Some awakenings do not bring the joy we imagine. Instead, they feel like a kind of death—as the world we once knew, and the self that believed in it, seem to collapse in an instant.
That Night, I Suddenly “Knew” Something
One night in May of that year, I fell asleep as usual.
At the very moment my body naturally turned to the left, I suddenly became fully aware that I was turning over.
My body seemed to remain asleep, yet my awareness was remarkably clear.
In that instant, two messages suddenly arose in my awareness:
“The medical and healthcare systems were established to weaken the human immune system.”
“The New Age movement and religion exist to weaken the human mind.”
These were not conclusions I had reached through reasoning, but sudden inner impressions so powerful that, in that moment, they felt beyond question.
I could not understand what they meant.
The moment I tried to analyse them logically, the seemingly clear flow of information abruptly stopped.
It was not until the following afternoon that I remembered the experience.
It was during the pandemic, so I naturally associated the first message with the public debate surrounding vaccination. As for the second, I still could not make sense of it.
I did not know whether these messages reflected the realities of the external world. Yet I strongly felt that they were touching upon beliefs I had never questioned before.
When Life Suddenly Came to a Halt
After that, I carried on with my busy life.
Work, teaching, translation—there was always more to be done.
Looking back, perhaps all that busyness was also an unconscious form of avoidance.
Then, one day in July, I was utterly exhausted.
It was a kind of mental exhaustion that words could hardly describe.
I decided to stop. Even if it meant missing work deadlines, I no longer wanted to force myself to keep going.
Every morning after breakfast, I would lie on the sofa, holding a pillow and closing my eyes.
No music. No meditation. No deliberate spiritual practice.
After lunch, I would simply continue resting.
Apart from eating, bathing, and attending to basic daily needs, I spent almost the entire day in stillness.
This continued for more than two weeks.
From the outside, my life seemed to have come to a standstill.
No productivity. No progress. Some might even have called it a period of idleness.
Yet what I could never have imagined was this—
It was during those days of doing absolutely nothing that I experienced one of the most profound inner upheavals of my life.
When the Familiar World Began to Collapse
During that period, many beliefs I had once held without question began to be shaken, one after another.
Beliefs about society, education, family, morality, success, religion, spirituality, and how a person ought to live.
The scope was so vast that it touched almost every aspect of how I had understood life.
I began to realise that many things I had taken for granted might simply have been ideas taught and repeated since childhood, eventually becoming part of my own belief system.
What does success really mean?
What makes a life truly meaningful?
Why do we so often believe that we are not good enough—that we must constantly be fixed, improved, or saved?
Everything I had once believed so deeply suddenly felt unfamiliar.
It felt as though the solid ground beneath my feet had vanished in an instant.
Shock. Disbelief. Even fear.
But the deepest emotion was grief.
Why had I only begun to see these things now?
How much had I missed throughout all those years?
If I had understood life differently much earlier, would my life have turned out completely differently?
It felt as though I was mourning my former self.
The “me” who had believed in certain standards, lived according to certain ideas, and worked so hard to become a particular kind of person seemed to have died.
I was still alive.
The sun still rose. People still went to work and carried on with their lives.
Everything in the outer world remained the same, yet my inner world had been turned completely upside down.
I could not return to the past, yet I did not know how to face the future.
I came to realise that awakening does not necessarily arrive with joy and light.
Sometimes, it feels more like death and rebirth.
The Way of No Way
What amazed me most was that all of this happened when I was doing absolutely nothing.
No rituals. No deliberate meditation. No constant cleansing, attunement, or attempts to raise my vibration.
I was not even seeking awakening.
I simply stopped.
This led me to reconsider what spiritual practice truly meant to me.
Have we become so accustomed to constantly “doing” in order to prove that we are growing?
Learning more. Practising more. Cleansing more. Improving more.
As though only through endless effort could we become better, more complete human beings.
Yet beneath all this lies a question worth contemplating:
If we continually believe that we are incomplete, could all our efforts to become whole actually be reinforcing that very belief of incompleteness?
We may believe we are moving towards freedom, while unknowingly moving from one belief system into another.
Those days of stillness gave me a different understanding of Non-Doing.
Non-Doing is not passivity, nor does it mean abandoning action.
It means no longer being driven by the belief that we must constantly do something to prove our worth.
Some transformations do not happen through constantly adding more.
It is only when we stop chasing that we may begin to recognise the beliefs that have been holding us captive.
Awakening from the Matrix
I once described this experience as “awakening from the Matrix.”
Today, I understand the Matrix as something that goes beyond external social structures or systems of thought.
At a deeper level, the Matrix consists of beliefs we have internalised so thoroughly that we mistake them for our own desires.
We believe that success must meet certain standards.
We believe that life must be lived in a particular way.
Even in spiritual growth, we may believe that we must continually be healed, cleansed, and elevated before we can become whole.
But how many of these beliefs have we consciously chosen through genuine understanding?
And how many have simply been repeated so often that they eventually became part of how we perceive the world?
The hardest limitations to recognise are often not those imposed upon us by others, but those we have come to believe without question.
After everything I experienced, one thing became increasingly clear to me:
Spiritual practice is not about becoming a healer, a teacher, or someone with a special identity.
These may be roles we take on in life, but they are not the ultimate purpose of the inner journey.
Spiritual practice is about rediscovering who we are and reclaiming sovereignty over our own lives.
We can learn healing practices, accompany others, and offer support.
But we need not continually seek salvation outside ourselves because we believe something is missing within us. Nor do we need to rescue others in order to prove our worth.
Ultimately, spiritual practice is a deeply personal inner journey.
Others may walk beside us, but no one can walk the path for us.
Even today, I would not claim to be fully awakened.
For whenever I think I have understood something, life may reveal yet another layer I had not previously recognised.
True awakening may not be about possessing truths that others do not know, but about beginning to see how our own unquestioned beliefs have limited us.
Sometimes, life's most profound transformations do not come from what we strive to do.
They happen in the moment we finally allow ourselves to stop, no longer rushing to become someone.
Non-Doing
Unlearn & Relearn
Death & Rebirth