It seems to me that on the so-called spiritual path, people get terribly caught up in ideas of better or worse, accomplishment vs. failure. People feel inferior for not having realizations. People feel that others are better than they are, or vice versa.
The most important thing to understand is that there is nothing wrong with you. Any idea of better-or-worse, any idea of success-or-failure that contains within it even a grain of self-hatred, that contains within it even an iota of the feeling that you are not good enough—is simply incorrect. It's just an incorrect thought-form that you've mistakenly identified with.
Yes, there are understandings to be remembered, but they have nothing to do with your inherent worth. Oneness does not mean loss of the sense of self. It means a remembering that all is given—that you exist and yet you are never separate, never unsupported, never without connection to your source.
No so-called spiritual achievement that does not resonate with this light of warmth and compassion—this absolute sense of love and belonging—is of any true or lasting worth.
This is not a contest or a competition. This is all about remembering love.
"Oneness does not mean loss of the sense of self."
Some people seem to think it does.
And some of them seem to have a horrible time with it at times, like Bernadette Roberts and Suzanne Segal. Reading their books is like The Shining.
Adyashanti recently taught me that the end of the ego and awareness of oneness are two different things which can happen at two different times.
Perhaps the feeling of loss of Self is a third thing.
Posted by: Eolake Stobblehouse | May 24, 2009 at 10:58 AM
Hi Eolake,
Loss of the sense of self is loss of the idea that you are Eolake Stobblehouse, that you are human, that you are a body, that anything concerning this body is permanent or harmful to what (who) you really are.
So yes, there is a loss of identification with the idea of being exclusively an individual separate human person. But there is still self. Not self as opposed to others, but self that is both individual AND shared, which is something the human mind can't understand.
The truth is that it really doesn't matter whether this is experienced or not. What matters, in the end, is that we avoid letting the idea that we are separate individual bodies and are therefore endangered and at risk (the ego) make decisions that cause more suffering.
Posted by: marian | May 24, 2009 at 12:35 PM