Don't Wake Up

Anyone who actually wakes up doesn’t wake up all at once. Even if there is that initial shock — the moment of reckoning — it’s swift, but the cleanup is long and arduous. It takes years.

You can say there’s no time, but it feels and is experienced as years, even if, when you look back, you can’t find them anymore. The underlying change is that you’ve changed. Your living state of being becomes almost unrecognizable from what you started with.

All or most of your ideas either change or vanish — seen as not only silly but ridiculously unreal, and more importantly, unnecessary, usually harmful or limiting in some way. Most were never needed; they were all baggage. I think I was walking around with a house in my pocket or on my back. How heavy it all was — mostly desperate, sad, and even terrifying.

One of the worst stages is when you go through wanting others to wake up — to see what you see, to stop being cruel, to stop being crazy. You think there’s a way to create a loving world or a loving space where all forget the madness and start anew. Anew. Utopia for all seems like a possibility—until it doesn’t.

At a certain point, you actually forget all about it. You stop caring what others do. In fact, you’re not even sure there are others — not in the sense you used to believe, as entities populating all the other spaces. That’s not how awareness actually works, you find out later.

Indeed, space is not really space but an experience of space — just another concept you’ve always blindly believed in. And who doesn’t? You’re no longer sure about that either — whether anything exists for you if you’re not aware of it.

It’s like believing my car is in my garage right now. If I walk out there, it will most certainly be there (and that’s good — I want to believe that). But no one is looking at it now, so is it there? We think the answer is yes, but the truth is, no one can know.

There’s no way to know whether it is there or not if you’re not actually looking at it. I believe it is — but that’s belief. The bigger question is: is it there when you are looking at it? Does your experience of sight and touch prove it exists in its own right, or is belief involved?

Again, you venture into belief, because you believe this is proof of something’s existence. And even though that seems extremely reliable, beliefs can change — and when they do, something else is bound to show up. So there’s a lot we can’t really know until we fully put our own belief system to the test, to see what — if anything — actually holds true for us, and how it does so.

Whether there’s one true formula or infinite variations — all perhaps beholden to internal factors such as hidden beliefs we might not even know we have — remains to be seen. At any rate, while you are sifting through the debris of your mind, you will most definitely, most heartily forget and dismiss the idea that you’re bringing anyone along with you on this journey.

Maybe this is how the actual journey itself becomes so distorted. If you were to seriously relate exactly what you’ve been through to anyone else, there’s no doubt they’d reject it outright — given the current experience of reality itself by popular demand.

To put it bluntly, the average person has never contemplated any of this and will automatically assume you are mad. No one you know even wants to look at it. The structure of the false self is beholden to protect most of the population from ever seeing it.

You’re not supposed to break out of character — that’s called hacking the system — and it’s clearly reserved for those who just can’t play along anymore with the internal imagination of the character they wound up with.

Here I’m not talking about altering who you think you are, but eliminating the “who” from the “what” completely. Actually, no one in their right mind would even attempt it — but the word “right” is synonymous with “insane” anyway, so sometimes it happens that you do what you have to do.

Another strange stage is when you think you might possess special powers to wake others up — maybe because your energy feels magical. It’s not.

It’s more likely that your energy now will actually agitate the false selves you come in contact with, not comfort them. Any tendency to start telling others that “everything is fine, don’t worry” will not be well received — and quite frankly, when you think that, you’re still delusional.

The idea that things are fine only pertains to you and no one else, because for all you know, they’re about to dream up a car accident where they lose their legs — or cancer. You have zero knowledge of anyone else’s circumstances or what they’ll be required to live through, so it’s good to learn to keep your mouth shut on that note.

It certainly appears that millions of people worldwide live miserable lives barely worth living, so what do you know? Nothing.

I’ve personally lived through enough crap that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but sometimes that’s how it goes. I know now that if I’d had any sort of comfortable or even remotely “adequate” life, I’d never have sought a way out of it — because I couldn’t stand being alive the way I was anymore.

Sometimes, if you can swing that back in your favor, you’ll end up realizing that all the crap was the gift, not the curse you once thought it was. Even that realization might take years.

The idea that waking up fixes everything instantly — because “everything is nothing” — is just dumb. The patterns your mind has been squeezed into come apart by degrees, and feeling good is a long way off once you see it.

Yes, life usually gets easier by degrees — worry falls away as you fall away — but the practical aspects of life are not magically transformed overnight. You might still have to work and pay bills. Many people get confused on this one.

That’s how they mistake a mystical experience for waking up — and instantly want to think they’re special, popping up on YouTube to instruct others in silent or positive meditations that actually take them in the wrong direction. Maya’s million tricks are not so easily dismissed.

