The 4th of 5 tennants.

Date:   5/21/2006 6:21:50 AM ( 18 y ago)

The Fourth Tenet:
The Truth of Impersonality

The fourth tenet is called The Truth of Impersonality. It states that ultimately every aspect of your own personal experience can be seen from a perspective that is completely impersonal. And it is from that vast universal perspective alone that true liberation can be found.

The impersonal view reveals to us that the separate self-sense, or ego, is nothing more than an illusion of uniqueness, created moment by moment through our compulsive habit of personalizing almost every thought, feeling, and sensation we have. The truth is that the human experience could never be a personal affair. Most of the highs and lows we go through and compulsively claim as “mine” are in fact shockingly impersonal. From the biggest perspective, all human experience can be seen as being part of a process—an evolutionary or developmental process that is moving forward in time. Our own personal experience of that process in all its many dimensions—inner and outer, gross and subtle—is ultimately a very small part of an infinite unfolding. Thoughts and feelings that arise in individual consciousness reflect emotional and psychological structures or habits that have slowly developed over hundreds of thousands of years.

If you step back and begin to look more and more objectively, in light of this greater context we exist within, you will slowly but surely begin to recognize for yourself the impersonal nature of all of your own experience. In that recognition, the personal dimension will suddenly become completely transparent to you. This insight, even if only temporary, will completely undercut every belief you have about being a unique, individuated entity who lives in some separate bubble, mysteriously isolated from everything else that exists. You are a process. Dare to face this and you will become transparent to yourself.

The personal is simply the veil that creates the illusion of separation that is ego. And it’s a mighty illusion. It’s powerful and profound. Most of us live our entire lives behind that veil, never stepping beyond it except perhaps in brief glimpses of higher states. But if you are willing to face into the truth of impersonality, and have the courage to see through your own personal self-sense, you will discover the utterly impersonal nature of the authentic self, which is who you really are. And as you embrace the impersonal perspective, your identification and allegiance will shift dramatically from the personal concerns of the ego to the impersonal passion of the authentic self, which cares only for the future of our collective developmental process. To the authentic self, the personal is irrelevant. If your allegiance is with the authentic self, you may still experience the personal dimension—the ego’s fears, neuroses, and irrational compulsions—but you will miraculously find that you have the emotional, psychological, and spiritual strength to be able to handle it. Why? Because you know that you are only a very small part of a vast impersonal process. When you pull away the veil of the personal, you discover a radical objectivity that liberates you, right now, to consciously participate in the highest level of that process, which is the evolution of consciousness itself.

Andrew Cohen


 

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