Ep 185: Fear, Ego & Awakening

What if awakening isn't about reaching a higher state but about acknowledging where we are, with all our fears and ego issues? Unravelling the intricate dance of awakening, a natural part of being human that invites us to explore various states of consciousness. I'll share a personal journey through guided meditation, where fear initially held me back, and discuss how cultural conditioning often teaches us to avoid our inner truths. Together, we'll explore the beauty of self-discovery that lies beyond the limitations of language and the unspoken truths about ourselves.

Awakening doesn't come with a hierarchy, and labeling others as "asleep" only feeds the ego. Instead, recognising our own moments of "asleepness" can be a powerful tool for growth. I'm grateful for the support of our community, and I encourage you to engage with this journey by sharing your thoughts and experiences. Whether you're curious about transformation, eager to explore coaching, or interested in the workshops at beingspace.world, there's something here for everyone on the path of self-discovery. Let's embrace this process with curiosity rather than fear and support one another in growth and awakening.

Chapters

• 0:02 Exploring the Nature of Awakening
• 12:44 Embracing the Process of Awakening

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Truth and Transcendence brought to you by being Space with Katherine Llewellyn. Truth and Transcendence, episode 185. Awakening I'm really interested in this word awakening. I've noticed that people use this word in many, many different ways and I've explored it and considered it and reflected on it and it seems to me that awakening is a natural part of being human. You know we're asleep, natural part of being human. You know we're asleep, we're half awake, we're awake, and then, when we're awake, we can become more awake and more awake, and more awake and more awake, and then we're drifting off, we're going back to sleep. We can be asleep when we're awake and we can be very lucid and awake when we're asleep. Those of us who know how to do lucid dreaming. So we naturally are actually designed to go through different types of awakening and a sleepless. It's part of our nature, it's part of what we're actually designed to do, and people talk about different. You know, how much sleep do we need and how much sleep don't we need, and how much meditation do we need and how conscious can we be and how much of the time can we be conscious, and all of these things, all of the kind of analytical, mechanical way of looking at it and I think that it's much more subtle than that. I think it's much more subtle than that. I think it's much more nuanced than that and I also think that you know, I've said this is a natural process for us to go through different states of being.

Speaker 1: 1:53

It seems to me that the two things, apart from the natural process of waking up when you've been asleep, you know, if you're not waking up when you've been asleep, you're tired and you need more sleep, or your nutrition is out, or you're not waking up when you've been asleep, you're tired and you need more sleep, or your nutrition is out, or you're depressed, or whatever. But in general, we wake up in the morning and we get on with our day. Consciousness, and what's implied by it, is a better state of consciousness than the one of not being awakened. So immediately, there we go into one of the two things which I think get in the way of the consciousness shifting meaning of the word awakening, because the two things that get in the way of that kind of awakening are fear and ego. Fear gets in the way by encouraging us to avoid connecting with our experience, to avoid finding out more about what's going on, to avoid eliminating our perception. Fear causes us to restrict, withdraw, hide within ourselves and, by definition, then reduce our capacity for awakening.

Speaker 1: 3:19

One example of this that I've experienced, and I'm sure other people have experienced, is when we enter into a guided meditation. The first time I was a participant in a guided meditation, I was actually sitting upright in a chair. I wasn't even lying down, I wasn't even sitting on the floor, I was sitting upright in a chair, the last place that a person would expect to fall asleep. But the first few times I listened to these guided meditations, I just fell asleep immediately. Now I now know I didn't know then.

Speaker 1: 3:49

I now know that this was a result of fear in me, the fear of what would happen if I stayed conscious during this guided meditation and followed where it was going to lead me. And the fear was partly a kind of a nameless dread. You know, this is different, this is weird, this is new and it was partly a fear of I would say more so a fear of discovering something within me that I was not going to be able to cope with or accept. And I think this is a fear that many of us encounter when we embark on considering awakening, because many of us have actually been brought up and told and taught and conditioned to fear ourselves, to fear that we have something within us that is reprehensible, negative, negative and bad. I just said negative twice. That's how bad the conditioning is. So we've been, many of us have been brought up to believe that, to believe that we have to kind of watch ourselves, that we can't dig too deep. If we dig too deep it's going to be dangerous, we're going to have a meltdown, we're going to break. Something awful's going to happen.

Speaker 1: 5:05

Now, this is not helped by the fact that, certainly in the culture I grew up in, a lot of things go unsaid, people not saying what they really think, what they really feel. And so we know for a fact there are things going on that are hidden. We know it because we can feel the inauthenticity and in fact, the human languages that we had are actually not sophisticated enough to express all of our experience. They just can't do it. So there's always going to be stuff that's hidden. There's always going to be information that is not shared because we just literally don't have the mechanism to do it unless we have a kind of supremely, unless we have a kind of supremely empathic or telepathic or otherwise, almost miraculous and heightened capacity for tuning into what the other person is wishing to express, or being able to express something ourselves. And yes, of course we do establish extraordinary degrees of understanding between one another that go way beyond language.

