Transcription
There's a peculiar symptom that appears in those who've glimpsed behind the cosmic curtain. A divine discomfort that no doctor can diagnose and no medicine can cure. It starts as a subtle itch in consciousness, a barely perceptible sense that something you've always believed is fundamentally backwards. Then one morning, without warning, the whole elaborate structure of who you thought you were simply collapses. Not dramatically, not tragically. It just quietly dissolves like sugar in warm water. And that's when the real trouble begins.
Because walking around without a self in a world built entirely for selves is like being the only person who knows the emperor is naked. Except the emperor is everyone, including you. You develop these exquisite agonies, these sublime sufferings that mark you as one of the infected, infected with truth in an epidemic of beautiful illusions. Seven distinct pains to be precise. Seven ways consciousness tortures itself awake. And if you're feeling even one of them, well, I'm afraid there's no going back to sleep. The awakening has already begun. And these pains are simply its birth contractions.
Now, the first pain is perhaps the most socially inconvenient. It's what I call the curse of X-ray vision. You see, once you've glimpsed behind the cosmic curtain, you can't unsee what you've seen. It's like being the only sober person at a party where everyone else is marvelously drunk on their own importance. You walk into a business meeting and instead of serious executives discussing quarterly projections, you see children playing dress-up. The more seriously they take themselves, the more absurd it becomes. There's Johnson, red-faced about market share, completely unaware he's going to be dead in 40 years. There's Patricia climbing the corporate ladder that leads absolutely nowhere. And they're all so beautifully, tragically sincere about it.
But here's where it gets interesting. You still have to play along. You can't simply announce at the water cooler, "Excuse me, everyone, but we're all pretending to be separate entities." When we are actually the universe experiencing itself subjectively, they'd cart you off to the nearest psychiatrist. So, you develop this peculiar double vision, simultaneously participating in the drama while knowing it's all make-believe. It's like being an actor who's forgotten his lines but can't leave the stage. You improvise. You smile at the right moments, express concern about the appropriate trivialities, all while this vast cosmic joke echoes in your skull. The Hindus call this leela, divine play. But when you're the only one who knows it's play, it feels more like divine isolation. I remember once sitting in a faculty meeting at the university, listening to a heated debate about parking privileges. 45 minutes of passionate argument about painted lines on asphalt. And suddenly I couldn't stop laughing. Not at them, but at the gorgeous absurdity of infinite consciousness concerning itself with parking spots. When they asked what was funny, what could I say? "Oh, I just realized we're all God arguing with himself about where to put his car." This is the burden of seeing through the game while being unable to quit playing. You become a spiritual double agent. One foot in eternity, the other in Tuesday's staff meeting. And the pain isn't in the seeing, it's in the pretending not to see. It's exhausting to act surprised by plots you can predict. To feign investment in outcomes that don't matter, to treat seriously what you know to be cosmic comedy. But wait, here's the twist. What if this pain itself is part of the game? What if the universe enjoys the tension of knowing and not knowing simultaneously? After all, if everyone saw through everything, the whole play would collapse. And then where would we be? Probably very bored.
The second pain is more subtle, more personal. It's the peculiar isolation that comes when your inner experience becomes literally unspeakable. Not unspeakable in the sense of being too terrible to mention, but unspeakable because language itself becomes inadequate. Imagine you've discovered a new color. Not a variation of existing colors, but something entirely outside the spectrum everyone else sees. How would you describe it? You can't say it's like blue, but more, because it's not like anything. It simply is. And you see it everywhere in everything. But when you point it out, others see only what they've always seen. This is precisely what happens when consciousness shifts. You experience the dissolution of boundaries, the direct knowledge that you are not in the universe, but that you are the universe. But try explaining that at a dinner party. "Pass the salt. And by the way, I've realized I'm not actually sitting at this table. I am the table and the salt and you passing it to me." People nod politely and change the subject to something safer like politics or death.
