Self-Realization and Other Awakenings

Thus was born the beginnings of getting your wants
and needs fulfilled through various adaptive strategies,
including using your intelligence to create situations or
items to fulfill your needs. You flaunt your
intelligence to gain recognition or love. Later you may
flaunt your sexuality, maleness or femaleness to get
what you want.
At school you learn reading, writing, social skills,
debating, and how to be an obedient and good
consumer. You learn all kinds of things that you
integrate into your self-image, which is opposed to a
non-self image also developing, namely the external
world. Now you have contracted from being the world
down to living in a mental creation. Everything, all
external data, all internal feelings and energies are
mediated by mind. You no longer live in the real world
but a mediated world.
All this is knowledge.
The first knowledge was ‘I Am.’ Before that,
though you existed, ‘I’, as an entity was not born.
Before that you existed, functioning perfectly,
instinctually, then the ‘I Am’ was born and everything
changed.
After that you were just knowledge, and in deep
sleep, the knowledge was lost. But still you existed,
just as you did before the ‘I’ was born.