Speaker 1: 6:13

But short of that, and even sometimes when that's the case, we know there are things that are hidden purely because we can't see them or hear them. And there's nothing wrong with that, there's nothing bad about that. But that's a benevolent aspect of something that we all go through life with, which is that, this knowledge that there's an awful lot that is hidden from us, but we don't know about it. It's below the surface, and our assumption, our first assumption, is not usually oh wow, I have a subconscious, can't wait to delve in there and find all the juicy treasures in there. Conscious, can't wait to delve in there and find all the juicy treasures in there. That's not the first assumption for most of us. So fear comes up. I'm going to find out that that thing that person said to me at school when I was five is true. I'm going to find out that that girlfriend who broke up with me 10 years ago was right, that I'm a complete loser, reprehensible, or whatever it might be.

Speaker 1: 7:12

So fear gets in the way of awakening, which is such a shame, because one of the best ways to banish fear is to awake, is to awaken, because when we do awaken and actually I believe that awakening is something which happens repeatedly and to greater and greater expansive degrees. So I don't think there is such a thing as fully asleep, fully awake in terms of the consciousness shifting that we're talking about. There is such a thing as being in bed asleep and then sitting up in bed awake. Those two things are distinct, but even with that, we know there's an interesting landscape in between those two different states of being, and that interesting landscape is something that is difficult to describe and that's just a very simple everyday experience that we have. So when we're looking at consciousness, all the different levels of consciousness and all the different aspects of consciousness and different ways, we can experience that there's no end to the shifts available to us in terms of awakening. So I've spoken about fear and I also mentioned ego. So I've spoken about fear and I also mentioned ego. Now ego gets in the way of awakening by claiming I am already awake and even by claiming and you are not I'm awake and you are not, or we are awake and they are not, or other such variations on the theme.

Speaker 1: 8:56

I've had conversations with people in the last few years. Uh, when they say this person's really awake, what they mean by that is this person agrees with my particular point of view about politics, the government, covid, vaccines, whatever it might be, this person's awake, they agree with me. Now, when, challenged, that person turns around and says what do you mean? I'm just saying that they agree with me. Are you saying you don't agree with me? Are you saying I'm wrong? So their entire currency is on the perspective and the point of view that they've decided is right, and that is therefore a more awake perspective than the other, whereas what I would say is that awakeness and being awake is about recognizing a wide variety of points of view and not being attached to any one of them, to actually making free choice in relation to those.

Speaker 1: 10:00

Timothy Leary said that you're only as young as the last time you changed your mind, which I thought was so powerful. So another aspect of awakening is are we able to change our mind? Are we able to swim in the sea of not knowing, whilst perhaps feeling sure about certain things, but knowing that our sureness is no guarantee of rightness or truth, are we able to do that? So ego gets in the way of awakening by fixing us on a particular point of view which, by definition, is partial and limiting and makes us stuck. So being awake in sense of consciousness is highly fluid, highly changeable. It's organic. So really I'm saying awakening is a process, not a, not a destination. But here in the West we are addicted to destination, results, deliverable arrival points, success and achievement. So we talk about being awake as opposed to being in a process of awakening. Now, in my opinion, we as a collective species are in a process of significant and great awakening, and I think that's a wonderful thing and I think many of us are consciously in that process of awakening.

Speaker 1: 11:26

Some people are in a process of awakening that are not aware of it. I had a conversation with somebody recently who'd been really struggling with something and couldn't see a way through it. It was, it was a block they were experiencing and it was very distressing. I said, well, how should we have a chat in a couple of weeks to see how you're doing? They said, yeah, absolutely. So we had a conversation in a couple of weeks and I said um, you know how's that thing that you were struggling with? And they said, oh, I forgot all about it. I said so how have things shifted for you? Oh, I guess they must have done. They must have shifted. And this person was in a completely different place, a much more awake place, and a process of awakening had been occurring for that two-week period that they were completely unaware of, they weren't even thinking about it, it just occurred. And then they were in another place and there was no necessity for them to even think about or remember the previous place, because it was a completed business, the business was done, and they were in another place, a place of greater freedom, choice and vivid color of life. So awakening is occurring.

Speaker 1: 12:39

In my opinion, you are probably in a process of awakening.

Speaker 1: 12:44

There is no such thing as a hierarchy of awakening. There's no such thing as we are awake. They are asleep the minute we say that we're not awake. That's ego. So something that is very valuable to consider is the process, not just the process of awakening, but, as part of that, the process of awakening to our asleepness, noticing those moments where we realize, oh my God, I was just completely stuck in ego, I was completely stuck in fear. I was completely stuck in fear. I was completely stuck in trying to avoid my experience right now because that felt more comfortable or because, who knows why, that's just what I was doing. So I salute your process of awakening and I wish you a week and I will see you next time. Thank you for listening to Truth and Transcendence and thank you for supporting the show by rating, reviewing, subscribing, buying me a coffee and telling a friend. If you'd like to know more about my work, you can find out about Transformation, coaching, pellewa and the Freedom of Spirit workshop on beingspaceworld. Have a wonderful week and I'll see you next time.