rude awakenings: trading the small for the All

If there’s anyone out there that doesn’t want to believe things are a changin’, they are in for a bit of a rude awakening. Well, for all of us awakening may turn out to be a bit rude, because to paraphrase modern brillz sage Adyashanti: we don’t want awakening, we want our version of awakening. Rude, is therefore perhaps, inherent.

And although those who are actively seeking, or at least actively considering a clumsy tango with this potential beloved (those, such as yourselves) are awake enough to see that it is unfolding whether we want it to or not—although we may seem to choose it, it is becoming increasingly apparent that this is dropping (Snoop Dog) “like it’s hot”—our mom, our boss, our neighbor is going to begin to lose it too. We’re waking up.

Again Adyashanti offers in “The End of Your World” :

“’Oh, yes, let me sign up! I’m willing to lose my whole world.’ But when your world starts to crumble, and you start to emerge from unimaginably deep states of denial, it is something altogether different. It is something altogether more real and gritty. It’s something that some people sign up for and some people don’t.”

That sounds pretty sh**y right? Mags, why would I want that? Um, I’m ready to have wintry meditative hibernation scootch over-- Yankees spring training has already started, lady.

Sorry sweets, I’m telling you, it’s gonna happen. It’s happening.

Not just in my circles—other friends who are spiritual visionaries in their own right, on paths and teachings I’m not associated with, have been espousing higher versions of themselves recently.

My fave button-pushing, rogue, self-dubbed “cybernetic yogi” Everett Bogue checked in via twitter and between cities. We both agreed, we’ve “upgraded.”

“The new me is not fitting into old forms...” was posted on Facebook by a dearest, a longtime student and teacher of the Self. He is not sitting barefoot, in white, on a floor in India. He is a New York Senior Vice President in a global public relations firm.

The time it is taking for me to organize, vision, support and care within my own community has become all encompassing. Without my choosing it, it is suddenly: “ok, I guess I’m doing this all the time now.”

I don’t need to tell you. You know. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.

What I want to talk about is one tricky aspect of this transition. There can be a sense of loneliness as this awakening starts to, for reals, sweep over our lives. What we’re doing is letting go of any attachments to what we think we are, and in turn, the Source of all that is fantabulous takes over instead.

Now, we’re always going to be the same “person.” I’m not going to awaken and become a unicorn walking around; that would super weird, make it difficult to get restaurant reservations and it'd just be a horrible waste of a spectacular wardrobe.

But, instead I become not defined by said wardrobe, or for that matter, by anything in my world. Whether positive or negative, nothing sticks. And in a way, this can come coupled with a type of mourning, because we are not our family, our lover, our job, the life we thought we so carefully constructed. Those shapes no longer provide us with comfort. They can present great joy, love, happiness, but it passes by in a warm flourish; they are not carried with us to buoy when a crap day rolls around.

Lonely is not the appropriate word for it. I think of a Polish word, smutný, which technically translates as sad, but for me has almost had a bit of a bittersweet meaning. If there were a positive word for lonely, that would be what it is, and perhaps we need to invent one. I bet the French have a word for it; they always vibe with those black and white, emotive juxtapositions.

As definition drops away, in tandem, things are taken away from us so that at times life “forces” this process of letting go, and that can (depending on where we are in terms of our ascent) be a painful and an outwardly seeming: totally unfair.

We lose ownership of anything in our lives, replaced instead by the Presence of experiencing it fully in the moment. I described it in an email to a girlfriend as “giving up the small for the All.”

This can be incredibly discombobulating, even frightening, which is why the process for most of us is a slowly unfurling organic flowering towards That Huge Understanding, rather than one big, dramatic, trumpeted BANG. If we woke up one day, just suddenly able to experience EVERYTHING, absolutement, it could be too much, on a very basic physiological level.

Because that’s what it is, experiencing EVERYTHING. Every cell pulsates with the present. To be anywhere other than exactly where you are would seem preposterous. No, that’s too strong a word—because the idea to be anywhere else, would simply never cross your mind.

In the courtship with our Awakening, we have it and we lose it. Over and again. And much like avoiding our suffering, if we have it and we lost it, we naturally reach to have it again. We reach for the love + comfort, because, obvi, we want it, always.

So life keeps things out of our reach so that we can experience uber-uncomfortability. It gets edgy out on the outside, so that we keep digging or wood-shedding or opening to that place of the main Truth that is our core.

Two of my closest friends, who I happened to marry about six months ago, are apart for the first year of their marriage because the gorgeous wife is on a Broadway tour. Theirs is one of the greatest loves I’ve seen. One could list any number of reasons, excuses, choices for their separation… she’s living her dream, after all.

I think the world has bigger plans for them.

There’s a depth and a solitude that needed to take place for their spiritual growth that wouldn’t have been able to happen in the newlywed year of marital bliss. Life has a larger Bliss in mind.

Although they are outwardly hottie pattotie rockstar creatives not to mention incredibly generous and loving and ridonkulously fun individuals, they are also serious students of this trot to Awakening. Life is saying, sorry, you can’t just spend all day Saturday practicing bringing the next little awesome version of you to this world—there’s more.

This is the overlying truth for everything. Life is this spontaneous unfolding that we are a part of, but we do not have control of-- a very tricky thing for our minds to wrap around, because for us to “understand” it, we need to be out of the mind.

Once we experience Reality, the moments of disconnect can be extraordinarily painful and, as I said earlier, lonely, as we settle into a new way of being and the old forms, relationships, comforts, identities no longer make the grade. It might for some moments feel like a disconnect, but what happens eventually and paradoxically is the ultimate *connect* because we feel more sensation, yet no possession of our bodies while in turn, connected to everything else.

It’s tricky because it’s not a choice—it just happens.

And there are actually two aspects of the loneliness I’m speaking to here.
1- loneliness in the process
2- (insert the positive version of loneliness) upon seeing

Loneliness in the process is the disconnect.
"Loneliness" upon seeing, is having it all, and knowing you didn’t do any of it.

Your business? Not yours.
Your partner? Not yours.
Compliments, praise, gratitude? Like eating a spoonful of New York Super Fudge Chunk, pleasant at the moment and then it dissipates into the past—it does not inform you, build you up or make you more than.

...not yours.

The contradiction that coexists is that there is more of all of it: you just don’t get to “have” it.

We, the world, will continue to unfold and extend until we are in that place permanently. The awesome thing is-- when we’re in that place of Being, and we see what it is, and we’re not scared of it, it IS the ultimate flow.

It is having everything we want, being provided for entirely and fully encompassed by purpose and love. Whether you're an executive vice-president, a Broadway dancer or a barefoot hippie.

No one can do this for us, so we may have to, for a time, learn to be lonely. It’s then and only then that we reach for the nourishment that really fuels our fire. And when we get there? Well, we’re going to have to find that new, positive definition for loneliness, because how can you possibly be lonely when you have it ALL?