Awakening outwardly is waking up from the trance of propaganda and indoctrination, and awakening inwardly is waking up from the trance of ego and delusion.
Awakening outwardly means becoming fully conscious of what’s really happening in our world beyond the propaganda and what we were taught in school. Learning about all the ways we’ve been deceived and manipulated, learning the truth about war, militarism, imperialism, capitalism, authoritarianism, ecocide, and all the interrelated abuses and injustices caused by the systems and power structures we live under.
Awakening inwardly means becoming fully conscious of the ways in which we have been deceiving ourselves. Doing the inner work necessary to bring consciousness to the delusions and dysfunction within us and discovering what’s really true about our unquestioned assumptions regarding basic elements of our experience like self, other, time, and space.
Both are necessary if our species is to survive into the future. We won’t be able to collectively organize the overthrow of the oppressive systems which are driving us toward extinction and dystopia until enough of us have a lucid understanding of how our world really works, and we won’t be able to act as individuals to give rise to a healthy world if we’re still wildly dysfunctional and egoically entranced.
And while both kinds of awakening do have areas of overlap, it’s entirely possible to be very awake in one while being fast asleep in the other. Most enlightenment teachers have spent their whole lives focusing entirely on inner awakening, and if you can get them talking about politics and foreign policy you’ll find that they tend to still be largely indoctrinated into the CNN worldview. Anyone who’s spent time in leftist and activist circles has met people who have all the correct opinions and understandings of politics and world affairs, but are extremely disruptive and impossible to work with as individuals because they’re plagued by inner misery and dysfunction.
It’s okay to have periods in your life where you focus on waking up in one way more than the other, but it is important to work toward both over the years. And by working on one you do help build a foundation for the other; someone with a lot of inner consciousness will have more wisdom and discernment to sort out fact from fiction when learning what’s true about the world, and someone who’s learning about the abuses in our world will have many opportunities for self-reflection and compassion by contemplating their own role in the dysfunction of our society and putting themselves in the shoes of those less fortunate.
It wasn’t always necessary for humans to awaken in both directions. Back when the citizenry had no means of organizing or controlling their society and humanity was divided by distance and language, the chieftains and monarchs were the ones with knowledge of what’s going on, while members of the citizenry would leave society and go off to become hermits and monks in pursuit of enlightenment. Now in the 21st century we’re all increasingly interconnected and empowered with information around the world, as the existential hurdles facing our species grow rapidly more urgent. So the call is now to expand our consciousness both inwardly and outwardly.
We can’t keep living like this. We’ve got to wake up. We’ve got to become better. We’re never going to make it if we don’t awaken to the reality of our circumstances, both as individuals and as a collective.
