Enlightenment Without Awakening

[Lenny]

7 minutes ago, JayG84 said:

Interesting, what do you mean by in front of your ego? I've always thought of the ego as a mask that I put on my True Self. So in essence, my true self would be behind it. Put that's all conceptual thinking stuff. Maybe we just have different perspectives of it.

Would your true self/higher self need to search for itself? Only something that is lacking is searching, the true self is not lacking. Therefore it wouldn't need to search. The true self is what you are right now and you've always been that. But, it is somehow covered by an investment into what you are experiencing. It's almost as if we loved what we experienced, then we became attached to this experiencing and somehow we then called what we experienced as us/ourselves.

Ego in this sense would be what you believe yourself to be, as in right now. Ego is the thing that is thinking that ego is a mask that is over it's true self. You think that you are your thoughts and you think that you are "making" them right now. In Truth, thoughts are spontaneously arising as a consequence of what is and as a consequence of reality. And as a consequence of Truth. 

It is very important to not dismiss your position or feel bad right now and know that you are right where you need to be in your journey. It's easy for me to say these things but so much harder to see when you're in the battlefield, so to speak. I have been here and I have been confused and I have been depressed, cycling over and over again, until I discovered enlightenment and ego. 

Also, the mind is a beautiful thing. The mind is also you. The mind actually assists us to find ego. The mind and it's perceptions pokes at our ego. The mind hurts our ego and presses its buttons. We can use our mind to "sniff-out" where the ego is hiding in us. Here when I say "hiding" this is relating to the extent to which we do not know our true self. It's almost as if the mind is being tricked into thinking it's something that it's not. The mind has somehow been deceived into thinking that it is the content (e.g. its imagination).

One idea that really helped me is the following:

You can never know yourself, you can only be yourself. If you know yourself, this seeming knowingness will arise as a thought, this thought is content. This thought about what you are is an effect, caused by what you truly are but not what you truly are. 

How does this understanding help? This means that any thought that you hold in your mind cannot be adequate to define you as Truth. 

Try and find where everything in your experience is arising from. Try and go to the beginning of a thought. Before it is born. How beautiful is it that you give birth to billions of thoughts every day! A thought cannot know where it comes from. I cannot know where I come from (this was a thought).

Anyway I hope this helps. I'm trying to bring up lots of ideas here hoping that you get a bite conceptually.

Also know that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Even a desire to find Truth is such an amazing thing. It means that you want to become (or more, recognise) the love that you are.

Lenny