Dear One,

Yes, I agree. There does indeed seem to be this phenomenon occurring in the world right now, as much as I want to deny it. As you well know, I used to think that the human race doesn’t really evolve, only change. But now I’m not so sure. It does appear that people are waking up. More and more of them. All over the place.

It used to be there were some holy people scattered throughout the millennia, a special sacred few who knew “the truth.” As we know, these ones had masses of followers, compelling teachings, and secure places in human history. What’s occurring now is different—there are many more teachers who are enlightened, yes, but also there are just lots of folks walking around this way, who aren’t even teachers, who don’t even talk about being enlightened. Unless asked. Many of them got that way because of their teachers, of course. But now there are so many of them that some teachers hold retreats only for awake ones! This is happening on Vancouver Island, BC, of all places. It began there with a couple of enlightened folks who woke up others, and now there’s a bunch of realized Islanders!

And, my dear, these days it seems the teaching itself doesn’t even have to have an eastern flavour. It used to be that becoming enlightened, realized, liberated, whatever you want to call it, was the domain of eastern mysticism: think Buddhism, Hinduism, all those Indian gurus. Paramahansa Yogananda and Ramana Maharshi are among the more well known ones—as well as those who are no strangers to controversy, like Osho, formerly known as Rajneesh. Their teachings, non-dualist all, are distinctly eastern, and their devotees take on Sanskrit names as a means to shed their self-identified characters; they chant Sanskrit mantras on their mala beads and go to India and meditate in ashrams. So there’s that way to wake up, as you know.

But I’ve noticed, dearest, that lately one might say a more democratic way to awaken has become common, a way that doesn’t come with new Sanskrit names and Om and India. One could even call it secular. And why not? Why should the East have a monopoly on realization? These days, while some of the most popular western non-dualist teachers have taken Sanskrit-sounding names that end in “ji,” others have kept their own names or found others they liked. Eckhart Tolle is an example of this: he named himself “Eckhart” after the mystic Meister Eckhart. And when Eckhart woke up, he didn’t even know what was happening to him! The public intellectual Sam Harris credits MDMA with accidentally providing him a taste of what it’s like to be enlightened—like Eckhart, he only adopted that word for it after the experience. And while meditation gets a good rap by everybody as a way to get there, it needn’t be that way, as Eckhart and others have shown. One can meditate for a lifetime in a cave and not reach enlightenment. Though I’m sure, my dear, there are many other benefits to such a lifestyle.

Perhaps waking up really doesn’t have anything to do with spirituality or religion. What do you think, dear one? I know that most of those who talk about it are indeed spiritual in the conventional sense—but some aren’t. Think about Sam Harris again, if that’s all right with you. He wrote an entire book called Waking Up, and he’s the most well known atheist I can think of! Even some of the mystics take it out of a solely spiritual domain when they say it is simply “our birthright.” The Sufi poet Rumi put it this way: “Die before you die.” 

When you are enlightened, you die; “you” as a reference point is gone. It’s very black and white. If you can point to anything outside of yourself, you aren’t awake. If you can point to yourself and call it “me,” you aren’t awake. In other words, if you are a subject and there are objects “out there” you aren’t awake. You are living in a dream world, a fantasy. But if you get out of your own way and step out of yourself, you let the created character go, and along with that, the illusory play of life. It’s all fiction, a story that you’re caught up in and mesmerized by. And it only exists in the eye of the beholder, the dreamer of the dream, the only one you can’t see in the dream. Beneath, within, throughout it all, there is what is aware of your thoughts and who is thinking them, a ground of beingness.

You know it because you’ve felt it. And you know that this sense of beingness doesn’t change, is the only thing in life that is changeless, because at your core you feel exactly the same as you did when you were a child—despite aging, collecting experiences and knowledge, learning stuff, growing “as a person.” In a very real, deep way, you know that you, the real you, hasn’t grown or changed at all. If you doubt this, just take a moment and look inside, my dear. Feel yourself.

