The most evident manifestation of the soul being asleep is one’s unshakable conviction in conventional or consensus reality, and in the content of one’s overall social conditioning. Regardless of what profound experiences of Being you may have had and how objectively you may have seen reality, when you get up off your meditation cushion or leave a meeting with your teacher, you act, feel, and behave as if reality is the world you learned from your mother. When you do this, you are expressing the asleepness of your soul. Even when they have had the experience that everything is love, most people go on acting as though it’s not true. We can talk about Essence and the realm of Being, but for most of us, when we really get down to it, that is not reality. Reality is our experience of the world filtered through our conditioning; our bedrock is consensus reality. This conviction that the egoic perspective is how things really are is what the Sufis are referring to when they say that man is asleep. They mean that you take conventional reality, which is just the superficial layer, to be the ultimate truth. Not seeing what is real or not believing it to be reality, and consequently adhering to the status quo of conventional reality, reveals a laziness in the soul in relation to the truth and to reality. – From Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas, ch.17
These elements of the mind—memory, conceptualization, thinking processes, creation of images, projections into the future, and so forth—become the basic ingredients of our suffering. Ideas and experiences from the past, from early childhood as well as later on, good and bad, form the foundation of your assumptions about who you are. For example, if as a youngster your mother always thinks you’re cute, you’ll build up an idea that you’re a cute person. If she thinks you’re dumb, you’ll build up an idea that you’re dumb. If, for whatever reason, you always feel weak with your father, you’ll build up an idea that you’re a weak person. Not only that, both your mother and father think you’re a person, so you build up an idea that you’re a person. Right? It is very basic. Your mother talks to you as a child in a body; who’s she talking to? You look at your body and decide that it’s you. – Diamond Heart Book Three: Being and the Meaning of Life, ch. 11
The most evident manifestation of the soul being asleep is one’s unshakable conviction in conventional or consensus reality, and in the content of one’s overall social conditioning. Regardless of what profound experiences of Being you may have had and how objectively you may have seen reality, when you get up off your meditation cushion or leave a meeting with your teacher, you act, feel, and behave as if reality is the world you learned from your mother. When you do this, you are expressing the asleepness of your soul. Even when they have had the experience that everything is love, most people go on acting as though it’s not true. We can talk about Essence and the realm of Being, but for most of us, when we really get down to it, that is not reality. Reality is our experience of the world filtered through our conditioning; our bedrock is consensus reality. This conviction that the egoic perspective is how things really are is what the Sufis are referring to when they say that man is asleep. They mean that you take conventional reality, which is just the superficial layer, to be the ultimate truth. Not seeing what is real or not believing it to be reality, and consequently adhering to the status quo of conventional reality, reveals a laziness in the soul in relation to the truth and to reality. – Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas, ch.17