Awakener; My Occupation. And yours?

Today, when filling in a registration form on a website, I realized I had a new occupation to list, that encompassed many of the others I've listed in the past. I am an awakener-- someone who wakes up.

My other half sent me a $25 credit I can use to loan someone as part of a microfinancing approach (a birthday present.) This is through kiva.org an incredible manifestation of the idea that Muhammad Yunus started.

As I signed up as a site member, the form asked me for my occupation. In the past, I've answered with a number of responses-- executive or entrepreneur or inventor for my small business futurehealth.org, counselor, from when I worked in the mental health field, or biofeedback practitioner, from when I used to work in that field as a practitioner, writer when I've functioned as a freelancer in the past or editor or journalist, more recently.

But today, I thought about what I've been across many of those "occupations, and I typed in "Awakener" because I realized that through most of my life, my work has been aimed at waking people up.

It feels so good to have founded a community that is filled with fellow people who share the same occupation.

Now, the dictionary definition of awakener as someone who awakens. That is not what I am talking about. Well, actually, my concept of the occupation of awakener is one in which we do the work that produces the dictionary definition-- people who wake up.

Do you volunteer for an NGO, non-profit, grass roots politics? Do you write about issues that people need to know about? Are you an educator, therapist, marketer, minister or coach? Try it on for size. See if or how it changes your approach to what you do and how you see yourself. It's just started to do its work on me.

I read this to my brother-in-law. He commented that it's not an occupation you'll see listed-- that I'll have to check off other.

Yet there are literally millions of people-- many millions, maybe billions-- who are on the awakener's path.

Seven years ago, I had an insight and realized that STORY is the biggest business in the world, except perhaps, for transportation and the energy sources involved, an that the world of story involvies movies, books, newspapers, television, cable, magazines, lawyers, politicians, ministers, corporate consultants, marketers, knowledge manager, therapists, scientists-- all creating narratives-- as well as storytellers, screenwriters, novelists,mythologists, linguists, philosophers, critics and poets.

I discovered, through conversations with leaders in those fields, that there had never been a conference that brought together people from all these fields. So I organized the first one and it was one of those blind wise men and the elephant moments, where people discovered they were all looking at different parts and aspects of story.

Blind Wise Men and Elephant Images by Rob Kall

My point is that sometimes we humans do some things, a real lot of us do them and we don't see, don't realize that there are millions of us doing the same thing and finally we do wake up. WAKE UP. And usually someone helps us to wake up. And that's what this is about. If the US and the world are to survive the literal war against humanity that corporatism is perpetrating in the name of profits, we must wake up-- first ourselves and then those around us.

In his visionary book, Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawkens describes how there are hundreds of thousands of people engaging in a bottom-up revolution that IS waking huge masses of people up.

There are millions of bloggers who are speaking truth to power, waking people up. Arianna Huffington, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Dailykos) Josh Marshall (talkingpointsmemo.com) are all opening up venues where people who practice the occupation of awakener can do their good work. And there are all those professions and lines of work I listed above.

The internet is definitely going to continue to accelerate the development of the field and probably turn it into a profession. We may even see the development of graduate programs for awakeners.

I often ask my readers to get out and do something. So I ask you now. Have you been working as an awakener? Is that the part of your work that gives you some of its greatest rewards. If so, take a look at how you can find new edges, how you can take this realization and stretch it so you find your next level and tap the potential you have within you to do more, reach more, to cast more light, ring more bells, touch more hearts. It's part of the process we awakeners engage in as WE wake up further.

I'm a quotation junkie-- bought my first quotation book from schoolastic books, in elementary school-- and I've accumulated over 500 books, an in my hard drive have over 500 subject files I've gradually created. So I figured I'd check what I had on awakening. Sure enough-- a file that's 34 pages long. Here are a handful I culled. One of these days we'll do a quotation database and maybe I'll do a book.

The millions are awake enough for physical labor, but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only on in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.
Thoreau, Walden, Chapter 11

Compared to what we ought to be, we are half-awake.
William James

There is only one time when it is essential to awaken.
That time is now.
Buddha

No human being ever learns to live until he has awakened to the dormant powers within him.
William James

The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes.
Martin Buber

Those who are awake live in a state of constant amazement...
Jack Kornfield

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats; Chambers of the great are jails, And head-winds right for royal sails. Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's the wierdest thing. I feel like I've been in a coma for 20 years and I'm just waking up.
Kevin Spacey, in the movie, American Beauty

Hope is a waking dream.
Aristotle 384-322BC, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

When the eternal knower, the rishi, wakes up in anyone, it proclaims,
"I must survive, I must create, I must be."
That marks the moment when human life truly begins.
Deepak Chopra

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.
James Joyce

Awakening begins when a man realizes
that he is going nowhere
and does not know where to go.
Georges Gurdjieff

Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n!
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk i. 330

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Ch. 1

She looked at him, as one who awakes: / The past was a sleep, and her life began.
Robert Browning, The Statue and the Bust, 10

He is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.
Bible, 1 Kings 18:27

I sleep, but my heart waketh.
Bible, Song of Solomon 5:2

Crossposted from OpEdNews.com