Do You
Awakening, spiritual egos, dark nights - and the thread that binds them all
“Hi Shiv,
About a year ago, I had an awakening that completely altered the way I experience reality. Since then, I’ve been trying to understand what it means to live from this recognition in the midst of ordinary life. I still go to work, pay bills, maintain relationships, and make plans for the future. Outwardly, not much has changed. Inwardly, however, everything feels different.
What confuses me is motivation.
If there is no separate self at the center of experience, then for whose benefit is all this activity taking place? Why pursue goals? Why improve myself? Why make difficult choices or put effort into anything at all?
How does meaningful action arise when the one for whom that action is supposedly undertaken is discovered not to exist?
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.”
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It was when I was in the midst of my own awakening, over twenty years ago, that I walked down to the garden outside the lobby of my apartment building to look at some fresh flowers the groundskeepers had planted.
For two months already, I had existed in a space of near-constant bliss - a stark contrast to the profound dread and depression that had been a steady feature of my life for the five years prior. The boundaries between where I ended and the world began had faded to near invisibility. Everywhere I looked, I saw the same radiant glow of being emanating from the world - animate and inanimate alike. I knew then, without a doubt, that the material world was a play of that very same light - temporary, fleeting, and destined to appear and dissolve as easily as the pixels on your phone screen light up and then go dark.
Taking off my shoes, I stepped onto the fresh grass and approached the raised flower bed - I could see that same radiant light emanating from each of the flowers. I felt the bliss surge in my chest as I bent to smell them. As I leaned against the wooden planter, my hand brushed against a small hidden wasps’ nest that had formed in a corner on the inside of the planter.
Three or four angry wasps emerged from the nest and one stung me on the hand before I had a chance to react. I stepped back quickly, waving them away and made my way back into the building. What I found remarkable was that I hadn’t felt any fear or alarm - the wasps appeared to emanate that same radiant light and there was no separation between them and me. And yet, that had not prevented me from acting with urgency. Recognizing the threat they posed to my body and removing myself from the vicinity until they had dispersed.
It occurred to me then that this same radiant beingness that pervaded all that I saw, including myself, was not passive or benign. Its expression altered drastically from form to form even though its radiance never dimmed. In the form of a flower, it emanated an ephemeral essence - gentle, fragile and beautiful. In the form of a wasp, it expressed an entirely different essence - energetic, aggressive at times, erratic.
Depending on what form it was doing, its essence would completely transform such that it was entirely unrecognizable from one form to the next. Yet, its radiance, that was so clear and evident to me during that awakening phase, is what gave it away. And it delighted me to no end - watching this game of hide-and-seek. Being wearing ten thousand disguises attempting to convince me that each of those things were separate from me. And yet, I could also see that my own body and mind were one of its disguises. For it expressed ‘me’ with a signature essence unlike any of its other disguises.
Just as being was doing all those other characters, it was doing “me” too. And although that glimpse eventually faded after a few months - and the radiance dimmed so that my eyes would strain to detect it, the memory of that view altered my understanding of myself fundamentally.
I realized I was not a being named Shiv. I was the being doing Shiv.
For a long time after that awakening, I struggled with motivation too. My ego reinstated itself - although significantly hobbled by what I had witnessed. This time it reinvented itself as the arbitrator of this new understanding - which opened up a whole other can of worms that I won’t go into at this time. Yet, the same questions you asked - about taking meaningful action when there is no central identity or narrative to drive that action - consumed me.
What I didn’t see at the time was that these questions were forming a narrative themselves. Unbeknownst to me, a new identity was being built around the experience of non-separation. This dilemma about how to act purposefully in the absence of a self was becoming the main plotline. A new hero’s journey of integrating the awakened perspective into the ordinariness of practical life was forming. And without realizing it, I had unconsciously slipped into the same dynamic just wearing an enlightened costume.
Being had successfully disguised itself as the spiritual ego and had me playing out yet another unconscious script, while convincing me I was ‘awake’. And there was a whole cast of characters to support this new production - an entire spiritual culture of similarly ‘awakened egos’ walking around faithfully narrating their stories of waking up, their experiences of non-separation and the fact that they no longer experienced a sense of self or agency.
I played along, yet somewhere within the recesses of my consciousness, I began to sense the whole setup had a kind of Truman Show-esque feel about it. I remember attending the Science and Non-duality conference in 2012 as a guest speaker - and for the three days of the conference, I felt like I was in a strange vaudeville show. The other speakers, teachers and audience members seemed caricaturish. As if they were all paid actors in some B-grade production. And I watched myself play along too - doing the extra-long eye-gazing, the uncomfortably long hugs, treating everyone I met as if they were the most precious human being I had ever met - only to forget about them a few minutes later.
Yet, even though I sensed something was off - it didn’t stop me from participating in the charade because, in the period after my awakening, my newly resurrected ego had built itself in the image of the memory of my awakening. It is the difference between laughing in a moment of genuine humor versus continuing to walk around with a smile pasted on your face for the rest of the day, even though that moment of humor has passed and you no longer find anything funny. My spiritual ego had become that pasted smile I couldn’t get off my face. Mostly because I was now exposed to a culture in which everyone walked around with the same pasted smile - while we all attempted to convince each other we were genuinely happy.
Gradually, however, that gnawing sense of something being amiss became unignorable. I began to feel the hypocrisy of this new identity I had formed and I grew allergic to it. It was around this time that I began writing essays on my Facebook blog, Advaitaholics Anonymous, where I exposed the same dynamic within spiritual culture as I had seen within myself. The energy of my writing was boisterous, polemic, and effervescent - yet in hindsight, it was the spiritual ego dissolving itself in real time - and the heat that process gave off is what I metabolized into my furious, and often humorous, essays.
And yet, I wasn’t prepared for what came after, once that spiritual ego had been thoroughly dissolved. Because without the armor of this superior identity and the support of a spiritual culture to bolster it - I found myself, once again, as a small, scared, and unsure nobody whose survival in this world was uncertain.
