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Today's
Meditation:
Awakening.
It's a frightening concept, because few of us want to
admit that perhaps we're sleeping our way through life,
that we're not as awake and aware of our surroundings and
our life situations as we think we are. We seem to
be dreaming all the time, passive actors in life, letting
life happen around us instead of being active players who
are fully aware of all that's happening because we've
allowed ourselves to be lulled to sleep by the sheer
overwhelming nature of life itself.
I
like the idea of awakening including a realization of our
oneness with all things. Not just with those things
that are close to us physically, not just with our
families or even our friends and neighbors, not just with
the things we know-- but with everything. That union
is pretty powerful, and it's something that can help us to
revisualize virtually every aspect of life that we
currently think we understand. The sleeper may be
"safe" because he or she isn't taking any risks, but that
person also isn't making any connections, not really
adding anything to life-- neither his or her own nor the
lives of others.
I
don't want to sleepwalk through life, though sometimes I
find myself doing so to a certain extent. I fall
into comfortable patterns and I allow myself to be
satisfied with them. When I do this, my life is
rather empty, to be honest, for I'm depending on something
that really isn't real, so to speak. The dream is
simply how we see life from a non-awakened state-- the hard
part is realizing that even though we're physically awake,
there's a good chance that we're not awake spiritually or
psychologically. We imagine that just because we're
not physically sleeping, we must be awake-- but the truth
is that our idea of being awake is only part of the
picture.
I
often remind myself during the day, "Wake
up!" I do this because I often start
functioning on auto pilot, so to speak, and I don't want
to stumble through life doing things by rote. I want
to be active and I want to learn and I want to understand
what's really going on around me, not just what I perceive
to be going on. If you see me sometime just making
my way through the day, do me a favor and tell me to wake
up-- or find someone else for whom you can do that
favor. If they understand what you mean, they'll
appreciate it greatly.
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