The Great Awakening

In the Bible it says Adam fell asleep—and nowhere does it say that he woke up. It’s as though the human race has been asleep for ages, not metaphorically but in a certain way literally. In our sleep, we have begun to dream. And some of our dreams have turned into nightmares.

Suffering is a nightmare. Addiction is a nightmare. Violence is a nightmare. Starvation is a nightmare. War is a nightmare. And the way we will change the world from being a place where these things happen to a place where they no longer do is not through what we do in a traditional sense, but because we wake up from the living nightmare in which they occur.

We have been asleep without knowing it, taking part in a great forgetting—of who we are, what our power is, where we come from, and what we truly need.

We have been asleep without knowing it, taking part in a great forgetting—of who we are, what our power is, where we come from, and what we truly need. But a great awakening is on the horizon, stirring like a new dawn in each of us.

It’s no accident that enlightened masters are called the “awakened ones.” And now a species that has been asleep too long is on the verge of a mass awakening. Resistance to this awakening, a lure to sleep, the false pleasures of numbness, are all real in our experience, but they are not as powerful as they appear to be. We are one with the Mind that thought us up, and nothing we make up separately has any meaning whatsoever. When we remember we are one with our Source, we’ll wake up to our power and our nightmares will disappear.

Forgetting Who We Are to Remembering

To change our lives for the better, the first thing we have to do is stop projecting our ego-based subselves all over the place. Leading with Me the depressed, Me the insecure, Me the angry, and Me the frightened is not exactly the psychological equivalent of putting your best foot forward. Yet these psychic splinters, as it were, are what we do lead with until they’re subsumed into the grandeur of your true selves.

Depression, insecurity, anger, and fear are not eradicated just because we have the right clothes, enough money, or the right credentials. They can be camouflaged, but only temporarily. People will almost telepathically pick up the truth of our deeper feelings and subconsciously reflect them back to us. All of us are involved in this constant interactive process, every moment, no matter what.

Confusion about our divine heritage translates into confusion about ourselves; not understanding who we are or where we come from, we find it hard to understand who we are now or where we are now.

The only way we’ll have whole lives is if we dwell within the wholeness of our true selves. And we are whole when we are one with God. The word holy refers to our connection to Him, and outside the connection we are dissociated from our own essence.

Wouldn’t it be weird to be one of Queen Elizabeth’s children but somehow not know it?

Wouldn’t we be missing out on a pretty significant aspect of our identity?

Magnify that geometrically in terms of psychological effect, and you have a sense of how bizarre it is that we’ve forgotten our Father is in heaven.

According to A Course in Miracles, what we have is an authorship problem. Not recognizing our divine source, we express ourselves as creations of the world rather than as creations of spirit. The world has imprinted upon our psyches its brokenness and pain. And there is no point in trying to heal that pain until we heal our misplaced sense of heritage. We are not children of the world; we are children of God. We don’t have to allow the false input of a weary world to affect us as it does.

Confusion about our divine heritage translates into confusion about ourselves; not understanding who we are or where we come from, we find it hard to understand who we are now or where we are now. And so we lack spiritual stability. In the absence of the sense of a divine creator, the mind assumes that we’re our own creator and thus our own God. If God isn’t the big cheese, then I must be the big cheese! And that thought—that we’re it, we’re the greatest—is not merely narcissism. It’s a psychosis that permeates the human condition. In remembering the truth of where we came from, we become more open to the truth of who we are.

All of us, however, in between our infancy and death, fall asleep to our true nature and experience the hell of our self-imposed separation from God.

Ego versus Holiness

One of the exercises in the workbook of A Course in Miracles reads, “Love, which created me, is what I am.” That statement amounts to a radical and counterintuitive evaluation of our true nature — for if I’m so good, then who is this person who keeps making mistakes, self-sabotaging, and repeating neurotic patterns?

That person is our fear-based ego. The word ego here means what it meant to the ancient Greeks: a small and separated self. When we identify with the ego, it’s like looking at a hangnail and thinking, “That’s who I am.” The ego is an impostor self, masquerading as who we really are yet in reality the embodiment of our own self-hatred. It is the power of our own minds turned against us, pretending to be our champion yet in reality undermining all our hopes an dreams. The ego is a delusional splinter that has cut itself off from our larger spiritual reality. It sets up a parallel mental kingdom in which it sees itself as different and special, always justified in keeping the rest of the world at bay.

When we remember who we are, when we stand firm in the light of our own true being as children of God, then the ego begins, however, gradually, to recede. Darkness cannot stand when we truly embrace the light—when we consciously foster it and devote ourselves to it. That is why recognizing who we are—that we are love, that we are as God created us—is the most important thing we can do in any instant. Love is our spiritual reality, untarnished by anything that has happened in the material world. When we forget this, thoughts of at least subtle attack and defense become a mental backdrop to our entire existence.

The ego is “suspicious at best and vicious at worst.” And we should not underestimate its vengeance. If we wish a genuine healing of our hearts—not just fixing things, not just bandaging the broken aorta of the spirit—we must question the ego’s most fundamental assumptions. For only when we reject the ego’s account of who we are, can we begin to discover who we really are. And who we really are, is holy.

All of us, however, in between our infancy and death, fall asleep to our true nature and experience the hell of our self-imposed separation from God. Remembering our connection to our Source awakens us and frees us from the nightmares we create. In any Holy Instant, the ego is made null and void.

Holiness is not simply a theological construct, applicable to saints and enlightened masters but not to you and me. Keeping such a concept on a high altar, away from practical application, issimply an ego ploy to keep it at bay. To say that we are holy is not symbolic; it is to say that we are children of God—not just children of this world—we begin to realize what spiritual wealth we have inherited. And it is ours to use, to cast out all darkness from ourselves and the world around us.

Our Potential

Through prayer we can work miracles in our lives. We have so much more power than we are using yet—to heal disease, repair relationships, reconcile nations, protect our cities, and transform our world. As long as we think that only “others” are holy, then only “others” will seem to carry miraculous authority.

Yet it isn’t true.

In fact, all of us are holy, for all of us were created by God. As we open our hearts to Him, and to each other, our minds become conduits of the miraculous. Any and all of us can pray for miracles, and He hears any and all of us when we do.When we have freed the inner resources of compassion that lie trapped within the maze of the ego mind, there will be an explosion of miracles that completely transforms ourselves and our world. We will become reborn in spirit, free to express the creativity and passion that lie within us in a way that we never have before.

Few mortals have even scratched the surface of the potential genius we all possess and will one day realize. The great enlightened masters, from Buddha to Moses to Jesus, attained such alignment with spirit that the world around them was never again the same. They are elder brothers who demonstrated our potential. They showed us what each of us can one day become.

As the mind is permeated by the realization of the awesome power that lies within us, and as we allow ourselves to embrace the principles of higher awareness, the ego in time takes a backseat to higher truth. It cannot stand before a mind that has begun to awaken to its true reality. Eventually, accumulated spiritual knowledge pays off, and a larger life begins to emerge.