What Is Awakening?

Awakening is the radical, and experiential, collapse of the sense of being a separate individual looking out at a world. It is this direct seeing that the person you took yourself to be with all its history, fears, and desires, is actually a fleeting pattern of thoughts and sensations, and not a solid entity called John, Sue or whatever name you use. This is an unmasking and the subsequent removal of an imaginary boundary, revealing that there is no central point where "you" end and "life" begins.

My first awakening happened in 2018. I woke up at 6.30am, and sat up in bed. As I looked out at the room, it suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t made up of my stories. My past did not need to define me, and in fact, I could not locate myself anywhere in thoughts, in the past, nor in the future. Whatever ‘I’ was, it was right here. What later followed was some very intense turmoil, emotional upheaval, and some very messy phases of upsetting people, as my inner struggles purged out.

For me, this was a profound shift, and I didn’t receive a new self to replace the old self. Instead, all concepts and personally identifiable thoughts and identities gradually dwindled into obscurity until the ever-present, indefinable reality that had been here all along was revealed. Life’s pleasant and unpleasant events continue to roll onwards, but are experienced as impersonal, energetic movements. I no longer need to struggle to protect, manage, and improve a separate self.

All these self-directed coping strategies simply fall away, leaving behind a deep, inherent, and immovable peace that surpasses logic and understanding. It is inherent because it is not something ‘I’ achieved or acquired. It was already here. It seemed to be obscured by my self-directed struggles. Once I had ‘got out of the way’, there it was.

No-self does not mean there is no functional self - that is a really important understanding. You do not merge with everything, although at times, it might seem romantic to think of it in that way, and you might experience something quite similar. After each bout of ego-death, the self has to reconstruct, so you can function again. That is really critical.

As each ego-death occurs, the centre must re-emerge as the focal point of the larger perspective. If done correctly, there will be two centre points: 1) the relativistic focal point, which helps you navigate the three-dimensional world, and adapt to its dynamic, changing demands - and 2) the greater part of reality has no single, locatable centre at all. The centre is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

For me, the insight of no-self was just too obvious and radical; there was no option but throw my TV set into the bin. I dropped everything to try and figure this out. But of course, I didn’t figure anything out. No special knowledge was given to me. For a long time, I bounced from boundlessness to feeling like I was the person in the story.

The real journey is in the melding of this back & forth resonance between feeling like you’ve won something (enlightenment) and loosing it all again. This resonance, while it can be extremely challenging, is the very journey itself.

It’s like a pendulum swinging between two extremes, where the trajectory of the pendulum represents a major shift in perception and identity. At one end of the extreme, you're totally boundless, at ease and free. At the other end, you’re completely identified with the individual narrative, its struggles and its life challenges.

Importantly, the motion of the pendulum is the journey, but it’s not taking you to a final destination, at least not in the way you could ‘think’ about it.

The pendulum eventually arrives at a very irrational and surprising resolution. In fact, the pendulum — which is analogous to the self-concept — disappears and the discernment of swinging back and forth is no longer an issue, although you should still recognise the ebb and flow of unconscious material, and the ability to hold those dualistic tensions. In essence, life still continues and so it should.

That is when you know awakening. It is both profound and very ordinary. It is not a final destination - you learn to live with the tensions life brings forth in whatever form they appear.

This website contains all my notes cobbled together into a coherent, user-friendly way. It is an ongoing project and things are being added all the time. It also contains my personal experiences of this journey. Hopefully, someone may find my trodden path helpful in some way.

Warnings - Please Read…

This is not a calming, spiritual website, so if you’re looking for those things, I would suggest leaving. Also, if you’re very sensitive, or have developmental struggles, or problems with dissociation, undergoing trauma recovery, or just generally mentally unwell, I would suggest leaving now, or else you might find yourself leaving later with an anxiety attack and a crippling existential crisis.

Adding to that, although it is typical for an ego-death to follow the trajectory of bouncing back and forth (the process of death and re-emergence), which is a sign of a healthy, transformative journey, in some cases, an ego death can become a permanent catastrophe from which the ego never recovers. In which case, you’ll be spending the rest of your life in a mental hospital.

The polar-opposite of an irrecoverable ego collapse is ego inflation. This is common in various Buddhists traditions, where the practitioner forces themselves — perhaps through concentration practices — towards the imagined goal, or they play around with powerful archetypes too early in their journey. While the practitioner might make it, the ego attains the bigger picture as if it is that bigger picture.

This is a huge danger because there has been little to no self-reflection upon their internal reality, their personal issues, and the collective. Whilst they might understand and speak well about these areas, the inner work hasn’t actually been done. Consequently, they might say things like, “I’m done” or “I’m now an Arhat” or share inflated ideals about creating mass enlightenment, or create models that they say will lead humanity to a perfected state, perhaps through their special system or try to use science as their next fixation. It’s all the empty, deceptive crusade of a saviour complex, which many people will find extremely appealing. But they are trying vehemently to save themselves.

They themselves are still unconsciously searching for an answer to their own human condition, but searching through the eyes of their teacher status. Their followers are simply ‘helping’ them with their misguided endeavour.

To name a few people who prominently show these signs: Shinzen Young, Daniel Ingram and Ken Wilber. Whilst they offer great, informative material, it is my view that they may have fallen prey to an inflated transpersonal ego, which has identified itself with the transcendent experience. As Carl Jung rightly said, ‘that is a fate too great for any mortal to bear’.

So, in these cases, rather than the ego collapsing into a permanent state of psychosis, the polar-opposite happens: the ego wraps itself around the contextual bigger picture; it permanently inflates itself to match that bigger picture; it becomes the bigger picture, and the practitioner becomes the enduring mouthpiece of God.

These types of people can often have a profound knowledge about these things and can speak about them with great eloquence and authority. Just like there's no turning back from the permanent and catastrophic collapse of the ego, there's no turning back from that permanent inflation, either.

While this type of inflated ego can look quite impressive, it is actually one end of a severe and tragic extreme. A person in this state doesn't even know that they are here. This is a clear sign that, at some point in their journey, they were scared witless; they became extremely frightened of loosing their egoistic structure and became captured by the enticement of the wisdom mind - so powerful is its allure.

This is testament to the task ahead, and the respect one must give to the process. The awakening journey can scare away the most seasoned practitioner.

In my view, the above two extremes are not awakening - that should be obvious with the former. In particular, the latter is a major distortion of identification with a powerful knowledge base - a kind of super-ego, if you like.