I Am the Teaching

An illustration of the inseparability of process and manifestation. If I didn’t lose you already with that mouthful of a heading, let me divulge further to clarify the statement.

Prior to awakening, I had the most vivid and extraordinary dream. In this dream, I realized I was a teaching that had been hidden until such time as it was needed. Teachings are programmed to be dormant, disguised until they are activated. Once activated, they switch into delivery mode. Having completed their single purpose, they cease to exist in their previous, latent form and only exist in their true form, which is the teaching.

At the same time that I realized this, I was approached by a group of people who knew I was hidden teaching and that I had been activated. They came to assist me in the delivery phase and to receive and promulgate the teaching once it was revealed. They gave me a place to sit and write, a round room, quite dark, almost like it was underground, round opening above where a single shaft of light poured down, similar to The Pantheon in Rome. There was a small desk and there lay a very large book of empty pages. I sat and filled them, each day, a little more.

As I wrote, my very existence unraveled…into the teaching, into the words and symbols I was writing. I had no idea of what I was writing, it came out of me automatically and I retained no awareness of the content. But each time I placed ink on the page, I, myself, became less and less.

Finally, it was understood that I would cease to exist once the last word was delivered. There was only a bare thread of myself still existing. I sat and wrote until the teaching was delivered, and I ceased to exist. My body evaporated, along with my awareness. I was now just the teaching, which is all that I had ever actually been.

It’s as though the teaching had been given a GUI (graphical user interface), and that was the person that everyone knew. It’s significant to clarify that I did not then go out and teach. I shed my GUI entirely, my code only appeared like that of a human being, when in fact it was information left for other human beings. The process of delivery was the complete transformation from human form to delivered information.

I had no body and no person-hood nor any vestige of my previous form. Something that has become very obvious to me after enlightenment, and yet is really impossible to get others to fully grasp, is that process and manifestation are not two things, but the same thing, inseparable.

This dream gave me an experiential understanding of this, even though I didn’t understand the universality of this until I fully awoke. You might be wondering, “Where’s the beef?” As I’ve said many times, I don’t have any teaching. A lot of people who present themselves to the public as enlightened have a teaching. My bag is empty, and it is crucial in this universal understanding of the process being inseparable from manifestation. I know that many will really struggle to understand this, but it’s so profound and fundamental.

Em Hotep - Patrick Gaffiero