Some are calling for a “war on woke.” Why are people so threatened by the idea? Admittedly, the term is meant to be provocative, still I can’t help feeling that parts of society harbor an underlying fear of being awake.
What is “waking up”?
Is it seeing past the firewall of self-perception or beyond the structures that govern our lives? If this were the case, then it would certainly be threatening to established structures – especially when those structures have developed to maintain a status quo. While some may throw blind darts to shadowed acts by the government or social elite, as meditators we always look to our own mind and psychology.
How are we controlling ourselves?
What is our experience of ducking behind concepts, ideas and prejudice for safety – often to find a perceived higher ground of judgement?
Stories about awakening and seeing behind the curtain are common themes in literature and movies. From The Matrix, throughout much of science fiction, conspiracy theories and popular culture, we’re fascinated by the trope of our being held at bay by whomever we deem to be holding us. We are being held away from the truth.
Perhaps this dates back to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Once Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat its fruit, a seed—an apple seed, we might say—was planted in their minds. In the patriarchal telling, it is the woman who becomes both tempted and temptress, pulling the man from his resolve and toward our demise. Once Eve fell for the snake – and what do you suppose that represents? – and convinced Adam to follow,
Through Eve’s sexual awakening a crack happened in the existential frame of the garden. Allowing perhaps chaos, or maybe light.
Either way everything changed in that instant. And, of course, this is all the lady’s fault. Buddhist scripture offers a striking contrast. In Tibetan Vajrayana, transformative feminine energy is equally disruptive but this fissuring of the conceptual frame—or waking up—is seen as essential to our development of awareness and compassion. This energy is often embodied by the dakini, or “sky dancer,” a beautiful young woman whose role is to seduce people beyond their rigid ideas. Far from blaming the feminine, the tradition exalts her.
There is a wonderful story about Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the most revered Tibetan teachers of his time. He stood over six feet tall—“two and a half Tibetans,” as my teacher put it—and in his later years often walked with his hands resting on his attendants’ shoulders.
During a very important empowerment in front of dignitaries, diplomats and students, the great man’s wife burst into the shrine room and began to berate him for some domestic injustice or other. She walked straight toward the shrine, yelling as the ceremony approached its most sacred point. I do not know what had angered her. Dilgo Khyentse simply looked to her and smiled, his face beaming with love.
Years ago, I was driving on an interstate in Maine with my then-partner when the hood of our jalopy came loose and slammed against the windshield. It happened instantly and was literally breathtaking. I managed to reach the shoulder without hitting anything. My heart pounding, I leapt out and began violently ripping the hood from the car, cutting my hands in the process, red-faced and furious.
Then I looked to my partner, a senior Vajrayana teacher and in many ways my teacher, as she stood outside the car that had nearly killed us, laughing. With the same loving gaze I imagine Dilgo Khyentse offering his wife, she said, “We handle surprises entirely differently.”
We cling to our conceptual frameworks with a tenacity that keeps us in the dark, or at least the semi-dark land of habit.
So what is the problem with waking up?
Meditation teachers describe awakening as refining the mind to see beyond constraining frames. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche said the only difference between the dreams of sleep and the dream of our ordinary life is duration. Most of us are dreaming most of the time, with only occasional cracks in the facade: a car accident, a breakup, a grave diagnosis.
From the perspective of our attachment to life as we know it, these events are terrible. Yet they may also offer the possibility of awakening—and for a Buddhist, awakening is everything. Even people with deep understanding and strong moral principles still have farther to go if they cannot see beyond those principles toward a truth that helps them communicate with the world as it is. Compassion is communication and communication requires us to look beyond our premises.
What, then, of the war on woke? Some see it as a campaign against chaos. Sometimes it may be. But it may also express a fear of opening the mind and heart to wisdom, to the knowledge of good and evil. Christianity and the Judeo-Christian traditions contain many beautiful, instructive, and transformative elements. Yet, one contrast is that the progenitors of the human race were warned not to look into the mechanism of their existence. Buddhism makes looking its central purpose.
This is not an argument that one tradition is right and the other wrong. It is an illustration: some social structures are designed to preserve order and control; other forces tear open the fabric so that the butterfly can leave the cocoon. The sanest view employs both. We need enough structure to feel secure and to communicate with one another. But when we grip that structure with white-knuckled fury and refuse to let anything new enter, we tighten our eyes and keep ourselves asleep.
Remaining asleep is not as easy as it sounds. We must squint, look away, and actually work not to see.
I imagine that if there were a God, they might point to reality and say, “It has been here all along. Why did you not look? Why did you not see?” Of course, the answer might be, “Because you told us not to.”
But that is another story.
Ultra-conservative movements, including those now exercising power in the government of the country where I live, maintain control by demonizing agents of change. They are agents of fear, fearful themselves and capitalizing on the fears of others. Witches, artists, transformational priestesses, shamans and those who revere nature have long been vilified or struck down for looking beyond established social, political, and religious structures.
You can control a mumbling crowd looking to the ground more than a group of people fostering the power of the earth.
Perhaps because I have attention deficit disorder, I tire quickly of the old tropes used to keep people from thinking. Unexamined stupidity seems to reproduce itself. The real struggle is not against every existing structure. It is against the structures we carry within ourselves by finding the essence of love within. Love allows us to open our eyes. Trungpa Rinpoche said, “Look, look. This is your life. How can you not look?”
To risk a cliché: love is stronger than hate. It may not feel as forceful in the moment as panic or fury, but people who traffic in hate are most likely frightened and insecure. Loving them may be a tall order. Yet refusing to be cowed by their fear—and allowing our own love to develop into empathy—is our transformational imperative.
Holding to beliefs, outrage, or righteous bias with white knuckled fury keeps us from seeing the alternatives around us. We’re using our passion to entirely miss the point.
My indignation about the gross master betas masquerading as strong leaders is understandable, but limited. It keeps me communicating with others in my garden, but not at all with those I wish to influence.
Letting go is the operative action in allowing ourselves to wake up. It’s actually harder to stay asleep. Let go and see the garden, you might say.
So, as Elvis might say, what’s so funny about waking up?
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