Introduction

The journey to self-knowledge that we each must take… is the prerequisite to full human consciousness, to the full savoring of the grandeur of this world, to the privilege of fully participating in life, and to the responsibility of contributing something sacred and essential to this world.
—Bill Plotkin, depth psychologist, wilderness guide, author Wild Mind

Welcome. It’s a privilege to be your companion in these pages as we explore life’s ultimate journey—the path of consciously evolving and waking up. And, most important, as we look at how this journey is unfolding for you.

Look around—how wild and sweet this shining world; how precious, this human life we share. Each new day, life offers a vast spectrum of dazzling possibilities and wonders—such beauty and opportunity, such love and joy. And of course, real challenges and suffering at times.

While many of us live comfortable and privileged lives, our children’s future and our beautiful planet stand threatened by escalating social and environmental problems, especially climate change. The good news is that together, we are up to the challenge—and you are part of the solution.

Humanity’s great hope lies in waking up, and accelerating the evolution of consciousness and culture—intentionally. Together, we can (and must) evolve enough, and make the large-scale transitions required to preserve a healthy future and planet.

Waking UP explores this evolutionary enterprise, individually and collectively. Part journey guide and map, part interactive adventure, part wake-up call, it offers a clear and practical path to walk—bridging both inner and outer worlds. These pages invite you more deeply into your own process of consciously evolving, embodying greater fullness, depth, and joy in your life, and working to help solve the immense challenges of our time.

This book takes you on a journey of inquiry, self-discovery, and waking up—in two parts.

Part 1 – ­The Personal: Our Inner Journey

Here we explore the personal process of waking up. Opening to life’s boundless possibilities, we consciously begin inquiring into life and developing ourselves. Starting with the basics, we examine our assumptions, who we are, what’s working and not working, and what more might be possible. We increasingly wake up from our old conditioning, limits, fears, and illusions. Through this process, we each find our own unique path of learning, growing, healing, and living more fully.

All this leads us to waking up from the social trance, to entering an expanded reality, more aware, alive, and wise. Moving forward, the inquiry broadens and deepens through cultivating our higher potentials and consciousness. We advance through known stages of expanding development and fulfillment. Exploring what it is to live an awakened life, we come to embody greater inner peace and outer freedom, we open to our innate higher nature. This transforming inner process ultimately takes us beyond the personal—we realize that our individual lives are an integral part of something much bigger, unfolding all around us.

Part 2 – The Planetary: Our Outer Journey

Next we explore waking up in the larger context of life in this rapidly changing world. We examine how our personal lives are part of the longer arc of advancing history, science, evolution, and culture. Joining the long stream of our ancestors’ steady progress over vast ages, we realize gratefully all that it has taken to get us to the privileges and progress of modern life we now enjoy. Inquiring also into the suffering and challenges in our world, we discover that much is needed, and each of us has an important part to play. We realize that our awakened hearts and wisdom are needed, that our leadership and actions matter. Taking our evolved understanding into the larger world, we find pathways to give our gifts; we make the unique difference we can make. Opening to life more fully, we wake up to a deeper humanity and caring for the whole, to a vast new worldview, to an expansive planetary perspective, and to a deep felt connection with all of life.

The last few chapters explore waking up to the serious state of our world, especially climate change. These chapters offer an overview of the climate crisis, bold and doable solutions, and a big call to action. Closing with a vision of a life-sustaining path forward, we see more and more of us, waking up, working together—creating a healthy future and planet, for ourselves, and for all our children.

This book covers a lot of territory; it bears a deeply hopeful message for our times. And for the journey ahead.

~ ~ ~ ~

Each life’s journey tells a remarkable and unpredictable story. Including yours. You’ve probably noticed how life keeps changing and surprising us. How we just don’t know, and can’t control, what happens every day. How any day—even today—can bring an unexpected new beginning, one that soon changes everything.