The words we have were designed for a world of separate objects and linear time. Subject, verb, object. I see you. But what happens when the "I," the "seeing," and the "you" collapse into one movement? The mystics have always struggled with this. They resort to poetry, paradox, negative definitions. God is not this, not that. The Dao that can be spoken is not the true Dao. And so you find yourself in the curious position of having the most important thing to share, but no way to share it. It's like coming back from the most extraordinary journey only to discover you've lost your tongue. You gesture wildly, point at the sky, draw symbols in the air, but everyone thinks you're either mad or putting on airs. Even worse is when people think they understand. "Oh yes," they say, "I had a spiritual experience once, too. I felt very peaceful." And you want to grab them by the shoulders and say, "No, no, no. I'm not talking about feeling peaceful. I'm talking about discovering you're the eternal principle wearing a temporary human costume." But you don't, because that would be rude. And besides, words would fail you anyway. So, you develop a kind of spiritual sign language with others who've been there. A look, a laugh, a shared silence that says everything. You recognize each other immediately, fellow refugees from the kingdom of separation. But these encounters are rare, like finding someone from your home planet in a foreign galaxy. The rest of the time, you're translating, always translating, reducing the infinite to bite-sized concepts, packaging the eternal in temporal wrapping paper, and something is always lost in translation. The bigness becomes small, the wetness becomes dry, the joke loses its punchline. But perhaps, and here's a thought worth considering, perhaps this loneliness is necessary. After all, if spiritual experience could be perfectly communicated, it would become secondhand knowledge, mere information. The very incommunicability forces each being to discover it firsthand. The loneliness might be the guardian at the gate, ensuring the truth remains fresh, immediate, personal. What a clever arrangement.
Now we come to the genuine whopper. The pain that makes grown philosophers weep into their brandy. It's the moment when you realize that everything you've called "me" is just a collection of memories, preferences, and habits with no solid center. It's like looking for the driver of your car only to discover it's been driving itself all along. This isn't philosophical speculation. You understand? This is direct, immediate, pants-wetting recognition. One moment you're comfortably being yourself, and the next, poof, you can't find yourself anywhere. You look for the thinker behind your thoughts, but find only more thoughts. You search for the observer behind your observations, but find only observations observing themselves. It's mirrors, reflecting mirrors all the way down. The Buddhists call this anatman, no-self. But calling it something doesn't make it less terrifying when it happens to you at 2:00 in the afternoon while buttering your toast. Suddenly, the butter knife feels like it's being held by no one. The toast is being eaten by an absence. And the strangest part, everything continues functioning perfectly without anybody running the show. Your first instinct is to grab onto something, anything that feels like "you." Your name. That's just sounds. Your body. But which part? The cells that replace themselves every seven years, the atoms that were once in Shakespeare's lunch, your personality, but that changes with your mood, your company, your blood sugar levels. It's like that moment in the cartoons when the character runs off a cliff and doesn't fall until he looks down. Except when you look down, you discover there was never any ground to begin with. You've been falling forever, but calling it standing. And here's where it gets deliciously paradoxical. The "you" that's terrified of not existing, that's part of what doesn't exist. It's like a wave being afraid of discovering it's really the ocean. The fear itself is just another movement of consciousness, another little whirlpool in the stream pretending to be separate from the water. I remember the first time this really hit me. I was giving a lecture. Can you imagine? There I was, explaining the nature of consciousness to a room full of students when suddenly I couldn't find who was doing the explaining. The words kept coming. The gestures continued. The lecture proceeded brilliantly. But Alan Watts had completely disappeared. There was speaking but no speaker, teaching but no teacher. The students never noticed. Of course, to them, Professor Watts was right there, solid as ever. But I knew the horrible, wonderful secret. He was a conspiracy of circumstances, a pattern that the universe was doing, like a whirlpool or a dance, no more substantial than a melody and just as impossible to pin down. The terror eventually transforms into something else, a kind of weightless freedom. If you don't exist as a separate self, then you can't die, can you? What dies? The pattern rearranges. The dance changes, but the dancer? Ah, the dancer is the whole cosmos, and that's what you really are. But between the terror and the freedom, there's this exquisite vertigo that can last for years. You function perfectly well, better in fact, but with the constant awareness that the person functioning is a beautiful fiction.
