© by Ric Weinman, Nov-17-04

Introduction

Although this ‘essay’ is, necessarily, a collection of concepts, it is important not to mistake the concepts for the Reality they try to point you to. But it is also important to realize that the concepts do have some relation to the Reality they point to, just as the word ‘apple’ is related to an actual apple. And through the concept, through the naming, someone can help you to find an actual apple by saying, “The apple is on the table.” So as you read what follows, in addition to creating concepts about what is said, allow your inner consciousness to follow the words and sense what is inside of them. Allow the words to engage you. You may discover more than you expect.

The Core Veil

     A ‘veil’ is something that hides or obscures. A veil over your face, for instance, hides you (on the one side of the veil) from people’s vision on the other side. But a veil within your own consciousness hides or obscures something from your own awareness of yourself. And so, your Core Veil must hide from your awareness the most essential element of yourself. What is this most essential element of yourself? It is your true nature. It is the Truth of what you are. Your Core Veil hides from you the Truth of what you are, and by doing so, creates a false experience of yourself; it creates the experience that you are a particular ‘I’, a particular ‘me’, a particular person defined by a particular history.

But this Core Veil is not something that was imposed on your consciousness from the outside. It is an expression of Universal Consciousness Itself, of Oneness, of That Which IS, exploring its own nature by creating for Itself the experience of being a separate person—lots and lots of separate persons! So, you are having this experience of being ‘you’ because that which you truly are—That Which IS—is ‘curious’ about what it is like to experience Itself as you. So, there is nothing ‘wrong’ with this experience. In fact, from the point of view of Consciousness, it is no better or worse than any other experience, including the experience of awakening. But at some point in your journey, in this life or another, Consciousness within you will end this experience of being a ‘someone’ and will awaken from this self-imposed Core Veil, realizing within your human consciousness its true nature.

Analogies

The simplest analogy for the Core Veil is that it is like a hypnotic trance. Imagine that you are hypnotized into believing that you are a kangaroo and that everyone else is a kangaroo. Now you will live in a kangaroo world, experiencing yourself as a particular kind of kangaroo. You will be fully engaged in this experience until you are awakened from your trance and remember that you are a human being. The Core Veil is like this hypnotic trance, except that it has ‘hypnotized’ Universal Consciousness within you, so that It believes that It is a particular person with a particular history. This person is now experienced as ‘I’, and that ‘I’ becomes the ego-center around which all life seems to revolve. The inner consciousness, which is still Universal Consciousness, is now experienced as my consciousness, and life is experienced as my life. When ‘your’ consciousness is awakened from this trance, it will not discover that it is really someone or something else; it will not discover that it is a higher version of what it took itself to be; it will realize that it is Mystery Itself, unknowable and without form. There will no longer be the experience of ‘my’ consciousness; it will just be Consciousness Itself, aware of Itself. The human form you had called ‘myself’ will still have a body, a personality and a mind, but there will no longer be the experience that there is a separate someone inside of all of that.

A second analogy for the Core Veil is what happens when we go to sleep. Although the inner consciousness that we sleep and dream with is not fundamentally different than the inner consciousness that we are awake with, the experience of these states is completely different. When Free Consciousness creates a Core Veil, it is as if it has gone to sleep within the incarnational form that carries the Veil, and it begins to dream that it is a particular someone. It is the same Consciousness, but now it is asleep and dreaming, having a different experience. Consciousness is still what It IS, but now it is dreaming while it is being what It IS. Dreaming doesn’t change what Consciousness IS. And the areas of Consciousness that go to sleep (only localized areas go to sleep) don’t become separate from the whole of Consciousness, which is always awake. That’s why, within this sleep analogy, even when you are in deep sleep, a small noise can awaken you. That’s also why, even in the middle of horrible nightmares, when your body is thrashing wildly about, it is very rare to fall out of bed. No matter how deeply asleep you are, part of you is always awake. No matter how deep into the dream of separateness ‘your’ consciousness goes, it can never lose itself in it completely. That’s why, here and now, waking up is always a possibility.

So, releasing the Core Veil is easily described as waking up from a dream. This is similar to the idea of hypnotic trance in the first analogy. Perhaps you are dreaming you are a kangaroo; when you wake up you realize that was just a dream. Awakening out of the Core Veil, though, releases ‘your’ consciousness from the dream that it is some particular ‘I’ with a past, present and future. Life still IS; but you are no longer who you thought you were.

