You may have forgotten it

awakening is recognizing that you're not your mind many people have had awakenings and they actually just forgot they repressed that they ever had any sort of awakening experience any loss of the false self any loss of faith or belief that they are their thoughts or their mind the reason why this is important is that if you have had an awakening on the level of mind but you forgot or you repressed it or you ran from it that could be affecting your ability to be motivated or fit into regular human society and so identifying that you did have that awakening and then grieving the losses associated with that awakening could have a profound impact on your quality of life and how you function on a day-to-day basis so i recommend that that if you're watching this and you're interested at all in what i'm talking about that you go back through your memories of your young adulthood say between the ages of 18 and now and just check and see if it's possible that you have had already had an awakening and that you forgot it when i went on my first adyashanti retreat after my second awakening halfway through that retreat i recognized that i had had a first awakening eight years earlier when i was 18 years old and it wasn't a small awakening it was an awakening that i had an experience of the desert of emptiness for four months straight and yet somehow i was able to run from that and repress that out of my consciousness of the desert of emptiness for four months straight and yet somehow i was able to run from that and repress that out of my conscious memory to the point where i totally forgot about it even though i had been studying meditation and buddhism and daoism and meditating daily for seven years i was able to run from that and repress that out of my conscious memory to the point where i totally forgot about it even though i had been studying meditation and buddhism and daoism and meditating daily for seven years the mind is a powerful tricky thing