Are you awake or are you asleep?
May 30, 2024 9:48:31 GMT
Post by Stella on May 30, 2024 9:48:31 GMT
You can never awaken by using the same system that put you to sleep in the first place. (G. I. Gurdjieff)
I want to start here with two quotations. The first is by Gurdjieff, a mystic and spiritual teacher. Then there's another brought to my mind by a dear, wise online friend Vincent in the States.
There is a resurgent interest in vague, anecdotal and often erroneous doctrines that imply an intellectual carelessness, an absence of tough-mindedness, and a diversion of energies not very promising for our survival. Such doctrines include astrology, scientology, flat earths, spiritualism; and the doctrine of the creation of mankind by God or gods, despite our deep relatedness, both in biochemistry and in brain physiology, with the other animals. Widespread acceptance of such doctrines indicates a lack of intellectual rigor, an absence of skepticism, a need to replace experiments by desires. (Carl Sagan - 'The DRagons of Eden'
What I want to write about here is reincarnation, but not in the context of life after death, but rather more in the context of being awake and being asleep. Let me throw out another quote by Gurdjieff here so we can together assemble all this into a coherent theme or subject area.
Let us take some event in the life of humanity. For instance, war. There is a war going on at the moment. What does it signify? It signifies that several millions of sleeping people are trying to destroy several millions of other sleeping people. They would not do this, of course, if they were to wake up. Everything that takes place is owing to this sleep. (G.I. Gurdjieff)
Now what connects all these three quotes is a kind implied imperative or admonition that we should all wake up and become more consciously aware. I'm personally not sure that either Gurdjieff or Carl Sagan fully understand the implications behind their sales pitch. On the one hand I get where they are coming from totally and have even held similar opinions and feelings in the past, but I can also see the flaws. I'm not sure whether you can see it.
What does being awake mean?
I'm not sure about you, but for me being awake beams being connected in an environmental sense and being consciously aware of your mystical transaction between you and your environment. It means being mindful and conscious of what's going on around you and also what's going on within you. Keep in mind my notion of being awake and asleep applies to all levels of reality and planes of existence. This means that being asleep is being unconscious, being mindless, being unappreciative, and being wilfully ignorant.
Keep in mind I'm generalising and being purposely vague because I cannot really offer a better definition of what being awake means. But I also want to bring to your attention 'woke' and 'anti-woke' culture, coming from the political right in the US and UK. Being 'woke' and being awake are not necessarily the same thing, but generally the anti-woke agenda is designed to send you back to sleep. I'm even more confident that the politicians and celebrities behind this anti-woke culture really don't get what lies behind their sales pitch either.
I'm not prepared to give examples because that means naming names and that's something of a no no for me. But I hope you get the gist of what I'm driving at here so you can fill in the space and the details with your own examples if you so wish to do so. I'm only interested in pointing out the flaw which lies behind the different sides....continue reading