October 28, 2025, Tuesday and so slow…

Transcript from a Youtube video with AI generated voice.

You know, there’s something rather amusing about this whole spiritual business. People come to me and they say, “Allan, I I’ve been meditating. I’ve been reading all the right books. I’ve had this extraordinary experience of oneness with everything.” And then almost in the same breath, they add, “But why am I so terribly alone? Why can’t I find someone to love?” And I look at them and I want to laugh. Not because I’m mocking their pain, you understand, but because they don’t see the cosmic joke they’ve walked into.

They’ve awakened to the fact that they are the entire universe expressing itself and now they’re complaining that they can’t find a date on Saturday night. It’s like a wave suddenly realizing it’s the ocean and then worrying that it can’t find another wave to go steady with. But let me tell you something. This loneliness, this sense of standing apart from the ordinary games of romance, it’s not a bug in the system. It’s a feature. And once you understand why, you’ll see that what looks like a problem is actually the opening of a door to something far more interesting than anything you left behind.

So, let’s talk about love, real love, and why those who wake up find the old game utterly impossible to play. The first thing you must understand is that what most people call love is nothing of the sort. It’s a transaction, a barter system. Two hungry ghosts making arrangements in the dark. You see, we’ve all been taught a very peculiar story about love. We’re taught that somewhere out there is the other half of ourselves, that we are incomplete, broken, insufficient. And if we could just find that special someone, that missing piece, we would finally be whole. What a marvelous piece of fiction that is. And like all good fiction, millions believe it without question. So we go through life shopping for completion. We dress ourselves up. We learn the right words to say. We practice our smiles in the mirror. And all the while we’re terrified, absolutely terrified that no one will choose us, that we’ll be left on the shelf like unwanted merchandise.

So this is what passes for a romance in our world. Two people, each convinced of their own incompleteness, each desperately hoping the other will fill the void. And for a while it works. the intoxication of it, the fever, the sleepless nights, the constant thinking about the other person. We call this falling in love. But notice the word falling. As if love were a pit you stumble into, as if it were something that happens to you rather than something you do. And what fuels this falling? Not love, my friends, not love at all, but need. raw desperate need. The need to escape from the horror of being alone with ourselves. The need to prove that we matter, that we exist, that someone finds us worthy of attention.

It’s all very romantic on the surface. the love letters, the declarations, the dramatic gestures, but underneath it’s just two people using each other as life preservers in what they imagine to be a drowning. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. When you awaken even just a little bit, you begin to see through this game, you start to notice that what you called love was mostly fear wearing a prettier costume. You see how much of your passion was really just anxiety about being alone? How much of your devotion was really just bargaining? I’ll be what you want if you’ll be what I want. I’ll soothe your terror if you will soothe mine. And once you see this, once you really see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s like watching a magic trick after someone has explained how it’s done. Oh, you can still appreciate the skill involved. You can admire the performance, but you’re no longer fooled by it. The rabbit was in the hat all along.

This is why the awakened find it so difficult to fall in love in the conventional way. Not because they’ve become cold or unfeeling. Quite the opposite, but because they can no longer participate in the mutual hypnosis that passes for romance. They’ve seen the wires holding up the stage. They know the love songs are about neediness dressed up in moonlight. They recognize the whole drama for what it is. A beautiful tragic game that two incomplete people play to avoid facing their own emptiness. But here’s the thing. When you wake up, you discover something extraordinary. You’re not empty at all. That void you were so afraid of, that terrible loneliness you were trying to escape, it was never real. It was a story you told yourself. A story so convincing that you organized your entire life around avoiding it.

The truth is, you are not half a person waiting to be completed. You are not a fragment of something that broke apart at birth. You are the whole thing. You are the universe experiencing itself through this particular pattern called you. You are as complete right now as you will ever be. The idea that you need someone else to make you whole is like a wave thinking it needs another wave to become water. It’s already water. It was always water. And when you really understand this, when you feel it in your bones, something shifts. The desperate hunger that drove you toward others begins to quiet down. You stop scanning every room for potential saviors. You stop measuring every interaction by whether it might lead to the completion you seek because you’re not seeking completion anymore. You’re already complete.

