is it a realization or only an intellectual understanding?
Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
Words are important when we are trying to realize consciousness as a single movement of totality that is inside of you — to see things as they actually are, including the psychological conditioning that creates the “me” or self; and to find the silent stillness as your essence. That’s a lot to pack into one sentence, one stream of thought.
While a person may say that “we are all one” or that consciousness is unbounded, there is a difference between whether such statements come from an intellectual understanding or a realization. Along with the intellectual understanding comes many misunderstandings about what it means to be awakened, as well as an infusion of the self into the understanding. But with a realization there is no confusion, doubt, or conflation with experience or phenomenal events (that which is perceptible by the senses).
what is the difference?
The self, which is the source of most of our psychological suffering, is built out of thought. Who we believe we are is the product of an accretion of thoughts. Examples of thoughts that create the self include such designations as I am a mother, father, writer, American, progressive, humorist, athlete, engineer, and introvert. These are descriptions of the self, but there is something behind the self, some essence that is not obvious to most people, including the one who believes there is a self. This “something” is not made of thought and therefore thought, the self, cannot be used to apprehend it. This is logical if nothing else. But is logic enough to actually know the truth of what we actually are?
the self is conditioned consciousness
The self believes it is tied to the body and all of its senses, movements, feelings, associations, concerns, needs, problems, anxieties, fears, and so on. It is also vulnerable, insecure, desirous, and dedicated to avoiding pain and having pleasure. As an accretion, or collection, of thoughts, the self is not real in the same way that a tree, a rock, or the body is real. The self is an idea, a belief system that forms a sense of me, which is the center of importance in its little world. But since this self is fashioned out of thought, it is fragmented — a fragment of consciousness. As a fragment, the self can only perceive fragments; it is partial in its observations and conclusions. Something other than the self is needed to apperceive the wholeness of reality and what lies at its essence.
Getting back to our original premise, the question is whether the self, consciousness, and beyond can be known intellectually — or whether it can only be known via a realization that somehow does not involve a thought process.
realizations are not intellectualizations
The word “realization” may not be completely appropriate or accurate, but we will have to use it for now to differentiate it from an intellectual understanding. The dictionary definition of realization is: an act of becoming fully aware of something as a fact. While the intellect also uses the word “fact,” it becomes difficult to be even more exacting in this discussion, because words are borne of thoughts, and thoughts are limited. Understanding what a fact is is yet another stumbling block, so we have to be careful about how we regard this word.
We can say that there is something that seems factual to the intellect versus something that is definitely a fact despite whether it can be known by science or the intellect. Thus, we can say that the word “fact” in our discussion refers to something that is immutable if not ineffable. By way of the intellect we can easily come to a conclusion today that will be overturned tomorrow pending more information. This is not a criticism of science or the intellect, it is instead an attempt to put things in perspective. Of course, science, the intellect, information, critical thinking, and analysis all have practical uses in our world — but they are the wrong tools for finding out what we are as our essence, devoid of thought.
Now that we’ve explored this distinction between intellectualization and realization, what does it mean when we claim that we are all one, that the ego dies with enlightenment, or that something exists prior to, or beneath, the self and consciousness? Can we come to such conclusions without the use of the intellect, which is dependent on thought? Since we have minds that are tainted with information, fears, apprehensions, prejudices, memories, concerns, and so on, we have to abandon such influences to see something on present evidence, which is to see in the absolute now. This means that thinking, analyzing, estimating, judging, focusing, and even intellectualizing must come to a stop. Otherwise, with the intellect, we can only know a fragment of reality in the same way that when we look at the moon with a telescope we can only see a portion of space and cannot see the entirety of space all at once.
suspending the intellect
If — “if” is a key word here — if you can suspend the intellect that can only perceive fragments of reality, then you can observe totality, but the “you” in this sentence refers not to the psychologically conditioned self but rather to the unalloyed awareness that is in observation.
Ironically, now that all of this has been laid out in an article it has become an intellectual discussion. To take it out of the intellectual requires that you actually do the observation for yourself to observe what occurs. If you do this persistently then you may find that thought shuts off completely and the self drops away to reveal a great clarity that holds the entirety of what is
