Perhaps it’s just a function of being excited about spending the weekend with my kids, but I woke up this morning thinking about “waking up” as a metaphor for the spiritual journey. According to most mystical teachings, we human beings are asleep to our true nature, living instead in an illusory, thought-created world of our own imagining.
I’ve spent this past weekend teaching with and learning from my mentor and colleague, Dr. Ken Manning. One of the conversations we had stood out to me, because I recognized it to be completely true in my own experience:
There is a fundamental difference between “understanding” something intellectually and “realizing” it insightfully…..
It’s surprising how often I have what feels like a brand new insight into the nature of the human experience only to discover that I’ve not only glimpsed it before, I’ve actually written about it. In fact, it happens so often I’m tempted to call the follow up to The Inside-Out Revolution, “No… REALLY!”
When I first began sharing the principles behind the inside-out understanding with clients and on our professional training and development programs, I came up with an unofficial, highly subjective, yet fairly reliable way of evaluating whether someone was really seeing the revolutionary implications of this understanding:
If they weren’t at some level thinking “Holy F*#king Mother of God”, they probably weren’t yet really seeing the power of the principles in action.
Almost 25 years ago, I had a conversation with a friend who had been struggling with anger and behavioral issues at around the same time as I was going through my own struggles with depression. We had both come out the other side of our personal emotional infernos, and I was intensely curious to compare notes and find out what he had found most useful in his own quest for happiness and at least a modicum of inner peace…
