and that you are realizing that state of Being is yours, you can enjoy eternal life now. What foolishness to ever think that eternity could somehow begin when certain requirements are met. Or did you know eternal life was always here, but you would somehow miss out on it? How would you miss it? You would have to sleep through it, and then you wouldn't know you missed it. Those who have had a near-death-experience all tell of a seemless journey from this plane to the next without a pause in awareness. They report, "I was still 'me' and I knew my body was dead and I was not."

The one who is afraid of dying is the ego. Realizing that we have an empty shell dictating it's fears to us, gives us the authority to ignore the ranting and train our focus on the newly discovered self, the Watcher. Only through neglect will the ego shrivel up. Only with unattachment to the old school will the rules no longer apply. The old model of a decaying world must be replaced by a new model of an undying world poputated by one everlasting Being. The ego may die with the body, or we may do it in while still in the body. Then we can enjoy the rest of our performance on earth looking at our character from the outside. Unattached to the thoughts and emotions, we need not feel injured by them. Unattached to our form and personality, we don't have to follow them to the grave. Knowing you are a spirit isn't enough. You must detach from all that isn't you to see the world and everything in it as a place for you to BE. A place where you are free of the fear of loss. The ultimate loss, death, has no hold on you because if it can die, it isn't you. You are the eternal Watcher . . . now.

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