Someday Awakening isn't Going to be a Big Deal

     Someday, pretty soon, awakening isn’t going to be a big deal.  Most everyone is going to awaken, probably as a natural component of our development fairly early in life.  The rapid increase in the last decade or two in the number of awakened people, and the ease and speed with which they have been able to awaken, are testaments to this.  What then, will we admire in our spiritual teachers?  Or, with regard to more than only our spiritual teachers, what will regard as full and highly developed human beings, if it is no longer awakened perception?

     The answer is simply character.  As was the case before this culture’s collective discovery of the possibility of awakening, basic human virtues, such as honesty, integrity, kindness, trustworthiness, humility, dignity, etc. will again provide the mark of someone deserving of our general respect.  Awakening will be common, as big and little a deal as graduating from college, or perhaps as going through puberty.  Embodying that awakening as a real mensch is going to be the next inevitable challenge.  Although I suspect it too will soon become not so difficult for the coming generations.

     We have our teachers to thank for this.  We have them to thank for the initial discovery in our culture of the possibility of awakening.  We have them to thank for the initial, and difficult, cultural translation of that work which opened the door for many more Westerners to gain access to awakening works.  We have our teachers to thank, and likely some other unknown, mysterious force or timing, for democratizing and popularizing real awakening to the degree that is now becoming evident, and which may continue to accelerate exponentially in the coming years.  And then it will be our turn.  The time is coming for our generation to come to terms with its own unique task in this world, which, as I see it, will be twofold.

     First, we shall truly be the ones to separate the baby from the bathwater.  To some degree our teachers have done this.  However, deep, rigorous, communal, intuitive and analytical examination of what awakening is and is not has yet to occur.  We generally do not have an agreed upon language or set of expectations regarding the awakening process, its results, or its methods.  This will come soon, but only as many more people become awakened who can and want to have such a conversation, and for whom that conversation is relevant and meaningful.

     And second, we will begin to institutionalize the awakening process.  I have a vision of teachers of awakening being as common, neighborly, and personable as your local therapist or doctor.  Teachers of awakening will become many, and most will be small scale, while, like in everything, a few will perform the roles of those who stand in the public spotlight.  In addition, awakening will be readily apparent in the general cultural scene.  There will be advertisements on TV for awakening coaches.  There will be major centers for the practice of awakening with many teachers.  There will be major centers for the training of teachers, and multiple 3^rd-party organizations which will certify teachers, based on their own detailed and severe criteria for who qualifies as being of the highest, and of more common, standards.  Such certification will help keep teachers and students safe.  It will also begin to erode the flexibility, merely heart-exploratory, from-the-hip style of teacher recognition and validation that exists now, in our current, wild-west version of a spiritual marketplace.  

     There will be a growing group of public intellectuals who will perform the task of creating and organizing a rigorous, trans-traditional theory of the awakening process.  Such scholar-practitioners will necessarily work side by side with other theorists in the fields of psychology, religious studies, cognitive science, and neuroscience, informed as well by philosophy, anthropology, cultural theory, biology, and genetics.  Whether the theorists of awakening work within or without academia, however, is as yet uncertain to me.  

     So yes, someday awakening isn’t going to be a big deal.  And that day is very soon.  And when that happens we’re all going to have to get on again with the business of simply being here, and of working together to form as healthy and nourishing a world as we possibly can, for everyone’s sake.  Most of this work isn’t going to be done by awakened luminaries, and in fact I think it’s time that we stop focusing so much on the famous of all kinds and realize that every single thing we see around us is created not by individuals but by whole movements of people and forces.  We have to learn to thank everyone, because we really are all working together to create the world we’re living in.  Awakened culture is not going to be characterized by the luminaries.  It will be characterized by the awakened mensch down the street, in the principal’s office of the local high school, behind the counter at the gas station, the awakened lawyer, swim coach, basketball coach, and maybe even the awakened rebellious teenager.  Every one of us will continue to fulfill the roles and house the institutions which exist now in society.  The big, evil Man out there doesn’t exist.  He’s us.  But soon he’ll be awake, because we’ll be awake.

     When we’re all awake, life will go on.  We’ll thank our lucky stars for being born when we were.  We’ll thank our teachers for the hard work they’ve done, and for their humility and willingness to look ordinary when so many spiritual teachers of the past looked so extra-ordinary.  And then, recognizing their wisdom, we’ll do the same, thus passing on awakened living and growing awakened culture generation by generation, one body at a time.