Waking Up Hurts

by Robert Cinque

Finding out that my life has been based upon lie after lie is sickening and painful. I threw up, like Neo in the movie The Matrix, when he discovered that his so called life was a dream, a nightmare of horrors, lie upon lie.

His awakening was bloody and painful. He did not greet it with a smile, he had to recover from it, his own awakening! The truth is so massive, so crushing, no one can endure its weight.

The Truth literally crushes you to death, and that is why Awakening is about It, not “me”. Your identity as a separate entity will not survive the journey to enlightenment. The Truth hurts, but it’s still the Truth, still Life Giving. There is no need for beliefs when you have the Truth, or rather, when It has you.

In our world, it’s not only the tyrants who lie their asses off, it’s the priests and doctors too, unwitting administrators of torture and falsehood. They promote lies they sincerely believe.

But does the truth care about my beliefs about it? No. Do my ideas affect the truth? No.

Maps are not the Territory. Menus are not the Meal.

Eat the Real, Live the Territory.

The Territory is the Radiant Conscious Field of Intelligent Light, the Impossible Wonder of the Presence of Life. The Meal is the ecstatic Whole Body Enjoyment of this undeniable Truth: the entirety of Reality Itself is your most fundamental identity now, we are absolutely inherently identical to Whatever the Fuck It Is that became us, little ole you and me, go figure. When we finally come to grips with the mind shattering reality of our Actual Condition, now, we will be able to manage our lives and this planet without conflict.

The Map is a compilation of our scientifically materialistic, religiously psychotic, politically constipated, culturally anemic ideas about It. Our job is to move from the Map to the Territory.

In my last essay, Whatever Destroyed the Towers Could Power the Planet, I identified 3 lies, 3 social memes that infect the body of Humanity and regulate its behavior just as surely as our genes rule our bodies.

Here is one more, the most basic lie of all, the one that most enables our domination by the Matrix.

Ego.

The so-called ego is born from an assumption. It is not an entity, but a belief in one, a belief in a separate self, one that is marooned on an island of flesh. Belief in the ego is the result of a confusion about uniqueness, where individuation becomes the equivalent of separation. The ego is a belief, a primitive superstition, a cult of one, an emotional recoil dramatized as abandonment and betrayal. Every ego is a fundamentalist, a fascist, and a tyrant in a drama of perpetrator/victim. I call it the Poor me/Fuck you syndrome.

The truth is, I don’t have an ego and neither do you! We have a belief in ego, an assumption about our state that has no basis in Reality itself. A belief in something doesn’t make it true, no matter how devout we are, no matter how dedicated we may be to that belief. Pious devotion to falsehood turns people into fools. When you unpack your “self” and all its contents, it turns out to be just a pile of old books and dirty laundry.

The One who did the unpacking, That’s Who I Am. You too.

There is only one Reality, not two. The One became the “two”. Still, no “objects” actually exist, only Consciousness Exists. You are That, showing up like a Fish in the Ocean.

You are the Ocean, the Fish, and the Observer, all at once. How can this be? No one knows.

It just is.

You showed up out of nowhere because two people you didn’t even know had sex, now you’re an expert on everything because of all the great things you believe in. The problem is, you don’t know jack shit and not only that, you don’t know that you don’t know jack shit, a very dangerous situation. It’s important to know when you are confused. Well, I’m telling you. You’re confused, you don’t know jack shit and neither do I. That’s our situation. All we know is what we think we know. Reality Itself is unknowable, because finite minds, local space/time perspectives on the Whole just don’t cut it! How could they? This sounds like really bad news because if I can’t know It and I don’t know jack shit, how can I survive? How can I control things?

This question and the answer we provide is the birth of the so-called separate self, the “ego”.

The separate self is born when I imagine myself to be threatened by the awesome forces of birth and change and death. The appropriate heart response to this Infinite Current is a Gasp That Takes My Breath Away, not fear, not doubt, not withdrawal. That’s right. Who am I to judge or criticize or condemn Life? What the Fuck do I know?

Once I recognize my profound ignorance in the face of Infinite Life, I suddenly, unexpectedly, become identified with It, bonded to It, not separate from It. My knowledge about It ceases to be an obstruction to its Fierce Power and I see that It is not an “Object”, not “other”, and that I am not only inherently intimate with It, I am It, It is “me”. It’s a profound, mysterious and terribly passionate Love Affair, in which I am happy to Drown.

