The human experience.

As we seek and search for meaning the mind conjures up ideas, it forms theories about what it is that it's trying to understand. It is the mind's job to seek solutions to problems and find order in chaos. What often happens is that with contact with new age philosophies we are exposed to a vast variety of ideas about what is needed to gain enlightenment, what is needed to purify the body and ideas about what enlightenment actually is. Most of these ideas are erroneous and they actually become an impediment. The idea that you can do something about enlightenment reinforces the idea that there is someone here who can do anything.

Classical concepts like omnipresent awareness creates the idea that once you are enlightened you will view the world from many angles simultaneously, other than your particular human experience. But that's not so simply because your particular experience is formed by the central nervous system processing and forming a unique perception that is then witnessed and from one particular vantage point in space/time. Pursuing the question 'who am I' will bring you to the point of seeing that whatever the mind wants to cling to as an identification is witnessed by awareness - is an object in awareness. Nothing appears without awareness witnessing it and in that way awareness is omnipresent. Enlightenment doesn't happen to an individual it happens through an individual. The human experience continues as before, from it's particular vantage point.

The mind, being just another object that appears in awareness, can never know awareness - subjectivity. But it continues to work as hard as it can to understand. In the end what is seen is that all there is is awareness and that all the appearances in awareness are awareness also. Waves on the ocean - the waves are still the ocean and at no time are they other than the ocean. Appearances in awareness are patterns of energy, ripples, in awareness and made of awareness.

One of the ideas that the mind will throw up is that after self realization the whole experiece will be different. Well! It is different and it is the same, meaning that the difference is that there is a more holistic understanding (and without the 'me' and all the suffering that goes with it). The human experience continues exactly as it did before as just another appearance in awareness, but now we don't understand exclusively via the human experience. We understand more holistically that we are the awareness the human experience appears in. Another way of looking at it is to imagine you are looking through a keyhole in a door into another room. As we grow up we look through these eyes but gradually forget that we are the one looking and become identified with the events in the other room. Self realization is the remembering that we are the one looking and are not the events in the other room, even though they continue and we continue to look.