For me, and most others I know, it has been a somewhat long and winding road to unwind this tendency to use realization, awareness, freedom, etc. as an escape valve, as a way of removing oneself from challenging mental-emotional states. Over the years, I have viewed and seen others view awareness as something that is free of uncomfortable experiences, something untouched as it were by what’s arising. I have imagined and even experienced awareness as a kind of special place or space we can go and then return to whenever we find some aspect of our experience to be too discomforting, too much.
Seeing awareness (or freedom) in this way, as something we can go in and out of, a thing we can either have or not have, is a formula for continued suffering since no state can be sustained. I know this dynamic quite well in myself and have also seen it to be one if not THE most common stumbling blocks for spiritual seekers, whether of the non-dual variety or not. Basically, what ends up happening is that awareness is reified as a “thing”, a state separate from other (usually more painful or uncomfortable) states. But this rendering of awareness isn’t really awareness at all; it is really more of a kind of witnessing, a temporary state that is actually viewed and experienced as something separate from whatever is being witnessed (which is why we can hear things in non-dual circles such as “awareness is untouched by whatever appears to it”).
But what’s amazing about awareness as I now understand and experience it is that it is both free of experience at the same time inseparable from it. Why this is so powerful to realize is that it allows us to be completely intimate with (and hence not seek to avoid or distance ourselves from) very powerful and uncomfortable mind-body states. It allows for us to be totally touched, even overwhelmed in a sense by what appears phenomenally at the same time not caught or defined by it and as a result, able to move more and more freely within whatever may be arising experientially or circumstantially. It turns out that it is in the non-avoidance or non-manipulation of even very uncomfortable interior states that we discover right there, right in the heart of the discomfort (and ultimately inseparable from it), the very love, clarity and wisdom we have sought by trying to avoid certain experiences. Put another way, by relaxing the effort to try to escape certain states, we find liberation IN those very states.
And so for me, the path is simply about an ongoing willingness to see this, to be intimate with whatever experiences might be arising within me, recognizing each appearance of life as inseparable FROM life. For me, the path is about remaining naked and vulnerable, unguarded and undefended in the face of experience, at the same time ever mindful of our very human tendency to equate freedom, well-being, happiness, etc. with particular states of mind, this tendency to privilege certain expressions of reality over others. For a long time, my spiritual and non-dual pursuits tended to reinforce this tendency to see certain moments or experiences as somehow more real, more free, more enlightened than others. Thankfully, that tendency is less and less present in my life. May it be so in yours as well!