Is Awakening the Next Human Milestone? A Secular Experiment in Shared Mind
SECULAR AWAKENING1940 words · 7 min read · Available on SoundCloud →
Awakening has long been imagined as a spiritual event, wrapped in robes, temples, or hidden wisdom. But what if it belongs not to mystics alone, but to all of us — here, in the middle of our daily lives? This essay, part of On Form and Concept of Self, explores awakening as a design question: a secular experiment in how perception shapes reality. Instead of doctrine, we’ll test practices. Instead of answers, we’ll keep the inquiry open.
Suppose awakening is not a mystical exception, but the next human milestone. If that’s true, the question is not whether it exists, but how we might recognize it — together.
Awakening may not be elsewhere. It might be here — at the edge of our current frame of awareness.
What Is Awakening? For centuries, awakening has been imagined as something distant — a moment reserved for saints, mystics, or monks. We picture it in temples and monasteries, wrapped in rituals or hidden wisdom, far from the noise of daily life.
These traditions hold real depth. They’ve guided millions toward glimpses of peace and insight. But if you’re not drawn to robes or rituals, the question lingers: is awakening forever out of reach? Or could it mean something closer to home? What if awakening is not escape, but a change in stance — a shift in perception that anyone can test in the middle of ordinary life?
From robes to subway stops, the question remains: what if awakening is not escape, but a shift available to anyone?
Awakening as a Human Milestone, Not a Mystical Exception
Across history, prayer, chanting, and meditation have carried countless seekers into moments of clarity. These practices matter — they’ve preserved living wisdom for centuries. Yet they often keep awakening framed as rare, fragile, or reserved for the few.
But what if awakening is not an exception at all, but the next milestone in our shared development — as basic as language, literacy, or the use of tools? Just as fire expanded our reach and writing expanded our memory, awakening could expand how perception itself is lived.
In this view, the raw material of awakening is not solitude or ritual but the texture of ordinary life: arguments and reconciliations, daily stress and fleeting joy, hands that type and hold, voices that clash and comfort. These, too, are openings into awareness.
For non-believers, this matters. It removes awakening from the realm of mystical claims and places it in the domain of secular experiment. If perception shapes experience, then awakening can be tested — not as doctrine, but as a design challenge shared in public. This is what we mean by secular awakening∞: a shift from authority to inquiry, where frameworks and field tests make the invisible movement of perception visible in daily life.
Why Awakening Matters Now: Identity, Technology, and Division
At the dinner table, families can no longer agree on what counts as fact. Each of us scrolls a different feed, curated by algorithms that hand us alternate versions of reality. Truth feels less like something shared than something marketed.
On our phones, we chase dopamine loops designed to keep us hooked. Likes, swipes, and endless scrolls promise connection, but the result is isolation: bodies together, minds elsewhere. Even when we switch off, the buzz of comparison lingers — am I enough, am I behind, am I missing out?
When identity fractures under feeds and noise, perhaps the experiment is not indulgence but necessity.
And beneath it all, identity itself feels unstable. Roles shift, values erode, cultures blur into a mainstream designed to sell. We belong everywhere and nowhere at once. The “self” is both overexposed and under-defined, leaving many of us retreating into private growth projects that only deepen the sense of separation.
If identity is collapsing in this way, maybe awakening is not indulgence but necessity. Suppose the real experiment now is not about perfecting the self, but testing whether a shift in perception can restore common ground.
We The Dreamer: A Secular Experiment in Perception
No dogma, no guru — just a field test you can run in the middle of your day.
Beneath the turbulence of our time, one freedom remains: the freedom to choose how we see. We can’t control the algorithms or the politics, and we can’t always control our own reactions. But what if perception itself is a choice — a stance we can shift, again and again, in daily life.
That idea is the heart of We The Dreamer — a participatory philosophy named after the symbol of the Dreamer∞, a way of picturing the conscious awareness that may be dreaming this world, part of the consciousness-first premise we are testing. It isn’t a doctrine or a belief system. It’s a secular experiment in perception — an invitation to test whether reality looks different when we treat it as mind-first. No gurus, no dogmas, no robes required. Think of them as prototypes — gentle flips of perspective, navigation tools, and relational dissolves. For now they are creative practices; in time, some may evolve into collective field tests for tracking perception together.