A third analogy for the Core Veil is that it is like a bubble created by pure Consciousness within itself, enabling a particular kind of experience to be played out within that bubble. Imagine what happens if you withdraw into yourself when at a party. That withdrawal creates a bubble, a space with a boundary, around you that other people can easily sense. It is not a physical boundary—it is only a boundary in consciousness—yet everyone can sense it (because everyone exists within the same One Consciousness). It makes you feel as if you are not a part of the party, as if you are isolated within your own bubble. And yet this bubble and boundary are nothing but a creation and expression of your own consciousness. Outside of this invisible boundary in your consciousness, there is nothing separating you from the rest of the party. So, this experience of separateness is just a play of your consciousness. The Core Veil is like this play of consciousness, except that what is playing is not an individual. The Core Veil is the play of Universal Consciousness Itself, creating a bubble within itself to enable the experience of itself as if it were a person. If the person at the party comes out of their bubble, their experience changes from someone who is feeling separate to someone who is feeling connected. But when Consciousness awakens out of the Core Veil, what changes is the experience of being a ‘someone’ to the experience of not being a ‘someone’. This is radically different. Now, it is the ‘someone’ that disappears, regardless of whether that ‘someone’ is depressed, or in a mystical experience of oneness with all of life, or is someone who has received the highest levels of initiation. That ‘special someone’ now disappears, because that experience of someone-ness only existed within—and was dependent upon—the bubble created by the Core Veil.

The Core Veil brings you, as Consciousness, free of time and space, into the experience of being someone with a past, present a future. The Core Veil is not something that happened to you somewhere in your history—before you were a particular someone, there was no one to have a personal history. So, the Core Veil was not something that was done to you or imposed on you. You are not a victim of the Core Veil; rather, ‘you’ wouldn’t exist without it. Your existence as an individual depends upon it. It creates the fundamental experience of separateness that you identify as your ‘self’.

Since the Core Veil creates this consciousness of ‘I’, and since without this ‘I’ there is no Core Veil, it can simplify matters to simply equate the two: the Core Veil is this consciousness of ‘I’. The Core Veil is the consciousness of being asleep in the experience of ‘I’. It is not so much a fixed structure as an ongoing experience (that becomes a very deep habit) of sleeping in the experience of ‘I’. In a human being, therefore, the Core Veil can be sensed as a bubble of ‘I’, a bubble of I-consciousness, that is centered in the heart. If you can observe a person’s sense of ‘I’, it will center itself at a spot in the heart. That spot is the center of a bubble of ‘I-ness’, which may look small or very large. And that bubble is like a dream-bubble. If you look at someone who is dreaming, you can see that they are in their own ‘bubble’ of sleep-consciousness, having their own unique sleep experiences. That bubble is not so much a fixed structure but is maintained by the continuity of sleep. The Core Veil is like that, creating a dream-bubble of ‘I’ for that human form. (Note: before the Core Veil releases, it may keep thinning out until there is just the tiniest bit of it left, but as long as it is not completely released, as long as there is a focus of ‘I’ centered in the heart, the basic awakening will not have occurred. And this is like waking up from sleep: even if a you are in a very light sleep, you are still asleep.)

In thinking about the Core Veil, it is easy to imagine it as a ‘thing’, sitting in Consciousness, which must be worked on like an emotional issue. But although it is sometimes difficult not to use language that creates this impression, the Veil is not a ‘thing’ and it is not separate from what you are; it is an expression of Consciousness Itself. So, what looks like the ‘release’ or ‘letting go’ of the Core Veil is more like the waking up from sleep described earlier: you don’t do anything to your dreams to wake up in the morning, you just start to wake up. ‘Your’ consciousness doesn’t ‘dissolve’ sleep—it doesn’t even ‘release’ sleep—it just starts to be awake instead.

This awakening from the Core Veil is most often talked about as Realization or Self-Realization. This is because the awakening from the Core Veil is simultaneous to the realization of what you truly are. The Core Veil disappears when ‘your’ consciousness realizes that it is Consciousness Itself, not the person you call yourself. When this happens deeply and fully enough, a permanent awakening occurs.

One way to think of how this bubble of Core Veil functions, how it creates the experience of ‘I’, is to think of the inside of the bubble as a mirror. Whenever Consciousness looks out at creation through, for instance, a human form, it has to look through this bubble, which is around the form. But the bubble is always creating a reflection of that human form (and its history) on its inner surface. So, when Consciousness looks out from within that human form, the first thing it sees is an image of this human being, with Consciousness within it looking back. This creates a sense of self there—it creates the sense for Consciousness that ‘I am this human being’. Then Consciousness takes the final step of letting go into that identification, and It experiences Itself as a particular ‘I’ with a particular history. (It can be useful, for breaking the ‘trance’ of this identification, to explore how you would experience yourself, if you dropped the mental self-image you always use to identify yourself to yourself.) Consciousness now ceases to recognize that the rest of the world is made up of Consciousness. The world has become divided into ‘I’ and ‘other’, and the boundary of the Core Veil has also created a sense of ‘in here’, where this separate ‘me’ is located, versus ‘out there’ where the rest of the world is located. All of this, in spite of the fact that both the ‘I’ and the ‘other’, the ‘in here’ and the ‘out there’, the Core Veil itself, and the awareness within each of these, are nothing but play of One Universal Consciousness, of Oneness Itself, rooted in Mystery.

