Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, Show Up by Toni LaMotta
It’s hard to live in this day and age and not experience a world that certainly seems to be torn apart. Many people I know are asking the question – As spiritual beings in this world, what is our role in it’s transformation? It’s certainly not as easy as putting on a demonstration or praying for world peace. Meditation and Spiritual insight alone cannot transform our world or ourselves. So, what will it take?
What I’ll be describing today is known as the Integral point of view, based on the teachings of Ken Wilber, one of today’s most important philosophers. Wilber is the smartest man you’ve never heard of. He’s a philosopher and mystic whose work attempts to integrate all fields of study into one single model or framework of understanding. When I say, “all fields of study,” I mean that literally.
What he and other integral teachers tell us is that simply “Waking Up” isn’t enough. We are also being called to “Grow Up” (loosely refers to models of human development), “Clean Up” (engage in what’s known as shadow work), and “Show Up” (embody our insight in our daily lives). I’m attempting to introduce today, more than I can possibly do in a short time. But, I will briefly address all of these ideas and then hopefully I’ll be invited back to go more deeply into each of these concepts.
The path of meditative development towards what is known as emptiness is what we are calling waking up. It’s more popularly called AWAKENING and sometimes called Satori, Moksha, Enlightenment or God Realization. One important step to get there is to believe it is possible…do you? And then – to believe it is possible for YOU… Just pause a minute and take that in!
Whether conscious of it or not, all members of humanity have the heart-desire to return Home; to return in a sense to Ultimate Reality.
Within the context of Integral Theory, we speak about “waking up” as it relates to various states of consciousness. The stages of waking up seem to be based upon 4-5 major natural stages of consciousness. The various traditions usually give these as gross states – such as waking physical consciousness; subtle states such as the dream state and certain meditative states, states of creativity and so on, and causal states, such as formless awareness– deep dreamless sleep or infinite abyss. Then something called turia which is Sanskrit for the fourth –which is said to be of pure awareness, or pure witness. It’s the observing self in you right now that is aware of your egoic self and everything that is arising moment to moment.
Rama Maharshi, an Indian avatar, called it the I- I – the big eye that is now aware of your small I. When you are aware of yourself right now, the self you are aware of, the self you see is your ego and the self doing the seeing is the true, witness – your real self. Beyond that, there is the final highest state – which is the unity or non-duality of the everyday witness… a pure oneness – one taste – the supreme identity. This is the state of enlightenment, awakening, Satori and so on.
Waking up to this sphere, always already perfect exactly as it is, must be our most prominent priority.
To wake up means to move beyond self-involvement with our own contracted story. I invite you to give yourself permission to live today without history or her story. Be in the moment with the Truth about you. Michael Beckwith, a famous New Thought Minister says -It begins like this ‘once upon a choice’ not ‘once upon a time.’
Most people live lives limited by their old memories, consumed by the details of what happened TO THEM in the past. But when you wake up, you awaken to the deeper truth – the true nature of reality, to no longer see yourself as a separate, alienated self, and to come to know your True Self.
As Adyashanti, a wonderful spiritual teacher put it in a recent interview, “I woke up and discovered I was not there.” I spent 21 days in India a number of years ago at a spiritual retreat that kept talking about the NO SELF. I get glimpses…and many of you probably have as well.
Some people have profound meditations and are what I would call “big experiencers” and others are not but fortunately, neither are a determinant of a higher state of awakening. I found this reassuring since I have never been a “big” experiencer. My growth has been a gradual awakening to a more expanded way of seeing the universe, more serenity, more ability to be in this world but not “of” it, greater ability to be in the present – basically a life filled with increasing beauty, truth, and goodness.
Often, however, I felt I was “behind” others on the spiritual path because I didn’t have the overwhelming state experiences they had – but I could see that my level of peace and joy kept increasing. What I’ve come to realize and to remember is that states of consciousness are mostly temporary until we reach the ultimate awakening.
