You Always Do More Awake and Aware than Asleep
Sleepers aren’t necessarily dreamers and are never doers.
I know people who have lucid, involved, detailed dreams. They tell me about crazy happenings they experience when they sleep.
I rarely remember my dreams. Once in a very great while, something lingers from my sleep, but more often than not, dreams elude me.
Over the past decade-plus, this idea has come into the collective consciousness where being “woke” is somehow a bad thing. What does that even mean? People use the term “woke” like it’s an evil, despicable notion. It’s as if the opposite of “woke”, asleep, is somehow better.
I get way more done when I’m awake than asleep. As far as I know, everyone gets more done awake than asleep. Further, when you’re awake, you’re capable of doing, being, and having things. Asleep, all you do is dream. Or sleep dreamlessly and recharge to a greater or lesser degree.
The truth of the collective conscious idea of reality is that you always do more awake and aware than asleep.
The literal and the figurative
When you’re literally awake, you engage your senses. Sometimes this is active, but for the most part, it’s passive. Reading this, you’re engaging your eyes. Pause a moment and listen to the world around you. You’ve just engaged your ears. If these words are having any impact on you, you’re engaging your extrasensory senses beyond the tangibles of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.
When you’re figuratively awake, you engage your inner being. This is where your conscious awareness, sensing who, what, where, how, and why you are, comes in. This, too, can be passive or active. When passive, you have a vague awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and actions. When it’s active, you engage thoughts, feelings, and actions and add intentions and approach.
In both the literal and the figurative, being awake and aware is how you can navigate the world consciously versus subconsciously.
Your subconscious mind is your autopilot. This is where rote, routine, and habit engage with your embedded beliefs, values, and memories. The subconscious mind is like a sponge, absorbing everything it touches. Unchecked, it will hold onto crap that, consciously, you likely wouldn’t keep.
Nobody lives purely literally or figuratively. Everyone blends both elements into being human. Hence, you always do more awake and aware than asleep.
Control is a matter of awake and aware
I think the main reason to decry and demean “woke” is a form of control. There’s a specific narrative alive today that’s incredibly backwards. Rather than work with progress, diversity, equity, and inclusion, this narrative is focused on lack, scarcity, and insufficiency. All of which are artificial.
The world is not just white people. Neither is it only male. Or Christian. Or choose your limited narrative. When you are actively awake and aware, this is incredibly obvious.
Yet change happens too fast for many. Seizing on this, certain bodies have placed the blame for that change not on the natural progressive nature of change, but instead on the “other”. Those people taking the jobs, money, and the like from the “deserving” only on the basis of being “other”. Never mind that the field has never been level or fair – or more importantly, that little to nothing is scarce, lacking, or insufficient.
To put it bluntly – white men have dominated society for centuries and can’t accept that there’s more than enough to go around. Hence, weaponizing “woke” to debase the “other” is their attempt to maintain their always artificial control.
The truth is that nobody can control anyone else. Why? Because you’re the only one in your head, heart, and soul. That’s why being awake and aware is how you take control of the elements of your life experience that you can.
That control, of course, is limited to you. It’s also largely a matter of employing active, conscious awareness – mindfulness – to make choices and decisions.
All control is a matter of awake and aware.
Awake and aware and engaged
There’s no denying that this is easier for some than others. For example, as a white cis-gendered male, I know that I have a degree of ease and privilege simply because of being part of the false majority.
I say false because, in truth, white, cis-gendered males are ultimately outnumbered. Fear has driven many to work against their own best interests to maintain the false control they think they’re losing. That’s how we got Reagan in the 1980s and the mess his administration’s policies created that placed us in this ridiculous, backward, anti-progressive place.
Unfortunately, there’s little to nothing you and I can do about that day-to-day. However, for our own sanity and peace of mind, we can practice being awake and aware and engaged with the world at large.
To do so, you start by engaging with your senses. See, hear, taste, touch, smell, and consider the world you live in. Then, engage with your inner being and become awake and aware of what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, what you intend, if your approach is positive or negative, and what you do from there.
Awake and aware and engaged is how you become empowered. Empowered, you make choices and decisions to drive who, what, where, how, and why you are. You always do more awake and aware than asleep. So, ignore the bullshit around being “woke”, be awake and aware and make active choices for your life experience and any paths you care to take.
Can you see how you always do more awake and aware than asleep?
This is the six-hundred-ninety-eighth (698) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to repost and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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