beginning the game

WHEN WE MAKE PROGRESS…

02 beginning the game

Continuing our understanding of how we make progress spiritually, we can elaborate on the comparison of life to a video game.

Let’s look at what happens when we wake up to find ourselves on a new level.

Worldly awareness begins with physical sensation. When we’re in overwhelming bliss we are pure awareness… not of this world.

When we become aware of our bodies, we enter this world.

As our mind settles into the body of a fetus, it’s only as the fetus develops that we develop body awareness.

Ultimately, Pure Awareness remains when everything else dissolves. Falling unconscious resembles the state of pure awareness: we no longer perceive a physical environment with a discriminating mind, and dreams do not arise.

Body awareness leads to mental discrimination through perceiving physical sensations. Mental discrimination leads to discernment, and discernment leads to subjectivity.

Until we reach a point of possessing subjectivity, our experience is purely objective: that of being one with all.

Once we arrive at a point of subjectivity, we begin to experience ourselves as separate from the world and others.

Margaret Mahler studied the development of the infant’s mind once outside the womb. She noted how babies only gradually – not immediately – differentiate themselves from their mothers. She called her findings “Separation-Individuation Theory”. Many consider this a natural process, and since all babies seem to do it, I suppose that it is.

This convention of ourselves existing separately from others holds a mixture of truth and falsity.