What "Enlightened People" Get Wrong About "Enlightenment"

If you hear the word, perhaps something tightens.

A small inner tension. Or an eye-roll. Or a sense of here we go again. You don’t say it out loud — there are people in your life who’d take offense — but it’s there. You feel it.

What is that feeling, actually? A tingle? A small flinch in the chest? Something in you registering bullshit before the conscious mind has caught up?

Pay attention to it. That little sensor tingles for a reason, and it’s been picking up something true that nobody’s named for you.

The word, the idea got ruined. The thing didn’t.

Somewhere between the Beatles going to India and your yoga teacher trying to sell you a ten-thousand-dollar retreat in Tulum, “transcendence” became a brand. A vibe. An aesthetic. Beige linen pants. Soft voice. Mala beads. A hundred-dollar candle that smells like a dentist’s office. You’re supposed to look at all of that and want it.

Many of you don’t. And you feel a little weird about that — like maybe you’re not spiritual enough or you don’t have the time or energy or money.

Here’s the thing: You’re fine. The thing being sold isn’t the thing.

I want to tell you what actually happened to me on my journey, because I think it’s important to communicate what happened to me, clearly, simply.

I sat with the intention of awakening. Thinking that would be the answer to all my traumas and problems. For twenty years I went at it — hardcore. Not in a robe, not in a monastery — in sweats and a tee, on a couch, eyes closed, sometimes for two weeks at a time. I came at it with a rational, scientific, critical-thinking brain. I wasn’t on drugs. I wasn’t chasing an experience.

I just wanted clarity. About life, about traumas, about past lives, karma, chakras, and enlightenment.

I was looking at my own mind because nothing anybody else was selling was holding up under scrutiny and examination.

What happened wasn’t dramatic in the Hollywood sense. The brain releases its own chemistry when you sit long enough — the kind people chase with substances. So yes, there were states. Openings. Transformations. Insights. Revolutions. But the real event was quieter than any of that.

One day my unconscious started showing me symbols. Everywhere. I’d look at a person and see what they were standing in for. The symbolic reality they were living inside of.

I’d look at a story, a religion, a myth, a belief, and see the older story underneath it. I’d look at my own thoughts and watch them resolve into images — pictures, postures, leftover scenes from decades ago, dressed up as conclusions about reality. And the realization that broke me open was simple:

All of this is symbolic.

Everything I’d ever taken as real — the fear, the want, the moral certainty, the shame, the meaning of every face I’d ever flinched from — was a symbolic construct my brain had been running in the background while I thought I was just living my life.

When that fog cleared, it stayed clear.

I want to be careful here, because this is the part where every spiritual teacher you’ve ever heard of goes off the rails. They had an opening and immediately drank their own Kool-Aid, built a religion around it. They started talking about energy. Or tantra, or meditation, or yoga. They began speaking about being drained by ignorant masses. About not being able to shake your hand because they’re too sensitive to interact with YOUR field. About past lives, aliens, conspiracies. About being able to read your aura but only on the third Wednesday of every month. Or just arrived at the certainty of their certainty that they had “figured it out.”

The world is just “fill in the blank” and if only other people understood “blank” the world would be a much better place. And thus begins the “group”.

Whatever they’re describing, it isn’t what I’m describing. They had a glimpse and immediately wrapped it in mythology. Built a robe around it. Sold tickets. That is exactly the opposite of what clarity is. Or more accurately, it’s in a different universe. A universe of beliefs and certainty.

That is definitely far from the universe I inhabit. I know, most certainly, that I don’t have a fucking clue.

So when I say “enlightenment,” what I actually mean is something so simple it’s almost boring:

Seeing what’s actually there instead of what your brain keeps telling you is there.

That’s the whole curriculum. No degree. No certificate. No lineage. No initiation. No retreat.

Here’s the small ladder, if you want to walk it with me:

Were you born into a body? Yes.

Did somebody hand you a worldview before you could walk? Yes.

Was a lot of that world view sex negative or body, pleasure negative? Yes.

Have you been running most of that worldview ever since, without checking it? …Probably yes - even if you have been doing “a ton of work” on yourself.

And even while feeling that life could be better? Yes

Has it actually served you? Some of it. Most of it has cost you.

Now we’re talking.

The gap between the worldview you inherited and the life you’re actually living — and the call inside of you — that gap is where everything you’re looking for is hiding. Not on a retreat. Not in a workshop. Not at the bottom of a guru’s water bottle. In the gap.

I’ll tell you why I’m writing this Substack, because I think it matters.

When I was thirteen years old, I was alone, isolated in my room reading every book I could find by every supposed master of the Far East and every healer and every guru and every channeler. And they were all lying. Or deluded. Or running a small business in robes. Same difference. I didn’t have the tools yet to see it clearly, and I suffered for years trying to fit my actual experience to the maps they were drawing. I needed somebody to walk into my life and say it plainly:

Kid. Put the books down. The masters are full of shit. The woman who says her bones magically healed in a second is lying or delusional. The dude who can’t shake hands because of “energy” is dealing with something that has nothing to do with anything real.

You don’t need any of this. Go fuck. Go play. Go make money. Go live. The clarity you’re looking for isn’t behind a paywall or in a workshop. It’s what’s left when you stop believing in the people selling you “the way” to reach it.

Nobody walked in.

So I’m walking in now, for whoever needs it. And I certainly don’t need you to believe me or believe in me. Please don’t.

That’s what this publication is. Not a curriculum. Not a conversion. Just me, pointing at the gap, over and over, from every angle I can find. Sex. Money. Communication. Fear. Relationships. The way your mother taught you to apologize when you weren’t sorry. All of it.

The naked mind isn’t enlightened.

It’s just no longer dressed up as an emperor. Or cult leader. Or a person pretending to be something they are not.

Stress is pretending to be something that you are not, doing something you don’t want to do, trying to be something that isn’t a thing, while feeling guilty or ashamed for not living up to your “full potential”, while feeling bad for the shadows and rage and darkness, confusion, fear and desires inside of you, while trying to reconcile the good books, written by people who never lived the life they claimed, nor aspired to, while teaching in the gap of “this” in conflict with “that,” while admonishing the sincere student to be better, to sell the classes, a new level, an ideology, a community, and inner circle, and the endless cycle of pain, suffering and struggle, while you twist and turn at 3am wondering what is wrong with your life…

That’s it. That’s the work.

If something here lands, feel free to pass this along.