AWAKENING

My walks and bike rides have always been a form of meditation. I was able to formalize it as such after years and years of reading and experiencing the so-called spiritual awakening that everybody today is aware of one way or another. Either as just a casual reader or some form of a practitioner.

At the beginning I wasn’t thinking about meditation per se but simply enjoying the surroundings, either urban or rural, or completely natural and wild. It was never about exercising, getting fit, reaching a fitness goal, fighting and sweating. It was about feeling good, inhaling the beauty of the surroundings, or if I’m doing it with someone, inhaling the wisdom of our collective thoughts.

The fitness comes secondary, as a result of the moving body and mind at the same time.

Years ago, around the times of my high school years, I started hearing about yoga and its popularity in America, or the west in general. Being the last shiver of the hippie movement in communist Yugoslavia (I can prove it: I have a peace sign tattoo on my left forearm that I got in the army when I was nineteen, in 1982. Of course, the movement itself was very different from what it really was on the West Coast here, but nevertheless....) I was open to those concepts and ideas, but yoga in the west just didn’t quite fit. I thought real yoggies are full of wisdom gained by years of practicing the physical and spiritual part of it. Not just anybody could ever do it right. It was also fishy to me that it was becoming commercial, and the concept even today I have a hard time accepting.

Years later, after I tried it myself, I realised that there is something to it, and it stuck. At the same time this awakening movement started happening and spreading around the world. All of a sudden, gurus, teachers and masters started showing up selling their ideas. To this day, although I got used to it for the most part, I have an uncomfortable feeling in my guts when I see all of those young, sometimes very young people, selling services of awakening and being proclaimed by their followers as gurus and teachers.

The problem is, their teachings come from research and reading, not from real life experience, most of the time. If it comes from experience, it is usually way too short to gain the weight of true life wisdom. It’s ok though. Since so many people are following them,I guess, any awakening is better than none. Also, the criteria of the general population has dropped significantly over the decades, so it’s not surprising that the wave of commercial wisdom is accepted so widely.

Obviously, I still look at all of it with a doubtful eye, but I am happy to see that so many people are hungry for it. There is a long suppressed need of people connecting with true universal wisdom that not only looks up to the universe, but more so deep inside ourselves. 

In spite of all of this oversaturation with various recipes offered to us today, people are more depressed than ever. The loneliness is at the highest level ever, even when people live together in partnerships and especially marriages. While we are reading and learning how to connect with ourselves from inside, our connection with the surrounding world is growing further and further apart.

Covid 19 aside even, the suicide rates are at the highest, the drugs are controlling our youth desperate to find some piece in numbing their reality around them, the grown ups are using it just to be able to deal with everyday burden, the divorce rates are skyrocketing, the friendships are way too superficial, etc.

Wherever one looks today, there are just too many things that need to be fixed. One needs several lives dedicated to fighting just to fix a few. Starting from the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the sun we don’t use, nature, the industry, the economy, you name it.

That leads me to the reason why I’m writing this today. As I was stopping to take pictures of these gentle flowers and leaves along my way, I realized: the true awakening will never happen until we are free! And we can never feel free in the system we live in today.

Not just free of accepting who we are, but of accepting the world around us. And we can only accept it when we fix it. Unfortunately, it’s not going to be my generation, but some of the upcoming ones for sure will have to.

To feel free, we need to be free.

We need to be free from the information dictatorships growing up daily, free from the money that breeds corruption, free from the modern day system based on work slavery, free from the fake democracy that hides behind genocides being committed to this day here in North Amerika, and elsewhere, against the indigenous people, free from the fake media that can only become true media when it becomes objective. To be objective we need to be free to see and choose from both sides. We need to be free to love whomever our hearts choose, we need to get rid of politicians and political parties, we need to be fed with healthy food.

It’s not the awakening that will bring us freedom. Everybody is aware of the problems we are surrounded with, and that doesn’t make us happier. On the opposite. We need to fix them first. We need to be in harmony not only within and with ourselves, but with the world we live in. Otherwise, we can never reach the full potential of who we truly are.

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but I know one day it will happen. It will all be fixed. Peacefully, I want to believe, but I’m afraid it might not be.

But I wish I could awaken in that world.