Your Conscious, Friendly Mind – Day 17
Your Conscious, Friendly Mind Day 17
Day 17: Are We Truly Awake or Sleepwalking?
We sleep for six to eight hours. For the remainder of the day, we only think that we are awake. The typical waking state, however, does not even approach wakefulness. We eat, talk, see and respond to the people, the circumstances and the world around us in the dull and dim awareness of habit. We live unconsciously, existing within the limits of what we believe we already know. Most people in the world are somnambulists, sleepwalkers.
The greatest challenge we face in life is to wake up, to awaken from the sleep of unawareness into the joy of mindful awareness. Awaken the consciousness. Arise to claim the magnitude of true inheritance. Until we awaken, we are vegetating, confined to our personal struggles and concerns. A larger life awaits us. Life is expansive. Spirit is expansive. We are expansive in our nature.
“Arise! Awake! Accept!” are the three cornerstones of spiritual practice. Until we embrace them as essential, we cannot be other than subject to the whims and vagaries of our untrained mind.
If we do not arise into our spiritual inheritance, if we do not awaken to the mind and lift it into the light of higher truth, if we do not accept all that life brings as the gift of God that it is, no amount of prayer, meditation, or spiritual practice will make a difference. We may sit before God. We may pray and meditate. We may perform other spiritual practices, but will remain asleep.
