I have generally observed that the majority of people in this world experience life with their eyes closed. They are asleep, going through life like zombies. There are degrees; some people have their eyes cracked open just enough to let a sliver of light in. Others have one eye open and one closed, their ears closed. Everyone’s somewhere on the spectrum between asleep and awake. I’m not saying I’m 100% awake, as nobody can be. The idea is to continue opening your eyes and mind, but nobody will achieve complete wakefulness. I’m here to try and wake people up, because life is so much more rewarding, interesting, fulfilling when we open our eyes. We walk a path through life, and with open eyes the path looks more beautiful, with vibrant colours, interesting scenery, things to experience and learn. Those things cannot be seen if we are asleep. This is not just some philosophical, religious or metaphysical nonsense, this is real, practical advice to living a better and more rewarding life. This is actually reality, and by starting to wake up we can start to walk this path. It’s only when we start to view things from a widened perspective that we can begin to question and change the way we think and the way we see things. A lot of this won’t make sense to you depending on your current level of awareness, but you need to trust me that this is real, factual and practical advice. The eventual idea is that if we start changing the way we see things and think, we may be able to affect our behaviours as well.
The Easy Path, the Hard Path
It’s no secret why the majority people sleep through life – it’s easy. The easy path is the one where we don’t need to take responsibility for our lives, where we can easily blame others for problems stemming from our own actions. It’s easy to cheat and deceive and keep our heads buried in the sand so we can plead ignorance. It’s so easy to take shortcuts, to make things simpler for ourselves. The signs of this are everywhere and obvious to anyone who has started to wake up. But waking up is hard – it’s a difficult path. It will test you. There are no shortcuts – it’s the long, hard path, but it’s extremely (ultimately) rewarding. It’s so hard to take complete responsibility for our actions. It’s difficult to look at what we do objectively and how our actions influence people around us and our own lives as well. You’ll need to learn to swallow your pride and bury your ego and those are hard things to do when everyone around you is taking advantage. We all do these things, but the first step is really trying to wake up enough to identify and accept that we do these things. To be able to recognize them gives us the choice of making a decision to do something different. We might not always make those choices because it’s difficult but the first step is to identify and accept them. Eventually, when we are ready we may decide to change our behavior after enough contemplation about it. That’s when we start to really walk the path – it’s taking the road less traveled – the more difficult path, the longer and more painful path. As we get older and more experienced, we come closer to full lucidity – and we are able to continue to grow and improve in terms of the way we think of ourselves and others, and how we act. Since we live in a world full of people with their eyes shut and hands over their ears, this is another level of difficult because we are the ones who seem out of place. We may ‘look bad’ and ‘feel bad’ because others are getting away with it so why can’t we? It’s the ability to transcend this that allows us to act as real individuals. We are only in control of ourselves and how we act. We are only really able to ‘manage’ life as best we can. Walking the path is the art of managing with what we’ve got. We need to take back our attention and centre it – so outside influences are not controlling what and how we think. Act like a true individual and look out for ourselves 100% – because we can never rely on anyone else to look out for our best interests but ourselves. Demonstrating strength of character and integrity are key aspects of walking the path. These are necessary skills to be developed if we wish to continually improve our lives and the lives of others in society.
The Never Ending Battle
It’s always hard to remain dedicated and convicted to our personal beliefs and values when many others would try and undermine us. We can think of those who are asleep at ‘lower levels’ in terms of a numerical scale where the highest ‘level’ represents complete wakefulness (something we continually get closer to through our lives, but probably never reach). Those nearer to the top than others will constantly have to deal with those at lower levels trying to pull them down, as if we’re floating in the ocean trying to keep our heads above water, and there are people below the water grabbing our ankles and pulling us down into the depths. We may go under, waves crashing over our heads, but through struggle and hardship we pop our heads up above the water again. This is a good metaphor to illustrate the difficulty of actually living by these ideas in a world where it’s easier for people to pull others back down to their level rather than for them to climb up to ours. It will always be a struggle, and this is a choice that needs to be made. There’s no reason a person can’t live a content life in a mostly sleeping state, but once you start to wake up magical things happen. The flat, grayscale world you once lived in will start to burst with colour, sights and sounds that tantalize the senses. It may be frightening, depressing, scary, intimidating, and downright unpleasant at times to walk this path through life, but ultimately it’s all about the journey and not about the destination (there is no endpoint, until death anyway). Isn’t it better to experience in in colour, 3D (or even 4k)?.
How to Win
By undertaking this journey and opening our eyes we see people in a new way and we begin to understand their individual and societal actions better. This way, we can start to become less fearful, less angry, less likely to want to succumb to the common action of trying to push back on them as they would push on us. It makes it easier for us to accept these behaviours because we can understand them. When we accept them, we no longer feel as compelled to behave in a way which takes us off the path. We then take ourselves out of the equation completely, and our negative behaviours won’t further perpetuate these behaviours in others because we no longer need to pull people back down under the ocean. More people can swim up and put their heads above water, and that could lead to a nice cascading effect (we start waking people up – it gets easier). The idea is to bend like a sapling in the wind, because resist the wind and we will break. Let the waves on a beach wash over us, as they will naturally approach and retreat, fight the waves and they will pulverize us.
Recapture Your Own Attention – It’s Beautiful
When looking at what’s going on in the world lately, or really any time in history it’s obvious how disastrous it can be when people at the lower levels of awareness start pushing on each other. They are extremely easily influenced, and their belief systems can be manipulated by those who want power – to control people. It makes it easy for others to capture our attention and take us away from what’s truly important in life (relatively trivial things like presidential campaigns, consumer society, personal image on social media – etc). Not to say none of these things are important, but their importance should be taken into consideration within the context of our own journey through life and scaled based on the relative importance to us. Otherwise, if we have no frame of reference for what is truly important (those who are asleep) then these things will consume us completely, and we become slaves to them. Compare those distractions with other things like spending quality time interacting socially with friends and family in a meaningful way, or appreciating the beauty in nature, perhaps by studying the intricate details of a single flower, and recognizing that the very fact that we exist in a capacity where we are able to study and appreciate these subtle details is a miracle unto itself. The fact that two autonomous sentient beings (people) are capable of sitting down together in a particular place at a particular time, and can share ideas, thoughts and feelings with one another is amazing. The way that our bodies evolved to allow us to produce vibrations in our vocal cords, causing waves of compressed air to leave our bodies and be detected by a resonating membrane in other being’s ear which is then translated into sound by our sophisticated brains, and that those sounds are organized and arranged into language which carries meaning and feelings, and the ideas shared between beings can include philosophical discussions concerning the nature of our own existence – questioning the very universe from which we emerged. Wow. Who thought the act of a simple conversation, which we take for granted every day, could be filled with such beauty, wonder, mystery and magic. When we open our eyes, this is what we see in everything, and it’s amazing.
Then, it becomes really frightening to contemplate how a person like Donald Trump is able to exert such influence over so many other people, dividing a nation and capturing the attention of billions of others around the world – an army of somnambulists. This is what we call ‘power’. Imagine what the ‘awakened’ population of the world thinks of us. No wonder we have problems. We did this, we all did this – we are all responsible. Do we not perpetuate it on social media, watch it on TV, talk about it at work? So, who really has your attention? Are you in control?
