Jul
6
More Moe Dialogue #2
Filed Under Awakening
Moe’s Question 2: If we are apparently already awake, but I don’t know or experience that, then how can it be said that I am already awake?
Dear Moe,
Your questions are so hook-laden there’s little wonder that you’re hooked. The word “hooked” is a technical term that captures that moment in a fish’s life when—while minding its own business—it swims across a morsel of food and suddenly finds itself pulled inexorably out of its favorite medium (water) and into an imaginary world where it is either dinner, canned, or thrown back into the lake (minus any of the innocence it once had). If this sounds like a metaphor for our own self-pursuit, you are correct.
Within this seemingly simple question, you touch on three different levels while treating them as one. While this is a common occurrence, the act of missing or confusing levels never ends well. In fact, it is the root of all human suffering. Allow me to elaborate.
“Apparent” and “know” and “experience” are actually three very different human interfaces. However, you’re inadvertently treating them as though they are the same. This is roughly akin to utilizing three different strategies to improve your vision: putting on your eyeglasses; holding a book flat against your face; or closing your eyes entirely. Putting on your reading glasses may assist you in seeing better, whereas attempting to look through the book probably will not. Closing your eyes will certainly not assist you in improving your vision one whit, unless you’re easily distracted by external sensory noise and distraction. If this is the case, closing your eyes might be just the ticket to exactly where you want to go.
Sidebar: A word about language, which you seem to suggest is a criterion for something. First off, ask any politician about language and he or she will say, “Anything can be said.” You can say you are awake, you can say you are asleep; you can say you are a woman, you can say you are a man. As Abraham Lincoln said, “You can call a dog’s tail a leg, but that doesn’t make it one.” And it certainly doesn’t mean that the dog has five legs.
Many years ago, I saw Art Linkletter at Mid-Vail in Colorado. Art is someone you may or may not have heard of, but that really doesn’t matter much; your having (or not having) heard of Mr. Linkletter really only has to do with you and in no way denies him existence or a good sandwich or anything. It doesn’t have you dispute his existence or doubt that there is, or was, such a person. I suspect you can imagine there are people in this world who apparently (your word) exist, but who you don’t know exist and you haven’t experienced as existing. Even so, you or someone else could still say they exist. Gandhi, Jesus, or John Travolta perhaps exist. There are different evidences for each, yet you wouldn’t deny any of them their existence. To deny their existence, you’d certainly be far enough outside of your own relevant business to be both wasting your time and energy as well as collecting problems you don’t need.
Let’s get back to Art—who certainly may exist, who I saw but didn’t meet, and who you may or may not know of. He once hosted a popular TV show: a kind of a candid camera for kids called, Kids Say the Darnedest Things. If you want something to be popular, make it about kids or dogs; if you want something to be notorious, make it about sex. Having led courses for thousands of people and been in the presence of any one of these walking, talking oddities we euphemistically call “human,” I must say that People Say the Darnedest Things. People will say practically anything. They will speak when they haven’t got a clue and pretend they have. They will speak when they jolly well ought to shut up. They will speak when it isn’t in their best interest. The gift of speech did not come the ability to relate to or embrace silence, and this really and truly is a human shame. The average man speaks about 2,000 words a day while the average woman utters about 7,000. I am not sure of the gay or lesbian count. How many of those words are “worth” saying and what does “worth saying” mean? Was “worth saying” worth saying? Did it make its own criteria, as in “you have to be this tall to ride this ride”?
In other words, you have to be a certain degree of awake to even notice that you are awake; and you must also have a certain level of self knowledge (perhaps the capability of shutting up?) to observe yourself at all. You can be a certain height, weight, and intelligence all without knowing that you are or have any of these. And what you say is really just your own personal contribution to global warming (i.e., hot air).
To boil it down, your question seems to suggest that if you don’t know of or experience something, what “good” is it? I suspect you don’t know the crystalline structure of water and yet still depend, to some degree, on ice. Actually, you depend on ice a lot, seeing that it is a primary constituent of maintaining the temperature of our planet. To do philosophy, make love, or be inclined to do anything at all, we need to have a certain ambient temperature. (Mercury is too hot for philosophy, while Venus is too cold.) While we need it hotter for making love than playing cards, we still depend on ice to keep things cool. So you might be better off knowing the crystalline structure of ice than at least half of the things that you actually do know.
(Footnote: Did you know water actually freezes in fourteen distinct crystalline structures? What determines the specific structural formation is the ambient temperature and pressure. If there isn’t enough room for water to expand as it might like to in your freezer, it simply freezes in a subtly different form. The only reason I know this is that I have an endless curiosity and good friends. One day, I asked myself the question, “what happens to water if it is under such pressure that it can’t expand even though it is cold enough to freeze?” Fortunately, I was able to phone a friend—in this case my sister who is a hydro-geologist—and get the answer.)
Like water under pressure and in the presence of varying degrees of evidence, we form different crystalline structures, all roughly known to us as “knowing.” Examples of these structures are sensory data, logic, experience, faith, etc. Interestingly, we have even more than fourteen different evidentiary formats and each has its own inherent strengths and weaknesses. A lack of appreciation of these “levels of knowing” is a bit like painting Earth a single color.
Back to life as Art. Mr. Linkletter, doesn’t need you to exist or to have existed. This is lucky for Art. In the same way, “awake” can reside comfortably in you without your knowledge, attention, or experience of ever running across its path.
