Wake Up Now (19 page)

But how do I let go? As you say, the ego is
programmed to hold on for dear life.

You’re right, of course. The illusory, separate self can’t “do” letting go. But if you can be aware of the holding on, without resistance or judgment, the grip of ego will spontaneously loosen. Then, if you’re so inclined, you can ask, “Who is aware?” (or if you’ve already awakened, simply remember who you are), and letting go will naturally happen.

For nondual purists who believe there’s no one there to do anything, none of this makes any sense. But as long as you take yourself to be a chooser, choose to be aware and let go. When you know there’s no chooser, letting go is unnecessary because it has already occurred.

Wake-Up Call

Who Do You Take Yourself to Be?

Set aside fifteen to twenty minutes for this exploration. Sit comfortably for a few minutes with your eyes closed. Now begin asking yourself the question, “Who do I take myself to be?” Make a list of all the identities, qualities, abilities, images, memories, roles, and accomplishments you take to be you. Don’t hold anything back in an attempt to be spiritual. Just keep asking the question, and write down what you come up with. “I’m a great lover, a skilled conversationalist, an accomplished musician, a loving father, a devoted daughter, a renowned author, a successful attorney,” and so forth. Be sure to include any spiritual identities you’ve accumulated over the years, such as “I’m a Buddhist, a Christian, an enlightened person, a longtime Zen student, a shaman, a psychic, a disciple of my guru, a being of light.” Spend at
least five minutes on this part of the exercise. (If you compile the list on your computer, print it out when you’re done.)

Now pick up your list, tear it to shreds, and throw it into the wastebasket. You’ve wiped the slate clean, eliminated all the extras, returned to bare bones. Now ask yourself, “Who am I without these identities? What is my original face before the ego was born? Who am I really?”

If you get more conceptual answers, continue to set them aside as you inquire. The ego is endlessly adept at coming up with more identities. Just see them for what they are and ask, “Who am I really?”

When I cease to own [physical or emotional pain], I liberate myself from its bondage and see it simply as it is.

—Tony Parsons

Many seekers think of spiritual awakening as an instantaneous transformation that emerges fully formed and never develops or deepens. After all, didn’t Prince Siddhartha sit down under a tree and walk away eight days later as the Buddha, the fully enlightened one? Didn’t the sixteen-year-old student Venkataraman pretend to be dead and stand up half an hour later as the great sage Ramana Maharshi, completely merged with the Self? Even those who practice for years to attain enlightenment expect it to occur once and for all and ever after, like the happy ending in a fairy tale. The traditional stories tend to support this view: the monk who woke up when he heard a pebble strike bamboo; the master whose body and mind “dropped away” when his teacher hit him with a shoe; the miserable grad student who went to sleep with a question on his lips and awakened the next morning without the slightest vestige of a self.

Radical and complete enlightenment experiences do occur, of course, as the traditional stories attest. In these rare cases, which often make history precisely because they’re so extraordinary, the light of truth drives out every last remnant of darkness and leaves the emergent sage completely transformed, with no trace of the old habits and patterns of mind that might lead to suffering and reactive, unconscious behavior.

More often, however, the initial awakening is more subtle and tentative—like a flickering candle that barely dispels the darkness rather than a bright midday sun, or a glowing coal in the fireplace rather than a raging inferno that burns down the house. Once the light is lit, you’re no longer stumbling along in the dark—you see who you are once and for all, and the recognition is immediate, unmistakable, and irreversible. But, as I explained in
Chapter 7
, you may keep forgetting who you are, and the light of this self-recognition may not be powerful or clear enough to penetrate to every area of your life and illuminate the difficult, stuck places of work, family, relationships, or challenging emotions and habitual reactive patterns. Despite your dedication and commitment to awakening, you may find that you’re still not living as the radiant mystery to which you awakened.

Many of my clients and students have described returning home from a particularly powerful retreat in which they experienced a clear recognition of their essential spiritual nature, only to immediately fly into a rage with their spouse or children or contract into a ball of fear about some insignificant concern. Needless to say, such sudden, uncontrollable
outbursts can leave you wondering whether your awakening is authentic—or even questioning the value of awakening altogether.

The reality is that awakening generally occurs instantaneously, but the process of transformation that awakening initiates is often quite gradual and may take a lifetime. Once you know who you are, the question is, how can you live this understanding in every moment of your life? How can you embody the joy, freedom, love, and silent presence you know yourself to be, not just on retreat or on your meditation cushion, but in everything you do? Yet most spiritual traditions barely acknowledge this embodiment process and offer little, if any, guidance for participating in and supporting it as it unfolds.

When I describe spiritual embodiment, I usually find myself drawn to the metaphors of fire and light. Just as the function of fire is to burn and the function of light is to drive out the darkness, the natural movement of truth is to illuminate and consume all the distortions, lies, self-deceptions, and self-defeating stories that have mired you in a lifetime of suffering and confusion.

When you awaken to the limitless radiance of your essential being, you uncover a fire and a light that, once revealed, have their own powerful momentum and agenda, and you may find that hiding out in your habitual patterns of reactivity, struggle, and unconsciousness becomes increasingly difficult. Wherever you’re attached, fixated, or
addicted to control, the truth of your being, which is freedom, naturally moves to pry your fingers loose. Wherever you “numb out” or go blind, the truth, which is lucid wakefulness, whispers (or shouts) in your ear in an attempt to wake you up again. Wherever you’re still deceiving yourself—living out old conditioning or failing to act in accord with the deepest truth of your being—the truth, which is radical honesty at every level, pushes and prods you to pay attention, own up, and let life live through you.

