The Three Great Truths and Lies of Awakening
I became fascinated with Spiritual Awakening, and one of my heroes, Richard Rudd, of the Gene Keys, makes some important points about this process, which I am sharing.
Awakening, as traditionally understood, is powerful but incomplete. The future of spirituality calls for a more integrated, holistic approach. I offer three key truths.
First: Awakening is not just about waking up. It also involves cleaning up and growing up. Profound spiritual realizations do not automatically produce emotional maturity, ethical behavior, or relational skill. Someone may experience deep awakening and still struggle with trauma, narcissism, sexuality, power, or integration. States of realization are not the same as whole-person transformation. True awakening includes integration, maturity, and the capacity to love without domination.
Second: Awakening is both vertical and horizontal.
Vertical awakening emphasizes transcendence, meditation, discipline, and realization of the source. It brings depth, clarity, and immense stillness—but on its own can become narrow, austere, or dismissive of ordinary life.
Horizontal awakening is inclusive, relational, and embodied. It unfolds through contemplation rather than intensity and embraces creativity, relationships, work, sexuality, art, grief, mystery, culture, and community. Vertical awakening reveals the source; horizontal awakening teaches us how to live from it. Full awakening requires both depth and breadth.
Third: Awakening includes romance.
By romance, I do not mean sentimentality, but a deep, sensual, creative, and mythic intimacy with life. Awakening is not only witnessing reality but entering into a love affair with it. Creativity, beauty, imagination, symbolism, and participation restore what older models often excluded. Awakening can include silence and stillness, but also conversation, polarity, paradox, and ordinary life fully lived.
The new awakening is deeper and wider—less about escaping life or chasing peak experiences, and more about loving life as it is. It embraces ordinariness, incompleteness, creativity, and relationship. Awakening is no longer about leaving the world behind, but about entering it fully, with courage, imagination, and a love vast enough to include everything.
The Three Great Lies of Awakening
So when someone has had a genuine experience of the awakened state, no matter how long it lasted, certain things lodge in one’s psyche and will not and cannot ever go away again. And it’s quite challenging to share those things. Most of the time, you can’t share them, and so when you come before someone who has awakened, or you look into the deep writings of the awakened or the things that have been spoken, you often see certain things that are never spoken.
And if you dig deeper, you will sometimes come to those truths. Or if you’re around someone, then they could come out. But for me, these are the three great lies, in a way, that should never be revealed or very rarely.
The first of them is you have no free will. This is a very difficult thing for humans to understand. We love the fact that we have free will.
I call it a fact because it feels like a fact. And if we don’t have free will, what does that mean? It means we’re machines. It means we are devoid of, you know, our true humanity, what makes us special.
And so where does that leave us? So this first truth that you realize in the awakened state, that there is no free will, is not as it seems. Because when you enter into that awakened state, there is no chooser anymore. There is no one available to make a choice.
So if there’s no chooser, then there is no choice. There is no free will. Only the whole makes its spontaneous choices.
And in that sense, there is no free will. But when the ego, which often returns after the awakened experience, when the ego comes in, it has to grapple with that. And that can be hard because other humans also do not want to hear this.
It’s interesting that brain science, neuroscience, has actually now proven that there’s no free will at some level. And that the microprocessors of the neurotransmitters in our brain are firing split seconds before our awareness takes place. Which means that we are reacting and responding to our environment and to life at a deep unconscious level that’s just taking place through us.
So if you make a decision, that decision is made in your brain a split second before you’re aware that the decision has been made. So something inside you has made that decision. But it wasn’t you.
It was not your ego. Your ego then just jumps aboard and goes, oh I’ve made a decision. Because the ego thinks it exists.