Project Vision 21

It could be said that throughout history, great thinkers and mystics share the same and urgent message for each of us, regardless of our culture, language, nationality, or other personal factors. And that message is: Wake up!

In current times and moments (chronological times and kairological moments, a distinction that we have already lost), we live asleep and believe that we are awake and therefore never wake up and remain as asleep as before, confusing our mental fantasies with reality.

Already in ancient times Heraclitus complained about those who lived asleep and, therefore, were unable to connect with others and with the universe, living -without knowing it- within a confinement of self-destruction that at the same time destroys the lives and futures of others.

Then, in his famous Allegory of the Cave, Plato graphically helps us to visualize that life of living asleep believing that we are awake, mistakenly assuming that the reality we know is all reality and the only possible reality. Thus, we prefer the permanent chains of ignorance to the temporary blindness of seeing the light for the first time.

Centuries later, Calderón de la Barca reminds us that "The king dreams that he is king, and he lives with this deception, commanding, arranging and governing." In that well-known expression of Life is a dream, Calderón emphasizes the word "deception" and rightly warns that the person who clings to that "deception" will wake up "in the dream of death."

Last century, Borges wrote somewhere (I don't know where) that the person who really begins to wake up will wake up more times than he went to sleep and began to dream. In other words, if you dream that you dream and in your dream you dream that you dream and so on several times, when you begin to wake up you will wake up more times than the dream levels you had.

And that is necessarily so, I add, to avoid the pernicious self-delusion of believing that because one has already awakened once then one is already awake. The levels of consciousness and self-consciousness are so many that awakening is both a single and multiple act, as Ksemaraja taught in his Doctrine of Recognition a thousand years ago.

Only a few years ago, the well-known trilogy The Matrix exemplified the possibility that our entire existence could come to be lived as a kind of technologically induced dream. A platonic, but technological cavern, where we believe we are autonomous humans, but we are just mere batteries totally manipulated by intelligent machines.

Be that as it may, we are still asleep. Perhaps in some moments we managed for a few seconds to half open our eyes and see reality briefly. But immediately, thanks to strong social and cultural conditioning, we close our eyes again. So, we "live" believing ourselves in control when we are controlled and accepting all deception as if it were true.

But can we really wake ourselves up from our own sleep? You find the answer.