Waking

Waking is a miraculous threshold of personal reacquaintance, a liminal moment of subtle transition between dark and light, subconscious and conscious worlds, a luminous passage in which we experience dissipation and formation, appearance and disappearance, coalescing simultaneously, the nocturnal happenings of the subterranean mind submerged again and again as an all too familiar self surfaces from out the deep each new day with its relentless agency, authority, and awareness. Waking is linking, swiftly, though not instantaneously, to a sense of self: the weight and levity of being a certain self, along with the associated problems, fears, and worries of this self, its autobiographical history, hopes, and dreams. But there is a moment, in between sleeping and waking, just prior to our consciousness of self, where something like simple awareness surfaces. Through a free flowing of extremely loose observation, thoughts, feelings, and sensations, we are momentarily privy to a stripped-down noticing, an impression of occurrences, a barely emerging recognition of appearances. Suddenly the sweet sound of a songbird outside our window. Or the noxious noise of the morning alarm. A fuzzy drape or blurred bedpost on the brink of coming into focus. And then, another second or so, and this simple awareness surrenders, as the familiar “I” solidifies and seizes the citadel of the mind once more. This prelude to self-consciousness is a moment we all know. And yet because of its brevity and seemingly inconsequential nature we are apt to give it little to no thought at all. The moment is nonetheless cause for pause and real reflection, as it is indicative of an alternative to what we normally regard as awareness, i.e., with the self at the center, unquestioningly so, such that the mere notion this self might still exist perfectly fine or even better decentered appears anathema to the ego, tantamount in absurdity to how the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system sounded in the mid-sixteenth century to most while still living in Ptolemy’s geocentric universe. The experience of what we might call “morning mind” is important because it is suggestive of another state of mind, more relaxed and empty of self, less inhibited by the analytical pains, neurotic trappings, and continual comparisons of classical consciousness.

For all the advances indebted to human consciousness, we are equally absorbed and often lost within self-consciousness, if not outright at war within, and among ourselves, in desperate need of waking from the self. And just as waking originally is beyond our control, a true moment of grace as it were, for the religious and nonreligious alike, simply given to us one day, beyond our willing it, perhaps so, too, waking from the self is not a phenomenon crafted or created through any of our efforts, and instead only an experience we might be poised and positioned to receive. If the centerstage self is at issue, in other words, then maybe the solution must come from beyond the self. And perhaps such positioning for this possibility can be learned from other experiences of waking, however fleeting: poetic, artistic, and elemental experiences, readily available to any of us. Not experiences where we create freedom from the self, but where the threshold of freedom is found indirectly through dissipation of the self in the creative act itself, either by being the artist, or by immersion in the artistic, both nature’s and otherwise. Art is the process of waking the soul, as Bill Viola once said, beyond the self. We are as much potentiality as actuality, and the self nothing more than a shifting state, continually capable of waking to something other.