We built a symbolic layer
Hi Everyone,
Here is what I believe awakening to be based on my ego dissolution experience . I will keep it short and simple.
When you dissolve the ego, through mediation, psychedelics, or what I experienced was a thorough demolition and rebuild, you see the raw reality. Raw reality is absolutely beautiful, it’s just pure sensory experience. However this is not survivable. So our brain builds a conceptual model of the self and the world around us. However, what I believe what happened is we built a world of concepts on top of the interconnected reality and lose touch with the original meaning of things. We slice reality into partial truths and half truths, the self becomes increasingly detached and separate from the world around us. And this is how misunderstanding and evil permeates. If you can label someone as less than you, if you can ignore the full complex human underneath the labels we place on one another then you can rationalize harmful behavior.
My mind used to weigh outcomes first and context second. And this would apply to everything. We start comparing outcomes and symbols and make assumptions about the underlying reality that leads to these outcomes. I now have a beginners mind. Reality is complex, often unpredictable, and the ego wants to feel special and certain so it collapses this complexity and picks and chooses what parts to feel special or superior to others. We’re each climbing our own mountains with our own resources acting like we’re on the same mountain.