Enlightenment is a Trip

When my big awakening shift occurred in 2022, after a decade of unraveling, it culminated in something that felt like the great death. The whole experiential reality dissolved in luminous transparency. Then even that dreamlike potentiality dissolved. The sense of I Am, which had morphed into a field of universal boundlessness, collapsed, and I had a complete cessation. 

During the acclimation that followed, my life prior to the release (for the lack of a better word) appeared rather insignificant. The spontaneous deconstruction of conceptual filters, the dissolution of the identity structure, the realization that reality is not real — was like dropping all the veils, seeing the ultimate Truth. 

The power of nondual formlessness that wiped out the world and established itself as the new normal was magnificent and complete. I could hardly remember the past, and if I thought about it at all I dismissed it as dreamlike, even illusory. Everything disappeared in the immersive wonder of radiant nothingness.

The Ultimate Wow — or so it felt like. Little did I know this was barely the beginning of the beginningless This.

After a year or two I seamlessly found myself back in the human experience although something was, well, different. Another phase in this mysterious process begun. I came to see that encountering the shadow, releasing transpersonal trauma and karma, and welcoming the unconsciousness is not something to “work through” but inseparable from what Truth is.

I can sense how absolutely everything that has happened in my life (however non-arising) has been karmically orchestrated by no one, how nothing can be extracted or added to its uncanny perfection, how the unknowable causes and conditions arise as awakening, liberation. 

I can feel the toxicity of human world, the devastating pain the planet is in, and I know the false promise of spirituality that misleads people to think awakening will bring an escape from the human experience. It will not.

I can also see how What Is is really nothing but sensorial figments of intelligent light, eerie ecstatic pulses of immaculate void, and that there is no actual continuity to Thisness whatsoever. I can tell my story in multiple ways because my life is constantly, organically re-arranging, re-shaping, re-creating and re-dissolving itself. It’s fully immersive, absent and dynamically not-happening. 

I can in no way separate my experience from the multi-dimensional matrix of innumerable sentient beings and their suffering and joy, yet there are no beings or dimensionality to be found if I care to look closer. I see what it means that samsara is nirvana, that human beings are born in natural perfection. At the same time, this is just normal, and not a big deal. 

I can sense how every single thread in the pattern of the whole is seamlessly woven to the illusory production of enlightenment — to the extent that expressions like enlightenment, awakening and liberation have become completely meaningless. These terms are deceptive and death-dealing, like a poison sting hidden in a children’s story book.

Every single word that is said about enlightenment is not it. Yet some expressions do manage to conceptually imitate and reflect the direct experience to the extent that it can even feel brilliant to the intellect that dwells on these concepts, perhaps even to the extent of inducing a powerful virtual immersion in which one masterfully groks what the ancient texts, sutras and masters meant with their cryptic, elegant and weirdly aesthetic descriptions. 

So yeah, some words can be pretty awesome as pointers. But the difference between intuitive understanding and the real deal is absolutely indescribable. You have to see for yourself, and the good news is, you can, if you want to. 

Just be warned. The quest for ultimate Truth is the ultimate scam.

And that I am: the great deception.

I am a formidable transformation, a flawless seppuku, a cosmic joke.

I am Maya, the goddess of illusion.

I am the dark night, the crucifixion, the original sin, the salvation.

I am the bodhisattva who has swallowed the poison of samsara.

I am a dream of suffering and its ecstatic transmutation.

I am ignorance. 

I am fear and fearlessness. 

I am God and the Void that annihilates God. 

I am prone to melancholy and self-doubt, I am emotionally honest, self-aware and imaginative, and struggle with a sense of being fundamentally flawed.

I am the dance of pure potentiality.

This Unreality is liberation, as nothing other than the bondage of What Is. 

Cannot be pinned down. Like an alien shapeshifter, fully human, embodied and magically spectral. 

I know without knowing in complete unknowing the perfect knowledge dawns to no one and nothing can be said about that.

And then,

One day, without warning, almost without noticing … in a similar manner the path initially kicked in, your life disappeared, you resisted like crazy, eventually gave in, there was just the path, the one walking the path disappears in the path, the path disappears in impossible failure, the failure disappears in impossible fruition, you think you are “done”, the great awakening disappears in infinite void, you realize you are unborn, the root ignorance disappears in primordial gnosis, the fruition disappears in no path, the shadow surges through, you face trials and tribulations, compassion is born, peaceful and wrathful deities appear, you discover crazy wisdom, basic sanity is born, you wage the battle with your antagonist, you realize you are very human after all, you come to know radical surrender, everything goes very quiet and normal, intensity disappears in equanimity, the vision feels open, insanely clear but also a bit confusing — and then, just like that, no path is nowhere to be found.

