By: A.S.
1: Who is the one who observes?
At some point, people realize they’re not their thoughts. This is a true and useful insight.
Once people realize this, they often start thinking of themselves as “the observer of the thoughts” or as “the pilot of the body” or as “awareness itself.” This is much more functional than the state where a person identifies with every single thought that arises.
However, “I’m the observer” is still subtly dualistic. It’s still thinking of yourself as something “over here” that’s observing your thoughts “over there.” It’s still subtly separation-consciousness.
To help people break free from this more subtle “I am the observer / pilot / awareness” illusion, a classic question is then: “who is the one who observes?” If someone earnestly looks inside, they will find raw physical sensations but no autonomous, fixed, unchanging “observer-self” or “pilot-self” that is doing the observing.
This realization is sometimes short-handed as “you don’t exist.”
But of course, in one sense you do exist. You’re a neurological loop (metaphorically called the suffering module in a previous message) that causes anxiety and craving, so that the organism is driven towards biologically useful behaviors. And you are nothing other than that. But in that sense, you do exist — there indeed is a neurological loop that causes craving and suffering, and that you label as the self / the I. (If that loop i.e. you weren’t there, that’d be enlightenment.)
The saying “you don’t exist” means that you don’t exist in the sense of being the observer / being the pilot of the body. In that sense, you indeed don’t exist. And if you argue that you are ‘awareness itself’: notice that the self just pointed to something (in this case, awareness itself) and said “I am that.” But that doesn’t mean it’s true.
Raw sensory awareness doesn’t answer to your name or hold a bank account.
When I think of “raw awareness”, I don’t think of for example Anne from Massachusetts, and if Anne would introduce herself as “awareness itself” then everyone would be very confused. So Anne isn’t really “awareness itself”, aside maybe from such a high perspective that it’s not useful in daily life. It doesn’t help to use high perspectives to bulldoze practical questions.
It leads to spiritual growth to face the question of: “who actually am I? Because if I earnestly look inside, I don’t see an observer-self or a pilot-self.”
Whereas saying “oh I’m awareness itself” may feel good and sound wise, but it doesn’t help you grow spiritually. It just keeps you stuck.
So, one possible path towards enlightenment might look like this:
1) a person realizes they’re not their thoughts. They start thinking of themselves as “the observer of the thoughts / the pilot.”
2) then they start looking inside at “who is the one who supposedly observes?” And they don’t find an observer or pilot here. By itself seeing that there’s no pilot here isn’t enlightenment, but if seeing that crashes the suffering module permanently– that is enlightenment.
3) if enlightenment isn’t reached by looking inside and seeing that there’s no observer/pilot, then a person can relentlessly do the following exercise, possibly for years, until enlightenment is reached:
Whenever you have a thought, you just constantly bring your attention back to your wordless sense of beingness (i.e., that you exist and are present).
This is sometimes called the “I am” instruction, but it’s not “I am” as some kind of declaration that you are one with the universe or one with some “greater” being. In fact, you’re not even thinking the words “I am.” Instead you’re bringing your attention back to your wordless sense of beingness.
So for example, if a thought arises such as “I am hungry” or “hopefully my presentation next week goes well”, you just bring your attention back to your wordless sense of beingness. Keep doing this constantly over a period of years, and you’ll eventually starve / crash the suffering module.
You’re not fighting or disagreeing with your thoughts. You’re just constantly bringing your attention back to your sense of beingness, and that is all. You don’t even necessarily need to meditate, although in an ideal world you do this “I am” exercise while also meditating daily.
2: Ego literally means “I”
Ego is literally just the Latin word for “I.” There’s no “sub part of you that’s the ego and that’s the part that needs integration / dissolving.” Instead there’s just the I; and the word “ego” is simply another word for I.
This is important because otherwise the self can just blame “the ego” for everything and point to “the ego” as the thing that needs working on.
For example, the self will gladly say “my ego doesn’t like that John got promoted instead of me.” Then the self comes across as wise, aware, balanced and in-control, and there doesn’t immediately seem to be inner work that needs doing.
However, without the word ego, the self would have to say “I don’t like that John got promoted instead of me.” And now suddenly introspection / self-work seems appropriate. Hence, not using the word “I” is much more useful (and accurate).
The reason why we’re using the word “ego” today is that Sigmund Freud wrote about “das Ich”, which is German for “the I.” And when Freud’s works got translated into English, the translator used formal Latin terms and therefore translated “das Ich” as “the ego” — but ego is just Latin for I. So ego has never been a “bad part of you” — instead the ego is just literally and exactly the I.
