What Does it Mean to “Wake Up”?
By: Jason Henry
Tags: Self Improvement, Spirituality, Psychology, Self, Personal Development

Photo by Rohan Makhecha on Unsplash

When you’re fast asleep and someone turns on the light, your eyes are searing in pain if you try to open them. As a matter of fact, you might not even be able to open your eyes.

It’s even worse when you wake up and reach for your smartphone. You have to turn down the brightness because your eyes will be in agony. At the very least you’ll need to block the blue light coming from the screen.

And just as when we turn on a light in a dark room, it’s the same thing when it comes to our own personal enlightenments.

When we’re in the dark or when we are unconscious for a long time and we see the light, not only do we have to turn away from it because it’s so blinding, we kind of hate it because it will hurt to some degree unless the amount of light is slowly increasing like when you use a dimmer switch.

But here’s the thing: what you see cannot be unseen.

When you are in a dark room for a long time, stumbling around for the light switch, you’re bumping and bruising yourself on all the stuff in the room. When you are unconscious, you stumble through the world in a similar way. You bump and bruise yourself, and you bump and bruise others, all while trying to find “the way.”

How am I supposed to navigate through this world? What am I supposed to be doing here? What is my purpose? These are the questions that will be answered when you finally find the light switch that illuminates your mental darkness.

What we do is to try and find something in our external world that is the answer to how to live, what to do and why to do it. These things attempt to point in the direction of the light switch without actually being the source of light itself.

These are things like religion, relationships, jobs, sex, money, pleasure and thought. These are the things people use to figure out who they are and what they’re supposed to do. The only problem is that these are man-made things.

Our ancestors had a need for identity, direction and purpose, and so they created these things and worshipped these things. They needed to quench their existential dread.

But these things are not the light. The light may be found in them or with their help and many people have attributed their personal enlightenments to these things. Right now I’m reading about a lot of people who were rock stars who turned to religion in their darkest hours and became sober.

But as someone who was religious and who has seen other religious people begin to worship their god and the bottle as well as people who were abused by the dogma of religion, I learnt that religion wasn’t the answer. Religion was merely a potential path towards the answer.

Same thing with jobs and money. People become extremely good at a task and then we see them decorated in the best clothes, money and accolades. We combine their talent and their stuff and call it “success,” and then we try to gain these things for ourselves for our own fulfillment but we can’t. There’s a missing ingredient.

Sex and all the things that cause a spike in dopamine are no different either. It could be food, music, drugs or whatever’s pleasurable, none of these things are the light that we seek. But they do feel pretty good. They feel really good. But again, how many people have we seen chase these things and then destroy themselves? Too many to mention.

Relationships don’t do the job either. It’s fantastic to be loved for who you are and fully seen by another. But that doesn’t mean much if you can’t do it for yourself.

And then there’s thought. Thought is the bedrock of all these things being used to chase identity, meaning, pleasure and enlightenment but it is also used as its own path to enlightenment.

Being conservative/liberal, metal/punk, masculine/feminine, theist/atheist or materialistic/asceticism are just thoughts. Any value these things have relative to its opposite is made up. But given the amount of bloodshed and fighting just these few dichotomies have shown the world, it is clear to see how much people imbue thoughts with meaning, truth and value.

As I said earlier, none of these things are the light. And despite people ruining themselves by trying to find themselves in these things, we have also seen people find themselves in these things. Or at least it seemed that way.

It is no wonder that when someone screams, “I found the light!” people sprint to that person and try to copy what they did.

People have not considered that something happened prior to the person finding the light that made them able to find the light, but I’ll tell you exactly what happened right now.

They stopped thinking.

Remember, all of this started when you were in a dark room trying to find the light switch so that you could know where you were, how to navigate through the room and who you were.

But when you remove the thoughts that you have to know something, you stop trying to find the light switch. You allow yourself to just be in the dark. You then realize that the dark isn’t bad at all. Who the hell said that the dark was bad, and why did you believe it? Why the heck weren’t you just enjoying life as it is?

This is far better than the struggle and strain of looking for the light. This is far better than judging people who were doing stupid things in their search for the light. This is far better than laughing at the attempts of others who were trying to find the light in a way you thought would fail. This is far better than forming bonds over the trauma of failure because eventually, you will see your own folly in them and realize how much of a fool you are.

This is far better because you’re finally relaxed.

And then it all clicks.

The light is on and you can see the room exactly for what it is. It takes some adjustment but the dimmer switch had already been increasing so it isn’t too bad. For some, it may be an immediate burst of light.

Nevertheless, you can see! And yet, you continue to watch everybody constantly feeling around for the light switch! You yell on the top of your lungs that the light is on, but everyone looks at you as if you’re crazy.

But you know what you’re talking about. You were in the dark, just like them. Then the light came on. How can you see it but the others can’t?

Then you remember some other people who also yelled that the light was on a long time ago, but you didn’t understand what the hell they were talking about. Clearly everything was dark. You might have tried out what they said and it didn’t work. But now you know why.

The problem was that you bought into the thoughts that said that there was something to change, something to fix, something that was lacking and that something was wrong. So you started to do the most to figure out the solution, but without ever actually defining the problem.

The light was never going to be found in the room. The light was in you. The light is you. But in order to block the light, something other than you had to be in control. That’s when thoughts hijacked the operation.

Turns out, the light was on by default. We are born with it on. It is no wonder why we kept searching for it because if darkness was all we ever knew, how would we know to look for its opposite?

Now that the light is on and now that you can see where you’re going, you don’t need thoughts. The truth is self-evident. The path is right in front of you. Thoughts are necessary when you don’t know the way but you want to keep moving. Thoughts are estimations of truth but they are not the truth, which is why they aren’t reliable enough to be fully believed in.

Not to mention, they just obscure what is right in front of your face. Or in the case of being fully deluded by thought, you’re in a pitch black room, trying to figure out how to live, what to do and who you are.

The answers to those questions and more are in front of your face. If you stop thinking, the answers are there. You may not believe it because you are still dominated by your mind, but if one of the greatest “minds” ever told you that your mind is overrated, would you listen?

“I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am.” “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.” “A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.”

Albert Einstein is one of the men who most closely looked at and studied reality. As a result, his research led to the development of the theory of relativity as well as quantum theory.

Apparently he also made funny faces in photographs and said some truly amazing and necessary sentences too. Truly a triple threat!

It is due to his reverence of what is that he was able to move humanity forward by contributing true value to the human race. Imagine what doing the same could do for you and for humanity.

As much as this would typically be called a spiritual post, I don’t even want to call it that because spirituality is just another path that may point in the direction of the light. It itself cannot be the answer, nor does it hold the patent or the copyright for the answer.

Look at your own life and honestly ask yourself if your thoughts have helped you or hindered you; have they honored you or hurt you?

Be scientific about it. Actually make a log of the thoughts you have for a specific duration of time. If you took action on the thoughts, why or why not? If you believed in them, why or why not? Were these thoughts useful at all? Do the thoughts sometimes contradict each other? Are the thoughts based in reality or are they based on previous thoughts?

Investigate and see for yourself.

Otherwise, you might be like me and others who became so overwhelmed with thoughts that you stopped buying into them and start buying into reality.

And when you really think about it, why would one ever need more than what is real? Why would one choose assumptions over truth?