Most people go through life identifying themselves with their thoughts, and believing that they are the controller of their life and that they are a separate self. This is usually the first illusion that we break through on a spiritual ‘journey’.
This is known as initial awakening in some circles, and as the breaking of the first fetter in Buddhism. Some people may feel that they have been called by God, others may have a shocking realisation that life isn’t the way they thought it was.
There are grosser and subtler levels of self belief. E.g. later, when the delusions around form and formlessness fall, there can be quite a blissful sense of oneness, ‘beingness’, perhaps a belief ‘I am awareness’, but this is not the complete unfolding.
Later we work to see through the subtler sense of self, those residual borders we still have in place. When they fall the sense of ‘beingness’ drops, too.
