How can an awakened person survive in an environment where nobody else is awakened?

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One of the weirdest spiritual lessons I’ve had to learn in my life is that the things I learn, I can only really primarily help myself with. When I help others, I’m helping myself. When I surrender myself, I’m actually building myself. Nobody else.

It’s impossible to transmit spiritual lessons. Hell, it’s hard enough to transmit mundane lessons. My by far most popular answer revolves around the difficulty of teaching. Whatever it is you learn in life, whatever mindset you choose to cultivate, you are probably going to be the only one doing it, while everyone else is going to want the benefits without having to do the work. It’s just human nature.

What is the answer to this? The same answer as always, surrender. You can’t change this state of affairs, so you might as well learn about it. I’ve been carefully observing this dynamic for many years. I’ve divided spiritual advancement up into two categories. One is relatively easier to discuss than the other.

It’s easy to talk about surrender. Everybody, intuitively, knows what surrender means, our books and movies contain heaps of advice and examples.

What’s not so easy to talk about is level of consciousness, even though it’s by far the more powerful factor. Because the sad reality, and the more you observe people, the more iron this rule clads itself with, is that a low level of consciousness means that you can be literally swimming in knowledge, but completely unable to drink.

You’ll ignore it all and look for ways to selfishly get what you want, while God’s sitting over there offering you everything, you’ll just ignore Him. Because He didn’t offer you everything in precisely the way you wanted it. You look His gifts in the mouth because He asked you to surrender what’s false about yourself in order to get them.

We laugh at and make fun of incels, but we all have these selfish aspects that we’re unable to surrender. At least they’re honest about it.

You want to know how to survive in such an environment, where you are the possessor of a knowledge that none of your peers have. I think the best way of doing this is to realize that you aren’t a finished project just because you got awakened.

When I said the only person you’re really going to be able to help with your spiritual gifts is yourself, I didn’t mean to imply that they were worthless. You do need help. You’re not perfect even though you have knowledge nobody else has. You are a perfectly valid recipient for the benefits of your understandings. You still have selfishness to observe and surrender.

The knowledge of how and what and when to surrender doesn’t change the fact that you still have to actually do it. That’s what this desire is really, the desire to live in a world full of already-awakened people. It’s the selfish desire to be done with all of this. To not have to do all this hard spiritual work anymore. To not grow. To just sit passively and enjoy divine providence.

But you’re already enjoying divine providence. If you want more, then you need to learn more.