In other words, awakeness doesn’t need you to know or experience it for it to exist. Awake is a special quality; it is a world aware of itself. It happened on Earth in human beings. The moment one person awakened, Earth was a planet aware of itself. Thank goodness neither one of us had to be the first person to wake up. How lonely must that have been to be the only one: how sick.
Since that first awakening, other people have also woken up. More accurately, everyone has awakened; but they’ve done so by degrees. It may be that everyone has the possibility of waking up completely; but certainly everyone is awake to a certain yet varying degree. The question isn’t really whether you are awake or not; the question is, “how awake are you?” The good news is you can regard the “how” of this question in its quantitative sense (i.e., meaning to what degree am I awake?) or you can see it in its more beneficial light as “how do I awaken?” And this opens a very practical doorway leading to practices for awakening.
There are degrees of awake. And awake itself is a slippery concept. Awake is the observation of a process that most of us perceive as a thing. Things have certain qualities including structure. Awake may also have structure (I don’t want to deny it that) but we certainly don’t know what that structure is. It’s easy to say you are awake or that you aren’t awake; but if questioned, you really must admit you haven’t a clue what awake really is, what makes it come and go, or even if it does come and go. Awake is best approached with openness. Yet any attempt to know or experience being awake is to approach it with closedness and with specific criteria.
I am told that there are people who can pick a place in the woods and sit so still that a deer will not only approach, but won’t even notice their presence. This stillness even allows them to gently touch the deer. This is a far more advanced practice than shooting a deer with a high-powered rifle from a quarter mile away, but it doesn’t lead to venison for dinner. I am suggesting that you are hunting the state of being awake. Actually, you’re really hunting the knowing or the experiencing that you are awake. I want you to stop that, simply because it’s a waste of time and energy.
Please allow me to explain: to submit something to knowing and experiencing (e.g., awake) is to require it to put on a specific show for you. This is not unlike requiring a deer (dear) to dance for you before you will call it a deer (dear). “Awake” is, as far as I can tell, formless. Requiring it to have form (in the same way everything else you experience or know has form) simply precludes you from observing it or observing through it. Worse yet: awake is actually a certain kind of “knowing” so it joins knowing and experience as interactive filters. In other words, knowing reveals itself to be a process not an object. Your question suggests you are in search of an object instead of searching with a specific filter called “awake.”
When looking for a noun, a verb is simply too fleeting to notice or register in your search. In fact, when searching for a noun, you are already under the spell of the verb called “searching.” Searching is a jealous verb that seeks to keep you from all other verbs. Whether you know it or not, you’re wanting “awake” to stop, disrobe, dance, and offer itself up to you. It might do that if it could; but given how unaware and unawake most people are, there just isn’t sufficient interface with the land of awake to put it to the very tests you’re wanting to subject it to. At this point (in time and level) we will have close calls with awake, and we need to be thankful for those. If you were to become truly awake, you simply couldn’t relate to the rest of us; we would be too slow, too stupid, and way too transparent. We would become rednecks at your symphony. Careful, please dear, what you ask for. Awake is a game in process. It is a partial offering. Not because awake itself is partial, but because our bandwidth isn’t currently sufficient to withstand very much of it. Awake is only a game so long as you don’t have all of it. And we do love a game.
I will now stretch way beyond your question and hint at how we might relate to “awake” more effectively. From what I can tell, like everyone else you possess certain abilities and not others. You might want to cultivate a witness. A witness is a pre- or post-reactive persona with little or no vested interest in a given outcome—and thus is open to whatever happens along. I can tell from your willingness to play this game that you’ve already worked and played a great deal—opening yourself to the magical “yes” word. And to this I say, “well done!”
Yet there remain imbalances you continue to pay tithe to. There are responses you must make, words you must speak, and preferences you feed at least daily. In other words, your witness often goes hungry in the face of preconceived outcomes. As your witness develops you will learn about the land of awake. You will discover awake is chasing her own tail (tale). You will discover what you’ve been after all along is awakening to awake—which is simply running before you can walk or even crawl.
There are so many simple ways to approach awake and cultivating awareness can further most of them. As you do so, awareness will reveal itself not only as “no object” but as your interface with objects. It will work its way back to that which you really are—the beautiful blooming into discovering oneself as a human being. As you begin playing with awareness, you will also discover its persistent twin: attention. Attention is simply awareness with focus or direction.
Cultivation of awareness and attention is what my work is about. Without cultivating this pair of twins, there just isn’t the possibility of the discovery of awake.
All that said, you just might want to know what awake is. This way you’ll have an idea of what you’re going after. Awake is a wake left by existence as it zooms on its way. It is an after-effect, like the wake behind the boat of existence. As such, it isn’t really awake you are after (except as an interim project); it is existence you are after, and we certainly would have to be deeply head bound to argue that you don’t have that.
“If we are apparently already awake, but I don’t know or experience that, then how can it be said that I am already awake?”
“How.” you ask? Easily.
Love, Jerry
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One Response to “More Moe Dialogue #2”
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Whatever you experience is what you are awake to.
Don’t confuse your experience of being “awake” with other peoples’ experiences.
Can you accept that all wakefulness is limited in someway.
All you can strive to for is to match some defined state of processing labeled “being awake”.
The “concept” of being awake sure has moved a lot of product for a lot of vendors in many cultures over thousands of years.
What would “officially” being awake enable you to do or have?
Seriously … what is its use?