by Ric Weinman
Published in Connections,
August 2009,
You experience yourself as ‘I’, as a particular, separate individual. It seems obvious and natural that you should experience yourself like this. And yet it is the Core Veil that creates and maintains this sense of separate, personal ‘I’. We know intuitively that all is One. And yet we don’t experience the world as One; we experience the world as ‘other’ from our self. Our experience is that we are locked within a localized, personal, separate self whose boundaries collapse only rarely and for just moments at a time—from deep surrender into love, from the sudden encounter with breathtaking beauty, or from the letting go that comes with joyous laughter. The rest of the time we experience our self as a separate, personal ‘I’ with boundaries. But how can we continuously experience our self in this way when we know—and have experienced—that this is not true? To do so we need a structure that can divide the One into two—that divides the One into me and other—and that can conceal the fact that the One is now appearing as two. And it needs to be a structure, not just an idea in consciousness, for it to create such an ongoing, continuous reality. If the separate ‘ego’ were just an idea or a thought, as is sometimes put forth in spiritual literature, then we would continually fall out of it, which we know is not what happens. We need something a bit more stable, and that something is the Core Veil.
A veil is defined as “something that conceals, separates, or screens like a curtain”. In this way, the Core Veil is a bit like a wedding veil. A wedding veil is designed to keep the bride concealed, to make it so that her true identity cannot be seen. The veil also acts like a partition, creating a clear sense of separation, so that whatever is being looked at is felt as out there on the other side of the veil, while there is an amplified sense that I am in here within the boundary of the veil. And the wedding veil also ‘screens like a curtain’ in that the bride can see through the veil well enough to function, but what she sees is distorted by having to look through the veil. She can’t see things as they are.
Now imagine that the bride is the Self and it is ‘getting married’ to the experience of separateness. It needs a special kind of wedding veil that can a) conceal its true identity (from itself and others), b) create a sense of being truly separate from everything else and c) create a screen that prevents it from being able to see things as they are—that the rest of the world is itself—and yet doesn’t interfere with it functioning in the world. A veil of fabric just won’t do the trick here. We need a special kind of veil made from consciousness—and one that will stay on after the wedding but become invisible, so we will forget that we are wearing it. We need a Core Veil.
The way the Core Veil comes into being is actually rather complex, involving the densifying of Self through the dimensions and through subtle forms on these levels into the dense forms in time and space, but we can keep it simple. Imagine that at the very beginning of your incarnational journey, before you became separate, you resided as Self in the heart of this new incarnational form. As Self, you perceived the world through the heart of this form, experiencing all as One. Except there was the intention to enter the dance of separateness, and so a special bubble of consciousness arose around your heart, which acted like a veil. It separated your heart from the rest of the world, and created the sense of being localized in consciousness. As you started to identify with this sense of locality, you developed the sense of being in here, while the rest of the world was out there. The world started to be experienced as other. And the more this developed, the more your sense of yourself moved into a kind of self-referral process, where you experienced yourself in terms of your boundaries, your form and your consciousness, rather than simply as beingness.
At some point you, as Self, let go into a fuller identification with this experience, and the sense of locality crystallized into a focal point of self-referral consciousness—the sense and identity of ‘I’. The creation of the separate, personal ‘I’, with boundaries was now complete —your were now fully married to the experience of ego and separateness. ‘I’ was now experienced as Real. And because the veil—the structure of crystallized self-referring consciousness—stayed on after the wedding, it continued to generate this sense of ‘I’, and it kept the ‘I’ from unraveling back to beingness.
From then on, all experience was filtered through this sense of ‘I’. This began the creation of a detailed, eons-long story about this ‘I’, which was experienced ‘personally’, and which made the fabric of the experience of ‘I’ so rich and interesting that we became completely enmeshed in the weave of its narrative. And the more deeply we identified with this, the more we reinforced our localized, self-referring consciousness, reinforcing and densifying our Core Veil.
