2012 and the Psychedelic Shamans (cont.)
By Thomas Razzeto

Your True Self

Of course we all see that our bodies were born into the world; this is beyond dispute. But isn't it also true that both our bodies and the entire world are born into our awareness? Our awareness holds everything without being held itself; it comes before everything and it plays host to all the phenomena that we experience. And a mystic intuitively understands that the divine awareness that looks out of your eyes is the same awareness that looks out of his or her eyes. What is seen is different but the awareness is the same. There is only one awareness, that of the eternal divine essence.

Imagine you are the one awareness and that you are in a room with many windows. When you look into the world through one of these windows, you see a certain view. In this way, you have all the experiences of one particular person. You see what they see, feel what they feel, think what they think, remember what they remember, dream what they dream and so forth. When you look through another window, you have all the experiences of another person. But you are still the same awareness. If you experienced all of these experiences altogether, it would be just a mass of color and noise. It seems that our individuated personal consciousnesses are what allow the one awareness to experience the world without it being a jumbled mess. But what has been created are unique viewpoints, not individuated consciousnesses. This is a very important distinction. The apparently separate personal consciousnesses seem to arise because of the combination of the one awareness looking through the many viewpoints. You are not a drop in the ocean of God; you are the entire ocean! You are the totality of reality and you are where it all comes from! You are both all of creation and the eternal Source of it all!

(Note: In my work, I will sometimes refer to the personal self or our personal consciousness. This is just a practical way of speaking. Ultimately, there is only one Self, the one Awareness and yet I often want to refer to the functional self, the apparent self.)

Another way to look at this is to imagine that there are billions of hand puppets on earth, all apparently different people and animals. But when we see beyond the illusion of separate sentient beings and correctly perceive the full picture of what is really taking place, we see that there is only one sentient puppet master with billions of hands animating all of life and, most importantly, experiencing all of life through all those different viewpoints. What a miracle! What a mystery!