 

Misconceptions

1. You (as ego) will get something out of losing your Core Veil: Although awakening usually still leaves a lot of loose ego consciousness floating about, this leftover ego consciousness is not able to get anything from the awakening, much as it tries. It will experience the sudden manifestation of Freedom in that human’s consciousness as something outside of itself, as something that it can’t partake of, understand, use, gets its mind inside of, or take responsibility for. Whatever you expect to get from awakening will not be there. There is simply nothing in awakening for the ego. Not only can’t you get anything out of it, but whatever part of you might try to get something out of it is no longer even experienced as real. Awakening is a huge disappointment for the ego.

From another point of view, since awakening is nothing other than realizing what you truly are—What IS—there is nothing to be gotten from awakening because you already are what you are—What IS already IS. Even the realization isn’t new, because you touch this place for a brief moment every time you completely let go into a laugh, Deep in your heart you have always known the Truth of what you are, so there is nothing new to get.

Because of this, awakening is not experienced as a ‘big deal’. Even the ego, in the midst of its confusion, recognizes that the awakening is nothing more than the natural state of being, which has always existed in the background. It’s hard to get excited about a natural state of being that you have always known, and that has always been with you, in the background of your consciousness. The awakening may look like a big deal to someone who still has his or her Core Veil, but once Consciousness has awakened within you, there is simply a return to the experience of what has always been. Nothing has really changed. Nothing has ever changed. It’s just that Consciousness within you had a dream of being a particular ego with a particular story and history, and now that dream no longer exists. There may be a sense of ‘Ah-hah’, of recognition, because Consciousness recognizes that this is what It has always known, without consciously knowing It knew this. There may also be a sense of how funny it is, that for all those years ‘your’ consciousness had thought you were someone that you weren’t. But this is just what IS; there is nothing to be done with it; there is no sense of achievement in it. And it is clear that no one will be able to really understand your experience unless they are already awake, so there is no urge to call your best friend to tell him that he isn’t who he thinks he is.

 

2. The Whole Dream Disappears at Once: Some people, when they wake up in the morning, are instantly awake and their dream world just as instantly vanishes. Occasionally, when someone loses their Core Veil, their whole dream of being a separate someone disappears and they live fully and continuously in the experience of what they really are. But this is very rare. To use our sleep analogy, imagine that you have been in a coma for some millions of years, your body maintained by special technology, and the drugs they have given you to keep you alive have the effect of keeping you in a very, very deep state of dreaming. Then imagine that one day, somehow, you wake up out of your coma. You don’t just move instantly into normal waking reality—after all, you have been in a coma for some millions of years and the dream-drugs are still pretty dense in your system. You have woken up, you sit up in bed, but most of ‘your’ consciousness is still in the dream.  You might even begin to lose consciousness, slipping back into your coma dreams, but you don’t go completely back into it, for you are sitting up now. You can walk around. You can see that everyone else in the room is still asleep, deep in a coma, because you’ve broken the trance of your coma. You’re awake now. It’s just that you’re still more asleep than awake. This is how it is for most people when they first lose their Core Veil. I call this state Basic Awakening to differentiate it from a fuller kind of awakening (the ‘full embodiment of awakening’ or ‘complete liberation’) that has very little dream left. Awakening has happened in Basic Awakening—Consciousness is now awake in the core of this being—it’s just that the being is still mostly asleep. For the most part, the human personality will still act and react the way they did when they were asleep, dreaming that they were a particular someone, because they are still full of that dream, and yet their relationship to that reactivity will be different. For instance, if they look inside to see who is actually reacting, they won’t be able to find anyone. (And a sensitive observer, looking into this person’s eyes, will not find anyone; the person will look ‘empty’.) Over time, as the balance of wakefulness and sleep begins to tilt more towards awakeness, then the person’s behavior will reflect that change. But this widening of awakeness is not a given; some beings will wake up but stay mostly asleep for the rest of their lives. And yet, in spite of this, they will still be awake in a way that the rest of the world isn’t.

 

3. After awakening, everything will become clear. Adyashanti says, in his book, The

Impact of Awakening, “After sudden Awakening to the Self, there begins a process of gradual embodiment of the transcendent into the human personality. . . . This process of embodiment is a continual stripping away of every remnant of attachment and ego. . . . It is a phase of spiritual unfolding fraught with many dangers, self-deceptions and misunderstandings. It is where many seekers of liberation succumb to fear, doubt and a lack of conviction. The process of embodiment can be very thrilling and quite disorienting.” (Adyshanti’s website is www.zen-satsang.org)

So, the “remnants of attachment and ego” that are left after the awakening can feel out of control, can delude itself, can panic, can do all the things that ego does. It can also be desperate to understand what is happening to itself, but to its surprise, it knows no more than it did before. In fact, the expectation that it should be able to understand now, that everything should be clear, that it should be at peace, etc, only amplifies the confusion, or sense of loss, or the fear that often arises at this time.

