Awakening is supposed to be a time of awareness, hope, and light. Yes, it is. But it is also something else. It is loss, it is death, and it waving goodbye to what you thought you were, what you thought the world was. Awakening is saying goodbye to the old dream, and hello to new possibilities. Yet, many of us, due to social conditioning and a culture that has no facility with handling death and loss, feel a sadness and despair that we don’t seem to be able to – or perhaps want to – shake. Our modern culture doesn’t like loss. It doesn’t like change. We like to think of ourselves as being highly sophisticated with high tech, but we fall to pieces when we experience loss in our lives.
So, instead of cultivating an understanding of what loss is, that is is a natural – and beautiful – process of life, that it signifies a time of great change into perhaps an unknown and mysterious territory, we immediately get to telling ourselves stories about what we are experiencing. We begin to label it with a Mind map. Psychology has provided us many, many stickers by which we label our feelings. So we eagerly grab those, and stamp what we think is appropriate on our foreheads. Yet, does it really help? I don’t think so. It is just making it worse.
Depression, sadness, anxiety, hopelessness: these are all feelings that we have from time to time. Sometimes they last for a short period, maybe a few minutes or a few hours. Sometimes they linger for days, weeks, or months; for some, this can go on for years. But regardless of the length of our hopelessness, they all amount to the same thing: feelings of loss, a little brush with the unknown, the invisible, something like death.
This sense of something missing or not being right can lead to many things. It can lead us into fear or panic. It can lead us into making up intricate stories about our feelings, based on past memories and future expectations. Usually, when we feel sad, our minds immediately go to our habitual interpretation of that sadness. This is why we feel like we are trapped in the sadness. The stories we create don’t feel like our creation. They feel real. When we are immersed in these stories, we take on a specific identity, a character. Others in the story also take on roles as well. They are either contributing to our sadness or they are trying to help.
When you are always using the same story about yourself in life, then that story feels real. So, for example, whenever you feel sad, you might use the same story or explanation, like “I don’t have love in my life” or “I am not lovable” or “Nothing works out for me.” These voices in your head are not coming from a good source and they can be quite stubborn. But you can wake up to them, to become a witness to them, rather than an obedient slave. In a lot of ways, what the voice is actually saying to you is: YOU DON’T BELONG IN THIS LIFE, IN THIS DREAM. When you realize that, you can start to see the absurdity of it. You are in this life because you are supposed to be in this life. It is that simple. Lies are not just on MSM or the media. They are swimming inside your head long after you shut off the television.
When you start to realize that you aren’t what your mind is saying about you, when you start to experience yourself as a Soul, rather than an ego/character/story, you start to realize that living life “in story” is very much like living life in a dream. That is when you start to awaken from the dream. The truth about the Great Awakening occurring on earth right now is that we are rising from the dream and dreams that we have had about ourselves. When we do this, we say goodbye to who we are. That conjures feelings of sadness and loss.
There is nothing wrong when you experience sadness in your life. We experience all kinds of emotions. Emotions are like water, and they flow through us like water. They take us up. They take us down. We built boats upon the water, stories, to help us understand who and what we are, where we are going, what to expect. But what happens when our hopes and expectations are dashed? Why does that make us sad? Well, there is a loss there, kind of like a death. We held onto something, a story, a person, an expectation, and we wanted it to be a certain way. But what if God and the universe has other plans. That is the best news because life, in its natural unmodified and unmanipulated state is designed to grow and expand. The best thing about human beings is that as our bodies age, our wisdom can continue to expand and grow exponentially. This is the true glory and wisdom of growing “old”, something that we have been taught to fear, rather than embrace. In modern society we have not only lost respect for our elders due to our fear of death, but we have lost respect for wisdom and our own Soul’s capacity for wisdom.
Even worse, we have been living in a world that wants and encourages sadness and depression. We are told, even by psychology, that prolonged sadness is a disease and is something bad and weak in us. But sadness, by itself, is an experience of loss. it is the death experience, the losing of something or someone you held onto in some way. In our culture we are just not equipped to handle loss in a beautiful way. The story of Jesus’ death is an example of a teaching that is trying to show you that loss is not an end, but is only a beginning. Plato, too, showed the same, in his dialogue called the Phaedo. In the Phaedo, Socrates is about to die, but he has no fear, and no sense of loss. The only ones who didn’t want to let go of him were his friends, because they saw him as a physical person, not as an eternal soul. But he saw a new life and a new world because he saw that the soul is deathless.
When we are asleep, due to centuries of human slavery and programming, we believe that we are only this body here, and we believe what our mind has been programmed to think about ourselves. We have been trained to become attached to the expectation of a system of control, and the way we have taught that it works. Letting go of this system of control is going to take a while for many, many people. We are all awakening on the planet now. We are all going to confront, eventually, the mirror of who we have been in this life. This is will be a gateway towards our own personal freedom, where loss is a something that we can learn to acknowledge as being a stepping stone for future growth. The caterpillar needs to be willing to let go of her caterpillar-ness and all the expectations of the caterpillar in order to allow the transition to butterfly. That transition can be challenging.
The truth about human beings, and the truth about you, is that you are way more than you thought you were. Your awakening is leading you to more freedom, more agility, more joy and more awareness in life. You will no longer tolerate being a slave to anyone. You will no longer tolerate the forces that have kept you from growing, becoming, who you are, an infinite being of infinite Love, a true child of God. Consider that the world has, up until now, wanted us to believe that we are small insignificant creatures. That we should worship the stars and the celebrities who are better than we are. That we should have every aspect of our lives controlled by experts and those who know better than we do. That we should worship, but not participate. That we should keep our masks on and shut up.
So, your sadness is located in loss. Your sadness is located in the missing of something. Take a look. God wouldn’t show you or have you feel sadness in order to make you suffer. Sadness is a beautiful thing, but you have to be willing to let go and look. Look and see what you are holding on to that needs to be let go of. You know that your soul is whispering something into your ear. You know deep inside that you are on this earth at this time for a reason. Your light is the reason, your wonder and curiosity and growth is the reason. Let go of your caterpillar dream, butterfly.
