Loving What I’m Not

Many of us are having the awakening experience, are ecstatic about the experience, but then watch it slip away. This leaves a yearning for a way to recapture awakening and experience it again, for longer periods, to explore it more. Unfortunately, our way back is elusive, without a clear path that our mind can wrap itself around and follow. 

One way that I have found extremely helpful is to embrace an attitude of loving what I’m not. Once we have experienced that we are something other than what the ego defines our self to be, what is the ‘I’, then we have a point of reference in our awareness to ‘what we are not’. Our comfort zone, however, is in what has brought us to this point, the ‘I am’. So how do we ease ourselves into longer periods of conscious awareness when the pull of the ego is so strong? A way I have found is to simply love who I am not. 

When I love who I am not, I leave behind all the judgments of the ego and the resistance of the I. There is an emptiness, a peace in what is, and a connection to everything. This is the place we all found when we had that fleeting glimpse of being awake. It is loving not I but everything, which I am a part of if I just surrender my need for separation. This is the place of the now, the place of peace in complete acceptance. It is where we fully embrace what is.

You see, it’s not that we don’t know where this place of awakening is, it is that we just don’t have the deep-down desire to return there because we are so attached to the ‘I’. So the journey back to awakening is not through the mind but through the heart. When we give our attention to what we are not and we get a feeling of comfort and joy in just being what we are not, then it is easier to move back to the infinite of nothing. 

One way to allow our self to expand our love of what we are not is to use inquiry to dive deep into the love we have for the ‘I’ and the love we can experience in the ‘not’. When we look closely, we can see that the love we hold for the ‘I’ is conditional. Sometimes we love our self but often we don’t, so our love of the ‘I’ is conditional, mercurial, and constantly elusive. Loving who I am not, however, is full acceptance of what is right now. It is constant because it has no conditions, expectations, or opportunities for disappointment. Loving what I am not is a relaxed, peaceful, state of loving-kindness for everything, including the ‘I’. Its draw is natural and effortless if you just get the ‘I’ out of the way. 

So, if you are longing to return to that awareness that you had a glimpse of just allow your self to fall in love again with who you are not.