The story of my Awakening

Letters to my unborn child.

Did you hear about Awakening?

If you read this, and you are over 12 years old, I am 100% sure that you already had a moment in your life, when you experienced the first step of awakening — the moment when you realized that you are not your body. At one point you just started to distinguish yourself and your body as two separate things. You disassociated them. You started to think of your body as of some kind of vessel for the being dwelling inside this body — You. If you took your time to investigate how You live inside your body, you might have discovered that depending on the state of your physical body, you feel different. This is very important to realize.

Your body is your only home.

People who embraced it treat their bodies differently. They understand that the closest way of interaction of the body with outside world is eating and drinking hence it is critical that you don’t put any crap inside yourself, as most of the “food” that is out there is literally a poison. They exercise and keep their bodies in a good physical state. But the real Awakening is the moment when you realize:

You are not your thoughts.

It is hard to understand this as a concept, for the simple reason. We think and imagine with thoughts. Our thoughts are complex images comprised of multiple components such as visual, audial, kinesthetic, components of smell, taste, and 6th sense, with 6th sense being not something metaphysical, rather being simply an internal feeling when something is right or wrong — your Intuition.

We think in these images, yet we formulate our thoughts in words.
If you make an experiment and ask a bunch of your friends to imagine an “apple” all of them will have an image of an apple in their head. If you ask them to describe the apple, you will find out that all of those imaginary apples are different from each other. They are different in shape, size, ripeness, and even in quantity and associations attached to them. Someone might imagine Adam’s apple, and someone the Apple of Steve Jobs. This simple experiment shows us how delusional is the concept of words by itself. Words is a decoding system to describe concepts, but as you can see, there is no word which would give a precise and full description of something that at least exists as a physical object, I wouldn’t even mention something that doesn’t.

The use of words doesn’t explain the reality that is beyond the words, the reality in which things exist as they exist in our minds, and this is the reality that you experience when you Wake Up.

Awakening is the experience when your thoughts stop. Your thoughts stop, but You are still there, You don’t disappear. So if you are still there, then who is that thinking Guy? When the Awakening happens you suddenly realize that you exist in duality: there is “I” that exists in the realm of words and formulation, and there is “I” that is observing. You definitely had moments when your thinking stopped, but most likely they were so short that you didn’t have enough time to detect the Observer. Or maybe it is better to say “to become an Observer”. Within this duality, these two identities are constantly playing push-and-pull, with one or another taking the spotlight on the scene of consciousness. You always say in your head: “I think that…”. So who is that “I” who says that? But most importantly, who is that “I” that is listening?

Awakening Day is the Birthday of the Observer, and all of the days after become a lifetime adventure of strengthening the inner Observer, making him bigger and stronger, so that he comes to the spotlight more often, stays for longer periods of time and doesn’t allow the other “thinking” guy to be reactive. I know it is hard to comprehend it. And honestly, there is no need in that. The sole purpose of my letter is to motivate you to go on your own journey of self-exploration. There are no shortcuts. You need to dive deep down the rabbit hole and find out how deep it is. All you need is

Meditation.

There are many types of meditations, and you can educate yourself about them, fortunately there are many resources out there. My personal choice is Vipassanā aka Zazen meditation— the meditation that uses mindfulness of breathing. You sit comfortably, eliminate external noise, close our eyes, plug in your earplugs, breath naturally and observe your breathing going through 4 points.

Inhale. Feel the sensations of your nostrils, feel how the air goes down through your pharynx, passing the trachea, and filling your lungs.
Pause. Focus on the moment between inhaling and exhaling. This is the moment of maximum silence.
Exhale. Feel how you diaphragm relaxes releasing the air washing out your thoughts like waves. And then it takes practice. Days of practice, years of practice, life of practice (probably you are very conscious of your breathing as you read these lines).
Pause.

I remember my first meditation. I was sitting near the pond, and waiting for my friends. I put a 10 min timer, and I swear I couldn’t wait when it will set off. I was impatient. My mind was like a crazy monkey running towards the cliff. But I was persistent, I didn’t know what will happen, but I read a lot about meditations and its benefits. I was practicing every day. 5 min, 10 min. My mind was buzzing like a swarm of wasps. 15 min, 20 min. My thoughts got slower, like a calm river but still multiple thoughts taking the spot-light one after another. I got calmer. I started meditations without the timer. 30 min, 35 min, 40 min. Thoughts were slow enough so that I could separate them into single thoughts. I focused on the self-discipline. Setting a record of 55 min, 1 hour. It took me roughly 2 years.

