Living in Alignment
Awakening doesn't have to be the goal (if there has to be a goal at all). Living from a place of authenticity is a great place to start and finish. Finding this authenticity comes from dedicated, and committed practice, and this will bring ease and acceptance - alignment. When there is alignment you'll be close to the perspective of Awakeness. There's no need to be obsessed with awakening. But being meticulous with what is true in your first person experience is vital. And if you do this, awakening may be a side effect. Don't get me wrong, keeping awakening in your awareness is vital too, but fixating on it is not. That could be detrimental even.
What is alignment you might ask? It's the allowing of life to move through us without being at the mercy of the push and pull of our programming. It's a full yes to life, no matter how painful. We are the holders of precious, and dear little chunks of life. Each pain we hold is ours to love and bring into the light of awareness. There's no escaping what we've been given. So we can meet the gift with avoidance, resistance, and upset, or with a willingness to love and hold that precious gift of life with the awareness that it is.
Life cannot be any other way. So you may as well practice welcoming it in.
Awakeness makes the process of finding these things easier as clarity becomes near effortless. There's only what is, and it's happening through a personhood, but without identity. Nonetheless, the work still needs to be done irrespective of awake or not. Programming doesn't disappear. Patterns that hurt us and others still play out. What people don't write about awakening is that it's not always a moment of magic and then a simple life of ease of acceptance with everything. Awakening can bring with it a shitstorm of trauma and pain. All the things that were suppressed and hidden can no longer stay out of sight. They must, and they will, step into the light of awareness. Every little drop of pain will be felt. It's not the child being abused that feels the pain. It's the adult, right here, right now, processing that experience. While awakening may make it a rapid process to digest these intense, unlocked experiences (and certainly easier to immediately release the small things), it usually takes time. This depends on the imprint of the personhood, and the stabilisation of the awakening. Bringing all this pain to light, is the start of coming into alignment.
From an awakened perspective, these pains aren't a problem. They aren't something that require fixing. But this programming can bring an awakened person back into sleep for periods of time, or even for the rest of their lives. Furthermore, with every action motivated from of a place of pain avoidance, the awake one knows and feels this. To know Truth but be sucked into programming and pain to the extent that Awakeness is in the background and identification with the personhood is primary, is painful.
And so the question is, why wait to come into alignment? The answer is, don't. Alignment is supportive of awakening and is a pathway to moment to moment freedom irrespective of any shift of perspective. And should there be a shift along the way, this work lays the ground for an immediate stabilisation.