Just What Do You Mean by ‘Awakening’?
We seem to be all over the shop on this, but I see two main themes…
First, let me say that I’m not talking about debates on the subject from traditional sources. Buddhists, for example, have all kinds of ideas about awakening: sudden or gradual, complete or partial, and so on. Those are big topics, and I’m not going to tackle them here, because I’m not qualified. What I am going to talk about is awakening as we talk about it in contemporary Western spiritual culture — like writers here on Medium and an endless number of YouTubers.
Freedom From…
I notice that a lot of us talk about waking up as seeing past cultural conditioning: freeing oneself from The Matrix. This is an important step in the awakening process, and is particularly easily available via psychedelics, although meditation, spontaneous experiences, and other means also work just fine. It’s even possible to achieve it through rational thinking.
The basic insight here is that the world works nothing like we say it does. For those of us in contemporary Western culture, this often entails recognizing the devastating effects of consumerism, materialism, and the mistaken belief that everything is ultimately dead matter rather than living spirit. With a little insight, the entire value system of our culture looks pretty rancid, and the basic assumptions of science and materialism — in politics, medicine, finance, business, education, and everything else — are brought into question. Those folks who are ‘playing the game’ fail to see what’s going on, and are asleep, in comparison to those who are awake.
There’s a strong parallel with Gnosticism in this type of awakening. Gnosis means ‘to know’, and the implication is knowledge beyond the merely rational. A basic Gnostic belief was that the universe we inhabit is not the work of the ‘real’ God, but a demiurge, a lower order of god, who pulled off a lesser Creation that we’re stuck in. The task we face is to free ourselves from this gimcrack version of reality, and the real God is trying to help us.
A creator god, demiurge or otherwise, is unlikely to be a popular concept among today’s awakened folk, and that creates a vacuum that is filled in various ways. We frequently hear about some vague ‘they’ that is running things, as in “They are building up the stock market so they can crash it,” “They have a cure for cancer, but won’t share it,” and so on. Other candidates to fill the shoes of the creator god include the rich and powerful (every time ‘they’ have a closed door meeting, conspiracies flourish), the Illuminati (and such), and aliens.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that there are many people who are trying to run the world, and they often do so in the background. Conspiracies do take place, and powerful people who manipulate the world do exist. But ultimately they themselves are just as caught in the net as anyone else, and as for running the world… I don’t give anyone that much credit.
The main point is that this type of awakening focuses on the reality external to us. It’s a major breakthrough that takes us away from the conditioning of our family, society, and the media, and opens us up to new possibilities for living more freely and authentically. But it doesn’t address the ultimate source of Maya.
Who’s Really Running the Show?
Spiritual traditions, especially Buddhism and Vedanta, don’t deny the role of cultural conditioning, but they ask us to go a little further in our understanding of how we get caught in Maya. Ultimately, it isn’t some ‘other’ that’s responsible, but ourselves. It’s our own attachments, aversions, and ignorance that brings us into the illusion. That big net of cultural values and assumptions is the cooperative work of all of us, a collective version of our individual needs, wants, and fears. It is the ‘collective ego’, generated by our individual egos.
Getting free of cultural conditioning, waking up to the bill of goods we’ve been sold, is one thing. Getting free of our own ego attachments, and waking up to our true selves, is another. It is holding onto our notion of a separate self, and then defending that self from all onslaughts — external and internal — that is the source of the problem for each of us.
Recognizing the problems with culture, society, and the external world is relatively easy (although not without some discomfort), but the problem is with them. On the other hand, our attachment to our sense of self — the real culprit — is very difficult to give up. You probably don’t even want to give it up, and you very likely doubt that it’s a good idea in the first place to give it up (I certainly have mixed feelings about it). And to whatever extent you do want to give it up, you probably can’t.
The result of this difficulty is that a lot of awakened people — awakened from the collective myth — work diligently to bolster their egos, sometimes falling into a kind of ‘zen materialism’, sometimes falling into the mindset of conspirituality, or taking other unhelpful paths. There’s too much emphasis on what’s wrong with the world, and too much concern over what ‘they’ are doing.
It’s far better to examine one’s own fears, attachments, and ignorance. Compassion, in thought and action, is a great place to begin, because it softens one’s attitude towards other beings, who we realize are caught in the web of Maya — just like us.