Is This All There Is?
There’s a predictable path for every fulfilled life. Most people never make it past the first step.
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On the adventure of Self-realization, most people will walk the same path from Success to Significance to Sanity. This has been true of everyone I’ve ever met who is fulfilled in life. I can’t think of a single exception.
It’s easy to mistake self-improvement (small-s) for Self-realization (big-S), which most people do. I certainly did for much of my life.
Self-improvement is mostly a status game of upgrading our ideas about ourselves with “better” ones. We measure our value relative to an ideal, against which we’re always falling short because the chasm between who we think we are and who we think we should be is designed to keep us feeling insecure, inadequate, and disconnected. Self-improvement is socially engineered insanity.
Self realization, paradoxically, describes the moment and process of (both) being and becoming who you are. It is a return to sanity. It makes little sense to the mind, but that’s okay. Life’s truest Truths have more in common with Dr. Seuss than Einstein. It’s helpful to be a bit out of your mind in conversations like these.
Success
The Success path is the one we all begin on. We want success, we crave it, and we orient our whole life toward it because society tells us our life situation is our identity and the aim of life is to improve our circumstances. From this perspective, happiness and fulfillment, as well as avoiding pain and discomfort, depend on attaining More and Better.
It’s not wrong—it just doesn’t work. And that’s something you can only discover after you get what you were told to want, only to discover that what you have is not what you truly want.
At this point, the path splits. It happens reliably around Midlife (or Quarterlife these days), as well as when adversity visits us in the way of illness, death, or the loss of a career or relationship. Here, we must make a choice and decide whether we’ll continue the way we always have or shift.
Some (maybe most) people double down on the Success path and aim for even More and Better. Others, in search of a Different and Deeper, veer onto the next path.
Significance
On the path of Significance, we seek meaning and purpose in new ways, usually through spirituality or service. We sense a deeper call that transcends our old ideas about who we are and why we’re here.
Many of the entrepreneurs I’ve worked with over the years know the adventure toward Significance well.
I once counseled a businessman who built a massively successful company. Feeling unfulfilled, he set out to move from “success to significance”. He’d “made it” and wanted to focus on transforming the world.
He devoted his time, energy, and resources to spiritual awakening, inner work, and service. He took psychedelics in the jungle, opened a retreat center, and invested his wealth in making the world better. All beautiful things, to be sure.
People were astonished by his remarkable transformation. He was a different person, and even changed his name and the way he dressed to reflect his new, more spiritual identity.
Eventually, though, I noticed a shift in him. He seemed to live from one peak experience to another, and a subtle sense of dissatisfaction began to seep through when we’d talk.
He had simply traded one identity for another. Where he used to look to his business achievements to give him a sense identity, he now looked to spirituality to do the same.
He had traded materialism for spiritual materialism1 and was still driven by not feeling enough. Only this time, it was not feeling enlightened enough or spiritual enough. Enough was still something outside of himself, something to achieve or attain.
It’s a seductive thing. Though Significance is a more refined or sophisticated brand of insanity than Success, it is insanity nonetheless. You can never quite get enough of it because fulfillment still relies on More and Better.
Sanity
Once the pursuit of Significance fails you, which it does everyone, a new kind of clarity begins to dawn. The best word to describe that clarity, I believe, is Sanity. For some it happens slowly, and for others it happens all at once.
I call it Sanity because it means seeing life clearly, as it is, and not through the delusional or distorted lenses we’ve been given, even the more refined and spiritual lenses. Sanity is realizing what was true all along.
Where Success and Significance are concerned with adding, Sanity strips away what is non-essential or untrue. One of the ironic things about spiritual awakening is that the ideas and revelations that lead you to it must eventually be dropped, too. Your ideas about Reality are the final obstacle to experiencing it directly.
You have to lose your mind to know freedom. I don’t mean that you must literally go insane, though some people do (I nearly did). What I mean is that you can’t think your way to who you already are. It’s so simple it can’t be comprehended, but it can be experienced.
Of course, this is total foolishness to the mind. There’s no need to pretend it’s not. It makes no sense, but it is the most sensible truth of all, that you are the one you’ve been looking for this whole time. You’ve just been looking for your Self where you could never be found—”out there” in the world of experiences, achievements, and More/Better.
The Path to Sanity
So, how do you accelerate your journey toward Sanity? That’s the question my younger self would be asking me today, if he could.
Honestly, I don’t know.
I’m not sure you can, really, any more than you can make a baby grow into a teenager more quickly. Even if you could, I’m not sure you would want to. There is a natural, intelligent unfolding to life.
The truth is, if you’re drawn to these things, it’s already happening for you. You can’t not stumble your way into sanity because it’s inevitable. Call it grace or destiny, or what have you. It can’t be explained as far as I can tell, and anything we say about it is just a guess.
We’re all like ants crawling across an iPhone screen, pontificating to our ant friends about how the Magical Black Glass Brick beneath us works . . . using ant language. It’s easy to think we know what we’re talking about, or that we should know when we really don’t.
What can you do then? This. What you’re doing right now. Follow the subtle pull of your interests, desires, and energy. In the same way birds instinctually navigate by Earth’s invisible magnetic field, so do we feel the unseen pull of our soul’s True North. Know that. Trust that.
If you’re reading this, I can safely assume that you believe the way humanity lives and works no longer works. And to invoke Einstein again, to keep living and doing the same things while expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.
Once you’re tired of that, you’ll eventually find your own way to Sanity. In fact, you’re already pointed in the right direction.
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Chögyam Trungpa taught this concept of “spirituality materialism” in his book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.
I spent all last year chasing self improvement and signifigance after I got what I thought was my dream job, hated it, and realized I had to start over. Started reading a lot of philosophy. Then a few weeks ago I broke through and realized this is all a big game and stopped worrying. I feel more sane now than I ever did before.
“I don’t mean that you must literally go insane, though some people do (I nearly did)”
Enjoyed this whole piece, and find myself most curious about what’s in the parentheses!
In my own most lucid, clear experiences of reality, it was the people closest to me who were vocally concerned for my sanity. Such a painful irony. But you are also very correct — it can be quite a fine line.