Awakening ...
Here is an idea that often comes up in Yoga, but why this idea of awakening? Who is asleep?
The aim of Yoga is to make us aware of our deep nature.
This nature is said to be similar to that of God (we are said to be a particle of God)
While being a part, we would be the whole.
This reality is hard to glimpse, and that is precisely the idea of awakening, and above all of experiencing it, because it is not something to talk about but to live. Just as after a big meal we feel "weighed down" by too much food, our consciousness is "swallowed up" in matter.
In doing so, Consciousness loses its brilliance, or at least its brilliance is covered over when it incarnates in our body. Then a discriminating idea appears (seeing a world inside and a world outside us), and this pushes us to identify with the body we have.
Prisoners of the body, of matter, of form, we cannot conceive that we are infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, all-conscious!
The ego then comes into play and seals us, for our little existence, into our certainties, our limits and our little story.
And yet, if we try to remember who we were 5 or 10 years ago, we will all agree that nothing has fundamentally changed. I am not talking about our life, what is around us, children, work, physical abilities; I am talking only about our feeling of being, not about what we "have".
So if life and time will take everything from us, our beauty, our strength, our possessions, our life, then if something is to endure after this inevitable death, that thing is already here, now!
In you, in us!
Trying to experience this thing is a marvel.
Perhaps the meaning of life is to become aware of this eternal thing, beyond time and space, and to discover that we are something quite other than a body in peril.
Stepping out of the dream of our lives, out of the dream of how we conceive our little world and our existence. That is awakening and regaining freedom, that is what Yoga offers, but the path is long and difficult.
Denis Billo
The action of thinking and the act of consciousness, which is the act of being,
are contradictory.
The verb to think is the negation of the verb I.
Stephen Jourdain,
L'IRRÉVÉRENCE DE L'ÉVEIL (The Irreverence of Awakening)
And for all those who think they have already reached awakening, and above all that there is nothing to do because everything is already there, I offer you this passage from Stephen Jourdain to meditate on!
Priest, plumber, member of parliament, sharp mind, lively people, cardboard soul, cultivated mind, fallow man, rigorous man, cheat, all asleep, all unconscious to the same degree, and deprived of Consciousness in exactly the same way.
For this metaphysical sleep has no gradation, no nuance; it is a single level to which one belongs entirely or not at all.
How can they be made to understand that they are asleep!
They would readily admit that the degree of consciousness they have of themselves is not ultimate, that this grasp of oneself could be improved in quantity, as one might make a day already dawned clearer and brighter. But how can they be made to believe, how can they simply be made to consider the hypothesis that precisely here the day has not yet dawned, that the question really arises whether the glimmer they know belongs to daylight at all. How can they be made to know that in this extreme vigilance which is ordinary self-awareness they are asleep, that in its essence the phenomenon called the waking state is asleep.