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that you are spiritually asleep.... and that is the problem. People don't think they are spiritually asleep, that's why they go on sleeping. Once you understand you are spiritually asleep, then waking is a very simple matter.
The hardest thing is to accept that deep in your being there is a sleep, an unconsciousness. Whatever meditations are being done here are just to shake you, to bring you to a point where the sleeping consciousness cannot sleep anymore; it has to wake up. It is only a question of simple understanding: You can wake up right now! This silence is enough.
Brigitte lay in bed on the first night of their honeymoon while Pat sat fully clothed on an armchair in the bedroom. "Why don't you come to bed?" Brigitte asked him.
"My mother told me that this would be the most exciting night of my life," said Pat, "and I don't want to miss any of it by going to sleep!"
It is very easy to misunderstand.
It is also very easy to understand.
It all depends on you.
Are you ready to wake up? Then nothing can prevent you, and no technique is needed. But if you are not ready to wake up, then no technique can help you. You have to see your life as the life of a somnambulist who is sleep-walking, doing things asleep... fighting, saying the same things which he has said before and have always brought anger, irritation, in other people.
It is a question of watching your life. Is it a life of a man who is awake? Can a man who is awake behave the way the world is behaving?
You have been angry, you have been sorry for it thousands of times, and it has still not become clear to you that again you will be angry and again you will be sorry. What you are doing, it cannot be said that you are doing it fully awake. Your whole life is more like a robot; you are just going through mechanical actions. You suffer, and you decide to change, but when the time to change comes, you forget it completely.
I have heard about a Christian monk who used to give sermons in different places, and his basic sermon was based on Jesus' teaching of the Sermon on the Mount. He would say again and again that if somebody slaps you on
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