The Awakened Way
From the desk of GraceWatcher Ministries
While the world is trying to solve its problems
and everyone around you is engaged in the same, you're not. While everybody
around you is trying to figure it out, trying to arrive, trying to get there,
trying to be worthy, you're not. While everyone thinks that awakening is a
grand, noble, halo-enshrouded thing, for you it's not. While everybody is
running from this life right now, in this moment, to try to get there, you're
not. Where everybody has an argument with somebody else, mostly everybody else,
starting with themselves, you don't. Where everybody is so sure that happiness
will come when something is different than it is now, you know that it won't.
When everybody else is looking to achieve the perfect state and hold on to it,
you're not.
When everybody around you has a whole host of ideas and beliefs about a whole
variety of things, you don't. Everyone on the path is getting there; you haven't
gotten anywhere. Everyone is climbing the mountain; you're selling hiking boots
and picks at the foot in the hope that if they climb it and come back down, they
may be too exhausted to do it again. When everybody else is looking to the next
book, to the next teacher, to the next guru to be told what's real, to be given
the secret key to an awakened life, you're not. You don't have a key because
there's not a lock to put it in.
When you're living what you are in an awakened way, being simply what you've
always been, you're actually very simple. You basically sit around wondering
what all the fuss is about. When everyone is sitting around saying, "I hope that
happens to me", you remember when you did that. You remember that you didn't
find a solution to that. You remember that the whole idea and that there was a
problem created - because of all of that. When you're being what you are, when
you're living the awakened life, there's nobody to forgive, because there's no
resentment held, no matter what.
The truth of your being doesn't crave happiness; it couldn't actually care less.
It doesn't crave love, not because you are so full of love, but because it just
doesn't crave love. It's very simple. It doesn't seek to be known, regarded
highly, or understood. When you're living what you are in an awakened way,
there's no ideal for you anymore. You've stepped off the entire cycle of
suffering, of becoming; you're not interested.
It's a curious life you find yourself in. You find yourself... where you are.
Not where I am, where you are. Where you really are. Where we really are. It's a
curious place to be (especially in the beginning) not to be driven by anything -
pleasure or displeasure, helping or hurting, loving or hating. The only thing
that will move you (and I don't mean to be too poetic about this) is the same
thing that moves a leaf hanging from a tree. It's simply because the breeze
blows that way. So you always know what to do: the breeze blows that way, and
that's the way you go.
You don't ask questions anymore. You don't evaluate why the breeze is blowing
that way because you know that you don't know why. And you know you can't know
why. There's never been a leaf anywhere that knows why the wind blows that way
on that day at that moment. That breeze changes the orientation of your life,
moment to moment to moment, simply because that's the way life is moving. And
when you're living in your awakened self you have no argument with the way it is
moving because it is the same as you are.
And you know that the breeze was always there, from the very beginning, and that
it wasn't reserved for special people. If you didn't notice it at some point in
your life, you know it was because you weren't listening, or because you thought
you had to figure something out before you could listen, or because you thought
there had to be some conclusion before you could just listen so deeply, so
without agenda, so without hope of a better future that you would feel the
movement.
Many of you know what I'm speaking of. Truth never explains why it's moving that
way at that moment. And if you ask, it won't give any information. It would be
like a leaf asking the wind, "Why are you moving that way right now?" The
question doesn't make any sense to the wind. But your argument with the way the
truth would move - whatever that way is - is no longer there for you. You're no
longer arguing with it. You're no longer trying to figure it out. Mother Mary
didn't figure it out. Buddha didn't figure it out. Ramana didn't figure it out.
None of them figured it out. They just became That. Simple. Ordinary - in the
same way a leaf is ordinary.
When you're living in your awakened being and living in an awakened way, power
on any level is not an issue for you. It's not interesting. The power to control
another human being is not interesting. Intellectual power is not interesting.
The power to control yourself is not interesting. The power that people want to
give you is not interesting to you - not because it shouldn't be; it's just not.
What would you want to do with it? You see that there's nothing you want to do
with it. You realize, in the truth of your being, that you are the totality
itself, but you have no interest whatsoever in doing anything with that
knowledge, with using that knowledge.
Finally, you realize that you really don't want to change anybody, not because
you shouldn't want to change them, because you just don't. You might not want to
be around everyone, but still you don't want to change them. None of this is an
ideal - it's the end of ideals. None of this is holiness; it's the end of
holiness. It's the beginning of wholeness. None of this is something to achieve,
because it's not achievable. It's simply what is in the truth of your being.
It's just what is. You can't attain what's naturally so. And nobody anywhere can
ever tell you when or why, or to what degree you'll let go of untruth; you will
let go when you let go, usually when nothing else works.
When you're living in the awakened way, in the awakened being that you are,
you're alone, and you're finally comfortable with it. You're alone, but you're
not lonely at all, because the only one who was ever supposed to meet you where
you are - the only one who ever could meet you where you are one hundred percent
- was you. Nobody else could ever fully meet you where you are - maybe ninety
percent, maybe ninety-five. Nobody can meet you fully but you.
When you finally do, then you don't need anybody else to do it for you. Then
you're alone, more alone than you could ever imagine. And strangely - very
strangely - you are more connected, more intimate, more at one with everything.
More. And you would have never thought that those two could in any way be
together: total aloneness and total oneness. You would have never guessed that
that's the way it would end up. But it does, and it always has.
And finally, when you're just living in the awakened way that you really are,
you'll never form an image again of what it's like. Even as it's happening, you
won't form an image because you'll know they're all images, dust. The way it was
yesterday won't be the way it is today.