On being awake without being healed.

"Being awake" is a phrase that's been so thoroughly captured by marketing that it feels dishonest to use it. But there is something real underneath it — a state of awareness that doesn't come with a fix for the thing you've become aware of.

Most of the teachings that pretend to offer awakeness skip quickly to the fix. You become aware of the suffering of others and you are handed an ethics. You become aware of your own mortality and you are handed a faith. You become aware of the machinery of your own mind and you are handed a meditation practice. Each of these handoffs is fast, and each of them, in its own way, is trying to spare you something.

What is being spared, in each case, is the part where awakeness does not resolve into anything else. The part where you see the thing and the thing does not get better. The part where the story most people around you have agreed to stops working for you, and there is nothing yet in its place, and the absence is permanent.

Why the handoff exists.

The handoff exists because unhealed awakeness is, for most people, not sustainable. If you see through the story and are then asked to continue performing the story anyway, for the sake of the people you love and the institutions you depend on, most of you will break down within a year. The pressure of the gap between what you see and what you are allowed to say about what you see is too high for the organism to tolerate indefinitely.

So the traditions that take awakeness seriously have mostly also built infrastructure for carrying it. Monastic orders. Wisdom lineages. Contemplative communities. Extended retreat periods. The infrastructure exists because someone at some point noticed that awakeness left alone eats its host.

Contemporary culture, which has mostly dispensed with the infrastructure, is not kind to people who are awake. It does not know what to do with them. It offers them medications for depression, which sometimes work and sometimes do not, and it offers them self-help books, which mostly do not, and it offers them religious communities they have already seen through.

What carrying it looks like.

The part of the Sola Exemplum argument that addresses this most directly is the idea that the pressure itself is doing something. Not as punishment. Not as random suffering to be endured. As formation. The consciousness that can hold unhealed awakeness for years — without fleeing into distraction, without re-entering a false comfort, without collapsing into cynicism — is a different shape of consciousness than the one that cannot.

You are becoming that different shape. You can feel it, on good days. On bad days you mostly cannot feel it and you think the whole premise is probably wrong and you are just quietly in the process of being worn down. But the wear is not damage. The wear is what is producing the change. That is the best way to put it that is honest about how hard it feels.

The teacher at the center of Sola Exemplum — Jesus, though he is almost unrecognizable by the time the institution is done with him — spent three years in the wilderness after his awakening before he started teaching. Those three years are almost never written about by the church, because the church does not know what to do with the part of the story where the teacher is already awake and is also still unhealed. But it is in the story. It is the most important part of the story for people in the position you are in.

What you actually do.

What you do is: you do not pretend. You do not pretend to other people, and more importantly, you do not pretend to yourself. You find the few people in your life who can tolerate hearing what you actually see, and you say it to them in real language, and you accept that most of the other people in your life will never be that kind of company for you.

You read the things that were written by people who were carrying something similar. Most of those things are old. You read slowly. You let the reading do what it does without insisting it resolve anything.

You notice that on some specific mornings — maybe one in ten, maybe one in thirty — the weight is bearable, and you are not looking for a fix. You are just watching the light come up on something that no longer requires a story wrapped around it. Those mornings do not arrive on a schedule. They do not prove anything. But they are what being awake without being healed turns out to actually be, most of the time, for most of the people who have managed to stay with it.

It is a living. Not an easy one. A real one.