The awakening is like being at a party where there are thousands of people and everyone is drunk except you. You are the only sober person in the party. That is the awakening, because the truth is that most humans see the world through their emotional wounds, through their emotional poison. They don’t have the awareness that they are living in a dream of hell. They aren’t aware that they are living in a dream just as fish swimming in water are not aware that they are living in water.
When we awake and we are the only sober person in the party where everyone is drunk, we can have compassion because we were drunk too. We don’t need to judge, not even people in hell, because we, too, were in hell.
Miguel Ruiz – The Mastery of Love