Breathe and Reflect

Stop for a few moments and notice what you’re feeling right now. Instead of affixing labels to the experience, just let it unfold in your awareness without resistance or indulgence. Drop the story and the commentary, and allow the experience to be just as it is.

Once awakened, the fire of truth can be profoundly disturbing and unsettling as it naturally moves to embody itself through your words and actions. Let’s make no mistake: Truth is a relentless power that ultimately seeks to transform your body and mind into a fluid expression of the unsurpassable peace, love, radiance, and joy that you essentially are. Sometimes this power is experienced as a ruthless energy that won’t allow you to settle into familiar grooves and patterns that no longer serve your awakening. At other times, it is experienced as a warm, boundless, uncompromising compassion that naturally moves to embrace and heal all the contracted, unredeemed parts of yourself and enfold them in the light and love of your essential nature.

In the light of awakening, many people find that their old identities and their accumulated beliefs about themselves and others no longer hold any meaning and gradually drop off like ripe fruit from a tree. Like the student I described in
Chapter 7
, you may find that the job you took because you believed it would provide status and financial security for the fictitious little me now seems pointless, given the realization that the separate self you imagined yourself to be doesn’t really exist. Or you may find that the relationship you began solely on the basis of shared personal history and future objectives now seems empty and unfulfilling, now that the objectives have lost their grip and the personal history no longer applies. Or you may find that old, unresolved emotions such as resentment or grief start bubbling to the surface to be faced and released. Many of my students complain that awakening turned their comfortable little world upside down, and no matter how hard they try, they can’t go back to their old way of being.

When the truth of your being is fully embodying itself from moment to moment, you’re no longer struggling to maintain control of your life. Instead, you’re surrendering to the current, at one with the flow, and life is living itself without effort or conflict. Rather than trying to impose your agenda on life, you’re relaxed, open, spacious, awake, and attuned to the way the whole of life wants to express itself through you. You welcome what is just the way it is, because everything is experienced as inseparable from you, and you find profound
contentment in the realization that this timeless moment is perfect and complete exactly as it is. This is it! In short, you’re fully living the truth of the oneness and completeness to which you’ve awakened, rather than compartmentalizing truth and limiting it to certain parts of your life.

Ultimately, the process of embodiment demands that you live with integrity in the true sense—that is, in alignment with the deepest truth of your being. Interestingly enough, the word
integrity
itself comes from the Latin root for “oneness” or “wholeness” and refers not to following certain predetermined rules but rather to acting from the realization that life is complete and undivided. When you live in harmony and attunement with the movement of the whole, responding to situations with the knowing that everything both “inside” and “outside” you is just an expression of who you really are, you’re living in integrity, whatever the rules may say. But if you act as if you’re a self-interested fraction of the whole, at odds with other fractions, you’re out of integrity, no matter how hard you try to follow the rules, and you inevitably cause suffering for yourself and others.

When you’re out of integrity, life has a habit of sending you situations that give you an opportunity to come back into alignment with truth. For example, if you revel in the joy and peace of your true self when you walk in nature or talk with friends but find yourself withdrawing in fear when you’re faced with difficult financial issues or tensing up with anger when someone threatens your power at work, truth, in its spontaneous movement to embody, will keep sending
you the same kinds of challenging situations to invite you to let go of control and live by your deepest realization. Financial issues may keep disturbing you until you relax your survival fears and remember that your true nature can never be destroyed. Or coworkers may continue confronting you until you see them not as your adversaries, but as expressions of the essential self you share.

When I first studied the sixteen ethical precepts of Zen, my teacher at the time kept emphasizing that these rules of conduct, such as “don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie,” weren’t arbitrary external standards that we should impose on our lives. Rather, he taught, they’re descriptions of how a fully enlightened person naturally acts. Don’t focus on following traditional guidelines. After all, circumstances are constantly changing like flowing water and can’t be pinned down or defined. Instead, wake up, and the clarity of your realization will show you how to act with integrity, in accord with the precepts.

Essentially, my teacher was right, but he conveniently overlooked the often prolonged and challenging process of living and embodying this clarity. Whereas the truth naturally moves toward integrity, the ego—which sees you as an isolated, separate self at risk in a world of other separate selves—doesn’t care about acting with integrity, though it may pretend to if that serves its purposes. Rather, it’s committed to maintaining control at all costs. In fact, as I
mentioned in the last chapter, control is the ego’s reason for being, its job description, and it does its job well. Awakening and embodiment seem to threaten the ego’s existence because they lead to letting go and moving in harmony with the flow, which is precisely what the ego is programmed to resist.

According to Western psychology, the ego emerges in early childhood as a way of mediating between inner experience and the outer environment and becomes solidified as the growing child is challenged to hold on to some semblance of security and control in uncertain, chaotic, or life-threatening situations. Even if your childhood was relatively happy and loving, you still encountered circumstances that taught you that you’re separate and need to protect, defend, or promote yourself in some way. By the time you’re an adult, you’re attempting to exert control over some aspect of your life in virtually every waking moment.

Pay attention, and you’ll notice how often you resist what is and try to get things to be different from the way they are. With friends or family, you may monitor your words and actions to make sure you elicit the love and approval you crave. In intimate relationships, you may avoid telling the truth or asking for what you want because you’re afraid of causing conflict. Behind the wheel of your car, you may honk, speed, and complain about the traffic and the other drivers as you rush to work. Moving through your day, you may control the environment constantly to maintain the most comfortable state of body and mind. Spiritual egos
aren’t immune to this addiction to control. Indeed, they may be the most flagrant addicts of all, as spiritual people seem committed to achieving and sustaining experiences of love, tranquillity, and bliss and avoiding “negative” emotions like anger or fear.