Awake in This Life

At this point, it might be helpful to go over a few words in order to stay clear. For instance, when I speak of wisdom, I’m referring to the knowing that flourishes beyond the separate sense of self—we could call it Knowing with a capital “K.” Wisdom is beyond the judgments and evaluations of the mind, or, we could say, the ego. Wisdom continually realizes the simultaneous, supportive coexistence of our Ultimate Life with our conventional circumstance. It’s the result of any person’s shift in perspective from the habit-driven contraction of unconsciousness to the vast opening of Spirit. From this new perspective, we begin to simply intuit a consciousness that “Knows” the totality of the All.

Wisdom is the Knowing of our total unification and interconnection with everything in the Universe. An occurrence of this is not an intellectual understanding but rather experiential in nature, and it arises whenever we begin to wisely recognize, or Know, the ego and its continual performance in our experience. Just watching it do its thing without judging it is wisdom. Nurturing this wisdom, as a spiritual sensibility, limitlessly fuels our journey toward becoming awake in this life.

When I speak of compassion, I’m referring to the activity that is supported and sourced from wisdom—activity free of egoic clinging. It is the same as a feeling of love without any greed. It’s simple, caring, natural, and at the same time, the most breathtakingly beautiful expression of tenderness we can experience. When any of us acts with compassion, we’re allowing Infinity to express itself through us as us, which is a great way of describing the path we might take in order to lead an enlightened, or Ultimate, life.

As an example of compassion, imagine walking in a crosswalk and finding that an elderly man is beginning to fall as he tries to cross the street. Few of us would decide to let the old man hit the ground. Most people would reach out to support him without ever taking into account the their potential trespasses against anything or anyone. We would just attempt to catch the man spontaneously without any evaluation or contemplation, without consideration of gain or consequence. This unconditioned helpfulness beyond the grasp of ego also fuels our journey of becoming awake in this life.

Being awake in this life means that we live from an enlightened orientation. The term Enlightenment may be the most challenging concept of all since its definition can change depending on one’s tradition. For our purposes, Enlightenment shows up as a conscious meeting of two things at once. When the continuous and total acceptance of whatever is happening to us at any given moment supports deeply conscious activity, we meet the world as an enlightened being. So Enlightenment is the simultaneous recognition of a profound interconnected unity among all things, with the natural impulse to share this Knowing with everyone and for everyone. As this sharing occurs consciously, the whole of humanity is offered an evolutionary spark that can light a collective fire of Awakening for all beings in this very lifetime.

On an individual level, this fire of Enlightenment involves a mind that does not identify with thoughts or feelings and is never limited by either the past or the future. This doesn’t mean that an enlightened master has no concept of past or future. Rather, it means that the enlightened aren’t caught by their relationship to either the past or the future. This allows them to be upright yet flexible in any situation. Also, an enlightened being will always surrender to the fact that there is no substantial difference between you and me. This means that the awakened among us, in other words, continually see that there is no difference between themselves and others. Furthermore, their enlightened perspective shows them unmistakably that there is only ever God, or Spirit, or as we say in Zen, Emptiness. Everything is seen and experienced as an infinite variety of Spirit, which shows up in a dramatic series of conventional circumstances that we call life. When this realization becomes our new frame of reference, Spirit consciously informs the world through our activity. From here, wisdom becomes intimately connected with compassion, which results in an Enlightenment that can show itself through every one of us, as every one of us. Encounters with individuals who live from this spaciousness are rare. But have confidence in the fact that the more attention we pay to our spiritual life, the more often meetings with this kind of embodied grace will show up.