TA

 

When people who had a spiritual awakening say that reality is an illusion, what do they mean exactly?

The same thing physicists mean when they demonstrate atoms are 99% empty and anything that appears solid isn’t.

There’s ‘something’ apparently there, but it’s essentially made of Nothing. So this is Nothing appearing as Everything, real and yet simultaneously unreal, similar to how the people & stories on the movie screen are not actually ‘real,’ just a projection of light & shadows.

‘Mind’ can’t grasp this real/unreal experience, because it is already starting with the conclusion that it is a real, permanent thing and everything it perceives is also real or solid.

This intrinsic emptiness & impermanence can be glimpsed outside of ‘mind,’ in samadhi, in radical ego-collapse (awakening) and even in mind-altering substance experiences (psychedelics.)

But regardless of how you get to a temporary or sustained Nothing Being Everything perception, what’s important is what you will now do with that realization. Will you stop going to work or consuming food? Will you leave all friends & relations behind and go sit in the desert? Will you attempt walking through walls to test the empty-solidness

The true value of the ‘spiritual awakening,’ in which you realize that what you thought was reality was actually just an illusion, is the direct realization/collapse of the false notion that “you” are real…that there is actually a semi-permanent ‘self’ inside this organism. There isn’t. It, too, is just an empty dharma, one more rising and disappearing phenomenon, pure consciousness-energy which seems to have condensed into a solid ‘self,’ but is still just random empty particles of energy.

Then you can go forward in the ‘world’ - as long as the body energy still remains contracted & cohesive, even ‘awakened’ ones must still interact with ‘solid’ reality - self-less-ly, impersonally, just flowing with whatever is happening, without minding or taking it ‘personally’ or thinking it ‘means’ something. Just Being with What Is. This also creates great compassion for all other temporarily ‘condensed energies,’ who, without your ego in the way, you can now selflessly serve and love without judgment or taking anything personally.

That not taking anything personally or assigning meaning to anything, that ability to exist in constant service and compassion for the world, is the real jewel of awakening, not some blissfully-detached walking around as if everything is a dream.

Awakened, life is incredibly ordinary. Only that it’s just Life life-ing…without an illusory “you.” 

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