We are constantly moving into temporary states of enlightenment with daily epiphanies. These are horizontal states, however, and soon we find ourselves moving back to our old self without much development. It’s like waking up in the morning, and eventually going back to sleep.
These horizontal states are still an important part of transformation, but it’s critical that we see this as a temporary state and not a more permanent developmental stage. Just as we need sleep in our lives, we need to work on building a foundation of horizontal states in order to wake up to the next step in our transformation. Ask yourself, what am I doing to have these more and more profound experiences – to ultimately reach the highest state?
Today there is a great push out there for people to “wake up.” Thousands flock to gurus hoping for transmission, meditate to escape into a world of peace and love. Books are written about how important it is.
And it is important. However, it is also important not to forget about “growing up,” – psychological and social development if you will -that moves us through various STAGES of consciousness – each one transcending and including the one before. Once you reach a state, you stabilize there.
There is a process that leads us to develop mastery of our bodies, our environment, our emotions, and our minds in this world, that requires us to get to know and manage our ego sufficiently to work with and care for others, that asks us to take ever broader perspectives through which we see the world, and that gives us the ability to act with more tolerance and understanding.
Growing up is about developing increasing perspective-taking ability, emotional capacity, moral understanding, and other traits associated with mature adults. It is about creating a life that is sane and balanced and maybe even noble. In short, it’s about developing both more wisdom and more compassion.
To grow up means to up-level your consciousness. Your level of consciousness is the set of organizing principles that form your worldview. These ascending levels or structures of consciousness have been mapped by extensive cross-cultural research by leading developmental scientists over the past fifty years. Ken Wilber describes this emergence as the latest in a historic series of transformations stretching all the way back to the birth of humanity, bringing humanity through several distinct stages of consciousness—namely archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral stages. These major transformations have successively redefined our understanding of the human condition each and every step of the way. bringing more consciousness, more complexity, and more compassion to just about every dimension of human knowledge and activity. For example, it has been shown that human beings in healthy development evolve from egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric to cosmo-centric consciousness. Each level expands your felt sense of love and empathy to wider and wider circles of caring.
So, ask yourself right now – How wide is your consciousness? At first, your caring and concern is limited to you and your immediate circle. At the second level — ethnocentric — your identity expands to a felt-sense of empathy and connections with your larger communal context. I am an American – I am Italian. I’m from Florida. Some people get stuck here. It’s only important if it’s in my sphere.
At the third level — world-centric — your identity shifts to a felt empathy with all living humanity. At the fourth level — cosmo-centric — you move beyond mere humanity and experience a felt sense of responsibility and empathy for all sentient beings throughout all of time, backwards and forwards.
Whole cultures go through this type of development as well as individuals – and all of them are equally important. “All dimensions of reality” are evolving. We realize that consciousness itself is developing.
How do you grow up? Some of the qualities that are all important to truly integrative development are developed during the growing up process – things like – accepting things as they are, the ability to take multiple perspectives, openness to not knowing, a willingness to rely on the workings of the universe instead of needing to work out everything logically, and comfort with paradox and complexity
Let me repeat that ==\
More mature people also have the ability to reflect on their own growth and thus know that growth can be expected to continue and that it can be disorienting at times.
Grown up people are able to accept and navigate the difference between a harsh and even insane outside world and an inner focus on wholeness and peace.
The more we “grow up” through varying structures of consciousness the more perspectives we can take, the more complexity we can hold, and the more care we can release in the world. A commitment to “growing up”, in all dimensions of life, needs to become a sacred vow we take to allow Reality to incarnate through us to the fullest degree possible.
What practices can you put into place in your life so that you are making certain that you are continually Growing Up?