The fourth pain is perhaps the most heartbreaking because it involves everyone you love. Once you've seen through the illusion of separation, you develop a kind of X-ray vision for suffering. You see it everywhere. People torturing themselves with imaginary problems, fighting battles with their own shadows, building elaborate prisons, and then complaining about the bars. It's like watching someone have a nightmare. They are thrashing about, crying out, sweating with fear, and you want to shake them awake. But here's the catch. You can't wake someone up from the outside. They have to wake themselves. And most people are very attached to their dreams, even the nightmares. Especially the nightmares. You see your friend Sarah anxious about her mortgage, not realizing she's the infinite cosmos, worried about a fictional debt on an imaginary piece of property. You watch your brother exhaust himself trying to become somebody important, not seeing that he already is everybody. Your mother frets about death while being herself, the very principle that makes life possible. And, uh, the peculiar thing is you can't simply tell them, "Mother, you're not going to die because you were never born. You're the eternal principle playing at being Margaret Thompson of Milwaukee." Try that at Thanksgiving dinner. Even if you could tell them, it wouldn't help. It would just become another concept, another idea to argue about or believe in, like giving someone a menu and expecting it to satisfy their hunger. The truth has to be tasted, not described. It has to be caught like a disease, not taught like arithmetic. So you develop this unbearable tenderness for everyone. You see them struggling so hard to be what they already are, seeking so desperately for what they've never lost. It's like watching people with amnesia trying to remember their names while wearing name tags. The cosmic humor of it would make you laugh if it didn't also break your heart. And then there's the really twisted part. Sometimes their suffering is exactly what they need. The pearl needs the irritation of sand. The butterfly needs the struggle out of the cocoon. To remove someone's suffering prematurely might be to rob them of their awakening. What looks like compassion might actually be interference. I once knew a Zen master who said, "My function is to make you so uncomfortable that you wake up, not to comfort you into deeper sleep, but to irritate you into consciousness." And life itself seems to work this way. It makes us suffer our illusions until we're ready to give them up. So you're left in this impossible position, seeing the suffering, feeling the weight of all that unnecessary pain, but knowing that your urge to help might be just another ego game. "Look at me," the awakened one, "helping all you poor sleeping people." The savior complex is just another dream character. What's left then? Simply presence, being available, like a door that's always open, but never insists anyone walk through. You become a kind of permission slip for others to be themselves completely without having to wake up on your schedule. And, uh, paradoxically, this acceptance of their sleep is often exactly what allows them to naturally wake. But oh, the weight of watching. Sometimes it feels like being the only sighted person in the kingdom of the blind, wanting to describe colors, but only able to hold hands in the dark.
Now, here's a pain no one warns you about. The genuine grief of losing your ignorance. We talk about enlightenment as if it's all sunshine and liberation. But nobody mentions the mourning period. You see, ignorance is comfortable, wonderfully, marvelously comfortable, like a warm bed on a cold morning. And awakening is the alarm clock you can't turn off. Before you knew better, you had the luxury of believing your problems were real. You could blame your parents, society, God, the government, anyone but yourself. More importantly, you could believe that solving your problems would make you happy. What a beautiful dream that was. The dream that somewhere, somehow, you could arrange life to your permanent satisfaction. But once you've seen through the game, you can't unknow what you know. You can't go back to believing that a new car will fulfill you, that the right relationship will complete you, that enough money will secure you. You've seen behind the wizard's curtain, and no amount of nostalgia will make you forget it's just a little man pulling levers. And here's the real kicker. You actually miss it sometimes. You miss the days when you could get properly upset about traffic, genuinely worried about your reputation, authentically anxious about the future. There was something satisfying about having solid problems with potential solutions. Now you have the ultimate problem. There is no problem. And try explaining that to your insurance adjuster. It's like being kicked out of a movie theater in the middle of a really engaging film. Yes, you now know it was just lights projected on a screen, but damn it, you were enjoying the story. You wanted to see how it ended, even knowing it was fiction. But once you're