The question was, "Where am I, the true me? Am I my body?" It was not a question in words.
What came of this was a wonderful and terrible time of great awareness. But mostly it was wonderful. I became very aware. In so doing, I "felt" where the real me was--not my body, not my mind, not my thinking. I was a speck located near what eastern religious types call the third eye. And this speck had little but the capacity for questions, watchful awareness, understanding (belief) and awe.
As I experienced the beingness of this speck of nothingness, I became an observer of my thinking, which went on without any active participation on my part--just watching with occasional questions. The thinking had mostly to do with memories of experiences. The questions were generally of the sort, "Why am I remembering THAT?" The answers came instantly, again not from me. They were such complete answers that there was no question about their truth.
This experience of awareness lasted for about a half hour.
I learned how I had once been a very aware child. I learned about the personal trauma that set me on my wrong path. I learned about judgment's wrongness and how hate crept into me as a consequence of judgment, displacing the simple love that children naturally know, which love we must return to as adults or perish because of our hate.
I learned that this is a divine law,"You become what you hate." I learned that when we are ready to abandon judgment, we can come back to being ourselves...
I learned that this return to self is done layer-by-layer, like peeling an onion. There may be many layers. It is not a thing that can be accomplished by hard work, either. Hard work only COMPENSATES for failure to allow the real work to be done by God's leading, giving only an illusion, a shadow...
The experience ended somewhat slowly as I saw how, with awareness, one can truly know what to do every day of one's life. How decisions become unnecessary, because with sufficient awareness, there really is nothing to decide. And here I made a mistake that cost me my continued awareness at this wonderful level: I thought that the wonderful awareness was by itself all that I needed--I thought that in some sense I had "arrived."
No, awareness by itself is not sufficient.
One must come to love the Source of this awareness, Itself.
Without such love, one is always susceptible to accepting lies, however subtle, and these lies cut one off from Truth, shutting down awareness.
So freedom is merely the capacity to will one's actions to be aligned with the Divine plan because of one's love for the Creator and His wisdom. We are free to express love for our Creator by doing His will, or not. That is the only choice.
C.N., October, 27, 2002
