Is there a difference between self-awareness and enlightenment?
by Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
To be aware of the self, which is self-awareness, has nothing to do with ending the identification with the self.
Consider the question: Who is being aware? It is the self that is being aware of itself, but because the self is limited it cannot get beyond its own image of itself. The self makes images, including images of others and of itself, and this image-making is due to the fact that the self is an arbitrary, impermanent, self-centered, fearful entity made only of thought. So the self, in self-awareness, is not an objective entity and is incapable of being neutral in its assessment of itself. In fact, whenever an assessment, judgment, criticism, or appraisal of anything is made, it is the biased self that does so.
The self is made out of an accretion of thoughts. It is created by the thoughts, teachings, and information of others — secondhand information — that have been impressed upon the mind and brain from the earliest age. If you have watched a baby grow from infancy into early childhood then you can watch this formation of the self in action.
A person does not come into this life as a Hindu, Jew, Christian, Muslim, etc. Rather, a baby is told that this is what he is. Likewise, a baby is told he is American, Indian, Irish, Canadian, African, or other such designation identified with a parcel of land. And a baby must learn, secondhand, that he is the image in the mirror, who his relatives are, whom to hate and whom to love, etc. A young person is psychologically conditioned by teachers, authority figures, religion, culture, parents, relatives, etc., to believe that he is a certain person with certain identities and associations. All of this is artificial and based only upon thought. Thus, the self is not real; an image is never real.
When one fully realizes that there is no self and that it is the cause of all suffering, including one’s own suffering and the suffering of all others; and when one realizes that all is an expression of a singular movement called consciousness, something clicks or flips like a switch and the world looks completely different. It becomes obvious that there is no self and that the self’s world view is but an illusion based upon its persistent image-making. This is commonly referred to as enlightenment.
Paradoxically, however, enlightenment does not actually exist, because the self can never be enlightened, because it is no more than a mirage. And consciousness cannot be enlightened because it is already complete, total. Beyond the self and consciousness is something else, an ineffable fundamental reality that the self is not able to behold. This stateless state cannot be enlightened and cannot become anything but what it is, which is beyond all description and thought.