outside in the daylight, you can't really go back and take it seriously again. I remember feeling this acutely after my first real satori experience. There I was, unable to worry properly about my mortgage. My wife would say, "Aren't you concerned about the bills?" And I'd want to say, "I've just realized I'm the eternal consciousness that manifests all bills and all money to pay them with." But instead, I'd nod and make appropriate concerned faces while feeling like a complete fraud. The grief comes in waves. You'll be walking through a shopping mall, watching people excitedly buying things, and you'll feel this pang of loss for the days when you too could believe that the perfect purchase was just around the corner. You see lovers making promises of eternal devotion. And while you see the beauty in the gesture, you also see its futility, and you mourn the loss of that particular illusion. Even your own seeking ends. And that's perhaps the greatest loss. The spiritual quest that gave your life direction and meaning, gone. You can't seek what you've already found. You can't journey to where you already are. The seeker dissolves, and with it the whole romantic adventure of enlightenment. What's left? Just this. Just ordinary life without the story. Chopping wood, carrying water, but no longer hoping it will lead somewhere. It's already led here, and here is already everywhere. But between losing the old dreams and accepting the no-dream, there's this valley of grief that everyone crosses alone. You mourn the death of your ignorance like losing an old friend, annoying, troublesome, but familiar and oddly missed.
The sixth pain is the vertigo of absolute freedom. You see, as long as you believe in external authorities, God's plan, karma, destiny, the laws of nature, you're off the hook. You're just following orders, playing your assigned part, reading from the cosmic script. But when you realize you are the author, director, and entire cast of this play, the responsibility is overwhelming. Imagine discovering that every rule you've lived by was something you made up and forgot. You made up the Ten Commandments, your own creation. The laws of physics, your own limitations. The necessity of death, taxes, and Monday mornings, all optional, all chosen, all maintained by your own unconscious insistence. This isn't the freedom they promise you in philosophy books. The gentle liberation of choosing between chocolate and vanilla. This is the terrifying freedom of realizing you're choosing the existence of chocolate, vanilla, choice itself, and the one who chooses. You're not just free to act within reality. You're free to determine what reality is. And that's when the cosmic stage fright sets in. What if you choose wrong? But wrong according to what standard? Your own. It's like being handed a blank check by yourself, made out to yourself from an account containing everything and nothing. How much do you write it for? What currency do you use? Who decides what the numbers mean? Most people, when they glimpse this level of freedom, immediately create new limitations. Quick, find a guru, adopt a system, follow a practice. Anything to avoid the dizzying responsibility of being the ultimate authority. It's like inheriting a vast mansion and choosing to live in the closet because it feels more manageable. I've watched so many seekers reach this point and panic. They touch the void of infinite possibility and recoil like they've been burned. "Tell me what to do," they beg. "Give me a practice, a path, a purpose." But that's like asking your reflection to tell you how to move. The anxiety is particularly acute when you realize that even your spiritual awakening is a choice. You could choose to go back to sleep. You could choose to forget everything you've remembered. You could choose to suffer, to be limited, to play small. And sometimes you do, just for the relief of it. But here's the beautiful joke. Even your anxiety about freedom is freely chosen. You're using your infinite freedom to worry about having infinite freedom. It's like using your wealth to buy poverty, your power to create powerlessness, the cosmic humor of it. And then, if you stay with it long enough, something shifts. You realize that this freedom has always been here. You've always been choosing everything, just unconsciously. Every breath, every heartbeat, every moment of existence, all chosen, all created, all maintained by your deepest "yes" to being. The anxiety transforms into a kind of cosmic relaxation. If you're already doing it perfectly unconsciously, why worry about doing it consciously? If you've managed to create and maintain this entire universe without a manual, perhaps you can trust yourself to continue. But between the realization and the relaxation, there's this period of existential vertigo where every choice feels impossibly significant and completely arbitrary. You are paralyzed by possibility, frozen by freedom. It's like being handed every instrument in the orchestra and told to play them all simultaneously. The music that eventually emerges is magnificent. But first, there's a lot of noise.
