The most frequent inquiry I receive from listeners is various forms of the question: “How do I wake up?” I reply to each inquiry individually, but I thought it would be good to do an episode addressing the topic
The most frequent inquiry I receive from listeners is various forms of the question: “How do I wake up?” I reply to each inquiry individually, but I thought it would be good to do an episode addressing the topic
The most frequent inquiry I receive from listeners is various forms of the question: “How do I wake up?” I reply to each inquiry individually, but I thought it would be good to do an episode addressing the topic again. I recorded an episode on this topic a couple of years ago, but it is always good to come at it afresh. I am not going to look at what I said then. Maybe this is similar or maybe not. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter.
The first thing I want to say is that there are various ways to ask this question, based on one’s religious tradition or lack of it. The term “waking up” reflects the popular nondual approach, but it also hearkens back to the Buddha whose title means “The Awakened One.” Some people use the words enlightened or enlightenment or liberation.
Jesus did not use the term “awakening” although he did tell stories about sleeping people who woke up. Neither did the early Christians use the term awakening. Christians tend to use the term union with God. And God is seen as bigger than traditional theism. More like Eckhart’s term “God beyond God.” Jesus used the term Kingdom of God, which as his disciple I also use. I also use the phrase unitive awareness. Jesus also talked about being born of the Spirit, born from above, born anew or “born again.”
Of course when evangelicals use that term “born again” they mean something completely different than what Jesus meant by it or how I am using it. Evangelicals use the term “born again” to refer to a decision to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, which is understood to guarantee a personal existence in heaven after death. Jesus never used the phrase in that way. Jesus used the phrase in the sense of seeing the Kingdom of God and entering the Kingdom of God.
Jesus also used the term eternal life. A man came to Jesus and asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” That man was asking the same question as “How do I wake up?” It does not matter what religious terminology we use or what spiritual tradition we come from, the reality that all these terms point to is the same. The question is the same: How? How do I realize this? How do I get there? What can I do to facilitate this? How do I wake up?
When someone asks me that I always start off saying that there is nothing you can do. Anything you do is work, and waking up is grace. Whatever you are doing to try to wake up, stop doing it! At least stop doing it for the purpose of trying to wake up. You can continue your spiritual disciplines and practices if you want, but they cannot accomplish awakening. Awakening is not a goal that is reached by doing the right things in the right way.
The truth is that what you are looking for is already here. You are already what you hope to become. You already are what you are seeking. Seeking assumes there is something different that you need to achieve, somewhere you have to go spiritually, or some state you have to attain. There isn’t.
That is the point of Jesus’ story about the prodigal son and his brother. The prodigal thought he had to go somewhere, so he went to a far country. Only later did he realize that what he was looking for was had always been at home. The older brother stayed home, but did not realize that everything he ever wanted was right there. The Father told him, “Everything that is mine is yours!” But the son did not see that. What you are looking for is here now and cannot be lost. That is the Father’s message to both sons. Both sons in their own way were blind to this reality.
You ask “How do I wake up?” Nicodemus asked Jesus that question in another way. Jesus told him he had to be born again, and Nicodemus replied, “How? How can a man be born when he is old?” It is the same question using a different metaphor.
Let me ask you: What does an infant in the womb have to do to be born? Nothing! The Mother does all the labor. The same with spiritual birth. The Divine Mother-Father does all the work. From our perspective we simply travel through the birth canal. Jesus called it the strait gate (not straight – strait like straitjacket, confining). He called it the narrow way that leads to life. It is the spiritual birth canal. Birth through this strait gate and narrow way can seem painful, but there is nothing we can do about that. And when we are born anew we wake up to a new world of spaciousness and light.
