Why Don’t We Start Out Awake?

So what’s the point of most of humanity remaining spiritually “asleep” for years or even decades of their lives? Why can’t we all just be born wide awake? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we were? Is it natural to start out asleep, or is it a consequence of living in a fear-based culture that stunts and restricts us? *Do* we need awakening as an initiation on its own, and if so, does that mean that all the things that have wounded and repressed us before are actually good and necessary?

These are questions that I wrestled with for a long time. After all, it seems like one can get so much more done in the world, can live one’s purpose so much more fully and vibrantly, after undergoing an awakening– so was everything before that just a waste of time?

In the end, I genuinely do not believe that any experience in life is a waste of time (even if it’s hard to see its value just yet), and I’ve come to believe that there actually is good reason for spending the first part of your life asleep.

Let me say up front that I don’t think this justifies the ways that we as a society hurt, limit, disparage, and bully each other into being mere shadows of our true selves, nor does it mean we should shrug our shoulders and overlook those unhealthy, cruel behaviors. Just as we can have a productive, restful night’s sleep or a troubled, stressful night’s sleep, there’s a big difference between a natural journey towards awakening and a death march through life in which we can only hope that some form of awakening comes as a crisis intervention.

Likewise, “asleep” doesn’t have to mean “oblivious”. It doesn’t mean we should just blithely sail through life unconcerned with the big questions of purpose and spirit, or that we don’t need to live by any personal code of values or try to improve ourselves. Ideally, the time leading up to the awakening experience should be a time of learning and preparation, so that the awakening itself becomes a rite of passage like the transition to adulthood.

Perhaps the best way to explain the reason for a healthy state of temporary forgetfulness is metaphorical.

Imagine that you’re going on a long hike through beautiful and fascinating, but completely unfamiliar, terrain. Whether you’re a seasoned naturalist or a complete newbie, you still don’t know all the peculiarities of THIS path at THIS time. Your approach to it might be very different than someone else’s– maybe you just want to wander, living off the land and using the signs of nature to navigate, or maybe you have elaborate maps and expensive equipment to ease your way. Maybe you actually want to see what happens if you get lost. Point being, it’s a whole new adventure any way you cut it.

Now imagine that before going on this hike, you accepted a big project– a major test to study for, a presentation to give, whatever resonates with you. It’s very important that you complete this task, and there’s a lot to accomplish before it’s done. You decided to plan this hike because for some reason the change of setting and the change of pace will help you with this task. (Even if it’s just giving you a chance to take a break because you’re tired or frustrated with your lack of progress.)

So now you set out on this hike. What happens if you start out and your focus and awareness are totally fixed on your project? What happens if that’s all you can think about?

At the very least, you won’t really pay very much attention to your surroundings. You might not notice how beautifully the sun is dappled through the trees; you might be oblivious to the glimpse of the rare butterfly in the wildflowers by the path; you might not really talk to your hiking companions. Or the situation might be worse– you might forget to drink enough water or reapply your sunscreen, you might get lost because you weren’t paying attention to where you were going, you might hurt yourself stumbling over something in your path that you didn’t notice. Only the biggest changes or occurrences will jolt through to your awareness. And you still probably won’t come up with any new insights or solutions for your project. When you complete your hike, you probably won’t have learned very much from the experience because you spent the whole time in your own head.

Instead let’s say that you set out and you become totally absorbed in the experience of the hike. What’s the difference?

For a while you’ll probably forget all about your project and instead you’ll be aware of the weather, noticing when the sun is highest, when it’s time to seek shelter, when it’s time to warm up or cool off. You’ll learn to adapt to the differences in terrain, moving differently across jagged rocks than over soft needle-strewn paths. You’ll practice using your tools, be it map and compass or flint and tinder. You’ll be alert to strange sounds, potential danger, or unexpected delights. You might take a side trip to explore an intriguing area, but you’ll have marked your return path. It doesn’t mean it won’t be a difficult hike, or that you won’t get hurt, but you’ll be dealing with those circumstances instead of accidentally falling into them. And it’s very likely that taking your conscious mind off of your project will release the tension you’ve built up, and something you see or experience on this trail will give you a flash of inspiration, a whole new perspective on your challenge. You can bring your awareness of your project and your in-the-moment awareness of your hike together to make progress on your project that you couldn’t have otherwise.

