Metaphysics 101 – Asleep, Awakening, Awake – Where are You?

by Marilyn Muir, LPMAFA

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Humanity is largely asleep at the wheel, so bogged down in the physical and the doing of life that we rarely realize there is more to life than our perceived physical reality. Few achieve an awareness that there is more; even fewer reach out for more, much less discipline themselves to participate; even fewer achieve and rarely transcend. Why? Waking up from our long deep sleep in physical reality is hard to do.

Do you remember the old 99 and 44/100th percent pure Ivory soap commercial? Translate that number as the bulk of humanity, which seems to live in what I see as a walking dream state, caught in our agreed-upon physical reality, suffering from tunnel vision or myopia and astigmatism of the spirit. I need to break that sentence apart and examine it more thoroughly. Science delights in showing us that what we perceive as reality is not necessarily true. For example, a solid table contains so much empty space that you wonder how it stands up, but we can and do use it as a table. Time is also a human construct, convenient, but our physicists perceive different possibilities of time than the common man.

When we as individuals enter the physical realm at birth, we enter a commonly held conceptual reality with seemingly infinite variety. We tend to get stuck right there, so busy concentrating on succeeding step-by-step that we literally develop tunnel vision as to other possibilities. We focus on the immediate, often losing sight of any possibility outside our collective reality, therefore are myopic (short-sighted) in our participation. If you ask ten people to describe a person, an event, even a room, you will get ten descriptions based on each person’s perspective and experience, our personal “astigmatism”. There exists our perceived truth, individual and collective, which may be distorted, and there is “the truth” which is often skewed to our personal perception.

How do we wake up or even begin to wake up? Tiny awarenesses occur. The universe is giving us hints, little tugs, experiences, tiny flashes of insight. What happens when you prod a person in deep sleep? It takes some effort to just get through to their slumbering consciousness. Then they are so groggy or out of it that it takes real effort to bring them all the way out… and they may not be happy! Not every one who gets these teasers from the universe wants to wake up. You do have a choice, you know. You can stay asleep through this lifetime. I don’t think your soul or spirit will be happy with your personality, but you probably can put off awakening for another day (or lifetime). Just as we turn over and go back to sleep in our beds, we can do the same with our consciousness. I’ve met only a few of these, but they do exist. They will just have to wait for another turn of the wheel of life.

As we get these little pushes, hints, tugs, teases from the universe, slowly but surely, we begin to wake up. We go through all the stages I previously described and our awareness slowly increases. We are no longer asleep, but you can’t really call what we are at that stage “awake”, can you? Remember we are dealing here with point 56% (about half a percent, and my numbers are personal estimates) of humanity who is in any one of the stages from not quite deeply asleep to fully realized (awake).

What can we do to help ourselves? Primarily we lack discipline, not opportunity. Just because waking up your spiritual self can lead to a better way of life does not make it easy. Working on your emerging awareness (awakening) is not a guarantee that you will succeed with every effort. You must persevere. There are no free rides in the universe. If you want growth and progress for your consciousness, you must wake up because it is impossible to achieve awareness when you are “asleep at the wheel.” Your awakening beckons you.

Published on EZine online February, 2010, republished with slight editing.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.