So what now? Totally asleep . .. I know the way back. Keep coming back again and again. Deepen the awakening to include all aspects of being. Don't identify even with your reactions to being awake or asleep -- they are just more sleeping and dreaming. The moment you say "This is it!" it isn't. I want to try to clarify that more because I have seen it more clearly than that. Maybe it's because the moment you think that, however subtly, you create a false dichotomy between yourself and the awakeness.
When it comes down to it what is really the essential part of you? What is the foundation on which all concepts of self are based? Isn't it only the simple fact of Being, alone, unadorned, so common it is neglected by almost everyone? It is so simple but just seeing it once will not set you free. The habits of a lifetime of ignorance are reverberating inside you. They are neither good nor evil. Your value judgements about them are just another habit. But we are creatures of habit, aren't we? A person who knows they have tasted awakeness but has not embraced it is like an inmate in a prison where there are no guards and no warden. All the doors stand open and the prisoner continues to shuffle around in his cell, or perhaps the hallway, mostly dreaming that he is still a prisoner. Sometimes he sees the Truth and shuffles closer to the Final Exit. The fear is intense and at time seems all consuming. It seems the prison is all he has ever known and if he walks through that final door he will leave everything behind. Who will he be? How will he live? Where will he go?
So many questions they could be contemplated for a lifetime, or perhaps forever. Perhaps they have been already. Perhaps we have been standing at the door all this time and now all that is needed is one step.