In an interview, Adyashanti shared that, after his own awakening (which was a broader awakening than most), one of his teachers warned him to be careful in several areas of his life, but that he ended up messing up rather badly in every one of those places. After awakening there is sometimes a new clarity, but when that happens, everything is not suddenly clear. Wisdom and clarity require time and experience. In fact, the sense of new clarity, experienced without wisdom, can lead to new ‘self-deceptions and misunderstandings’, as Adyashanti points out above.

 

4. Your suffering will disappear: The belief here is that you will stay as you are—an individual ego—but without suffering. The fantasy is that you will be there to enjoy life without suffering; but that won’t happen. That ‘you’ will be gone. That ‘you’ will not be around to either suffer or be free of suffering. But there is still the dance of the conditioning that was there before the awakening. That conditioning, with all its suffering, still arises, because there is still so much ‘dream consciousness’ lingering in the system, for most people, after awakening.

In fact, because of this remaining dream consciousness, many people have deep experiences of loss immediately following the release of their Core Veil. Suddenly, they feel they can’t find themself and mourn the loss of their self. Of course, this is really their dream-self that they can no longer find. And it is still the left over ego-conditioning in personality and in the mind that is doing the looking and that is doing the grieving. This can go on for a day, a week or months. I knew one woman who spent much of the next 3 months in bed, in a deep experience of loss, and then it passed as if nothing had happened.

Often, there is the experience of a sort of schizophrenia, which may be experienced as disturbing or not. Now, everything is the same as it was, and yet everything is different. The mind and emotions may act as if nothing has changed, but there is no one inside of any of that. Life is still mainly lived in the mind and emotions, and yet the core is just emptiness and openness, filled with being.

And yet all of these experiences, including the experience of all the leftover conditioning with all of its suffering, is now different, because the identification with it has lost its power. In addition, even the meaning of the suffering has changed, because there is now more openness to all experiences, including the experience of suffering, and the ‘story’ about the suffering now refers to someone who is no longer experienced as real.

 

5. Awakening will Create Mystical Experiences, Mystical Powers, Wisdom, Omniscience, etc: None of these are an integral part of awakening. Awakening itself is not a mystical experience; it is simply the dropping out of a dream of what you are not. This misconception is often created by the mystical experiences that spiritual seekers have before awakening. They believe that these experiences are tastes of awakening, so they believe that awakening will be like that but bigger, better and more. But awakening is more like the relief of taking a stone out of your shoe than the excitement of getting new shoes.

 

6. If you’ve had a Taste of Mystery or Emptiness or Freedom, or had the highest initiation possible from the highest guru in the world, then it means you’ve lost your Core Veil: Since you already are That Which IS, there may be a taste of That at any time; but that doesn’t mean that you have lost your Core Veil. A dreamer may seem to wake for a moment at a noise and then go right back to sleep. Of course, the memory of that taste will linger, which will either attract the seeker to want it again, amplifying the inner call of Freedom, or possibly frighten the seeker away. (Interestingly, the majority of people who have had a ‘peak experience’ say that it was the most important thing that ever happened to them, but they never want to have another one again.)

 

7. If you work hard enough at it, you can wake yourself up: This is a tricky one because those who are most desperate to wake up, who do everything and anything they can to wake up, do wake up more often than those who aren’t so committed to it. And yet, it is not the ego, the person who is trying so hard to wake up, that creates the awakening. As long as the identification with that desperate seeker is maintained, the awakening does not happen. Instead of ‘becoming the awakening’ the person becomes a desperate seeker. Something must happen to break that identification. And then, if the identification is broken, because so much had been invested in it, when it goes, there is suddenly an enormous space of openness and unknowingness that is ripe for awakening.

       Another thing that feeds this misconception comes from the fact that more people who are interested in awakening awaken than those who aren’t. The ones that are interested are seen to be doing various practices to facilitate their awakening. But it is the movement of awakening that is calling them to do these practices; it is not that the practices are calling forth awakening.

       In addition, people who are ‘trying to awaken’ often spend as much time as they can with awake teachers. While around those teachers they may be doing all kinds of practices to wake themselves up. If they do wake up, then it may seem as if it was all the ‘trying to awaken’ they did that woke them up, when in fact it was simply being in the presence of, and aligned with, that which was already awake.

