The End of the Spiritual Project

Freedom doesn’t negotiate with your preferences.

What is written here does not match the popular image of awakening. It does not fit the narratives that center around warmth, widening, or a deepening of connection. It does not cater to the belief that truth should preserve the sweetness the mind associates with being human.

It points to something far more ruthless than that.

There is a common confusion that happens when this is heard. A confusion between what happens after collapse and the collapse itself.

The softness, the spaciousness, the deep tenderness that may arise later is not the process of awakening. It is what sometimes flowers when the scaffolding of self has been reduced to ashes. But the fire itself is not gentle. It is not loving. It is not kind. It is not cruel either. It simply does not negotiate with what is false.

The narratives that say awakening should lead to more love, more connection, more humanity, more patience, are just that. Narratives. And it is a trap. One of the most effective traps the mind has ever built.

The moment awakening is measured against an idea of how it should look or feel, it stops being about truth and becomes about fitting reality into the dream. It turns into a performance. A standard to meet. A checklist for the nervous system. A self-improvement project wearing spiritual clothes. It is the dream of being awake, not the end of the dream.

It’s like the final plea to say, take the suffering, take the confusion, but let me stay someone. Let me still be a good person. Let me still be kind. Let me still be someone who loves. Someone who belongs.

It does not work like that.

Truth does not melt the walls between souls. It reveals there never were any. It does not widen love. It burns through every concept of what love is. It does not preserve your humanity. It reveals that humanity was never what you thought it was in the first place.

It does not ask whether you want it. It does not check whether it feels like warmth or distance. Whether it looks like connection or severing. Whether it fits the nervous system’s idea of safety or the mind’s idea of progress. It does not ask for approval. It does not negotiate with your preferences.

The lie beneath these stories is simple. The belief that something should survive. The belief that awakening should preserve something. The idea that this process should leave you intact, just slightly improved. More open. More connected. More kind.

That is not what this is.

What collapses here is not your capacity for feeling. It is the one who needed that capacity to mean something.

What dies is not tenderness. What dies is the compulsive need to perform it.

This is not an attack on warmth, or love, or kindness. It is simply the end of the one who needs those things to prop themselves up as evidence of having arrived.

If after that there is love, let it be love. If there is silence, let it be silence. If there is distance, let there be distance. If there is coldness, let it be coldness. If there is warmth, let it be warmth. If there is laughter, let it be laughter.

None of it belongs to anyone. None of it means anything about you. None of it proves anything. None of it is a sign of arrival.

This is not cruel. It is not kind. It is not warm. It is not cold. It is not loving. It is not unloving.

It simply is.

And it no longer waits for the stories about how it should look.

PS: Everything shared here is freely given, whether you're a free or paid subscriber.
If something cracked open in you and you feel moved to give a gift, you're welcome to.
Not as payment. Not in return. Just as a quiet gesture of support, if that’s what stirs in you.

All gifts go toward what’s slowly unfolding through Suan Jai.

---