Everybody is having a human experience – enlightened and unenlightened – and everything that goes along with that.
– Adyashanti
One of the misconceptions about awakening is that it will solve all our problems. It will put us in a permanently blissful and joyous state, or a state of permanent ease. It will magically make our human life in the world better. We’ll be blessed by the divine, in the way our habitual patterns dreams of. And so on.
All of this is the dreams of separation consciousness, the parts of us shaped from within the perception that we are most fundamentally a separate being.
In reality, when we notice what we are, and even when we live from it as best we can, we still have this human life. Our human self is still mostly the same. Many of our hangups, wounds, and traumas are still here. Our life in the world is still pretty much the same.
Awakening doesn’t solve our human problems in the way parts of us may wish.
What it does is change our relationship with it all. And that does make it a bit easier.
We may recognize that to us, our life and the world happen within and as what we are. We may recognize that at a human level, what we see in the world mirrors what’s here in us. We may realize that holding any thought or assumption as true is out of alignment with reality and creates suffering. And so on.
We may also realize that when we notice what we are, and life from it here and now, it allows for a transformation of our human self. More parts of our human self become more aligned with reality. Our human self and the different parts of our human self heal and realign within oneness and love.
And yet, we still have a human experience. Whether there is awakeness here or not, we still have a human experience. We still experience the life of this human self in the world, with all that entails.