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Imagine it's your birthday, and you're excited because a favourite uncle is coming, the one who always brings a wonderful gift. This time though there's a difference, as he offers you not one but two beautifully wrapped presents and insists you pick only one. Anxious for a moment, you wonder if this is a trick, that he's offering a good gift and a dud one; but your kindly uncle quickly reassures you the two are of equal value.
The one on the left, which you eagerly unwrap, is a handsome gold wristwatch. The other, although you don't know it, is an elegantly bound book of art, photography, wisdom sayings and poetry. Telling you happily that he might return with it for you next year, your uncle implies you must earn this second gift.
In her remarkably insightful book, The Awakened Brain, psychology professor Lisa Miller describes two types of awareness by which people conduct themselves: Achieving awareness encourages us to organize and control our lives, with our main concern being: How can I get and keep what I want? Awakened awareness (using different parts of our brains) allows us to see more, to integrate information from multiple sources of perception, helping us feel better connected to the whole, to nature, and to each other, so that we experience ourselves, rather than doers, as seekers, tasked with finding our own uniquely meaningful pathway through life. According to Dr Miller, "We look across this vast landscape and ask: What is life showing me now?"
Both these gifts and the two types of awareness have a bearing on mankind's future. The wristwatch measures chronos, linear clock time, by which we must abide to get and keep what we want in terms of fortune and fame, power and possessions, and is therefore associated with achieving awareness. The book of images, wisdom and poetry is associated similarly with awakened awareness, and relates better to kairos, circular sacred time, when things happen unpredictably, serendipitously, always at the perfect moment, bringing about synchronicities, meaningful coincidences that help direct us in finding and keeping to our destined path.
What are the two options?
Option One: To continue with achieving awareness dominating our lives, getting what we want (or think we want); continuing to wreak havoc and destruction on the planet, persisting in competing with one another, living lives ruled by fear, mistrust and eventually stark deprivation through the cumulative effects of technological advances, war, climate change, epidemics of anxiety, depression and addictions, viral pandemics, and the rest. The warnings have been with us for some time. Why is this such a good option, even a gift? As valuable as the other? Because it is reality, not make-believe; and primarily because it is just. Through ignorance and folly, we are bringing down the impending catastrophe on our own heads. Also because the survivors who will thrive into the longer-term future will probably be those indigenous peoples of the earth who have the knowledge, skills and wisdom to husband nature's gifts, not plunder and destroy them. They have been marginalized and mistreated, and their special relationships with the land and living creatures ignored, for far too long.
Option Two: To foster awakened awareness within ourselves, to teach and encourage others in a similar vein; developing an over-arching sense of unity, oneness, kinship, and thus an outlook of altruism, of loving one's fellow humans as oneself, whatever differences of age, skin colour, nationality, creed, politics or anything else may threaten division; to foster compassion and kindness; also to treat nature and the planet with restraint and respect; to rediscover the joys of frugality and humility, the release from permanent striving. Option Two, avoiding the intolerant, short-term, self-seeking approach of Option One, is the way of wisdom, compassion and love.
The way forward cannot successfully be prescribed by government agencies or other global institutions, however well-meaning. What happens depends on individual decision-making. This is our responsibility. Every person on the planet, consciously or otherwise, has a choice between the two options, between the gold watch and the poetry book, between achieving and awakening. Just like that favourite uncle, as far as the Universe is concerned, there is no right or wrong here; both options are equally acceptable. Both ways of engaging with the world are necessary; the question is, 'Which dominates?' 'Which takes precedence in the heart and mind of each person?'
It's not necessary for the long run to feel greatly stressed about all this. If you think you've chosen the wrong option today, you can reverse your decision tomorrow. Miller says that if we quieten down our achieving brain sufficiently (and there are many wisdom exercises and other ways to do so*), our awakened brain will inform us spontaneously either what to do, or what to simply wait for, indicating somehow what will be happening for our benefit. Then all we must do is humbly acknowledge its wisdom and stick with it, respecting and following the signs and synchronicities. Make a commitment to shift your life balance from achieving to awakening. Give yourself time, and it really shouldn't be all that hard.
Copyright Larry Culliford
References
The Awakened Brain, Lisa Miller (with Esme Schwall Weigand) Penguin Random House UK, 2022.
* See, for example, www.wwwow.net