How one day—each in our own way—we may start to realize that something is off, something is missing, something isn’t working. We may feel a nagging sense that there must be more to this life, and to who we are. Or we may have achieved much, yet there may be growing stress, confusion, restlessness, or emptiness. An unnamed longing. We may feel lost.

Deep impulses like this usually don’t fade away. More often, they eat at us, heat up, and expand. This inner process can become quite uncomfortable—even unbearable. Some people try to escape or numb the increasing tension through diversions, work, addictions, etc. But this cooking cauldron of transformation doesn’t dissipate. For many, it builds and builds in intensity and pressure until it becomes just too much—until it’s clear that if things stay the same, it all may start to fall apart. Or explode. Or die.

Many of us intuitively recognize this organic process—our version of it—as a sign of what is most needed and urgent in our lives. Eventually, we get it—something must change. Maybe a lot of things.

In this way, many of us arrive at a great turning point in our journey. We find ourselves face to face with what may be life’s most important choice—and consequence:

Will we consciously open our hearts and minds, turn toward self-inquiry, and embrace the adventure of active change and growth?

Or, will we contract in fear and turn back to the known, settling for the sameness and unconscious limits of “normal life” and the way it’s always been?

We each must choose. And in doing so, we choose between two distinct paths leading to profoundly different futures.

For those who are frustrated and fed up, or courageous and willing, or desperate and on the edge—or perhaps exactly wherever you are—this is often how life’s deeper journey begins and really comes alive. Though we might fear or resist change, if we feel there must be more to life, we can choose to follow that critical intuition. We can choose to interrupt our usual patterns of thinking and being. We can choose to explore, to develop ourselves, to live more fully. We can choose a different story, a different version of ourselves.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
–Henry David Thoreau, philosopher/author, Walden

This impulse to reach for more—is it stirring within you? That “Yes” to life–is it arising in you, even now. Do you feel it emerging? Yes. Do you feel it on your lips? Yes.

Saying this great Yes turns an inner key that releases an unseen lock—and a door in the world opens before us. We don’t know what lies ahead, but somehow it just feels right. Trusting life, we take a deep breath, and step forward. And we begin walking down a new path….

~ ~ ~ ~

Our journey starts here, from where you are. So what has you inquiring into life? What catalyst is opening you, drawing you deeper, revealing the potential of something greater? It’s different for each of us, and often challenging.

You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me.
–Morpheus, The Matrix (Andy & Larry Wachowski, screenwriters)

Perhaps you picked up this book because your world is falling apart. Maybe you desire to understand yourself better, and make more of your life. Perhaps you are one of the curious ones, the creative ones, the restless ones. You might wish to engage your own process of development more deeply and actively. You may be among those who feel they are somehow different or don’t belong. Perhaps you are in crisis, suffering, or depressed. You could be realizing that life is different from what you were taught back in Sunday school. You might be having questions about your conditioned ideas of what’s real and important. You may feel growing concern about our broken political and economic systems, and the serious social and environmental challenges we face. You could be increasingly concerned about climate change. You may be sensing the inner impulse that moves us all toward something higher, deeper, and more authentic.

If any of this resonates with you, read on. In the pages ahead, we’ll explore how any of these situations—at any age or stage of development—can catalyze positive change, can open a door of awakening.

~ ~ ~ ~

What is it to wake up or awaken? There are various meanings and dimensions of this phenomenon. Some people believe that awakening is some mysterious lightning bolt of spiritual grace that strikes only a rare few—a dramatic experience of dying to the conditioned ego-self, followed by permanent enlightenment and bliss.

Here’s the good news—waking up is something far more accessible and attainable—in ordinary life, for ordinary people. Awakening is not one single experience, realization, or event. More realistically, people usually wake up progressively, through an unfolding process of conscious personal growth over time. As we do our inner work, as we heal, as we learn and evolve, as we engage and give in the world—we naturally become more and more awake, in more areas of our lives.

While people experience waking up in different ways, it usually involves two parts. We wake up from something limited, smaller, or partial; from something contracted, separate, or less developed. And we awaken to something larger and truer, more inclusive and whole; to something more open, developed, and expansive.

