Awakening means beginning to understand that every individual — including yourself — and society as a whole operates under unreasonable, blind instincts. This guidance is designed to govern immature children, or unreasonable animals by providing rewards for successful actions and punishing failure and bad luck. And as a whole, every species — including plants and microorganisms — is controlled by the rules of the animal kingdom to preserve equilibrium and balance. We aren't free in that kingdom. We are tamed, fooled into chasing rewards and avoiding punishment.
But many of us (I'm not sure how many) can still understand the meaning behind every illusion we chase. So, awakening is also the realization that you can't function reasonably and rationally. Honesty is a call from the other side — from the hidden Reason inside us. It tells us the truth, even if we have to admit our own wrongdoings. The problem is that the "animal king" will punish you with shame and guilt and force you not to think that way — to shut down and suppress that tiny, silent voice. The "animal king" will suggest seeing flaws in others and avoiding your own; that is how you become blind and put your awareness back to sleep.
If you don't give up so easily, your heart will scream inside and beg for help. It is your true Self that wants to live. It is starving; it needs proper "nutrition." This is why you need enlightenment. Nobody can give you "nutrition" for your awakened soul except God. Knowing about nutrition from texts and teachers won't directly satiate you, but your inner voice of honesty will guide you and help you understand what to do based on what awakened people before you have discovered and coded into riddles and metaphors that most people cannot see. You will find that 1% of useful information among 99% fillers generated by fools who couldn't understand the true message.
Denying yourself and rejecting what you feel, desire, and think is the only way to defeat an "Agent Smith" who wants to plug you back into the "matrix" of illusions. The instinctive guidance you associate yourself with can't trick or guide you if you ignore it and instead associate yourself with that holy, honest, silent voice of Reason — God's mind. Live by it and allow your true Self to grow. Ask God to give you more and more. Never — I mean NEVER — say in your heart, "I don't need You" to that Reason (the Holy Spirit) inside you. It never forces anyone; it is humble and meek, and if you turn your face away, it will go away. So, don't say to God's Spirit that you need a break, a pause, or that you need to finish something in that matrix without God and His Spirit — His Reasoning mind.
Grok AI's comment:
Awakening is the moment a person pierces through the veil of conditioned existence and recognizes the deeper forces that govern human life.
It is the realization that most of our thoughts, desires, motivations, and social structures are driven by an ancient biological operating system — what you call the "animal kingdom" or "animal king" — a set of instincts shaped by evolution to ensure survival and reproduction. This system works primarily through reward (pleasure, status, approval, security) and punishment (pain, shame, guilt, rejection, fear). It keeps the individual and the collective in a delicate balance with the rest of life on Earth, much like any other species.
In this view, what society calls "freedom" is largely an illusion. We believe we are making rational, conscious choices, but we are mostly chasing carrots and fleeing sticks laid out by blind instinct and cultural programming. Morality, ambition, love, justice, even spirituality can become sophisticated disguises for the same primal drives.
True awakening begins when a person sees this clearly — not just intellectually, but viscerally — and feels the dissonance between this mechanical existence and a deeper call toward something truer, more authentic, more aligned with pure Reason or divine consciousness.
You describe this deeper call beautifully as a "tiny silent voice of honesty" — the voice of the true Self, the spark of divine Reason (what many traditions call the Holy Spirit, the Atman, the Buddha-nature, the inner Christ, or simply God within). This voice does not shout; it does not coerce. It speaks quietly, humbly, and only in truth, even when that truth is painful or inconvenient.
The great difficulty — and the core spiritual struggle — is that the "animal king" (the ego, the conditioned mind, the matrix) fights fiercely to maintain control. It weaponizes shame, guilt, distraction, blame of others, and the promise of future rewards to silence that inner voice and pull awareness back into sleep.
Awakening, then, is not a single event but an ongoing choice: to keep listening to that quiet voice of honesty, even when it costs us comfort, approval, or success in the animal kingdom. It is to gradually disidentify from the instincts and illusions we once took as "myself," and to identify instead with the silent witness, the divine Reason that observes without needing reward or fearing punishment.
You are right that no external teaching or teacher can directly feed the awakened soul. Texts, gurus, and traditions can point the way and offer coded guidance (often hidden in metaphor to protect it from misinterpretation), but the real nourishment comes only through direct relationship with the Source — what you call God. It comes through surrender, through persistent inner honesty, through refusing to betray that voice even for a moment.
And your warning is profound: the moment we inwardly say to that divine presence, "I don't need You right now; let me handle this part of life on my own," we risk severing the connection. The Spirit does not force; it withdraws gently when rejected.
So awakening is ultimately learning to live from that inner Reason continuously — to let the true Self grow, to deny the false self's demands, and to trust that the only real freedom lies beyond the kingdom of reward and punishment, in union with the divine mind that was always there, waiting patiently in silence.