What if Maya quit and everyone suddenly woke up? What if the walls came tumbling down and truth was revealed for all to see? What if we were all catapulted out of the oily black smoke of delusion and into the clear blue sky of lucidity? You destroy the dreamstate illusion by opening your eyes, so what if everyone’s eyes popped open and we all stopped seeing what’s not and started seeing what is? Would that be a good thing, or a bad thing? 

That’s what a real armageddon or apocalypse would be; not a mass death but a mass awakening. An extinction level event would not look like a big-ass meteor blowing us all to bits, but a big-ass alarm clock blowing us out of the dreamstate and into stark raving awareness. 

Mass awakening might be the ultimate be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenario; Maya just wakes up one day and says, “I’m tired of being the bad guy. Fuck it. Y’all want to be enlightened so bad, here you go.” She snaps her fingers and all veils burn away. Her palace of illusion or prison of delusion simply vanishes and all the inmates and guests are suddenly set free; sane and lucid. What would happen then? 

Well, for one thing, if everyone woke up, my function would be instantly obsolete and I’d be out of a job. I’d have to go bag groceries and collect carts at the local Piggly-Wiggly, which would be a big step down from this ultra-cool enlightened-guy gig; that would suck some serious ass. I’d be reduced to staying warm and eating for no better reason than a mild disinclination to freeze or starve. (Worry not, imagined reader, there are no Piggly-Wigglies near me.)

Is mass awakening even possible? There are two significant processes involved in this transition – out-processing from the current paradigm and in-processing into the new one – and if those steps are skipped, a frothy mix of hilarity and madness must surely ensue. Probably the closest analog we have is entheogenic adventures where realer-than-real realities are visited, but because no processing takes place during departure or return, they amount to nothing more than a super-cool (or super-shitty) grown-up theme park ride. You climb aboard the magic bus, take a trip through the tunnel of mind-blowing, reality-rewriting hyper-consciousness, and get off right where you got on. (Don’t forget to stop by the giftshop on your way out; “Mind got blown, body got a t-shirt.”). As real as those trippy trips seem, they’re just another dimension of appearance, and Monday morning you’re back on the factory floor.

Mass awakening might sound great to the Bodhisattva-mindset, but it’s really pretty dumb. The future prospects for an awakened humanity are both boring and brief. Once emotion has been rendered subordinate to mind, we’re no more amusing than chimps or dolphins (somewhat, not very; a little nature goes a long way). It’s not that easy to be amusing at all, much less when Brahman is in the audience; in all of known creation, only human children can do it. These humanoid creatures (formerly me, currently you) perform a function nothing else in the universe can; they are capable of amusing and entertaining the sole beholder, if only barely.

Human adults, in contrast, are boringly simple and unamusing to behold. Simplicity at the personal level is awesome. I’m as simple as it gets (in a technologically advanced civilization). I default to simplicity as my natural lifestyle, but what if everyone went into bare-bones mode? That would be a problem because a lot of stuff would stop getting done, like pretty much everything, and that would mark the end of society and civilization. There’d be no more stocked shelves, no more electricity or running water, no more drama and not much creation, no more games and movies and wars and shit, just a lot of mellow people sitting around being mellow. (We don’t criminalize weed to protect the individual, but society. Good vibes do not a dramatic dreamstate make.)

The reason I can enjoy simplicity is because so few do. It takes a lot of people working behind the scenes to make my pastoral lifestyle possible. If everyone wanted to live like me, I’d have to go do something different (pillaging and marauding sounds nice). As it is, I’ve got millions of little worker-bees out there keeping me well-stocked with food and fuel, providing me with entertainment in many forms on many fronts, keeping me supplied with internet and techy gadgets, keeping roads clear and bridges open, maintaining law and order, even letting me know what the weather will be in Stockholm next Sunday. Take all that away and suddenly the simple life starts looking pretty stupid, and I start looking like just another crazy asshole living in the woods (not saying I’m not). 

The dreamstate is only germane to awakening insofar as it’s what we have to fight our way out of; up-the-slope being out-processing from the old paradigm, down-the-pipe being in-processing into a new paradigm (or so you hope). Nothing about you matters during the ascent portion of the journey except the exact obstacle at which you are currently obstructed. Your feelings and beliefs don’t matter, your biography doesn’t matter, your suffering doesn’t matter, nothing you’ve ever read in a book or experienced in meditation or heard from a guru matters. All that is just makyo which, in Japanese, means the realm of demons and monsters. For us, it means the sticky emotional overburden we have to dig through to get to bedrock, where the real battle is fought.

You are stuck at an exact point of blockage and the only way to make progress is by bringing the full focusing and illuminating power of your mind to bear on it. Nothing but truth can survive such scrutiny because nothing but truth exists. Once you see the obstruction in fullness, it will disappear, allowing you to step forward to the next seemingly impassable barrier. There are no side avenues or secondary objectives or related issues, there’s only the one thing that prevents you from taking your next step. 

Picture yourself thirty feet underwater; lightness above, darkness below. You’re strapped into a life vest pulling you up, and you’re holding an anchor weighing you down. That seems like a simple problem – release the anchor and rise to the surface – but what if you like it where you are, or you’re just too scared to move? Maya is the anchor, rather, she’s the aspect of you that clings to the anchor. If it weren’t for that part of us, we’d drop the deadweight and shoot up to the surface where we rightfully belong. It takes tremendous energy to hold onto the anchor, but that’s what fear does; it holds on. Emotion is the superpower of the unenlightened mind. The anchor is not chained to you; the only thing holding you down is you, and the only one who can raise you up is you, so the question isn’t what if Maya quits, but what if you quit?

It’s much harder to stay asleep than to wake up, but you won’t believe that until you’ve seen it for yourself. Heading up has little to do with you, but staying down has everything to do with you; that’s why there’s so much talk about ego and attachment. You maintain your hold on the anchor through millions of emotional microfilaments; thousands couldn’t keep you down, but millions form a web from which you can’t break free. Those strands have only the power you pump into them, which means allowing you to wake up is not Maya’s decision, it’s yours. 

Just because a few of us want to awaken in or from the dreamstate doesn’t mean everyone should. Everyone should just keep doing what they’re doing; nothing is broken so nothing needs fixin’. Everything is always just right and can’t be otherwise. Human children perceive wrongness where nothing can be wrong, and create the illusion of purpose and meaning where none can exist. They generate the high highs and low lows that make the tragicomic dreamstate possible; without human children, there’d be nothing to behold but cute puppies and hungry sharks (hopefully not together). 

Emerson said that man is a god in ruins, but what if gods ruin themselves? Isn’t that how the myths begin, with bored gods taking human form and inserting themselves into human affairs? Awakening is not about remembering you’re a god, but forgetting you’re a human. That’s where emotion comes in. Your brain is fogged in. You don’t have to elevate yourself to godhood, just unplug the fog machine.

Which brings us back to our question; What if Maya quit? Without her – without fear and the intelligence of fear – it would be game over. No more dramatic dreamstate, no more creative playspace; we’d all just float on our backs and soak in the sun. The new spiritual shepherds would then be those who taught us to struggle downward, against our natural buoyancy, into the darkness, to get our fuckin’ anchors back. 

Moral: If you meet a Bodhisattva on the road, kill him.