Only that which is awake can wake up that which is asleep. In addition, only that which is asleep can wake up. But the ‘you’ that you think you are, is not what is asleep; that ‘you’ is simply a dream, dreamed by sleeping Consciousness, asleep through the Core Veil. So, that ‘you’ can’t even be woken up. Hence the expression: “No one wakes up.” It is not the individual that wakes up. What is asleep is Consciousness; what wakes up is Consciousness. What wakes up sleeping Consciousness is awake Consciousness. All that is, is Consciousness, is Oneness, simultaneously asleep and awake, doing the dance of going deeper into the dream of separate individuality in some areas of itself and waking itself up in other areas of itself.

Although awakening happens at a moment, it is a result of a very long process of movement from sleep to wakefulness, even if the process is not evident, is unpredictable, and can take many different forms (including different forms at different times for the same person). What is common to the process is that Consciousness is waking Itself up. When that happens, the human person often feels a ‘call to awakening’ and begins to do things to follow that call. As described above, the person believes that they are doing things to create this awakening, but the awakening is already being created. So, what they are doing is actually a result of the awakening already in process, which is facilitating its own movement by creating ‘ripening’ through a particular spiritual practice.

The call to awakening comes into a person’s life unbidden. It comes because Consciousness is waking Itself up. And Consciousness allows itself, in its dream of being a person, to either follow that call or resist it. Truly following the call will bring up a lot of fear in the person, because they will feel this urge to awaken as taking over their life. They will feel as if they are losing control (believing that they had control). Their fears of annihilation will arise. Their life will change before their eyes, and what was once important is now seen as trivial. The result is either conflict and confusion, or a surrender to this call to awaken that is pulling the seeker into the unknown. Because the person believes they are making the choice, it appears that the person who is following the call to Freedom is waking himself up. But it is always Consciousness that is waking Itself up.

 

8. There is nothing I can do to facilitate awakening, so I’ll just do nothing. Although there is nothing you can do to wake yourself up, whatever you do is the process by which Consciousness is waking Itself up. This means that although there is nothing you can do, what you do DOES MATTER to your process of awakening. You can’t separate the result from the process. If Consciousness is waking itself up through meditation, then meditation is important to that process of awakening. If Consciousness is waking itself up through selfless service, then selfless service is important in that process of awakening. The problem, of course, is that you can’t necessarily know how Consciousness is waking up within you. All you can do (or seem to do) is follow the call to awakening as deeply as you can, surrendering into wherever that takes you. Although your spiritual practice won’t create awakening, you may (or may not) need to do a particular spiritual practice to awaken. Whatever Freedom uses to wake Itself up, it is always Freedom Itself that is manifesting the awakening. You may feel a pull to a particular practice, but it is really the pull and call of Freedom that you are following.

Unfortunately, the idea that there is nothing you, as a person, can do to awaken is misinterpreted by the ego. The ego hears this as, “I shouldn’t try to do anything.” So, this truth, that there is nothing the person can do, becomes a lie the moment the ego hears it. And unfortunately, that often creates complacency, or creates an inhibition to following the flow of life that calls them, which can block the movement of awakening. Perhaps there is a pull to go listen to a particular awakened being. The ego’s misinterpretation says, “Since there is nothing I can do, then nothing I can hear can matter either, so I’ll just stay at home.” But of course, wherever the ego is, there Consciousness is as well, sleeping within, and what sleeping Consciousness hears matters, because it can respond to what it hears—it is Real. So, what is awake in the teacher can speak to what is sleeping in the seeker and facilitate that to awaken.

 

9. Being awake is better than living in separateness. This belief avoids the important question: better or not for whom? It is Consciousness that is awake and it is Consciousness that is experiencing separateness. Free Consciousness, in its infinite dance, naturally moves into the experience of separateness, and separation consciousness naturally moves both deeper into separation and towards waking up. These are just different expressions of One Consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t consider one of its expressions better or worse than the other. Ramakrishna, who was fully awakened (and considered to be an avatar), talked about how wonderful it was that he could experience enough of a sense of separateness to be able to enjoy the company of his friends, as friends. Separation consciousness is the realm of experience. Consciousness becomes separate in order to experience this—in order to experience all of this—which includes the experience of ‘you’, just the way you are. The reason you want to wake up is not because it is better, but only because the urge to awaken has been sparked in you by Freedom, and so you, personally, consider it to be better.

 

Aspects of the Core Veil

There are different aspects to the Core Veil. Rarely, they all release at once; more typically, either just the main aspect releases, or that and another one do. This is part of the reason why Basic Awakening still leaves a lot of dream in the consciousness—the dream is reinforced by aspects of the Core Veil that have not yet released.

