A Deeper Waking Up

"The path," says Pema Chodron, "is the goal."   (When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times)

I read this today and it struck me: I have heard how it's the journey, not the destination, that we should be paying attention to, but this was a new way of saying that we are already here, if only we would wake up.  What does it mean to wake up?  There are as many ways of waking up--and kinds of waking up--as there are alarm clocks and sleeping people.  

A tooth hurts.  It nudges us awake; we get up and go to the medicine cabinet.  The analgesic is only a temporary fix.  We know we must have the tooth pulled in order to heal.

We are sound asleep and then we hear our baby begin to fuss in the next room.  Immediately, we are completely awake, pulling ourselves out of bed and stumbling into the next room to lift the baby from the crib.

A restless sleep, too many dreams; a glance at the alarm clock--there is not much time left to sleep and we know we will not be feeling good at work the next day due to our lack of rest.  Finally, just before dawn, we fall into heavy slumber only to be jolted awake fifteen minutes later by the buzzing of the alarm.

These are temporary sleeps; these are fleeting awakenings.  They are shadows of the real thing.  One day, the tooth will be gone from the mouth.  One day, the baby will be grown.  One day, work will have ceased and the alarm clock will be out of a job.  We will sleep through the night.

Most of us are sleeping through our lives, too.  We are focusing on the throbbing tooth, the demanding baby, the worries of the wee hours.  We do not want to pay attention to the greater pain which undergirds the others.  It is too big, too steadfast, a monolith of fact which we are too weary to face.  We are hoping for a better tomorrow, five minutes of peace today, everyone getting along, and eventually, heaven.  We are lulled by the narcotic of quotidian events into ignoring the pain beyond the pain.  It is a human truth that it usually takes a life-or-death blow to awaken us further.  Sometimes we are hit by financial devastation.  Sometimes we find out we have a serious health problem.  Sometimes our lover betrays us.  Sometimes we lose a child to sudden death.  In all of these injuries, we are given an opportunity: run toward the experience or do everything possible to scramble away as fast as we can.  The world around us is heavily invested in the latter solution.

When a woman is pregnant for the first time, she can only project what labor will be like for her from what she hears and what she reads.  When a child has a loose tooth the first time, he is afraid.  He trusts no one but himself.  The tooth is hanging by a thread but still, he resists its loss.  He does not understand that once on the other side--toothless--he will turn and see himself five minutes ago and laugh at how he'd been afraid.  Labor is not quite as easy, although a newborn baby at the breast somehow causes immediate amnesia of preceding pain, as women who have been through it know.  Irrespective of evolution, wiggly teeth and uterine contractions, and their accompanying fear and pain, are still part of the human experience.  Tooth fairies cannot come if the tooth remains in the mouth and women cannot become mothers if the baby is never born, philosophical objections to the contrary notwithstanding.  As a species, we have not evolved past pain; it is still part of our experience, although we sometimes individually evolve out of or because of our own pain.

Death is the final unknown, and all our conjecturing and belief before we enter into that experience, all our faith in a particular outcome, is no guarantee that we are correct in our thinking.  Only when, only if, we are still there on the other side of the experience will we be able to look back and see how little we understood.  Maybe death is a little like losing a tooth for the first time, a little like the first experience of childbirth.   Transformation often has its before and after.

We all have particular struggles.  We would like them to go away.  In Kabbalah, one of the teachings says that we each choose our soul's difficulties before existence.  We choose our weaknesses, our parents, our life's path; the trouble we face will be the vehicle to help us evolve, if we pay attention and do the work.  At birth, this consciousness is erased.  We are, with regard to our pre-carnate but sentient self, tabula rasa.  In a certain respect, this concept, whether true or not (and it is obviously entirely unprovable), can give us hope and strength, for if we were the ones who knowingly chose the difficulties we are now facing, we are also the ones who have the way up and out.  It will not happen without a fight, even though most of us will decide to stay out of the fray of battle and just go through the motions of being alive.  Yet, Kabbalah insists that we have chosen exactly what we need in order to come up higher.  We are empowered to rescue ourselves; indeed, we are the only ones who can.

Were it not for a broken heart, I might not have learned that I was already enough.  Were it not for the pain of rejection, I might never have had to accept myself.  Were it not for thinking about Kabbalah's claim and discovering what I had been trying to prove, or what I was waiting for someone else to heal inside of me, I might never have rescued myself.  I might still be on a path of self-improvement rather than plopping down under the bodhi tree, already myself, already with everything I need.  This is not to imply that I have arrived; rather, I am continually arriving.

Loss always provides us with an opportunity for going deeper into the experience of transformation.  Loss always means another door has opened; the room beyond it is dark, but so is the room in which we find ourselves presently.  Once you recognize that you are already in a cave with no way out, there is not a whole lot of reason to stop exploring.  You may just find, once you lose your fear of the dark and of death, that you finally get to live.  There is a deeper awakening out of a deeper sleep.  It is only by running directly into our experience--and perhaps witnessing ourselves in the midst of our suffering--that we discover our profound courage.  When we finally stop wriggling to get out from under the grasp of what is, we can look around and see that we have nothing more and nothing less than ourselves and maybe, as Pema Chodron often says, "we could give ourselves a break."  Maybe we can embrace compassion and forgiveness and let the awakening take whatever path it will.  Maybe we can recognize this moment as just what it is: our life.  And maybe we  can let that be goal enough.