What Does it Mean to Wake Up?

Awakening is not changing who you are but discarding who you are not.
Deepak Chopra

What Does it Mean to Wake up?

Many people shy away from the term "awakening".  They feel uncomfortable with the notion of "enlightenment" assuming  it is going to require  them giving up all worldly possessions, changing who they are  and spending months meditating in an orange robe on some Himalayan mountain top.  They fear the terms "consciousness" and "spiritual awareness" and attribute them to New Age woo-woo nonsense that is a blasphemous insult to their religion and established philosophies. 

I spent years fearing and avoiding my own awakening for these reasons.

Is it right to back away?  What does it really mean to "wake-up"?

Deepak Chopra's words above say it best. There is no change required in us if we chose to wake up.    In fact,  when we begin waking up we realize who we really are can not be changed.

We come to know who we really are.  That is what the process is basically all about.  We realize we are not human beings seeking the odd spiritual experience...but spiritual beings wanting to come through our human image.

Still too woo-woo for you?

Awakening is simply discarding all the things you are not...that keep you distracted, diverted, numb and asleep.  When we detach from our obsessive thinking and doing tendency, when we realize the impact of ego in our lives, when we see that these bodies are just vehicles that carry us toward our purpose...we have no problem discarding them when the time comes.  We learn that they are valuable tools when we use them correctly...chains and weights that hold us down with the potential to destroy when we don't use them in the  way they are intended to be used.

Say what, crazy lady?

It is like waking up from a dream and seeing the world in daylight...clearly.   As you wake up you look back at the nighttime hours and all the stuff that occurred in your sleep, regardless if it was positive or negative...and say, "Oh it wasn't real.  It was just a dream. It was just in my mind."  You can get up and walk away from it because it wasn't real.

Most of the lives we have been living prior to waking up were just in our minds.

When we are dreaming, however, it all seems so very real. Like lucid dreamers walking around the planet we control our dream states to some extent.  We selectively choose what we want in those dreams and shut out the rest. 

Who wants to dream about the  effects of global warming on our oceans?  Who wants to see the violence that is going on all around us for the soul purpose of protecting ego?  Who wants to feel the suffering of other beings on our planet who are starving ( when they don't have to be), sick, or sad?  Who wants to think that our dreaming is destroying the planet and everything in it...including us?  As long as we are dreaming we can shut these realities out and focus only on our own immediate needs.

Waking up is challenging yes...because we have to see and feel the consequence of our sleeping in. We have to see that it just didn't make us late for work but that everything...everything around us is effected by it for we are all just one big extension of  the Source of all life.

Man!  You mean it isn't all about me?

When we wake up, we see the effects of ego and how far it has led us all astray.  We see how it affected our own puny little life but more importantly how it impacted the world.  We look back, then,  to a memory of who we really are and were before the ego took over.  We head back in that direction.  

We seek to get beyond the dream state to the truth.  It is from that place and that place only that our nightmares and false fantasies turn into Truth.  It is from that place of realization that we find the desire to heal and  make it all good again.  We open our eyes to a beautiful world that needs some healing...to a beautiful humanity that needs some healing and to a beautiful self that needs some healing.  We heal.

In a nutshell

Waking up is simply a willingness to put aside the dream of what we are  for the  truth of who we are.  It is a willingness to put aside the ego for the soul...to put aside violence, destruction and neglect for a desire to heal...and to put aside the  nightmare shadows we are all running from in fear, for love and compassion, the two qualities of humanity that have the power to save us all. 

Awakening involves no change in us...just a letting go of all that doesn't serve the greater purpose.

Wouldn't the  world be a better place if we all just woke up?

All is well in my world!