The mechanics begin simply: a small practice, a subtle flip of perspective, a pause that changes the frame. These aren’t mystical techniques but design-informed gestures — portable, repeatable, and open to anyone. Each one works like a prototype: light-touch, provisional, and meant to reveal what shifts when perception itself becomes the medium. Over time, some may evolve into true field tests, shared more publicly through notes, conversations, or even data. For now, they remain invitations to try — sketches in lived experience, gentle rehearsals in seeing differently.
Why bother?
Because the return on investment is practical: fewer flare-ups in arguments, more clarity in choices, deeper connection in relationships. These shifts may seem small, but they point to something larger: awakening as not a private fantasy but a collective milestone.
If that’s the case, then the task isn’t to wait for a chosen few to model it, but to run the experiments that test whether perception itself can be shared ground. The benefit is not only personal ease but cultural resilience — a way to face climate collapse, digital isolation, and political fracture without sinking into despair.
Seen this way, awakening is not indulgence but responsibility: the responsibility to notice that we are already co-dreaming this world. To call ourselves Dreamer is to accept that responsibility lightly, not as burden but as invitation. Each small reduction in reactivity, each moment of clarity, each act of recognition becomes a contribution to the dream we are making together.
That’s why We The Dreamer lives in public. Essays, video loops, journal notes — these are fieldnotes, not final answers. The project grows only as others try it, test it, and add their voice.
Even conflict can become a field test — a chance to remember the dream is shared, not separate.
A Taste of Oneness in Daily Life
Suppose awakening is not a sudden revelation but a subtle reorientation, available in the middle of an ordinary moment. A taste of this shift can be disarmingly simple: noticing a thought that isn’t fully “yours,” or feeling a judgment loosen when you remember the whole scene is part of one shared mind.
Conflicts, comparisons, even small frustrations become field tests. When a fight erupts, We The Dreamer chooses again — not to deny the tension, but to let it dissolve in a larger frame of oneness. When a friend fails you, the reminder comes: it is not “them against me,” it is the mind dreaming itself in two roles.
This reframing doesn’t erase life’s complexity; it reveals a freedom within it. To see yourself not bound by body or role but as part of a larger awareness — expressed through qualities we sketch in The Projection — is to feel a lightness return. These qualities aren’t dogmas but working projections: touchstones reverse-engineered from consciousness-first principles, designed to make field tests possible. Confidence and humility rise together: nothing defines you, yet everything can be played with. That taste is enough to remind us that awakening isn’t remote. It’s here, in every shift of perception.
Awakening isn’t a private fantasy but a collective design challenge. We only test it together.
Designing for Awakening: A Studio Question
Suppose awakening isn’t just a philosophical puzzle but a design question: how do you make a subtle shift in perception visible, repeatable, and shareable? At L’Enclos, we treat it like a studio brief. We don’t start from revelation; we start from extraction — noting where science and contemplative traditions converge, sketching provisional principles, and asking how they might be tested in lived experience.
From hunch to prototype: make the shift visible, testable, shareable.
From there, we build scaffolds. The Dreamer Action Catalogue is one: a working inventory of cues anyone can carry into daily life, from pauses in conflict to reframings of identity. The Four Cs framework is another: a compass for tracking states of captivity, curiosity, chemistry, and clarity. These aren’t doctrines; they’re field structures — loose enough to dissolve, clear enough to be tried.
What unites them is not certainty but iteration. Each tool is provisional, logged, and open to refinement as participants report back. In this way, awakening becomes not an abstraction but a design experiment in progress, a rehearsal in perception carried forward together.
In the end, our work circles the same paradox: trying to make visible the invisible move of perception. If we succeed, even briefly, it’s enough to remind us that another stance is possible. If we fail, that too is instructive. After all, would you expect a character in a video game to escape the program it was coded into? Perhaps we will always be dreaming, still bound by the frame we inhabit — yet even so, we may learn to glimpse what lies beyond it.
Awakening is not a finish line but a collective rehearsal — a way of practicing the world we might one day share. Not escape, not arrival, but a question lived in common. What would change if we designed our lives around that?
That is why the phrase We The Dreamer matters. It carries both the intimacy of a personal shift and the collective gravity of “We The” — a reminder that perception is never private, but shared. It names the possibility that consciousness-first reality can be approached with both poetry and rigor: a secular awakening, rooted not in belief but in experiment. In that sense, We The Dreamer is less a slogan than a foundation — a way of rehearsing what a conscious humanity might become.
The experiment doesn’t end here. Join the reflections, the practices, and the ongoing conversation — each note, each trial, each perspective helps shape the dream we are making together.
