I live in Ashland, OR, a town where the word ‘awakening’ can be heard in spiritual circles daily. Many spiritual concepts, like ‘awakening’ or ‘waking up’ are tossed around spiritual communities, like Ashland, so often that we may overlook what they really mean to us, or to the person we are speaking with.
As you may have noticed, I speak of ‘awakening’ or ‘waking from the dream of separation’ often. It’s one of my favorite subjects really. Living in a town with such a high concentration of spiritually focused people, it’s become quickly apparent that we do not always give the same meaning to the spiritual concepts we toss around. So, today I thought I’d share more about the meaning I give to the word ‘awakening’.
I relate ‘awakening’ to the great advice Jesus gave humanity to be “in the world but not of the world.” For me, waking up/awakening is both recognizing the untrue nature of the reality we perceive through our senses, and living in it fully, with complete presence, passion and power. When we awaken to our true identity and reality, that of absolute oneness that cannot even be put into words or bodies, we do not try to get rid of or run away from the experience of being in the earthly/physical dream reality of bodies, emotions, perception and separation. Indeed, to resist the experience of the physical, no matter how painful, slow or monotonous, would be to give it power, and to deny the truth of who we are.
Heaven does not resist hell; it simply knows the truth, and quickly laughs at untruth.
I often remind myself, friends and clients that ‘what you resist, persists.’ What you feed grows, what you give your attention to manifests. Awakening is about waking into life, not trying to get out of it in search of something better, more heavenly. Its about bringing heaven to earth, seeing it’s already here and always has been. Heaven, our true reality, is not somewhere out there that we have to escape or ascend to. It’s right here, inside of us, all around us. (For everything we see around us is inside us!). And we bring it into our experience by accepting what our experience is with great amusement and unconditional love, recognizing what is a reflection of the truth of heaven, and what is a projection of the thought of separation.
This is awakening: bringing the awareness of truth/what is real, into our experience every moment, and allowing that experience to be what it is. When you’re asleep at night, dreaming while your body lays there in bed, you see and experience all kinds of things–fun, scary, painful, happy, sad, confusing. But when you wake up in that dream, you’re aware that where you really are is safe in bed, untouched by anything your experiencing in the dream. And so, when you wake up in the dream, you know “hey, this is just a dream, so it’s no big deal if I fall of this building, or show up to school naked or meet a scary monster”. You don’t try to fight the dream or run away from it. For, in order to wake up from the dream, you have to bring the truth of who you are into that dream. Bring your bright, joyful, all-giving and forgiving Self into the insanity of your experience and show it what’s real: show it love.
Love is unconditional, infinite, ever-present and unchanging. Love is presence. Love is whole, complete, One.
Waking into life means bringing this Love, this presence, into your life, your every moment experience. This means surrendering to and allowing what is, rather than trying to change, fix, get rid of or solve it.
And, “when you want only love, you will see nothing else.” “Seek first the kingdom of heaven, and all these things will be added to you.” There is no need to put so much effort into manifesting all of the things we would like to have in our experience. We can choose to have all that is fulfilling in our lives simply by choosing God. When we seek first the “kingdom”, the truth of our Being, our true reality of oneness, all “these things”, the desires of our heart, our given us. The desires of our heart manifest in our experience as a natural result of our choosing God, choosing truth.
This is the journey of waking into life. Our experiences do not always match what we want or would choose to have in our life. It’s a journey of becoming aware, and choosing again. When “all of these things” do not seem to be showing up for us, it is apparent that there is a choice, somewhere in our (unconscious) mind, against God, against truth, against That Which IS. And so, we choose again, choose Love, choose God, seek first the kingdom, the oneness that we are. And let the experience be, forgive the experience, allow it, laugh at its absurdity and its beauty. Wake into the life we have always had, and somehow, in an instant, forgot.
And now we are remembering.
