Watching Awareness Move Through Life

Your capacity for awareness is an innate aspect of your true Self.

A baby fetus is aware of its surroundings, even if it doesn’t have the capacity to mentally language its experience. Awareness is prior to all thought, yet people tend to believe that thoughts are who they are, as if they couldn’t exist without thought.

The ego is reborn every morning. If you’ve noticed, when you first wake up, the very first experience is simply conscious awareness. As the ego slowly returns and identifications reappear, one next starts to realize ‘where’ they are, but they don’t know what day it is. The sense of space returns, followed by the sense of time. A person’s name and identity then return as well into their conscious experience.

In that very first moment when you just wake up, notice you still exist without an ego, a sense of “me.” It is possible to exist sans ego, but we’re generally not used to functioning in such a way.

Let’s talk a little bit more about this.

A useful exercise is to pretend that you have no memory.

By setting aside memory (it’s not you anyways, it’s simply stored experiences and programming), Self-inquiry is much easier. In this moment, without a memory, who are you?

This leads to the discovery that there is no ‘who’ there, only awareness of this moment.

The Self actually has no memory whatsoever. Every moment is experienced as a magnificent and glorious awe-inspiring wonder of the grandeur of life, like the very first time you stepped up to the edge of a massive canyon or gazed upon a fiery sunset. It leaves one utterly speechless. It’s like a newborn child who looks around the world in amazement. This is the perspective of the Self.

When one awakens to this reality permanently, an experience commonly known as enlightenment, memory is not necessary in order to experience this moment fully. This moment is complete and total in and of itself.

Memory can be activated as a tool to recall facts when necessary, but the incessant and unasked for access of memory in the form of autonomous thinking no longer occurs. Thinkingness is never identified with, only accessed and used as a tool.

When one awakens first thing in the morning, the very first realization is a nonverbal realization of one’s own existence. That is all. From there, the mind kicks back into gear and a false sense of “me” becomes dominant. Planning and mental activity resume. Programming returns. In animals, we call the programming instinct. In humans, it’s all our learned behaviors and knowledge.

Thought is simply mental activity that arises in the Now. It’s not you. Your thoughts are not you.

Similarly, your human biology and your body are not you. Biological functioning and brain activity are part of the physical body. Awareness is actually part of the energetic etheric body. It’s not part of the physical body at all!

Awareness is a capacity of spirit.

This distinction becomes clear when one starts to reach higher states of consciousness. It’s also apparent to those who are able to recall past lives or have experienced out of body experiences (OBE’s) or near death experiences (NDE’s).

I (”Ariel”) have experienced past lives as well as OBE’s in meditation.

When one accesses another lifetime, it becomes clear that “the other side” as we generally call it is not so much the “other” side as simply “another” side which is as equally real as this lifetime. There are infinite other sides. It’s simply that one’s awareness has shifted through time and space to another facet of “me.”

If we were to picture ourselves as a massive painting, this lifetime is simply the portion of the painting of life we happen to be consciously aware of in this moment. At the same time, all other portions of the painting exist simultaneously. All “past” and “future” lives exist Now. Instead of having multiple past lives, we could more accurately say that we have multiple simultaneous lives, all existing Now.

I’ve also experienced spontaneous OBE’s during meditation when abiding in complete surrender. When the experience happens, it suddenly becomes very obvious who you are once you actually detach from the body and exist somewhere above the physical head looking back down at the body people refer to as “Ariel,” as if that body had anything to do whatsoever with “me.”

When you go to sleep at night, the soul goes off to play in other dimensions and other realities in time and space. It actually leaves behind the physical body as well as the human ego when it accesses other dimensions. What a relief! What a sense of freedom to not be burdened by the physical body for a little while!

In those other dimensions we can experience any reality we wish. Manifestation occurs instantly because time does not exist. We can will anything into and out of our experience of reality simply by choosing it. Our creative powers are, in a sense, magnified.

All beings in all dimensions, not just the physical dimension that human beings abide in, live according to the Universal law of creation, commonly referred to as the “Law of Attraction.” It’s just that this physical reality is a time/space reality in which it takes “time” for manifestations to appear. We actually have the gift of realizing exactly how the thoughts we have contribute to what manifests in our life. We get to change our attitude and state of being before the manifestation takes place, unlike in a dream, and thus “choose again” if we don’t like what that thought would manifest should it actually develop into physical manifestation.

A fun little side note is that this delayed manifestation is not a hard and fast rule in physical reality. A yardstick to measure how close to mastery you are is the time it takes you to manifest. As you begin to approach mastery, the time it takes progressively decreases. In fact, manifestation can occur instantly! It’s really nothing special. It’s simply understanding the way the world is set up, trusting the universe totally, and seeing through the illusions of that which we call time.

Anyways, when one “wakes up” in the morning, the soul actually returns to the body. Land ho! How the soul actually gets from “there” to “here” we’ll save for another post. Here’s a hint though… like everything else in this universe, it all has to do with vibration.

So we’ve seen that when the soul returns to the body in the morning and that when the body wakes up, awareness of one’s own existence is all that exists. Then the underlying awareness returns to this time/space “location.” A sense of identity and its associated thoughts return and the ego is essentially reborn. The process can be so quick that most people miss it.

The ego, brain, thoughts, body, memories, personality… none of that is you.

If none of that is you, then who are you?

Do you really and truly know who you are?