The Importance of Being Awakeness

Today I helped a really pleasant woman in California wake up. I would guess she was around 40 and she has been on a spiritual path for a very long time for a person of that age. Luckily for her she’d encountered enough suffering in recent years that it had pushed her into getting serious about not just seeking some fabled bliss-bunny enlightenment, but rather in actually finding out the truth of her own identity.

All of this is dream-talk, of course. In truth there was no woman and no California and no spiritual teacher. Of course not. How could there be? There is, in fact, only You.

So another way to write that first paragraph would be to say that Oneness spoke to Oneness about Oneness this afternoon. In front of one iPad, Oneness was pretending to be a female human, and professing to be asleep. In front of the other iPad, Oneness was knowingly utilizing a male human body, and knew itself to be Awakeness.

There is, of course, zero possibility of there ever being, or there having ever been, any person anywhere who woke up. Buddha never woke up, nor Socrates; neither Jesus, nor Meister Eckhart; not Sri Ramana Maharshi, nor Nisargadatta Maharaj. Fredness didn’t wake up and You won’t either. If that sounds like hard news, then the great news is that I didn’t need to and neither do You.

You don’t need to wake up, because You are Awakeness Itself. If someone’s had a reasonably clear awakening, then they know who they are, even if that knowing gets cloudy as all get out. You can’t unknow it. Awakening leaves a permanent imprint. If someone hasn’t had an awakening, then they don’t know they are Awakeness. The may think they are, or believe they are, or hope they are, but they don’t know they are.

This is what awakening is about. Notice that it’s backwards from what we, when we believe ourselves to be limited to the existence of a single human unit, want. All of spirituality works 180 degrees differently than You think it does, at least until You see, as the Zen master’s say, Your Original Face.

You, in Your divine confusion, when You want me to wake up a given character-unit, are innocently asking me to turn up the brightness of the moon. But of course the light of the moon is only a reflection of the light of the sun. I can’t turn up the light of the moon, because it isn’t self-effulgent to begin with. It has no light of its own.

It is just the same with humans and their make believe characters.

My client today came to the awakening party expecting me to wake up the Alicia character so that the Alicia character could then shine with the Light of Truth. What we discovered is that there is no Alicia, so there was no way to wake her up so she could shine.

Next we found out that what my client really is is the Shining Itself. Can you believe it? I had Oneness for a client!

It may seem remarkable to you that I had Oneness for a client today, but in fact Oneness is the only client I ever have! How could it be otherwise? And today Oneness left our session bright and smiley and sorta dizzy and very grateful. You know why? Because I woke my Real Client up. I woke up Oneness not an imaginary Alicia.

Another way to put this is that Awakeness moved from experiencing Itself as a state of unconscious awakeness in the Alicia unit’s relative location (think one of the jewels in Indra’s Net) to a state of Conscious Awakeness pouring through the Alicia unit. That’s what happens when Awakeness wakes up to the truth of its so-called “secret” identity.

And guess who it was that woke up Awakeness today? Awakeness! I’m Awakeness and so are You. We are simply different expressions of the same Oneness. We couldn’t be anything but You, because there’s not anything but You! A weaver can take a bolt of cotton and make it into a sweater or a shirt or a pair of jeans. But all three remain cotton; they are just different expressions of the weaver’s art.

Here we’re just talking about the Big Weaver, so to speak.

Do you see how this works? See the mechanisms behind the illusions is key to seeing through the core illusion–the dream separation.

A lot of teachers downplay initial awakenings. I will never in a thousand years figure that out. I have to think that most of them have either forgotten the impact their own initial breakthrough, or they never had one, or perhaps they notice they have very little leverage over whether you have one or not, so why open a can of worms?

I want to go on record as stating that in my opinion the single most important event you will ever have in your entire spiritual journey is an initial awakening. Fortunately, as Fredness, I’ve been given a method which grants me a lot of leverage in that area. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t do well. The wake-up thing is not one of them.

I can’t make awakening happen; it doesn’t work like that. If the client’s willingness to tell themselves the truth about what’s false is not yet present, it ain’t gonna happen. But if that willingness is there, it’s gonna happen. Every time. It’s unmissable.

I could see that I was slowly getting through Alicianess today, but really slowly, as there was a lot of unintentional resistance on her part. I had to lead her one baby step, one bread crumb at a time. Fine. If the client is getting it, I have the patience of Job. We ran long, but by golly Awakeness had a clear awakening before it was over.This is what the spiritual journey is all about. There’s a lot more window dressing in this field than most are willing to admit.

Granted, there’s a lot of work left for Alicia to appear to do, because there’s a lot of Alicianess still appearing. Conditioning will still play out, but the identification with that conditioning will steadily thin if it’s worked with.

Fine again. Welcome to post-awakening. Welcome to cultivating clarity. It’s what I spend most days helping people do. We wake up, we grow up, and we clear up.

Or we don’t–dependent upon Oneness’s readiness to abandon that story to make way for truth. I can’t stuff anything into an already-full client. But oh my goodness, if the space is there, the Big Wheel starts to roll.

In the space of minutes today, many, many things fell into place for Alicianess today. She instantly “got” stuff she’d been missing for years. And what fell into place for her, what she was seeing-being simply can’t be seen or understood from anywhere but the eyes of Conscious Awakeness. This is why I harp so much on the importance of an initial awakening, on the importance of being Awakeness.

No, Alicianess is not done. No, it’s not the end of her journey. Thank God! Who in the world even wants an end to the journey? Only ego. You, my dear Awakeness want an end to seeking, but never an end to deepening.