Wake Up Now (16 page)

Eventually, as awakening deepens and unfolds, this more spacious localization melts into the heart center in the chest, which is where some sages consider the Self to be “located,” at least on the relative, phenomenal level. Ultimately, even this most subtle localization dissolves and the Self is experienced as all-pervasive and omnipresent. In the words of the Greek philosopher Empedocles, “God [that is, true self] is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

Now that I’ve described how spiritual awakening looks and feels from the inside, I’d like to address some of the more popular misconceptions that hover around the experience like clouds. With so many books (including this one) saying so much about something that can’t really be expressed in words, no wonder there’s so much confusion. On the one hand, I’ve met folks who wander from satsang to retreat in pursuit of enlightenment, as if it were some prized archeological treasure or sacred relic they could claim as their own, bring back, and display to their friends. On the other hand, I’ve met people who seem content to consider themselves enlightened because they’ve read a few books and met a few teachers who assured them they already were. But awakening slips through your grasp when you try to achieve or possess it, and it doesn’t blossom if you don’t make it your own.

No matter how powerful they may be, most spiritual experiences turn out to be merely temporary insights or energetic states that inevitably change or fade away like images on a computer screen. After all, even the most meaningful events are impermanent by their very nature. Enlightenment is not a state or event in space and time, but the realization that you are the screen itself, the timeless, unchanging space or ground in which all states come and go, the silence behind the noise, the stillness beneath the activity.

Of course, it can be inspiring and uplifting to sense your oneness with all things, to feel a powerful outpouring of unconditional love, to undergo a dramatic surge of kundalini that lights up your chakras and sends sparks of light out the top of your head. But if these experiences aren’t accompanied by a permanent shift in who you take yourself to be—by the clear knowing that you are the radiant, empty, ungraspable awareness that’s looking out through these eyes right now—you still haven’t awakened to your timeless, spiritual nature, and even the most exalted experiences will eventually fade into memory. Just as a sudden flash of lightning may direct your attention to the vastness of the empty sky, spiritual experiences can serve as wonderful pointers to the vastness of awareness in which they arise.

Similarly, enlightenment is not something you can become; it’s what you already are—yet as soon as you try to catch it and make it your own, it eludes your outstretched fingers. Enlightenment can never belong to a someone because it’s the clear realization that the separate someone doesn’t exist—and everything is just as it is, perfect and complete, in the absence of a me experiencing it. Contrary to popular opinion, spiritual awakening doesn’t give you anything, it takes away what you thought you had. In the absence of a separate self, the incomparable and ungraspable truth of reality reveals itself to itself.

The mind keeps trying to co-opt enlightenment and claim it as its special prize, but its efforts are doomed to failure, like the child who keeps trying to catch the moon in a pail. When you realize, in the words of the Upanishads, that “I am That” (the absolute, undying Self of all), the natural response is not pride, but profound humility, not a sense of accomplishment, but boundless gratitude, because you see that you’re being animated and lived by the divine mystery.

If you practice a progressive path, you may be told that awakening is the end result of years of diligent effort and devotion. Even if you don’t, you may have imbibed the popular image of the long and arduous trek up the distant mountain of realization, which is grounded in our cultural emphasis on success through hard work. In reality, however,
genuine awakening seems to occur more often as a sudden letting go of all effort, a spontaneous dropping of a burden you’ve been carrying for years, a complete and unexpected giving up of all hope—what the Twelve-Step programs call “bottoming out.” You’re just as likely to wake up in the midst of a crisis as in the course of a meditation retreat.

My friend and teacher Adyashanti often says that he stumbled on awakening only because he was such a failure at meditation. Eckhart Tolle went to bed one night in a paroxysm of self-loathing and woke up the next morning completely free of a sense of self. Byron Katie was living in a halfway house, consumed with rage and depression, when she looked at a cockroach walking across her foot and realized that the foot didn’t belong to anyone. John Wren Lewis awakened without preparation after nearly dying of poison on a bus ride in Indonesia.

Pure wakefulness is your birthright, your natural state, and it’s always present and available in every instant of awareness. You merely need to let go of all effort and die into what you already are. If crisis or suffering helps bring about this death, then so be it.

Just as our Western preoccupation with achievement and hard work may mislead us into believing that we need to struggle toward enlightenment, we seem to have developed the misconception that awakening involves assassinating the ego and dropping its body in the ocean of the Self. But the
ego isn’t your archenemy, it’s merely a function, a diligent worker that goes about its self-appointed task of monitoring your survival and holding on to control.

When you wake up, you see the ego for what it is—a collection of thoughts, feelings, memories, and beliefs held together by a sense of identity—and no longer mistakenly take it to be the truth of who you are or feel compelled to follow its directives. In the welcoming, nonjudgmental space that reveals itself, the ego no longer disturbs you because it has ample room to play its limited part without ruling your life. You may even feel a certain compassionate affection for its well-meaning but often misguided attempts to take care of you. Everything is perfect just the way it is, including the ego that insists it’s not.

