The humour of awakening ...

While I am alive, everything seems important. Life feels full of importances. My family is important, my ambitions are important, even Enlightenment is important — and of course, I seem important too.

But the process of Awakening rests on a paradox. It appears terribly serious, and at the same time, completely absurd. To struggle toward freedom from something that was never necessary to begin with — that is pure craziness! Why even bother?

Yet true Enlightenment is simply to awaken from the seriousness of experience. It is not about ignoring life or adopting some clever one-liner that explains it all away. People often settle for answers that are no deeper than their favorite joke — something they carry around, ready to pull out whenever life feels too heavy.

But the truth is far more radical. The whole presumption of an objective world “out there” and a separate “me” in here has never had a shred of reality. Every moment of ordinary consciousness is nothing but this drama of seriousness, this theatre of an independent existence that doesn’t actually exist.

When awakening dawns, even for a moment, I see that Reality Itself is always already prior to every appearance. In that recognition, humor and freedom break through — the humor of knowing that no experience has necessity. There is only Enlightenment, only Divine Freedom, no matter what arises.

So I see I must relax the tight fist of the heart. I must come to rest in God, in Grace. Grace is the humor of this resting, the release of tension, the loosening of the locks. When the heart rests, energy is freed for real spiritual life.

The moral of all this is simple: I must realize humor, freedom, and distance from the deadly seriousness of my daily pursuits. I must see their ordinariness — even their absurdity — without cynicism. Only then am I free to rest naturally in the mood of the heart, the intuition of Radiant Transcendental Consciousness.

If I rest in God, then Grace pervades my daily life and carries everything into its ultimate transcendence. If I do not rest in God, the heart is a stone, a clenched fist — self-meditative, self-defensive, always threatened, always obsessed with survival and pleasure.

The only Happiness is the release of the heart. The self is just like a clenched fist — it feels solid only because of the tension that holds it. Relax the fist, and there is nothing inside. Relax the heart, and there is no one inside.

There is no ego. There never was. That is why Enlightenment is not an event, not some extraordinary phenomenon. From the ordinary point of view, it may seem like the disappearance of the separate self. But in truth, Enlightenment is the tacit recognition that no such self has ever existed — not in me, not in anyone, not even in all the struggles of trying to get Enlightened.

Only this: the Radiant Freedom of Consciousness, always already the case.

by Alaya inspired by the teachings of Avatar Adi Da Samraj