ALL A MATTER OF BELIEF, I BELIEVE

Spiritual awakening is the aim of the curiously titled, ‘Wake Up! You are not You.’
Am I asleep I wondered? Yes, it seems I am. And my ‘suit’ or ego is keeping me from my true, spiritual self, from my soul, according to ‘Wake Up!’
To remedy this I need to realise that my mission is to get closer to God through the exercise of free will, first recognising what sort of suit I inhabit during my walking-around life and then learning how to thwart said suit from obstructing my progress to ‘the higher virtues’.
Notions of duality underpin the thrust of things: good-bad, life-death, light-darkness. ‘Most people wander through life with a sense of existential emptiness,’ blinded to the truth of life by our suit’s delusions, deceits and distractions. ‘It’s a shame to wait until death to understand life.’
But what if there are many ways of understanding life, I wondered? What if we may understand it differently at different times and in different circumstances? And is it actually necessary to understand it? Isn’t is shimmering slipperiness key to its mystique? Perhaps not understanding life confers a certain…
The notion of duality seemed far too simplistic to explain life’s great pageant.
That said, ‘Wake Up!’ definitely made me think. I was taken with some of the many aphorisms, one or two of which may well remain with me, returning unexpectedly years from now.
One idea seemed unpalatably punitive, at least to this listener, however. Should a person prove unworthy of their mission, of climbing their life’s ladder to God, their soul could, as it were, slide down a snake and have to start anew, in a new life, or a succession of new lives. Life as boot camp, as it were – a daunting prospect for the Private Pyles among us.
The authors predicate life as a tension between the duality of suit and soul, a struggle for mastery. The idea is that the soul with the aid of free will defeat the sly, slothful suit and transcend – to God.
Personally, I recoil from the notion of internal tension, pitting the metaphysical part of the being against the physical part. My instinct is that they are indivisible.. I don’t claim to know this. But then can anyone be certain have a separate soul? Tis a matter of belief, I believe.
Yes, I was engaged by ‘Wake Up!’ It made me think.
Much of the subsequent narration was devoted to detailing nine different types of suit and scrutinising their attributes and, especially, their flaws. The idea being to recognise which suit we inhabit the better to counter the automatic responses it generates within us. This was fascinating. Clearly there could be hundreds of different suit types, with variations thereupon. But the point was made by the nine described.
Alas, there was something formulaic about the nine portraits, with certain phrases being repeated verbatim.
That said, I sensed that the nine suit types would bear listening to again, the better to weigh the characteristics attached to them. This I may do, just to see what I missed.
One thing puzzled me from the outset and I remain puzzled. ‘Wake Up!’ starts by describing a terrible family beset by violence, mental instability and death. Yet none of this is referred to again. Perhaps the point is obvious, that even from such an unpromising beginning may be transcended, with free will and effort – and divine providence.
The narration was clear and consistent throughout and entirely in keeping with the earnest intent of the content.

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