Inner Work

For the week of: December 8, 2003

Consciousness and Personality

A major milestone in the spiritual path emerges when we begin to have contact with and understanding of real consciousness, not just the content of our ordinary thoughts, emotions, and sensory impressions. Consciousness embraces all our experience through the dimension of context, the cognizing stillness underlying all that goes on.

A corollary development weakens the grip of our personality, our conditioned patterns of thought, emotion, and action. Personality responds to the content of life, but does so in a programmed way, with no real freedom of choice. Do we choose to get angry at rude behavior? Not likely. The anger comes as a powerful and automatic conditioned response, to which we passively acquiesce. The same holds in every other department of our lives. In many ways we are effectively little more than what robots will be some decades from now.

Consciousness, though, carries a greater degree of freedom. Instead of being in our personality, our personality is in us. When we open to consciousness, we become the context, the silent basic awareness underneath all the content of life. We relax into our inner stillness, which is our pure awareness itself. By living in contact with our contextual awareness, we become able to see our personality patterns in action without being totally caught up in them, able freely to choose our responses to the events of life. Abiding in consciousness we live fully, experiencing the joy and love of living in wholeness.

For this week, notice how you are always caught up in your personality. Work to open to the pure seeing of consciousness, to be able to say “here I am, fully present.”

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