Waking Up!

by Alan Lowen, founder of The Art of Being®

I want to put in a word for the ordinary state of being awake. Never mind enlightenment! Living the life I live and doing the work I do, I’ve met a lot of people who are very busy with their spiritual consciousness. I’m not decrying the quest. We all need to go this journey. But there is a way of being busy with it that is really nothing more than narcissistic day-dreaming. Osho used to say, “The most dangerous dream is the dream that you are awake.” Dangerous because it is such an engaging dream that we may never wake up out of it! One of the common characteristics of this dream-state is being very busy with all the jargon of spirituality and enlightenment, as though being able to talk about it all demonstrates wakefulness. Meanwhile, hardly noticed, life is happening!

In the end there’s not much difference between being spiritually unconscious and acting under the illusion of being spiritually conscious. All that’s really different – and it is really different! – is what you do with your time in either case. In the first, you live the life that society has ordained for you. Work, entertainment, sport, family, marriage, perhaps divorce, doing some good, doing some bad and making the most – or perhaps not - of whatever you have in the way of skills, material goods, the body you were born with, and so on. In the second case, you do all those things that are devoted to or associated with spiritual awakening: you practise your yoga, meditate each morning, eat vegan food, think positive thoughts, go to Tantra workshops, sit with gurus, and so on.

A lot of us live somewhere between these two states – we want more than run-of-the-mill consciousness, and yet we’re happy vegetating in front of the TV watching take-home movies. We can hang out comfortably between these states just because they aren’t essentially different. After all, they are both driven by our trying to get what we want, whether what we want is a life of pleasure or the golden carrot of enlightenment. In either case it’s the TRYING TO GET that runs us.

Being really awake – now that’s different! It has nothing to do with what we do. It has to do with how we do what we do, with how we live our being. Being awake is so simple it doesn’t require any practices. It is the way we are when we are in touch with all our senses and sensitivities, with our feelings, our talents, our intuition, with every murmur in our body that speaks to us of our joys, sorrows, fears and vulnerabilities, with our heart’s longings, and at core, with the indescribable mystery of soul and spirit, as well as being wide awake to all the wonders of this here-and-now reality.

When we are this awake, our experience of existence is rich enough that discussing spirituality and consciousness is not interesting. It’s only because we’re not awake that we need something to fill the gap, something to entertain us, occupy us, feed our sense of self-importance. And why such needs? Fear. In the three decades that 1`ve been helping people – beginning with myself - to wake up to the full gift of being, it has always only ever been fear that is in the way. We are more afraid than we know of who we are. We’re afraid of how much we can be, of how little we can be, we’re afraid of our needs, of our nature, of our sex, of our tears, of our tenderness, we’re afraid of death, we’re afraid of the ghosts of our imperfect childhoods, we’re afraid of not knowing, of not being good enough, we’re afraid of heart-break and pain and sorrow, and sometimes even of joy and ecstasy. We’re afraid of the dark, we’re afraid of the unknown, and most of all, we’re afraid of nothing. This is why spiritual seekers go hunting for spiritual experiences. God forbid that nothing should ever be allowed to happen. It’s always been profound to sit, as I sometimes do in my workshops, with a circle of participants and let nothing happen. I discovered many years ago that for many people this is almost unbearable. I also discovered that as the circle gradually came to trust the space of nothingness, extraordinary openings and awakenings happened. Yes, out of nothing! But this is the way it always is. Essentially, awakening is about making friends with all that we are, with whatever we have come to reject in ourselves.

Normally we don’t even know we’re afraid. We are so skilled and trained in avoiding our fears that we can think things about ourselves that actually have little bearing on who we really are and how we really experience life. We think that we are! Like people who have lost a limb or an eye or their hearing, we learn to function on less than our wholeness. We may well have no inkling that there is anything we are missing, until, if we’re lucky, something happens that shatters our illusion. Often the first step in our awakening is the realization that for our whole life we’ve been fooling ourselves. It is only when we are able to say hello to what we have been afraid of that we can begin to experience all that the fear kept suppressed or deadened in us. It is the befriending that resurrects us. We become more alive, and in that aliveness we can sense and feel more.

What I love most about all this is that awakening is a never-ending journey. I guess this is why the ones who are really awake have a natural humility about them. They’re not seeking any glory for their attainment. They don’t parade their sublime state. They don’t sit basking in the reflected light of adoring disciples. They appear quite ordinary because what they love is being, not being worshipped! To wake up is to realize that awakening is ongoing. It’s not an end-state. It keeps happening; unless, that is, you try to grab hold of it and make it yours. The simple fact is that all you can ever be is in the way, just as so many self-styled spiritual teachers are in the way of the very thing they are talking about. Spiritual awakening doesn’t need our clichéd words of wisdom. It just needs our trust and courage to keep opening, for ever. Love the journey!

© Alan Lowen 2005