I know this title sounds a little bit like the start of one of those American country songs where the guy or gal is proclaiming their freedom from a bad relationship.
This isn’t about that.
I mean it could be, I suppose, but mainly the joy people feel in those situations is because they no longer have to have their own issues mirrored back to them. They are in a period of relief as opposed to release, which is when an issue is gone for good.
In this instance, I’m talking about how we settle into awakened awareness and we stop needing or wanting anything. It’s a lovely space. You are complete in and of yourself. Obviously, most people don’t understand this space, and for many people in your life, they may seem to think that you don’t care about them anymore. Honestly, the more you rest in awakened awareness the easier it sometimes is to trigger any and everyone. It’s not because you mean to cause others trouble, but it’s because some of you are more actively living a life where your role is to call to the depths of awakened awareness that is stored in others.
When someone else’s awareness starts to naturally bubble up in your presence, it generally runs into all kinds of resistance that people immediately want to project onto others. Nonetheless, there is no need to be concerned if you are resting in this joy more and more. You can’t control how others respond and react to you. If you are fully grounded in this joy, you already know this, but on the off chance some of you are still getting hooked into old patterns and are concerned about how seemingly indifferent you are in your relationships, this spiritual awakening blog post is for you.
The Awakened Consciousness: A Whole Unto Itself
It’s such a simple statement. It’s so profound. It’s so very often completely misunderstood or just a mental idea for most people. But we are. In oneness where we lose separation, we gain unity. We are everything.
Obviously, we are still living in bodies as awakened beings, but the veil of even that physical reality becomes very thin. You really do learn what is necessary and what is not on a physical level, and there is a kind of bending of the usual rules of physical life that can start to happen around you. I know this sounds outlandish, and there’s no real need to go into it any more than that. Most of you aren’t ready. Most of you still need to go back to my starting out section or my “Can a Spiritual Awakening Go Wrong?” blog post. This isn’t a bad thing. It is simply honoring and taking ownership of wherever you are on your spiritual path. The seed has different needs than the sprout than the 3-year old sapling than the 50-year old mature tree. At every step of the way, we honor the process.
In the stage of awakened flowering and maturity, we are happy within ourselves. Nothing else is needed to bring love to us. Love is in the air and in the soil and in our words and in our hearts. But where we get separated or stuck in an old issue, the pain and clarity of that delusion comes back with perhaps greater ferocity than ever before.
The Return of Need and Delusion
It can seem like we go in and out of awakened awareness, and definitely right after the awakening, there is this kind of in-and-out yo-yoing that goes on. Although even there, my sense is that the connection doesn’t go away. It just gets covered up. Once the connection is made, it is always there. But we certainly can do plenty to try and ignore or forget it. However, the matured awakened individual sees both. You can see when you are getting caught back up in need, and in some ways, it’s like watching this other person who is you trying to act out something else. You may catch yourself smiling at this old person–this old ego program–and in that smile things are already being acknowledged and released. It does become harder and harder to want to get caught up in any of it because so much of the core illusions around the necessity of a particularly need–such as having a romantic life partner–are simply gone.
But roots can go deep for issues. New layers of need and delusion show up as we grow deeper into this present moment and grow stronger in our awakened awareness. Nothing wrong is happening. Awareness is simply expanding, growing, and opening your perspective to some new or old area that you couldn’t fully see before.
The Loss of the Need for Relationships
It’s hard for people to imagine that they don’t need relationships. In fact, relationships are illusions. For the most part, they are stories we created about ourselves and then created about the other people whom we wanted to play roles within our stories. In the past, if someone didn’t play their role properly, we’d get angry or upset. The damsel stopped being in distress so you couldn’t save her. The knight in shining armor stopped coming to your rescue, so you had to do things for yourself. This sudden shift in the script completely upset you. There are a whole host of stories that we get caught up in, and as always, I encourage you to sit down with your journal to write out what stories you are still committed to, outcomes you want from others, and so forth. It will be illuminating.
But as you no longer need someone to slay dragons for you or people to need your help, more and more of your love stays within. You stop projecting it out onto others, and this dramatically changes how you see relationships. You start to notice who really is coming into your life to support you and who is really just acting out a role in that old crappy play you’d been enacting your whole life. The mask and costume, however, have come off. There’s no need to take the stage anymore even as so many of people in your life still are playing their roles on the stage. Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and all the rest are still performing, and as such, many of them may no longer be a part of your life.
And in the awakened awareness, you will will not be bothered.
What Is a Spiritual Awakening?
A Difference Between Indifference and Aloofness
To not care about the play doesn’t mean you don’t love all the people. You simply choose to not play along. You don’t play along with your wife’s tantrums. You don’t play along with your boss’s fears about the project outcome. You don’t play along with your son’s high school football coach’s concerns that he isn’t hitting hard enough when your son tackles someone. It’s not real, and while you aren’t energizing these things aka believing in them and acting upon them, you are still fully engaged with the moment.
There is this misconception that an awakened or spiritual person in general doesn’t care about the world. They’re aloof and off sitting on a mountaintop somewhere. While plenty of immature spiritual people do this, the mature awakened soul cares deeply about everyone because we are all one. The awakened soul knows that it is impossible to cut yourself off from the whole of civilization, although he or she will definitely have preferences about people and places that feel genuinely supportive. All in all, the awakened individual doesn’t need anything but doesn’t blame others who still do. As such there’s nothing to be upset about even when people are getting upset with the awakened person. It’s all just consciousness working itself out in a myriad of light, dark, ugly, strange, amazing, depressing, and enheartening ways.