Now, this sounds wonderful in theory. And in many ways, it is. There’s a tremendous freedom in not needing others to validate your existence. But there’s also a price. And the price is this. You can no longer play the old game. You can no longer pretend that the theatrical performances of conventional romance are real. You can’t fake being swept away when you see too clearly how the sweeping is done. This is where the loneliness comes in. Not the loneliness of being physically alone. That’s easy. You can sit by yourself for hours and feel perfectly content. No, this is a different kind of loneliness. It’s the loneliness of seeing through a game that everyone else is still playing. It’s like being the only adult at a children’s party. The children are having a wonderful time. They’re completely absorbed in their games, but you can’t join them. Not because you don’t want to, but because you can’t make yourself believe the games are real anymore. You meet someone, they’re attractive, they’re interesting, they seem to like you. And in the old days, this is where the story would begin. The story of pursuit and conquest, of longing and fulfillment, of two people finding each other in the vastness of the world.

But now you see the story before it even starts. You see how it will unfold. The initial intoxication, the gradual revelation of flaws, the negotiation of needs, the slow recognition that neither of you can give the other what they’re really looking for because what they’re looking for doesn’t exist outside themselves. And so you hesitate, not out of fear, but out of clarity. You cannot walk into a trap when you see it so plainly. You cannot drink the poison when you know what’s in the cup. And this hesitation, this inability to throw yourself into the old drama. It sets you apart.

Others sense it. They feel that you’re not playing by the usual rules and it makes them uncomfortable or it makes them curious. But either way, it creates distance. Here’s what nobody tells you about awakening. It raises the standard. Before you might have been content with someone who made you laugh, someone who found you attractive, someone who filled the evenings with conversation, but now that’s not enough. You’re looking for something else. Something that has no name in the usual vocabulary of romance.

You’re looking for someone who has also seen through the game.

Someone who knows they are already whole. someone who isn’t trying to use you as a missing piece in their puzzle. Because only then can you meet each other as you actually are. Not as fantasies or saviors or solutions to loneliness, but as two expressions of the same reality. Two waves that have both realized they are the ocean.

And here’s the difficulty. Such people are rare, extraordinarily rare. Most people are still caught in the old story. They’re still looking for their other half. They’re still trying to build their identity through relationships. They’re still playing the game with deadly seriousness. And you can’t blame them for this. You played it too until you didn’t; until you saw through it. But the fact remains the field has narrowed considerably. Where once there were many possibilities, now there are few. Where once you might have fallen in love with someone’s smile or their wit or their way of moving through the world, now you need something more. You need them to be awake or at least awakening. You need them to know what you know, to see what you see. And that severely limits the options.

This is why so many spiritually awake people find themselves alone. Not because they can’t love, but because they can’t love in the old way anymore. They’ve outgrown it. Like a child who has learned to read and can no longer find satisfaction in picture books. The old stories don’t work anymore. They need something more substantial, something real. And sometimes, often actually, that something real doesn’t appear. Years go by, you meet people, you have conversations, you feel connections, but none of them go deep enough. None of them touch the place where you actually live. And so you remain alone, not in bitterness, not in despair, but in a kind of patient waiting, waiting for someone who speaks your language, who breathes the same air, who has traveled to the same country you have and knows its geography.

There’s a certain dignity in this aloneness, a kind of integrity. You’re not willing to settle for less than truth. You’re not willing to go back to sleep just because sleeping is more comfortable. You’d rather stand in clarity, even if it means standing alone, than kneel in illusion with company. But let’s be honest, it’s not always easy. There are nights when the silence feels heavy. When you wonder if you’ve made a terrible mistake. When you look at people in their ordinary relationships with all their ordinary dramas and compromises and you think maybe that would be easier, maybe you’re asking too much. Maybe this clarity you’ve gained has cost you something precious.

And you’d be right. It has cost you something. It’s cost you the ability to be satisfied with illusion. It’s cost you the option of using another person to avoid yourself. It’s cost you the comfort of not knowing what you know. These are real costs and sometimes they feel like too much to pay. But here’s what you must understand. You can’t go back. Even if you wanted to, even if you tried to play the old game to pretend you don’t see what you see, it wouldn’t work. The awakening has happened.

