Why is "waking up" trending?
The epidemic of unhappiness and global upheaval
“We are in the midst of a momentous event in the evolution of human consciousness but they won’t be talking about it on the news tonight.” E. Tolle, A New Earth
Can you feel it? The great awakening? Right now, on this earth, millions of people are waking up – both personally and globally. We are waking up to our own life circumstances as well as the world around us.
We are feeling shifts in our relationships, in our work, in our health and in our communities - across the globe. It has been said by many spiritual leaders that we are in the midst of an evolutionary shift for both humanity and the planet. There are two main reasons why this awakening is happening right now: an epidemic of human unhappiness and our current global upheaval.
An epidemic of unhappiness
There is a current epidemic of suffering on this planet. The levels of depression, addiction, and suicide are beyond imagination, as are the pharmaceutical drugs to combat it. Almost fifteen percent of the American population has been diagnosed with depression and trillions of dollars is spent annually on pharmaceuticals designed to resolve anxiety.
More and more of us are noticing the insanity of day-to-day life, which typically involves working to the bone all week and taking a few holidays each year. Many people barely make enough money to cover the cost of food and shelter. As Shaman Durek (“Spirit Hacking”) says,
“When we are old enough, we are placed in an institution that stifles us with rules, and tells us to sit still, and to shut up, and to raise our hands to ask the questions we are discouraged from asking in the first place, and then to regurgitate all this indoctrinated nonsense they’re shoving down our throats so we can get into a good college, and take out thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of loans, to go to yet another institution that insists to indoctrinate us some more, so we can tack a bunch of letters after our name, to get a job that will suck our time, our life force, and our creativity, in exchange for just enough money to survive, plus two weeks’ vacation per year.“
Although our world is much richer than it has ever been, we are at a shockingly low psychological, emotional and vibrational level. In the last few years whole industries have been created to help us deal with “stress and anxiety” and thousands of books have been published on “how to be happy.” Yet rarely do they investigate the real culprit, which is our whole culture and society. Instead they tell us to simply be stronger and more resilient.
The current global upheaval
Globally, things are looking just as bad. Our world and whole societies are on the verge of collapse (and have been for a while) because of the way in which we live. It is simply not sustainable.
Our earth is being destroyed, our minds are being poisoned and our hearts are almost completely closed. We have become disconnected from our true selves, separated from others, and distant from the vast natural world. We a accept this type of life that consists of wars, pollution, and degradation as natural.
We have allowed governments and corporations to convince us of ideas that have literally created a prison in which we live. They use fear to keep us weak, fearful and under their control. These leaders often pursue their own interests instead of the interest of the majority of humans on the planet. They create laws and systems to keep us trapped, while telling us that we are free. And slowly we have become a population of the “learned helpless” feeling powerless to bring about change. As Tina Louise Spalding (“You can free yourself from the karma of chaos”) says:
“It is as if our society has been developed very carefully and clearly brick by brick by people who have no love for us. It has been propagated and promulgated by people who do not care for the survival of you or the planet. Yet, this world cannot survive in a system where there are uber-rich and uber-poor. The only reason the rich are rich is because they are taking resources and labor from the “poorer” countries. They keep us so busy and give us enough luxuries that we don’t spend the time to ask the most basic questions, like how did we get here and is this all there is?”
Importantly, we have also fallen for the lie that we humans are random, irrelevant and replaceable. We are told that we are simply flecks of dust that are simply born, survive and die. This particularly powerful lie flies in the face of all the literature that sees humans as not only vital to the universe but part of a much larger unified field of life – that supports and connects us all.
These last few years have forced many of us to wake up to many things. Here are a few:
We have woken up to the fact that we depend on governments and large corporations for almost everything, from food and shelter to water and air.
We have seen the rich get richer and a handful of people attempting to control everything on the planet – even life itself.
We have witnessed global manipulations and restrictions, including lockdowns and violations of human rights.
We have woken up to the fragility our humanity and our sovereignty yet also realize the ways in which we are all connected, particularly in terms of resources and food.
And all of this – the epidemic of unhappiness and global upheaval - is causing billions of folks around the world to not just wake up (in a very practical sense) but also to question everything.
In my case, this questioning lead me from psychology and spirituality to culture and sociology. Eventually I ended up in the vast world of the so-called wisdom literature. There I discovered that for thousands of years mystics and sages have pretty much been saying this: Until we wake up to who we really are, we will remain trapped in our unconscious and keep creating an insane world of suffering.
As Eckhart Tolle (“A New Earth”) says: “Your main purpose is to awaken. It is as simple as that. You share that purpose with every other person on this planet – because it is the purpose of humanity.” In other words: the solution to all of our problems – from personal to global - is to become conscious.
Stay tuned.
In my next entries I talk about:
What is consciousness?
Why bother waking up? There are many benefits.
Why has it taken humans so long to wake up?
Thank you for joining me.