From the initial shock that “nothing is what you thought it was” comes a long, drawn-out process of discovering what is — and how that “what” actually works. Trial and error becomes a way of life, with more failures than successes. The minute you think you've found something that always works, it won't, it will stop working. That's good to know. Reliance is always an illusion.

The only redeeming factor about you now will be stamina — and how much you hate the false.

All those loving messages you become prone to from time to time — as you go in and out of lucidity — are just childish fantasies designed by Maya to lead you back into the fold of human folly, not away from it.

Rule number one: stay away from people when you can, and keep your distance when you can’t. The less you talk to them, the better. All characters have the insidious desire to bring you back into whatever illusion they’re experiencing, not out of it.

Telling someone life is not really real will do nothing at worst — and at best, it will drive them away, which is desirable. The old adage applies: it’s not good to wake up those who are sleepwalking.

Consider the character in a heated argument. Are they going to take your word that they’re merely engaging with an aspect of their own mind that’s come up to be challenged, instead of following the urge to defend their position and win? Of course not.

The character’s job is to keep them in character — not let them slip out.

You learn quickly that the defenses of the false self — the personality types people wear and play as themselves — are not easily breached, more like never. It may actually be impossible to crack the code of someone else’s defenses, and who’s got time for that when you’re battling your own? It can take the rest of your life to dissolve every last one.

Of course, you’re not actually the one doing this — it’s happening to you. Once you step over the ledge and start falling, going back up is impossible.

What you can do is reach out while you’re falling. Before you reach the abyss of no self, there might be a root or branch — some idea that sticks out far enough for your false self to grab onto. Maybe it pulls itself onto some ledge between where you used to live and nowhere.

Of course, it’s just a ledge — not a house or a world — and after a while it starts to feel claustrophobic. There’s no room to run around there. The only thing that keeps you on the ledge is fear of what’s below if you slip back into falling mode.

So, another fear to investigate and destroy before you can keep going.

Every deeply embedded belief — something everyone adheres to — is usually the culprit. The question is always, “How freaky can it get?” I’d say, you’d be surprised.

The rabbit hole isn’t just deep — it’s unfathomable from the human perspective. I’d liken it to parts of the ocean where no one’s ever been — that sort of deep.

What the hell is down there? Valid question.

Personally, I like the ocean and I'd love to live next to it but I don’t want to swim in it. If I enjoy it, it’ll be from a towel resting on the sand. There are some things I don’t want to see. Sometimes, I think I’ve seen too much already. Way too much. Not all that much fun.

Maybe that’s why it becomes common to admire the little normal things life gives — a cup of coffee, for instance. Kind of a miracle, no matter how easily found. Mine will be a cappuccino: three shots of espresso with plenty of cream. One of life’s wonders.

Let’s just put it this way: no one really wants to know that things aren’t what they seem, because really — how terrifying is that? It can upend your whole life philosophy. If you know up is really down now, how are you going to keep walking the same way?

Your entire system loses equilibrium. No one is prepared for that. It can be very upsetting, because when one of your core beliefs is destroyed, you instantly realize how many others relied on that one — and nothing holds them up anymore.

Every belief relies on a beam of stability. That stability is created by your system’s emotional ability to believe in it completely — so that reality appears never to question it. Wipe one away, and if it’s big enough, the whole house can fall down.

So yes, I’d say waking up is not a good idea for most people. In fact, in some cases, it can make them crazier than they already are.

That’s the real reason some awakened beings long ago made up a million rules to live by — such as don’t hurt others, don’t lie, don’t steal. They knew what they were dealing with. And today is no different.

Most people think humans were savages long ago — but that time is still now. Nothing has changed. The forms of self-hatred, conditioning, inner doubt, fear, and the false self just take on subtler, more insidious shapes — harder to see, harder to root out.

So, do you want to wake up out of your life and current reality?

Say no.

That’s my best advice.

The odds that you’d handle it well are slim, and the ride isn’t as smooth as you’ve been led to believe. It’s the opposite of what’s hyped. After all, when you’re really done, the you you thought you were is gone.

Does that sound like a walk in the forest — or a nosedive off a canyon wall with no bottom?

Yeah. At least if there were a bottom, you’d eventually go splat and it’d be over. But not so with the real deal.

Here, you just keep going — and where you wind up is unknowable.

The only good news is that, in some strange way, life actually comes alive when the character is no longer in it.

I guess that’s the paradox:
you can have yourself, or you can have life —
but you can’t have both.

There’s nothing here that cares which way it goes.
Life has no opinions.

Author’s Note

I don’t write these things to discourage anyone from waking up. I write them because no one ever told me what it would really cost. Awakening isn’t about light and bliss; it’s about dismantling everything you ever mistook for yourself.

If you find yourself somewhere in the middle of that fall — half afraid, half awake — know that it’s not supposed to make sense yet. Keep going. Keep questioning. The world you lose was never real to begin with.