There’s a tendency to believe that awakening eradicates all traces of the personality. The unawakened mind holds a picture of an “awakened person” as someone who shows no emotion, who speaks slowly, who never refers to “I” or “me”, who has no memory of their own past (or at least denies that any personal history…

There is a big misunderstanding. That awakening erases our humanness. That personal history is wiped out. That all uncomfortable feelings are vanquished in one fell swoop. That we rise above the searing pain of heartbreak when a loved one dies, that we transcend the fragility of form, that we are immune to the horrors of…

More and more, I come to see that enlightenment is an illusion. Part of the same matrix that keeps us believing in separation. Upheld by millennia of religion and spiritual tradition. Upheld by the self that wants to escape the existential agony of having incarnated as form. As if there is another world that cradles…