Awakening…..?

This morning I read about a beautiful soul who spent twenty-one days alone in silence, meditating for hours each day, fasting, sitting in darkness, and eventually emerging with profound insights about life, consciousness, and the nature of reality. I thought: wow…a part of me admires that.

Many retreats, teachers, books, and spiritual practices have helped countless people, including me. Looking back, I can honestly say that every workshop, retreat, and course I attended contributed something valuable to my journey.

Yet whenever I hear these stories, another thought quietly appears….:

What about everyone else?

What about the mother raising three children, the grandfather struggling with arthritis, the nurse working night shifts, the mechanic repairing cars, or the billions of people who simply try to live decent lives without ever spending even one day in silence?

Are they somehow excluded from discovering who they truly are?

If awakening requires extraordinary discipline, years of intense practice, special diets, endless meditation, and increasingly complicated spiritual exercises, then it seems that only a tiny fraction of humanity would ever succeed.

The rest would simply live, do their best, grow older, and die.

That cannot be the whole story !!

Fortunately A Course in Miracles offers a surprisingly hopeful perspective. It tells us that what we experience is based on what we believe, and that we have been given the power to change those beliefs. The body follows the mind, not the other way around. The body does not imprison us, nor does it awaken us. So the real classroom is the mind.

At first that sounds wonderfully simple…..

Then, almost immediately, another question appears.

“Fine. But how?”

If I have spent seventy years building this personality, collecting opinions, defending ideas, worrying about the future, regretting parts of the past, and maintaining a carefully constructed image of who I think I am, how exactly do I stop?

My ego immediately wants a complicated answer :

It wants a twelve-step program. It wants three advanced workshops, a special breathing technique, a spiritual mentor, and preferably a certificate at the end proving that I have successfully become my true Self.

The irony is almost comical.

But what if the very voice asking for all those complicated instructions may be the thing creating the complexity in the first place ?

The ego loves projects. It loves self-improvement. It loves searching. It loves preparing for some future moment when enlightenment will finally arrive.

Love seems far less impressed by all of that.

Love simply asks what we are choosing right now.

Not next year. Not after retirement. Not after the next retreat.

Right now.

Am I choosing fear or love….judgment or understanding…attack or peace? Am I choosing to defend my self-image, or am I willing to laugh at it for a moment?

(That last one may be particularly important.)

Many of us have spent decades taking ourselves very seriously. We defend our opinions, our preferences, our stories, our wounds, and our personal history as if the survival of the universe depended on it.

Meanwhile life quietly keeps reminding us that we may not be quite as important as we think.

The traffic jam does not care about our spiritual achievements.

The supermarket cashier does not know how many books we have read.

The neighbour’s barking dog remains completely unimpressed by our level of consciousness.

Perhaps that is part of the lesson and everyday life is the monastery.

Perhaps the difficult colleague, the demanding family member, the unexpected bill, and the neighbour who starts mowing his lawn at exactly the wrong moment are all playing their role in our spiritual education.

Not because God sent them to annoy us, but because they reveal what is still happening in our own minds.

That is where the choice appears…..Not in some distant future after we have perfected ourselves, but …..Here….Now ! In the middle of ordinary life.

I am in my seventies now. I eat much as I always have. I enjoy a little cheese, some fish, a glass of wine, and a good meal with friends. I no longer feel the need to constantly search for the next technique, the next teacher, or the next breakthrough experience.

What interests me more is whether I can choose love instead of fear today.

Can I forgive a little quicker, judge a little less?

Can I remember, even briefly, that the person standing in front of me wants the same thing I want: to be happy, to feel safe, and to be loved?

Those may seem like small things, yet perhaps they are not small at all.

Perhaps awakening is not about becoming extraordinary, but it is about becoming natural.

The world often tells us that valuable things must be difficult. We are taught that transformation should be hard work, that truth must be complicated, and that peace must be earned, but what we are looking for is already here, it never left. It just needs to be remembered.

And maybe that is why there is hope for everyone.

For ordinary people like you and me living ordinary lives, doing their best, making mistakes, learning, laughing, crying, forgiving, and beginning again.

Because in the end, the choice between fear and love is available to all of us. And it is available now.

With love and light,

G.