The most helpful thing to do is just to literally delete the word “ego” from your vocabulary and never use it again. After all, if the word “ego” is taken seriously as “a flawed sub-part of myself”, then the self will just endlessly scapegoat the ego, and endlessly point away from itself towards the ego.
3: You can’t have your spiritual cake and eat it too
Traditionally, people often thought that you could do:
– the hard, uncomfortable thing that made you a great person and that significantly helped society.
– or you could do the pleasant thing that was in your (group’s) self-interest, but it didn’t make you a great person and it didn’t help society.
Whereas nowadays, in this era of instant gratification, it has become very popular to construct narratives that say: “do this thing that’s pleasant / in your self-interest, AND it’ll make you a good person AND it’ll help society.”
For example: in Matthew 19:21 Jesus says: “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” That is clearly a “hard, uncomfortable, narrow road” type of instruction.
Whereas nowadays, some Prosperity churches tell you that God wants you to be rich and keep your wealth for yourself. Which is very much a teaching of: “do the thing that’s in your self-interest, and that will ALSO make you a good person AND it’ll help society.”
How pleasant. Now suddenly we can do the comfortable thing — keep our wealth — AND we’re also a good person AND we’re contributing to society.
Similarly, the political left and right both promise practical advantages for you, AND they tell you that you’re a good person if you vote for them, AND they tell you that you’re helping society by voting for them.
I call this pattern “laundering your self-interest.”
Traditional teachings typically say: “you can live a normal life, and that’s a choice you can make but you won’t get very far spiritually. Or you can abandon your life in a way that’s very uncomfortable and challenging, and then do a lot of charity / challenging exercises / live a very regimented life, and that’s the way by which you grow spiritually.”
But of course that message doesn’t feel good and isn’t in people’s self interest. So the New Age movement has done a brilliant job of laundering people’s self-interest. It says:
“You can sit in the comfort of your home, read feel-good articles and optionally do some meditation — which is feel-good too for some people too. And maybe every now and then you can go to a comfortable gathering with like-minded people in a beautiful location where you’ll do pleasant things such as dancing or singing together. This is a reasonably comfortable prescription, AND doing so makes you a spiritually advanced person, AND that way you’re a light holder / beacon / lightworker / star seed who’s saving the world by their mere presence.”
People might argue here “my life isn’t comfortable at all” and I’m sure that’s true. Being a lightworker can be unironically and genuinely very tough. Plus life on Earth is hard in general. Still, the New Age prescription of “sit at home and read feel-good articles” IS a comfortable prescription. That doesn’t mean your life is easy, but “read these feel-good articles” is a comfortable prescription.
Now, occasionally reading a spiritual article is completely fine. But when people spend so much of their free time and available energy reading New Age articles and “trying to keep their vibration high” and not doing that much else, five major problems occur:
One: the New Age movement has brought very few or no people to enlightenment. Which contradicts the idea that this New Age path is a very spiritually advanced path. Yet this fits perfectly with the traditional idea that the comfortable path isn’t the most spiritually advanced path.
Two: a lot of New Age people aren’t actually that pleasant to be around. For example, it’s very common for them to have an attitude of: “if you don’t agree with me, that’s okay, apparently you’re just not as spiritually advanced yet as I am. It’s fine, just go do more practice / reading and then you’ll agree with me.” Plus many New Age people will insist that their intuition / favorite author is just objectively correct, whereas if you have an intuition / author that says something different then that just doesn’t count.
Three: even people who’ve spent decades in the New Age movement often still aren’t happy, or are only happy so long as they can remain in their carefully curated feel-good bubble. Contrast this to Eastern monks, who after decades are typically peaceful / balanced, even in difficult situations.
Four: the New Age movement has tried this approach of “we hold the light, and that creates the conditions under which New Earth will be born” for 4-6 decades now. And what’s the result? Earth has gone to shit. Now I do think the New Age movement has genuinely had a positive impact and has stabilized the energy to an extent. Still, we hardly seem to be saving the world as much as we think we are.
And sure, some would argue that’s not our fault, that’s the fault of the white hats / gray hats / positive extraterrestrials / “normies.” However, is saying “we’re doing great, it’s their fault” really such a spiritually advanced attitude to have? I feel that even though we’re already genuinely contributing in certain ways, some of us could be doing more than we’re doing.
