Redefining 'Wake Up'

Redefining 'Wake Up'
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Success 3.0 has to answer a couple of questions.

One: "Who are you?" "Who am I?" These are the big questions.

Two: Are we willing to play a larger game? Are you willing to be, are WE willing to be, extraordinary? Are we willing to be utterly humble and radically audacious? Are we willing to participate in the evolution of consciousness? Are we willing to participate in the evolution of love?

Here's a vision of the story, six words: Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up.

Timothy Leary tried it once in a different version: tune in, turn on, drop out. He was actually saying the same thing. But we're going to up-level and evolve it: Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up.

Wake up. What does "Wake Up" mean? "Wake Up" means that we were asleep. Now this "Wake Up" idea is the best of traditional systems of thought. It's in Buddhism. It's in Kabbalah. It's in Sufism. It's in every possible version of mystical Christianity. It's in Taoism. It's the best of the pre-modern world. The best of the Perennial Philosophy. It's a deep, powerful technology that's actually gotten lost in our story.

So let's start by reclaiming "waking up" in our story. In the exterior level -- which I go into in more depth in my other writing -- you can wake up through studying systems theory. If you know systems theory, you that there is no part that's separate from the larger whole. Systems theory scientifically, gorgeously, explodes the myth of separation. The myth of a skin-encapsulated ego. Systems theory says all objects in the exterior world are connected. If we go deeper than systems theory, if we go to the inside, to the inside of the inside -- to the interiors -- we actually get to something which is called "enlightenment."

Let's talk about enlightenment. Not enlightenment in Nepal, or a backstreet in Jerusalem, or in some monastery somewhere. Let's talk about what I want to call the "democratization" of enlightenment. Can you feel that word? "Democratization." Now if we had talked about the democratization of governance a thousand years ago, or the idea that that women would vote 120 years ago -- it would have sounded absurd. Women didn't vote any place in the world.

So democratization of governance was an utter absurdity until consciousness evolved, and now every 7-year-old knows that the democratization of governance is actually the best option we have today for governance. So a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, Buddha didn't know it, and now a 10-year-old knows it. What's that called? That's called the evolution of consciousness. It's the evolution of love. People are participating in the game in a bigger way.

So let's take the next step. What if we talk about the democratization of enlightenment? So to talk about that, we need to explore what enlightenment really is.

I want to give you three words. Enlightenment is not "being perfect." Enlightenment is a particular line of development. In three words: enlightenment is sanity. It's a really simple idea. To be enlightened is to be sane. What does sanity mean? Sanity means to know my true identity. Sanity means I know my true nature, I know my true identity.

Now, to really get this, let's just dive in for a second. What I'm about to suggest is not a dogma of any religion. Rather, this is rooted in a collection over the last 70 years of the experiments of spirit done empirically by the great systems of knowing in the world. Habermas, the greatest philosopher alive today, pointed out the idea of validating something through its own interior criteria. This is empirical, spiritual science.

So if I think I'm someone else -- if I think I'm John, when actually I'm Marc -- that's insane. But that's a small mistake of identity relative to the mistake of thinking that I'm just a separate self.

This is the forgotten truth that we have to reclaim in the "wake up" category. The truth is, we are not separate. That we're indivisible from the larger, seamless coat of the universe, and it's all moving through us. That we're connected to it all, with all of the gorgeousness, all of the love, and all of the energy of reality pouring through us. And that everything we do effects everything in every moment of time.

Separation is a radical myth. Not to know that -- to have the mistaken identity of being a separate self and not a True Self -- is what I am calling "insanity": a mistaken identity.

So the first principle of Success 3.0 is, "Wake Up," from separate self to True Self. From ego to essence.

Wake Up is not the province of the elite. Let's talk for the first time in history -- not of a democratization merely of governance -- but about the democratization of enlightenment as a necessary and full option for every human being.

We suggest this: That only if we evolve consciousness in this way and put this into culture do we begin to create the possibility for the evolution of consciousness that's going to allow us to engage with full power and creativity the challenges that are with us on the planet.

That's "Wake Up."

To be continued...

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