Awakening is not a walk in the park. It is a ride through hell. It is the tearing down of all of your beliefs and everything you thought about yourself.

There is no way around this. You must enter the shadowlands, and come face to face with your shadows.

It is there that your false ideas of who you are are shattered. It is there that all of your false beliefs are destroyed.

You must face these false notions and see them for what they are. This is the only way to heal, to become whole again, to live in integrity.

Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. It is the crumbling away of untruth.

It is seeing through the facade of pretense. It is the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.
Adyashanti

You go through life with so many false notions of the World, of spirituality and of yourself. You build up masks and you believe the facades. It is all a charade. It is all based upon illusions and deceit.

You deceive yourself at every moment, and the World also deceives you at every moment. You live in perpetual cognitive dissonance, justifying the most absurd things in your mind.

You constantly lie to yourself … and you believe it.

You are attached to the lies. You want to hold on to the illusions and to become enlightened at the same time. That is not possible. But hundreds of phony gurus and spiritual teachers that tell you it is.

They offer you processes to become happy, fulfilled, calm, be positive, find your soulmate, get the right job, make lots of money, balance the chakras, become healthy and whatever else you may be desiring.

This has nothing to do with awakening. This is only polishing the Ego. They all lead you right back into the matrix.

It takes courage, discernment and self honesty to walk the road to truth and freedom. Not many people have that. You have been weakened by the onslaught of programming since your childhood.

You want to remain in the herd, as you find comfort in the company of other deluded souls. It takes a certain individual to break free of the herd.

The road is not easy. It is a treacherous road that will shatter every part of your existence. No, it takes a certain type of person to walk that road; a person that is willing to give up everything to find his true Self.

Everything came crashing down at once. In the past, I was strong, and I kept my sense of self, of who I thought I was. But this time, my sense of Self, who I thought I was, gave up. I stopped trying to be strong. I just collapsed. My health collapsed, my business collapsed, and those that I thought were my friends were not. I was alone. I tried to be in denial, grabbing straws as I was being dragged down into the abyss. My World around me collapsed, but so did my self-worth, self-esteem and my false ego. I felt unloved and abandoned. My life story shattered.

I was left in this darkness for some time. I was slowly being dismantled, as I had to face the hard cold facts. I had to be brutally honest with myself. I came to the point of realizing that I hated my broken body, I hated the World, I hated myself, and I really hated god. Yes, I was very angry at him. He abandoned me. I felt the entire World abandoned me. It was not fair. I was facing my darkness with brutal honesty.

This continued for weeks, right through Christmas. I felt rejected, alone, abandoned. The pain of being stripped naked in the cold, with no hope in sight. But I accepted what was happening. I was no longer trying to push it away. The suffering felt endless, I endured it. And then one morning of January 2017, I woke up. Not to a new year, but a new life. The suffering was gone, I was at peace. A peace that I had never known before. That which I thought I was no longer existed.

When you decide to take the road to the Self, you realize you are alone on that road. The herd is going in the opposite direction.

You must be prepared for that, to find comfort in being alone, not understood by others.

The choice rests with you. No one can do this for you. You, and you alone, must take that road. There is no other road. It is a road of destruction.