A recontextualization of “awakening”.
I want to introduce the notion that there needs to be a new way to describe Awakening. Because what it originally meant, isn’t what it is being used to describe today. It feels to me that the kind of way people want to experience life needs a new word. I like the term “wholeness”. That place people long to get to, doesn’t actually happen with Awakening.
Hold this in your heartspace and see how it feels…Awakening is only the beginning. And Wholeness is what you then consciously work on for as long as you are here.
Wholeness, is the movement to consciously integrate our suffering. When we do this, by and by we are then free to consciously express self love, self care, compassion, empathy, love for our fellow human beings, spiritual and personal integrity, service. Awakening, rarely, if ever, involves all of these things. I have run into a plethora of awakened beings, tremendously awakened beings…who barely had an ounce of compassion…whose hearts were some of the most closed I have ever witnessed. The most closed hearted and passionless people I have ever met were also the most brilliantly awakened people I ever met. Because that is all that they had…AWAKENING. They woke up, went up into the sky…and left the rest of themselves down below, presuming that equaled freedom. I have also run into people who awakened and left behind anything that didn’t feel like pure love. They don’t take care of themselves, they have no sense of how their behavior effects others around them…because “ahhhhh”, they are existing in a state of pure love. They can look you in the eye as you announce your divorce and they will smile at you trustingly and talk about perfection. And yes, they are correct. But seeing how everything is connected is not the same as feeling compassion or expressing sympathy for another’s loss.
It’s about wholeness…the whole being thing…being a wholly-human-being, with all the aspects present.
Real freedom…is love. Loving all of yourself, is real freedom. Awakening is what happens when you can see that this is actually a possibility for you and that is actually what you have come to remember to do while in a body.
And if you have to leave behind things because you find them unloveable, in order to have freedom, that is not love. However, it WILL FEEL like freedom. At least for a while.
Awakening, as a concept, is on the edge of becoming a religion. Awakening, and living in a “new paradigm”, the way the terms are bandied about they now have the substantialness of cotton candy. Awakening, is the way that things become lighter. It gives you the glimpse, the knowing, that the dream of freedom is more than just a dream. But awakening does not mean we are clear, or finished, no matter how incredible or fantastic the manifestations of our awakening may be.
No one here, is completely clear. I don’t care who they say they are channeling.
But can you feel it in your groups and meetings and Satsangs and retreats…the impetus, the hurry, the way people want to just get through it and to the other side? It is because of this notion that we think Awakening “should have happened by now…why am I not awake yet in that lasting way?” Is it safe for you to consider that what you seek is actually not possible in the way you want it to happen or were told it would happen? It is okay with you if Awakening was the big hurdle, and now all there is left to do, is to simply integrate deeper and deeper? Is it okay with you, if you will have to take the time to love all of yourself after Awakening, for you to experience, what you hoped Awakening would bring?
Because the thing is that you WANT Awakening to fit your needs. And you have a need to not suffer any longer. But honestly, you NEVER arrive and stay in that blissed out place. But when you integrate more and more and you are as comfortable in the sky as you are on the ground, guess what?…you won’t care about arriving any longer. Bliss will be just being grateful to exist at all, regardless of how you may or may not suffer that day.
Suffering. People so intensely want suffering to end. Like they want war to end, or hunger to end. I feel that one of the reasons people so want their suffering to end is because they have been fed the idea that their suffering MUST end for happiness or harmony to be restored. They are fed the idea, just like racism or capitalism, that it is attainable to have no more unpleasant emotions. The truth about suffering, is that your freedom is through it, and not around it. And even if you don’t like that or reject that notion. Just look at your life. Has your life not been chock full of humanity? Has it not been fully loaded with challenges, loss, despair? And the reason you are unhappy isn’t because those things happened. More so, we end up unhappy because we have the idea that these kinds of things should not happen. Oh, if only we all saw the way love is behind the whole thing. Wanting our personal suffering to end, is like telling God to go away. Embracing our suffering does not mean that we are surrendering to always suffer…it means Wholeness. It means that we can openly look into anything that comes our way.
When we do that, is when we see that love is behind the whole thing. Look closely. Look closer. Awakening may not be what you’ve been taught. Talk more about Loving yourself and less about awakening. Suffering does not have to disappear for you to feel whole again. Love is closer than you ever imagined.
