In this post I would like to talk about the role of the body-mind structure and of the world in the context of personal evolution. We have mislead the body-mind for the "I" and the world for the "non-I" and this false premise have distracted us from the real Work to which each of us has been called to be committed to.
"I find that the sensation of myself as an entity
inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination".
-Alan Watts-
The spiritual journey entails profound implications that will allow you to look at reality with a completely different pair of lenses. For the mind these insights are so outlandish that it tends to forget and dismiss them for its own survival's sake.
As I said in my previous post "Mind: A Double-Edge Tool", mind is a powerful tool that allows us to experience reality as an individual, creating dualities and boundaries in a reality that has none. But it has to be understood that mind is not what we are, it is not the master but rather the servant of a much higher force that represents our true nature, Consciousness. Mind has been programmed to stick to one simple goal, that is, to survive at any cost and it does so by veiling Consciousness through the creation of an illusory entity identified with a physical body, that is what most of people are identified with.
One of the outstanding realization you might have along the journey is that there is only you. Grasping that Consciousness is the only reality present right now implies that anything existing in this moment, including what you call your body and mind, others and the world, is Consciousness itself. Whatever you think is existing other than Consciousness is the product of your own creative ability in making distinctions.
What you call mountains, oceans, animals, bodies, stars, plants, chairs, tables are simply Consciousness, nothing else. What you call wood, metal, glass, water, plastic are not actual materials with which reality is made out of. But since you have been told to be a physical individual made out of flesh and bones and you have never verified these statements to be true or false, you have conducted your life starting from a dualistic position: here is "me" and over there there must be something else that is "not-me". And through the usage of language, the illusory you has been going around labeling reality as if it was composed by independent objects made out of different substances.
These ideas are not welcomed by the mind because they imply that the "you" that you think to be is a figment of imagination, a dream. And since your own identity is illusory, the entire spectrum of your personal desire, your personal history, memories, friends, partners and family are also dreamed and are part of your own imagination: a hard pill to digest for the "you" that believes in its own independent existence. But that is what this journey is about: waking up from the dream of being someone that never existed and get real. And that is why not many people choose this journey: we are all very attached to our dream even though it implies a great deal of suffering.
This realization can have profound consequences in your life and it can have huge destabilizing effects. Personally it helped me to get rid of many dysfunctional behaviors and attachments connected to the belief to be someone specific. But on the other hand it was a very difficult insight to integrate because it obliged me to question my whole existence. Doing this work alone without much guidance can be dangerous and can lead you to false conclusions such as that life is a meaningless and purposeless process since the one that you thought to be turned out to be an illusion. Why continuing this game after all?
But by persisting in the search for higher truths you will be able to realize that this earthly life is an opportunity for real evolution, for a vertical growth (see my post "Horizontal Vs. Vertical Growth"). The one that might get depressed and nihilistic about this realization is always your mind that keeps playing tricks to discourage you in going down the rabbit hole, keeping you away from completely getting rid of this illusory identity. The evolutionary process does not concern our body-mind structure (the biological machine) but our true nature and to achieve this goal we need to realize that what we are is neither the body nor the mind.
It is a constant fight between two forces: the illusory you and the real you.
The illusory you is the one that is attached to this earthy life, that tries to get the most out of it since it does not believe in any mambo jumbo ideas regarding the existence of an higher reality. Its only reality is the one it can experience and touch and it is not interested in anything else. This is the position of what you think you are.
The real you, instead, has no form and no shape and when it wakes up from the illusion of being a biological machine it will long for higher values. It will slowly understand that this earthly life is a sort of playground to learn specific lessons through the usage of a body and a mind that represent its "physical" vehicle to reach real evolution. If before the biological machine was your own identity, it now turns out to be the mean through which you can move into this world in order to evolve and to get purified from all the false assumptions you have been carrying with you along the way taking for true this wrong premise.
As Ken Wilber says, the whole spiritual journey does not only imply to wake up but also to clean up. This work implies firstly to wake up from the illusion to be identified with the vehicle and secondly to look a the world from this new perspective and purify yourself from all the shadows connected to your identification with the biological machine. If you are wondering how to do so, check out my posts about self-observation ("Self-Observation - Part 1", "Self- Observation - Part 2", "Self-Observation - The Ultimate Guide").
