Wake Up Now (17 page)

You say that the me can’t wake up. What about
people who claim they’re awake? Is this just
evidence of their confusion?

At the absolute level, claiming to be awake is as significant as claiming to be breathing. Awakeness is your essential nature, and you can’t possibly
not
be awake. At the relative level, people who claim to be awakened may simply be using a convenient shorthand to say that the locus of their identity has shifted and they know who they really are. But those who are genuinely established in the realization of their true nature have no motivation to claim or defend any statement or position. It makes no difference to them what other people think. As my teacher Jean Klein used to say, “Our real nature can never be asserted or denied.”

Wake-Up Call

Awakening to the Limitless Body of Awareness

Set aside fifteen to twenty minutes for this exploration. Begin by sitting quietly with your eyes closed for five minutes or so. Rest your awareness on the experience of sitting, and allow your body to relax. Now open your awareness to the full range of bodily sensations, which at any moment may include heat, pressure, pulsing, energy, pleasure, pain, lightness, density, and so forth. Don’t focus your attention on any particular sensations, just be aware of the rich, multidimensional play of sensations throughout your body. Set aside any images or ideas you may have about your body. The only body you have is the play of sensations you’re experiencing right now.

Be sure to include the sensations in your head, including the feelings of the face you take to be yours and the sensations of thoughts as they apparently arise in the brain. Set aside all names and interpretations, and experience the sensations directly, without conceptual filters.

After several minutes, allow your body’s boundaries or edges to dissolve and “inner” sensations to merge with “outer” experiences. Your awareness now includes the full range of sensations both outside and inside your body. Indeed, the distinction between outside and inside no longer applies. Everything is happening inside of you.

If this doesn’t make any sense yet, just keep allowing the edges to dissolve and your awareness to expand indefinitely. You feel infinite space in every direction—front, back, side to side, above and below. Who you really are is this inexhaustible awareness without center or periphery, this groundless ground that gives rise to and embraces all things. You are the limitless enjoying its expressions in form. No matter where you look, there’s no separate self to be found—just this!

Keep letting go of all boundaries and concepts and surrendering to the groundless ground of inexhaustible awareness. No need to hold on to anything. This limitless vastness is what you are.

The mind is constantly trying to figure out

What page it’s on in the story of itself.

Close the book. Burn the bookmark.

End of story. Now the dancing begins.

During one of the many retreats I attended with my teacher Jean Klein, I was especially impressed by the contrast between the ease and peace of mind I experienced there so effortlessly and the stressful, claustrophobic mind-state that dominated my life most of the rest of the time. Even though I had glimpsed my true nature several years before, I kept getting seduced back into believing the fears and worst-case scenarios my mind churned out in everyday life. Even though I had experienced an initial awakening, I kept falling back into a half-sleep.

When I described my situation to Jean in a group dialogue, he talked about the baggage of beliefs and psychological memory that weighed me down wherever I went, and he invited me to put it down. I was galvanized and inspired by his suggestion that I could actually drop the accumulated
conditioning of a lifetime all at once, but I couldn’t imagine how. The power of the mind seemed overwhelming.

After a few moments of reflection, I said, “Yes, I have a sense of what you’re talking about. Deep down I know who I really am, but the old beliefs and stories are so intense that I keep forgetting.”

“Ah, forgetting,” he replied, with a bemused smile on his face. “The ultimate forgetting.” After a period of silence, he placed his palms together and left the room. The dialogue had ended, and I was left to reflect on the power of my own forgetfulness.

In the aftermath of awakening, the ultimate forgetting that Jean referred to occurs repeatedly as the mind attempts to reassert its control. Such forgetting is more than just a casual by-product of the mind’s other activities: it’s actually the mind’s reason for being, its job description. Because the mind feels threatened by the openness, spaciousness, and mystery of spiritual awakening, it will go to great lengths to obscure it.

From an early age, we’re trained by family and culture to forget the oceanic feelings of openness and oneness we’re born with and to consider ourselves separate someones with particular names and identities. For example, instead of seeing a kitten, a flower, or a toy as an extension of yourself, an expression of your very own being, you learn to view it as an object out there that you can manipulate and use for your own purposes. Instead of experiencing yourself as a limitless,
boundaryless field of energy and light that includes everything, both inside and outside, you’re taught that you begin and end with your thoughts and your skin. Over time, this identity narrows even further as you take on more and more characteristics that both define and limit you. You’re a good girl, a bad boy, a scaredycat, Daddy’s little princess, a skilled athlete, a poor student, and so forth. Now you know who you are in the eyes of family and friends, but you’ve lost touch with your essential self, your true nature.

Breathe and Reflect

Have you had a glimpse of your true nature and then forgotten? How did the forgetting happen? Can you ever lose your true nature, or does it just recede into the background of your awareness? In this very instant, can you remember who you are?

Throughout childhood you experience countless interactions with parents, siblings, relatives, and friends that your mind internalizes and gradually cobbles together into a complex, multilayered representation of self and reality. Psychologist James Bugental aptly calls this the “self-and-world construct system.” It’s the cloudy lens or veil, made up of ideas and stories about yourself and others, through which you see yourself and the world “around” you.

When your childhood interactions are largely comfortable or pleasurable, you tend to internalize the view that you live in a benevolent world where you can relax and deal with life’s circumstances as they arise. As a result, your boundaries tend to be looser and more permeable, and you find it easier
to let go and allow life to unfold as it will, without tension or worry. When you experience particularly stressful or painful relationships with significant others—relationships in which you believe you risk losing their love or being intimidated, shamed, or abused if you act a certain way—you internalize the view that you need to watch out, be careful, and hold on to control at all costs. As a result, your boundaries tend to be tighter and more rigid, and you find it more difficult to relax and go with the flow of life.