Some use the term “waking up” in just a spiritual sense, but the term has great meaning in many areas of our evolving lives. As we actively engage our own process of inquiry and growth, we wake up from the sleep and smallness of our early conditioning, from the misconceptions and limits of our old assumptions and beliefs. We wake up as we become more conscious, aware, and present—moment by moment. We wake up as we resolve whatever issues we have been avoiding, hiding, denying, or lying about. We wake up as we become more healthy and whole, and as we come into full integrity. We wake up as we deepen our understanding of life, ourselves, and the world. We wake up from the dream state of our fearful, conditioned self. We wake up from the sleepwalking spell of the social trance. We wake up from our unsustainable ways of living on the planet.

In all this, we awaken to a new life—to a progressively expanding reality of greater freedom, understanding, and peace. We enter a larger world of limitless possibility and promise. Our consciousness and perspectives expand. Our energy and senses are heightened. We experience more, and more deeply. Our whole being opens, our worldview expands, our humanity deepens. We know and see more; we love and give more. We awaken to our aware essential self, to our innate higher nature. We are able to hold and manage greater complexity. We awaken to the possibility of a sustainable future on a healthy planet, and actively help create this reality. We awaken to the expansive vision of a planetary perspective and consciousness. We awaken to our authentic connection and kinship with all of life and existence.

This provides a glimpse of the process and possibility of waking up—described in the pages and journey ahead.

~ ~ ~ ~

We humans, with our vast spectrum of potentials, are animated by an innate drive to grow and progress—to move from our lower, less developed nature, to more evolved states of being, understanding, and fulfillment. This evolutionary impulse—to become more, to seek the new, to improve things, to go beyond, to create, to transcend limits, to contribute—this impulse is alive and pressing out in everyone. And in you.

Whether you’re new on this path of consciously evolving, or have been walking it for years, you can probably find yourself on the spectrum of development and potentials that are described in these pages. If you’ve mastered the early material, skip ahead to what is more relevant for you. If you’re interested primarily in climate change, turn to the chapter – Our Planetary Emergency – in Part 2.

Waking UP doesn’t contain a formula, nor anything to believe. It’s not about what you should do, or how you should be. It’s not the answer, nor is it the truth. Rather, at its core, this book is an inquiry. It offers a guide for radical inquiry—into your deepest and fullest self, and into the higher potentials of this extraordinary life you are living.

Waking Up paints an overview of the landscape we travel through in this human lifetime. It offers a unique model and map to support you in navigating the terrain of life’s possibilities and pitfalls more skillfully.

This book doesn’t just speak conceptually about life’s journey. This inquiry is designed to be highly personal and experiential. In these pages, we step inside your journey, walking forward through it, actively living and exploring it, inquiring deeply, discovering new territory and treasure, working with what is found, and progressing toward greater wholeness and contribution.

Each chapter explores different aspects of waking up, and different ways to access the greater life we long for. Each chapter suggests key areas of growth and potential to examine, develop, and increasingly master. Each chapter can be new ground taken, a milestone on your path of personal growth, a larger dimension of yourself to embody. Each chapter can be another step forward on your journey of awakening—personally, and in the world.

In reading, engage the material in each chapter through the filter of your personal situation, challenges, and opportunities. Consider the ideas and possibilities being offered. Try them on; move around in them—freely, lightly, loosely. See what feels right, what has value, what opens you—and what doesn’t. Try the questions, inquiry, practices, self-examination, experiments, mind-twisters, and different perspectives that are suggested. See what happens.

Ultimately, Waking UP is about one thing—it’s about you—about the great story and adventure that is your unfolding life. May this book and journey provide a helpful guide in discovering for yourself what is most important, true, and fulfilling, in creating your deepest and richest life possible, and in fully giving your gifts in the world.

~ ~ ~ ~

We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.
–Joseph Campbell, author, The Power of Myth

Some of my early story follows, describing what first blew open the windows in my mind, began my journey of awakening, and eventually led me to write this book.

