The Cost and Compensation of Awakening

             Buddhist parables:

 

“A monk set off on a long pilgrimage to find the Buddha. He devoted many years to his search until he finally reached the land where the Buddha was said to live. While crossing the river to this country, the monk looked around as the boatman rowed. He noticed something floating towards them. As it got closer, he realized that it was the corpse of a person. When it drifted so close that he could almost touch it, he suddenly recognized the dead body – it was his own! He lost all control and wailed at the sight of himself, still and lifeless, drifting along the river’s currents. That moment was the beginning of his liberation.”

 

“One day the Master announced that a young monk had reached an advanced state of enlightenment. The news caused some stir. Some of the monks went to see the young monk. ‘We heard you are enlightened. Is that true?’ they asked.

‘It is,’ he replied.

‘And how do you feel?’

‘As miserable as ever,’ said the monk.”

 

Sometimes someone asks me, knowing how difficult shifting to Spirit-consciousness has been, if it has been worth it. Well, yes, of course, and I always knew it would be. And knowing this is what got me through the difficulties. But I also felt it would come at a “cost.” And it did.

The thing is, the compensation for spiritual awakening does not come in the same place as the cost, which I knew, and which is why I felt resistance to it. It is why you so often hear, from those who have been through it, that spiritual awakening is not what you think it is. You will have peace and happiness, yes. But they will not come to where you were asking for them.

It’s very much like receiving an inheritance or life insurance when a loved one dies. Financial gain does not compensate the loss of a loved one. It does not fill in the hole, just creates a mound of its own. So, Spiritual Abundance comes, but it does not fill the lack caused by ego. Ego (personal identity) is not “fixed”. It falls away and, initially anyway, this is felt as a loss.

The good news is, the loss of the personal identity, is not truly a loss. But it can take a while to fully realize this. My mind was so convinced that the personal identity was the “getting mechanism” for abundance that when ego fell away, it went into shock and grief and terror that it will never be whole. Of course, as a part of me, it is whole and always has been and the idea that it lacked and needed to get abundance was the delusion of ego. As it slowly realizes this, it realizes ego was not a loss because ego was the sense of lack in the first place. Lack was a false experience.

This is what I have dealt with since the shift in consciousness. I felt death as the shift approached. And since the shift, I have watched and experienced that part of my mind come out of the delusion of ego with all the attendant grief and insanity of that. I labeled that part of my mind the ego-identifier, as it’s the last part of this mind to come out of the delusion of ego as though it was the part most deeply deceived.

The person was clearly not me, and my identification with it has diminished, or “wound down”, as my Identity in Spirit has grown stronger. The compensation of wholeness, peace, and happiness now outweighs the loss, which I knew it would eventually. I just didn’t know how long it would take. It was nearly three years after the moment the personal identity fell away, which I called The Break, before I saw the first glimmers of the turnaround. I ended my memoir with those glimmers just over a year ago. And I have only grown happier and more at peace as Seeing has come to take the place of ego.

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