Non-Dual Awareness and the End of Career Anxiety

Where the mind dies, you will find yourself.

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Most people climb career ladders that are leaned against the wrong walls.

Observe humans and notice this. We're all built to strive. Every human carries a seed of hunger - to achieve, to create, to make something of themselves. But almost from the moment we're born, that hunger, that desire to create, is hijacked by external conditioning. The mind is becoming full of the world, and the world contaminates us.

First, we get brainwashed by cultural conditioning. How many of our choices are driven by association with our culture? Look around and investigate this. If you have Indian friends, they'll tell you about the "five honourable professions" - doctor, engineer, civil servant, armed forces officer, teacher. Your parents want you to be a certain way, and so you go and force yourself into a path you might not be cut out for. Talk to someone from an Asian culture - Korean, Chinese, and you'll hear about the crushing academic pressure from childhood, and their tears over scoring 97 when someone else scored 99. Why the suicide rate is so high in those countries despite the economic development? It is because the soul is crushed by the pressure created by external conditioning. You are placed in a comparative system of coordinates (or should we say the comparative system of coordinates is placed within you - planted in your mind) before you even know who you are. And knowing who you are is act of work. It takes hunger, it takes perseverance, and normally it takes decades of human life invested into deep investigation.

In the West, the script is different, but the result is the same. Here, you are brainwashed from your young age with a capitalistic value system. You must succeed. You have to keep up with the Joneses. Money becomes the ultimate metric of worth. If you make a lot of it, you must be important. And if you're important, you're supposed to be happy. But are you happy?

Then, if you are successful in training your mind how to generate money, you get there - you are passing the threshold and getting into a certain level of income that allows you a lifestyle where you stop fighting for survival and start seeing the truth: making money is one skill, making yourself happy is a completely different one. The latter is just as hard - or maybe even harder - to master.

Over the last 6 years, I've met thousands of people from every walk of life. Different incomes, different titles, different ages, psychodemographics. And I see a pattern that is persistent through all social layers: most people are confused.

This confusion comes from one fundamental illusion that dominates humanity:

Everything you chase in life, you chase as a person. And you do this because you believe you are that person.

But are you the person? I am here to ask you that question. I am here to invite you to explore this in depth. And for that I invite you into the space of non-dual awareness.

What Non-Dual Awareness Really Means

To understand non-dual awareness, one must first understand duality.

Duality, as the name suggests, means “two” or "two-ness" - the experience of life as two opposing forces: push and pull, light and dark, men and women, sun and moon, ground and sky. You see it everywhere, and ancient symbols like the Yin-Yang capture it perfectly. ☯️ Darkness becomes light. Light becomes darkness. Good can’t exist without evil. Happiness is the mirror reflection of misery. One cannot be known without the other.

Observe life and you will see that (seeming) duality in everything.

The first layer of duality is physical. Since you were born you have a body. Your body is solid, it has boundaries. When you were little you thought you were the body. When you grew up you started noticing that it feels more like "you" are inside the body, sitting somewhere in the depth of your skull, looking outside through your eyeballs, controlling the avatar - seeing the world. Everything else - the whole world and other people - seem to be “outside”. This seemingly obvious experience creates the illusion of separation - the sense that there's a separate "me" here and there is a separate "world" out there.

But examine your direct experience, and the illusion starts to crack. Let's take a look.

How do you know anything about the "external" world? Only through your senses. And those senses - sight, sound, touch, taste, smell - are nothing more than sensations arising in your mind. The whole experience of the so-called "external" world is happening only inside. Does it mean that all experience is “internal”? Well, there is no "internal" either. Every single thing you've experienced has happened within the mind, within consciousness. Your sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, memories, expectations, hopes, fears and dreams - your whole unique and unprecedented human experience is unfolding in its totality in You, exclusively for You. You are the creator of the experience, and you are its only witness. 8 billion people. 8 billion unique realities. Everyone is locked inside their head, a prisoner and the only beholder of the reality of their own mind.

There's no "inside" or "outside" - there is only experience itself and the awareness of that experience - that which you are.

From here, the investigation deepens:

If I am aware of my experience, then what is the nature of my experience? Well, apparently, I am experiencing my thoughts.

