Allowing an Awakening...

                                                                                Allowing an Awakening...

Increasingly, it seems to me, the so-called spiritual life is, before all else, the choice to get out of the way... Women, men, youth, and children alike are supposedly about the core work of self-identification: learning to recognize "I" is just the beginning. After "I" comes a cosmic catalogue of differences: me from you, me from every "other", me wanting safety, me wanting you... and on and on... into school (what shall we learn today, children?)... into... and into... We live in a social construct of separation, reinforced by both religion and science... And, to what end the philosopher among us might ask?

Recognizing the reality of this social construct of separation is the first step in the only essential separation: you from all the systems of separation that dominate, manipulate, and extract from you your genuine identity... Realizing that you are the other in this system of separation can be scary... discovering both how to think and what should you now think about is both liberation and difference-making... Think like a Buddha or dance like a Christ is not normal...

​Normality is the goal of the "system": if you are normal, you will believe the collective myths: you will join a productive business model: you will contribute to society: you will say very little about bad subjects: such as war, violence, addictions to both, racism, sexism, every known social phobia, and the like... Normal is going along to get along... it's what everybody does... It's about my survival, man...

​Luckily for me, I had a gateway into abnormality: a cultural shift moved just enough for a crack in the wall of separation to appear... the short version of this shift would be the single word hippie... tack on the Beatles, Dylan, Joan Baez, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Vietnam War, and for a brief moment there was the legend of a movement... The longer version would add the arrival of Swami Vivikananda in the United States in 1898 and Paramahansa Yogananda some years later, but to be honest, one mustn't forget the Transcendentalist philosophers like Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau... and poet Walt Whitman: ee-gadz, where would we be without Whitman?

​And the Beats and Buddhism? Have you read The Dharma Bums by Kerouac or Siddhartha by Hesse? In the fifties and the sixties the West finally awoke to the East: but still, the social construct of separation overcame... Hippie could be bought and sold: much like today's bohemian style: hippie and bohemian instead, mean Salvation Army counters (Leonard Cohen, Suzanne): at best, simple living, at worst, rugged poverty and soup lines... The system sustains poverty because it is a reminder: poverty serves the purpose of handjobs for separation... purposeful pleasure for complete domination...

​Okay...

​One cannot awaken and at the very same time remain asleep (Alan Watts!) The "I" that we so earnestly develop and sustain is only, at it's very best, a vapid summation of going along to get along... Salvation theology is the big-seller in this market... But if you have even the barest inkling that there could be more to the story, you've got to get to work: you are the one who has to write the story! And man, the story is not about separation! LSD and pot and gurus may have helped hippies to see through the cracks in the wall, but the only way through is that of allowing an awakening...

To be continued...