Are YOU Awake Yet?

Although you believe you woke up this morning it is highly likely that you are still asleep. Not from the kind of sleep that keeps you unconscious during the night, but the kind of sleep that has overcome us all, to some extent or other, during our waking hours. It takes time and the practice of self awareness to ‘wake up’ from the illusions and beliefs, accumulated on life’s journey, that keep us less conscious, less aware, during our waking hours, than we could be.

However we have been in this form of sleep for so long that our thought and behaviour patterns based on these beliefs and illusions are now so well established. Waking up and staying awake means ‘seeing through’ the illusions and recognizing the false beliefs to which we are subconsciously clinging. Only when we reawaken a deeper awareness of what is true can our thoughts/feelings/behaviours change. Some of those illusions are so obvious we might wonder why we didn’t see through them earlier. Others are harder to see as we are so deeply schooled to believe that these beliefs are true!

Are you awake or are you still asleep? We can only fully know for our self. Here are four of the main signs and symptoms of someone who is sleepwalking through their life.

1 Stress Projections

You are still asleep if you blame others, situations or events for your stressful feelings. You believe others create your stress. Stress is a form of pain or discomfort that comes to tell us there is something we need to change within our self, not in the other. All stress is self-created regardless of the circumstances. That’s why some people appear to be emotionally devastated by some situations whereas others sail on through without a second thought. Every time you blame others for what you feel it means you are asleep to the truth that your thoughts and feelings are your response, therefore your responsibility or ‘response ability’. The awakened person accepts full responsibility for their thoughts/emotions/attitudes/actions…everywhere and always! Not easy, especially when almost everyone seems to find it easier to point the finger, which means they have learned to believe ‘it’s not me, it’s them’.

2 Self Comparisons

You are still asleep whenever you compare yourself with another person. It means you have not yet realised your own uniqueness and value. In effect you are saying, “I want to be someone else”. You believe that you should aspire to be like someone else and that when you are you will have achieved some sort of success. Which of course is impossible. Or you unconsciously believe, “I am unworthy, I am of less value than them”. Which is untrue! The awakened soul knows their value and is able to affirm their own worth. They never aspire to be someone else. They are constantly rising to the challenge of expanding their capacity and awakening their own true potential.

3 Controlling Behaviour

You are still asleep whenever you attempt to control or manipulate others. Whenever you become upset with someone it means you subconsciously believe you can control what you cannot control. You believe that you can make others do your bidding. Sometimes it looks like they do, but they don’t. The truth is everyone makes their own decisions on how they will act and interact, regardless of the external situation and circumstances. If you are a clever sleepwalker you may even sense the vulnerabilities of others and be quite adept at exploiting them to your own ends. But that only keeps you locked in a false power trip that is actually draining your power. As you try to take advantage of the other, deep down your conscience knows that you are compromising your authenticity and acting against the grain of right relationship. The awakened soul never takes advantage of other sleepwalkers. They know their role is to awaken others, not exploit them.

4 Emotional Indulgence

You are still asleep when you indulge your emotions, when you go searching for some stimulus to invoke the ‘feeling’ of certain emotional states. Perhaps you like to argue because is seems to enliven your day, which means you are indulging in anger. If you keep talking about what went wrong, what you have lost, it means that you like to wallow in your own sorrow. And if you keep looking into the future with trepidation and anxiety then you are likely to have an addiction to fear. The awakened soul has broken their addiction to, and dependency on, their emotional states. They have relearned to choose and create their feelings at each moment in every scene. Not so easy in a world where the most common currency of exchange in our relationships tends to be such ‘unhappy emotions’.

By © Mike George 2010, Clear Thinking