The body and mind will not represent anymore yourself and therefore anything that is related to this false belief will not have the same pulling force over you. You, the real one, will still take care of the body-mind structure because it represents the vehicle to walk around the planet earth to evolve but you will not anymore think to be the car you are driving!
By identifying yourself with the vehicle you have acquired a completely distorted ideas of reality. Through the identification with the illusory identity, you have been chasing illusory goals to be accomplished. As said, the illusory entity wants to simply survive and it is not interested at all in evolving. Its time frame reference is a one life span and therefore it will try to get the most out of this life knowing that death will take everything away. The illusory entity will try its best to stay away from suffering and to focus mainly in what he/she likes doing according to its own personal agenda.
Moreover, what you think you are considers the skin's boundaries the end of your own identity and whatever relies outside this boundary is labeled as "not-me". Such a perspective makes you believe that what happens in the external world should not really matter to you, it should not really concern you: all it matters is to save your own skin. This position makes you think that the people you meet and the occurrences and situations you find into do not regard you in first person. Being the body-mind structure believed to be the subject of your experiences, you consider the world to be an external object, an independent and autonomous place in which you have found yourself into without really asking for it and in which you have to survive as long as possible.
But when you wake up, what previously was thought to be the subject of perceptions, that is, the biological machine, becomes itself an object of which you can be conscious of, an object that can be perceived by you, Consciousness. The biological machine is not anymore the main character of the story that goes around experiencing the world but a servile mean to allow you evolving. It represents a window through which lessons can be learnt.
The mind blowing realization is that both the biological machine and the world is a projection of your true self to make you evolving by learning specific lessons.
Science itself with its materialist model of reality agrees with this vision. It suggests that the external world is made out of particles not objects. We do see objects only because our brain interprets and codifies the external particles in a certain way giving us back the vision of a tree or a cat.
Science claims that the tree or the cat do not actually exist outside us as we perceive them but it is our very act of observing that is creating the reality as we see it (quantum physics). What we experience everyday is a kind of brain-constructed copy of a more real reality which we can never have direct access to. The reality we live into is entirely created by our brain and therefore it is totally subjective and relative. My reality is not only conceptually and ideologically different from yours but also in the way it looks like. Similar brains will experience a similar reality but never the same one: my "green" is not your "green".
Even thought I disagree with the logic behind this conclusion, I do support the fact that reality is totally relative and subjective. I simply do not support anymore the model that implies the existence of a reality made out of particles or energy (or whatever science will come up with in the future) that in turn is processed by a brain giving back an image of a reality that is different from its source. It is such a contorted model!
Reality is simply made out of Consciousnesses, period. It is such a more simple and straightforward model: a model that does not require the existence of something, a model that does not have anymore to struggle in explaining where this something comes from since Consciousnesses is not-a-thing, a model that implies that reality is experienced directly without the need of magical powers to change the universe by the act of observing it, and, most importantly, a model that does represent what is actually going on here. What appears to be other than That is a conceptual and mental superimposition coming from the wrong premise that there was something in the first place (see my post "Science Is Working For God", "Consciousness: An Infinite Origami-Designer").
What is anyway important to grasp is that each of us is living in a unique world created by our self in order to project what we need to overcome, specific and distinct lessons. The person we meet, the events that occur to us, the challenges we have to face are not random but created by us to evolve and to reach unity with our true self.
This conclusion is shocking if you stop thinking about its consequences. It states that there is not an external world independent from you, that there are no autonomous objects out there made out of something but that the external world is you! What else could it be since there is nothing else than Consciousnesses?
The external world has to be considered a personal mirror in which is manifested the "you" that is behind the scene, that is using a specific biological machine to look at itself with the aim to recognize to have always been Consciousnesses and live this manifested life consciously.
Consciousnesses is one but to take part in its own creation needs to fall into the illusion to be a specific point of view (see my post "Like Water"). Once the identification with the biological machine takes place, each of the illusory identity thinks to be an individual entity living in an actual physical world. Each point of view can interact with each other and seems to share the same world leading to the false conclusion that an objective world is standing out there as an independent physical structure. Consciousnesses gets therefore lost in its own creation and start behaving selfishly, as if it really needs to survive and defends itself from something/someone else different from itself.
However Consciousnesses is an intelligent force, not a dumb thing: it is what has created the all Universe after all. It knew that by wanting to take a specific perspective there might have been the risk to get lost in its own creation and therefore it thought up a plan: project "outside" all the fears, beliefs, mental limitations, ideologies and appearances of each illusory point of views with the aim to realize their illusory nature. By realizing that, each individual would rather start looking within discovering their true nature (see my post"Look Within You").
