When you awaken spiritually…
You will become more selective with who you call your friends. You will start noticing how conventional conversations with old friends and acquaintances no longer engage you. Somehow, you will no longer be able to participate in small talk about daily routines, annoying spouses or business troubles.
You will stop playing games. And because every game needs at least two players, you will become a very uncomfortable person for your friends. Your mere presence will be showing everyone’s true colors, as you will be seeing through all the petty masks and make-believes.
The job that you may have been doing for years, will suddenly become unbearably dull and boring. You will find it increasingly difficult to do something which has no purpose, and will either choose to become involved and active to the extent that was not available to you earlier, or change the line of work entirely. If what was keeping you in the old job was fear, habit, or routine, it will come up to surface immediately, forcing you to act and change.
Because most relationships are not a union of equals, but a tight knot of inter-codependencies and compensations, your romantic relationship will start crumbling and falling apart. Your partner will instinctively feel that he or she is losing you, and will put in every effort to get you back. But you will see these attempts as a form of alien communication, which you can neither fully emphasize with nor understand.
You will experience loneliness. All superficial relationships which are not rooted in reality, which were built on lack, emptiness, consumerism and egotism, will start disintegrating. And this new, unexpected, abysmal emptiness will terrify you at first, but will gradually fill up with everything that is alive and real within you.
You will no longer be able to lie to yourself, or to others. Almost physically, you will start sensing every inner untruth — in words, thoughts, or actions. Every time you say something you don’t mean, you will feel a screeching sound in your soul, a knowing that you are out of alignment with reality.
You will suddenly find that people around you are suffering deeply. And the cause of their suffering does not come from life’s hardships — on the contrary, their lives are perfectly fine. They are suffering from the illusion that something is wrong with them or their lives. You were just too busy with your own suffering to see it before your awakening.
You will feel ashamed. For your old words and actions, now that you can look the truth in the eye and admit that the source of all of your problems is not anyone outside of yourself. It is you. But as soon as you understand this, shame will be transformed, and replaced with inner peace.
You will talk less. Because everything that you used to say out of fear, envy, selfishness or anger will fall away. And you will find that silence indeed is golden, you just didn’t have time to appreciate it in the rapid progression of events that your daily life used to be.
Your former worldview will collapse like a house of cards. Everything you so passionately defended, believed in and argued will turn into a pile of rubble. Your opinion will no longer be the only correct one, while everyone else’s just a matter of seeing the error of their ways. Instead, you will know an infinite universe of options and possibilities. And it will become clear that any restrictions on these possibilities of reality are just your illusions.
You will have to take responsibility. You will know that you cannot expect anything from anyone, and no one owes you anything. Whatever you have in life does not depend on external factors. It is not your stupid boss, an unsympathetic partner, or currency exchange rate — it is you, and you alone who make your life what it is.
You live exactly the kind of life that you deserve, and no other life is possible until you take responsibility for the one you have. But as soon as you realize this, personal responsibility will no longer be a burden, something to run away from as fast as you can, trying to dump it on others — instead you will know it as the only real way to be.
When you awaken, everything that is fake, artificial and hypocritical will start crumbling, disintegrating daily, opening internal chasms that you never knew existed. When you awaken, everything real will start emerging, breaking through the clutter, growing and taking root. It will not be a gentle or pleasant process. Often, it will be a complete destruction of habits and routines that you have been robotically repeating for years.
But when you emerge from the ruins of your collapsed mental templates, you will know — all of it was worth it.
