There are many concepts that point toward this understanding: terms such as "awakening", "non-duality", "prior to understanding", "consciousness-without-an-object", "pure being", and so forth. All these concepts are sound. But they are pointers, not the realisation itself. The realisation itself is a knowing of a different order beyond conceptual categorisation. It is radical, revolutionary, and always now. It turns everything upside down, and is a full stop in the groping of a confused mind.
The Program is the understanding of what our consciousness is, and of the essential non-existence of the wilful self, the person consumed by fears, attachments, and cravings, who thinks that they can control things and believes they have free will; even the person who thinks they want (or need) to become enlightened in some way.
The Program is not non-dual, as that is yet another category applied by the mind. Nor is it dual. It is neither, beyond both, and nothing. It cannot be seized and catalogued. That does not mean that awakening cannot be approached via thought. It certainly can, and it can be described and understood intellectually.
The mind, clarified and sharpened, is an important tool for undoing the delusions of the personal self. But the mind only takes us to "99 degrees celsius" point. It does not take us beyond the boiling point of awakening. It ushers us to the door, along with its essential companion known as "emotional passion".
The Programs consciousness sees and understands the intrinsic and seamless perfection of each moment. It sees and understands that the personal self does not, and has never, had any substantial existence, beyond being a mental construct: a collection of memories and identifications, a presumed "centre of gravity" inside that does not exist in any absolute sense.
The Program its-self cannot be realised if we are run by desires generated by the phantom of the personal shadow self. The personal self seeks many things, the endless Holy Grails of the world. Awakening will simply be yet another of its desires if it sees something desirable in the process of becoming awakened. Our personalised shadow self thinks that perhaps this "awakening" will relieve us of certain things, and certain responsibilities. The personal self usually has a wrong motivation to seek an awakening, and in time this wrong motivation is revealed, resulting in a decline of interest in our program. This decline in interest most often takes the form of becoming distracted by other matters. These distractions are in fact the personal shadow self seeking to escape the business of recovery, and reacquiring its old hold and habits of dysfunction and coping strategies.
For the personally constructed self, the program is ultimately terrifying, because it is a call to abandon ship entirely. It is the death of all cherished illusions. As such, it is not possible for us to embark on this path unless we are truly tired of our illusions and dissociations, and of the utterly repetitive nature of child hidden withins suffering.
The Program is liberation from illusion, freedom from ignorance. But in almost all cases our personal awakening is not a one-shot affair. Its realisation is radical and immanent, but rarely complete and total. The personal shadow self does not give up its cherished illusions so quickly or easily. It usually puts up a long sustained fight.
Because of this, it is useless and pointless to turn the shadow self into some sort of enemy. This will just be the spiritualised ego fighting with the shadow self. It will be illusion at war with illusion. Many fellowship seekers fall into this trap. To do this is not to become liberated, but rather to become inwardly divided, to ultimately become little more than a moralist, an insufferable priest of the church of a Phoney fellowship.
A more reliable approach is to bring awareness into our personal shadow self. Instead of making it an enemy, or running from it in fear and judgement, we must become deeply familiar with it. This inevitably involves the need to be exploratory with life to some extent. We are better off exercising some of our desires in order to become fully familiar with them, rather than controlling and repressing them in the name of a sought for recovery that is really litle more of a frightened escape from our human condition.
To be exploratory is not license to indulge. We avoid the extremes of repression and indulgence. In so doing, we seek to realise truth on both absolute and conventional levels. We seek to realise truth in silent meditation and contemplation, and in the noisy market place or when quarrelling with our lover. We seek to realise truth in focused and inquiring thought, and in the expanding awareness of silent observation of that which observes. We seek to realise truth in sensual contact and in ordinary activities, by being fully present in all acts.
We have no hope of walking the path to recovery without a deep and sustaining passion for truth. At first, and possibly for a long time, this will seem like "my passion for truth". Eventually we will recognise—always now—that this is truth discovering itself, and that the personal shadow self, with its agendas and prized dreams, is gradually consumed by the fire of this passion.
The Program is not about renouncing the world. It is not about renouncing anything. It is rather an opening to what is, and a realisation of the perfection of what is.
This is accomplished by realising the nature of illusion as it is generated by the personal self...me, my desires and my fears. That, combined with a passionate and abiding interest in ultimate truth, are the twin tools for recognising the true nature of reality. However ..and this is a crucial point .. to recognise the illusions of the personal shadow self does not mean that we leap over the personal self, in some misguided attempt to bypass it rapidly, to dismiss it as illusion, when in fact we are still in its grips. If we attempt this we will likely fail. Instead, what is required is a full investigation of the personal self, a mature willingness to be responsible for its manifestations, and to take full ownership of it. We cannot drop a ball unless we are holding it in our hand. We cannot drop the delusions of the personal shadow self until we have seen and understood the full extent of our identification with it. This requires a profound level of honesty, and a consistent willingness to face our child hidden within in every moment.
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