Awareness Monism (11/11): Conclusion: Being awareness
[This blogpost is a part of the series Awareness Monism, originally my Master’s thesis. Go to the disambiguation page here.]
Conclusion: Being awareness
Even considering AM as a possible truth about ourselves shifts a person’s attitude toward others—and toward themselves. If it is actually the case that not only this particular human being from whose point of view you’re currently experiencing the world, but all sentient beings are you—are the centers of experience of the same awareness—then their pain and joy, their hopes and frustrations are all equally as painful and joyful and bright and dark, to you (to me), as those of this particular person through whose eyes the world is currently revealed.
If AM is the case, all experiences actually are a palpable reality to you, not just something you can imagine and empathize with. You experience everything—all experiences are yours, not just the experiences of this particular human being that you happen to inhabit currently, of this particular moment. The welfare of all conscious beings is revealed to be as existentially significant to you as the future welfare of this particular person that you currently find yourself being. All conscious beings are your incarnations—they are the different roles the I assumes at different times, and then abandons.
The phrase “there but for the grace of God, go I”, in recognition that there is no but, but it is indeed you that goes there, acquires a new (dreadful, really!), meaning. Envy and jealousy are recognized as truly misplaced, and death, too, might lose its bite. At the same time, you still remain the person that you currently are, in the moment where you currently find yourself, with all the limitations that entails. Your fears and desires and frustrations and hopes remain valid, on their own level. The person that you currently are will still die.
The good news: all joys are yours—yours will be the greatest ecstasies and all the heavens will be inhabited by you. The entirety of knowledge is yours. You are the author of all things of beauty, of all inventions, of all the great works. The lives of all the lucky people you currently envy and wish you were born as are actually yours.
As exhilarating as that might sound, there is also the other side of the same coin, and it is horrifying beyond grasp. You will experience all sufferings, too—some of them of inconceivable depth. Yours is an eternity of suffering. You are all the tortured victims of serial killers. You are Anne Frank. You are all the serial killers. You are there, experiencing their actions and their passions from the first person point of view, oblivious about your nature—just as you’re experiencing this moment, reading this sentence. You will forget everything you know, learn it again, and forget it again—and again, and again: an eternity of learning and forgetting. All tragedies and misfortunes are yours. And there is no escape. It is like a nightmare you don’t realize is just a dream, that you have to live through until you wake up. And even if you wake up, you rest uneasy knowing that soon you’ll fall asleep again. The moments of being awake to your nature are just brief respites, before you’re thrown into another dream.
Once you assume a role, you’re free to act as you please, and to make of yourself what, from that perspective, you find yourself desirous of becoming. Needless to say, your choices do not determine only how your current life will turn out to be, but they affect other lives—all of which are yours, too. And so you ultimately determine not only the fate of the person that you currently are, but all of them. The law of karma is literally true—you reap everything you sow, if not in your present role, then once you assume the roles of the others you’ve affected by your actions.
Since we’re at the end of the present work, I will allow myself to conclude on a mystical note, for in the end that is what I believe AM actually amounts to: a religious insight. As awareness, what you are—what I is—is being (of experience) itself. And in that sense —a very particular sense!—you are God.