"Awareness: Awakening the Authentic Self"
Tom Smith-Myott
Sunday, August 1st 2004

Introduction

Anthony de Mello tells the following story: Last year on television I heard a story about this gentleman who knocks on his son’s door. “Jaime,” he says, “wake up!” Jaime answers, “I don’t want to get up, Papa.” The father shouts, “Get up, you have to go to school.” Jaime says, “I don’t want to go to school.” “Why not?” asks the father. “Three reasons,” says Jaime. “First, because it’s so dull; second, the kids tease me; and third, I hate school.” And the father says, “Well, I am going to give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it is your duty; second, because you are forty-five years old, and third, because you are the headmaster.” De Mello adds: Wake up, wake up! You’ve grown up. You’re too big to be asleep. Wake up! Stop playing with your toys.

Addicted and Asleep

• We’re all brought up addicted - we’re taught that happiness and security come from outside ourselves, so we look for approval, affection, power, control, gratification from outside ourselves. This is an inherently frustrating circle.
• One of my addictions or attachments is books - until recently I kept almost every book I bought or was given. I even kept books I knew I would never use again - old theology and philosophy books, old sociology and psychology books, old fiction books - because somehow they were an external sign of my education, of my intellectual accomplishments. And I always needed more books - I never had enough to satisfy me or make me happy. Because they couldn’t!
• We’ve been told from childhood on that we need something or someone added to our lives to make us happy, whole, “saved” - we’ve been taught to put conditions on happiness, freedom, salvation - I’ll be happy when I have…I’ll be saved if I do….
• Our culture fosters addictions and attachments - it purposely fosters insecurity in order to sell security through consuming - like the rich man in our gospel today who loses his inner authentic self = soul (psyche) because he’s so busy accumulating toys. Our culture and upbringing tell us to keep building bigger barns.
• Attachment = belief - and fear - that without something or someone we are not going to be happy
• Sleepwalking through life - in the illusion that exterior events can make us happy or hurt us, that we are all the labels and titles that people have put on us or that we have put on ourselves
• A whole other area that keeps us sleepwalking, unaware, through life is that we are not in control of our minds - “monkey minds” that obsess on the past or worry about the future - repressed and painful emotions, fears, angers. We spend so much useless energy on the past and the future.

• Life wakes us up to a deeper awareness once in a while - sometimes abruptly and sometimes slowly
• I wake up occasionally - but then fall back asleep in daily routines and patterns
• Having to move my books twice in the last year has awakened in me the question: what do I need them for? Why am I so attached to them? And I’ve been working at weeding them out and getting rid of many of them, knowing that some day I will have to let go of all of them. None of us can take our toys with us.
• We need to practice being awake, we need to pay attention to how our mind works, to the patterns that keep us from freedom and happiness
• We need to learn how to focus on the NOW, to be mindful in the present moment - do we really believe the sacramental message that the divine, the eternal, is available to us right now? As the disciple said to the teacher, “Help me to find God” “No one can help you there.” “Why not?” “For the same reason that no one can help the fish to find the ocean.”
• The heart of one’s spiritual life is to practice un-attachment/detachment
• Need practices/work to go beneath our ego or false (exterior, dual) selves to our Authentic Self, our Inner Witness
• Our gathering here this morning is an attempt to wake us up to the sacramental vision and awareness that God is present everywhere, in everything, including in ourselves = worship is meant to raise our consciousness, to wake us up to this reality, to help us become aware of our Authentic Self.

• We are more than our name, our body, our feelings, our thoughts, our job, our accomplishments
• We are created good, whole, happy. We don’t have to do anything or make anything of ourselves
• Our Authentic Self = true, nondual, unified self
• Inner Witness = observes body, emotions, mind; permanent self, beyond spacetime
• Metaphors in scripture = temples/sacraments of divinity; = “the new self…in the image of the creator” (Col.); = the soul
• Mystics in all spiritual traditions tell us that when we allow the authentic self to emerge we also find ourselves in touch with the Absolute Self, the divine creative consciousness we call God
• We come face to face with the divine presence, a motherly compassion and communion, with the experience of being holy, of being awesome in an awesome creation

• Our spiritual practice is not meant to do something, but to let go of, to drop all that gets in the way of the divine emerging within us
• We only change through awareness and understanding
• Not rejecting or renouncing, but seeing through why we’re attached (like me to my books) and letting ourselves be transformed
• Practices:

  Solitude - moving beyond the fear of being alone

  Practice mindfulness = self-awareness:

  1. awareness of things
  2. awareness of thoughts (“me”)
  3. awareness of the thinker

  Centering Prayer

  Meditation - focusing the mind

  Contemplation - emptying the mind

  Community

• An awakened person = one who no longer marches to the drums of society but who dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within

• Waking up hurts; it’s painful to see our illusions shattered.
• Also it’s unpatriotic, un-American because awareness leads one to consume less and to consider everyone a brother or sister, even those our country considers enemies
• Waking up is coming home to our authentic self
• When you wake up you know what to do or what not to do when faced with injustice and violence, your compassion emerges freely and generously
• Anthony de Mello: …the image of the dancer and the dance. God is viewed as the dancer and creation as God’s dance. It isn’t as if God is the big dancer and you are the little dancer. Oh no. You’re not a dancer at all. You are being danced!
• Anthony de Mello: “Prayer, love, spirituality, and religion are about ridding yourself of illusions. When religion brings that about, that’s wonderful, wonderful! When it deviates from that, it is an illness, a plague to be avoided. Once illusions have been abandoned, the heart is unobstructed, and love takes hold. That’s when happiness occurs. That’s when change takes place. And only then will you know who God is…”