How do we quiet the voice of our inner critic? How do we balance the inner-voice from overpowering our quest for truth? Answer. We need a radical awakening!
The great teachers down through the ages realize that most men and woman are in a sort of hypnotic sleep. Jesus talks about “staying watchful” in many of the gospels, and the name “Buddha” literally means “I am awake” in Sanskrit.
We are never unhappy, scared or depressed for the reasons we think or suspect. It is indeed due to a false and illusory sense of identity. This is a structural problem developed from mental labels and conditioning.
We incorrectly believe that we possess a separate self and an individual ego. This is a false idea that causes fear, loneliness and neurosis. It puts us into conflict with other people who are also under the illusion of having separate selves.
In reality we are all connected. And the reality is there is only oneness. Oneness which results in truth through “at one ment” or atonement.
The late mystic Vernon Howard beautifully summarizes this for us:
“Psychic sleep is the cause of every human problem and disaster. It is sleeping people who suffer from heartache and loneliness, from fear and violence. Only self-awakening can end these sorrows. However — and please emphasize this point in your mind — man does not know he is asleep. So deep is his immersion in psychic hypnosis, that he instantly denies his actual condition. In other words, he does not know that he does not know. He spends his entire life under the gigantic illusion of being happy and productive, never once facing the terror in which he lives. Man huddles fearfully in a haunted house which he calls a castle”. -VH
The same thing has been said by others from Buddha and Jesus to Socrates and Guerdjeff…
“There’s only one sign I’m going to give you: the sign of the prophet Jonah.”- Jesus Christ
“Sooner or later, life is going to lead us (as it did Jesus) into the belly of the beast, into a place we can’t fix, control, explain, or understand. That’s where transformation most easily happens—because only there are we in the hands of God—and not self-managing”. —Richard Rohr
The mind falls silent.
“One thing, and one thing only is therefore necessary. It is necessary for individual men and women to awaken, to remember Who they are, and then to become Who they really are, to live it in the service of Truth. Without this awakening and this becoming, nothing else can help us”. -Guerdjeff Foundation of California
So, there you you have it again. The sleep and the need to awaken
It all comes back to self -identity and asking who am I and what is real and what is truth. We can see that truth is not owned by one religion or one philosopher.
It is certainly magnificent to worship and hold in one’s heart the love for the great mystic teachers and Christ himself.
- But we need a radical awakening beyond the mind to understand the crucifixion and the reality it points to in each of us.
- The truth of who we really are beyond the mind made self holds the answer.
- All goodness and blessings to all.
“Behold, the real experiencer is not the mind, but myself, the light in which everything appears. Self is the common factor at the root of all experience, the awareness in which everything happens.” (Nisargadatta Maharaj)
