Wake Up Now (18 page)

Rather than allowing awakening to unfold and continue to illuminate the emptiness of self, the ego obscures the light of truth by claiming awakening as its own possession and creating the fiction of an awakened separate self, which is a contradiction in terms. The proliferation of spiritual teachers claiming to be enlightened attests to the widespread popularity of this tactic, which is known as “ego inflation,” or “spiritual drunkenness.” As I mentioned earlier, no one ever becomes enlightened, and awakening can’t be owned in any way because it’s not an object or a mind-state but the unseen subject of all objects, the mysterious and ungraspable background of all experience, the light that illuminates all phenomena. Attempt to grasp it, and it slips through your fingers. Let go of it, and it fills your hand.

Even the ultimate pronouncement “I am That” (where That refers to ultimate reality), which recurs in the Upanishads and other great spiritual texts, doesn’t mean that the separate self has in any way encompassed the absolute. It simply means that the separate self is not, and only the absolute exists. In complete self-realization, any sense of identity, even with ultimate reality, dissolves in the ocean of the Self.

Yet the mind may grab hold of a particular mind-state, such as bliss or love. “How blissful or peaceful I am,” the ego proudly declares to itself (and possibly to others as well). “It’s a mark of my spiritual attainment.” But such fabricated emotions have nothing to do with awakening and naturally
arise and pass if you allow them. Awakening is the impersonal nonstate that remains unchanged while all states come and go.

“Now I have it, now I don’t,” thinks the mind, as it chases the awakening it believes it once possessed but now has somehow misplaced. Because awakening can’t be owned, it also can’t be lost. But the mind mistakes a particular experience for enlightenment and keeps attempting to re-create it. “Once I felt so open, so spacious, so loving, so empty, and now I don’t,” says the mind. “Maybe this means I’m not awakened anymore, and I’d better do everything I can to regain it.”

For this reason, the word
awakening
can be misleading; it seems to refer to an event in space and time, whereas it’s actually the instantaneous awareness of the timeless and boundaryless dimension of being. Even though the energetic phenomena that accompany this awareness—the rush of bliss, the upsurge of love, the profound peace—can be extremely appealing, the point is not to focus on the passing states but to open to the awakeness, the timeless presence, that’s been revealed as your very own self. Just as you don’t keep trying to re-create your wedding once you’re married, but instead enjoy your partner and the life you now share, you don’t keep trying to re-create awakening, but relax and allow awakeness to express itself through you.

Adyashanti has observed that spiritual people tend to be more afraid of living than they are of dying, and some respond to the powerful transformational process that awakening precipitates by retreating from active participation in the world to the detached position of the disengaged witness. Also known as the “Zen sickness” or “spiritual bypassing,” this tactic turns awakening from a living, breathing reality into a fixed position or point of view and prevents it from unfolding, deepening, and embodying in an ordinary, everyday way.

Claiming that there’s no doer, for example, you may decline to do anything and spend your days in stubborn and determined inaction. In social situations, you may remain on the periphery, detached and undisturbed but also unresponsive and inflexible, with a smug, knowing half-smile on your face. In relationships, you may participate to the degree that suits you but pull back into a forced equanimity and insist you don’t have any feelings or needs when difficulties arise. “Who, me? I never get angry or upset. After all, I don’t really exist.” In this way, the ego uses awakening as a pretext for remaining in control by withdrawing from a world that seems demanding, frightening, overwhelming, or chaotic. If you can’t control the board, you simply refuse to play the game. (For more on spiritual bypassing, see
Chapter 9
.)

When you first awaken to the emptiness at the heart of existence, you tend to experience it as vast, radiant, silent,
and infused with love. But as the fullness and richness of the experience fades, the ego may turn it into an intimidating absence of meaning and identity, a groundless abyss through which it’s terrified of falling endlessly and without support. People who were inadequately nurtured and held as infants may project onto this emptiness the desolation and isolation they endured when they were young and helpless, and those who were abused may view emptiness as potentially invasive and engulfing. In essence, the ego is once again frightened of dying and losing control, even though at another level it longs for its own dissolution in the vast ocean of being. (Otherwise, why would you pursue awakening in the first place?)

My friend Suzanne Segal (whose awakening story appeared in
Chapter 6
) had a profound dropping away of the separate sense of self, which was followed by years of terror in the face of the absence she encountered whenever she attempted to locate herself. Finally, she met Jean Klein, who told her to simply give up this habit of trying to locate a self inside. When she followed his instructions, the emptiness of no-self gradually flowered in the fullness of the realization that everything was her very own Self.

