Lachlan Brown
For most of my life, I thought spiritual awakening would feel like a thunderclap.
Some defining moment of bliss or insight that split the sky open and handed me clarity like a scroll from the heavens. I imagined it would be neat. Clean. Uplifting. Maybe even cinematic.
But that wasn’t how it happened for me. Not even close.
Instead, it came slowly. Unevenly. Not as an addition, but a dismantling.
Piece by piece, the ideas I held about who I was—my career, my accomplishments, my opinions, my need to be liked, even the version of myself who was trying so hard to “wake up”—began to fall away. Not all at once. But with just enough friction that I couldn’t ignore what was happening.
It was like watching a tightly coiled rope start to loosen.
And the more it loosened, the more I realized how much tension I had been holding all along.
The ego fights back hardest just before it lets go
That unraveling was terrifying.
Not because anything terrible was happening externally—in fact, my life was objectively fine. But internally, something kept shifting.
It turns out the ego doesn’t go quietly.
The self-image we construct over years—the roles we play, the stories we tell ourselves, the need to feel in control—all of it creates a kind of psychological armor. And when that armor begins to crack, even gently, it can feel like dying.
Carl Jung once said, “Enlightenment is not imagining figures of light, but making the darkness conscious.”
In my experience, this is the heart of spiritual awakening: not bypassing your suffering, but learning to sit with it long enough to see through it.
I remember one day in particular. I was meditating in my apartment in Chiang Mai. Nothing mystical happened. No vision, no voice. But I felt a sudden collapse of effort. For a moment, I stopped trying to be someone. And instead of disappearing, I felt… present. Not in an extraordinary way. Just simply here.
And that scared me.
Because if I was still here without all the striving, who was I?
Who are you when nothing you clung to feels solid anymore?
In Western psychology, we’re taught to build up the self—to strengthen identity, increase self-esteem, foster autonomy. And to an extent, that’s healthy. But there’s a limit.
When every experience is filtered through the question “What does this say about me?”, we become trapped in a loop of self-referencing.
Spiritual awakening breaks that loop.
And it does so not by giving us a new identity, but by taking away the illusion that we needed one in the first place.
This is where the Buddhist concept of Anatta, or non-self, becomes so powerful.
Anatta doesn’t mean we don’t exist. It means the self isn’t fixed. It’s not a singular, permanent entity. What we call “I” is a fluid, ever-changing process—a collection of thoughts, feelings, habits, and conditions that arise and pass away.
Contemporary cognitive neuroscience shows that the brain’s default mode network (DMN)—centered in the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices—generates the stream of autobiographical thought that we experience as a “narrative self.”
Crucially, DMN activity drops in experienced mindfulness meditators, reflecting a quieter, more present-centred mind.
The same network’s internal connectivity can fragment under psychedelics such as psilocybin or LSD, correlating with the familiar reports of transient ego-dissolution.
But what I found most profound wasn’t the theory.
It was the lived experience of no longer needing to cling so tightly.
Where psychology meets Buddhism: the illusion of a permanent self
The more I studied both Buddhist thought and modern psychology, the more I realized they weren’t in conflict. In fact, they were two lenses on the same landscape.
Daniel Siegel’s work on narrative identity showed me that our sense of self is largely a story—a coherent story, yes, but still a constructed one.
Tara Brach’s teachings on the “trance of unworthiness” revealed how often the ego operates from fear: fear of being not enough, of being unloved, of disappearing.
And the Buddha, more than 2,500 years ago, simply pointed out: suffering arises when we cling to what is not permanent.
That includes our idea of self.
When I started to see this more clearly, I noticed something else: the parts of myself I had been running from were the very things keeping me tethered to a false sense of identity.
My anxiety? It was rooted in trying to control how others saw me. My perfectionism? A desperate attempt to prove I had value. Even my spiritual seeking was, in part, another identity trying to outdo the previous one.
But underneath all of it was something quieter. A kind of stillness. A presence that didn’t need to prove anything.
Real freedom comes not from becoming more — but from becoming less
This is the paradox of awakening. You don’t become a perfected version of yourself. You become less identified with any version at all.
You begin to live from presence rather than persona.
And that presence is profoundly ordinary.
It’s making tea without needing it to be a ritual. It’s holding your partner’s hand without scripting the moment. It’s walking through the world without narrating every step in your head.
But getting there requires a kind of courage we don’t talk about enough.
The courage to let go of the rope.
Not because you’re rejecting yourself, but because you’re no longer mistaking the rope for who you are.
The rope doesn’t vanish. It loosens.
I still have an ego.
I still get caught up. I still worry. I still fall into old patterns.
But what’s changed is my relationship to those patterns. I don’t believe in them as much. I don’t feed them as often.
And that small shift has made all the difference.
Spiritual awakening, at least for me, wasn’t about becoming someone new. It was about becoming radically honest with what was already here.
It was about noticing the rope I had tied around my own sense of self-worth—and gently loosening it.
Not cutting it. Not burning it. Just letting it fall slack enough to breathe.
That’s where the freedom is.
And it might not look like light pouring through the ceiling.
But it feels like home.
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