Wake Up Now (20 page)

Fortunately, the ego gradually loosens its grip as the journey of awakening unfolds. In the light of the initial awakening, which reveals the emptiness of the separate self, some of the more blatant forms of manipulation and control simply become untenable. For example, you may stop “power-tripping” your employees or yelling at your kids because the boundaries between self and other have suddenly dissolved and you can no longer treat others as if they were separate from you. Then, as awakening deepens and spreads and you live more and more consistently from the awakened perspective, the ego may relax its hold even further as it realizes that life continues just as effectively—even turns out to be infinitely more satisfying and harmonious—when you let go and let life live through you.

Most of the time, however, the ego will stubbornly continue to maintain control over certain areas of your life, even after you’ve awakened. “I can relax and let go in relationships or with family and friends,” your ego may concede, “but I have to hold on tight when it comes to money or health.” One of my students, for example, had a series of profound realizations that transformed his life in countless ways, but he continued to obsess over his health and couldn’t trust consciousness or true self to take charge of this area of
his life as well. Trust is the core issue here: Egos are programmed to distrust because they develop in early life in response to uncertain or untrustworthy situations. If you’ve had a happy childhood and your lack of trust is minimal, your ego tends to let go readily. But if you’ve experienced repeated betrayals of trust in the form of disappointment, abandonment, or abuse, your ego may hold on for dear life because it doesn’t trust the ground of being to support you. Beneath the ego’s tenacious demand for control generally lie core stories or beliefs about life that need to be acknowledged and investigated.

Lest I give the ego a bad rap, I want to emphasize that it’s not your enemy, it’s a dedicated general in what it perceives to be the battle called life. It may have guided and protected you through difficult times, and it believes it must be constantly vigilant. The problem is that once you awaken, you realize that the belief that life is a battle is merely a construct created by the mind and perpetuated by the ego. You could say that the ego is the screenwriter, director, producer, and star in the movie called
Life
, but none of it has anything to do with you. When you step out of the film into the clear light of reality, the ego no longer has a role to play and may let go of control completely. Or more often, it may retreat to some stronghold deep inside where it maintains control at a subtler, more unconscious level. Either way, the love that you are ultimately embraces the ego as a devoted servant that has mistakenly assumed the role of master. In reality, it’s just a function or mechanism without any substantial or abiding reality.

At this point, you may be wondering what you can do to help facilitate the process of embodiment. Let me begin by reminding you that the “you” that believes it can do something to make embodiment happen is merely the ego in disguise, attempting once again to impose its agenda on life. “There’s something wrong here, something missing,” the ego inevitably believes. “I’m not fully embodied enough, whatever that might mean, and I need to remedy the situation as soon as possible.” But full and complete embodiment is available right here and now when you let go, stop resisting and controlling life (including the so-called embodiment process), and allow everything to be just the way it is.

“Then how can I let go and stop resisting?” you may wonder. Here again, you might ask whether the ego is merely seeking another strategy for becoming a better, more spiritual you. You can’t “do” letting go—it just happens naturally as the light of awakening illuminates the innumerable places where you’re still holding on. If there’s any strategy, it’s this: Stay awake! When you feel the grip of the ego in your belly, the contraction in your heart, the tensing of your shoulders as you once again hold on and resist what is, stop and inquire, “Who is aware of this right now? Who am I really?” In an instant, you may find yourself out of the process, once again expanded, spacious, awake, and non-reactive. Now abide knowingly as this spacious awakeness without trying to change the external situation in any way.

In general, the path of embodiment asks that you live your understanding from moment to moment. As my friend and teacher Adyashanti put it, serve the truth you know yourself to be. Rather than allowing yourself to fall back into old patterns, live the silent presence—the empty fullness, the openness, peace, and clarity you experienced when you woke up—in every situation. In other words, be who you are.

This requires what my teacher Jean Klein called earnestness or sincerity, a deep, abiding commitment to the truth in all circumstances. Awakening tends to ignite it, but this commitment may flag from time to time as the ego puts up a fuss. If you appear to have a choice, choose the truth again and again—not only the absolute truth of your being but the relative truth of the moment. In its efforts to maintain control, the ego tends to fudge, obscure, or avoid the truth in order to manipulate situations for its own benefit. Instead, the process of embodiment asks that you tell the truth and let go of the outcome, which involves a major leap into the unknown.

For example, you may be accustomed to telling white lies in your relationship to avoid conflict and elicit your partner’s approval, but you compromise your commitment to truth in the process. What would your relationship be like if you kept telling the truth of your experience, not in a brutal or judgmental way, but gently and honestly? What if, instead of trying to manipulate your partner into giving you what you want, you just asked for it and allowed your partner the freedom to say no if he or she felt inclined? Are you ready to
let go even that much, be that vulnerable, and welcome the unknown? If you’re not, you end up sacrificing your own awakeness and lulling yourself back to sleep again.

Breathe and Reflect

Begin by sitting quietly with your eyes closed. Now open your eyes and look around while telling yourself the story that you’re trapped in this terrible, unworkable life circumstance, and nothing is the way you want it to be. Notice how you feel. Close your eyes, and when you open them again, look around while telling yourself the story that everything is perfect just the way it is—indeed, it’s God or spirit in manifestation. Notice how you feel now.