 

Main Aspect: this is the bubble of ‘I’ that is centered in the heart. After it releases, although the mind can still think ‘I’, the core sense of ‘I’ is gone. Conditioning will still arise and the mind will think that ‘I’ is feeling certain things, but if you look to see who is within the reacting, there will be no one there. This aspect can release without any of the other, secondary aspects releasing, but no other aspect can release unless this one releases as well.

 

Mind/ Conceptual Aspect: Your identification with your I-thoughts, with the concept of ‘I’ as what you are, extended the Core Veil to the mind and set up the mind/ conceptual aspect of the Core Veil. Once established, the sense of ‘I’ was extended into every I-thought, so that your I-thinking felt like self. This I-thinking arises in the center of brain, where it is amplified by the 9^th chakra and kundalini, giving it more energy. If you follow your I-thought down to its root, you will realize (experientially, not just intellectually) that it is just a concept. It doesn’t actually refer to anyone, because there is no one for it to refer to. It only refers to a story, a story about a character in that historical novel that is always being told and retold in your mind. Realizing this deeply enough breaks down the identification, and with that, this aspect of the Core Veil.

Some teachers have said that ‘I’ is just a concept. Usually they have come to the Core Veil through this aspect of it, by following the concept down to its root, in consciousness. Then this, along with the Main Aspect releases, and their experience is that all you need to do is realize that ‘I’ is just a concept. But in the Main Aspect, ‘I’ is experienced as a sense of ‘I’. When this Conceptual Aspect is released, you can no longer think ‘I’ in the middle of your head. The I-thinking still moves around the periphery, but there is no center to it any longer.

 

Body Ego Aspect: Your identification with your body extended the Core Veil to your physical body and set up the body ego aspect of the Core Veil. Once established (in the womb), the body seems to experience itself as if it’s someone or ‘someone-ness’. It’s hard to notice unless you compare the sense of your body to someone’s body that has lost this aspect of the Core Veil. The sense of the body as ‘someone’ reinforces the experience of separateness when the Core Veil is intact, and it helps to maintain a sense of ‘I’ in the left over ego consciousness after the Core Veil has gone.

 

Etheric Body Aspect: Because the etheric body is your interface to your outer world, there is an aspect of the Core Veil that expresses through the etheric body, which helps to hold a certain kind of boundary that maintains the sense of the world as ‘out there’, as separate from ‘in here’, and which also helps to maintain the sense of ‘other’. After the Core Veil is gone, that duality of ‘out there / in here’ still helps to maintain the sense of ‘I’ in the leftover ego consciousness. As this etheric body aspect starts to break down, the distinction between ‘out there’ and ‘in here’ breaks down as well, blurring the sense of ‘other’. To explore this aspect, meditate on the boundary that defines where you end and the world begins.

 

Shadow I’s—Emotional Identity Aspect: Your identification with your emotions extended the Core Veil into your emotional body and set up that aspect of the Core Veil. Once established, you experienced every emotion as ‘my emotions’ and these emotions were experienced as ‘me’. This emotional identity maintains itself even when the main aspect of the Core Veil is gone, even without a core sense of ‘I’, if this aspect of the Core Veil is still in place. Even without a present, core sense of ‘I’, the emotional identity can use the ‘Shadow I’s’—the emotional memories of ‘I’—to maintain itself.  And consider what it has to draw on: eons of memory of ‘I want, I don’t want, I like, I don’t like, I love, I hate, I think, I feel, I need… I… I… I…’ which are imprinted as emotional memory in the emotional body. And the leftover ego consciousness can use this emotional identity and these Shadow I’s to maintain a sense that it is still real and to keep its story going. As an example of how these Shadow-I’s are used: if you had a habit of reacting to someone’s anger, the leftover ego consciousness will still try to generate that reaction (even after the Core Veil is gone, because that is how it identifies itself) and it will look to these Shadow I’s to give life and reality to these reactions. Once this aspect of Core Veil is gone, although leftover conditioning will still generate emotional reactions, there is no identity in it. It feels like it is just happening. The sense of emotional identity is gone. This can be very confusing. The ego now has trouble referencing itself—and the mind can get very confused—because there is no emotional point of reference for creating a Shadow sense of personal self.

 

Pre-Karmic Aspect: The ‘pre-karmic’ was our first level of identity, at the very beginning of our incarnational journey, before we moved into the experience of a being a separate incarnational personality and before we ever incarnated. At that time, we identified with the whole field of creation, in a way that is similar to the way a newborn identifies with its whole environment, before it experiences itself as a separate part of that environment. This pre-karmic aspect helps to maintain a non-specific, background identification with all issues. This was the first secondary aspect of the Core Veil to form, after the main aspect. The etheric body aspect and body ego aspect need to release before this one can.

    

Note: There is no particular order for releasing these secondary aspects of the Core Veil. It will be different in different people. And there may be other aspects as well that I have not yet encountered or recognized. In fact, all that I am saying here is just one point of view about the process of awakening.

