We Are NOT Woke AF
People who claim to be “woke” are the exact opposite. Self-awareness and consciousness are not destinations or fixed states to achieve. Awakening is a neverending process of growth and expansion.
“Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.” — Sri Ramakrishna
On the Internet, people seem to love sharing memes, quotes and images talking about how “woke” they are or declaring that they are now “woke AF”. It’s an interesting phenomenon in the health and wellness circles that I’ve watched pick up a lot of momentum in the past year or two. I can’t help but giggle a little bit when I see someone post about how woke they are, or that they want a man or woman as a partner who’s woke AF or how NOT woke their parents or family are… it’s an extensive list of comparisons between these seemingly woke people and everyone else who, well, isn’t.
Here’s my observation about this whole shebang: the people who feel the need to declare they’re “woke” are actually the exact opposite. Because if you need to publicly announce to the world how self-aware and conscious you are, it seems that you’ve missed the ploy from your ego to elevate itself in relation to everyone else who’s “not as woke as you”. And if you were truly as awake as you claim to be, you probably wouldn’t feel the burning desire to broadcast your newfound self-awareness and gurudom it to the entire world, seeking approval and validation for your heroic victory of achieving, what, “more” consciousness? Sounds like a big, steaming bucket of horseshit.
Self-awareness and consciousness are not set destinations or fixed states of Being to try and achieve. The process of awakening is a neverending journey of growth, compassion, expansion and experimentation. This process is not something that has a starting point and an end point. This process is something that you voluntarily keep saying “yes” to, over and over again, as you are compelled to keep exploring what it means to be a more self-aware and actualized individual. Each and every day brings many moments to raise your awareness, to expand your consciousness and to, yes, wake you up from the mire of illusion, expectation, assumption and projection.
Aside from the egoic desire to claim “awokeness” publicly, I’m not sure that people truly understand what asking for more consciousness will bring into their lives. Rather than using meditation, mindfulness practices, yoga, conscious communication, therapy, sound baths, chanting, festivals, vegan food and Ayahuasca ceremonies to wear as some badge of honor that make us more evolved human beings than everyone else — perhaps we can begin to realize that seeking conscious awareness will bring us equal amounts of both pain and pleasure. That we cannot automatically exclude pain, suffering, confusion and anxiety when we declare, “High vibes only!!!” on our organic, fair-trade, eco-dyed t-shirts.
“Because consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain, to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness…The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing. Music is a delight because of its rhythm and flow. Yet the moment you arrest the flow and prolong a note or chord beyond its time, the rhythm is destroyed. Because life is likewise a flowing process, change and death are its necessary parts. To work for their exclusion is to work against life.” — Alan Watts
And therein lies the rub. So many people are doing the work to become more self-aware, conscious, awakened individuals, but they’re doing it to try and escape from their darkness, pain, suffering and shame — which is NOT the path of consciousness. The sheer denial and lack of integration of all aspects of existence simply pushes us further away from being in alignment with life itself and all of the myriad emotions, confusion, clarity, calamity, breakthroughs and breakdowns. If you truly want to be a more awakened person, you better damn well know what you’re asking life for. You either want the whole enchilada or not.
There is so much subversion in the work of becoming a more conscious person. We so often choose the small caves with the baby monsters because those shadows are easy to deal with. And we give ourselves so much credit for addressing our darkness that we develop a sense of acclimation to taking small risks. We become so damn acclimated to taking these small risks that we often talk ourselves out of facing the giant, scary, unknown monsters in the big cave. You know the one. The cave that’s at the end of the darkest part of the forest. The one we KNOW has been waiting for us. The one we’ve avoided… for freakin’ ever.