And eons later, here we are! And we are still married to separation—imagine being married for so long! The center of our Core Veil is still rooted in the center of our heart (and the consciousness of the veil fills our entire auric field). If you stop for a moment and simply say ‘I’ and feel the sense of what that means for you, you will notice (if you pay close attention) that the sense of ‘I’ arises as a particular feeling/sense in your heart. That sense of ‘I’ is experienced as both the center of what you are and as your self. What happens with awakening is that this core sense of ‘I’ disappears. Imagine: here one moment, gone the next, never to return.
Awakening, though, happens only when Self, sitting for eons of lifetimes within the identity of ‘I’, having gone into that identity as deeply as it can go, spontaneously begins to disengage. One can say that having fully played out the deepening into the sense of ‘I’, it now moves to play out the experience of awakening out of that. And this movement, which is a movement of ripening, happens over many lifetimes, until the incarnating ‘separate’ being is ripe enough to wake up. There are many paths and methods that facilitate the final awakening movement (some much better at this than others), but the methods work only because it is divine intention to have places where ripe beings can go, and methods that ripe beings can practice, to wake up. And the methods can be very different. But they all rely on the fact that for the consciousness of the Core Veil, which is the consciousness of ‘I’, to maintain itself, movement is required within that consciousness. This is because the sense of ‘I’ and the sense of being localized require a self-referral process in consciousness (as explained above), which requires movement. If that movement stops, the sense of being localized and separate from everything else disappears and the sense of ‘I’ simply stops being created. With that, the consciousness of ‘I’ literally disappears, exposing it as an illusion, and if the spiritual seeker is ripe enough, the disappearance is permanent. (If the spiritual seeker is not ripe enough, it becomes a ‘taste’ of awakening.)
I should just point out here that the ceasing of movement is not so much in the mind as in the heart. The Core Veil and its consciousness of ‘I’ sit in the heart. It is when the movement there stops that awakening (or the taste of awakening) occurs. You may be able to get a small taste of this simply by noticing that, in any given minute, there are micro-moments when you are not sensing yourself as ‘I’ in your heart, where your heart is not self-referring, where it is still. Even if you can’t catch these moments as they happen, if you look for them in your memory, you will see them. Who are you then, when you are not aware of yourself as ‘I’? Or another route: What happens to ‘I’ when you are suddenly awestruck by beauty? Who are you in that moment?
I should also point out that what happens when the sense of ‘I’ in the heart disappears is not what one would expect. Life goes on as before. All the emotional conditioning and reactivity that was created by the story of ‘I’ still continues as before, and the mind continues to think about ‘I’ and to tell its story. It’s just that there is just ‘no one’ in the center of all of this any longer. In addition, the mind expected that awakening would mean that ‘I’ would become expanded in some way. But the ‘I’ is not what woke up. It didn’t become bigger, better or more. In fact, awakening happened only because ‘I’ disappeared. And that’s part of the cosmic joke: After being married for eons to separation, suffering horribly in the marriage, you finally manage to get divorced only to discover that divorce isn’t what you expected, that the suffering actually continues, that all your mind stuff and emotional patterns actually continue, and in addition, you have now lost your identity and no longer know who you are or even who is suffering. Sound confusing? Yes it is. Welcome to the wonderful world of awakening.
Awakening is the permanent, experiential realization that you are not ‘I’. Before awakening, your experience is that you are an ‘I’ on a journey. At the moment of awakening, this ‘I’ disappears, which starts the beginning of a new journey of ‘no one’ into a fuller realization of its own nature. The confusion lasts for some time. And there will be different levels and depths to the awakening, and different levels of embodying the awakening as well. For instance, with the loss of the Core Veil, you have awakened out of the false identity of ‘I’. But you have not yet awakened to what you truly are, to your true nature. But all that is another story.
Ric Weinman is the founder of
VortexHealing® Divine Energy Healing. For more information on
VortexHealing visit www.vortexhealing.org