In other words, you need to stop peering into the void from the detached perspective of the mind and instead allow the mind to dissolve into the void and peer out at the world
as
the void encountering itself. Emptiness is what you are; it’s not an object of your perception. This shift inevitably releases the fear and brings deep peace and relaxation of being.

After the initial awakening to the emptiness of self, life may suddenly lose its appeal and seem dry, flat, and lifeless. “What’s the point?” you may wonder. “It’s all empty anyway.” You may find yourself disillusioned and dissatisfied, especially if you once harbored high expectations for a life of unending bliss and delight. Suzanne Segal, who spent years in this limbo of boredom and resignation, called it the “wintertime” of the experience. Here again, the mind reifies emptiness and determines that it’s empty of meaning. The only antidote is to stop conceptualizing the void and keep dying into it as a vital reality until it blossoms as the source and essence of everything. (Needless to say, the void doesn’t blossom; it already is the source and essence. What blossoms is your realization.)

Breathe and Reflect

If you’ve had a glimpse of your true nature, consider the methods your mind has used to obscure the truth from you in order to lull you back into a half-sleep.

The most powerful approach to the mind’s strategies is to recognize them for what they are—sophisticated attempts to slow down or derail the awakening process in service of the ego’s need for control. They immediately loosen their grip just a little. Then ask yourself who is recognizing, and you’ll find yourself free of fixation once again, resting as pure awareness itself. The more you abide as awareness—not in
a dry and detached way, but energetically, with your whole being—the more these tactics will lose their hold over you, and the more your newfound identity will become deeper, more stable, and more consistent.

Once you know who you are, you’ve ignited what Adyashanti calls the “fire of truth,” which may begin as a glowing ember and end up as a raging conflagration that burns away every falsehood in its path. Truth seems to have a natural longing or determination to awaken fully to itself through us, and once you’ve let the genie out of the bottle, there’s no use trying to stuff it back in. Your cherished beliefs, values, and assumptions are no longer safe and may be burned to ashes before your very eyes. As I noted in
Chapter 2
, the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche liked to warn his students to consider carefully before they embarked on the spiritual path, because once they had begun, there would be no turning back, and their lives would be gradually overtaken by the power of Dharma, or truth.

If you play the awakening game with the intention of gaining something for yourself, you may be startled and dismayed to discover that you’re actually required to give up more than you could possibly imagine: accomplishments; comforts; identities; possessions; in short, everything you hold dear and then some. The truth demands nothing less than truth, and the journey of transformation that follows
awakening involves gradually embodying and actualizing the truth you’ve realized in every area of your life.

I’m still not clear what happens to the so-called ego
when we awaken. How can it continue when we’ve
completely disidentified from it? Maybe it still has
some important purpose or role to play.

In the nondual traditions, the term
ego
is used to refer to the glue of identification, attachment, and addiction to control that binds the various thoughts and feelings into the illusion of a separate self. When you awaken, you see through this illusion, and the glue begins to loosen its grip—though it may take a long time to let go completely. Western psychology uses
ego
somewhat differently, to refer to an essential inner function that mediates between one’s instinctual drives and desires and the outside world. (In common parlance, the word
ego
is used in a variety of different ways.) When you awaken, the function of ego as Freud and his successors described it continues—you couldn’t live in the world without it. At the practical, everyday level, there certainly is an inside and an outside, a mine and a yours, and the ego negotiates these distinctions quite skillfully. After awakening, however, you know that you’re not the ego in any of its guises, and it no longer has control of your life.

In my years of seeking, I’ve lost interest in the
accomplishments and possessions that seem to
preoccupy most people, but I can’t claim that I’ve
really awakened to who I am. I find myself saying,
“Is this all there is? There must be something more.”

You seem to be experiencing what Saint John of the Cross called the “dark night of the soul,” in which you’ve lost the comfort of your familiar worldview and your accustomed sense of self but haven’t fully realized who you are. The dark night is often likened to crossing a dry and desolate expanse with no relief in sight, and the tendency is to fall into depression or despair or to question the validity of the teachings.

In my experience, this period is often intensified and prolonged by the mind’s expectations about how awakening is supposed to look. You’re constantly trying to figure reality out, rather than letting go and being present for what is. In the simple, direct experience of what is, you have an ongoing opportunity to awaken out of the trance the mind perpetuates—“This isn’t it. I haven’t awakened yet. There must be something more.”—to the radiant fullness and completeness of being. Just keep letting go and surrendering to what is.