Right now I’m considering a question that is troubling me. Regardless of age, class or race, there is a growing body of us who are in the process of becoming deeply awake, yet our numbers are still extremely small. Why doesn’t everyone wake up? What is standing in the way?
I usually assume the problem is that we’re just not ready to wake up. But maybe there’s more to it than that? Perhaps the problem also lies with the state of modern spirituality? Spirituality has the role of waking us up, but is it up to the job?
There’s a gullibility that pervades modern spirituality. As a philosopher, this disturbs me because without rational doubt, we easily become lost in fantasy, rather than waking up to reality. Modern spirituality needs to consider what philosophers call “epistemology.” Before we can say “what we know,” we need to think about “how we know it.”
Do we take channeled wisdom from the ascended masters residing in the Pleiades at face value? Or do we stop and ask ourselves, “How can I check if this is for real?” We need to keep an open mind and listen to our intuition, for life is strange and anything is possible. But we also need to be savvy and judicious.
Many people today, however, are consuming large amounts of spiritual junk food without chewing – so there’s an epidemic of philosophical indigestion. We’ve become so transfixed with the mysteries of the crop circles and the crystal skulls that we’re ignoring the real mystery…which is that we exist and don’t know what to do about it!
And here’s another thing that bothers me. I hate all the sanctimonious seriousness and saccharine niceness so often associated with being “spiritual.” It gets in the way of our being authentic with each other. Some of the new “gurus” are so safely bland that it’s like listening to elevator music. That’s not going to enliven us. It’s going to put us to sleep in a comfortable spiritual cocoon.
For me, the real heroes of the new edge of evolution are radically real people like the late Bill Hicks…a comic genius who took us to big love via his own unique brand of taboo-breaking, consciousness-raising, misanthropic humor. Even though Bill Hicks is dead now, if I had the choice of hanging out with him or Swami Blandananda, it would be no contest.
Damn it! I think I’m beginning to become a channel myself. I can hear Bill’s manic Texan drawl raving in my ears:
“Listen up! I’ve got some really good news! Everything is okay!
“Being alive is weird and scary and never really makes sense, but that’s all right because life is like a dream…so there’s nothing to be alarmed about…it all turns out all right in the end…because when you die in a dream, you wake up.
“But before you bow out, why not enjoy the show…because it’s a thrilling roller coaster of a ride…and when you stop worrying about falling off, you can just throw your hands up in the air and yell ‘Bring it on!’…as you career through the highs and lows of the ever-changing moment…toward the sign marked ‘exit.’
“Heh! I know what I’m talking about because I’m dead! The way to enjoy the trip is to lighten up, not tighten up!
“If you take things too seriously, you’ll be popping Prozac just to cope with the anxiety…and when ‘numb’ becomes ‘normal,’ every day will be a monotonous cycle of drudgery. Then you’ll remember all the things you’ve got to get done…but forget the most important thing about life.”
I really enjoyed your article, and it is a qood question as to why more people aren’t waking up, and we do seem to be small in numbers. Maybe it isn’t for the whole world to wake up though, maybe it’s only a small portion of humanity that will split off into a reality that is kinder, gentler and more benevolent. After all, some say the Mayans switched dimensions, and that was a pretty small number of people compared to the world at that time. So maybe it’s not all bad that not everyone is waking up in large numbers. Seems that more than ever are doing so though!