If we’re fortunate during this thing we call life, something nudges us enough to suggest we’re asleep. Not asleep in the way we’re accustomed to thinking about it, but asleep in the sense that we’re moving through this life utterly oblivious to what is really going on.
Usually the source of this nudge is suffering, otherwise known as a rejection of what is. Our sleep is sufficiently disturbed – by disease, accident, or plain old misery – that we’re at least temporarily jarred into questioning what is.
If our good fortune continues, the suffering is sufficiently momentous or unrelenting to prevent us from falling back asleep. The old antidotes of the ego – money or fame, drugs or sex, or just everyday life – are no longer sufficient to lull us back to sleep. From that point on we remain steadfastly glued to the so-called ‘spiritual path,’ which is really just a flowery way of describing a search for the Truth of our being.
Looked at through a conventional lens, my life has involved great gobs of torment and suffering. In the past when I shared even just snippets of my life story, the reaction was usually one of ‘Wow, how terrible.’ This isn’t to say others haven’t had it worse. But you don’t begin contemplating suicide at 13 and revisit the idea all the way through your 40s without a steady diet of misery.
Today? I am so very grateful for all of it. Even my late-father, who was perhaps my greatest tormenter, while not missed, has been pardoned. The gifts he unwittingly bestowed on me are far too numerous to list here, but suffice it to say when I think of him now there are only warm and compassionate thoughts.
Look around you at today’s world. So much judgment and condemnation, so much self-righteousness and ego. And all of it emanating from a species so profoundly, staggeringly blind.
Which perhaps is why it’s so often been said that the first genuine step on the spiritual path requires a confession of one’s own ignorance. Ignorance of what? Everything.
The deeper you tread on the spiritual path, the more obvious all of this becomes, the more the long sleep is removed from your eyes and you start to see clearly. You cannot help but marvel at the endless sources of human agitation and the corresponding impulses to make the world a better place, right all the wrongs, and otherwise improve things. Yet nothing ever actually changes.
Why? Because we keep trying to change the world around us, the world outside of us, the world we mistakenly imagine is doing things to us.
Where is the answer? Time to wake up and find out.