The Basics Means of Survival
I know the ego wants to confuse the idea of needs with eating, drinking, and breathing. “We still need to eat and drink, right?” Well, need in this sense is a very different thing. But I will say that it becomes so much more clearer what you need to eat and drink to maintain a healthy body. In the past, a lot of the needs were corrupted by ideas. People have learned to eat very, very, very poorly in Western Society. So initially, people who think they need to eat a hamburger to feel good will be illuminated by some startling revelations. And while we are all interconnected, we appreciate our bodies and take only what is necessary for us to stay in optimum health. So any basic “needs” are often revealed as being more minimal than we initially thought.
By and large, this post is more about all the other needs that we once had–money, cars, relationships, houses, stocks, beautiful clothing, physical appearance of a certain musculature, successful careers, 401ks, specific outcomes for our children, and so forth. Pretty much all of these go away as we learn to have faith and trust in what is arising. More often than not, we are guided where we need to go and find things that suit us better than the ideas we had in our heads.
And this isn’t naive faith.
The awakened person understands that the universe is vast. Many things can and will come to us that bring great difficulty or pain. But we do not suffer as before. Because in suffering we would have turned these occurrences into stories about ourselves and avoid feeling and processing the pain. As such, the pain would go on and on and on. This type of avoidance goes away. As remaining vestiges of this old internal patterning are healed, even difficult situations are easier and easier to be with.
It’s Not Fantasy; It’s the Truth
The only way for many of you to really appreciate this post is to come down this path. I’m not selling anything. In fact, the spiritual path is a going-out-of-business sale. Everything you are carrying must go. Most of those ideas, pains, and memories are the foundations for all the needs you have. You keep trying to cover them up with other things–like the need for a relationship–to avoid the pain. But in the awakened space when we’ve transmuted the pain back into love, you don’t need anyone to come make you feel any way. There’s no need to wait to feel your own joy. How crazy it is that we sit around with a pile a gold in a chest in our own living room and we never open that chest. Instead we try to get others to give us theirs. Such crazy nonsense. Such madness. That’s the real fantasy people live in, and it’s a terrible one at that.
Resting in Love
The deeper you go into this awakened space, the less you need. The less you need to do or to say. The less you need to act in any specific way other than what arises for you in this present moment. It is deeply relaxing. It is deeply calm and free. It’s a joyous place to reside, and it’s a place all of you already have.
8 Comments
Thanks for this post
I hear you my brother! It's almost strange that I don't need anything anymore!
Don't even want a relationship, totally satisfied with just being! I suffered so much and had to loose so much to get here,but it was worth it! It almost killed me, or me myself , but worth it!
Thanks for sharing, I needed to hear this; sometimes I struggle between the pull for a partner and remaining in solitude. I hope I can reach a level of stillness and ego disintegration that helps me release this craving for companionship. I cannot tell if this is craving for genuine soul connection or if this is craving for ego validation through companionship.
Yes. Being is enough. We need nothing more (outside of actual physical necessities like air, food, and water).
If you are experiencing craving, then that's ego. Here's some more thoughts on craving:
Craving Love
Great article, Jim. It has also been my experience that we can drop in and out of this awareness until it perhaps one day settles. Like you say, roots can go deep for issues. But just knowing this and seeing the issue for what it is, rather than dodging the pain, makes all the difference.
This is such a beautiful post.
Its also such a coincidence that this morning I finally found some time to sit and begin clearing my inbox of tons of unread emails that have piled on top of each other for months now. I found myself beginning to unsubscribe from old subscriptions that I once found exciting to open because they were selling me something new and shinny to buy. For some reason, even though I hadn't opened any of those types of consumerism emails in a while, I just hadn't thought to unsubscribe. But as I did so, I realized that something fundamental within me has since shifted.
Same thing in my relationship. I am currently Separated from my Husband. And when the initial shock of the infidelity that led to a breakup happened, my initial programming drove me to immediately get on Dating Apps to "see what else is out there". However in just a few weeks after, I soon found myself deleting all dating apps from my phone as I found them too time-consuming, distracting and a waste of my valuable time. After which I got this sense of inner peace and a desire to just want to be alone for as long as it felt right.
Lately, I have found this to begin shifting again. I began sensing that I want to be with someone again but not in the old way of attachment and expectations. I just want a travel companion – someone who shares a similar journey so we can travel life together for as long as it feels right. No expectations. No attachment. No Judgment.
And with this awareness, I find myself suddenly opening up like a flower to the Universe to do its thing and make the magic happen.
In a sense its like I am two people and one of me is simply curious to observe what I would be like in a new type of relationship like this – almost like a sort of detached experience that you know you will feel intensely but without attachment.
This process I must say I have found to be the most intense ride of my life where I never know where it will lead and my only life line is to TRUST completely using wisdom as my guide. So hard to explain yet so beautiful to experience.
Dear Jim, thank you so much for this post! I just had this moment of clarity arise just an hour ago that I don't need anyone. It came to me during a time of turmoil with my parents who have been trying for a while to reel me back into the role of a child, and for the first time in my life (I'm 33…well in this incarnation ;)) I was able to say no to that. And that's when I realized that they do it because the tables have turned: they realize that now they need me more than I need them, as opposed to the child who needs the parent(s) to survive. And suddenly I felt this deep truth that I am absolutely whole and good and divine and complete without anyone. Deep euphoria! I googled to see if anyone had posted anything about this and found your post/website which is resonating so much. Thank you for this. In deep gratitude, warmly, Lexi