So there is nothing you can do to be born of the Spirit. Yet Jesus told people to do some things anyway, because he knew what is in us. He knew we feel like we have to do something even if we know that nothing can be done to cause the new birth. A wealthy man came to Jesus and asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” This is another form of the same question. Think about that metaphor for a moment. What does a person need to do to inherit something in this world? Nothing! It is entirely up to the one from whom you inherit it! It is all a matter of your relationship to the deceased, and whether they put you in their will.
Jesus told the rich man to obey all the commandments. He figured that would keep him busy. But the man said he had been doing that all his life, and it had not worked. In other words he considered himself to be a really good spiritual man. He had followed all the rules. So Jesus told him to do one more thing – to sell everything he had, give the proceeds to the poor, and come be his disciple. That is the one thing the man could not do, so he walked away. Why? Because his identity was wrapped up in what he owned. To give up his possessions was to die, and that he could not do. Your identity may be wrapped up in something else that you cannot give up.
In other words if you want to wake up, you need to give up who you are – or think you are - your sense of identity, your own self, which is really not much of a sacrifice because it is not real anyway. It just feels real. Giving up the self is what Jesus meant when he taught his followers to deny themselves, take up the cross and follow him. He is talking about dying to self.
That is the one thing we cannot do. The self cannot die to self. It cannot give itself up. Because the self would be the one doing the giving up thereby entrenching itself even more in its self-sacrifice. That is the trap of spirituality, where the self becomes a spiritual self, an unselfish self, an awakened self. That is self-righteousness, egotism and hypocrisy. It is just a deeper self-deception. The only way to wake up is non-action. Non-doing. Wu-Wei is what the Tao Te Ching calls it. Non-doing by a nonself. That is the non-way. That is the way of the Cross.
So what do you do to wake up? I tell people to keep do whatever they are doing but do it lightly with detachment. If you are doing spiritual practices go ahead and do them. But do them without attachment to any results. That is the central lesson of the Bhagavad Gita.
Both Christ and Buddha gave their followers things to do, while they were waiting for enlightenment. Jesus put it forth in his Sermon on the Mount. Buddha put it forth in his Deer Park sermon. Jesus’ sermon was about a way of life that went beyond the laws and traditions of religion. He talks about paying attention to intent. He talked about speech and conduct. Buddha said the same sort of thing. He called it right intention, right speech, right conduct, and so forth. It was his Eightfold path, which was a way of spiritual and moral life.
So how do you wake up? The same way you wake up every morning from sleep. The same way you were physically born as an infant. That is how you wake up. The important thing to realize is that nothing really changes. The infant is an infant before she was born and after. Nothing has changed except a shift in location from inside to outside the womb. When you wake up in the morning what has changed? Nothing has changed except for a shift in consciousness. It is a shift in perspective from inner to outer. After you wake up spiritually you realize that this unitive awareness has been here all along. Nothing has changed. Just like the Zen saying about mountains and rivers.
I have a friend in the Netherlands named Paul Jordaans, who describes it as “falling awake” in his and his wife Debbie Parkins’ soon-to-be published book “Tales and Paintings from Oneness.” “Falling awake” is a wonderful metaphor. It compares waking up spiritually to falling asleep physically. What can you do to fall asleep at night? Well you can do some things like not drink caffeine in the evening, have a darkened bedroom, and have a certain bedtime routine. But none of those cause you to fall asleep. They remove some obstacles to sleep.
It is the same with waking up. There are some things that you can do, which Jesus talks about in the Sermon on the Mount and Buddha talks about in his Deer Park Sermon. But these practices do not cause the waking up. They just help remove obstacles to waking up.
People seek to wake up, thinking it is something different than right here, right now. It is not. It is brilliantly ordinary. That is what makes it extraordinary. And it is right here, right now. It is just a matter of being here now, as Ram Dass always said. Me telling you how to wake up is like a person telling another how to breathe. Whether you learn breathing techniques or not you will keep on breathing. You are always breathing as long as you are alive. Just breathe. How do you wake up? You are awake! So be awake. Wakefulness is what you are. Be who and what you really are. That is how you wake up.