You know, there's something rather curious that happens when you begin to wake up. And I don't mean wake up in the morning after a good sleep, though that's [music] important, too. I mean wake up in the sense of seeing through the game, understanding the cosmic joke, realizing that you are not a stranger in this universe, but rather an essential feature of it.
When this awakening begins to occur, you'll notice something peculiar. Your circle of friends starts to shrink. Not because you've become disagreeable or antisocial, but because you've begun to operate on an entirely different frequency.
It's rather like trying to tune into a radio station that most people can't quite pick up. They hear static where you hear music, and they hear music where you've begun to notice the silence between the notes. Now, let me be perfectly clear about something.
This isn't a matter of superiority. The spiritually awake person isn't better than anyone else. That would be missing the point entirely.
In fact, anyone who thinks their spiritual awakening makes them superior has simply swapped one ego game for another. They've traded their business cards for prayer beads, but they're still playing the same game of oneupmanship. The reason spiritually awake people often find themselves with fewer friends is far more interesting than simple superiority.
[music] You see, most human relationships are based on mutual hypnosis. We agree to believe certain things together. We agree that Monday morning is terrible and Friday evening is wonderful.
We agree that success means [music] climbing a particular ladder. That security lies in bank accounts and insurance policies. [music] That happiness comes from getting what we want.
But when you wake up, you start to see through these agreements. You [music] realize that Monday morning is neither terrible nor wonderful. It [music] simply is.
You see that the ladder everyone's climbing doesn't actually lead anywhere. >> [music] >> because there is nowhere to go. You're already here.
This is it. And that bank account you're building, well, it's a wonderful convenience, but it won't save you from the fundamental insecurity of being alive. When you try to share these insights with your old friends, [music] something interesting happens.
They look at you as if you've gone slightly mad. And from their perspective, you have. You've stopped playing the game they're still deeply invested in.
It's as if you're at a poker table and you suddenly announce that you can see that the cards are just pieces of cardboard with symbols [music] printed on them. Technically, you're absolutely right, but you've just ruined the game for everyone else. The conversations that once sustained your friendships begin to feel hollow.
Your friend complains about their boss, and you understand that they're not really upset about their boss. They're upset [music] about their resistance to what is. Your colleague obsesses over their child getting into the right university.
[music] and you see the anxiety is about their own unlived life, not the child's future at all. Your neighbor boasts about their new car, and you recognize it as a desperate attempt to feel significant in a universe that appears indifferent. Now, you could point all of this out.
You could try to wake them up, but here's what you learn rather quickly. Nobody wants to be awakened. The Buddha himself said he could only point the way.
He couldn't walk the path for anyone else. People are deeply attached to their dreams, even when those dreams are nightmares. Especially when those dreams are nightmares, because at least a nightmare [music] is familiar.
So, you find yourself in a peculiar position. You're living in the same world as everyone else, but you're experiencing it differently. You're like someone who's suddenly realized that the movie they're watching is just light projected onto a screen.
You can still enjoy the movie. In fact, you might enjoy it more, but you can't quite lose yourself in it the way you used to. And uh your friends are still completely absorbed, crying at the sad parts, cheering at the victories, utterly [music] convinced that what's happening on the screen is real and important.
The spiritually awake person begins to value authenticity over comfort. And this, my friends, this is where friendships begin to fall away like autumn leaves. Most social interactions are built on a foundation of mutual pretense.
We pretend to be more confident than we are. [music] We pretend to be interested in things that bore us. We pretend to agree when we disagree, [music] to understand when we're confused, to be fine when we're falling apart.
But when you wake up, you lose your taste for pretense. You can't quite muster the energy to maintain the facade anymore. When someone asks, "How are you?
" You might actually tell them, not in a theatrical uh attention-seeking way, but simply honestly. And this makes people uncomfortable because how are you isn't really a question. It's a greeting.
The correct [music] answer is fine, thanks. And you? Anything else disrupts [music] the social protocol.
You also stop laughing at jokes you don't find funny. You stop nodding along with opinions you don't share. You stop engaging in gossip about people who aren't present to defend themselves.
Not because you're trying to be difficult, but because these things suddenly feel like eating cardboard when you've tasted real food. And your friends notice, they notice that you've become unreliable as a co-conspirator in the usual social games. Here's something else that happens.
You become comfortable with silence. Most people are terrified of silence in conversation. They fill every gap with chatter, with observations about the weather, with recycled opinions about current events.
But silence is where the real communion happens. Silence is where two consciousnesses can actually meet without the interference of all those words. The spiritually awake person discovers that you can sit with someone in complete silence and feel more connected than you ever did drowning in small talk.
