Awakening and Embodiment

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What is awake does not have a point of view. It simply sees what is without distortions—distortions of conditioning, culture, personality, ideas, meaning, or interpretation, which are all additions to the bare experience of what is here Now. When the mystery of this naked Awareness awakens itself spontaneously within a body-mind, it is not a “person” who wakes up to the truth of his or her own clear nature. It is Awakeness that has awakened within its own experience of Being. It is the Mystery, and not a “me,” that sees itself beyond all separation, for in such undivided Truth, the “me” is seen to be fiction, not fact, an idea, not Reality, an expression of life and not life’s victim.

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Awakening to our true nature happens in a split second when the mind is still. Nothing needs to change in order to wake up to the truth of our Being. The full embodiment of this awakeness that we are, however, might last years or a lifetime. It is in the embodiment of the truth that real transformation takes place. Such embodiment is a continual process of shedding identities and ideas, however, not acquiring them. Embodiment might be said to be the real work of awakening, but it is a natural, spontaneous process, not the project of the egoic mind, for that thought is never what awakens.

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In an initial awakening, Awakeness wakes itself up out of the relative into the Absolute. This moment, however, is not an end, but simply the beginning of truth moving more consciously within us. Eventually, What is awake returns for the Whole of itself, and everything that was once refused or rejected comes up to be awakened also. Our true nature is present to all moments and all experiences without picking and choosing. Sooner or later, everything gets to be seen, met, accepted, and loved. Nothing is excluded. It is not just the mind that wakes up to its true nature, but the heart, hara, brain, even the cells of our body get to wake up. We no longer refuse the moment—whatever it may be—because we meet it as an expression of what we are. We find ourselves wanting the truth of our experience more than we want life to look a certain way. We realize, in truly being here, that there is nowhere else to be, and nowhere to arrive.