Sleeper, Awake!

What does living an awakened life mean?

Awake, calls the voice to us

of the watchmen high up in the tower

awake, you city of Jerusalem

Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme

This is a highly developed and beloved cantata of J.S. Bach. It’s based on a Lutheran hymn that in turn comes from the parable of the ten virgins (Matthew 25:1-13) as well as, interestingly, the love poetry of the Song of Songs.

From this Wikipedia article:

The lower voices add in unusually free polyphonic music images such as the frequent calls "wach auf!" (wake up!) and "wo, wo?" (where, where?)

We all know from experience, whether from trying to get reluctant children up to go to school in the morning or otherwise, that it can be very difficult to wake someone up, requiring much repetition of “Wake up!” in various forms.

Where do humans disappear to when asleep?

Being “Woke”

Black activists in the early to mid-20th century started using the term “woke” as a call for awareness of racial discrimination. They felt people were sleep-walking through how severe it was at the time, and needed to stay alert for all and any forms of it. Later it began to be applied to other forms of discrimination and oppression including sexism, poverty, and the marginalisation of queer people.

Now it has been weaponised by the right-wing to make fun of people they feel are “too progressive”.

What Does it Mean To Be Awake?

While as a woman of colour who is an ally of LGBTQIA+ people, I am very interested in everything to do with being woke, I am primarily concerned at this moment with the nondual implications of the concept.

Here’s something from late 20th century popular culture:

”Wake up, Neo! The Matrix has you.”

Is the Matrix a good metaphor of the dangers of duality holding people in its thrall? Perhaps in some ways. It certainly has significant limitations though, so let’s look at another perspective.

Jeff Foster wrote a scathing critique called Awakening From the Dream Of Non-Duality

The discovery of the absence of a separate self can be a shocking, often life-changing insight that pulls the rug from under our feet. But many are now taking this momentary insight to be the destination, the goal, rather than a new beginning… Without the balance, nonduality just remains some conceptual understanding that does not truly bring rest to the weary seeker. It simply becomes another burden for the seeker to carry. It becomes a new dogma. And causes new conflict, both internally and between each other…

It is (sic) possible to come down from your “I am nobody” perch, to leave your “I am pure consciousness” castle, to stop protecting yourself with the “I am not a person” personal identity, and rediscover your deep humanity?

Oh yes, there is no question – this is a call to total humility…

Nondual clarity without love is not really worth talking about anymore.

And so, mental certainty and all of those second-hand nondual concepts melt into this love and acceptance and compassion beyond words, and all that is left is an invitation, constantly renewing itself in the furnace of intimacy…

To be human means a lot of things, one of which is the tendency to glom onto concepts and ideals rather than being itself. So ironically it is all too common for proponents of being awake and nondual to engage in very dualistic and sleepwalking conflicts with others. I know this personally as I struggle with it on a daily basis. I want to think of myself as this wonderful awake person. But in many (most? all?) ways I remain stuck in the ways of sleep: trying to cling to control, falling into all kinds of dualistic thinking, speaking and behaving, and acting like theory is anything without the primacy of love, as it is.

Awake, calls the voice to us

The sobering, humbling truth is that however close I may come at times to waking up to the truth of Reality As It Is, I fall back asleep for longer stretches of times, maybe into a deeper sleep.

Does it seem strange to you that sitting on a chair or a cushion without moving, looking like sleep is on its way, can be a path toward living a life that is more fully awake?

Meditation, even contemplating continually, is only part of the answer, though.

I could just through meditation become obsessed with my own ‘awakeness’ and further become more asleep in alienating myself from the ground of my being and from other people.

It’s how I meditate, and continually contemplate, then. It’s maintaining a willingness and practice to return over and over again to Being With, learning over time to remain with or in the words of John 15:4

Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.

It’s a deep in-dwelling, based on a lifetime of openness, humility, and willingness to question myself and what I am believing to be Reality rather than embracing Reality As It Is, however challenging that may be.