Growing Up and Waking Up
Crecer y Despertar
A reflection on the distinction between two dimensions of spiritual development: the timeless nature of awakening and the gradual, embodied process of maturation, and how confusing the two can keep us stuck.
Growing Up and Waking Up
A reflection on the distinction between two dimensions of spiritual development: the timeless nature of awakening and the gradual, embodied process of maturation, and how confusing the two can keep us stuck.
There are different ways to meditate, and so many things that can be called meditation. Some of it is more towards what I would call growing up, and some is more towards what I would call waking up. You really cannot wake up without growing up, and you cannot grow up without waking up. They go together.
But you could have a bit more of one than the other, and then you do a back and forth. What often happens is that people get stuck, and it is unclear how they are stuck. Often this is because we are focusing on something that is not where we are hitting the ceiling. We could be focusing on the growing up while expecting waking up. Or we are trying to wake up when what we actually need is to grow up, because the obstacles we are hitting belong to the growing up dimension.
When waking up isn't enough
This is more startling: people who have woken up to some degree sometimes stall, because there is so much work needed on the growing up side. This happened to me. You could still feel quite horrible even though a great deal of waking up has occurred. The tendency then is to keep focusing on waking up, when what is actually calling for attention is the growing up work.
The simplest distinction
The quickest way to distinguish the two is this: growing up takes time. It involves the body and mind, and it happens over time. It simply cannot happen instantly. If something happens instantly, it is waking up. Anything that, in a sense, steps out of time belongs to waking up, and you do not need to understand what that means or even recognize it. Often it happens without us recognizing it.
Waking up also has different degrees. It can be partial or total. We can have many partial glimpses, and then total glimpses, and we can have them more than once. Often what follows is that we need to do the growing up work. What has been seen in a glimpse, what has been revealed in the waking up, needs to be applied and integrated.
The scope of growing up
There is a great deal of growing up that is not directly related to waking up or to the process of spirituality, depending on how you define it. There is how we get better at everything: at work, in relationships, and so on. You could say the spiritual work encompasses all of it, but often it is good to focus on the mental and emotional realm, on what is happening at the level of our emotions and at the level of our thinking.
For example, we could have had an experience of pretty clearly seeing true nature, but then go on living as if we had not. In that case, it is more important to trust what we have seen and really bring it into how we live. That is what I would call growing up.
This would involve something that brings us into relationship with more fear and more pain, but in an applied way. It concerns what is happening in a relationship, our relationship with the world, our relationship with ourselves, with our emotions, with our past. It could be described as shadow work, or sometimes as therapy. Especially if one has never done therapy, that is more likely what is needed. If we have done a lot of therapy already, it might not be the most important thing.
A common confusion
It is important to understand that these two aspects exist, and this has been spoken about by various teachers in the past. Some talk about it in roughly this way, some less so. But I have seen a great deal of confusion where the focus lands heavily on waking up when what is actually needed is growing up. That is often the case in groups where there is a teacher who has awakened.
The reverse also occurs. You could go to groups where there is not a teacher who has awakened, and what is needed there is the waking up. The participants are deeply involved in the growing up. They are lost in the process of growth. For example, I once went to an ashram in India, and my sense was that the people there were completely lost in a perpetual process of growth. The language they used was very much about waking up, but the actual orientation was process, process, process. And process, by definition, requires time.
Hopefully this is not too clear. Hopefully it is a little confusing, because it should be.