Essay #28:  Awakening from Personhood

Was it the ray that caught my eye
And drew it to the tree?
Was I asleep beneath the sky
And dreaming silently of me?

By and by as Gautama meditated his awareness landed on a variety of thought-forms with a likeness to “my” and “mine.”  Whenever his awareness would land on one of these, it would cast a shadow on the ground as if some monolith stood tall enough to block even the passing clouds.  Even worse, it seemed to so re-direct the flow of his awareness as to cause it to spin in a kind of vortex around this thought-form.  And whatever other aggregates or objects his attention might have touched, it drew these into this vortex around itself so that all became “colored” by their rotation around this thought.

Again and again, Gautama sensed that he was close to enlightenment.  Again and again, his mind fell short of achieving it by becoming entrapped in the vortex of one or another qualities we would call “personal.”  Some preference would arise, or some aversion.  Some hunger would flare or some fear for his survival.  At first Siddhārtha may have dealt with these qualities of mind individually through a process of reasoning:  “Hunger can be satisfied with the food that is available.  Therefore, let hunger go.”  Similarly:  “There is no sickness or imminent cause of death.  Therefore, the fear of death is unjustified.”  Such arguments may have worked in individual cases.  However, the problem is that there are always more cases.  As soon as we address personal concerns in one area, new ones arise in another.  The fires of the mind burn low across one swath of ground then jump into fresh tinder and blaze intensely once more!

Through many days and weeks Gautama pressed on with his meditation.  His effort reached a pitch until it finally dawned that all his effort was no different from surrender.  With a final elevation of his awareness Buddha saw that all of his effort was part of an oscillation which included surrender.  Although it came with extreme effort, enlightenment itself was not about holding onto or achieving anything.  The very same effort which revealed to him what was really true also showed him that there were no personal gains to be achieved.  There was no success to be achieved in reasoning with or satisfying the fires of the mind.  That they would just start up again in another landscape or another person showed that they were not ultimately “personal” at all but just qualities moving back and forth under a much higher, general awareness.  In a broader sense, all qualities that seemed to define or delimit “personhood” were spatially and temporally relative to other similar or dissimilar qualities or aggregates in other time frames and locations.  But that was all.  Within none of these aggregates could be found any such thing as a “non-relative self or individual.”  In other words, one’s sense of self is due entirely to the activity of awareness happening to land on these aggregates and being, so to speak, “localized” and “informed” by them.  It has nothing to do with a substantial or absolute self in which awareness has “taken root.”

This insight was the ray that freed Gautama from all attachment to the personal and made him Buddha, that is, awake.  At once he saw that all thoughts of personhood amount to living life inside a dream whose illusory dimensions are “my” and “mine.”  Waking up he noticed the tree he was sitting under as if for the first time.  No longer seen through the lenses of “not me” and “not mine” the tree appeared in his awareness now equal in stature to all of the qualities formerly held to be different in kind under the divisive thought-form of “mine.”  Thus—in this new stature—the tree became a witness to Buddha’s enlightened awareness which made no judgmental divisions among all that came under its attention.  Impartial as the sky, in wakefulness he could embrace it all.

The shedding of the self, identification with the self, and identification with the various and sundry preferences, aversions, images, and delusions that defined the self did indeed prove to be the turning-point in Buddha’s quest for enlightenment.  Now he could arise.  Now he could begin to organize his awareness into teachings and methods for the liberation of his buddies in Benares and of all humankind.