Awakening
After a climactic night of meditation, the Buddha became fully “awakened” at the moment of sunrise. This word invariably implies a kind of fresh morning radiance in the soul. We imagine an awakened person as having a continuously serene and joyful state of mind.
Paradoxically, we all seem to have an inkling of what that state would be like, even if we’re utterly miserable. We can all recollect times when we’ve felt fully alive, and that vision of perfect happiness seems to be within all of us. This implies something quite extraordinary: that you and I, in all our confusion, already know what it is to be awakened. As Emerson said, we can’t understand anything unless it is already within us.
So if we know it, why can’t we live it? How many of us live in the brightness of the dawn? Our mental skies are more likely to be overcast and laden with dread. Many people feel perpetually frustrated and confused, and whatever “happiness” they enjoy is largely defined by the consumption of goods and services.
So is awakening really possible, or is the word just another piece of bait to extract money from lost souls? Great ideas tend to become stale and corrupted very quickly - partly because they are so useful for exploiting others. People get very rich and powerful talking about God or freedom or morality, for example. To take words such as “awakening” and “enlightenment” at face value can be disastrous, unless you find ways to bring them back to life.
So what do they actually mean? Here is a crude guide. “Awakening” usually means “seeing into the nature of reality”. “Enlightenment” means being able to think for yourself, without reliance on authorities or received wisdom. So far, so good.
For Westerners however, “awakening” also implies the legacy of the Italian Renaissance, which was that “rebirth” of human intelligence, imagination and science that ended the Middle Ages. For Buddhists, on the other hand, “awakening’ implies ‘Nirvana’, which literally means ‘the extinguishing of the life force.” In practical terms, Nirvana implies the peace that comes from total detachment. Which kind of awakening would you prefer?
So is awakening a transcendent state? Western secular thought has largely killed off the idea of absolute truths. We now see most truths as being relative to time and place. This means that awakening, and the way you understand it, will always be personal to you. It will be inseparable from your individuality and your cultural context. Your awakening won’t be the same as your guru’s. No matter how hard to strive to be selfless, you will never eradicate your unique sense of self, and it will flavour everything you know.
In the Asian tradition however, awakening is usually seen as a transcendental state untainted by individual perceptions. In effect, an Asian teacher will claim that the truth as he understands it is the absolute truth for all time and for all people. This makes his message very appealing in its paternalistic simplicity: “Think like me and you too will eventually awaken.” Yet it should be self evident that striving for someone else’s awakening is a kind of self-loathing and is bound to fail anyway.
Furthermore, awakening is unlikely to be a single moment of cosmic illumination that makes you permanently awake. Any experience, however strong, soon decays and is manipulated like any other memory. Because we are living organisms in constant flux, awakening will always be a process: you live it day by day.
Once you realise that your awakening is personal to you, it also be comes possible! You don’t have to become some washed-out, white-robed saint. Neither is it some remote possibility for a future lifetime, as the Tibetans generally say. You can only awaken in a day very much like today, with all its apparent limitations. So how do you do it?
Awakening is about intensifying consciousness. The mind becomes bright when it is focused, as when you concentrate the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass. The most intense states occur when all your attention is streamlined into the moment. This can happen involuntarily through alcohol, critical illness, intense love or violence or adventure. During these peaks, you may think: “This is what it means to be alive!”
Fortunately, there are safer and more durable ways to enhance consciousness. They usually involve focusing, which is the art of paying attention to one thing to the temporary exclusion of all else. To be awake also means to be fully conscious of the thoughts, feelings and sensations of this moment. In fact, the most beautiful times occur when you are also conscious of being conscious: when the mind reflects its own radiance.
If we think of consciousness as a kind of mental energy similar to the physical vitality of the body, we can see why it often goes dull. If we scatter our mental energy over a thousand things a day, they’ll all appear foggy. A restless, unfocused mind can’t perceive anything with clarity or depth. Furthermore, habitual worry and physical tension will so drain our batteries that very little juice remains.
Let me give you some suggestions about how to be more alive. First, get very good at shedding physical tension. You have to stop the unconscious energy drain. I would suggest you can do virtually anything - walking down the street, doing the dishes - in a tense or a relaxed fashion. Ask yourself periodically: “What am I doing? How am I doing it? Can I do this activity in a smooth and unhurried fashion?”
Secondly, learn to focus more deeply on the sensations of the present - sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. When you focus deeply on anything, that object rapidly appears more vivid. Your mind slows down and notices detail with increasing pleasure, and the past and future temporarily vanish.
Thirdly, become more aware of your thoughts and feelings. Deep, sustained focus illuminates what you focus on, but it also makes the mind clear and still. This clarity enables you to break the grip of the habitual thoughts that typically drain your mental energy. You can ask yourself at any time during the day, “What am I thinking about? And is it worth it?” If it’s not, you can drop it. Similarly, if you see your emotions in the cool light of awareness, they tend to resolve themselves more rapidly.
Fourthly, focus on and amplify what is beautiful in your life. As you clear the mental junk, there is more space for beautiful and healthy thoughts and sensations to fill your mind. They are legion - just to be alive is the most extraordinary experience - and yet they also tend to be subtle and transient. Our usual mental noise and confusion is quite enough to smother them. Even mild anxiety can make the whole world grey. To be fully alive means to have a careful eye for beauty, and to know how to cultivate it.
Finally, give yourself the chance to consider the big questions with complete honesty. You can be happy believing in things that are not real, but awakening is a more grown-up state. It is about seeing things “just as they are”, without illusions or sentimentality. For example, what is the experience of being alive?
I would suggest that life is both profoundly horrible and indescribably beautiful at the same time, and this is probably as true for birds and fish as much as for us. To be alive is eternal delight, as the poet Blake said. Yet at the same time, we all live by plunder and carnage, no matter how neatly we package it. If we try to ignore or explain away the horror, we also fail to see the beauty. If we dull our consciousness of death we also dull our consciousness of life.
Cancer survivors often say that nothing wakes up the mind as much as the prospect of imminent death. If we ignore death, we tend to plod along as if we will live forever, and that makes the mind very gray and dull. We can even deny that death is real by vaguely believing in reincarnation or a future life. If you assume you’ve got time, even a few more years, then of course you won’t treat this day as anything special. Yet who of us can be sure of even one more day? Only if you are open-heartedly at ease with death, loss and misfortune - those building blocks of Nature - will you fully appreciate being alive.
Awakening is about being fully conscious of this moment, in all its uniqueness. It won’t come again, and it won’t be the same tomorrow, and the day will come when there is no tomorrow. You see the transcendental not by trying to have someone else’s experience, but by having your own. You really can see infinity in a grain of sand, and eternity in an hour. And then the next hour comes, and the next grain of sand, equally infinite and eternal in their own unique way . . .