There’s a question that is often bothersome on the seeker’s path …
Does awakening erase the personality? Do all personal traits, tendencies, and idiosyncrasies get wiped away in one fell swoop? Does our astrological imprint become obsolete? Do we transcend our conditioning completely? Do we return to some kind of innocent tabula rasa?
It boggles the mind to decipher what happens to the self after awakening out of the dream of self.
Would it help ease your restless mind if I told you that awakening does not erase your personality? Would it help if I told you that even after the self has been seen as an illusory construct, even after the self has merged with Life/God, even when the story-maker has died and all that is left is naked experience … even then, there is still a unique you?
There is a sacred geometry you are born into .. call it your astrological imprint, your enneagram type, your human design, your gene-key code, or your archetypal pattern. Call it what you will (or will not, if you are averse to any system of description) … it is an invisible portal through which you enter this earthly dimension and it makes you uniquely you. Just as the brushstroke of the shape of your face and the color of your eyes are unavoidable expressions of your incarnation, so is the warp and weft of your psyche as it expresses itself in this world.
But everything in the world of form is subject to distortion. Just as cellular function gets polluted by unwholesome lifestyle choices, so can the light of your deepest and truest expression become dulled by an unexamined core belief in separation. It’s like a pristine-clear crystal that accumulates layers of dust because it hasn’t been polished. This unpolished crystal is the lower aspect of personality … the unconscious expression of innate traits based on conditioned reactivity.
And then there is the crystal that has been polished … the higher aspect of personality, the transmuted expression of innate traits based in the open hand of non-reactiveness. The journey of seeking truth, of investigating what is more true than what you believe, of listening to your innermost .. all this takes you back and forth from the density of conditioned self to the lightness of being, from the story-maker to the one who is closer than any story. You go back and forth, until by practice or maybe by grace you no longer need to go back and forth.
When you no longer go back and forth, a new clarity arises because you become attuned to the innermost impulse of life’s intelligence unhindered by the victim at the root of ego’s need for self-preservation. Without resistance or cover-up, you are left with the art-work of your incarnation … your sacred geometry. But this is not a fixed behavior, it is not something that needs to be defended or destroyed, it is not something that makes you feel better or worse about yourself. It is a gentle emanation that flows unimpeded through your life, without possession and without special-ness.
My friend, listen closely … so that your innermost can recognize what is more true than any ideas of awakening as the end of who you are. Awakening is the demolition of self as the story-maker … but as long as you are alive, it is not the end of you as a unique expression.