There are popular metaphors for explaining this unchanging beingness and waking up to the realization that you are really that: some involve movie screens (we don’t notice the unchanging screen while we’re watching a movie, even though it’s always there and we couldn’t see the movie without it) and nighttime dreams (we don’t know we’re sleeping until we wake up). Do you see how we get so caught up in our stories that we can’t see anything else? And there are many names for this ground of being—Consciousness, Source, All That Is. Love. God. (And I’m sure you can think of many more.) This waking up to who you really are is what Rumi calls “the open secret”—because it’s so very obvious once you realize it. It not only permeates what we think of as reality, it is reality.

Doh! as our beloved Homer Simpson might say, as he hits his yellow forehead with the heel of his four-fingered hand. It was there all along.

So why is awakening even couched in spiritual-religious terms, techniques, and teachings? Perhaps because when you wake up you see how everything is God, including you. As JC put it, “I and the Father are one.” In other words, that ground of being is often described as “God.” Even the experience of realization—and it can indeed be experienced temporarily, without awakening taking hold, like occasional lucidity in a nighttime dream—is what gets identified as “seeing God.” That experience, that glimpse, never happens when we are distracted and caught up in the busyness of daily life, the stories, the movie show. You know that it doesn’t.

Sometimes it occurs when you are in such emotional pain that “you” are hardly there and really don’t want to be. Sometimes it occurs when you are lost in creativity—playing music, writing, painting. Sometimes it occurs in nature, in stillness, in a church, in a café, in a moment where you are suspended. There is an opening. Something shifts.

And afterward you feel your breath deepen, you feel a sense of peace, of wholeness. You feel that everything is just perfect as it is, that you’re at one with it all. Some call it grace. Some call it being touched by an angel. By any name, it’s a mystical experience. A taste of bliss. And those who are hit hard fall on their knees in tears and are forever changed. These are the mystics, the monks, the spiritual devotees, the ones who have seen the light and want to live in it. The ones who have felt what’s true and see everything else in life as but a shadow, a pale facsimile, as Plato had it. How can you live the way you did before, when you now know it’s not really real? Waking up from your dream would become your life’s mission. I don’t see how it could be any other way. Can you, my dear? And if a teacher aided you in this experience, would you not just run to him and sit at his feet?

So. I know you know some or maybe all of this already, dear one. But now I’m going to take an odd turn and go where we haven’t gone before. Warning: True weirdness ahead. Bear with me.

What if that veil of illusion can be lifted and true reality exposed through a solely physical technique? A simple thing—not years of Kundalini yoga or meditation or chanting, not even holotropic breath exercises or ingesting substances and throwing up. What if there was something you could do with your body right now that changed everything, that took you out of it all? Not by stopping your heart, not physically dying. I’m talking about some small yet precise physical movement, like a specific turn of the head while holding the body in a particular way. What if?

What if this great mass awakening that we seem to be seeing the beginning rustlings of these days will soon be accelerated by this discovery? What if it’s something that anyone can do, at any age, in any culture? What if it’s so simple that although it might begin with a few teachers showing how it’s done, the teachers aren’t really needed? After a while, the simple physical technique would get passed around from person to person until it catches like wildfire and spreads across the globe.

What if that happened? (I can almost hear your sharp intake of breath.) Because this, I predict, is the next phase of this whole awakening thing. Isn’t everything now being discovered to originate in the physical body? (The awake teacher with the non-Sanskrit name of Judith Blackstone approaches this: she’s developed a series of near-physical techniques called the Realization Process that helps you find what she calls “fundamental consciousness” inside your body, and she trains others to teach it.)

Change your name? Study with a teacher? Sit with a guru? Meditate for days? Go to India? Nope, you won’t need to anymore. Imagine: spirituality, and maybe even religion, would be made redundant once this occurs. (Think about that for a moment! And, dear one, please don’t forget to breathe.) Because anyone who wanted to could know what’s true, what’s real, and live in that, as that. The kingdom of heaven that is within you would become without too. Heaven on earth. You are that. I am that. And we’d all be let in on the open secret that was there all along. Easy-peasy. Simple.

Thanks for hearing me out, dear one. I hope I didn’t blow your mind too much. Or maybe I hope I did!