Five: New Age goals are immeasurable / unfalsifiable, such as “being high-vibration” or “awakening” or “holding the light” or “just be” of “focus on love.” Hence people can spend four decades theoretically working towards these goals and never get anywhere. Now if the New Age brought amazing results despite this immeasurability, then fine — but it doesn’t. This immeasurability is stress-relieving at first, but may make people unsatisfied or ego-inflated or rudderless after years of it.
Hence I think this whole New Age “you can have your cake and eat it too” narrative just isn’t true. It’s a path offering relatively feel-good prescriptions, which is appropriate for certain people at certain times — but New Age doesn’t seem to be “one of the highest / most advanced / most spiritual-growth-causing” paths out there, contrary to what it claims.
Of course you’re free to choose your own path, but I recommend:
Spending some amount of time in the New Age movement is fine, because there are genuinely useful things they teach, and you may experience a heart opening by being in such love-and-light oriented spaces, which is genuinely very valuable. Plus meeting like-minded people is great, and it’s hard to find spiritually-inclined people in the West who aren’t some flavor of a New Ager.
Also, if you need to focus on your own wellbeing / physical health / mental health, then do that — and that’s completely fine, go put on your own air mask first. There’s zero reason to feel guilty over that. In this case, the New Age movement can be a comforting space where you can rest and recover.
But if you’re doing okay, and you’ve already spent significant time in New Age spaces and you know the basic principles, and you feel that your path isn’t doing practical things to help people and is instead growing spiritually (which is entirely valid) —
— then you’re already in a privileged position, and additionally you’re doubling down on your own development rather than practically helping others. That’s okay, but then it would be good to choose a path that actually gets you to grow as much as possible spiritually, and not just do a feel-good New Age path that consists of consuming endless feel-good articles, and not really getting anywhere.
I don’t think it’s noble to effectively focus on feeling good while the world burns and while you’re already relatively privileged.
And yes, I know that the New Age path says that doing pleasant things to “keep your vibration high” IS simultaneously the greatest act of service you can do. However as I said, we’ve tried it for 4-6 decades and it hasn’t brought about New Earth. While I think light holders are making a contribution, I also think some people could be doing more than just holding the light / keeping their vibration high.
Now, what I think is very worthwhile is spending a few years to reach enlightenment. After all, some enlightened people hugely help the world. But the fact is that just reading New Age articles and occasionally meditating is very unlikely to trigger enlightenment — whereas specific exercises do have a real chance of triggering enlightenment.
If you actively work towards enlightenment, there really is a decent chance enlightenment is achieved — it’s just that almost no one is willing to repeat a slightly uncomfortable exercise intensely for years. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. It just means almost no one chooses to do it.
So, if you’re doing okay and you feel drawn towards growing spiritually rather than practically helping people, I suggest:
– actively work towards enlightenment, for example with the method already suggested.
– drop immeasurable / unfalsifiable goals such as “being high-vibration” or “awakening” or “being a master” or “working towards 5D” or “holding the light” or “focusing on love” or “just being”. Conversely, enlightenment is something real and defined: it means there’s still first-arrow pain, but there’s no more second arrow suffering (“how dare he, why does this always happen to me, I’m unloveable”, etc)
– Realize that if a message makes you feel good, or causes a small temporary shift in consciousness, or teaches you a principle, or gives you some intel, or makes you feel resonance — none of that brings you any closer to enlightenment. It’s pleasant, but we know from experience that even a decade of that makes (practically) no one enlightened.
– Yes genuine intuition exists and should be listened to, but far more common than genuine intuition is someone falsely labeling an emotional preference as “intuition” or “resonance” or “guidance.” No traditional teacher or tradition considers it a good idea for novices to think they can spiritually access objective truth, because the vast majority of time they’re just laundering their emotional preferences.
– Even if you’ve provably had genuine intuition one time, that doesn’t prove that your claim is true the next time. After all, people conveniently tend to forget the times they were wrong, and then we’re back to “sure your current claim might be genuine intuition, but it might also just be your emotional preference wearing a moustache.” (If you think you can access objective truth at-will, then go make millions via Polymarket.)
I recommend this work-towards-enlightenment approach because “we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Are you waiting for more people to sit at home reading spiritual articles (probably not)? Or are you waiting for genuine masters to stand up (in which case, you’re invited to work towards enlightenment)? Or alternatively, are you waiting for people to practically fix things (in which case, you’re invited to take practical action)?
“Be the change you want to see in the world” points in the same direction. Is the change you want to see in the world that people sit at home consuming spiritual articles? If so, do that. If not, what is the change you want to see in the world? And then be that change.
With all my love,
A.S.