Gary Crowley – Only More So
*Chapter excerpt used by permission from the author.
Only More So
The world after awakening to enlightenment is exactly as your world is right now, only more so. With no illusion of separateness, the awakened is now the entire experiencing of whatever is. Awakening to the actuality of what is makes everything exactly as it is, only more so.
For the awakened, everything is different and everything is exactly the same. Tastes in music, art, food, humor, etc. remain essentially the same. Thoughts and feelings continue to arise of their own accord just as before. Family and friends remain as they are. The history of every body is absolutely the same, down to the smallest detail. If there is a memory of dropping an ice cream cone at age five, that memory remains. The only difference for the awakened is that they are no longer distracted by the illusion of separateness. This leaves everything exactly as it has always been, only more so.
Pic by Sherri Rosaldo
“Tastes in music, art, food, humor, etc. remain essentially the same” – Gary Crowley
The awakened rests in the understanding that there is no conscious choice over the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that arise within us. There is understanding that each human being is a unique pattern of neurological development and adaptation that functions outside any concept of conscious will. Each neurology simply encounters life situations and reacts in its own idiosyncratic way. The already established neurology just does what it does. After all, how could it not?
Being linked in the chain of cause and effect does not confuse the awakened. There is no struggle and strain as the chain unwinds. Everyone and everything still does what they do within the chain. There is an understanding that no one in the physical world acts as pure causality. When investigated, our experiencing is understood to be a long chain of linked effects, each prior effect becoming the cause for another effect as the chain unwinds. This understanding allows the awakened to effortlessly be the experiencing of life itself.
*Excerpt from Chapter Seven (Re-Integration: Awakening to Enlightenment) from the book From Here to Here – Turning Toward Enlightenment by Gary Crowley.
Gary Crowley was born in 1965 and was raised in Massachusetts as a practical-minded New Englander. He graduated from Stanford University in 1987 with degrees in Economics and Political Science. At a young age, he was attracted to Eastern philosophy and spiritual writings that seemed to offer a glimpse of something greater than the life he had known growing up.
However, by 2001, Gary finally gave up on all forms of spiritual seeking after decades on the path. He surrendered under the weight of the many well-intended spiritual teachings he’d accumulated over the years. All the study had not caused the shift in awareness that he’d so earnestly sought and had been so often promised. The problem, he then realized, was that he had been simply piling up concepts without addressing the very foundation –his sense of “self” –that was doing the seeking. He discovered that it is only by dismantling our assumptions about “who we are,” and not merely describing a state of being such as oneness or wholeness, that we can bring about a natural opening to a new way of experiencing life.
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