25/08/2023
I AM THE SAME "I" THAT HAS ALWAYS BEEN HERE.
Awakening doesn't change your personality. It doesn't make you a more happy person or a more confident person or a more perfect person. It doesn't change how you look or how you feel or how you walk or how you talk.
It is not the person who awakens. The person is not elevated to some new stratosphere in which the human experience is erased. The person does not have a shiny new life in which everything goes the way you want it to.
It's simply that the person stops being a problem to itself.
Awakening is the falling away of concern about who you are as a personhood. It doesn't happen "to" the person, but simply reveals itself as the open space of awareness that was always here occluded by the tight focus on the personhood.
I am the same person as I was twenty or thirty or forty or fifty years ago. But whereas I used to be a problem to myself, always trying to fix myself or improve myself or hide myself, now I am simply silent within myself. What has fallen away is the endless chatter of the mind, the false beliefs about myself as wrong or incomplete or unloved or any of that stuff. What has fallen away are the layers of armoring around my heart, the defendedness of the "me" identity when it felt attacked or hurt. What has fallen away are the veils of identity that obscured the naked radiance of what is.
All that remains is an intimacy with the lived experience. And an intimacy with the silence that permeates it. I am the same "I" that has always been here. Simply, "I AM".
~ Amoda Maa
03/11/2022