Excerpt from Wake Up Now, Chapter 7, "In
the Wake of Awakening"
How (and
Why) the Ego Obscures the Truth
Although spiritual
awakening itself is generally a blissful, expansive experience
that may be accompanied by weeks or months of extraordinary
inner peace, joy, love, and freedom from reactivity, it's
often followed by an extended period of insecurity and confusion.
After all, you've just experienced the most profound paradigm
shift imaginable--the seeming center of your universe, the
separate self you've spent a lifetime cultivating and serving,
has revealed itself to be a colossal illusion. Even though
you may have encountered spiritual teachings that helped prepare
you for this tectonic shift in consciousness, the experience
itself can be frightening and disorienting as your accustomed
world collapses around you.
In particular, the ego may feel threatened
by the radiant emptiness that has revealed itself to be your
essence, your true nature, and it will do everything it knows
how to make you forget who you are. (Remember, that's its
job description, its reason for being, and it's been doing
its job well for a very long time.) Committed to seeing itself
as a separate someone with a particular life story--with all
the suffering and exhilaration, success and failure, this
story brings--the ego is terrified of being annihilated. The
tactics it employs may be heavy-handed or subtle and range
from trying to stuff awakening back into a conceptual box
to attempting to co-opt awakening for its own purposes. But
the result is the same: the clouding or distortion of the
truth to which you've just awakened and the reassertion of
the ego's control. Here are seven of the ego's favorite ploys.
Pretend
Your Awakening Never Happened
If you had no interest
in awakening in the first place or didn't realize it could
be so intense and unsettling, you may try to go about your
life as if nothing has changed, pretending to be interested
in the same achievements, possessions, dramas, and roles as
before. The problem is, the awakened view keeps reasserting
itself, like an abyss opening up beneath you and revealing
the emptiness at the core, or a voice speaking truth from
the whirlwind beyond the mind. No matter how hard you try,
you just can't get your life to fit back into the comfortable
little box you once inhabited. You're in no-man's-land now,
uncharted terrain. The old maps are worthless, and new maps
have yet to be drawn--or more accurately, can never be drawn
because reality is constantly changing and doesn't lend itself
to predetermined directions. Eventually, you need to find
a way to accommodate your new identity.
One of my students, for example, had a lucrative,
high-profile job at a software company that gave him a sense
of status and power. After his awakening, status and power
lost their luster, and his work revealed itself to be inherently
manipulative and dishonest. But he pushed on as if nothing
had happened, attempting to talk himself out of his misgivings,
because he was afraid of making changes that might cause him
to lose a lifestyle to which he had become attached.
Discredit
Your Awakening
Because your awakening
doesn't resemble the ones you've read about in books, you
may dismiss it as inauthentic. Or because you still feel angry
or afraid, you may conclude that the awakening was inadequate
in some way. "After all, someone like Eckhart Tolle went
from self-loathing to bliss overnight," you may argue,
"and his 'negative emotions' completely dropped away.
Whereas I just had this moment of insight where I realized
that I don't really exist. My awakening just doesn't measure
up."
However, genuine awakenings come in all shapes
and sizes and don't necessarily guarantee an immediate, thoroughgoing
transformation in your way of being in the world. You've merely
discovered who you really are--transformation follows or not,
depending on how effective your ego is in its attempts to
derail the process. But the spiritual superego likes to compare
your insights to the enlightenment experiences of the great
masters and sages and find them wanting. What better way for
the ego to stay in control?
Co-opt
Awakening and Make It Your Own
{Rather than allowing
awakening to unfold and continue to illuminate the emptiness
of self, the ego obscures the light of truth by claiming awakening
as its own possession and creating the fiction of an awakened
separate self, which is a contradiction in terms. The proliferation
of spiritual teachers claiming to be enlightened attests to
the widespread popularity of this tactic, which is known as
"ego inflation," or "spiritual drunkenness."
As I mentioned earlier, no one ever becomes enlightened, and
awakening can't be owned in any way because it's not an object
or a mind-state, but the unseen subject of all objects, the
mysterious and ungraspable background of all experience, the
light that illuminates all phenomena. Attempt to grasp it,
and it slips through your fingers. Let go of it, and it fills
your hand.
Even the ultimate pronouncement "I am
That" (where That refers to ultimate reality),
which recurs in the Upanishads and other great spiritual texts,
doesn't mean that the separate self has in any way encompassed
the absolute. It simply means that the separate self is not,
and only the absolute exists. In complete self-realization,
any sense of identity, even with ultimate reality, dissolves
in the ocean of the Self.
Yet the mind may grab hold of a particular
mind-state, such as bliss or love. "How blissful or peaceful
I am," the ego proudly declares to itself (and possibly
to others as well). "It's a mark of my spiritual attainment."
But such fabricated emotions have nothing to do with awakening
and naturally arise and pass if you let them. Awakening is
the impersonal nonstate that remains unchanged while all states
come and go.
Cycle Back
and Forth Between Getting It and Losing It
"Now I have it,
now I don't," thinks the mind, as it chases the awakening
it believes it once possessed but now has somehow misplaced.
Because awakening can't be owned, it also can't be lost. But
the mind mistakes a particular experience for enlightenment
and keeps attempting to recreate it. "Once I felt so
open, so spacious, so loving, so empty, and now I don't,"
says the mind. "Maybe this means I'm not awakened anymore,
and I'd better do everything I can to regain it."
For this reason, the word awakening
can be misleading; it seems to refer to an event in space
and time, whereas it's actually the instantaneous awareness
of the timeless and boundariless dimension of being. Even
though the energetic phenomena that accompany this awareness--the
rush of bliss, the upsurge of love, the profound peace --can
be extremely appealing, the point is not to focus on the passing
states but to open to the awakeness, the timeless presence,
that's been revealed as your very own self. Just as you don't
keep trying to recreate your wedding once you're married,
but instead enjoy your partner and the life you now share,
you don't keep trying to recreate awakening, but relax and
allow awakeness to express itself through you.
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