What is the sound of awakening?
Each night before bed, we set the alarm. We enter a dream state. Then, abruptly, the sound wakes us up. Unless, of course, we hit the snooze button.
As you read this, what you are experiencing is an analogy regarding a dream.
Or are you dreaming of an analogy regarding a dream?
In our last few lessons, we’ve been unpacking the concept of awakening in some ways you might not have considered. There are mini-awakenings, there are micro-awakenings, and they both play a role in our practice. Even the recent Zen Drop regarding walls and self-disruption offers a glimpse into the nature of illusion.
Zen lore is littered with stories—
A monk hears a bell and becomes enlightened.
A master slams a door, and a student bursts into tears—for no reason he can name.
A pebble hits bamboo and someone sees the entire nature of reality.
What are we to make of such tales?
Should we return to our alarm clock analogy?
Are these sounds the wake-up call of the universe?
Or is our analogy imperfect, as most analogies tend to be?
I suspect you already know the answer, so let’s explore…
The sound of awakening is a crack in the illusion
Zen teaches us that within the experience of sounds or interactions with the world lies the potential for awakening. Yet they do not cause awakening, like an alarm clock in the morning. Rather, these moments offer a crack in the illusion. A blip in the matrix.
Such interactions, through no efforts of our own, can crash the illusion entirely—
but only if we have properly prepared ourselves.
Yet even in the absence of any kind of Zen practice, we are all familiar with this phenomenon.
The urn gets knocked over at a funeral. Ashes everywhere.
Everyone freezes and looks at each other, wondering:
Should we laugh or should we cry?
Someone breaks wind in a dead-silent yoga class.
Half the room is horrified.
The other half is barely holding themselves together.
These moments can hardly be labeled as spiritual.
Memorable? Yes.
Absurd and unexpected? No doubt.
These moments are both unreal and too real at the same time, and so the usual narrative is broken.
The ego, the interpreter of what we perceive, is caught off guard and cannot keep up.
The result?
A mini-awakening in its own right.
A moment of perception without a perceiver.
So what is the lesson here?
Should we start going out of our way to manufacture absurd and unexpected moments?
Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it might make life more fun, more interesting.
The prankster has their role—but I daresay,
you are not going to fart your way to enlightenment.
Such efforts will only redefine the role of ego.
Thus, the ego will continue to interpret and define each moment,
and prop up—not dismantle—the illusion.
You cannot capture the ungraspable.
The fact of the matter is that any sound or experience—every sound or experience—holds within it the potential to accompany awakening.
All of our practice is designed to properly position us so that, perhaps,
preparation meets opportunity and nothing happens.
Nothing is achieved.
That nothing is everything you could ever want.
We experience the ultimate failure:
the failure to interfere.
The failure to hit the snooze.
The moment speaks for itself,
free of the bias and conditions of the ego.
What is left is a direct experience of manifestation—
a state in which perception merges back into the perceived.
And so we have reached the topic of our next lesson.
But that is another story for another day.
(A story that the ego is just dying to get its hands on.)
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