About waking up - in short
Different Realities
There is something to wake up to—a different worldview, a new experience of life and of yourself.
Have you ever had a dream that felt completely real, even after you woke up, and only realized it was just a dream some time later? Most of us have. I remember it as something quite special, especially that moment when you’ve just woken up and slowly begin to understand that it wasn’t reality, but merely a dream.
It’s as if one reality is replaced by another.
This is a good image of what it’s like to open up to the Heart and begin to experience life through the Heart’s life experience. Opening up to your Heart is, among other things, like realizing that part of the worldview you’ve held until now has merely been a dream you were convinced was reality.
This dream is something most people, to some extent, live under. Describing a reality that you don’t necessarily (or only partially) experience or know exists is a challenge.
In truth, only the Heart can show you that your way of viewing life—when experienced through the Ego’s life experience—and the way you live it, is in part like a dream you’ve mistaken for reality.
The Ego Makes Dreams Seem Real
There is a part of you that is an expert at making dreams appear as if they are reality. That part is your Ego. The Ego specializes in turning dreams into reality—but in a way that convinces you the dream is reality (or at least the only reality that exists).
The Ego can very effectively prevent you from waking up, and many people never truly wake up during their lives—they live instead in a dream, which may very well include themes like the Heart, higher states of consciousness, and spiritual insights.
The Ego makes dreams seem real
by convincing you
that the dream is reality.
Losing the Dream
Waking up to the Heart is waking up to reality—or to a higher reality, to be more precise, because the Ego’s world is not unreal, just as a dream is not unreal, since it does take place. The more attached you are to your Ego-dream, the more “dangerous” it feels to wake up, because as you awaken, you lose the dream—and losing something you feel safe with is not always pleasant.
That’s why the Ego fears waking up. It knows that if it happens, it will cease to exist. And it’s right.
So all people, while they have an inner longing to wake up, also resist it.
Waking up is therefore also about daring to lose—your dream.
Do You Dare to Wake Up?
The Heart is a vast place, and when it opens to you, only a part of it opens at a time. Thus, only part of your dream is what you wake up from. Even if you’ve had, or have, contact with your Heart, you still have many dreams to wake up from—far more than you realize.
But while you’re dreaming, you don’t know it. While dreaming, you believe the dream is reality. I could ask you whether you’re aware that the way you view and experience life is, in part, illusory—whether you’re aware that you’re dreaming, right now. But of course, you would say no. It would be like asking someone who’s asleep whether they know they’re dreaming. Of course they don’t—unless they wake up.
And so one might ask what good it does to tell someone they’re dreaming—if you don’t also help them wake up.
Realizing the illusion in your worldview can be quite frightening—unless you can also glimpse reality.
With few exceptions, we are all, right here and now, living in a dream. And it is my hope that you will one day dare to lose your dream—that you will dare to wake up from it. It’s a challenge you might as well get used to. I myself constantly practice waking up, and I know very well how frightening it can be—especially when you’re on the verge of waking up, when you’re about to lose your dream but haven’t yet seen reality. That’s the hardest moment of all.
But I also know how truly wonderful it can be when you’re fully awake. Then you don’t feel unsafe. Then you don’t feel like you’ve lost anything.
Daring to lose your dream is truly the first step on your path toward a greater reality.
Only reality can reveal your dream
as the illusion it is.
And reality does not come in words
but as experiences.