But most people find this unbearably awkward. They need the noise, the distraction, the continuous [music] stream of verbal pingpong to avoid confronting the vast mystery of simply being here together. And then there's the matter of purpose and meaning.
Your old friends are still chasing goals, climbing mountains, trying to prove something. They're running on the treadmill of achievement, always one success away from being happy, one acquisition away from feeling complete. But you've realized that happiness isn't at the end of any road.
It's the road itself. When you stop treating it as a means to an end, this creates a strange disconnect. Your friend is stressed about a promotion at work, [music] and you can see that whether they get it or not, they'll still be themselves, still be here, [music] still facing the same fundamental questions about existence.
The promotion won't save them. Nothing will save them because there's nothing to be saved from. This is it.
this moment, [music] this breath, this strange and wonderful fact of being alive. But you can't say this, can you? Because they'll think you're telling them not to care about their career, not to have ambition, to just give up.
And that's not what [music] you mean at all. What you mean is something far more subtle. You mean that ambition is fine.
Careers are fine, but they're not what we think they are. They're part of the dance, part of the play, but they're not the point. The point is the dancing itself, not some destination the dance is supposed to reach.
But try explaining that at a dinner party. You see the spiritually awake person has died in a very particular way. Not physically, of course, but psychologically.
The person they thought they were, that carefully constructed identity with its story of where it came from and where it's going has been seen through. And once you've died like this, once you've seen that your ego is just a useful fiction, a convention like inches and centimeters, you can't really take the drama of personality quite as seriously anymore. Your friends are still deeply identified with their personalities.
They are their opinions, their achievements, their failures, their reputation. An insult wounds them because they think they are the person being [music] insulted. A compliment inflates them because they think they are the person being praised.
But you've realized that you're not your personality anymore than you are your reflection in a mirror. The personality is something you're doing, not something you are. This creates what we might call an authenticity gap.
Your friends are performing their personalities and they need an audience. They need validation, agreement, recognition, but you're no longer a reliable audience member because you can see the performance as a performance. You can appreciate it, even enjoy it, but you can't quite believe in it the way they need you to.
And uh and here's where it gets really interesting. The spiritually awake person realizes that aloneeness and loneliness are not the same thing. Loneliness is the pain of feeling separated from others.
But aloneeness, real aloneeness is the recognition that at the deepest level you are the entire universe experiencing itself from a particular point of view. You are not a separate fragment desperately seeking connection with other fragments. [music] You are the whole thing playing hide and seek with itself.
When you understand this, the desperate quality leaves your relationships. You stop needing friends to complete you, to validate you, to save you from yourself. You can enjoy companionship without clinging to it.
You can be alone without feeling lonely. And paradoxically, this makes you less attractive as a friend to people who are still seeking salvation in relationships. Most people want friends who will reinforce their worldview, who will agree that their problems are real and important, who will commiserate and validate and support the dream they're dreaming.
But the spiritually awake person can't do this in good conscience. They can offer genuine compassion, true presence, real love, but [music] they can't pretend that your crisis is what you think it is. Your friend is [music] devastated because their romantic relationship ended.
And you can see that they're not really mourning the person. They're mourning their fantasy of who that person was and what the relationship meant about them. You can hold space for their pain, but you can't reinforce the story that's causing the pain.
And this more often than not [music] is experienced as a lack of support. The awakened person also stops participating in collective delusions. They can't get excited about tribal identifications.
My country, my political party, my sports team, my religion is better than yours. They see that all of these are just games of us versus them. Ways of feeling special by contrast.
ways of forgetting the fundamental unity that underlies all apparent separation. But human society runs on these tribal identifications. They are the glue that holds groups together.
When you stop participating, when you can see the good in the other side and the flaws in your own, [music] when you refuse to demonize the enemy or idolize the hero, you become unreliable as a tribe member. And friendship for most people is a tribal affair. There's also the matter of time.
The spiritually awake person has a different relationship with time. They're not constantly leaning into the future or dwelling in the past. They've discovered that the only time that actually exists is now.
The past is a memory occurring now. The future is a thought occurring now. There is only ever this moment and this moment and this moment.
But most social activity is based on shared anxiety about the future or shared nostalgia about the past. Planning, worrying, reminiscing, [music] anticipating. These are the currencies of ordinary conversation.
When you're fully present, you have less to contribute to these conversations. Your friend wants to worry about retirement 30 years from now. And you can see that they're missing the only retirement that matters.
retiring from the psychological time that prevents them from being fully alive right now. Let me tell you something about solitude. The spiritually awake person discovers that solitude is not the opposite [music] of companionship.
