Exploring the Impersonal: How Detachment Leads to True Freedom
The Impersonal
To slough off the universe
To be utterly naked
God is alone.
This passage comes from the book Luminous Night’s Journey by spiritual teacher A.H. Almaas. It chronicles his process of inner transformation and describes the unfolding relationship between the personal and universal dimensions of awareness.
The excerpt begins with Almaas noticing a tension indicating the subtle presence of a separate ego-self. Contemplating this contraction brings insights about the ego-structure’s sense of being an individual. The “ego-line” represents identification with personality, which Almaas recognizes as an imitation of essential nature.
As the egoic tension dissolves, Almaas has the realization of being an immaterial witness, a pure awareness beholding all phenomena. This brings up resistance – the belief that he would lose his personal life without egoic enmeshment. Almaas penetrates this belief when Being reveals his personal essence as a luminous presence.
He further realizes the unconditioned existence of Being itself can be personal, embodied as a substantial “existence pearl.” This resolves the notion that losing ego boundaries would threaten his personal existence. Being intelligence responds precisely to resolve conflicts through essential manifestations.
The state of universal witness unfolds over days as Almaas sees everything arising within vast awareness. He recognizes his true nature as unchanging, beyond all flux. Though essence is timeless, the universal witness transcends all time and space.
Almaas comprehends the ontological relationships between the various dimensions of Being. The personal consciousness develops a life work and role, while the impersonal witness cannot act. Realizing the universal allows the personal to fulfill its role in freedom.
Luminous Night’s Journey offers a profound glimpse into the unfolding of awareness and the integration of personal and universal dimensions of Being. Almaas’s account provides an illuminating mirror for our own self-understanding.
