An Experience of Awakening

Many people, because they have not actually experienced it for themselves, misunderstand the nature of what a true and authentic spiritual awakening really is. There is nothing wrong with this of course, but for those who wish to understand – perhaps an explanation, of sorts, will help. Not as something to be grabbed and clung to as a new concept, but as a way to shift our perceptions of what we 'think' it is.

The Dream Within the Dream

You, as a human being, are a beautiful expression of consciousness; a vehicle of expression that makes our experience of being possible within the presence of being. And yet you are a dream within a dream; completely unaware of your own true nature. You may go through your whole life seeing yourself as a separate individual who stands apart from the whole; living it all out from the position of the mind.

However, there is something far deeper within you, something that cannot be put into words. We may refer to it as a sleeping giant – something angelic, innocent, untouchable by the world. Something that is beyond all words, concepts, and ideas. All models and notions. It sleeps within you, expressing what you would call 'yourself', as a shadow of its own true nature – 'you', as you see yourself, are its dream.

You, as you take yourself to be, are not really here. You never really were. You were a dream state that occupied the mental-construct called 'mind'. The mirror self. The reflection. When awakening occurs, it is not the dream that awakens – in other words, 'you' do not awaken. The dreamer awakens out of the dream. At which point, the dreamer and the dream encounter each other for the first time.

The dreamer is beyond love, beyond patience, beyond beauty. Beyond anything and everything that your mind can possibly imagine, because it does not exist in a way that the mind can grasp or explain. It is I, before I becomes 'I'. It is the inclusive ME that has no exclusive me. We rest within it, and it lives within us – with no borders or boundaries to be found anywhere. It is the great weave of beingness.

Polishing the Mirror

So as it wakes up within the vessel of itself, and encounters the egoic mirror of itself, it must begin working to polish that mirror. It begins using everything at its disposal to do exactly that. All of your inner and outer experiences are shifted in the direction of a great undoing of what has been done. All to cleanse the mirror of the mind of its learning, knowledge, views, beliefs, opinions, and preferences.

Eventually, awareness leads to acceptance. Acceptance leads to surrender. Surrender leads to silence. And silence reveals the truth. By this point the mirror is clean enough for the egoic, mind-made, conceptual self to leave the dream, by dying into the dreamer; who is now awake. But the transition, at this stage, is so subtle as to be next to nonexistent; because the dreamer and dream were always One.

This my friends, is what it truly means to awaken… What it means to awaken into life; the dream of this life, of this experience of being. Because the nature of the dream goes one step further – and encompasses all that is. As I said in the beginning, you are a dream within a dream. There is the dream of you that you awaken from, and then there is the dream of existence that you awaken to. The dreamer of both is also one and the same.

But that is a conversation for another time – or perhaps something to be realized within your own experience of awakening… Until then…

~From the Heart of Bradley