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"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting," Wordsworth wrote. What is it we have forgotten? Among other things, we have forgotten what it is not to be asleep. We dream our lives away thinking we are awake. Sure, we can usually manage to cross the street without getting run over. But we remain almost wholly oblivious of life’s splendor as we go about our daily rounds, perpetually distracted by petty grievances and desires. For most people, it’s one damned thing after another, then it’s over – and for what?
In the Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell suggested that what we truly seek is not so much the meaning of life but the experience of being fully alive. Many spiritual traditions describe this experience as a kind of awakening. But what is it exactly that is awakened in us? Some speak of a higher self, the part of us that is made in God’s image. In some sense we can say that God is awakened in us, meaning that he must have been sleeping before. But it’s not really God’s fault. When you come right down to it, most of us would prefer to let sleeping gods lie.
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