What Does Spiritual "Sleep" Really Mean? And What Can We Do?

According to the Jewish mystical tradition, the Kabbalah, the Sacred Feminine is the ‘Vessel’ that accepts and protects the ‘Seed’, the ‘Light’, of the Sacred Masculine, like a chalice filled with wine. She then pours forth all of nature, abundance, and life. The Kabbalah adds, however, that as the Vessel continues down the path of ‘Creative Descent’ and reaches our level of material life, the divine Light becomes too intense for this lower inca ation of matter and the Vessel shatters, dispersing the Light. A dramatic image of this same concept is found in Exodus, when Moses, having left God and descended dow Mt. Sinai, takes the stone Tablets (the Vessel) that are engraved with (i.e., fertilized by) the Word of God (Light), and shatters them on the ground. Both of these stories symbolize the fragmentation and dispersal of divine wisdom and truth that takes place when the soul ‘falls’ into this illusory world. Of course, everything we experience on this plane of existence is made from the Divine Vessel and is vivified with Divine Light. But the pieces are broken and fragmented. What does this mean in terms of our lives? The soul shatters when we are taken in by the overwhelming hypnotic spell of the material world around us, and our response is to disperse all our thoughts, interests, and energies, outward into that world. This means that the central focus of our lives, the soul’s ‘center of gravity’, shatters – and all the pieces end up being exte al to ourselves: in other people, events, and material objects. Once the focus of all our attention is outside of us, and all our emotional and intellectual energies are constantly swept away by our fascination with exte al things, we stop experiencing our own inner Being, our own Presence, here in the midst of our own life. In other words, we forget ourselves, we lose ourselves, and exte al phenomena take control of our consciousness. While we are in this state, everything ‘just happens’ to us – we cannot really ‘do’ anything, since we are not really present. It is in just this way that we become completely passive, and the body and material world drag us by the nose through a life that we no longer own. Our participation in life is then as passive and unconscious as stone, and we are completely at the mercy of fashion and whim. This is what it means in the Bible to be asleep (to ourselves). While sleeping, we dream about ourselves and our idols. Sometimes our dreams are quite pleasant. Sometimes they are terrifying. In the end, of course, this difference scarcely matters. The return to Divinity begins with efforts to put the Vessel back together: again to heal the world, and to heal the soul. In other words, the work of Spiritual Initiation must begin with putting the soul back together again. Spiritual Awakening comes after. This is the Great Work of Art, the great construction. The Pyramids, the Temple, the Gothic Cathedrals – these are just imitations.