After the awakening
The insight was real. The opening was real. But nobody meditates forever, and the dishes are still dirty. So what was it actually for?
There’s a story the spiritual marketplace loves to tell, and it goes like this: you seek, you practice, you open — and then, one day, you arrive. The awakening. The peak. The download, the realization, the light. Roll credits.
And then Tuesday comes. There’s a bill to pay and an irritating person to deal with and a fear that grips you at 3 a.m., and you find yourself asking a question nobody put on the brochure: okay… now what?
I want to talk about that — the part after. Because whether you’ve already had some genuine opening and you’re standing in the “now what,” or you’re someone who deeply wants to awaken and is trying to understand what you’re actually reaching for, the honest answer to “now what” is the same. And it’s not what most of the marketplace is selling.
Awakening is not a state to collect
Here’s the first thing worth saying plainly, because it saves a great deal of wasted effort: awakening is not a peak experience you chase, catch, and add to your collection (of anything.)
The marketplace tends to package it that way — as a series of highs to pursue. The insights. The synchronicities. The energy. The expanded states, the signs, the peak experiences, one after another, each one chased and captured and, often, posted about.
And I’ll be gentle but honest here: people who pursue it that way tend not to arrive, because that isn’t how it works. You can’t collect your way into it. The peak states are lovely, and they are not the thing. Treating them as the thing is one of the most common ways to spend years seeking and never settle.
Because — and this is the heart of it — awakening isn’t something out there to attain, or strive toward, or reach. It isn’t external at all. It’s already you. It’s the deepest layer of what you are: call it the soul, call it the Universe expressing as you. You don’t travel to it. You settle into it. And once you’ve genuinely tasted it — even for a moment — you can’t un-taste it. You know the way back, because it was never a place you left. It was in you the whole time.
I’ll be honest about the limits of what I can tell you here: I don’t teach the path to it, and I couldn’t hand you a method if I tried. I can only describe the territory as I’ve lived it — so take what’s useful and leave the rest.
What it’s actually like — and why it’s so hard to describe
Trying to describe the awakened state to someone who hasn’t tasted it is a genuinely difficult thing. It’s one of those experiences that words circle but never quite land on — you can point at it, but the pointing isn’t the thing. Some things can only be known from the inside.
But here’s the closest I can come. Being awake isn’t a fireworks show. It’s quieter than that, and steadier. It lets more of life flow through you — you take more in, and you probably send more out. And it settles you into a calm, stable, present place that isn’t easily knocked over. Not numbness — the opposite. A kind of grounded aliveness that most of the ordinary storms can’t displace. Once you can see from there, you can’t unsee it. It stops being a state you visit and becomes the ground you stand on.
That’s why, for me at least, the dramatic “now what?” the brochures warn about never really happened. There was no cliff to fall off, no high to come down from. Just a way of being that continues — so I simply experience all of life differently from that point on. All of it. It isn’t a place you go to and have to find your way back from. It’s a state you exist in.
So how does it change Tuesday?
This is the real question, and here’s where it gets genuinely interesting — because Tuesday still happens. The bill is still due. The irritating person is still irritating. The dishes don’t wash themselves in the light of your realization. Awakening doesn’t exempt you from ordinary life. What changes is who’s driving.
Here’s how it actually works, in my experience. The soul is what’s awakened — and most of the time, it’s the soul that runs things. That’s what brings the peace and the joy and the equanimity, even in the face of hard things. But the personality, the persona — the everyday self that handles logistics and crises — doesn’t vanish. That’s the part people get wrong when they talk about “transcending the ego.” The persona doesn’t go anywhere. It simply steps into the background and lets the soul lead.
And then, when something demands immediate action — a crisis, an emergency, a situation that needs the practical self to do something right now — the persona steps right back up. It’s there. It’s handy. It does what needs doing. And when the moment passes, it recedes again and lets the soul resume the lead.
So it’s not a war between soul and ego, with one killing off the other. It’s a partnership, with the soul in the lead seat and the persona on call — deferring most of the time, stepping up exactly when it’s needed. That’s what integration actually looks like on a Tuesday. Not that ordinary life stops being ordinary. That you meet all of it from a different seat.
The part nobody with any honesty leaves out: it isn’t seamless
Let me tell you the hardest part, because any account of this that skips it is selling you something.
For me, the hardest thing is fear. I still get triggered. Something frightening happens and I get knocked clean out of that calm, grounded place, same as anyone. Being awake did not make me immune to fear. I doubt it will free you from it, either.
What it gave me instead is this: I know where the equanimity is, and I know how to work my way back to it. When fear throws me, I have to actually do the returning — deliberately make my way back to the calm, present place where I can think from my heart instead of react from a jangled nervous system. I don’t enjoy the hard things any more than anyone does. But meeting them from equanimity, rather than from an emotionally unbalanced state, is so much better that the work of returning is always worth it.
That’s the honest picture. Not a person who floats serenely above human life, untouched. A person who gets knocked off center like everyone — and has learned, most of the time, how to find her way home. If you’re already awake, you know exactly what I mean. If you’re reaching for it, let this be the encouraging part: the goal was never to stop being human. It’s to have a reliable way back to your own center when being human throws you.
What spiritual development is actually for
So if it’s not for collecting transcendent states — what is it for?
Here’s my answer, as plainly as I can say it: spiritual development is the gradual — or, more rarely, sudden — return to a soul-based operating system. That’s the whole project. Not accumulating peak experiences. Not escaping ordinary life into permanent bliss. Just this: shifting the seat you run your life from, out of the reactive, fearful, persona-driven scramble and into the calm, present, soul-led ground that was always underneath.
And notice what that means for the difference between having an awakening and living one. Honestly? There’s not much difference — because it was never a place to go to. It’s a state to exist in. The “living it” isn’t a separate, harder phase that comes after the good part. The living is the awakening. Tuesday, with the soul in the driver’s seat and the persona ready to help — that’s not the disappointing comedown after the mountaintop. That is the mountaintop, finally brought down to where you actually live.
So to both of you — the one already awake and the one longing to be: the same truth holds. There’s nowhere to get to. There’s only a deeper place to live from, one that’s already in you, waiting to be settled into and then — the real work, the good work — lived. In how you handle the money. How you treat the irritating person. How you find your way back when fear throws you. How you do the dishes.
That’s not the part that comes after the awakening. That’s what the awakening was for.
If this speaks to something you already know, or something you’re reaching toward, my book The Code of the Soul is about exactly this shift — recognizing the soul-based operating system underneath the persona, and learning to live your ordinary days from there. It’s the most direct map I have to the territory this essay can only point at.
Keep going: Who Are You When the Person You Used to Be Isn’t You Anymore?, You Haven’t Lost Yourself. But You May Have Lost Contact With Yourself., and What Is Soul Mastery in Conscious Evolution?, the bigger picture of this work.