You Are Being Called to Awaken
By Deepak Chopra, MD
Asleep: Life is based on the physical world.
Awake: Life is based on who you really are.
The deepest dedication that anyone can have is to a calling. When a person says, “This is my mission” or “I’ve found what I am passionate about,” both are strong statements. But a calling is unique. It comes, sometimes out of the blue, as if from a higher power or another plane of existence. No wonder, then, that a calling is generally seen as religious.
It doesn’t have to be. In the coming year, I want to unfold a calling that applies to everyone, regardless of religious beliefs or even without beliefs. It is the calling to awaken. For many modern people, the call to awaken does indeed come out of the blue. But this isn’t because waking up is arcane, mystical, or simply a poetic metaphor.
Awakening comes out of the blue because modern life has turned away from it. A value system thousands of years old feels archaic, unsuited for our overloaded, stressful, distracted, and high-speed lives. Countless people have spiritual goals, but usually these remain a dream, because the last thing anyone has time for is another project, no matter how valuable the project might be.
Awakening isn’t a project. Many changes are involved. You find yourself realigning with other people. The mind becomes quiet, more secure, more at home with itself. A word as basic as “I” gains new meaning. That might sound like a project, but in reality, the process is natural and effortless. Waking up in the spiritual sense isn’t all that different from waking up in bed every morning, which no one considers a project.
The first step in the process is finding a vision that will hold good for the coming year. Here is what I propose. The foundation of reality is you. As visions go, this one is radical. We are all conditioned by our age of science and technology to accept that the foundation of reality is the physical world. Who are you to challenge the mountain of evidence that supports physics and chemistry? What is your birth compared with the Big Bang, which gave birth to the cosmos?
You, as a limited body and mind, aren’t the foundation of reality. We must bring to light another you that has always existed, one might say, on a parallel track. It silently oversees the you that consists of a limited body and mind. It has none of your likes and dislikes. It doesn’t interfere with your life history.
This other you is content simply to be aware. Therefore, it is totally awake — here, now, always, without limitation. Awakening would be happening all around us if the only thing needed was to see this other you. We already glimpse it in moments of love, compassion, peace, joy, insight, and beauty. In those moments, the everyday self, which is asleep, flutters its eyelids and sees the other you.
But inertia is powerful, and the situations we are tangled in justify the poet William Wordsworth when he declared, “The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” If asked to name the greatest power on Earth, how many people would say the power of awareness? That’s why the vision of awakening is so radical. It places the source of all power in one thing, pure awareness.
If pure awareness is the source of creation, it must also be your source. The logic is simple and undeniable. The phrase “pure awareness” sounds appealing, like pure air and water. The world’s spiritual traditions have dressed it up as the eternal light of existence or the presence of God. But pure awareness doesn’t sound urgent; it certainly doesn’t seem to be a calling.
Yet appearances are deceptive. Behind the stress and busyness of modern life, the other you never stops calling. It exerts an unseen influence on your every thought, word, and action. You can block the call or be asleep to it. Neither really matters. You couldn’t exist without being connected to your source. Its call is nothing less than “Get real. I am you. Stop laying waste your powers.”
Because awakening overturns all past experiences, it opens up everything everywhere all at once, to quote the title of an Oscar-winning movie. I’m proposing a year-long journey together in order to enjoy the experience of new horizons and unexpected vistas. No one is going to want to wake up unless the process brings more light than everyday life does. I hope that what I’ve offered as a vision and a calling makes you hopeful.
For decades, I’ve kept with me a favorite verse from the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore: “The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.” One reason to cherish this quote is that it states the truth. Another, more emotional, reason is that Tagore expresses the kind of exultancy that awakening should always bring.
A Step Forward:
Every week I’ll suggest a reflection that will help nudge your awakening forward.
This week, take time to listen to your calling. In a moment when you feel most alive, loved, appreciated, filled with beauty, experience inner peace, or simply feel that being here now is enough, pause and say to yourself, “Ah, this is my calling.” With these words, you are acknowledging the other you that is reaching out to find you.
Namaste,
Deepak
(Pre-order Deepak’s latest book, Awakening: The Path to Freedom and Enlightenment)
