Presence: Awakening
[Exploring Life] At night we sleep and surrender our awareness to the unconscious world of darkness and dreams. During the day we remain attentive to our needs, hopes, and desires in the midst of the circumstances that inhabit our conscious awareness. When we first begin to wake in the morning we are guided into a fragile and mysterious space, a threshold between the mercurial world of dreams and our episodic foray into the world of striving. In the threshold of our morning awakening a primal and mystical conversation occurs. We are not completely awake, nor completely asleep, but our awareness travels deftly and fluidly across both realms. Our conscious thought is intimate with our most imaginative dreaming. An awakening is a primal threshold and a magical moment; when we awaken there is subtle yet pervasive feeling of moving from one mode of reality into another.
Sleep is the carnal medium of dreams. If our sleeping patterns become worn and imbalanced, the equilibrium between our conscious and unconscious worlds is contorted. Insomnia is an inability inhabit sleep, as well as a disruption of the natural interplay between our conscious and subconscious conversation. When sleep is illusive, we lose intimacy with the primal cycle of surrender and awakening. Our minds can become addicted to thought trapping our presence in a whirl of mental activity that inhibits the approach of sleep. Without sleep there is nothing for us to wake from. Morning creatively emerges with the rising sun and the earth begins to vibrate with the rhythms of life, yet we are already awake – we fail to emerge creatively. Somehow the quality of those initial moments in the morning inspire and animate our presence during the day.
Where are we in those first subtle moments of awakening? Our souls move in unison with the earth. The cycles of day and night, and the magical thresholds in between them, are deeply intimate with the secret essence of our presence, identity, and well-being. The earth provides an essential pulse; planetary rhythms are a faithful guide in preserving a sacred relationship with the natural world. The essence of time is not chronological or mechanical; there is a natural sense of time that flows around the immense creativity of the seasons in vast improvisatory displays of weather and climate. Sleep and dreaming create a fluency with the rhythms of the earth. We feel the consistency of the earth, yet each day on the planet is creative and unique. To awaken is to participate in eternal and universal patterns of variations on the theme of Earth.
How unfortunate it is to awake in the morning feeling uninspired. It is amazing to think that we can close our eyes and enter into a world we call sleep and later open our eyes and re-emerge in the here and now. The trust implicit in this phenomenon is immense. However, our daily lives are often mired in struggle and striving of our own design. That is to say, humankind has instituted a kind of survival of the fittest in social and economic terms. Our approach to living together remains naive and pedestrian as our history of conflict shamefully reveals. The inability to evolve beyond the immature foundations of our social-economic assumptions is one of the most profound and dramatic failures of the turbulent collective venture known as civilization. When we lose our intimacy with the earth, we lose the inspiration to awaken. Our days become blandly habitualized and routinized, while our sense of wonder, surprise, amazement, exuberance, grace, and beauty deteriorate. We wake up feeling uninspired because we have amputated ourselves from the rhythm and presence of the natural world.
What are our first thoughts, perceptions, and feelings in the moments we begin to awaken? If our souls have lost connection to the earth, we may be waking only to immediately begin thinking about the tasks and requirements of the day. In other words, we awaken in the midst of noise and rumination. Our first moments of the day, the threshold of awakening, can be a protected sanctuary for the care of our spirit and soul. Our first thoughts, perceptions and feelings while we awaken should inspire us to feel gratitude for the arrival of a new day. Each day we experience is a gift, and we have no way of knowing how many days remain ahead of us.
When we fail to get enough sleep what have we lost? We have lost our instinctive relationship with the natural rhythm of the earth. After a night of little sleep, we arise but have no real need to awaken. The threshold of awakening that cultivates an intimate interplay between our conscious and subconscious world deteriorates into merely getting out of bed in order to endure the initial habits that routinise the morning. We forget the immensity of the mystery that we participate in. We lose the wonder that is innate in the approach of a new day. We lose the presence of creativity and beauty that is symbolized by each rising sun. When we lose the threshold of awakening, we begin to lose our perspective on life itself. We lose the feeling of impermanence that walks with each of us. These losses reveal themselves in our lack of appreciation and expression of the fact that we are in the presence of a new day, and therefore a new possibility for creative expression.
Waking up takes place in a secret space. No one else ever knows what our experience of awakening is. Often we do not recall the experience clearly ourselves since we are inhabiting an in-between space – a threshold. Thought cannot penetrate a threshold; a threshold invites perceptual awareness and pure observation in order to pursue a creative exploration of our experience. Yet we have an unfortunate tendency to revere thought and regard it as the most important way to interact with our experiences. Without a keen sense of awareness and observation our thought patterns inevitably remain confined, constricted, and unimaginative. When we are in the midst of awakening, our task is to open our awareness and attention as fully as possible to the experience, without imposing external thoughts upon it. All thresholds befriend observation, awareness, and attention.
Sometimes we arise to the immediate assault of thought. This can often take the form of a grievance, a worry, or simply be an extension of compulsive busyness. It is a difficult way to greet the morning, to greet a new possibility in life. We do, however, live in a social system that we seem resigned to endure more than enjoy. Society is a game of survival, and how well we survive requires a degree of conformance to the rules demanded. The inept and deceptive drone of politics begins to make us weary. We live in an age of serial crises; angst is persistently hurtled at us using evermore sophisticated technologies. The more we communicate with each other, the more neurotic we become. Our minds drowning in an excess of imposed demands, requirements, commands, and procedures. We collectively mass produce solutions to anxieties and neuroses that don’t exist. It is no wonder that thought begins to ceaselessly torment our conscious; we risk becoming senselessly addicted to rumination.
Of course, thought is a significant and important mental capability. It would be foolish to portray all thinking as being inherently problematic. However, thinking can easily become both excessive and obsessive. In addition, thinking is part of a larger mental environment and is stimulated by other modes of perception and awareness. There is little enjoyment in waking up in the morning to find ourselves agitated by thoughts flowing through our mind. In this moment, thoughts only serve to blind us to the experience we might have, and cause us to behave in an insular, closed manner. Not only do we become lost in thought, we become lost. The morning is the dawn of new creative possibilities in our lives, and these possibilities thrive in the in-between space of the threshold of awakening.
Perhaps we should consider the first moments of the morning, the mysterious and luminous moments of our daily awakening, as sacred time. By this I mean that the threshold of awakening each day is a time for reverence and the exploration of our spiritual presence as it gradually transitions from dreaming into conscious awareness. What do our nocturnal forays have to offer the embrace of the new day that is beginning to unfold? How can we continue the nightly conversations of our dreams with the daily interaction of our everyday lives? In this way we might be able to reanimate the mystery within our presence and inspire our life with a mystical allurement.