Since I first sat down to write The Simplest Path to Personal and Planetary Awakening: FREE YOUR MIND back in 2005, my goal has always been to keep it simple, sister! (KISS).
Spiritual awakening, stripped of all the bullshit, is simple, as in it is not complicated.
It took me a whole book to break down the process by which we are transformed in childhood from untamed balls of awareness into hypnotized adults possessing and enslaved by an attention-generated self.
In just a few essays on this website, I’ve managed to lay out a working schema of how reality really works, and what that makes possible for human beings.
In this essay I’m going to make it even simpler.
For all the pomp and circumstance built up around religion and spirituality, true human spiritual awakening comes down to just two things – a premise and a promise.
THE PREMISE:
What we mistake for a real and external physical world, which includes our own physical bodies with their sense of selfhood and an inner world of mind, is a dream. Not “like a dream.” We and the world actually are a dream. The world and each of us living in it are dreamstuff in exactly the sense that our nighttime dreams create worlds entire, filled with startlingly “life-like” dream characters. It’s all just awareness in motion, currents of consciousness spinning up temporary whirlpools of experience.
You and I and everyone else are dream characters with as much substance as the characters we dream at night, which is none.
To awaken spiritually means to experience for ourselves that we are characters in a dream, and – this part is critical – IT’S NOT OUR DREAM.
Just as the “you” in your nighttime dreams isn’t actually you, the dreamer, but is rather a dream character representation of you, waking you is not the dreamer, either. Waking you is also a dream character representation of the real dreamer.
And so am I. And so is everyone else. So are animals, insects, plants, dirt, mountains, cities, oceans, planets, stars… everyone and everything you can think of.
Once you experience the dream as dream, it will feel subjectively like you are a lucid dreamer, awake within the dream, with new powers to control the setting, narrative, and other dream elements. That’s how humans experience awakening.
But even that is not quite true. The truth is that once you awaken to the reality of the dream, you become a point of lucidity within it. It is the dreamer who is awake within the dream, made lucid by your lucidity. You are not you being lucid. You are the dreamer experiencing lucidity through a representative dream character – YOU.
There’s nothing more to say about this. Beyond this point there is only experience. It’s time to stop thinking about awakening and just do it.
THE PROMISE:
The promise is that you can experience the premise for yourself. You do not have to take the premise as true on faith. You only have to accept the premise as possible on faith – and even there, only with sufficient faith to speculatively invest effort into redirecting your attention away from your attention-generated self, and into practicing transformative stillness.
The promise is that you don’t have to DO anything to experience the premise and awaken spiritually.
If reality really is a dream as the premise presents it, then the reason you experience reality as physically real and external, and yourself as both physical and mental, outer body and inner mind, is because you are continually working hard to create and maintain that illusion.
By focusing all of your attention on your attention-generated self, for example.
By staying constantly busy and distracted, for example.
The promise is that if you will stop doing those things your self-generated illusions will eventually fall away and reality as-it-is will be revealed.
Redirect your attention. Practice stillness.
When you and the world resolve into dream, be lucidity.
My Cosmic Download 