“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center. You will find the jewel, and it draws you off.” — Joseph Campbell
What you realize is that the monster in the cave… is actually you. It’s not something “other” that you need to destroy. It’s a part of your cosmological makeup, your deepest psyche, that you’ve been dreading and flat-out avoiding. The painful truth that you’ve been unwilling to face and cunningly subverting your entire life. See, the horrors and trauma “outside” of ourselves, well, those can be easy to keep at arm’s length or rationalize away. It’s the unresolved fear, anguish, brutality and pain deep inside that scare the holy crap out of us. These aspects of ourselves form the classic literary archetype of the monster, the vampire, the zombie, the great evil thing in the cave that we so often read about in our treasured stories, movies and myths.
However, the realization that we are not separate from these terrible monsters is both profound and necessary. We start to get a glimpse that, indeed, we are the source of it all and the entire Universe is inside of us. That we have a choice to keep running from our painful truths or face them, bravely and completely. When we face our pain, suffering, darkness, anger and violence, look them in the eye and not run away… that’s the beginning of being a more awakened, fully integrated human being.
“I think the violence in the world right now is being reflected inside people. And I also believe the violence inside people is being reflected in the world.” — Marianne Williamson
Until we choose to take responsibility for our unresolved darkness, our misunderstood suffering and our deep-seated aggressions, we will continue to destroy one another in comment sections, battlefields and beyond. The wars will perpetuate, the stratification in our society will grow and we will keep each other at a distance with our bombs, our vitriolic words and our collective lack of empathy and compassion for one another.
Believing that the cause of our collective pain and anguish is something or someone “over there” is the very opposite of self-awareness and consciousness. This illusory perception of victimhood creates more divisiveness, separation and blame. And we see this in damn near every arena of life: the Democrats hate the Republicans, the vegans hate the paleo people, the Christians hate the Muslims, the Lakers hate the Celtics… we could go on and on, ad infinitum. My point is that it’s way easier to put the blame on someone else and make them the focus of your pain than to do the necessary work on healing yourself. I mean, just look at the state of our world at this moment. We, as humans, are not taught how to take responsibility, how to examine our deepest darkness, how to reconcile the anguish we’ve caused for ourselves and others. We have not been taught how to do these things, and for that, I do have compassion. How the hell can you heal when you’ve never been taught how to do it?
What I don’t have is a taste for people using ignorance as an escape pod. Once you become aware of something and its effects, you then have a choice to continue your behavior or choose a different way of Being. And this takes WORK. That’s a big reason why I think people don’t choose to change their behavior. Because it’s often painful. It’s so much easier to continue to perpetuate an egoic sense of superiority based on who you vote for, what you eat, who you worship, what country you’re from or how big your bank account is. There are a billion ways to divide and conquer ourselves and, as a species, we’re doing a damn fine job of it right now.
“Before God, we are all equally wise, and equally foolish.” — Albert Einstein
If we are to continue existing on this planet, we must take full responsibility for our ignorance, our sloth, our resistance to change, our dependence on comfort and our unwillingness to look at the most painful, terrifying aspects within ourselves. Yes, we can clean up the environment, ban plastic straws, eat vegan food, drive electric cars, protect endangered species, install wind or solar farms, plant millions of acres of new trees, however, if we don’t collectively change as a species on the level of conscious awareness for our actions and take full responsibility for the mess we’ve created… then what’s to say we won’t repeat the cycle of apathy, greed, violence and entitlement that has literally poisoned our beautiful planet?
The desolation of this world reflects the desolation of our hearts.
For our species to continue to thrive on this planet in a sustainable and sane manner, technological advances are helpful, but not enough. Bioremediation, electric cars and plastic bans can and will address our problems on a symptomatic level. More so, examining our collective psychoses, hateful aggression, toxic behaviors and general nihilism towards life — THAT will address our problems on a level of pure causality and help us get to the root of how we got ourselves into this calamity.
For the human race to continue existing, thriving and growing, we must change ourselves, our thinking, our actions and our regard for one another. We must cultivate more healing, more compassion, more empathy, more generosity and oneness. Then we can, perhaps, actually begin to save ourselves from our own potential destruction.
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” — Leo Tolstoy
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This writing was originally posted on Wellevatr.com.