 

To Awaken

In general, since it is Freedom that is doing the awakening, and it is Freedom that is using various methods to create ripening, what seems to help one person may be useless to another. For one person, even living in an ashram with an awakened being may be just a way of avoiding what they really need to experience to awaken. Another person may do years of intense spiritual practices, feel that have gotten nowhere, stop spiritual practice, and then one day, just as they are about to sip their 5^th tequila in a bar in Mexico, they wake up. Someone else, looking at that, may believe that it takes 5 tequilas drunk in the right bar, at the right time, in Mexico, to wake up. But if that becomes their spiritual practice, it is less likely that they will wake up than that they will become a frustrated alcoholic living in Mexico.

     One or more of the following will probably be needed for you to complete your journey: a deep alignment with the inner urge to awaken, trust, doubt, a willingness to deeply surrender, detachment, frustrated attachment, a deep sense of peace, a complete lack of peace, a willingness to hear the Truth, earnestness, love, a deep willingness to sit in a place of not-knowing, a willingness to let go of control, an openness to the unknown, complete honesty with yourself, and/or some amazing good luck. (Of course, for you it may be different.)

    Often, the desire to awaken creates a lot of frustration for the ego-personality that wants to awaken. Sometimes, the frustration is not really about awakening, but because the ego has become enamored with the idea of awakening, as if it were another thing it could own or achieve. Then it projects its inner drama of lack and neediness and desire onto the quest for awakening. This kind of drama doesn’t lead to awakening; it only creates a new drama for the lack and frustration that was already there. Sometimes, though, the desire for awakening is truly that. One has come to a place where life no longer has the possibility of being satisfying without it. The divine has deeply activated the desire for Freedom within that person, and the ego can do nothing but own that desire as its own. The search for Truth or Freedom or Awakening becomes all that truly matters. But even when the search is real, one of the consequences of being pulled by the call of Freedom is often dissatisfaction with life as it is, so frustration is typically already built into the picture. Add to that picture the fact that there is no way to know when or if you will get the awakening you desire, add that there is no definite route or actions you can know you can take to create what you want, and add whatever number of years you have already been pursuing this, and the frustration grows exponentially—if you identify with that drama. So, being a true seeker will, for those who do identify with that drama, be quite frustrating. And usually there is a hidden dimension to this frustration as well. The secret fact is that even when awakening is truly desired, that being doesn’t want to surrender to, or open up to, its own fear of annihilation, which is often the doorway to awakening. So, there is a kind of life and death struggle between the desire (often desperate desire) for awakening and the ego’s desire for security, and the conflict can be amplified tremendously by the deep survival consciousness involved in this struggle. At the same time, this kind of struggle is often the vehicle for the surrender that is often needed for awakening to occur. It can lead to a place where the ego finally feels that it must awaken in this life or die trying. That is a common theme in the history of beings that have awakened, and it creates a very deep surrender and opening. But there is a big difference between the simple willingness to die to become free (that was a common theme for these beings) and the drama that the ego can create about being willing to die to be free. And you can’t decide that you must awaken or die; either you feel that way or you don’t. Even the basic desire to awaken is not chosen; it chooses you. (The urge actually exists within everyone, but it is either not activated, or it becomes avoided and suppressed, because allowing this urge to be experienced threatens to overturn everything that is secure and stable in one’s life and to make the person feel completely out of control.)

Often, a person has to be willing to open to their deepest fear to awaken. This is because the deepest fear—the fear of annihilation—sits in the heart, and it deeply holds in place the sense of ‘I’ that sits in the heart. But Freedom sits even deeper in the heart. How can you get deep enough to get to Freedom if you are avoiding the fear that sits in front of it? It can be useful to ask yourself if your spiritual practice is a way of getting to this fear or a way of avoiding it.

One way out of the frustration that seeking awakening can generate, is to not let the urge to awaken create a huge drama about awakening. Instead, you can simply sit with the urge to awaken and feel the yearning inside of it. This doesn’t mean to sit with the ego’s desire to awaken; it means sitting with where the urge to awaken arises from, beyond the mind and emotions. Then, you just follow that yearning deeper and deeper, to its source. The source comes from Freedom Itself, calling Itself home. Whatever fears come up, just open up to them and let them be. But don’t concerned with them; concern will just generate drama. Notice that the urge to awaken is deeper than the fear. So, use your connection to the urge to awaken to relax through the fears. Stay focused on the yearning for awakening that is arising from deep within you. This is the call of Freedom, calling you home. You don’t need a big drama; you just need to go home.

When in doubt, simply listen to your heart and follow where the call to Freedom takes you—without creating a drama about it and without creating an identity out of it. Eventually, you will follow it back through own Heart and discover what you have always known. The ironic fact is: you already are what you are. Whatever you are looking for, you are already That.

