Is it possible to experience reality as it is outside of your perception and independently of your model of reality?
No.
We can experience reality as it is and perceive it through the model.
- Since the true nature of mind is also the true nature of all phenomena,
- and since consciousness and phenomena are mutually conditional as well as interdependently co-arising,
- we can have any experience of phenomena with Awake Awareness – simultaneously.
We can experience any thought, emotion or sensation and integrate Awake Awareness simultaneously with whatever arises, regardless of circumstances or events.
We can’t prevent the process of illusion-creating when we’re watching a show, reading a book or listening to music. We can observe ourselves doing it simultaneously with experiencing Awake Awareness.
Instead, we become heavily invested in our systems and groups, with an added catch. If something is “true”, then it must be OK to have a “self” that believes it.
Without such a concept of “self”, we can be much more fluid in in our approach to anything. The reality we’re describing also appears more fluid in the process.
It’s not that the individuated self model is ‘wrong’, with its emphasis on integrating all aspects of consciousness, and evolving with expanded awareness, perception and abilities. However, it maintains the dualistic polarity between ‘self’ and ‘other’, between ‘self’ and ‘world’, between ‘truth’ and ‘heresy’, one worldview and another, and the polarization between one group and another. Again, any conceptual understanding creates a metaphysical construct in the reality being perceived, which will be subject to all the problems of monism or dualism in its worldview.
The ‘individuated and transformed self’ model appears to be absolutely necessary for energy and karmic clearing, physical and psychological healing, and deconditioning. This process is sometimes about as subtle as blasting crud off the walls with a fire hose.
Along the way, there’s also a general, incremental and progressive feeling of lightness, helped also by the progressive entrainment into more beneficial emotional and physiological states. All of this is the massive, ongoing work required for transformation, along with uncomfortable self-honesty. This path tends to reinforce the self-image of an ‘initiate’ or an ‘evolved and transformed being’. Many groups will use terms like ‘graduate’ or ‘alumni’ that also subtly reinforce a sense of self.
It is one, very subtle, way in which the traditions that maintain belief in an individuated, evolving, permanent ‘self’ tend to differ from ‘selfless’ traditions like Buddhism. Seeing through the delusion of ‘self-as-thing’, and keeping a consistent (preferably continuous) recognition of Spacious Awareness, is how such traditions define ‘enlightenment’.
There is a functional Middle Way between ‘selfless, headless’ and ‘individuated and evolving self’. We can experience ourselves as a constantly-changing process, a oerception-processing wave, an open-system being in a constant process of energy and information exchange with our environment, which is also a constantly-changing process.
After all, we do have to function in the circumstances and situations of our lives, so (I’m just guessing ) it may be useful to recognize the true nature of the self and of our relationship to the phenomenal world.
© Malcolm Fraser 2022. All rights reserved.