When you’re fully embodying the truth of your being, you’re living not as the story you’ve taken yourself to be for a lifetime, but as the pure, empty, radiant wakefulness you’ve always essentially been. Instead of imagining yourself to be the personal center around which the drama of your life story plays itself out, you’re now the vast, unencumbered space in which life itself unfolds as an impersonal mystery, with your body-mind as just one part of the total manifestation. Now you’re free to respond not from psychological memory, but from the limitless freshness, openness, and compassion of don’t-know mind. Many people experience this way of being for extended periods of time after they awaken but then seem to lose it as awakening fades into the background and old stories reassert themselves.

While living in a halfway house after years of depression and rage, Byron Katie woke up to her essential nature when she saw a cockroach walk across her foot and realized that the foot didn’t belong to a someone. The sense of a separate self had completely dropped away, and she was reborn as innocent wakefulness, without a life history or even a name. Yet every time Katie found herself “velcroing” to a thought, as she put it, she noticed that she began to suffer again. So she developed a process of inquiry that allowed her to investigate and release the thoughts and stories that caused her pain. Out of this firsthand experience, the Work of Byron Katie emerged. Katie initially called it the “Great Undoing,” because it allowed her to release the grip of the stories that kept returning to haunt her—until they didn’t any longer.

Just as you can use self-inquiry to turn your attention back on the Self and invite an initial awakening to the truth of your being (see
Chapter 5
), you can use the Work and other forms of investigation to question the beliefs and stories that flood back to fill the space that awakening reveals. “I’m not good enough. I’m not safe. Life is a struggle. Nobody loves me,” you may find yourself believing again. In response, you can ask the questions that Katie and others recommend: “Is it really true? Can I really know that it’s true? How do I respond when I believe this thought? Who would I be without it?” With dedicated self-inquiry, the stories gradually lose their hold and recede into the background or dissipate altogether, and you once again rest as open, unfurnished awareness or presence, without center or
periphery. This natural movement of resting and inquiring is like the alternation of the left and right foot in walking.

As long as you appear to have a choice, choose to rest or abide as much as possible as the open, unfurnished awareness and limitless love of your essential nature, and meet each story or belief with inquiry. Eventually, resting and inquiring become choiceless and effortless, like the blinking of your eyes or the beating of your heart, and embodiment naturally deepens and expands. Particularly tenacious or deeply rooted “core stories” (known as
samskaras
in the Advaita tradition and
kleshas
in Buddhism) may invite more focused investigation, as discussed in
Chapter 9
.

As its name implies, the embodiment of awakening tends to move down through the chakras (the seven energy centers) from the upper realms of spiritual illumination through the heart and into the body and the more instinctual centers. For many people, the initial awakening takes the form of a profound insight into the empty nature of reality and the nonexistence of the separate self. But this insight may remain just a powerful spiritual idea or, at best, a shift in perspective unless it’s fully received by the heart and allowed to transform the way you relate to life.

For example, the realization that you’re pure, limitless wakefulness or presence is centered in the upper chakras and may afford you tremendous equanimity and detachment. But until this realization descends and blossoms into
the deeper knowing that everyone and everything you meet is the same presence, the same true self or Buddha nature, you haven’t awakened your heart and allowed the boundless love and compassion of your essential self to flow. With the awakening of the heart, the dry, detached perspective of the disengaged witness, which still involved a subtle separation between self and other, dissolves into the unconditional love that includes and embraces everything without exception. The awakened heart is not limited to the energetic center in the chest, but ultimately reveals itself to be the limitless ground of reality, the current of love that animates all things. As Nisargadatta Maharaj puts it, “When I look within and see that I’m nothing, that’s wisdom. When I look without and see that I’m everything, that’s love.”

As powerful as it may be, abiding as the heart is just the beginning of an even deeper phase of embodiment. If you have unresolved issues, core stories, or karmic knots in the lower chakras, you may still have difficulty expressing the love and wisdom that you are in a practical, embodied way when you feel challenged or threatened. For example, if you were often shamed or overpowered as a child, you may forget who you are and lash out in anger when you feel criticized or judged and may even be inclined to impose your ideas and judgments on others. If you were often abandoned or rejected, you may react with terror or rage when you sense significant family members or friends withdrawing their approval or love. And if you didn’t feel safe or supported, you may constantly feel insecure or distrustful about your physical or financial survival.

Because these lower-chakra concerns are so deeply imprinted, they tend to overshadow or sabotage the more recent and tentative realization of your essential nature. No matter how awakened your heart and mind may be, you keep getting ambushed by strong emotional reactions that grip your body and don’t readily respond to the spiritual knowing of your upper chakras. In his bestselling book
Emotional Intelligence
, Daniel Goleman calls this “emotional hijacking.”

As the embodiment of truth continues, the love that you essentially are naturally moves down into the lower chakras to embrace and redeem these core stuck places just as light, by its very nature, seeks to illuminate every last vestige of darkness. In the process, old habits and difficult emotions may get activated, and you may end up feeling as though awakening has caused you more suffering than it’s relieved. At this point, you may be moved to work more closely with these deeply ingrained reactive patterns, as I’ll discuss in the next chapter.

You talk about the importance of telling the
truth. But sometimes telling the truth seems
to get me into trouble.