Am I Sleepwalking Through Life?

(Short Answer: A Lot More Than I'd Like.)

I experimented with hallucinogens for a few years starting when I was 18. I don’t fiddle with them anymore for the simple reason they messed with my mind too much. I’ve likened it to being the passenger in a car where you may indeed see some extraordinary scenery along the way, but you’re not the driver, you’re not in control of the steering wheel.

That said, there were many striking things about those early experiences I found fascinating, one of the most interesting of which was the ability of hallucinogen like LSD to shear away projections and concepts from one’s perceptions of things, allowing you to experience phenomena as if for the first time, through the proverbial eyes of a child. I remember seeing the blueness of the sky like I’d never seen it before, or even hearing sounds in such a precise way that I swear I could hear the individual micro-frequencies. The sense of taste was especially amazing - almost to fault, since you could spend an hour eating an apple because you were taking so long to savor it. (Or at least it seemed like an hour; it could have been three minutes for all I know now.)

I came to realize over the following decades that you really don’t need hallucinogens to cultivate that freshness of perception. In fact, most of the mystical and meditative traditions of the world aim to help us break free from that robotic conditioning in our lives, and to “wake up.”

Just the other day while walking down the stairs outside where I live, a strong breeze came along and brushed across the skin on my arms and face. I noticed my mind processing the sensation and essentially dismissing it as “Oh, that’s just the wind.” But I wonder how “wind” would feel to someone locked in a wind-less room their whole life who then stepped out into nature for the first time? Or to a newborn child being brought from the hospital room to the outdoors?

I constantly catch myself falling into a similar routine when I’m eating. I’ll be taking a bite of an apple and see my brain reactively think “apple” and translate that to my taste buds, and essentially shield me from actually experiencing the fruit. That happens all too often for me, not just with taste but touch, seeing, hearing, and smell.

As many different teachers have expressed it, most of us are sleepwalking through life, whereas “waking up” is more about being alive and experiencing life to its fullest. This has a lot to do with enjoying life, actually. (Even the difficult experiences and sensations, you ask? Well, yes, apparently. As the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki-roshi put it, “Why don’t you enjoy, you know, ‘your difficulty’? [Laughs.] That is, I think, our practice.”) When you’re sleepwalking, there’s not much enjoyment or vitality to be had, with either the seeming “positive” or “negative” situations you encounter. Life can become boring.

I remember someone once asking Goswami Kriyananda, “How does a mystic deal with boredom?” He paused a long time and said, “A mystic is never bored.” Alan Watts said much the same thing, but in terms of a mystic “being amazed by everything.” Easier said than done, of course. I find my biggest challenge in adulthood has been to avoid slipping into that semi-conscious state each day when I lose sight of the moment and instead drift into memories or expectations.

So, just how does one go about turning that around?

Meditation can definitely be a way to cultivate that sense of wakefulness over time – although there are some relaxation-oriented meditation techniques that actually magnify the sleepwalking process instead of countering it, by lulling one into semi-conscious trance states. (I’ll refrain from citing specific methods or meditative schools here, since my comments could easily be misunderstood as criticisms of those schools or their practitioners, which they’re not.)

By way of contrast, I remember John Daido Loori at the Zen monastery talking about the Buddhist meditative technique known as shikan-taza, which is sometimes simply translated as themeless sitting. He remarked how you might even look at someone intensely engaged in shikan-taza and see them “popping beads of sweat.” Yowzer. . . That certainly isn’t a relaxation-oriented meditation method! Which isn’t to imply there’s anything wrong or misguided about relaxation-based techniques, since those can be especially helpful or healing for some. But unless they’re practiced very attentively, they’re certainly very different in nature or intent from wakefulness-oriented techniques, that’s all. Different strokes for different folks.

The good news is, one doesn’t need to formally “meditate” at all to achieve what I’m talking about here. How could that work?

Well, changing one’s daily routines is a very simple way that some suggest; if you’re used to walking a certain route to work every day, for example, try a different route; if you only eat at a particular restaurant in your area whenever you go out, perhaps find another place to eat; or if you have a certain routine on waking up every morning, vary it in some way. That sort of thing.

But to my mind, perhaps the single most powerful method in the esoteric canon I’ve come across for this is simply holding in mind that this day could be your very last – or for that matter, this hour could be your last, or even the next five minutes. It’s an incredibly effective technique for “waking up,” if you’re able to hang onto it.

And what exactly is the end goal of all that?

No “end goal,” really - just living life, nothing more, nothing less. Keith Richards (of all people) said it very simply here:

Ray Grasse is a writer, astrologer, and photographer based in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books, including The Waking Dream, Under a Sacred Sky, and An Infinity of Gods. His websites are www.raygrasse.com and weww.raygrassephotography.com.