Spirituality and metaphysics teach that awakening/enlightenment/liberation is a process involving right thinking, meditation, breathing practices and all manner of disciplines that must be diligently practiced for years and years. But is it true?

I have been a student of metaphysics for over forty years.  The study of metaphysics, “positive thinking for positive results”, supports the belief that the body is real and that happiness can be found with the right programming. Believing this to be true, I have diligently practiced many of the prescribed disciplines. There is an experience of improvement. Life gets better and better —- less fear and confusion and more joy and appreciation. I become more conscious, more aware, more present. I am ever becoming, becoming… …searching, searching….for that moment in time when I wake up from the dream-experience of duality.

“Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream.”

If that is true, “life is but a dream”, how do I wake up? Is it a process? Or is it simply an ah-h-h moment you pop into on an ordinary day of your ordinary life?  How attached are you to your “process”? Would you be willing to drop your belief in a process in exchange for the thought that you are awake, here and now?  Here are some pointers I have come upon while embracing that thought:

Nisargadatta Maharai says:
When you see the dream as a dream you have done all that needs to be done.  Understanding is all. www.nisargadatta.net

A Course In Miracles says:
The goal of the Course is to lead us out of the dream entirely by undoing the thought of separation. The journey to awakening lies in the practice of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the only “programming” the Course offers. It awakens us from the dream of separation and leads to peace. 

Adyashanti says:
Enlightenment does not mean one should disappear into the realm of transcendence. To be fixated in the absolute is simply the polar opposite of being fixated in the relative.  With the dawning of true enlightenment, there is a tremendous birthing of impersonal Love and wisdom that never fixates in any realm of experience.
 
To awaken to the absolute view is profound and transformative, but to awaken from all fixed points of view is the birth of true nonduality. If emptiness cannot dance, it is not true Emptiness. If moonlight does not flood the empty night sky and reflect in every drop of water, on every blade of grass, then you are only looking at your own empty dream. I say, Wake up! Then, your heart will be flooded with a Love that you cannot contain."  http://www.adyashanti.org/

Douglas E. Harding says:
….Enlightenment cannot be earned or achieved but is the natural state of anyone who is simple and open enough just to be himself and stop pretending. Douglas E. Harding, 1972, On Having No Head

Our bondage is not failure to win our liberation, but to see it. There is nothing to be achieved; all is well here and now; we have never for an instant left the goal we are striving to reach one day. In fact, it is our aim that stands in the way of its realization; it is our anxiety to arrive at perfection in the unreal and unrealizable future which hides the Perfection which is at this very moment staring us in the face.  Douglas E. Harding, 2000, Face To No Face

“Sailor” Bob Adamson says:
Awakening, enlightenment, liberation, or whatever name seekers give it, is simply the realization and the letting go of the false sense of personal identity… we refer to as “me”.  Awakening is not an experience, despite the fact that it is promoted as such by many gurus. It is the understanding that the wholeness you seek, you already are. …. Moreover, there is no meaning, no purpose, and no significance to life. What is, is. Period. Everything else is an interpretation made by a mind whose job is to label everything it perceives in order to make differences. Why make differences? For fun.

Awakening is the understanding that the only thing we know for certain is that we cannot say we “are not”. We cannot say we do not exist. And that leaves us with nothing but presence awareness, the eternal now and that always was and always will be.  James Braha, 2006, Living Reality— My Extraordinary Summer with “Sailor” Bob Adamson

John Wheeler says:
There is no “I”.  There is just what is. In spiritual circles, people are striving for an awakened “I”. ...... The clearer position is much more radical—the relinquishment of the “I” itself.  Along with that also goes satsang, awakening, retreats, progress, teacher, student, living the teaching and all the rest. Usually people balk at that when they come face to face with it due to an emotional and psychological investment in their assumed identity.  Real freedom comes in the dissolution of the very notion of the person. In truth, there is no awakening involved. That concept is very tantalizing to committed teachers and students because it keeps the game going and gives some rationale for retreats, events, products, spiritual lifestyle, etc.

With the exposing of that concept, the whole affair collapses and is found to be a hollow activity, which is hard to face if one is heavily invested in all the spiritual trappings based on the concept. People seek out various events and awakened beings, but it really ends up to be like looking for water in a mirage, because what is being sought is shining in plain view as the simple sense of knowing and being that is right with us at all times.  At some point, we will stop long enough to notice this. Then it all falls into place and the course is run. You end up at the place you have never left.  John Wheeler, 2008, The Light Behind Consciousness, Radical Self-Knowledge and the End of Seeking

Leo Hartong says:
Awareness is Self-luminous and does not need to be aware of anything outside itself.  In other words, Awareness is all there is. In the universal dream, just as in the dreams we have at night, there is the illusion of this and that, near and far, past and future, self and other, which creates the relative experiences of space and time – but space and time in and of themselves have no reality.

……there are no distinct objects or events separated by space and time, nor does the dream itself have a fixed size or time span. The dream and the dreamer are one-and-the-same Self-aware reality. You, as a dream character, are a temporary occurrence, while you as the dreamer are beyond space and time. When you wake up to this realization, you will be as unconcerned with your personal story as you are with the character you appeared to be in your dream. 

……This is not to say that you will be indifferent and without feelings. When reading a good novel, you are aware of its illusory nature, but nevertheless become engrossed in the characters and unfolding plot. In the same way, as long as you appear as a dreamed character, you will not wake up from the dream, but you might awaken to the dream. Leo Hartong, 2001, Awakening To The Dream

Is awakening a process or are you already awake?  You decide. And then, SO BE IT!  Until you return, fill your days with GIGGLES, JOY, APPRECIATION and AWARENESS!

Sylvia Silk, D.D. Director of the Institute For Balanced Living, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Doctor of Divinity, Spiritual Coach, Reconnective Healing Practitioner, Writer