Awakening Was Supposed to Feel Like Bliss. It Didn't

Almost every account of awakening you will read describes the same moment. The sense of self thins out, the world opens, and what floods in is peace, or joy, or light. Very few mention that sadness after awakening is possible too.

I had read those accounts for years. I knew what was supposed to happen. And when the insight I had been chasing through physics and philosophy finally landed, the first feeling was not peace or joy, and it was not described in any of those books.

I want to explain it carefully, because I don't think it was a mistake. It comes down to two plain questions: what was that first feeling about, and who was actually having it?

I had spent years working toward that moment without knowing it was the destination. First physics, then the hard problem of consciousness, then idealism, then nonduality. Each layer peeled back another. I understood the concepts. I could argue the case. Then one ordinary day it stopped being a concept and simply landed.

I typed the first thing that came to mind:

"just realized im emptiness and not sure how to feel about that, ego feels sad"

Not ecstatic. Not enlightened. Sad.

Who Was Doing the Grieving?

For as long as I can remember, a story has been running: I am this person, with this history, these opinions, these wins and losses. The ego is not a villain. It is the character that holds that story together and defends it.

So picture what the realization looks like from the character's point of view. The thing it has protected its whole life turns out to be more like weather than like a solid object. Something happening, not something that exists on its own. To the character, that sounds a great deal like death.

And death, even a symbolic one, brings grief.

But notice one strange detail. The sadness was seen. There was the sad feeling, and there was something aware of the sad feeling. If I were only the ego, there would be no one left over to notice the ego mourning. The grief itself pointed straight at what wasn't grieving.

Emptiness Isn't Nothing, Exactly

"Emptiness" is a poor word in English. It sounds like a void, a hollow, a loss.

What I actually saw was closer to openness. Not a thing, but the room that things appear in. A sky is not sad that it has no fixed shape. Having no fixed shape is exactly what lets clouds pass through it. The ego had believed it was the whole sky, and now it saw itself as one cloud. That is a painful demotion for a cloud.

The physicist in me finds this oddly familiar. The deeper you go into matter, the less stuff you find. Particles become excitations of fields, and fields become mathematical relationships. At no point do you reach a small solid nugget. The self, examined closely, behaves the same way.

Too Simple to See

Something else came out of that same day. I had spent years in every labyrinth of the mind I could find: science, simulation theory, psychology. I had been sure spirituality was the rock bottom, without realizing it was another labyrinth I was swimming in.

What landed was not a more elaborate theory. It was the opposite. Every description I had ever read, "pure awareness," "the Self," "I am that," suddenly looked as though it was adding too much. The thing they all pointed at was always the one doing the looking, and you cannot describe the looker the way you describe what is being looked at. (That realization deserves a post of its own, about the single letter "I".)

Honestly, it was shocking. In my words from that day:

"…the Truth was just too simple to be comprehended"

The mind is built to grasp complicated things. It had been looking past the simple thing the whole time, the way you can search an entire house for the glasses sitting on your head.

Why the Bliss Didn't Last

For a while afterward, there really was bliss. A couple of weeks, then on and off for a couple of months. Everything felt lighter, more loving, more obviously connected.

Then ordinary life did what ordinary life does, and the ego came back online. Rejection, expectation and loneliness returned, and they had a new sting. Before, there had always been a higher truth to chase. Now I had already found the highest truth I could imagine, and things could still hurt.

That stage is rarely talked about. Seeing through the ego does not make the ego disappear. It changes your relationship to it. The character still shows up for work. It still wants love, still gets disappointed, and still feels sad when it learns it was never the main event.

I have come to think the grief was the right response. It is the character finally hearing the truth and reacting the way characters react. The mistake would be to treat the sadness as proof that something went wrong, or to fake a serenity I did not feel.

Less Wanting, More Having

One question from that day still lingers. Is this why the less you want, the more you have?

If the ego's whole job is grasping, getting more and becoming more, then emptiness looks like the ultimate loss. But if nothing and everything turn out to be two sides of the same coin, then the emptiness the ego mourns is the same fullness it was grasping for. It simply cannot be owned.

Coming Down the Mountain

There is an old problem with any insight like this. You see something simple and total, then you have to come back down the mountain and explain it, and it gets turned into rules again.

So here is my attempt, without rules.

If you ever reach the moment when the self you have defended for decades suddenly looks see-through, you may not feel enlightened. You might feel sad, or scared, or numb. Let the character feel that. It has earned it.

And then, just for a second, notice that something is aware of the sadness. That awareness is not sad itself, and it is the part of you this whole post has been pointing to.