The ego constricts around a more-or-less fixed mode of being. So when the ego is transcended and the constrictions are released, then the manifest being reorients to a more natural, unconstrained mode. And we don’t have any real idea what that might look like. During the ego’s reign fundamental embodied modes of intelligence may well have been completely subsumed, and so after awakening, in time we might find that we become an entirely different person with different likes and orientations. Political and social views might change, new paradigmatic perspectives might emerge.

But profound flexibility allows all our manifest aspects and characteristics to transform while never losing one’s essential being-nature. We are now the clay not the pot, and it turns out that the clay is not fixed and fired, but infinitely malleable. The trouble is that (for now) we live in a world of pots, and the temptation is to listen to them. “You are a pot! That is your fixed identity and only mode of being.”

The great challenge and the great freedom is to find, establish, and stand in your own inner truth and not to evaluate yourself by outer authorities. You must be the measure of yourself and the world. You know best for you, no matter what others would have you believe. If we give away all our power to the other by allowing ourselves to be judged and measured and defined by those who would control us, it’s invariably in the direction of limitation. You have to take that power for yourself, stand free in your own truth and be what you must be, on your own terms.