A Joyful Journey: The Promise of Awakening
By Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, FRCP
For the coming year, I will be guiding a journey I’ve never undertaken before, leading everyone who is willing to the state of awakening. My intention is to devote the entire year to this journey, with the hope that I will be leaving a personal legacy that survives for as long as the message of awakening holds its appeal.
There are many kinds of spiritual journeys, but awakening is unique. It isn’t a path leading from starting point A to endpoint B. That’s because waking up is a change of state. We wouldn’t say, “I didn’t sleep long enough last night to wake up.” Sleep is a different state from waking up. Therefore, the amount of time it takes is irrelevant.
To put it another way, how much time does it take to become timeless? The question makes no sense because, once again, being timeless is a different state from being trapped in time. In the same way, the path of waking up covers no distance, because being awake happens here and now as the eternal recurrence of living in the present.
These unique traits, unfortunately, have not helped the cause of awakening. Everyday life is spent hemmed in by time and space; our activity aims at fixed goals; we see our bodies change as we age, implying a straight line from birth to death Centuries of guides, savants, teachers, saints, and gurus have asserted that everyday life isn’t reliable when it comes to waking up, just as being asleep in bed is irrelevant to opening your eyes in the morning.
If this has been the centuries-old message, the same centuries have seen countless people ignoring the message. Strangely, it is much easier to convince believers in an almighty, omniscient, invisible God than in their own ability to wake up. As the great mystic poet Rumi so poignantly asks, “Why do you stay in jail when the door is so wide open? “
One good thing about such a persistent problem is that brilliant solutions have had time to emerge. These will be the core of The Year of Awakening, the name I’ve given to 2026. We are going to try 52 ways to wake up, 52 angles of approach, 52 triggers to each “Aha!” moment when waking up becomes viable, practical, and personal.
The brilliant solutions proposed over the millennia all rest upon a single truth: What the human mind has made, it can unmake. The condition of being asleep depends upon years of inattention, old conditioning, second-hand beliefs, low expectations, and the persistent threats of depression and anxiety. As much pain and suffering as these conditions have created, they do not impair or distort the state of waking up, which is free from all of them.
The ability of the mind to heal the mind is termed “a thorn to remove a thorn” In Buddhism. Not that the process is painful. What the image stands for, speaking literally, is the capacity of consciousness to heal unconsciousness. In and of itself, this is a joyful prospect. In your essence, you possess the qualities of pure consciousness, which is free, unbounded, timeless, creative, and blissful.
The ultimate reason that awakening is a promise, not simply a far-fetched spiritual dream, is that returning to our own true nature is effortless, just as waking up in the morning is effortless. A new state dawns. This change of state is often expressed ecstatically, as when Kabir, another ancient mystical poet, writes, “Inside you there is a spark that longs to rise. Open the door of your heart, and its fire will flow into the world.”
But the reality is that waking up is as different as any two people, and it is often surprisingly different from the social self we present to the world or the “me” we recognize in the mirror. One thing is unchanging, however, in each story. You can always tell that you are no longer asleep.
Over the coming year, the focus of each weekly post and meditation will be on my long-held conviction that reality urgently needs rescuing. Too many problems face humanity that only the presence of awakened people can solve. The rescue operation is only complete when reality matches the truth of who we really are and why we are here. The path to awakening is one that every person can follow — I hope you are intrigued.
Namaste,
Deepak
(Pre-order Deepak’s latest book, Awakening: The Path to Freedom and Enlightenment)