I am an ordinary man who has lived—to my own great surprise—a remarkable adventure of self-discovery and growth. Growing up in a devoutly religious home, my early life was traditional and conservative. I was the oldest of six, raised in a family of good, caring people who were also flawed and limited, as we all are. As a child, my home environment seemed to be largely loving, supportive, and positive. I now see that it was also rigid, narrow, and dysfunctional in important ways.

From early fundamentalist conditioning, my daily existence was permeated with negative notions of exclusive truth, self-righteousness, strict rules and limits, blind belief, obedience, temptation, weakness, sin, guilt, and shame. It seemed as if I was living under a constant cloud of judgment, control, and insecurity. While trying earnestly to live as I’d been taught, it always felt as if I wasn’t good enough, or I was somehow wrong, bad, or sinful. There was a continuous background fear of not making it to heaven, and suffering eternal punishment. Having grown up inside the bubble of this belief system, I firmly believed it was the true way. I’d been taught that even doubting or questioning was a sign of weakness, a lack of faith—dancing with the devil. So, I didn’t question any of it. For many years.

I married at twenty-three, earned a master’s degree, and helped raise a beautiful family. A career in business brought both success and failure. I divorced and remarried. With marriage, career, and kids came much joy and satisfaction, along with challenges typical of modern living. Life was mostly good. My early thirties brought significant professional success, but at the same time, there were growing problems at home and in my personal life. Though advancing in my career, I felt increasing stress, uncertainty, frustration, and unhappiness in my life overall. I didn’t understand why. By my late thirties, many things just weren’t making sense or working well anymore.

Then unexpectedly, something happened that put me on a parallel track. This trigger led me to begin living my soul’s real passion—a path of actively exploring the human condition, this life’s unfolding journey, and the mystery of our higher and deeper potentials.

It started when several personal and family crises occurred all about the same time, involving my father, career, wife, son, and church. The combined impact of these crises cracked me open and moved me to do something I’d never done before. Something forbidden that I’d been sternly warned against. Something that proved dangerous indeed… in the best possible way.

And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
–Anais Nin, author

As the tension tightened, one day I just knew I had to find out for myself what life was really about. For the first time, I began therapy. I loosened my rigid attitude of blind belief, and began to open my mind. I started asking questions, looking within, and consciously examining everything. I asked for help, which proved to be critically important. I inquired deeply into my life, my assumptions, what was and wasn’t working, my life’s choices and their consequences, and the conditioning and worldview I had grown up in. There were two years of deep exploration, intense inner work, and great healing and growth—much of it guided and supported by a gifted therapist and teacher. This process was not easy, it was profoundly challenging—but highly fruitful. Still, many questions and doubts remained, constantly swirling in my mind.

~ ~ ~ ~

Then, one night at home, sitting quietly alone, contemplating it all—something amazing happened. Though my eyes were closed, in my inner vision I saw all around me what looked like a kind of encircling web, one that seemed to form a large bubble.

I could see that this web was woven of the many interconnected threads of my old conditioning, assumptions, beliefs, identifications, worldview, fears, expectations, and limits. I realized how all this had formed a kind of invisible psychic shell—one in which I’d been living without knowing it. I saw how this mental web or shell had largely defined and contained me. I saw how it had become the very context, foundation, and structure of my life, and had shaped a huge part of my identity, actions, and reality in the past.

I saw how this mind-web had formed in childhood, as a collection of thoughts, beliefs, concepts, interpretations, roles, and patterns that I’d received from my family and culture along the way. I realized that while this particular collection came from my unique experiences and journey, it could have been different; in fact, it could have been anything. And it hit me: all this—my reality—lived only in my mind and imagination; it was not a fixed or given reality, as I had always assumed.

With this revelation, something shifted in my consciousness. Something opened inside. Things seemed to all come together, all at once. And in my open inner state, wave after wave of realizations washed through my receptive awareness.

