The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

Some people can spend quite a period of time stuck in this depressive place. One of the antidotes to being stuck in meaninglessness is to see that we are only looking at truth from the ego’s point of view. There is nothing in awakening for the ego. Awakening wakes up from the ego, so from the ego’s point of view, awakening has no benefit. Awakening

Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you’re willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.

There is no such thing as past awakening; past awakening is past. The only thing that is relevant is the present. Am I awake to the truth right now, and not only in my mind, but in the entirety of my being?

There are a lot of influences that come to our aid when we’re willing to be on our own—seen and unseen, known and unknown. The point is not to get stuck on the idea that it is all about being alone. That is a particular experience of a moment of aloneness, of facing oneself, of not grasping on to the teacher or the tradition or the teachings—includ

What is required is the willingness to let life impact you; to let yourself see when life impacts you; to see if you go into any sort of separation about it, if you go into judgment, if you go into blame, if you go into “should” or “shouldn’t,” if you start to point the finger somewhere other than at yourself.

To be truly awake, to be enlightened, is to be free of all grasping—to be free of all points of view. That state is literally indescribable. We cannot conceptualize what that state of being is like. Up until that point, we can always conceptualize to some extent.

What are you telling yourself that is creating a sense of division, whether it’s a sense of superiority or anything else?

I would say that my experience is that I no longer believe the next thought that I have. I’m not capable of actually believing a thought that happens. I have no control over what thoughts appear, but I can’t believe that the thought is real or true or significant. And because no thought can be grasped as real, true, or significant, that itself has

From our new view of reality, we are free from the egoic desire to find meaning. We see that the ego’s desire to find meaning in life is actually a substitute for the perception of being life itself. The search for meaning in life is a surrogate for the knowledge that we are life.