Awakening doesn’t give us a “get out of jail free” card, if anyone still remembers the old game called Monopoly. We don’t somehow ‘wake up’ and then magically disappear out of these bodies into some new dimension of reality where the principles of gravity, entropy, disease, aging, and death no longer apply. We also don’t get out of a world full of people endlessly pestering us to get “located on Google maps” or “get a great network of referrals from the Better Business Bureau” or whomever is crowding our phones, emails and airways with things we “can’t afford not to buy.” The awake are still subject to all the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and all the immoral, unethical, untruthful, sociopathic scoundrels who ply the world or both sides of the political aisles of government looking for “suckers.”
When this body-mind, sometimes called “I” or “me” gets overwhelmed with the sheer level of detail required to live a 21st century “modern life,” the mind sometimes wonders what good ‘waking up’ did? Oh, THAT!
What I don’t have to do is identify as this screaming, gibbering, chattering, little voice in my head that calls itself “I, me, my, mine, etc.” I don’t have to listen to my mind spit out the lies it has been taught about Reality. I don’t have to believe the news reports that are mere opinion, speculation or interpretation. I don’t have to fear the future, as much as all the advertisers in the world want me too, because fear sells products and services. Attention can fall back into Pure Awareness Itself, the peace that passes understanding.
When the agitation of life is overwhelming, I merely sit my attention down into that Pure Awareness and experience that peace. That was worth the practice, learning, effort and attention of awakening.