Staying Awake
“If I truly wake up—if I realise the Self, the Ground, the Infinite—Will I still be me?”
To be human is to dance at the threshold of infinite potential. We are beingness entwined in the technicolour exuberance of embodied presence—forever becoming. For a visual metaphor - Think Yin-Yang. And that is true whether we are aware of it or not. Waking up is simply seeing the whole picture as it is.
Before waking up our attention is almost exclusively focussed on becoming... a ‘someone’. At the edge of our conscious awareness, we sense the emptiness that sits at the heart of our true self... and it scares us. We feel alone with nothing. Everyone else seems to be something in particular, carving out their destinies and making their way in the world and we feel forced into hiding our emptiness with a carefully curated set of ideas that function as an avatar – no matter how limiting they are, like an over-tight suit of armour.
Over time this solidifies into something semi-permanent – a voice in the ear seducing us into believing it is who we are: we are hypnotised into a state of unconscious participation – and the momentum builds – it becomes self-perpetuating, and we are asleep behind the wheel – like a passenger in an autonomous self-driving car.
Even when we’re unaware of our indefinable essence, it remains the foundation of who we are. And messages filter across the boundary – intuitions of something more that we cannot name. Some of us are brave enough to listen and begin to remember what we never truly forgot.
There have been times when this voice from the core was loud and clear and I was presented with a choice that felt already made—arising not from pros and cons, but from something deeper, beyond my conscious awareness- a choice that would tilt my life onto a new course.
My first experience of this was in my late teens when I was desperately confused about what direction to take. One night as I was drifting into sleep I suddenly woke up and I knew beyond any possibility of doubt that I was going to go to Manchester University to study Optometry—and with that, the noise and confusion vanished. In its place was a silent certainty, whole and unshakable. At the time I almost wondered if God had spoken – and maybe in a way that was the case.
This sense of a guiding hand has happened on numerous occasions now – the spontaneous decision to move to London that led to my passionate spiritual search, the decision to move into a spiritual community with out ever returning to my previous home – choices that catapulted me ever deeper into the sort of exploration I needed to peel back my self-construction and uncover the dynamic and living being that I had buried.
“No longer stuck onto the false idol we have worshipped as self, they now become the stained-glass windows through which the light of pure being is refracted”
Although I generally like to think of myself as in control of my life journey—and I’m not a subscriber to destiny or fate as some heavy hand writing a script I merely perform—I can now see a thread that has woven its path though every step I’ve taken. The invisible essence of presence has had a quiet magnetic attraction pulling me, through multiple life experiences ever closer into a tight orbit of my true self.
As the pull gets stronger, it starts to strip away anything that is redundant and the layers of protection and the mask of performance that I have relied upon as my interface with the world are seen now as false and limiting narratives that no longer serve me.
Does this mean that I’m no longer the ‘me’ I’ve believed myself to be?
Well, it’s a complicated answer that is both “Yes” and “No”.
The false constructed self that kept the world at arm’s length is fragmenting as the real starts to permeate my being. So “Yes” the constructed self will fade away in time as attention shifts to the aliveness of presence as self —an insight I wrote about in Re-Entry – Peter Mitchell
But personality and hard-won life experiences are woven into the fabric of our embodiment. So also “No”. We are each an individual with our various unique skills and interests that colour our manifestation in the world. No longer stuck onto the false idol we have worshipped as self, they now become the stained-glass windows through which the light of pure being is refracted—something I explore in Windows.
We are not uniform expressions of oneness, but a vast diversity reflecting wholeness. Each of us weaves our particularity into a greater image that unfolds as an ever-evolving tapestry—of which we are an intimate and essential part. This vision comes to life in The Richly Embroidered Tapestry of Emptiness. – Peter Mitchell
So do we lose our personality when we wake up? No. But it stops being a fortress. It becomes a vessel, porous and open And slowly, one drip at a time, the water of presence erodes the hard edges—just as I explored in Questions not Answers – Peter Mitchell
Before waking up our attention is almost exclusively focussed on becoming... a ‘someone’. At the edge of our conscious awareness, we sense the emptiness that sits at the heart of our true self... and it scares us. We feel alone with nothing. Everyone else seems to be something in particular, carving out their destinies and making their way in the world and we feel forced into hiding our emptiness with a carefully curated set of ideas that function as an avatar – no matter how limiting they are, like an over-tight suit of armour.
Over time this solidifies into something semi-permanent – a voice in the ear seducing us into believing it is who we are: we are hypnotised into a state of unconscious participation – and the momentum builds – it becomes self-perpetuating, and we are asleep behind the wheel – like a passenger in an autonomous self-driving car.
Even when we’re unaware of our indefinable essence, it remains the foundation of who we are. And messages filter across the boundary – intuitions of something more that we cannot name. Some of us are brave enough to listen and begin to remember what we never truly forgot.
There have been times when this voice from the core was loud and clear and I was presented with a choice that felt already made—arising not from pros and cons, but from something deeper, beyond my conscious awareness- a choice that would tilt my life onto a new course.
My first experience of this was in my late teens when I was desperately confused about what direction to take. One night as I was drifting into sleep I suddenly woke up and I knew beyond any possibility of doubt that I was going to go to Manchester University to study Optometry—and with that, the noise and confusion vanished. In its place was a silent certainty, whole and unshakable. At the time I almost wondered if God had spoken – and maybe in a way that was the case.
This sense of a guiding hand has happened on numerous occasions now – the spontaneous decision to move to London that led to my passionate spiritual search, the decision to move into a spiritual community with out ever returning to my previous home – choices that catapulted me ever deeper into the sort of exploration I needed to peel back my self-construction and uncover the dynamic and living being that I had buried.
“No longer stuck onto the false idol we have worshipped as self, they now become the stained-glass windows through which the light of pure being is refracted”
Although I generally like to think of myself as in control of my life journey—and I’m not a subscriber to destiny or fate as some heavy hand writing a script I merely perform—I can now see a thread that has woven its path though every step I’ve taken. The invisible essence of presence has had a quiet magnetic attraction pulling me, through multiple life experiences ever closer into a tight orbit of my true self.
As the pull gets stronger, it starts to strip away anything that is redundant and the layers of protection and the mask of performance that I have relied upon as my interface with the world are seen now as false and limiting narratives that no longer serve me.
Does this mean that I’m no longer the ‘me’ I’ve believed myself to be?
Well, it’s a complicated answer that is both “Yes” and “No”.
The false constructed self that kept the world at arm’s length is fragmenting as the real starts to permeate my being. So “Yes” the constructed self will fade away in time as attention shifts to the aliveness of presence as self —an insight I wrote about in Re-Entry – Peter Mitchell
But personality and hard-won life experiences are woven into the fabric of our embodiment. So also “No”. We are each an individual with our various unique skills and interests that colour our manifestation in the world. No longer stuck onto the false idol we have worshipped as self, they now become the stained-glass windows through which the light of pure being is refracted—something I explore in Windows.
We are not uniform expressions of oneness, but a vast diversity reflecting wholeness. Each of us weaves our particularity into a greater image that unfolds as an ever-evolving tapestry—of which we are an intimate and essential part. This vision comes to life in The Richly Embroidered Tapestry of Emptiness. – Peter Mitchell
So do we lose our personality when we wake up? No. But it stops being a fortress. It becomes a vessel, porous and open And slowly, one drip at a time, the water of presence erodes the hard edges—just as I explored in Questions not Answers – Peter Mitchell
