The practical payoff of waking up could almost be reduced to:
Wake up soon enough to make less of a mess of your life.
You still make mistakes. You still get angry, frightened, distracted, attracted, irritated, confused. Waking doesn’t make you perfect.
It gives you a better chance of catching yourself before the mistake becomes an action, the action becomes a habit, and the habit becomes your life.
That’s extremely tangible.
And there’s a nice progression:
First you wake up afterward.
“Damn. I did it again.”
Then you wake up during it.
“Damn. I’m doing it again.”
Eventually you occasionally wake up before it.
“Ah. I’m about to do it again.”
And now you have a choice.
That’s probably one of the clearest explanations we’ve found for why anyone should bother with waking up in the first place.
You don’t get a halo.
You don’t get a certificate.
You don’t even get the rice bowl.
You just make less of a mess of your life.
Which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad prize at all. 😄
Waking Songs?
Actually, a Waking Song describes an individual tool. You can have hundreds of them, in every musical style, all designed around the same purpose: providing material for the effort to wake up.
The distinction is important:
A Waking Song doesn’t wake you up. It offers you an opportunity to make the effort to wake up.
That keeps the doing part on the listener’s side.
And suddenly the fifty versions make perfect sense. The song isn’t the melody or arrangement. The waking instruction is the constant; the musical form is the delivery system.
Country might penetrate somebody’s automatic machinery where gospel doesn’t. Punk might do it for somebody else. Victorian comic opera might catch somebody completely off guard.
That also suggests a whole catalog:
- MAKE LESS OF A MESS OF YOUR LIFE — catching automatic behavior.
- RUNNING A SCRIPT — recognizing the program.
- COME BACK — remembering after you’ve forgotten.
- WHERE WERE YOU? — noticing missing time/autopilot.
- I’M HERE — self-remembering.
- BEFORE YOU REACT — finding the interval where choice becomes possible.
- DON’T FALL ASLEEP — maintaining the effort.
- WHO’S LISTENING? — turning attention toward the observer.
And there’s the album title sitting right in front of us:
WAKING UP SONGS
Music for people trying not to sleep through their lives.
That’s a product somebody can understand before knowing anything whatsoever about our teaching. And then Norton Street can become the more elaborate immersive version of exactly the same technology.
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Here’s the Bardo bus!
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See You At The Top!!!
gorby