Unless you get just-the-right-take on it, the waking up thing will leave you forever frustrated. It does not matter whether you think of what you are doing as trying to achieve enlightenment, awakening, liberation, or to discover The Truth, The Secret inner peace, inter alia, all such activity is, and always has been driven by the same, single, simple physiological urge, (which seems mental even if called spiritual), because it occurs in the verbal conscious operations of man’s brain as opposed to say, his quiet liver or non-commenting kidneys.
The urge is extant and observable in all men, but only in a few does it appear with an intensity sufficient to move them to action. Even if it only be of the intellectual variety, which as it were, is the only variety it comes in. But hey! Who the hell realizes that in the beginning? In the matter of exact fact, who the hell ever realizes it? Damn few, dear friends, scant few – but, back to today’s ostensible subject, which was also yesterday’s and tomorrow’s, but as ‘twas being noted, only in a few people does this natural, species-wide urge surge sufficiently to drive them to seek its fulfillment.
These people in earlier times were called Philosophers, then Mystics, and that is nominally about where it stands today from the general public’s view of the matter. But there is not, nor never has been, any description of this urge that is adequate. Since the throat of the urge is the same as the sounds which try to describe it, and those whose mouths normally utter such sounds in the attempt to describe it fail totally to ever catch on to what is happening.
The numerous ancient and contemporary attempts to describe what: “wanting to wake up” or to “achieve enlightenment, liberation, or inner peace, or to discover the meaning of life, or the hidden knowledge, or the great secret, or simply “the truth” means, all catastrophically fail to do so. Because there can be no adequately useful description of that quite real urge present in all men, (and active in the few), and until you realize strictly on your own and for yourself the fact that you do not really understand at all what any of these terms actually mean, (or any others your thoughts may employ in this regard), you are stymied and do not know why.
People attempting to satisfy this urge predictably begin to believe that either the method or teaching approach they are following is faulty, or else they are simply not up to the task. Either the system they are using to try and wake-up is a fraud, or else perhaps, they are simply too stupid to ever achieve it. But neither is a real world response nor possibility.
J.