And then…it happened.

I was meditating on my bed, just as usual, and then my thoughts stopped. I was shocked. There were no thoughts. But I was there. It lasted just several seconds, and then it slipped away because I thought “OMG! I am not thinking!”.

It’s a very tricky part to keep the silence of a mind. But once I experienced that one time, I knew how to do it. I stepped into the space beyond the words. I put my leg in the aperture, keeping ‘the door’ open became the just a matter of practice. So I did. I kept practicing, and I was fascinated to see how my mindfulness grows. I was observing my breath and my thoughts while walking, I was actively meditating everywhere I could, being present in the moment. The awareness muscle was getting stronger and it is still. I am working on it every day. I am still weak, I still slip from observing into reactive thinking but I understand my weaknesses. Once you wake up you start to understand so much more.

Wake up, kiddo.

Once awaken, you start to see.
You start to see when someone talks to you from their very center, or on the contrary just repeats some preprogrammed formulas recorded in ego.

You can see all the conditioning that someone experienced in his life. Social, cultural, internet conditioning. Some of that programming is set on self-destruction, some of it just some dogmas that a person picked up, without even remembering where. “I am Russian so I need to drink!”, “I am Korean so I can’t argue with elders”, “I am a man so I need to be emotionless”, and this list can go on. Hell yeah, mindfulness helps to detect a lot of bullshit.

You start to perceive the world as a child again. You see a dawn, and you don’t call it “pretty” because you understand that the moment you call it “pretty” any trace of its beauty just fades away. In such moments, you start to stay in the zone beyond the words, and channel the beauty of the moment through your body and soul, feeling how truly unique, unrepetitive, and breathtaking it is.

You will get freedom — freedom from what people think, as you will start to see the true nature of their thoughts.

You start to be less reactive. You will start to see the duality of ReaCtivity and CReativity. You are able to create your reality only in the moments when you are not reactive, and on the other hand, when you get possessed by thoughtless reactions you are losing the control over your life.

You will be less attached to material things. When you come to someone’s homes, and the host suddenly tells you to go away, are you pissed? No. Of course, not. It is their home. But imagine someone comes to your home and tells you to go away. That would make you angry. The point is, that we need to live our lives like we are all guests on this planet. We are here temporary. We will die, and take nothing with ourselves. This cozy home will stay, this fancy car will stay, this fresh shiny smartphone will stay. You will take nothing and will go into the darkness empty-handed. Live free of attachments.

You will value relationships. In the end of the day, this is what makes us happy, when the time to leave this planet comes. Who did we make happy? What did we make other people feel? How are we remembered in the hearts of those who walked with us?

You will care more about food for your thoughts. Once you understand the nature of thoughts, you will be careful what to feed to your mind. Unlike, stomach, which is in this sense has a very smart design, and can puke poison or something it can’t digest, our mind is a collector of everything we serve it on a plate. Be careful with what you feed your soul.

You will be intact with nature. You will feel good spending time on nature, and feel bad in huge concrete jungles. You will feel good on the beaches, and you will see blind people in the nightclubs. You will love breathing in fresh air on the tops of the mountains, and you will suffocate on the streets. You will run bare feet, and you will be a wild and beautiful animal, exactly the way you are designed to be and you it won’t be anything but natural to you.

You will know that if praying is like talking to God, meditation is like listening to him. You will be coming back to this space, to get energy and remember your true nature.

You will find God. You will understand that the dark and silent space inside each one of us is absolutely identical. Once we erase our definitions we become the same. No… We become One.

You will understand people. We are all lost children, trying to find our way back home. The home that we carry inside ourselves all our lives. If we take our time to forge our self-discipline we will come back to the Source. And we will learn.

We will learn that happiness is the illusion. It is always somewhere in the future luring us like a little green light. Whereas the present moment is the ultimate reality in which everything happens, and we can dissolve our pain in it. Our planet is sleeping because we forgot who we are.

We can transcend. In fact, humanity doesn’t have a choice. We need to elevate our collective consciousness or perish in a technological catastrophe which we one day will cast upon ourselves. The new level of consciousness is coming, it is inevitable. Let’s hope it will not be too late.

I am a little bit jealous of you because you live in the age when there are more awaken people. And you become one of them.

You were born to make a difference, not just add up to the noise.
Remember it, kiddo.

With you between the lines.
I love you.