ON BEING AWAKE IN A SLEEPING WORLD When you’re awake, you’re no longer numb. You can no longer turn away from Truth. You can no longer comfort yourself with the old fairy tales, stories of good and evil, positive thinking. The light of awareness cannot be switched off. You can’t hide from yourself now. There’s nowhere to hide. You live life in the raw. And you feel more than ever, not less. Your bandwidth is infinite. From the deepest despair to the most ecstatic joy, it all passes through. But the difference is, now, you are not at war with it all. You allow all feelings to surge through. You don’t judge them or try to get rid of them. You are their mother, their sanctuary. You don't blame anyone else anymore. You no longer have a fixed identity. You don’t know who you are anymore, from the perspective of the mind. And yet, you know who you are more deeply than ever. You are alive. You are life itself, inseparable from the stars, the moon, the flowers and trees. It is dizzying, sometimes, this freedom. Like being born again in every moment. Like dying every day to the old hopes. Reality is groundless, you see, dripping with uncertainty. You live at the point of total insecurity, nothing to hold onto, no concept to bring comfort to a weary mind. And yet, you feel the deepest kind of security of all, a security deep within your bones, the security of Being itself. You know that your experience is always trustable, even if it hurts like hell. You won’t call yourself an ‘awakened person’, you won’t think of yourself as better or worse than anyone, you won’t lie to yourself about having the answers. You won’t make a big fuss about yourself at all, for the self is the biggest illusion. It’s simple, being so fully awake, because it is the effortless embrace of the present moment. But it’s not easy at all, because your old reality has shattered into a billion pieces, and the old protection has gone, and you are a vessel for all the joy and the pain of the world, and you can’t kid yourself that you’re in control any longer. It’s not easy, to be so open to life. It’s not easy, to see all the pain of the world. It’s not easy, to sometimes feel like you’re a stranger in a strange land, knowing yourself as Love more clearly than ever, yet seeing others around you forgetting so much. It’s not easy, no longer fitting into the systems that promised so much happiness and delivered so little. And yet, this is the price you pay for absolute freedom. One cannot be fully awake without fully dying to the dreams of yesterday. One cannot live without leaving the known. Those of you who are WALKING this exhilarating and terrifying path, I bow to your courage. ~ Jeff Foster