Many people consider the spiritual path to be the ultimate self-improvement project and expect awakening to iron out all the kinks in their personality and transform them into a kinder, holier, more virtuous version of themselves. To these folks, I say, “If you want a more perfect me, you’re driving on the wrong road. Backtrack five exits and turn right at the sign marked Self-Help.” The fact is, awakening frees you from your need for self-improvement because it frees you from your identification with the body, mind, and personality, which allows them to function more spontaneously and efficiently. When you no longer impose your ideas and stories about how a better, more spiritual person should look and
behave, you’re no longer bound by the drama of the separate self—including the story known as “self-improvement”—and can therefore be more naturally and perfectly you, with all your apparent imperfections.

If anything, enlightenment does the opposite—it puts you completely at ease with not knowing anything, least of all the mystery of who you really are. As I’ve said before, the truth of who you are can’t be known by the mind, you can only be this truth knowingly. When the mind gives up trying to know, true self-realization has an opportunity to flower. The only remarkable ability that awakening confers is the freedom to act spontaneously and appropriately in each situation, without inner conflict or self-judgment. “My miraculous power and spiritual activity,” admits Zen Master Layman Pang, is merely “chopping wood and carrying water.”

As the flip side of the addiction to struggle and attainment, this laissez-faire approach to awakening places you outside the gateless gate I described in
Chapter 1
, looking in. Yes, you’re already enlightened, but until this enlightenment dawns in this particular body-mind, it’s just an abstract concept with little power to relieve your suffering and transform your experience of reality, which is
the whole point of the awakening process. Paradoxically, the separate self can never become enlightened, yet genuine enlightenment must take root and blossom here. Only then, in the words of an old Zen saying, can the withered tree bear fruit and the “stone woman give birth to a child in the night.”

Breathe and Reflect

Remember that every awakening experience is unique, and yours may not resemble those you’ve read about in books, even this one. Ultimately, awakening is your birthright, your natural state; it’s simply a matter of recognizing the awakeness that’s always already present.

How then, you may wonder, can I know whether the awakening I’ve had is authentic? In the Zen tradition, you’re generally counseled to seek a well-established teacher who can evaluate and authenticate your awakening for you and suggest further practices to clarify and deepen it. But such teachers usually require that you join their organization and engage in regular meditation before they’ll agree to meet with you individually. Besides, even if you’re interested in joining, you may not happen to live in the vicinity of a Zen center. Teachers of Advaita Vedanta tend to be more accessible and plentiful, but so many claim to be enlightened and declare themselves to be teachers with only a minimum of preparation that you may find it difficult to determine which ones are qualified. For better or worse, there doesn’t happen to be a licensing board for spiritual teachers!

Ultimately, only you can know for certain whether your awakening is real. Does it resemble the awakenings I described earlier in this chapter? Has the locus of your identity shifted from “small mind” to “Big Mind”—or disappeared entirely? Do you experience more contentment and peace of mind and less reactivity? Has your seeking come to an end? If you’ve read the teachings of the great masters and sages, you’ll find that your awakening tends to authenticate itself. For most people, even those without any spiritual background, the realization is unmistakable. Eckhart Tolle didn’t need a Zen master to tell him that the peace and wonder he experienced was the result of a genuine spiritual transformation. Neither did Byron Katie or Robert Adams. (In rare cases, like Suzanne Segal’s, however, awakening may be temporarily mistaken for mental illness because the fear is so intense.)

In genuine awakening, the truth of your being recognizes itself through you. The process resembles looking into a mirror—you immediately identify the face as your own. The Zen tradition tells the story of a young woman who temporarily goes crazy and runs around claiming she’s lost her head. Eventually, her friends and family steer her to a mirror, where she’s snapped back to sanity by the sight of her own face. This parable has clear implications: The unawakened state is actually a kind of insanity that’s cured in a moment of lucid self-recognition. The problems tend to arise only later, when the mind reasserts its control and begins doubting and discrediting what you’ve experienced or, just as problematic, claiming the realization as its own.

Ordinary, everyday awakening involves a change
of state from dreaming to waking. But spiritual
awakening seems to be different, since the
awakened person doesn’t move from one reality to
another. Could you say more about that?

The metaphor of awakening can definitely be misleading. In spiritual awakening, you wake up out of the dream of separation into the ongoing realization that there’s no separate self running the show, just this seamless, indivisible reality living itself. The awakened person doesn’t lose touch with ordinary reality the way the person who wakes up in the morning loses touch with the dream. Indeed, awakened people seem to function more effectively in everyday life because they act in harmony with what is, rather than in conflict or resistance. At the same time, they see the empty, dreamlike nature of reality—you could say that they awaken out of the illusion of substantiality into the reality of the empty, ungraspable nature of what is. The awakened person is “in the world but not of it”—or as Walt Whitman put it, “in and out of the game.”