Now we come to perhaps the most insidious pain. The addiction to truth in a world that runs on the lubrication of lies. Not malicious lies, you understand, but the necessary social fictions that make civilization possible. "How are you?" "Fine, thanks." "Nice to see you." "The check is in the mail." "I'll call you." These little lies are the grease in the social machinery. But once you've tasted truth, real truth, not concepts about truth, you develop an almost physical aversion to pretense. It's like developing an allergy to your own medicine. Every false smile feels like swallowing glass. Every polite agreement that masks disagreement burns like acid. Every "I'm fine" when you are falling apart feels like betraying the universe itself. The addiction starts innocently enough. You have one moment of absolute honesty with yourself, with existence, and it's like your first taste of pure water after a lifetime of drinking syrup. Everything else suddenly tastes sickeningly sweet, artificially flavored. You want that clarity again, that cleanliness, that direct contact with what "is." But here's the problem. Almost nobody else is interested in that level of honesty. Try telling your employer the real reason you're late. "I couldn't bear the thought of pretending to care about quarterly reports when we're all hurtling through space on a rock." Try being honest at a funeral. "Well, he's not really gone because he was never really here as a separate entity anyway." See how far that gets you. So you become a kind of truth junkie, desperately seeking your next fix of authenticity in a world dealing almost exclusively in counterfeit currency. You search for others who've had the same addiction, forming little underground circles of radical honesty. But even there, new games emerge. New pretenses. "Look how honest I'm being" becomes its own kind of performance. The really maddening part is that you can see the beauty in the lies, too. The social contracts, the agreed-upon fantasies, the collective dreams, they're all magnificent creative works. Money is imaginary, but it builds hospitals. Borders are fictional, but they create diverse cultures. Identity is an illusion, but it allows for relationship, drama, love stories. I remember once being at a wedding, watching two people promise to love each other forever. My truth-addicted mind wanted to shout, "Forever? You don't even know who you'll be tomorrow. You're promising something you can't possibly deliver because the 'you' making the promise won't exist by next Tuesday." But I also saw the beauty in their beautiful lie, the nobility in their impossible promise. This is the torture of the truth addiction. You can't fully participate in the lies, but you can't fully reject them either. You're like someone who's learned how magic tricks work trying to enjoy a magic show. You see the slight of hand, the misdirection, the hidden compartments, but you also see the joy on the faces of those still enchanted. And perhaps the ultimate truth is that the distinction between truth and lies is itself a kind of lie. In the deepest reality, everything is true and nothing is true. The wave is a lie the ocean tells, but it's also a true expression of the ocean's nature. We are lies the universe tells, but we're also its truthful self-expression. But knowing this doesn't cure the addiction. If anything, it intensifies it. You become addicted to the truth that there is no truth, which is itself both true and false. It's enough to drive you beautifully, perfectly mad.
