Awakening

1.

The Eternal Promise

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As a child, I grew up in a family that was ecumenical to a fault. At one extreme was my religious mother, who went to temple in New Delhi every morning for her devotions. At the other extreme was my father, a Western-­trained doctor who went to his cardiology practice every morning and whose only religion was science. For some reason, this contradiction didn’t confuse me. Our house was open to people of all faiths, of which India has more than any other country. Some people came to sing hymns to the music of a harmonium in the living room; others gathered outside for a free medical consultation—­my father turned no one away for being poor.

Such openness of heart made an indelible impression on me. I didn’t realize, as I matured and followed in my father’s footsteps, that my mother stood for something I now know as the eternal promise. It is the promise of full awakening to who we really are. And who are we? We are the expression of pure, infinite, unbounded awareness. To a religious person like my mother, awakening reveals the divine presence in everything. A rationalist like my father might have accepted what the physicist Freeman Dyson once wrote: “God is what mind becomes when it passes the threshold of our comprehension.”

Without awakening, no one can reach the full potential of being human. In fact, it becomes impossible to know why we are here in the first place. Only as expressions of unbounded awareness do we find a timeless footing and a place in the cosmos.

The eternal promise is open to everyone without their conscious awareness. If the promise could speak, we’d hear a voice in our heads whispering, “Don’t you want to wake up?” But the voice is silent. Hardly anyone, just the smallest sliver of humanity, gets the message. Therefore, the eternal promise goes unfulfilled.

If we don’t hear the message, how do we even know that awakening exists? There are clues, beginning with the words of those who have awakened.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.” (William Blake)

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” (Rumi)

“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.” (Hafiz)

Blake, Rumi, and Hafiz are often described as mystical poets, but they are more accurately called awakened poets. Their words reflect the profound truths that awareness revealed to them. Awakening is not merely a poetic or mystical concept; it has real, tangible effects on a person’s life. Those who wake up often describe a profound sense of well-­being that touches every aspect of life—­mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. This deep connection between awareness and well-­being has been observed for centuries, but today we can actually measure it. Later in this book, we’ll explore a framework for assessing this transformation, helping you understand where you are on the path to awakening.

When people first encounter the idea of awakening, they often find it mystifying. And being mystified keeps them from diving any deeper. Yet the process of waking up is natural, and the path is not difficult. In fact, a small percentage of people awaken spontaneously. Looking back, they can pinpoint the exact day it happened, though why they were chosen remains a mystery no one can explain.

A hidden choice

The opposite of waking up is being asleep, not physically but by living unconscious of your true nature, hidden behind everyday existence. To be awake is to break out of the limited state of awareness that each of us occupies.

Sheer inertia makes today feel much like yesterday. We are immersed in a reality where waking up isn’t a choice, practically speaking, because we fall back in every situation on a host of behaviors that screen “real” reality. Pause to consider how the following list applies to you, not with an attitude of self-­judgment but by taking an honest look in the mirror.

How Much Are You Influenced?

Routine: a pattern of familiar default activity during the day

Habit: automatic behavior that runs on its own inertia, even when you want to change

Old conditioning: secondhand responses you picked up during childhood from your family

Stubborn beliefs: ingrained opinions you accept without examining them

Groupthink: things you say and do to conform with society

Ego needs: the priorities you set that look out for number one

Desire: the force behind wanting, craving, envy, and jealousy

External demands and duties: the things you do for money or to satisfy other people

Personal fears and insecurity: the things that keep you up at night

The list could be much longer because even the most routine, ­boring, unfulfilled, and thwarted life is complex. It is impossible to get to the bottom of every cause and influence that shaped you. But we don’t have to dive into the murky subconscious or the dimly remembered past for answers. If you can identify with the experience of being hemmed in, frustrated, and limited, you are ready to wake up.

Here we encounter the divide between waking up and the rest of life, which is all about doing, thinking, feeling, talking, and the like. That dimension is rooted in the thinking mind. Awakening, by contrast, is rooted in awareness. This difference turns out to be the key because the two worlds of “in here” and “out there” aren’t separate but intimately linked. There is no such thing as an experience without awareness, which makes it more fundamental than thinking, feeling, and doing.

If you pay attention to your state of awareness, nothing else is needed to wake up. For all practical purposes, your self-­awareness is the inner space where waking up occurs. It helps to refer to those few people who wake up spontaneously. What they experience contains the following elements.

The Experiences of Awakened People

They have fewer thoughts, mostly those involving practical matters.

There is an absence of anxiety.

They feel present in the moment, not overshadowed by the past.

They face the unknown with openness and a lack of assumptions.

Their sense of “I” feels expanded.

They experience bliss in some form.

They don’t feel trapped inside the limitations of the physical body. they may experience a sense of physical lightness or expansiveness.

Their five senses are more alert.

Their existence feels free.

You are more ready than you think

Some people are more self-­aware than others—­psychologists consider this a mark of maturing into adulthood—­but everyone has a self and everyone is aware. The fact that you answer to your name is a sign of self-­awareness developed before you could walk. Awakening takes this essential human trait and carries it to its fullest extent. Since spontaneous awakening is so rare, for the rest of us there is a path. After decades of experience, I’ve come to the conclusion that the discipline of meditation over years and decades is beyond all but a few people. Meditation has a practical value for everyone, however, as a pure experience of silent awareness. The experience is simple but necessary. If you haven’t meditated before, here’s an exercise for contacting pure awareness.