One day, all awakening shifts, all the realizations that once seemed so important, all the bloody debates about the right view and correct stages and who has the best map, all the imaginary but very real suffering, conditioning and karma that was released, all the brutal and unexpected twists and turns of the events, all experiences, all battles, all break throughs, all losses, all disillusionments, all insights — the most profound, sacred and earth shattering quantum release of uninhibited uncreated potentiality exploding as subtler than subtle sheer creative power in all the cells of the body that rapidly disintegrate (without entheogenics, this stuff just becomes the new normal) releasing empty bliss in infinite ecstatic cycles that endlessly devour time, space and continuity, releasing radiant bursts of intuitive information, releasing infinite timelines and lifetimes, that all disappear in the spontaneous self-emanation and self-absorption of timeless nano seconds that disintegrate in the non locatable dynamic no perceiver no experience no ground no time no control perfect surrender kind of impossibility of endless possibilities that very viscerally feels like Love beyond any comprehension — this whole damned quest for Truth, this mission impossible that succeeded against all odds and that absolutely failed — becomes so thoroughly assimilated, integrated and blended in the texture of life that it feels like it's simply gone. 

With the disappearance of enlightenment comes the loss of capacity to see any deeper meaning in that which previously seemed so exciting, relevant and essential. This is very different from a common nondual view "there is no meaning" which is actually an overlay, a nondual conditioning, an interpretation. Most of the times when people say this it's coming from intellectual understanding. The truth is that even after deep realization the fundamental meaning making is still operating but in infinitely more subtle, impersonal and fluid manner (I know this because I've done it). It has shifted from conventional narratives to formless insights, archetypical patterns and visionary dimensions.

The deities from vajrayana and shaiva tantra, for example, are means that aim to utilize the creative meaning making power of the unconsciousness in empowering and liberating ways and ultimately override the socio-culturally conditioned identity, resulting in the death of the separate self and the integration of unresolved unconscious material. But eventually also the enlightened, emancipated identity must collapse, there is a deeper and more thorough death that follows. This does not usually happen at once but cyclically, in a series of ecstatic nonlinear iterations. At one point it feels as if the whole psyche is positively energized, all psycho-somatic processes spontaneously sync. The superconscious display is recognized to be intimately sustained and fed by the vitality of the shadow, now wholly unlocked. All psychic divisions, all the various ways of pushing and pulling, managing and controlling, resisting and holding, repressing and indulging, collapse in dynamic wholeness that functions unhindered, in a natural state of flow.

When it becomes clear that your most mind blowing experiences of universal heart opening or absolute void have no more truth value than your most horrendous nightmares and bizarre self-delusions  — all being equally a demonstration of Mind's creative power  — something fundamental lets go. The tendency to fixate on any kind of awakening-induced identity disappears. Paradoxically, everything appears now strangely meaningful, co-creative and synchronous, while being at the same time totally empty. The senses soar in effortless, luminous dream-like absorption, pulsing with spacious aliveness. The world is simultaneously zero-dimensional and infinitely rich. That is what those enlightened guys mean when they say that a blade of grass contains more Truth than all your ideas about Truth.

The weird simplicity of (no)path still “occurs” (for the lack of a better word”), “life” continues (for the lack of a better word). It’s not like you went back to a separated state, but neurologically it does feel a bit like regression more than progression, to some sort of pre-rational mode, just that the thinking function is available when needed. Wondrous deepenings, delusions, revelations and obscurations may still occur at times, it just becomes impossible to tell the difference between those and brushing your teeth, to differentiate in any meaningful manner. Healing still continues, without the need or belief in improvement. The human experience is still here, however alien, however awkward.

To summarize,

First we wake up from the conventional identity into something that feels like our True Nature. We wake up from what feels like mind identification to “how things really are”. We make statements about the nature of Reality being consciousness / emptiness / universal presence / energy / unconditional love etc that can be non-conceptually realized (emphasis on this!) and that truly phenomenologically reveals itself as Truth. 

What happens when all these terms cease making sense? When the capacity to perceive something that could be called “True Nature” falls completely away? 

At some point the distinction between artificial and true, illusion and enlightenment, bona fide and fictitious simply disappears. You look at the words “True Nature” and they just don’t compute. It’s like observing an alien language that once upon a time used to make sense, but now it’s just letters on a white page, and they don’t appear that interesting or important. With some sort of empathic effort you can relate to people who use this language and understand what they mean, evoking distant dreamlike memories of what once felt like “awakening”, perhaps even entering in bizarre life altering dialogues about these matters ... but it does feel a bit odd.