AWAKE

The point of living is to be awake for it.

That’s true no matter what the Big Picture turns out to be — we could reincarnate; we could all be dreaming right now; we could be a biological accident that disappears with the death of our physical bodies — it doesn’t matter.  Any way you look at it, life is pointless if you’re not paying attention.

And let’s face it, sleeping less is the easy way to address the necessity of Awakeness (which could just as easily be called Awareness); and it’s also, in that sense, a cheat.  The point of living is not to be physically awake for more hours — that’s a useful and cool thing if you ask people like me, but it’s not IT.  IT is being more aware while you ARE awake.

Does anybody try this?  Does anybody pause during an average day and marvel at how much of it you’ve managed to barely pay attention to?  I do, and it’s a bit scary.

Moreover, it’s actually sometimes scary to be awake. Have you tried it?  Have you focused as much as you can on the moment you’re in, mental-eyes wide open, judgment suspended, all senses as live as you can get them?  Granted, I think it’s only scary because it’s such a smashing of the psychological status quo; it’s a type of experience few people have, so as an unknown, it’s scary.

It’s funny, because Awakeness, deliberately cultivated, can feel really good — especially when you are scared or panicking, getting your emotional feet on the ground makes you realize that you actually only have to “handle” this moment, this tiny slice of time, and that’s a big relief when your brain is screaming about how it “can’t handle” whatever horrors and scenarios it’s imagining.  The feeling of Awakeness brings into focus that those things are imaginings, and not actually worth freaking out about at all.  Awakeness can also feel awesome when coupled with being in contact with nature — it seems to allow you to share the state of consciousness much of nature happens in — and I’ve certainly heard nothing but good things about it in most other circumstances, too.

In fact the single best, clearest, most evolved mental states I’ve ever achieved — what I’d have to call Samadhi — have been a result of forcing my attention onto a single moment as much as I possibly could.   Awakeness, when it’s allowed to become the defining characteristic of your presence, feels an awful lot like…what?  Immortality maybe.  Infinity.  Like being everything.

On the other hand — and if you’ve never done this, pardon me for how odd it probably sounds — being Awake, aware of the moment, also makes Time seem totally bottomless. And this, while it sounds awesome in theory (oh, the ideas I’ve had, about eternity, immortality, spacetime, dimensions–!), trust me, it can be unbelievably uncomfortable in practice.

Let me back up a little.  Grant me that we stay distracted, stay away from Awakeness/Awareness, because we’re avoiding Pain, where “Pain” is the undifferentiated totality of unconsciousness-qua-negativity.  I realize we’ll all fill in the details, and define these broad nouns, differently; but for now that doesn’t matter.  Everyone has a few forms their Pain generally takes most often…examples are anger, anxiety, depression, dissatisfaction, etc.  A very big one for me is boredom.  I learned to hate boredom early in my life, and since then it’s become a trip-switch for negativity — both a cause and an indicator.  (I know, I totally just made a big chunk of my psychology make sense to you, did I?  ;)

Awakeness means you experience that moments aren’t narrow tunnels that shoot off into the distance; rather, they’re deep landscapes filled with a literally infinite amount of information and experience, waiting to be paid attention to. Normally, we experience them shallowly, or not at all, or only as memories of themselves.  But given the effort, one of the things that becomes immediately apparent is that there’s so much there in every moment — and also that, if you hold your awareness to one moment, it doesn’t “tick over” into another, but rather changes smoothly, becoming a single moment literally filled with (potentially) everything.  The “tick over”, the sensation that life is composed of discrete moments, is actually caused by us losing track of moments and then noticing them again — usually shallowly or as memories of themselves, as I said — giving the impression of a flicker of tiny things, rather than a vast cosmic stream that it’s easy to imagine has no beginning and no ending.

One of the quotes I have on the “random quote” section of the site is this one, which I put there precisely because it speaks to this oddness so well:  I do not cut my life up into days but my days into lives, each day, each hour, an entire life. –Juan Ramon Jimenez. That’s *exactly* what it feels like to have one’s attention on the moment; to be Awake.  The more Awake you get, the more experience fits in a smaller slice of “time” (insofar as time can still be understood to function the same way in that state).

Is anybody reminded of the Upload Your Own Skillz aspect of the Matrix story?  You could learn anything in that world, because technology had found a way to shrink the amount of time you needed to spend with it.  …HMMM, godlike powers from accessing more of the experience available in a moment, anyone??

But now, go forward again.  Imagine what my unconscious reaction against boredom does with the memory and anticipation of that feeling…it sounds something like, OMG EACH MINUTE IS A LIFETIME LONG!  OMG THERE’S ENOUGH INFORMATION BETWEEN HERE AND WALKING DOWN THESE STAIRS TO FILL UP A WHOLE DAY!  OMG I CAN’T STAND IT IT WOULD TAKE A MILLION YEARS JUST TO GET TO DINNERTIME!

Awakeness isn’t really boredom-inducing — in fact, far from it; you don’t get bored when every single thing is full of a lifetime’s worth of information — but from the outside, it looks horrendously boring, and I know for a fact that I’ve shied away from being more Awake at times because I felt that I couldn’t stand the boredom if I was.  Even though I actually, physically know better.  (Gotta love Psychologies.)

Of course, “boredom” as a form of Pain isn’t actually the desire for more information or richer experience; I know that.  It’s the desire for motion, to be dragged along and distracted by stimulus — and focusing deeply on reality doesn’t give you that; in fact it tends to smooth motion out, which is probably why your Zen-master types could ride out ridiculously stressful events with nary a nervous breakdown.  So my reaction against boredom isn’t appropriate here; it’s not really an argument against Awakeness — just one excuse I have for not pursuing it as much as I should.

(Of course, how do you pursue something that can’t happen in the future?  Damn yooooou English Language!  ;)

Some of you may have noticed my Three Recent Principles as they made their way over Twitter (which was really me being totally impressed with myself that I managed to create Principles so short!).  Those are renewals of a methodology I need in order to keep myself on a right path — I needed to re-work them and I’m happy that I did.

(They look like this:  1) Find the truth in silence; 2) Face the truths you find with courage; 3) speak the truths you know without compromise. I might write more about them later, I suppose.)

The necessity of Awakeness as a central part of any meaningful life was one of the very first truths that slapped me upside the head, after I first applied that method.  And I should stress again that Awakeness isn’t thinking, judging, contemplating, examining, reviewing, or being extra-aware of the past or the future:  It’s being willing to experience right now as fully as possible, without succumbing to any of the zillion excuses (Now sucks!  It’s boring!  It’s scary!  It’s unknown!) for letting life — actual in-the-moment life — pass us by.

So I’m going to be working a lot more on Awakeness.  Since I’ve had these initial revelations, I have managed to spend some time at least once a day “getting there”, which so far is an achingly slow and mentally difficult process.  But shit, if I can learn kungfu I can learn this, and it’ll get easier.

I’ll keep you posted, and if you learn anything profound about Awakeness, you keep me in the loop too, eh?