Self-Realization and Other Awakenings

All concepts, including: physics, mathematics,
economics, politics, morality, conventional daily life,
the place of work, faith, trust, and the meaning of
life; all were up for questioning in the sense that they
disappeared, and I began to operate in freedom.
Yet, ‘I’ still existed. I was able to talk to people, go
to Starbucks, right psychological reports, take care of
my cats, deal with my significant other on a daily
basis, and read about philosophy with a new and
deeper understanding from the ‘no mind’ point of
view. This entity called, Edward, this body/mind
complex, continued to function in the world with
barely a problem. It seemed as if all functioning was
automatic. But this is to be expected, since in our
daily life most functioning is automatic anyway.
It is just that the mind was no longer involved in
terms of daydreaming or thinking about the world or
what was going on. Thoughts did not interfere, and the
world was seen to be illusory, in the sense that the
world I had lived in was an artifact of the network of
thought, and once belief in that network disappeared,
my belief in the permanence of separateness of the
world also disappeared. There was just functioning
without self-reference.
I do not mean that the mind disappeared; rather
its importance was diminished. It was not the
predominant element that ran my life, but my life