painted with watercolors
Awakening is often treated as the highest achievement.
But achievement is the wrong word for it.
Achievement implies that you have done something and have succeeded at doing so and can now enjoy the fruits of your achievement.
Awakening precisely dispels this illusion.
I’m not saying awakening doesn’t improve your quality of life. It does, just not in the way you imagined.
But it still isn’t an achievement for the apparent separate self. It’s a disappointment for it.
While it’s true that awakening doesn’t meet your hopes and expectations and thus it’s a disappointment, the beauty of the term doesn’t come from its everyday meaning but from its etymological deconstruction.
The prefix Dis- suggests a reversal or negation of something. Appoint comes from the Latin appointare and means to arrange, to fix, to assign. And the suffix -ment turns verbs into nouns, which indicates the result of.
So disappointment literally means the undoing or reversal of an appointment.
At some point, an imagined self was appointed as the CEO of something we call ‘my life.’ Awakening is the undoing of that appointment.
So it’s the apparent self that is at center stage of all this disappointing. The self that thought it was in charge is dis-appointed as the controller, doer, thinker, feeler, experiencer.
And no one new is being appointed. The reins wriggle on the ground (is it a snake? A rope?) and no one’s here to pick ‘em up.
I’ve noticed something amusing (okay, perhaps it’s only amusing to me) when I thought about the word disappointment.
The German translation of it is ‘Enttäuschung,’ which is an even better word because it not only has the emotional letdown component of the word disappointment but picked apart — Ent- (removal) + Täuschung (illusion/deception) — means the removal of a deception, which is more in line with how we usually speak about these awakening matters.
While it translates to disappointment, a more literal translation is ‘disillusionment.’ But the German translation for the word disillusionment is ‘Desillusionierung.’
Des- works much like the English Dis- which announces an undoing or a negation. Illusion comes from the Latin illusio and refers to a false belief or deception. And -ierung is a nominalizing suffix (closest to the English -ization), again, turning a verb into a noun.
So ‘Desillusionierung’ literally means the process of removing an illusion or the losing of a false belief or even becoming un-illusioned. It originally refers to the emotional or cognitive state of losing a comforting belief — in this case, the belief in a separate you.
The interesting bit is that ‘Desillusionierung’ kind of means the same thing as ‘Enttäuschung’ but with a different emphasis:
- Enttäuschung = emotional letdown (personal, common)
- Desillusionierung = loss of illusion/ideal (deeper, more reflective)
The combination of both I call the Grand Disappointment. It’s a subjective and objective disappointing. It’s the twin movement of emotional unmooring and conceptual clarity.
Okay, enough of the etymology and German lessons.
Anyway, so this is what awakening stands for in a nutshell — the dispelling of illusion.
“Being awake” means no longer being under the primary illusion. No longer do you believe you are a ghost in a machine walking around in an objective world separate from you.
With this disappointment, the direct recognition of what has always been the case remains.
Consciousness, direct experience, the world — it’s all the same. And there is nothing apart from it, standing outside of it, controlling it.
The Grand Disappointment might sound negative initially, but it’s about as negative as having a corrupt leader removed. The irony is that the leader being removed never actually held the reins — he was your little sibling with the unplugged controller and even more ironically “little sibling” was your identity.
You were always playing all-parts, believing you were a-part.
Luka
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