When Awareness Comes to You…

Your circle of friends will shrink. You’ll start to notice that your usual conversations with friends and acquaintances just don’t flow like they used to. Everything seems the same, but somehow it’s less interesting. That’s because you’ll no longer be able to keep up conversations about how everything is bad, everyone around is terrible, work is uninspiring, business isn’t working out, your husband is unbearable, or your wife is to blame for everything. You’ll stop playing these games, because it takes at least two people to play by the rules. That’s why, for your friends, you’ll become a very inconvenient person—someone who ruins the game and makes it obvious that the emperor has no clothes.

It will become hard for you to work at a job you don’t love or do things that feel meaningless. As a result, you’ll either choose to fully engage in your current work or make a radical change. If you stayed at your old job out of necessity, fear, habit, or autopilot, those reasons will come to the surface and you’ll have to deal with them.

Your relationships will start to crack. That’s because most relationships aren’t true partnerships of equals, but rather a tangle of dependencies and compensations. Sensing that they’re losing you, your partner will do everything possible to get you back, but you’ll respond to all their complaints with surprise and confusion, as if an alien were trying to communicate with you in Martian.

You’ll feel lonely. All the unnecessary and fake connections—those built on lack, emptiness, consumerism, and selfishness—will fall away. This new emptiness, which seems to appear out of nowhere, will be scary at first, like a gaping abyss. But gradually, it will start to fill with what is truly alive and real within you.

You won’t be able to lie to yourself or others. Almost physically (like Pinocchio with his growing nose), you’ll feel any inner dishonesty—in your words, thoughts, and actions. It will be downright unpleasant, because every time you say something you don’t truly mean, it will feel like cat claws scraping your soul. And no, you can’t turn this off.

You’ll suddenly notice that people around you are suffering deeply. But they’re not suffering because life is hard—on the contrary, their lives are just fine. They suffer from the illusion that something is wrong with their lives. If before you were too busy living through your own suffering, now you’ll start to feel the suffering of those around you, because your own suffering will be gone. At that point, you’ll have only one option—to help everyone you can, in every moment, in any way you can—because doing otherwise will simply be impossible.

Your worldview will collapse. You’ll realize that it’s not just your “right” opinion versus everyone else’s “wrong” ones, but an endless space of options and possibilities. All limitations are nothing more than illusions you’ve created yourself.

You’ll have to take responsibility for yourself. You’ll understand that there’s nothing to expect from anyone, and no one owes you anything. Everything in your life doesn’t depend on outside factors, a clueless boss, a difficult partner, or the price of Bitcoin—it depends on you. You live exactly the life you deserve, and nothing will change until you take responsibility for what you have. But at that moment, personal responsibility will stop being a burden you want to run from or dump on others; it will become the only true and logical order of things.

And so, day by day, everything superficial, artificial, and hypocritical will start to fall away, exposing inner emptiness. Everything real will begin to reveal itself, grow, break through, strengthen, and take root within you. And this is far from a gentle or pleasant process. More often, it’s a crushing break from habits and automatic behaviors built up over years. But when you finally emerge from the rubble of your destroyed mental patterns, you’ll realize it was all worth it.