Fear and Resistance After Awakening? Congratulations, the Ego Isn't Dead Yet

Your spiritual awakening didn’t kill your ego.

This brutal truth shatters the fantasy that one glimpse equals permanent freedom from psychological suffering.

You cracked the self-illusion, reality shone through the cracks, and you thought freedom had arrived. Then fear crept back like a unwelcome house guest, resistance tightened its familiar grip, and old patterns returned with medieval vengeance. This isn’t evidence of failed awakening or spiritual incompetence.

These reactions are the ego’s survival mechanism kicking into overdrive, sensing annihilation…

…and fighting back with everything it’s got.

The Phantom’s Last Stand

Your fear isn’t personal property.

Fear after glimpsing no-self reveals the ego’s desperate attempt to maintain its illusory existence through psychological terrorism.

Picture a condemned building moments before demolition – the initial blast took down the main structure, but debris still falls, foundations still crumble, and the phantom blueprint keeps trying to rebuild itself from memory. The fear isn’t yours because there’s no you to own it, yet the conditioning continues its automatic defensive responses.

This creates a bizarre situation where impersonal fear masquerades as personal crisis while the entity that would supposedly experience the crisis doesn’t exist. The fear of losing the self is the self’s final magic trick…

…performed by a magician who was never there.

Investigation Beats Medication

You can’t manage what doesn’t belong to you.

Resistance arises when something tries to fix, control, or overcome the fear, but who exactly is doing the resisting?

Imagine a detective investigating a crime scene where the victim, perpetrator, and detective are all the same phantom person – that’s the futility of the ego trying to solve its own existential crisis. Instead of managing the fear, investigate it like a curious scientist examining a fascinating specimen. Where does this fear live in the body? What does resistance feel like before the story kicks in? Who or what would be annihilated if the fear came true?

The investigation reveals that the investigator, the fear, and the one who fears are all appearances in the same consciousness…

…with no solid ground anywhere to be found.

The Story Factory Never Closes

Every fear comes with it s own soap opera.

The ego manufactures elaborate narratives to justify its terror: “If I let go completely, I’ll lose my relationships, my career, my sanity, my ability to function.”

These stories feel compelling because they’re designed to hook attention and generate emotional investment in the phantom’s survival. But stories are just thoughts wearing costumes, impersonal mental events arising and dissolving in awareness like clouds in an empty sky. The key isn’t believing or disbelieving the stories but seeing them as automated productions of a meaning-making machine that never stops running.

When you recognize that the storyteller telling stories about stories is also just another story, the whole narrative house of cards starts looking pretty wobbly…

…and comedy gold begins to emerge from the cosmic joke.

Fuel for the Fire

Fear and resistance aren’t obstacles to awakening.

These psychological eruptions are premium fuel for further dismantling the illusion they’re trying to protect through their very intensity.

Think of them as the ego’s final tantrums before complete structural collapse – the louder the screaming, the closer you are to the end of the performance. Each wave of fear points to where identification still sticks, each moment of resistance reveals another attachment ready for incineration. The beautiful paradox is that the ego’s attempts to save itself actually accelerate its dissolution by making the phantom nature of the whole enterprise impossible to ignore.

Use the energy of fear to investigate further, let resistance show you what still needs burning…

…because this fire burns hottest just before it goes out.

The Demolition Continues

This demolition has a completion date.

Fear and resistance after awakening aren’t signs of spiritual failure but confirmation that the dismantling process continues according to its own mysterious schedule until nothing false remains.

You thought awakening was graduation, but it’s more like enrollment in a program where the curriculum involves systematic disillusionment with everything you thought you knew about existence. The phantom ego will keep staging elaborate comebacks until there’s nothing left to come back to, and even then it might try a few more times just for old time’s sake.

Don’t fight the process, don’t indulge it, just watch the whole show with the detached amusement of someone who finally gets the joke…

…and knows the punchline was always you.

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