In my last post I said that that when it came down to it most people didn’t actually want to wake up. Someone asked for my thoughts on why that might be the case. This was my reply…
In terms of why most people don’t really want awakening/liberation, I’d say that this freedom requires (and is) a willingness to feel everything and a willingness to sacrifice everything for the truth. That’s a lot for most people who mostly figure they can get by in life without needing to pay that kind of price. Most are frightened that if they let go completely they’ll have to change or lose something important to them, they’re fear losing what they’ve got. This may be fear of losing material things but also losing the capacity to function in a certain way, losing status, or losing some cherished ideas. Identity is a big part of it. If you believe that you’re essentially the body and a person who’s in control, then when that idea starts to get radically challenged experientially there can be a powerful threshold of resistance and fear that needs to be confronted and traversed. (See: Fear)
Basically people put conditions on their freedom, which could be described as a complete ongoing surrender to what’s arising as experience; a complete energetic openness and nonresistance to the bleeding edge of the felt experience of being alive. It isn’t mental. Maybe they want some things in their life to change because they’re suffering them, but when it comes to it most are not willing to let go of their attachments, they’re not willing to make the sacrifice of the lower for the higher. People want guarantees before they fall into the endless groundlessness.
Now reassurances are fine and I can say everything will be OK. But only as long as you’re OK with everything and anything. There’s the rub; you don’t get to control the content, you don’t control outcomes. This radical openness and complete absence of control is anathema to most people which is why most people don’t want it. In reality it’s not that you’re giving up control but rather you’re giving up the illusion of control which feels the same. It’s this unwillingness to let go and remain open that’s the not wanting to ‘wake up’, because awakening is the deepest acceptance moment to moment, opening to your deep experiencing not pushing it away or wishing it away. It’s not that all problems will go away but you become free of the affliction of needing life to be any different to what it is at any given moment.
When it comes down to it ‘letting go’ is not something ‘you’ have to do, but it’s only when the willingness to embrace radical acceptance is present can the freefall begin. The trouble is this whole ‘freefall’ thing might not sound too attractive to a mind. And so it’s like “why bother, what’s in it for me?” But the point at which whatever it is that you don’t like or don’t want in your life becomes so utterly intolerable, and when you run out of options to get what you want or get rid of what you don’t want, then the opportunity arises for real transformation through deep acceptance. In that acceptance you find (you are) the spaciousness and capacity for all that is, all that can be. The narrowness of imagined personal limits are expanded and dissolved to accommodate whatever comes. Then you find you’re not existing as only a person, you recognize yourself and live as something more essential, as being itself.
So when people say that they don’t want to feel the way they feel, the irony is that the way to deal with that is to accept the way they feel at the deepest level. They don’t have to go searching for something to feel, they just have to allow whatever is happening in them to flow.
Are you willing to let go of control and accept whatever’s here? Probably only when you finally see that it’s your only option, then you’ll surrender. Until then you’ll hedge. That’s just how it works. It comes only when we’re ready for it, when we’re truly and actually done with all the strategies and the temporary fixes that never stick. This is being available to Grace. And living in Grace is when you’re perpetually surrendered and it’s left running the show. At this point ‘you’ and Grace are synonymous.
I invite you to let this in, because what I’m talking about isn’t some flowery words for the mind, it’s the living reality of your being and in order discover true and lasting peace you need to sacrifice the old and familiar patterns that may well be comforting in a way, and let yourself blossom into the freedom of a new way of being.
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