Being Deeply Awake

Mukul Sharma

The Navajo Indians of America have a very old saying, “The only thing more difficult than waking a person who is sleeping is waking a person who pretends to be sleeping.”

We’ve all done this and know exactly how it sometimes succeeds in getting those extra 40 winks, but did the Navajo comprehend a deeper concept here? Consider, for instance, what some of the truly wise people of the world have been telling us through the ages: that we all possess the godhead within us but have either forgotten the fact or don’t know about it, and are going about the business of living while being completely asleep with our eyes wide shut and dreaming about life.

Which is why it’s called enlightenment: it’s the act of coming out of the slumber of darkness and into the awakening of light. Forgetting, however, may be unfortunate, but, ultimately, pardonable because, after all, if there’s a God and he’s created Himself in all our images and then can’t remember it for some reason, how can the images be blamed?

It’s the image that knows about all this and then acts as if it doesn’t. That’s far more problematic and corrupt since it immediately births and begets an evil that will deliberately not awaken out of itself. Was Hitler who killed six million Jews oblivious to his deeds? Did the Austrian who enslaved his daughter in his basement for years and sired many children with her not know what he was doing?

Indians too have an old saying that goes, “The baser sinner is he who is agyaan paapi” — one who knows what he is doing is wrong and still pretends he doesn’t. He’s very hard to rouse.