It is said that each of us is offered an endless number of opportunities to “awaken.” That life is filled with these mini-alarm clocks, each tolling at different times and frequencies and each affording us an opportunity to stop, if only for a moment, and reconsider everything we believe to be true about ourselves and the world around us. If we ignore them long enough bigger alarms sound until, at long last, we no longer can ignore the jarring intrusion into our “reality.” Unfortunately, for too many of us that final alarm is death itself and by then it usually is too late – at least in this lifetime.
For me the Big Alarm came on March 31, 2006, when girlfriend and job alike bid me adieu. The truth is those events in themselves weren’t sufficient to dispatch me to a new path – they could just as easily have been a cancer diagnosis, bankruptcy, the death of a parent or child. They were simply the final holes in the delusional fabric I called “me.” Once that critical mass was reached, once those final alarms sounded, the whole tattered wreck collapsed under its own toxic weight.
The mistake I have since made and only very recently recognized, is that the alarm doesn’t stop ringing simply because we at last recognize it for what it is. To continue the metaphor, it’s very easy to say, “Oh, it’s time to wake up,” and then pat oneself on the back, slap the snooze button and disappear right back into the same egoic mess that put us to sleep in the first place. How many of us have had that “aha!” moment, made some kind of universal declaration along the lines of, “Now I get it!” and then within days or weeks lapsed right back into the same patterns of thought or behavior?
With any good personal crash comes humility, a deep-seated recognition that acknowledges, “I don’t have a clue who I am or what I’ve been doing all these years.” Out goes the strong sense of self built from years of conditioned thinking (“I am Doug Rekenthaler Jr., hear me roar!”) in comes a humbled plea for help (“Dear God, it’s me, can you spare a few minutes?”).
But being humble and humility are two entirely different things. Being humble implies the ego grabbing hold of it and saying, “See how humble I am. Boy am I a spiritual cat now.” True humility, conversely, is akin to true surrender, a daily commitment to let go of all my conditioned beliefs about “me.” It is a recognition that awakening to the fact we’ve been asleep does not, in itself, mean the alarm has been silenced. Instead it says, “Hey, glad you finally opened your eyes, now let’s get to work stripping away 40-something years’ worth of misinformation about who you think you are. Stay humble big fella, stay alert, because it may take some time and vigilance is key.”
All of this may sound confusing, but in a nutshell it stems from a recent, painful acknowledgement that recognizing one’s unconscious living, while an incredibly important first step, is only that: one step in a long journey back to Self. The minute the ego grabs hold of something, spiritually-based or otherwise, “you’re” in trouble because, well, “you’re” once again involved.
To myself I must each and every day renew my pledge to surrender, to acknowledge that “I” don’t have a clue what is right for this journey. So perhaps that bedside alarm has more of a use than I’d previous imagined?
In listening the Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” in my car yesterday I was pondering the same thought about self image and how long it has taken to remove those bricks to see inside myself a little better. Now that I am tearing down my own wall, I also wonder what brick and mortar have been tossed at my own progeny?
Steve
Amen to that. Why it’s called “sins of the fathers,” handing down our baggage to our children.