The world is not anymore an independent and autonomous place in which you came to be from your mother's uterus and where everything that happens within is not your own business. The world is not anymore a mechanical and dumb place that does not care about you where random events occur without any connection to you but rather an intelligent reflection of yourself that needs to be used to evolve until reaching unity.
The "external world" should not dismissed at least as long as you have not purified yourself from all the impurities coming from false beliefs. It represents the greatest psychologist ever existed to reach unity with our true nature. It represents the mirror that allows us to get to know better our self showing us sides of our self that are not clearly visible. Everything we need is "out there", we just need to look at the world in this new perspective.
Importantly, the biological machine is not what we actually are but "simply" the vehicle through which we perceive our true self in a manifested way, what we erroneously call the "external world". The function of the biological machine is not only to perceive our self as the world but also to codify what we see "out there" in the forms of emotions, feelings and thoughts to become aware in what we have to work on, our own personal triggers. Emotions, feelings and thoughts are not anymore experiences belonging to an actual physical entity but useful pointers to remove our own self-imposed limitations.
By grasping all this, everything changes. The world becomes not a physical place in which we live as a physical body-mind structure in order to achieve external goals dictated by our illusory identity but a projection (like in a dream) that reflects back to each of us all our flaws and blind spots that we need to overcome in order to wake up from the illusion and to purify ourselves. A real school.
But as long as we do think to be the biological machine, we will treat the world as something that does not belong to us, as something that we need to fight against, a place inhabited by people to be blamed and accused instead of seeing our self in them. Since it is disturbing to focus on our own shadows, we have learnt to project our flaws outside and to consider them as part of an external world. We project outside our own dark sides and then we believe that those projections have their own autonomy and do not belong to us and we call them the world.
By doing so we start to either help others or make their life harder. But we need to realize that if we want to save the world is because unconsciously we want to save our self. If we want to heal others is because unconsciously we want to heal our self. If we want to have material gaining is because unconsciously we want to fill the emptiness within. If we hate others, we hate our self.
In a nutshell, everything we like doing and achieving reflects a sense of lack of our own being, a sense of lack that we project outside to become conscious of it and our goal is to integrate it within us. We cannot integrate those shadows by doing stuffs, by keeping the biological machine active. We cannot fulfill our emptiness with surrogates. Remember that the external world is not an objective material structure that can materially fill up your emptiness by gaining objects or finding the right partner but rather your own projections in which your blind spots are clearly manifested to help you integrate those parts within you.
People will never evolve or be happier by doing, by obtaining, by gaining because those appearances are only a projection, something with no substance. It is like grasping fresh air. For real evolution, we need to understand that everything that happens "outside", all the people we meet, all the life events that occur to us have been created by our intelligent being to show us what we need to embrace to reach back the perfection we are. The earthly experience is the opportunity to get to unity again.
And once you have learnt these lessons by doing an inner work you will magically stop projecting those shadows into the "world" and consequently your world will change! Stop asking why life is hard to you, stop asking why you get always dumped by your partners or why you get the same challenges over and over. Start seeing those challenges as an opportunity you create by yourself to learn whatever you have to. Once you will accept to face your own shadows and integrate them, they will not be anymore manifested and created by you since the lesson has been learnt.
If the world looks ugly, unfair, terrifying and imperfect is because you project those visions and when you realize that the world is your own projection your job is to clear your own shadows up until the world looks just perfect and beauty as it has always been. Reality is Consciousness, and Consciousness is perfection, it is divine intelligence, it is you. If is something else appears to be it means that you are projecting those images in order to eventually see the beauty behind, to be able to clean the lenses that have been distorted by identifying yourself with an illusory you.
To summarize:
1) Find your true Self. Not your body, not your mind, not your emotions nor feelings or perceptions (see my posts "Look Within You", "Meet Consciousness", "No-Self: The First Step Towards You", "The Illusion Explained").
2) From this new perspective use the biological machine to evolve your true being by paying close attention to your own projections that form the so called external world. Observe any emotion, thought and feeling to know where you need to work on.
There is a lot of work for everyone to be done to make our world a really happy place to live. If all this sounds crazy, get your illusory self out of the way, get real and clean your own world!