Crossing Over

If you only knew what’s going on, what’s really going on, you’d probably live differently from the way you’re living now.

Not that your life is entirely enveloped in delusion, but it is the case nonetheless that the short story of your personal myth keeps your attention preoccupied with mostly small daily concerns.

As a self-conscious person, there are roles to play and rules to follow and responsibilties to stay on top of, as you manage your position within the ranks of society. Living inside this made-up world of roleplays and pretense, you are doing your best to hold on to security, find lasting love, to discover your purpose and make your life come true.

Everyone else around you is striving for the same aims and ends, but no one has your exact set, as yours is utterly unique and separate from the rest.

On a given day you will feel satisfied, anxious, frustrated, or depressed depending on how well or badly things are going inside your world.

With everyone else equally absorbed in and obsessed with their own pursuits, it can be a challenge some days to feel secure enough, loved enough, or successful enough to just relax into your life without the sneaking suspicion that someone or something, somewhere, is about to take it all away or expose you as a fake.

After all, when you really think about it, this personal identity of yours is just a mask. Who you are in the roleplay, the script you’re following, the story that’s playing out, and the larger stage of your personal world where all this drama is unfolding – none of it has substance, none of it is really real.

What’s behind the mask? What’s going on between the roles and off-stage?

Before you pick up your mask and step into the performance, what’s really going on? As I said, if you truly knew, you’d probably live differently from the way you’re living now.

The revelation that personal identity is a put-on is unacceptable for many, and you may be one of them. As the veil – and “revelation” is literally about pulling aside a veil of illusion – opens to the realization that your story is made up, that your world is a narrative construct spinning almost entirely in your head, and that the meaning of your life is not really “out there” in any objective sense, such disillusionment can be very disorienting.

If you’re like most, it’s preferable, if just for sanity’s sake, to laugh it off and dismiss such insights as ludicrous. Otherwise you might reject them as dangerous heresies.

Whether you laugh it off or try to discredit the assertion that what you have been working so hard to manage and defend is not even real but actually an elaborate stage production, the burden is still on you to prove me wrong. Social consensus is insufficient, of course, as you will find the majority of people around you equally spellbound in the trance of personal identity. Inside every roleplay is a set of roles; with every role comes a short menu of masks; behind every mask is an actor identifying with and “speaking through” it (from the Latin persona).

But what’s behind the actor? Nothing! It’s all make-believe.

To understand what’s really going on, you need to drop the charade. This isn’t to say that your personal identity and life pursuits are a complete sham. It’s all very urgent and meaningful – at least to you. And others whose storylines are woven into yours will agree on how significant it all is, or at least how significant it all seems – at least to them.

Just for a few minutes, let’s take a look off-stage and outside the theater.

Your self-conscious center of personal identity (the actor, or what is named ego, meaning “I”) is a very recent arrival to the scene. It’s origins aren’t even as far back as you’ve been alive. Not long after you were born, your tribe got to work shaping you into a proper person, a well-behaved member of the group. Technically speaking, “you” (i.e., the self-conscious ego-actor) were not the substance they were working on, but the product of their work.

The substance they were shaping was a sentient mind, or what is generally named “consciousness.”

Consciousness has a past much deeper than your personal story, of course, going back not just decades but many millenniums into the history of life on Earth. This same fundamental structure and neurological design of sentience – of the capacity of consciousness to sense and respond, to feel and to think, to desire, enjoy, and to suffer – is present right now, humming beneath and supporting the stage-play of your personal world.

Even older and much more primitive evolutionarily speaking than your sentient mind is a living body that pulses along the vital rhythms of respiration, metabolism, and energy exchange with your physical environment; not just thousands but millions of years, reaching back to the earliest life-forms on our planet. This ancient cradle of vital rhythms is also right here, undulating far below the surface where your ego frets and futzes, “standing on a whale” (as the Polynesian saying goes) “fishing for minnows.”

And beneath that? What lies below and serves as foundation to even these largely unconscious cycles and urgencies of life? The material ground of existence itself: physical matter and its quantum bubbles crystallizing and dissolving spontaneously out of the abyss of dark energy. Yes, that is going on not only all around you, but beneath you and as the physical, living, sentient being you are.

By comparison, all of that business transpiring on stage is nothing (really) but images reflected in a hall of mirrors.

Once you see this, when you realize finally that the separate center of self-conscious personal identity you have believed yourself to be is only a construct of language, a social convention, an admittedly serious game of make-believe, the veil will then completely fall away – or perhaps it will go up in the flames of apocalyptic disenchantment.

But rather than cast it all off and exit the stage in shame, resentment, or self-disgust, you have an opportunity now to step fully (and, as paradoxical as it sounds, self-consciously) into a still-higher realization.

All of that primeval and ancient history in the evolution of matter from energy, of life from matter, of mind from life, and out of your mind this unique person you are pretending to be – all of that has arrived here, now, with the universe contemplating itself.

This theater and stage, your personal story and character, your script and the mark where you presently stand have become the springboard to an awareness – the “Shining Truth” – that All is One.

This truth is older than humanity but it awaits the fresh discovery of each new generation. Until all of that make-shift scaffolding was in place for you to take your own separate center of self-conscious personal identity, and until you were ready to break through the delusion of who you are, the transpersonal spirit of your human nature awaited its moment, like a butterfly asleep inside its chrysalis.

Now it’s time to take wing, and maybe live differently than before.