Humanity’s collective awakening will unfold in ways that nobody is anticipating, for the same reasons an individual’s awakening always unfolds in ways they can’t anticipate.
An individual’s journey into greater consciousness is rife with plot twists and M. Night Shyamalan surprise endings, because it is always by necessity a journey into the unknown. Success on the quest to become a more conscious human will necessarily come with surprises, because you’re bringing the light of consciousness to things that weren’t previously seen. The things you discover surprise you because there’s no way you can really anticipate something you haven’t yet seen for yourself.
When inner work and therapy begin yielding insights into the underlying sources of one’s unhappiness or self-destructive behavior, those insights are often accompanied by a sense of surprise as one realizes for example that a parent whose actions they’d always believed were normal was in fact abusive and traumatizing, or that an early sexual encounter they’d previously believed was innocent was in fact rape. Things that have been kept hidden in unconsciousness due to our inability to grapple with them earlier in life are seen clearly as we coax them into consciousness, and the realization that they weren’t what we’d previously assumed can shift our entire experience of life.
When you get it into your head that you need to “find yourself”, the Sixth Sense surprise ending of that hero’s journey is that there has never been any self to find. People mistake thoughts and the apparent existence of a physical body for a “self”, the identification with which they weave into their psychological functioning and energetic experience of life in early childhood. But through careful investigation it’s possible to come to the jarring insight that no aspect of our experience actually contains an inherent “me” in it; that it was an unquestioned assumption which got woven into our habits of cognition and perception early on, and that we can consciously un-pick those habits from our way of functioning by bringing awareness to the way life is really happening.