 

Process vs. No Process

From Absolute Truth, there is nothing to say. There isn’t even anything to say about ‘nothing to say’. There is no mind to say anything, no story, no words, no concepts. There is no concept of awakening or non-awakening, no concept of free will or no free will. There is no concept of divine intention or process to life; there is no ‘time’ for process to occur. There is only Absolute Truth, as IT IS. In fact, because there is nothing that can be said, there is no teaching possible from this place, only silence. Absolute Truth is not a teaching; it is What IS. Teachings are concepts about the nature of What IS, and about what can be done to realize What IS.

The moment someone says, “There is nothing you can do because there is no one to do anything” or says, “There is no spiritual process to awakening,” then you are hearing some kind of interpretation, some kind of concept about What IS. What you are hearing is a teaching about the Truth. And this is the way Truth looks from a particular point of view—but it is not the Truth Itself, which has no point of view. It is a teaching. Aligning with this teaching and where it comes from in that teacher will be useful for some beings, but not for others. Papaji (and Ramana Maharshi before him) had the wisdom to say that this teaching is only for the ‘select few’. Not that those select few were special, but rather that this teaching would only help a select few.

Other teachings, other points of view of the Truth, are also possible. The teaching presented here sees awakening as something that happens in a moment, but at the end of a long process of ripening. It is a teaching based on the fullness within the silence of Truth, not on the silence alone. This fullness is pure being, and yet it is not separate from our sense of self. Although we falsely create the sense that we have a self or are a self, we are able to do that only because we have a sense of self-ness to begin with. That self-ness is part of the nature of being. Adyashanti, in Emptiness Dancing, says, “The sense of self becomes like sugar dissolving into water until it’s as if there isn’t a self, and yet we still exist.” In other words, when the sense of ‘my self’ dissolves, Self-ness still remains. Self-ness is not ‘a self’, and it is not ‘my self.” It is What IS, and your inner being is That. It is what pervades the emptiness. You know this place. You touch it, for at least a moment, every time you begin to laugh with someone, when you merge into that place where your laugh and the other person’s laugh have become one laugh. It is that laugh just before it becomes ‘my laugh’. Self-ness is like the essence of this shared laughter. Emptiness is pervaded by this essence of laughter. Oneness is this essence of laughter. And this makes for a very different kind of Oneness than a Oneness that would be only pervaded by Silence. Oneness pervaded only by Silence can only witness life. In Silence, one can eat an apple, but cannot name it. In Silence nothing is really happening. But Oneness pervaded by being, pervaded by this essence of laughter that is the essence of Self-ness, creates life and participates in it. This kind of Oneness can eat an apple, can name the apple, and can throw the apple in the air, just to see how high it can go. Life isn’t just happening, it is being created and it is being participated in. In fact, it is being fully participated in by the Oneness that manifests it and that has intended it. Life is the vehicle for the beingness of Oneness to engage Itself, to express Itself and to experience Itself—in every moment and every facet of creation: when the wind blows through the trees, when rain falls, when an engineer is using his mind to design a new machine, or when two people are relating to each other, even as they imagine that they are separate persons. In every created moment, Oneness is there experiencing Itself, and all of Creation is engaged, through Oneness, at every point of experience. It is not that life ‘just happens’ and there is no process, but rather that life is being created and everything is in process, with all processes intimately connected. Human beings are part of this infinite process; they are part of the movement of awakening in creation as a whole. And as part of that infinite process, they have their own ‘localized’ process as well. The fact that this infinite creative process arises from Mystery, and is completely unpredictable and completely unknowable, does not negate the reality of the process itself or the incomprehensible creative awareness that guides it.

It would be easy, of course, to claim that this kind of teaching is a ‘better’ teaching. But is it actually better or truer than the teaching of non-process? It will seem to be for those for whom it works, and it will seem not to be for those who are drawn to the teaching of non-process. Whichever teaching works best for you right now is the one that is true for you, right now. And of course that may change—may even change many times—over the course of the illusion of time.

End Notes

     This handout is meant to give you some sense about the Core Veil and make you aware of the some of the misconceptions about awakening. Many concepts were presented, but if you only take in the concepts and don’t sense between the lines, then this essay may have done you more harm than good. Concepts are only useful as long as you remember they are concepts. Otherwise, they simply create a mental structure that you identify with as Reality. Then you think you have ‘got it’, but all you have is mental structure made of concepts. So, hold these concepts loosely and let them engage your inner being. Don’t turn them into a mental prison. The concept of what happens when the Core Veil drops and Basic Awakening occurs has nothing to do with what actually happens in that moment. The concept cannot even come close. It cannot even get into the same universe. It would be like trying to use mathematics to describe the smell of a rose. To know what a rose smells like, you just have to wake up and smell the roses.