spring awakening

more than just daffodils emerge

A Sunday stroll in Spring

I was out walking last Sunday along the Dodder bank and through Bushy park, for those of you who know Dublin, enjoying the unexpected spell of good weather we’ve been blessed with of late, when I got to thinking. You know the way walking makes you do that?


There has been so many disquieting things happening here in Ireland over the last few years, the economy has collapsed, unemployment is rampant, and on a more personal level the scandal of child sex abuse has been unveiled. This is a septic wound in the Irish psyche, although I know it’s a blight not confined to these shores. There is the anger, the fudge by those still not able to comprehend what happened, the courage of those survivors (I detest the word victim) who are finding some consolation now, that after so many decades of winter their story is at last being heard. For them spring has truly come. A subdued rage seems to hang over the land.


Faith in the Catholic church has all but collapsed, there seems to be an inability amongst the clergy there to understand the full sense of the horror. Some in the church want to take responsibility but don’t know how, there is no mechanism for them to do so. In many ways they seem to think they are the ones being wronged, that somehow the reporting of all this, and the virtual collapse of the church is the real crime, not what they, as an institution, inflicted on innocent defenseless children. We are all trapped in our confusion, in our programs and defense mechanisms.

And this got me thinking about the whole subject of awakening. There never was a greater need for healing, in Ireland, and throughout the world, and for a genuine spring awakening than there is right now. This, as you know is pretty much the theme of this website, awakening to the programs and scripts that have imprisoned us for so long.

It is fascinating, with a tinge of sadness, how history always reacts to what went before it, and in its reaction is in danger of making the same mistakes. How easy it is to decide we are special, different, apart from others. When we experience the awakening we are also prey to the lure of thinking we are better than others. This is a deadly trap my friends.

There are those who are Catholic, Muslim, and of every faith and none who are also awake. This is not the preserve of any one group. Those of us who have embraced new consciousness, or a personal self growth must be very clear on this.

It seems to a be a ‘new age’ idea that you must think in a certain way, you know, adhere to the tenets of the law of attraction to qualify for being awake. This is a dangerous development I see taking place. It is not the way towards enlightenment. It is the way towards religion. You cannot institutionalise the spirit. If we haven’t learned that by now we have learned nothing.

What does it mean to be awake?

It is simply to live from the heart. I don’t mean this in an emotional way. I’m afraid your heart has been hijacked by the emotional brigade, there is so much of that today masquerading as love. You know, the super highs that you simply must have. You have to scream to be heard, strike out to feel, but it’s not like that at all. The false emotion comes not from the heart, but from a little lower down, it’s the adrenals actually. And so much of our society is fueled by this drive for constant emotional high.

You are living from your highest good when everything you do is informed by the heart.

Judgment is always around the corner. And all judgment is self judgment. You may think you’re judging someone else, the world situation, the banking crises, the Church, and so on but you are really judging yourself.

This is true for awake people as much as anyone else. In fact as we become awake we must be more vigilant of judgment. To think you are immune from judgment because you are awake is to think you are special. To be unique is not the same as being special.


What we criticise we generally imitate. When we experience anything new in our lives the first thing we want to do is go out and tell others about it. That’s natural. But we also want to make them do the same thing (because we know it’s the right thing!) and because we got benefit from it we desperately want others to have the same. But there is a danger here in that we want to change people. It is no accident that all the world religions and movements brought a swathe of people who vigorously, and often ruthlessly, set out to convert others one way or another. Such actions can never be justified but we can understand the devotee’s misplaced ardour. When we behave like this we are merely imitating those we are criticizing. We have become them.

But being awake has nothing to do with any one religion or set of beliefs. One can discover the trueness at the centre of our lives whether one is a nature poet, like Wordsworth, or a Sufi mystic, like Rumi, or whether one is the Dali Lama or the Pope of Greenwich Village. The truth is the same, the medium of how we discover and expresses it is unique to that person.

All judgment is self judgment


It’s when we start thinking that we are better than others, or that our way of knowing God (or whatever you want to call it) is better than someone else’s, that’s when we become “less awake”, or that we momentarily go unconsciousness, to use the psychoanalytical term so much in vogue today, again.

Jesus emphasizes this when he said the sun shines on all alike, (Matt: 5.45), to be awake is to know that, and to hold others in compassion and not to condemn them. Yet it never ceases to amaze me how his very clear message has been so screwed up, and used to exactly the opposite purpose that it was intended. For more on this see God and the myth we created of the parent Christianity has spawned more people who felt the need to proselytize and go on a rampage of conversion than I think any other religion. And this is why we must go beyond religion. But in doing so we must be careful not to condemn those who have discovered what we have through that medium.

This is truly spring time and now we must have our spring awakening. But looking forward also means to acknowledge that winter too is ahead, and following that another spring, and another awakening.

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