It is my true identity, not “me”. The “me” suddenly becomes weightless, transparent, and extremely sensitive to literally everything.

Enlightenment is perfect non- obstruction to the White Hot Core of the Living Current and results in a deeply felt emotional sensitivity to literally everything, a vulnerability to and passion for Whatever the Fuck It Is. I don’t know What It is, all I know is that I love It, I am in Awe of it, I trust It, I align myself with It, beyond and before the mind and its ideas. I am prior to the mind, a realization which makes the mind useful, otherwise, it’s a real bitch, as you know, your mind and everyone else’s. This is what Jean-Paul Sartre meant when he said “Hell is other people”, the basis of his play, Nausea. Hell is “me” and “you” grotesque and monstrous impersonations of our Real Condition, a Frankenstein run amuck in the Kingdom of the Real, the Infinite Heart of Love.

But, instead of mystical euphorias and other caricatures of enlightenment, you get complicated and painful ordeals of the heart. Instead of gleeful happiness and “fulfillment” you get a bleeding, oozing wound that never heals. Instead of glamorous rewards for your search for God, you get the utter destruction of the searcher.

This is not what I expected.

I thought I would be adorned in shining robes and bathed in light when I became enlightened, but I am being crucified on this cross of light and dark. Still, I do not suffer, even though Awakening really hurts. How can this be? Pain without suffering? What? Yes. How can this be? I do not know. All I know is that I trust the excruciating Pain. Do you? Or do you turn it into blame and self pity?

Now, as a result of recovering from your illusions about yourself, your Actual Condition at Infinity becomes painfully clear. You start to become animated, humorous, and irreverent. You poke fun at very serious issues and you crack jokes about really painful subjects. People can’t understand you, what the fuck is wrong with you?

You woke up, that’s what.

Now, you have to deal with it. So do they. Their job will be much easier than yours though, because they can just ignore you or write you off as a nutcase. They would be exactly correct. According to the rules of this world, you are a nutcase, thank heaven.

Your true, actual, always already existing identity, is not a separate self, but the very One Who Is Alive As All Things. You are That, me too. The ego idea is a preposterous and ridiculous lie, an assumption, not an “entity” that needs to be overcome. No such entity exists, never has, never could, it’s impossible. Stop making the presumption of egoity, and your life will get better, stronger, more fundamentally true and alive. This is not a prescription for a real disease, only for an imaginary one, but one with real and deadly consequences.

Overcome your belief in a separate self, then, What is already true, What has always been the Case, will become perfectly Obvious. The Truth is the Truth, now. Also, our Singularity as a species has always existed, it’s just that it has been overtaken by ego insane ideas, just like our personal identities.

Our job is to restore our sanity, our personal and common humanity, by recognizing what is absolutely, fundamentally true: one, singular Consciousness is the nature of Reality. There is no inherent problem with Existence, no dilemma, no threat. All things, all worlds and universes are absolutely coherent and perfectly coincide with the Eternal Radiant Transcendental Being of Existence Itself, the Person of Love. Creating problems where none exist is the ego hell of ordinary life. It is arbitrary and unnecessary. Ego belief is easily transformed when the nature of Reality becomes apparent. Whirlpools don’t exist without a River. The bodymindself is a whirlpool that becomes an ego when it can’t Find the River.

This is the same message as the Original Gospel of Jesus: prior, already existing unity with the Divine Reality, and is the very message that got him killed. The world is based on the ego lie of separation which necessitates salvation schemes and atonement rituals which Jesus routinely condemned in public. They strung him up as quickly as possible and crucified him as a dangerous heretic. Later, he became the poster boy for blood sacrifice. This is an example of how the Truth is weaponized. Jesus had great credibility among the people, he was intensely loved, he was the greatest mouthpiece the Pharisees and Rome could ever hope for, so he became the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world”. In this way, the ego lie was kept in place and Jesus was used like a nail in that coffin.

The ego lie is the most fundamental premise of the world, which is why we have scientific materialism, the idea that consciousness comes from the brain, and religious superstition which imagines parental deities who must be placated and obeyed, a clearly childish context. An adult context would be heart felt love communion with That, not mommy-daddy appeasement rituals.

Humanity is like a child who has been severely used and abused. Our task is to recover from the lies we believed and the abuse we both endured and participated in and enabled. We must mature in this way on both a personal and a planetary level.

We can do it and we must.