It's the foundation of it. You can only truly meet another person when you first met yourself. And meeting yourself requires solitude, silence, time alone with the vast mystery of your own being.
But modern society is terrified of solitude. People fill every moment with noise, with stimulation, with [music] company. They're always texting, scrolling, watching, listening, interacting.
And they call this being connected. But it's often just sophisticated avoidance, a way of running from the only companion they'll have from birth until death themselves. The awakened person doesn't avoid company, but they don't fear solitude either.
[music] They've discovered that being alone is not being lonely. In fact, they've discovered that you can be lonely in a crowd and deeply connected in complete solitude. This makes them seem strange to people who need constant social stimulation to feel okay.
Here's another crucial point. [music] The spiritually awake person has surrendered to life rather than trying to control it. They've realized that the universe has been doing quite well without their management for billions of years.
They've relaxed into the flow of existence rather than swimming frantically upstream. But most people are still trying to control everything. Their image, their future, other people's opinions of them, outcomes they have no real control over.
They live in a constant state of tension, of holding on, of trying to make things be a certain way. And they need friends who will support them in this impossible project, who will strategize with them, worry with them, help them maintain the illusion of control. The awakened person can't do this.
They can offer presence, acceptance, [music] love, but they can't pretend that your need to control the uncontrollable is anything other than the source of your suffering. And this is often experienced as a lack of caring [music] when it's actually the deepest form of caring. You also begin to see through the victim stories.
Everyone [music] has them. The narrative about how they were wronged, how life dealt them a bad hand, how they would be fine if only this or that had been different. These stories give people a sense of identity and absolution from responsibility.
But when you wake up, you see that holding on to these stories is like drinking poison and expecting someone [music] else to die. This doesn't mean bad things didn't happen. It doesn't mean people weren't hurt or that [music] injustice isn't real.
It means that continuing to identify with the wound to build your sense of self [music] around what was done to you is optional suffering added to unavoidable pain. But try pointing this out to someone in the middle of their victim story and watch your friendship evaporate. The spiritually awake person has also made peace with death.
Not in a morbid way, but in recognizing that death gives life its poignency, its urgency, its beauty. When you accept [music] that this moment is all there is, when you truly digest the fact that you're going to die and so is everyone you love, something shifts. You stop postponing life.
You stop waiting for conditions to be perfect. You stop treating this moment as a stepping [music] stone to some better future moment. But most people are in deep denial about death.
They organize their entire lives around avoiding any reminder of mortality. And they need friends who will participate in this denial, who will help maintain the fiction that we have all the time in the world that death is something that happens [music] to other people far away. Not yet.
When you stop participating in this denial, when you live with death as an intimate companion that makes every moment precious, people find you unsettling. You remind them of what they're trying to forget. Your presence is an unwelcome interruption in their elaborate system of avoidance.
Now, I want to be clear about something. The spiritually awake person isn't cold [music] or uncaring or isolated by choice. In fact, they may love more deeply than ever before.
But it's a different kind of love. It's not need masquerading as love. [music] It's not transaction disguised as affection.
It's not two people using each other to avoid facing themselves. It's a love that sees the divine in everyone. That recognizes the same consciousness looking through all eyes.
that doesn't need anything in return. And this kind of love is often too much for people. They're more comfortable with the conditional love they're used to.
I'll love you if you make me feel [music] good. If you agree with me, if you reflect back to me the image I want to see. So what does the spiritually awake person do?
They don't force their insights on anyone. They don't proitize or try to convert. They simply live from their [music] understanding and trust that their presence will attract whoever is ready for genuine meeting.
They accept that they may have fewer friends, but the friendships they do have will be deeper, more authentic, more real. They understand that awakening is not the end of the journey, but the beginning. They remain humble, recognizing that there are always deeper levels of understanding, that ego is sneaky and can co-opt even spiritual awakening for its own purposes.
They stay awake to their own tendency to fall back asleep, to start taking their insights too seriously, to create a spiritual identity that's just another prison. And perhaps most importantly, they realize that having fewer friends is not a problem to be solved. It's simply what happens when you stop playing games you can't believe in anymore.
The point was never to collect friends like trophies. The point is to wake up, to be present, to live authentically, to love without conditions. And if that means spending more time alone, so be it.
Because you're never really alone anyway. [music] How could you be? You're the universe experiencing itself.
You're the eternal consciousness playing at being a temporary person. You're the infinite wearing the mask of the finite. And once you know this, really know it, the question of how many friends you [music] have becomes rather beside the point, doesn't it?