Needless to say, each of us has our own unique self-and-world construct system, based on the many thousands of unique interactions and experiences we’ve accumulated over a lifetime, and inevitably it’s a blend of positive and negative, reassuring and threatening. But whether your childhood experiences are predominantly pleasurable or painful, your boundaries primarily tight or loose, your view of life mostly benevolent or sinister, you inevitably carry with you, as an essential ingredient of your separate sense of self, the urge to control life to a greater or lesser degree.

This need to control the flow of life because you somehow feel your well-being or survival is at stake is universal to the ordinary human condition. Generally experienced as a tension in the gut, often in the solar plexus or the lower abdomen, it’s the glue that holds together the thoughts, feelings, images, and memories that make up the illusory self. As long as you believe yourself to be a separate someone, you’ll continue to feel compelled to control the people and things
you mistakenly perceive to be separate from and outside you. The inner mechanism or function that’s programmed to maintain separation and hold on to control regardless of circumstances is often called the “ego.” Essentially, the ego is an ongoing argument or struggle with the way things are. (For the remainder of this chapter, I use the terms
ego
and
self-and-world construct system
more or less interchangeably.)

In genuine spiritual awakening, you finally recognize this ego for what it is—an illusory construct held together by a sense of separateness and the need to control—and realize that you’re the looker, the silent presence, the limitless space in which this construct arises. In the wake of this transformative insight, the construct loses its hold over you, at least temporarily. But because it has developed over a lifetime and gained its strength in situations where you believed your survival was at stake, the ego has tremendous power and tenacity and doesn’t let go of control without a fight. In rare cases, the awakening is so complete that the separate sense of self drops away in an instant and never returns. Most of the time, however, the awakening merely shifts the location of your identity, as I described in
Chapter 6
; it knocks the ego from its accustomed throne as the lord of your domain but doesn’t completely dismantle or disempower it. Inevitably, the ego rises again, weakened and disoriented, like an ousted dictator, and attempts to regain control of the country.

I’m playing with adversarial metaphors here because that’s often the way this process is experienced by the mind. In reality, however, there’s no conflict or struggle. There’s
only the dance of God or consciousness in manifestation, and you definitely don’t need to oust the ego; you merely need to see it for what it is and rest in the spacious, all-inclusive presence that you always already are. The ego has its place in the scheme of things, its role to play—you just stop taking it to be the truth of who you are. As Ramana Maharshi says, it’s merely an illusory shadow cast on the ground by the Self. I’ll talk more about relating with the ego in the remaining chapters of this book.

Although spiritual awakening itself is generally a blissful, expansive experience that may be accompanied by weeks or months of extraordinary inner peace, joy, love, and freedom from reactivity, it’s often followed by an extended period of insecurity and confusion. After all, you’ve just experienced the most profound paradigm shift imaginable—the seeming center of your universe, the separate self you’ve spent a lifetime cultivating and serving, has revealed itself to be a colossal illusion. Even though you may have encountered spiritual teachings that helped prepare you for this tectonic shift in consciousness, the experience itself can be frightening and disorienting as your accustomed world collapses around you.

In particular, the ego may feel threatened by the radiant emptiness that has revealed itself to be your essence, your true nature, and it will do everything it knows how to make you forget who you are. (Remember, that’s its job description,
its reason for being, and it’s been doing its job well for a very long time.) Committed to seeing itself as a separate someone with a particular life story—with all the suffering and exhilaration, success and failure, this story brings—the ego is terrified of being annihilated. The tactics it employs may be heavy-handed or subtle and range from trying to stuff awakening back into a conceptual box to attempting to co-opt awakening for its own purposes. But the result is the same: the clouding or distortion of the truth to which you’ve just awakened and the reassertion of the ego’s control. Here are seven of the ego’s favorite ploys.

If you had no interest in awakening in the first place or didn’t realize it could be so intense and unsettling, you may try to go about your life as if nothing has changed, pretending to be interested in the same achievements, possessions, dramas, and roles as before. The problem is, the awakened view keeps reasserting itself, like an abyss opening up beneath you and revealing the emptiness at the core, or a voice speaking truth from the whirlwind beyond the mind. No matter how hard you try, you just can’t get your life to fit back into the comfortable little box you once inhabited. You’re in no-man’s-land now, uncharted terrain. The old maps are worthless, and new maps have yet to be drawn—or more accurately, can never be drawn because reality is constantly changing and doesn’t lend itself to predetermined directions. Eventually, you need to find a way to accommodate your new identity.

One of my students, for example, had a lucrative, high-profile job at a software company that gave him a sense of status and power. After his awakening, status and power lost their luster, and his work revealed itself to be inherently manipulative and dishonest. But he pushed on as if nothing had happened, attempting to talk himself out of his misgivings, because he was afraid of making changes that might cause him to lose a lifestyle to which he had become attached.

Because your awakening doesn’t resemble the ones you’ve read about in books, you may dismiss it as inauthentic. Or because you still feel angry or afraid, you may conclude that the awakening was inadequate in some way. “After all, someone like Eckhart Tolle went from self-loathing to bliss overnight,” you may argue, “and his ‘negative emotions’ completely dropped away. Whereas I just had this moment of insight where I realized that I don’t really exist. My awakening just doesn’t measure up.”

However, genuine awakenings come in all shapes and sizes and don’t necessarily guarantee an immediate, thoroughgoing transformation in your way of being in the world. You’ve merely discovered who you really are—transformation follows or not, depending on how effective your ego is in its attempts to derail the process. But the spiritual superego likes to compare your insights to the enlightenment experiences of the great masters and sages and find them wanting. What better way for the ego to stay in control?