Awakening is an important spiritual metaphor, but it only becomes meaningful if we understand the state of spiritual sleep. And to really understand that, we need to be willing to acknowledge and engage the parts of us that resist awakening, even while other parts may desire it. We can never full-heartedly choose to awaken until we recognize the strength of our desire to stay asleep.

To be asleep in a spiritual sense is to be oblivious to crucial dimensions of reality. This has been the context in which spiritual teachers have long urged followers to awaken. Across human cultures and spiritual traditions, we encounter stories about being blind and coming to see, being asleep or dead and coming to life, and living in a state of delusion and coming to truth and reality. In whatever form these stories are told, we are presented with what seems to be the default state of human consciousness – a lack of awareness.

In words that would be deeply shocking if we were to truly hear them, Jesus said that we choose blindness and deafness to avoid being healed.1 What he is saying is that our lack of awareness is a choice. It is not just that we haven’t heard the invitation to full awareness; it’s that we don’t want it.

The Russian mystic, Gurdjieff, also used shocking imagery to describe this reality. He taught that the fundamental human problem is that we choose to go through life in a hypnotic state that he called “waking sleep.” Even if that sleep is occasionally interrupted by moments of intense emotional experience, we quickly slip back into a tangled dream of fantasy that blocks awareness of truth and reality.

So, what is it that keeps us asleep, and even after awakening makes us fall back into our slumber of oblivion? What keeps us stuck in our mindless robotic shuffling through a somnambulistic fog? Let me suggest three broad categories of sedatives to which we are addicted that keep us stuporous.

Spiritual Sedatives

1. Our illusions, prejudices, projections, and preconceptions

Written around 300 BCE, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave presents a picture of the way distorted perception leads to illusions that we take for reality. It’s a story about the difference between people who mistake sensory knowledge for truth and those who actually see what truly is. It is a story of walking out of the cave of entangled fantasies that thrive in semi-darkness into the full light of reality. Our prejudices, projections, and prejudgments are a few of those filters, and awakening requires identifying and releasing our attachment to all of them.

Anthony De Mello describes this lack of awareness by means of a pithy aphorism. “Life,” he suggests, “is like heady wine. Everyone reads the label on the bottle. Hardly anyone tastes the wine.”

Confusing the label with drinking the wine is responding to the world through our thoughts, judgments, biases, and preconceptions. But the map is not territory it describes; the concept is not the reality to which it points.

Our knowing of everything – including ourselves – is filtered through our prejudices and preconceptions. We don’t see reality. Instead we see only what passes through the filters of the categories into which we jam what we see. But experiencing the world through categorization and prejudgment is not experiencing things as they actually are. The distance this provides from reality keeps us comfortable, but it also keeps us entangled within the web of our illusions. It keeps us asleep.

2. Our attachment to our adaptive (or false) self

Psychoanalytic developmental psychology places the roots of the adaptive self (or what is often called false self) in the first four years of life. During this time, we learn to make adaptations to the developmental demands that surround us. Even though these adaptations may contain the seeds of our avoidance of reality, they are essential to our development. So, they are not bad in themselves. But, what might be necessary in a transitional stage for the two or three-year-old is seriously maladaptive for the mature adult.

In the earliest weeks of life, infants seem to experience an undifferentiated sense of self and others – a kind of oneness with everything. Feelings of omnipotence come from this absence of differentiation. However, after a few wet diapers and a lack of immediate responsiveness from caretakers, it doesn’t take long for this illusory sense of omnipotence to give way to overwhelming feelings of separateness, powerlessness, and vulnerability. This shift is terrifying. The infant soon learns that the way to remain safe is to act in ways that please adult authorities. This begins the journey of adaptation that we typically think of as socialization. But it also introduces us to highly addictive ways of defending against unwelcome realities.

Slowly we learn to minimize or deny unpleasant inner experiences and project them onto others, who are perceived as separate from us. We also learn to package and present ourselves in ways that will get us what we want from others. This is where we begin to lose alignment with the truth of our being and settle for living our falsity as we seek to hide what we consider to be our weakness and vulnerability.

3. Our resistance to life as it is

The most general form of our resistance to awakening is our unwillingness to receive life as it actually comes to us – as it truly is. We think we treasure life, but what we treasure is the fantasy-shaped expression of our most superficial desires. We want a life filled with good health, good weather, and good friends, and an absence of suffering, disappointment, and loss. Your fantasy may be slightly different, but fantasy is always the enemy of reality.

Resistance to life as it comes to us is resistance to reality. Life is not a pick-and-choose cafeteria. It comes to us unchosen. And until we stop trying to avoid the elements of life as they actually come to us, we will never be able to truly and deeply desire awakening. And until our deepest desire is to awaken to the fullness of reality and life as it is, we will always remain caught up in our illusions, prejudices, projections, fantasies, preconceptions, and attachment to our false ways of being.

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The great value of a diagnosis is that it presents us with an invitation to engage reality as it truly is. Although this identification of some of the reasons we resist awakening might be unwelcome, I believe it is important if something within us also longs for truth and reality.

The good news is that awakening is possible. This is the truth that has been proclaimed by all the great religious and spiritual traditions, Christianity certainly included. In the second blog in this trilogy, I will describe what this involves, and in the third I will describe signs of awakening. But let’s not rush to that too quickly. It’s easy to defend against what we don’t want to hear by focusing too soon on comforting things.

The place to start is right where you are in this moment. Embracing the reality of the present moment is the doorway to awakening, presence, wholeness, and fullness of life. There is, in fact, no other doorway to these things.

Notes

1. Matthew 13:15

2021 © Dr. David G. Benner

• In what ways do I confuse the label with drinking the wine as I respond to the world through thoughts, judgments, biases, and preconceptions?
• What masks do I wear that put me out of alignment with the truth of my being?
• What makes it hard for me to accept life as it arises and truly embrace reality?

This is the first of three blogs on awakening that I offer to help you prepare for the upcoming video series on this important topic.

More information on this video series – including sample videos – will be available soon on this website. Please contact us at info@cascadialivingwisdom if you have any questions

Resisting Awakening