The eighth pain is particularly excruciating for those of us foolish enough to become teachers. It's the maddening paradox of holding the most precious gift while knowing it can't be given. Like having the cure for all suffering, but discovering it can't be administered. It has to be spontaneously generated from within each patient. You see someone struggling with a problem you've transcended and every fiber of your being wants to help. "Look," you want to say, "you're creating your own suffering. Just stop. See how you're doing it to yourself?" But of course, telling them they're creating their suffering just gives them one more thing to suffer about. Now they're suffering about their suffering, judging themselves for creating what they can't stop creating. It's like trying to teach someone to fall asleep. The harder they try, the more awake they become. "Relax," you say, and they tense up trying to relax. "Don't think," you suggest, and they think about not thinking. "Let go," you encourage, and they grip tighter to the idea of letting go. This is why Zen masters resort to such peculiar methods. Shouting, hitting with sticks, asking impossible koans. They're not trying to teach. They're trying to exhaust the students' trying. They're creating a controlled collapse of the seeking mechanism. But even this doesn't always work because some students just become excellent at getting hit with sticks. I've spent decades attempting to share these insights. And the cosmic joke is that the people who understand don't need to hear it, and the people who need it can't hear it. It's like being a swimming instructor in a desert or teaching flight to fish. Not because they're incapable, but because they don't yet know they have wings. The most frustrating part is watching someone get close, so close, then veer away at the last moment. They're right at the edge of realization, and then they turn it into another concept, another belief, another thing to achieve. They collect your words like butterflies, pinning them to boards, not realizing that the life was in the flight, not the form. And yet, we keep trying. Why? Perhaps because the trying itself is the point. Perhaps the universe enjoys this game of hide-and-seek where it pretends to teach itself what it already knows. Every teacher is the universe attempting to wake itself up. And every student is the universe playing at being asleep. Sometimes, miraculously, something gets through. Not your words, not your concepts, but something between the words, in the silence, in the quality of your presence. The student suddenly sees, not because of what you've taught, but in spite of it. Your failure to teach becomes the perfect teaching. Your inability to give the gift becomes the gift itself. But mostly, you're left with this aching desire to share what cannot be shared, to give what cannot be given, to teach what cannot be taught. You become a finger pointing at the moon. Frustrated that everyone's looking at your finger. You want to shout, "Not the finger, you fools, the moon!" But that just makes them study your shouting. The deepest teaching I've found is to become so completely yourself that others remember who they are. Not through words or methods, but through a kind of contagion of being. But even this can't be done deliberately. The moment you try to be yourself in order to help others, you've lost it. It has to be purposeless, like the sun shining without choosing who to warm.
Here's the pain that nobody admits to. The strange homesickness for unconsciousness after you've awakened. It's like being released from prison after 20 years and finding yourself standing at the gates looking back with something almost like longing. Not because prison was pleasant, but because it was known, familiar, structured. Freedom, it turns out, is terrifying in its vastness. You'd think that once you've seen through the illusion, you'd never want to go back. But that's like saying once you're an adult, you never miss being a child. Of course you do. You miss the simplicity, the certainty, the blessed ignorance of not knowing what you now know. You miss having problems that felt real, enemies to blame, goals to achieve. There was something cozy about believing you were a separate self struggling against the universe. It gave life a plot, a narrative arc, a hero's journey. You were the star of your own movie, battling against odds, overcoming obstacles, searching for meaning. Now you realize you are simultaneously the hero, the villain, the obstacle, the journey, and the destination. Where's the drama in that? I catch myself sometimes actually envying people who can still get properly upset about politics, who can still believe their team is right and the other team is wrong. What a relief that must be to have enemies instead of seeing everyone as yourself in different costumes. To have opinions that feel solid instead of seeing all perspectives as equally valid and equally empty. The nostalgia comes in unexpected waves. You'll be sitting in perfect peace, aware of your true nature. And suddenly you'll remember the sweet agony of longing for enlightenment. The seeking itself, you realize, was more fun than the finding. The hunger was more intense than the satisfaction. The question was more alive than the answer. It's like finally understanding a magic trick you've wondered about your whole life. The moment of revelation is thrilling, but then it's just a trick. The mystery is gone. The wonder has evaporated. You can't unknow how it's done. You can't return to the delicious state of not knowing. Sometimes you try to forget, to pretend you don't know what you know. You attempt to work yourself into a state about something. Money, relationships, health. But it's like an actor trying to scare himself with his own performance. You can go through the motions, but you can't quite believe your own act. This is why many awakened people go through a period of spiritual depression, not the dark night of the soul that comes before awakening. This is the gray morning after enlightenment. Everything continues exactly as before. Except now, you see, it's all a game, and games are less fun when you know they're games. But here's the final twist in this particular pain. The nostalgia itself is part of the game. The longing for unconsciousness is consciousness playing with itself. Even your desire to go back to sleep is happening within the dream. You can't actually go back because there's no back to go to. There's only this pretending to be that, longing for then. And if you wait, if you're patient, something new emerges, not the old unconscious engagement with life, but a new conscious play. You learn to dream lucidly, to play the game knowing it's a game. It's like the difference between believing in Santa Claus and playing Santa Claus. Both involve presence and joy, but one includes the twinkle in the eye, the cosmic wink.
