Joe defines awakening as a shift in identity—the moment you stop experiencing yourself as personal and start experiencing yourself as universal. It is the thing Buddhists call awakening and Christians call Christ consciousness. But the first thing he insists on is that the experience cannot be captured by thought. The mind wants something concrete to aim at, and the mind is precisely the wrong instrument for the job.
“Awakening is an incredibly hard thing to define. It isn’t what you think it is. If your mind can think of it, it isn’t it.”
The symptoms can be described—a sense that there’s nothing to defend, the fading of the inner critic, the dissolving of problems, near-constant access to peace—but the thing itself resists crystallization. Joe admits that when teachers told him it was “way bigger than you could ever imagine and way smaller and more insignificant than you could ever imagine simultaneously,” he wanted to shout, “Shut up. Give me something concrete.” There isn’t a concrete version. It happens differently for different people, which makes it doubly hard to describe.
“There’s no way to really crystallize the experience of it in a way that the mind is going to fully understand.”
This is why trying to grasp awakening conceptually keeps it at arm’s length. It isn’t a state to be understood but a seeing-through of the one who would understand.
Related Concepts
- Awakening happens through the head, the heart, and the gut
- Awakening is not a finish line — evolution keeps going
- Be in the unknown during identity shifts
- The dissolution of self happens through many paths
- Making awakening a goal slows the process down
- Enjoying the sensations rather than bracing eases the integration
- Awakening is not a conclusion, just part of the journey