How Do "You" Wake Up?
Thought experiment: How do you wake up in the morning? Maybe you set an alarm… but if you don’t set an alarm, how do you wake up?
It seems to me that the process of waking up from sleep is totally out of my conscious, willful control; it just happens. And yet, simultaneously, it is very much so “me” who does this.
Maybe “waking up” in the sense of enlightenment, spiritual realization, self-actualization, or whatever you’d like to call it, is like waking up in the morning. “You” have no control over it and cannot make it happen. Effort exerted to do this, to try to become enlightened or truly awakened, may actually block this process from occurring.
Each morning, after sleeping and dreaming through the night, we awaken and often step immediately into yet another dream world - that of our wandering mind, our internal narrative, our “story.” This constant running chatter, always focused on preparation for the future or remembrance of the past, can keep us from connecting with something more basic. What if we could connect with that basic part of ourselves that just wakes up without any conscious, willful effort? Maybe the opportunity to do so is most available right there, first thing in the morning, a gap of time before the persona (e.g., “Charles”) has taken over… a gap of time where you are just this process that organically and miraculously shifted from sleep to “turned on.”
I was having an interesting conversation this weekend with a friend who asked me, “What does meditation mean to you?” Prior to his question, he had said something about how miraculous it is that we are even alive and breathing in this world. After a moment of thinking, I reflected back that his statement was about as good a definition of what meditation means to me as I could think of: a way of connecting in a very direct way to that miraculousness of just being alive (sometimes I call this feeling “HolyShit!ness”).
Intellectually, it is easy to comprehend that the miracle of the present moment is all we ever really have, but it is quite a different thing to viscerally understand or experience this. We are blocked from this experience by the story in our heads that has been running on a loop since we first grasped language in childhood. This may be one of the great challenges we face as humans - to really notice and remember that we are, in fact, simple alive right now… and that this fact is AMAZING.
Maybe enlightenment means to simply “wake up” to this fact, again and again.
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes (from the Zen figure, Dogen) that I’m sure I’ve referenced here before, but it feels apropos:
