You are still not awake, but in some stage Sleepwalkers refer to as awakening.

I did not share this experience, this so called process of awakening that so many describe.

In one moment, I woke up. When you are awake, it is so stark and different. There exists no notion that one is in some process of waking up or that one is operating a various levels of being awake. Only Sleepwalkers make these distinctions because they are still dreaming and do not have the experience of being truly awake by which to understand the difference. People are awake or they are not. In a mundane sense, you can understand this: A brain surgeon is awake or he’s not. The pilot flying you from Los Angeles to London is awake or she’s not. In those circumstances you would never think to apply and accept some kind of gradation of how deeply or lightly asleep these people are.

When I woke, I saw people in a way that cannot be described very well.

All at once, I saw them all-through-time, I saw them as glowing balls of light, I saw them riddled with parasitic attachments, I saw them in thrall and in love and enslaved in addiction to their non-existent personal self, to their story. I saw how dangerous they were, to each other, and sometimes to me especially. That which keeps people asleep would kill people like me. Kill or neutralize. I became aware of what people were thinking, of their constant stream of petty, grasping and violent thoughts. I could see when they were lying, and that people lie a lot. Nearly everything that people said was robotic, mechanical, manipulative, nonsensical. I saw all this, and more, with absolute clarity, but no judgement.

It’s not that I refrained from judgement because I’m a good person, a wise person, a morally superior person. There simply is no judgement. It’s very difficult for people who are still anchored to a personality-self to truly grasp what it means that there is no judgement. You can understand the concept that you shouldn’t judge, but it’s hard to understand that judgement doesn’t exist, it isn’t an option, it doesn’t happen. So, while I can say emphatically that people who abuse children sexually must be stopped from doing so by all means, I don’t experience any judgement. I don’t need to rationalize that maybe it’s just the way their brains are wired or that they were abused themselves, so are somehow also victims. Nothing like that. It just doesn’t come up.

These days, we spend a lot of time talking with or in some way communicating with computer programs. Sometimes we know it, and sometimes we don’t. When you call customer service and you have to talk to an automated program, some of them are quite sophisticated. Some, less so. There are programs now that can chat with you online so seamlessly that you would be hard pressed to even know there wasn’t a person on the other end of your chat. Most people are not aware that there are computer programs now that write news articles and blog articles. No human needed.

Waking up, really waking up, you find yourself awake in a whole world of people who are in fact run by programs.

Some are rudimentary, some are very mechanical, others read the New Yorker or The Atlantic or The Economist, go to interesting parties and conferences and are more sophisticated programs. What does that feel like? To be in a world of purportedly billions of people and be the only one awake? Not that I am the only one, but how often, I wonder, does one truly awake person ever just happen to live next door to another?

There is an adjustment period. You will have to process this. It’s a lot.

Another thing that happens when you are awake living in a world of Sleepwalkers is that you suddenly have no more hooks. People walk around with all these things that can be hooked into, and they also have hooks that they use to interact with others. When you wake up, you don’t hook other people and you no longer can be hooked by others. Once people realize they can’t hook you, a lot of time you just become invisible to them. You fall out of their field of focus, which is to say, their reality. It’s a very interesting thing to experience.

I could say a whole lot about how people communicate with each other, things that have become utterly transparent to me, but are opaque to Sleepwalkers. You may have the knowledge, the concept that people behave this way, but you don’t see it with total transparency every time people do it. It’s quite a different thing.