Inner Work

For the week of: October 6, 2003

The Cost of Awakening

Those who recognize the necessity of pursuing spiritual practices such as presence and mindfulness, throughout the day, every day, and who make a serious effort at it, realize how difficult it is to achieve even a small degree of awakening from the continuing thrall of associative thoughts, emotional reactions, and sensory seductions. In the face of this, we all too readily give up or lapse into half-hearted efforts. We think that we cannot awaken. We believe that the ordinary demands of living preclude and overwhelm our chances to be relatively awake, in the spiritual sense, for a substantial portion of our typical day.

Yet this is our life, each precious day of it. Are we condemned to live lost in our inner fog of automatically flowing thoughts and reactions? It would seem to be so.

But if we look again we may see our assumptions and beliefs that this automated, half-lived life is the best we can hope for. It is not. We can live fully present to this moment, and this moment, and this moment. Only we must be willing to pay the price. Unlike the air we breathe, awakening is not free.

Some spiritual teachers say we are all already awake: we only need to realize it. But if you look honestly at your own experience, you cannot escape the fact that such teachings mislead, that you live on the automatic level, hardly in contact with the real world, rarely in substantial presence. We all do have another level within us, a depth in which we could live consciously. However, the intervening layers of fog rarely part, and then only briefly.

But we can cut through and awaken, if we truly decide to do so. It is really that simple and that hard. Given some knowledge of how to work at presence, all it takes is a real and constantly renewed decision to practice. That is the price of awakening. We give up all our notions that we cannot be present, that there are too many distractions and demands, that we have too little energy. We give up our attachment to the flow of associative thoughts and emotional reactions that we falsely take to be who we are. We give up the comforts of being half-alive, not responsible to anything greater than ourselves or perhaps our families. We pay the price by letting go of all the inner baggage that keeps us asleep. And we decide to awaken, to stay in contact with the present, to abide in conscious presence, in every situation.

Do you really want to awaken? If so, what's stopping you? Your inner world is your domain. You can awaken, if you genuinely decide to do so.

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