You’ve tasted something real. And once you’ve tasted the real thing, the counterfeit loses all its flavor. So what do you do? You wait. You live. You continue to grow and learn and experience the richness of existence. You don’t close your heart. You don’t become bitter or cynical. You simply recognize that love, real love, must come from a different place now. Not from need, but from fullness. Not from fear, but from freedom. Not from the desperate grasping of two incomplete people, but from the joyful meeting of two whole beings. And maybe it comes. Maybe one day you meet someone who has walked the same path, who carries the same quality of presence, who looks at you and sees not a solution to their loneliness, but a companion in the mystery. Someone who doesn’t need you to complete them because they’re already complete. someone who can love you not because they must, but because they choose to. Because the loving itself is the point, not what they get from it.

When that happens, if it happens, it’s nothing like the old falling in love. There’s no fever, no obsession, no desperate clinging. Instead, there’s a recognition, a meeting of equals. two people who are already at peace with themselves, choosing to share that peace with each other, not because they need to, but because they want to, because it’s delightful, because it’s an expression of the freedom they’ve each discovered within themselves. This kind of love doesn’t bind, it doesn’t possess, it doesn’t make demands. It simply is like water flowing, like birds flying, like the sun shining. It’s love without agenda, without negotiation, without the subtle bargaining that underlies so much of what passes for love in this world.

But again, such love is rare, and there’s no guarantee you’ll find it. You might spend your whole life waiting. You might die having never met another awake being in the intimate way you long for. And you must make peace with that possibility. You must be willing to walk alone if that’s what clarity requires because the alternative is worse. The alternative is to go back to sleep, to stuff yourself back into the old costume and play the old part. to use someone or let someone use you in the mutual pretense that this will solve the problem of existence, and you can’t do that anymore. The costume doesn’t fit. The role doesn’t convince. You’ve seen behind the curtain and there’s no putting the veil back up.

So, you carry this strange gift, this burden of clarity. You’re awake in a world that’s mostly sleeping. You see through games that everyone else takes seriously. And yes, it’s lonely sometimes. Yes, it’s difficult. Yes, you wish it were easier to find someone who understands. But you wouldn’t trade it because you’ve tasted freedom. And freedom, real freedom, is worth any price. The spiritually awake can’t find love. Not because love has abandoned them, but because they refuse to call anything less than truth by that name. They’ve stopped confusing need with love. hunger with passion, attraction with devotion. They’ve stopped playing the game where two people use each other as escapes from themselves. And in stopping, they’ve opened themselves to something far more real. Something that may never come or that may come tomorrow or that may already be here in forms they haven’t learned to recognize yet.

But whatever happens, they know this. They are already whole, already complete, already free. And that knowledge, that certainty is more valuable than all the counterfeit romances in the world. They would rather be alone in truth than coupled in illusion. They would rather wait a lifetime for something real than settle for something that merely fills the time. This is the price of awakening, and it is also its gift. You lose the ability to lose yourself in others, but you gain the ability to find yourself in everything. You lose the comfort of mutual neediness, but you gain the freedom of not needing at all. You lose the old story of romance, but you open yourself to the possibility of something so much greater. Love without conditions, love without demands, love that asks nothing and gives everything. Love that is not a feeling or an emotion but a way of being in the world and if you never find another person to share that with, well you still have the love itself because it was never in the other person anyway.

It was always in you, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be lived. Not as a transaction between two people, but as the ground of your very being. As what you are, not what you do. As the ocean, not the wave. This is why the spiritually awake can’t find love in the usual way because they’ve already found it in the most important way. They found it in themselves. And nothing, no person, no relationship, no romance, however sweet, can compare to that discovery. Everything else is just play. Delightful perhaps, beautiful sometimes, but play nonetheless. And you can enjoy the play without mistaking it for the real thing, without betting your piece on its outcome, without forgetting who you are beneath all the costumes and roles.

So, yes, you’re alone sometimes. Yes, the crowd has thinned out. Yes, it’s harder to find someone who speaks your language. But you’re also free in a way you never were before. Free to love without needing. Free to connect without clinging. Free to be yourself without apology or pretense. And that freedom, that vast spacious freedom is what you’ve been looking for all along. Not in another person, but in yourself. Where it always was, where it always will be. Waiting for you to come home.

https://youtu.be/ifY_7fGVcpQ?si=tX5OJmcNLr-_-DLy