Awake in This Life

A practitioner at a retreat that I was leading challenged me to simplify Awakening into as few words as possible.

Amazing, I thought silently, we are always looking for ways to speed up the process. Of course, I was including myself in this commentary since I had asked basically the same question of my teacher some years earlier. The response that my teacher gave me was immediate.

“Let go,” he smiled. “That’s it. Just let go.”

I didn’t really know what to make of his answer. It sounded pretty silly at the time—a way of avoiding responsibility and a path to becoming something more like a couch potato than an Awakened being. Still I trusted something about him so I just let his comment marinate my brain, hoping against hope that his words might cause something to shift.

I decided to offer the same response to this inquisitive person on our retreat, but I embellished it a little. “Let go, and then step into the world informed by this deep release,” I said.

Letting go of our attachments and acting from a place of spontaneous clarity and spaciousness is the activity of all Awakened beings. This simple yet revolutionary routine means that in order to stop our suffering, all we need to do is practice the intentional, moment-by-moment releasing of everything.

This lets us take in the view from the summit of the Mountain of Spirit. It reveals our core essence as being that which is beyond time, beyond feelings, and beyond thought. We are none of these things. Rather, we are the awakened space that infuses, sources, and informs them. This awakened space in the middle of everything arises as one identical Knowing that each of us shares with every other being, just as we are all equally inseparable from Infinity.