Here’s one – Start with the commitment to discovering how everybody is right, or, as Ken likes to joke, that no mind is capable of being a 100% wrong. This practice is embodied, for example, in the refusal to choose a side in the fight between science and religion, religion and spirituality or between democrat and republican but to instead seek a perspective that lies beyond both, integrating their essential elements in a wider, deeper embrace. CHALLENGE…
The second practice concerns the reason why everybody is right. Every perspective, every viewpoint, and every approach is both true and partial, and, as a practice, this is engaged when we seek to decipher how some approaches are more true, or more inclusive, than others. It’s defined by the active and participatory practice of honoring of the spiral of evolution; a spiral that sees less adequate and less compassionate approaches transcended by ones that are more adequate and more compassionate—even when the approach or perspective being transcended is your own. Such practices, along with a handful of others, define the coming integral wave.
Another important practice can be called Cleaning Up
If we are intentional in waking up and growing up, the third critical component to our transformation is “cleaning up.”
The more integrated each of us is, the more whole and psychologically healthy we are, the less dusty the glass is in our stain glass window of life. The less dusty our window, the more brightly what I like to call the Light of Reality can shine. This means we all have a responsibility to “clean up” anything that might be clouding that transmission.
Major cleanup is about dealing with our shadow. What is the shadow? The parts of ourselves that we may try to hide or deny. According to Carl Jung, it can be said to consist of energy patterns, known as selves or sub-personalities that were disowned — pushed down into our unconscious in childhood, as part of our coping strategies. Re-owning our shadows takes the practice of simply experiencing and transcending our charges to a profoundly deeper level of insight and breakthrough.
How do we transform and heal the shadow?
There are a variety of healing modalities to assist with the process. I typically use situations that are triggering me and dialogue directly with that energy. When something annoys us in someone else, we usually want to correct them. Help them see where THEY need to change. Think of road rage for example. Instead, shadow work invites us to look within. What IN ME is actually being triggered? No one can push our buttons if we don’t have any! We must first acknowledge, befriend and embrace what we see. Not try to fix someone else or even ourselves! That’s key. We must begin to shine the light of our own awareness on those parts of ourselves that we judge as unlovable or unworthy. This is a subject I could talk about for hours – but for now, let me just say:
Never fear shadows, it simply means there is a light shining somewhere nearby.
If the process of “growing up” helps to provide more tools in the toolkit of life, “cleaning up” gives us more refined skills and more potent energy for how we actually use those tools. At a certain point in practice, we no longer do psychological work just for our own benefit. Rather, because we know that Reality can touch more people through us the cleaner we are, we clean up to be of deeper service. Cleaning up shadows and integrating all relative dimensions of self allows us to purify the signal from Source as it broadcasts out into the world through us.
And when we do that, we are truly Showing Up
What does this mean? to live the unique life that is yours to live, and to give the unique gifts that are yours to give.
I read somewhere recently that -The core realization of a world spirituality is that every human being is both part of the whole and at the same time a high priest or priestess in their religion of one. The core obligation, joy, and responsibility of each Unique Self is to answer the call and give its unique gift, which fills a unique need in the cosmos.
So, Integral teaching is calling us to wake up to who we really are from a place of the most expanded state of waking up and the highest structure-stage of growing up.
When you fully wake up, grow up and show up, the evolutionary impulse incarnates as you. You embody a purpose-driven and values-driven life, overflowing with aliveness, love, and energy.
Finally, all of this, whether we speak of waking up, growing up, or cleaning up, is used in service of the whole. The entire frame is just a skillful way to develop your maximum potential to “show up” in all of your glory, as a true emanation of Source.
As we learn to move beyond individual paradigms of isolation and separation, humanity will more fully discover the power and potential of shared unified intention. Then with this understanding at heart and with each of us exemplifying a unique expression of intrinsic unity, “We” can, together, rain-down the blessings on the Earth that we have come here to give. I’m not sure I fully understand this yet – but something deep within me KNOWS it is Truth. My hope today is that this be an invitation as well as an activation of all that necessary for us to show up together as the single unified force of Reality that we truly are.
How then do we transform our world? – A simple outline is offered to organizations, cultures and to each of us individually: Wake up. Grow up. Clean up. Show up.
Are you with me?