Tentative
I see how we define “awakening” differently. A dog sleeps and is awake in the same way we sleep at night and awaken in the morning. But this isn’t what I understand as conscious awakening.
The dog lives its life as a living machine that transforms materiality. Its life processes serve this process. As a living machine its life is a continual reaction to external influences. Choice exists for a dog as a resolution of conflicting desires. There is no conscious action but only unconscious reaction.
I understand awakening as conscious awakening to this same condition in our lives. What we consider our normal lives is also as a reactive machine. This self knowledge is what we awaken to.
However, as you’ve noted, the dog is just reacting: “Only man and perhaps a few other animals have the capacity of sentience, to project themselves ‘outside’ themselves .”
This is where the ego comes in. The experience of life with conscious self awareness allows for the beginning of the mechanical reactive life’s experience being put into a conscious perspective. It is also the natural invitation for higher consciousness to assist man in further developing his consciousness and experiencing choice not as a reaction to conflicting desires but a result of acquired conscious perspective .
Original sin refers to an unfortunate condition that gradually put man out of balance. Where our thinking, emotion, and sensations should function harmoniously and connected consciously with each other. The result of original sin is to leave us out of balance and the connections we have with the external world through our thoughts, emotion, and sensations, cannot be connected consciously as would be normal for evolution but instead, out of balance, They have become connected through imagination resulting in all sorts of preconceptions which motivate our lives referred to as “sleep.”
The dog is often a far better balanced machine than we are and serves its purpose well. We’ve been put into this unfortunate condition that because of our normal capacity for conscious evolution, becoming out of balance, we’ve allowed imagination to replace consciousness and formation of this corrupted ego that lives the life of imagination or “sleep” we’ve come to know. Our lives are primarily run through stubborn habits and fears which in a sense makes us inferior to a dog or the lilies of the field.
Without consciousness, I believe that life will continue for us much like Buddhism describes as the wheel of samsara.
It is only the results of consciousness or its abuse that could warrant either heaven or hell as life continues. That is why a dog exists from dust to dust and perpetuation of the species or machine continues through sexual reproduction. There is no consciousness to warrant becoming more conscious or the difficulties from the abuse of the inclination towards consciousness. Actually the Buddhist conception of Hell is very enlightening since a person can see exactly what “abuse” means. I just put this here for reference if it is of interest to anyone:
khandro.net/doctrine_hells.htm
So as I understand it, the only way we can become aware of how out of balance and under the influence of imagination we are is through becoming consciously aware of it through conscious self awareness. As we are, we are incapable of experiencing how unnatural we’ve become This is real knowledge and requires a gradual awakening to. Only then can we begin to change and develop on an objective, non-illusory psychological foundation that allows consciousness to become a part of our lives and the “good” that comes of it.