When Awakening Meets the Collapse of All Remaining Hopes

Photo by Lanju Fotografie on Unsplash

In my previous post I talked about the awakening insight that led to a fundamental transformation in how I live. But I did not include an important detail: It took a year for the insight to fully penetrate and transform my way of being. I lived with the new insight while holding onto my attachments. Consequently, I oscillated between egoic and trans-egoic modes of being.

Oscillation is natural for a psychological developmental transition. When a new perspective emerges, an old perspective and its associated lifestyle can persist for some time before they fall away and a new way of life settles in. For those who are interested in theoretical stuff, I’ll explain how motivation, cognition, perspective, and identity develop together in future posts. In this post I’ll recount my recent experience.

After the awakening insight, my attachments did not fall away immediately. Even though I knew they were not aligned with my new perspective and kept me from leaping into a new way of life, I held onto them.

I kept the hope that awakening would revive the career I had abandoned. I left an academic career to pursue the ultimate truth. I thought that if I achieved enlightenment and shared my insights with the world, the sacrifice I made would be repaid and a new career could take off. But it didn’t. I shared my insights, but they got few views. At the same time I saw online spaces flooded with spiritual insights written with AI. Some of them were really well-written, weaving valuable insights together with perfect coherence. Why would anyone read my insights when AI could write similar things? My insights would be used for AI training and become part of it, so I would soon be irrelevant, I thought. My hope for a new career was crushed. I am grateful it did. If my insights had met with public recognition, it would have perpetuated my attachment and hence my ego.

Around a month ago, my relationship also ended. My ex-girlfriend and I had different worldviews and were going towards different directions, but we tried to find a compromise rather than letting each other go. I held the selfish hope that if I kept sharing spiritual knowledge with her, she would join me on the awakening journey. At the same time, I tried to suspend my awakening journey to make space for the kind of lifestyle she desired. It goes without saying that such attempts only made both of us constrained and frustrated.

So my biggest attachments collapsed within the same month. I fell into the void where there was nothing to hold onto. It was not an unfamiliar place. I had been here before, when my previous attachments had fallen apart. But this time I did not try to escape from the void by searching for new attachments. I stayed. I meditated. It became clear that this was the same place I had been going in and out of since I had the awakening insight. This is my true home, my true nature. Now that my attachments were gone, I could be nowhere else but here, and I could see it clearly, beyond a shadow of a doubt. There emerged a tremendous sense of freedom and power I had never experienced. I understood, not just conceptually but viscerally, that I had never owned nor lost anything and that I would never own or lose anything. All phenomena are already always fully liberated. I have always been the infinite power. I did not need to acquire it. All I needed to do was realize it and rest as it.

Now I have no plan for the future. I don’t have the plan to turn my insights into a specific form, into a specific career. I don’t plan to have a writing career. I write because I feel like it and enjoy it. I currently work in a warehouse, but I don’t stop sharing my insights while working there. I transmit them not through words but through intentions. Insights can be shared in infinite forms. They come fully alive when they are free to take any form and not forced into a particular box.

The moral of the story is this: The awakening insight can fully penetrate only when it meets the right condition: the collapse of all remaining hopes and attachments. Until then, it remains a fleeting glimpse and peak experience. And you can’t force the right condition. It happens naturally and usually unexpectedly. Understanding this fact may help but will not grant a smooth and peaceful transition. In fact, you will most likely resist the collapse of your remaining hopes until the last moment. It is impossible to bypass the process. The only way is through.