A Secret of the Awakening Process

I have a secret to share with you, if you promise not to abuse it. Here is how I ask you to hold it: please do not share it with anyone else. You are welcome to have your friends read this, but until at least a year after you have awakened, please do not try to teach this to anyone yourself. Are we agreed? If so, read on.

There is a place in you that is very uncomfortable. It is why you don’t want to be here. It is what makes you want to be somewhere else – in another place, in another time, in another body, with different karmas. The discomfort is composed of a feeling of isolation, separation, incompleteness, confusion. Perhaps you feel incomplete in yourself, or uncompleted by another. Perhaps you feel a yearning, an endless reaching, a seeking. For what? Perhaps wholeness, completeness – but what that would be is unclear, confusing. Perhaps you feel a pressure beneath everything, a need to do something, a constant urging for something else, something more. Perhaps it is an irritation of unknown origin that you can sometimes forget with food, sex, cigarettes, or intoxicants. Perhaps staying happy or busy distracts you, or perhaps staying sullen or depleted is a good drug. But under it all, there is something very hard to bear that never really goes away.

That something is a kind of wound. Like a gash at the core of your being. A bleeding place, as if you have been injured in your basic selfness. A wound beneath all of your personal wounds, a pain beyond your personal story. Do you know this place? Do you feel it? Can you sit with it right now, not looking for something wonderful to happen, not hoping for a spiritual experience? Can you feel the yuk of your own moment here? Take some time. Look for the yuk place. It’s not just a bodily sensation… it’s more like a whole-Being feeling tone. The feeling of Being here. It’s a very old feeling….perhaps as old as you can remember. Stay here until you find that feeling, then read on.

That impersonal feeling of a wound is connected with suggestions that there’s something personally wrong with you; that there’s something you should do about it. The suggestions whisper that you should be a better person; that you should eat right, go to sleep earlier, and think better thoughts. It insinuates that you should meditate, contemplate, or pray. It urges you to work harder, play better, be more creative. Think more of others, give more to the world. Something… something… something. Anything but THIS. This yuk. This pit. This emptiness, this agitation. This endless wanting, this endless yearning, this endless seeking. This ceaseless striving for something better, something more.

Do you feel the suggestions? Do you see how you have spent your whole life responding to them? Think now… what have you been doing to follow that impulse? How have you been trying to improve yourself, to express yourself, to justify your existence? What song has your being needed to sing in order to be worthy? What have you been doing to follow the suggestions associated with the wound? Wait until you get this, then read on.

Now that you get how you have been following the suggestions, I will tell you the secret. It is this: All suggestions for action in response to the wound are your own hopeful escape from the wound itself. THE WOUND ITSELF IS WHO YOU ARE, at the core. There is nothing wrong. You ARE the very pain from which you have been running your whole life. You are The Pain of Unity. Stop the running, the automatic following of the suggestions, and just feel the pain, the yuk. Feel it and drop into Being it. This, my friend, is YOU. This is your True Nature, your True Self, from which you can never escape.