I finally realized, deeply and viscerally, that my old belief system was one of many valid possibilities, but not the one and only true way. It was just the perspective I happened to grow up inside, and naturally absorbed. I saw that much of what I had always believed was actually arbitrary, not the absolute truth I had thought it to be. It became clear that much of my previous life and reality had been built on the sand of unreal assumptions and limits. I realized that the life I’d been leading was fundamentally off—not my true life. And from all this, I recognized that I was not, in fact, who I had always thought I was.

~ ~ ~ ~

As these revelations rolled through my being, what seemed like a psychic earthquake began rumbling in the depths of my soul. Once the false foundations, limiting beliefs, and illusory structures of my old life were exposed, they could not stand. It all began shaking and breaking apart. Then, in my mind’s eye, I saw this whole mental construction—this brittle shell of illusions—shatter like glass and crumble around me. I watched my old, limiting worldview and reality die. I watched it all fall away. A most beautiful (and unsettling) thing to behold.

And as the dust settled, out beyond the fading limits of the old container, something extraordinary was coming into view. I saw a vast new world, radiant with limitless potential—an expanded realm of being that felt alive and welcoming. I realized this greater reality had always been there, just outside my old limited awareness, just outside the restrictive borders of my previous conditioning and perception. This was the larger life that had always been right here, always available, but was blocked by the old mental web, with its confused and sticky thinking.

As this experience unfolded, it felt like a dawning—like going from night’s darkness to noonday sun. It seemed as if all the lights came on. Suddenly, here was this expansive new world of illuminated possibility, and I was living in it. I seemed connected to, and part of, everything around me. The old small sense of “I” faded away. There was a sense of greater energy within me, and a deep feeling of peace. Astonished, I sat there a long time in silence, just taking in the miracle of this new awareness and existence. Eventually, I fell asleep.

This experience was not a dream, but the waking up from a life-long dream. The next day, everything was different. My inner sense of reality had completely shifted and vastly expanded. There was a great sense of freedom I’d never felt before. The conditioned mental web that had defined and controlled me was gone. The bubble had popped. The shell that contained me was gone. The old limits and illusions were gone. The insecurity, worry, and shame were gone. The fear and darkness were gone.

I was awake in a way I’d never known was possible. Though my life situation remained the same, I seemed to be in a new and bigger dimension where everything was more open, alive, and vivid. It seemed like all my psyche’s systems had been upgraded, rewired, and rebooted. Anything seemed possible. All my senses were heightened. It was like going from watching a predictable, flat TV show in black and white… to suddenly finding myself dancing and singing in a vibrantly colorful 3-D movie musical. For months I seemed to almost float as I walked, buoyant with joy, wonder, and gratitude.

This powerful experience began the larger process of waking up that followed, and it ignited a fire in me. A great curiosity and energy came into my being and lit me up. I became a dedicated student and seeker, committed to truth and to evolving. Having awoken from the old dream of believing many fundamental things that weren’t true, I realized how much I didn’t know. Hungry to learn, I set out on my own journey of discovery. Passionately drawn to inquire deeply into life and myself—I set out to explore what was real and true, what was possible, who I really was, and to experience the fullest and richest life that I could.

It’s been over twenty-five years since this deeper journey began. Over these years, my evolving process has included much inner exploration, research and learning, and continuing personal and spiritual development. There have been many books, workshops, practices, therapists, and teachers along the way, including a serious accident and long recovery. All this has catalyzed great personal change, healing, and growth, along with greater engagement in the world, including my climate activism and writing this book. It feels like a new lifetime, and a far greater one. For all this, I am profoundly grateful. With my human flaws and imperfections, I have faced my share of challenges, confusion, loss, and pain. I still do at times. And I have experienced the kind of grace and miracles that come to those who long for more, who open and inquire, who do their inner work and evolve. I have loved this wild and wonderful adventure. And that fire burns brightly still.

While Waking UP is informed by my path and experience, this book is not about me. It explores the larger story and journey we are all part of—the great process of conscious growth and awakening that is now unfolding in countless people, all around the world.

And it seems—given that you are reading these words—in you.