How To Wake Up To Life

The Master Of Ceremonies

Have you ever noticed how the mind narrates life as you’re experiencing it? I have. Sometimes, the thinking mind starts chattering the minute I wake up in the morning. It’s as if thought were standing at the ready, salivating. The mind springs into action even before I can open my eyelids, spewing prediction like it had a crystal ball.

If I’m not careful, all of my awareness, or focus, will be sucked into this fast-talking, cerebral commentary. While I have physically awoken from the night’s sleep, I have mentally fallen asleep into thought. When my focus is captivated and submersed in thought, nobody’s home. My body is there, but I’m not really there. Unnoticed, unexamined thought, is the prelude to unconsciousness, or living life once removed.

Analytic Inebriation

The thinking mind has two priorities. The first is to think, and the other is to enhance the mind-made identity. Make no mistake, the thinking mind will take every opportunity to do what it does best, think. In a way, you can’t blame it. It’s only doing what it was made to do.

Excessive thought, however intoxicating, is not necessary to my wellbeing or existence. Unwarranted thought eventually produces bad feelings. The bad feelings are the messengers, the sign posts, the alarms, that we are engulfed in gratuitous thought.

What effect does surplus thought have on my day-to-day experience? There’s an absence of inner ease and security when I’m inadvertently existing inside of the bubble of thought. Clarity is obscured, and there is a perpetual possibility for pain and suffering. While I can’t blame my thinking mind for doing what it was made to do, I can awaken from being submersed in its excesses.

Wake Up And Plug In

To be lucid is to be present in the moment, outside of unnecessary thought. It is to perceive life without narration. I can offer life my full attention, and in return experience the rush of a direct connection. From this space I’m able to acknowledge thought if it pops up, without falling unconscious into a story. When I step outside of surplus thought that is nonessential to my survival, I cut down on the inner static, and am better able to hear and/or feel Guidance. I open the space for opportunity, and novel ideas to surface. I beckon the muse, and open the door to intuition. Reasoning guesses, intuition knows. Lucidity is a living meditation.

Snow Globe Of The Frontal Lobe

The thinking mind is like a snow globe. The tiny specs of glitter that float around inside are like thoughts, beliefs and stories. There are stories about who we think we are, our life experience, and everything in it. The snow globe of the frontal lobe pumps out evaluations, judgements, and opinions. This is the kind of thinking that is unnecessary. The kind of thinking that my life does not depend on. This type of thinking becomes the bubble through which I try to live my life.

When we shake our globes, stirring up these stories, we find ourselves in a mental storm. Lost in a storm that is made up of no more than thought. We are unconscious, sleepwalking inside the mind’s unnoticed speculation, wondering why happiness seems like such a hard task. It’s not until we realize where we are, that we can get out. When thought is the foreground of life, reality becomes the background. Here, we experience life with our teeth clenched and our guts wrenched.

To live as our true Selves, outside of the globe of thought, we must switch states. The absence of the mind’s chatty and unfounded supposition, opens the space for clarity to emerge. In lucidity, reality becomes the forefront of my experience, and thought becomes the background. I wake up to the bigger picture of my situation. I begin to see reality, instead of the mind’s version of it. I recognize sign posts pointing to my highest good. In this state I have a direct connection to the people in my life, and to life itself. Here, we experience life peacefully, with that subtle, underlying buzz of excitement.

This is authentic living, stepping out of the limitations of unnoticed, unexamined thinking. This is where life gets real, juicy even. This is where the mind stops talking about life, and you experience it. Becoming the eyewitness to thought is a practice worth exercising. When we wake up out of the snow globe of the frontal lobe, we wake up to our lives, and step into the field of unbound possibility, the creative flow, and abundance. This is the space of miracles, that have your name on them. There is a field....I’ll meet you there.