The primary intention of The Awakening has little to do with the goals of mindfulness practice that are currently proliferating around the planet.  As wonderfully salutary as these practices are, they still keep you confined to your conventional mind.  The Awakening supports you in freeing yourself from the domination of the conventional mind and exposes your natural participation in the awakened states that all the great spiritual literatures and traditions speak of as both the birthright and destiny of every one of us. 

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The quality of consciousness that passes as normal—even if the mind is calmed and your experience of functioning in the world of form becomes enhanced—still binds you to the illusion of self separate from everything that you can see outside your physical body (what Albert Einstein has referred to as “the optical delusion of consciousness.”)

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Both the Heart Sutra and the quantum physicist David Bohm tell us that the world of visible, physical form that we designate as constituting reality is only half of what reality actually consists of.  In addition to the very solid looking world of form there is an underlying substratum of a formless but highly palpable realm often referred to as space/emptiness.  The Awakening directly exposes you to your intrinsically ecstatic (ex-static) nature by giving you a direct, felt experience of the existence and inseparable reality of form and emptiness both.

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Through the relaxation of the buffering tensions that create what Rumi referred to as the consciousness of separation—me inside here, everything else I see outside there—awakened body begins to radiate and merge with the visual field instead.  As you give up your resistance to the altogether natural energies of The Awakening, the fields of sensation, sound, and vision collapse down and into one another, a crack in the fabric of the world of appearances opens, and you glide right through into your fundamental nature:  The Great Wide Open.  The slumbering veil of conventional consciousness lifts, and you awaken.

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don’t look through the eyes of the head

see with the eyes of the awakened body

 

dissolve the body into vision​

become seeing, seeing, seeing!

—Rumi