12 Years into Awakening, I Finally Get the Now

Be kind, truthful, and authentic,
that is all to spirituality folks,
and if despite your best efforts
you fall short of expectations,
ask yourself why that’s the case.
Maybe you catch your self
when events get the better of you.
Every moment is an invite
to lose your self.
(Christian M. Wiese, Lose your self)

Timothy Wilkerson wrote a book about his enlightenment experience and he proudly shared with me that he didn’t use the somewhat opaque expression ‘ego’ a single time in it. I did think that it was an accomplishment, especially because I also started embracing the view that the ‘me, myself and I’ is the interference that we are after. We don’t need a villain called ‘ego’ to mess things up. There is a ‘no self’ state that we can experience, and the moment to enjoy it is here and now.

I made a change myself in the forthcoming book, ‘Breaking Free—Awaken from your illusionary self’. I finally dropped the expression ‘the Way’, or Tao, that I had used in my earlier two books. The Way is a reference to the awakening program that kicks in one day for many of us. A higher Power steers us on a self-dissolution course and we have little choice but to move along. Reverently, I called this process Tao. Life as such becomes holy because everything that happens is bound to set us free.

Actually, everyone is on that liberation journey. It’s just that prior to experiencing the feeling of being called these processes are all subconscious. We think we have free-will but we don’t. We are steered towards liberation thinking that we are given free reigns to run after our own happiness. We are not. We are primed and conditioned into this journey that after awakening becomes our own quest. There comes a day, however, when this quest ends. We have finally grown up.

The choice to step out of self—or rather, the realization that we are operating ‘out-of-self’ always happens here and now. There is no awakening, and there is no quest! We may have an unconscious moment when our self tightly clings to the the steering wheel, and that is totally ok. Still, the next set-up for the ‘out-of-self’ phenomenon is still here and now. Twelve years into the awakening quest I have grown up and finally get what our sages talk about, 12 years into awakening I get the now.