And now, my friends, we come to the biggest joke of all, the cosmic punchline that makes everything I've just told you absolutely hysterical. These seven mortal pains of spiritual awakening. They are the ego's last stand, its most sophisticated attempt to maintain itself by claiming ownership of its own dissolution. Think about it. Who experiences the pain of seeing through everything? The very self that doesn't exist. Who suffers from the loneliness of awakening, the separate entity that just realized it's not separate? It's like a wave complaining about being wet or a flame lamenting its heat. The ego, that crafty little bastard, has co-opted even enlightenment. "Look at me," it says, "I'm so awakened that I suffer from my awakening. I am so enlightened that I have special enlightened problems." It's turned spiritual realization into another identity, another way to be special, another form of separation. This is the ultimate spiritual materialism. Collecting pains instead of possessions, hoarding insights instead of objects. "My dark night of the soul was darker than yours. My ego death was more complete. My awakening is so profound that I have seven different kinds of existential suffering." The moment you realize this, the whole house of cards collapses in the most delightful way. All these pains I've described, they're real, but they're real in the way a dream is real to the dreamer. They happen, but they happen to no one. They're experienced, but there's no experiencer. It's like this: Consciousness plays at dividing itself, then plays at suffering from the division, then plays at transcending the suffering, then plays at suffering from the transcendence. It's an infinite game of cosmic hide-and-seek where you're always pretending you're not pretending you've discovered you are pretending that discovery is painful. The loneliness, you're only lonely for yourself. The grief of lost ignorance. You're mourning an illusion with another illusion. The terror of non-existence. What's terrified is what doesn't exist. The whole thing is so sublimely ridiculous that all you can do is laugh. And here's where it gets really beautiful. Once you see that even these spiritual pains are part of the game, you're free to feel them fully without resistance. They become like weather. Sometimes it's sunny enlightenment. Sometimes it's raining existential crisis. But you're not the weather. You're the sky. The weather happens in you, not to you. This is what I call the second awakening. Waking up from awakening. Realizing that enlightenment itself is just another dream, albeit a more interesting one than the dream of being an accountant in Duluth. The spiritual path turns out to be a circle that leads you right back where you started. Except now you know there was nowhere to go and no one to go there. And the final, final joke, even this understanding is just another concept, another position, another game consciousness plays. You can't win because winning is losing. And you can't lose because losing is winning. You can't get it because you are it. And you can't not get it because, well, you are it. So, what do you do with all this? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Or everything. It doesn't matter because you're going to do what you do anyway. And what you do is what the universe is doing at the place you call yourself. Welcome to the cosmic joke, my friends. The entry fee is everything you think you are, and the prize is discovering your everything.
So, here we are, the end of our journey through the exquisite agonies of waking up. And if you've really heard what I've been saying, you'll realize we haven't gone anywhere at all. We've just been consciousness talking to itself about the troubles of being consciousness, like a dog chasing its own tail and then complaining about being dizzy. But perhaps that's the whole point. Perhaps these pains, these struggles, these cosmic growing pains are how awareness experiences its own depth. Without the darkness, how would light know itself as light? Without the game of separation, how would unity recognize its own wholeness? If you're feeling these pains, congratulations. You're right on schedule. The universe is waking up to itself as you, through you, in you. And if you're not feeling them, congratulations. You're also right on schedule. There's no wrong way to be what you are. The deepest secret is that there is no secret. The ultimate teaching is that there's nothing to teach. The final destination is realizing you never left home. And the greatest joke, you will keep forgetting this and remembering it over and over, 'cause that's the game. So relax, have a cup of tea, watch the clouds, feel your exquisite spiritual pains when they arise, and laugh when you remember they're just consciousness giving itself goosebumps. After all, what else is there to do?