Awakening Into Life

The term awakening is often used in spiritual language to describe an experience of utter clarity about the nature of reality. The experience is usually the result of a lot of deliberate practice and is even the final goal of some spiritual paths. 

The term awakening can be a bit misleading though. Awakening to the truth of what you are at your core does not mean, as the work implies, waking up from life to something else. Instead, it is the recognition that all of reality is a self-created experience with literally nothing "outside" of it. In other words, it has no objectively true ground to it, that is different from your very experience of life, right now and that you can wake up to. 

How do you wake up?

Even when this is obvious to us, it is still important to remind ourselves of this fact when we are engaged in spiritual practices that are meant to facilitate insight into the nature of reality. The reason is that words and our ways of thinking can have profound effects on our expectations. As long as enlightenment or awakening is a goal in our minds, we project an imaginary state of being to some other place and time. We create a sense of separate existence, which is actually keeping us from the very realization that we are practicing for. 

Instead, I suggest we do the following. While we go through the various experience of life, we can ask the question: How am I not seeing this very moment as the divine light of pure consciousness? The contemplative process is aimed at fully embracing and merging with the flow of experience. Drop the idea of awakening to anything that is different from this very experience. Waking up is surrendering the illusory sense of self which seemingly separates you from the whole of existence. There is only this flow of experience. Even including the sense of separation and the conceptualizing mind. 

Thinking of this very moment as a whole. Looking for the ways in which our minds separate the whole into a seeming multiplicity of things. How can we do that? We can contemplate the question: What is the same in any experience when all differences are taken away?  The answer comes as the utterly mind-blowing experience, that on a certain level of perception, there are absolutely no distinctions in this world. No words can really describe this recognition. You cannot even make out any sense of self, of ownership, or of individual agency anymore. All experiences become a pure expression of the one infinite light of consciousness. And this one light has no other to compare it to, therefore no outside, no size, and no time.