Your soul’s purpose is your “project” and the life you’re living now is the hike. Your purpose, which is inseparable from your spiritual awareness, exists in a symbiotic relationship with your life. That is, each one feeds the other. Your purpose goes far beyond the limits of this one life, and your life will probably contain experiences and lessons that aren’t directly related to your purpose, but at heart they are crucial to each other. Purpose gives life meaning, context, direction, and power. A mortal lifespan provides a rich symbolic setting within which the soul can conceptualize and better understand its purpose.

Let me put that last statement in less abstract terms: Think of the way that wise teachers use parables, or teaching stories, to explain important ideas. Our mortal lifetime is like a teaching story, one in which our soul roleplays the protagonist’s part. (This is why we so deeply need our mythologies, our stories, our legends– they help us make sense of the nature of life and reality as a vast cosmic tale.) Everything we perceive as material reality, every action, every energy form we experience, even our own bodies, are the tangible forms of ideas. They are symbols distilled into form. The symbols we encounter– and most particularly the ones that most deeply affect us and penetrate our consciousness– make up the language of the story of our lives, communicating far more to our souls than we could ever hold in our conscious awareness. Just the way that if we hear a story where the hero encounters a lion, we can understand intuitively the ideas communicated by the symbol “lion” without having to have them literally spelled out in the story, our souls experience the symbols of our lives as a way to organize and absorb an infinity of ideas in a manner that is useful to our purpose.

(This is also why it is so valuable to develop an awareness of your life as a story, and to take an active role in telling and interpreting it; it allows your physical awareness and your spiritual consciousness to work together to achieve greater knowledge and deeper understanding, and to co-create the best possible setting in which to live according to your purpose, accelerating your soul’s development. Think of the way that psychologists sometimes work with patients to retell or re-enact a scenario from their lives in which they act in a more empowered way than they did at the time, or the technique for dealing with nightmares in which you are supposed to try to take control of the dream circumstances and turn them to something more positive and less frightening.)

A big part of the reason for incarnating in this world and this reality is that it is so different from other experiences your soul could have, but because of that, you need time to navigate this existence of form and matter, to learn its rules, to understand how to function in a body of flesh and blood. It requires “forgetting” your awareness of a higher spiritual reality, your purpose, all the great knowledge you had before you were born– but that experience of forgetting is not a hard separation. It’s not amnesia, but a shift in focus, the same way that you lose track of time when absorbed in a fascinating task.

It’s often been observed that children tend to be more psychically aware and attuned to things that adults are not, and that as children get older, “the veil drops” and they lose this awareness. I believe that newly incarnate souls do start out somewhat “awake” (though lacking the motor and language skills to communicate this awareness very clearly), and that the natural process is that over time, the physical, mental, and emotional demands of learning to live and thrive in this material realm gradually become more complex, and require more and more focus. Because the soul’s vast consciousness is now being filtered through a more limited human consciousness, it can’t hold everything at once. The denser and more immediate physical reality takes precedence, and the abstract spiritual awareness recedes to the background. The person begins to live more or less fully in this life and this world, and subconsciously strives to master it, to integrate it, so that there will eventually be capacity to sense beyond it and to bring in again an awareness of a higher reality. When this happens, the person experiences it as an awakening. The degree to which it is a joyful or frightening experience, or a gradual transition versus a shock to the system, depends on that person’s physical consciousness and whether it has been prepared to understand and accept the experience or not.

Just as we often wake from a good night’s sleep with a sudden new insight to a problem, or having had a dream that helps us make rapid progress in waking life, I believe that our “sleeping years” can be a rich and fertile environment from which we can harvest great wisdom and clarity once we’ve awakened. The challenge of our time is to bring awakening into our cultural consciousness as a rite of passage and a new stage of life rather than an unexpected upheaval, and to cultivate teachers and guides who have themselves been awakened, who are capable of wisely and compassionately helping others through the process. Bringing the awakening experience into right alignment with our understanding of the stages of life’s journey, we can build from a purpose-centered life towards a purpose-centered world.

This article is part of an ongoing series on the topic of spiritual awakening. You can read the previous article here.