Thoughts about work, about career, about money. Expectations and future modelling of reality, visualizations, thought processes, triggers, emotional reactions. Anxious thoughts, fearful thoughts, limiting thoughts - they all are rising within the space of the awareness that you are.

They come and go. They appear and disappear throughout your entire life... Your Identity, aka Self-Concept, is transforming. Thoughts of the world. Thoughts of who you are. They all change… But wait, if they constantly change, then who is the one who notices them? Your body is changing, your identification is changing with the body - child, student, professional, leader, parent, single, divorced, widowed, actively searching - you call yourself all these things and these things always change - yet it is always "YOU". It always has been “You”. So, who is that aspect of “You” that remains unchanged through the transformation of life regardless of the role, age, shape or form of your body, occupation, experience happening in the moment. Who is that “I” that is associating itself with all these things?

Ask yourself what your identity is if not an entanglement of those thoughts of association. Who are you without the association? What would remain if you lost all your memories? Investigate and you'll see that the Identity itself is nothing more than a thought - the "I" thought - the core thought from which all other thoughts flow: I have to... I want to... I must... I can't... I am…

And once you see that all your beliefs and notions of self stem from this foundational "I" thought, something else shatters - the realization that will change the game for you: If I am aware of the “I” thought, then it might be that I am not it. But if I am not it, then every other sentence that starts with “I” is a false statement too.

Naturally. How can you be the thought and be aware of the thought? In order for the act of witnessing to take place, you’ve got to be something different.

That recognition is non-dual awareness.

You become aware that you exist independently of the thought process that is unfolding within your mind, and you always have a choice - to forget yourself as awareness and merge with the thought fully, or to remember yourself as awareness at all times and see the mind at play, conjuring its illusions.

You can be the mind daydreaming in the world of thought. Or you can be aware of the mind, fully awake, fully present, vigilant to every egoic movement inside your head, every judgmental thought.

This shall become the main discovery of your life. And your life will start to transform.

Life and Career Before the Shift

As you are reading this, you can look around and notice this: most people are daydreaming.

Most people live in the illusion - the illusion of the "I-thought". They are immersed in that belief that they are some kind of person. I'm John Smith, the architect. I'm Jane Doe, the nurse. I am Nikhil Gupta, the software engineering manager working for Meta making 900k a year. I am so important, but Mr. Zuckerberg can fire me any day now. I am the body, I am the name, I am my roles, I am my status, I am my money, I am - whatever notions I choose to believe in.

And this is all that people do. All day. Every day. Their entire life is a chase of things that they chase and pursue as that “person” - the person they believe themselves to be - a consolidated entity built from thoughts and the glue of association.

But that person is not real. It is woven by attachment, conjured by the thinking mind from millions of different thoughts that come out of nowhere. Thoughts absorbed from the so-called "external" world. Ideas of how the life should be, what success is, what happiness is, what the meaning of life is. All that external conditioning determines the whole decision-making framework - around career, life, choice of a partner, country or city to live in, philosophy around money, safety, security. And this is what life looks like before an awakening experience - living in the illusion of personhood.

You chase things because you believe you are some kind of person, and that person believes something. That person believes that they need to become a millionaire to be happy. They believe that they need a high title to be respected. They believe that external validation will bring them peace, and they will finally compensate for some kind of childhood trauma, or prove something to parents, or ex-partner, or ex-boss, or the world. They don't even know where the origin of all these beliefs is located inside their mind. They're scarred and traumatized, anxious and restless, but they've never explored and dissected what these scars are, what this pain is that's locked inside that drives them, who inflicted it, and what kind of beliefs it has shaped.

A person might have one singular experience, not even a series of experiences, and then create conclusions about life and be driven by them. To be betrayed one time and then conclude that all people of the opposite gender are betrayers in disguise. To fail one interview, and then make conclusions about their own capability - that they're incompetent, that they're not enough. Fail one business, and form a belief that they are simply not "entrepreneur-type". What have you - the mind is full of such traps, and this is one of its most favourite ones - the confidence in your own pattern recognition that is drawn from a limited data set. You think you get the principles of life just from one, maybe two, isolated experiences. But do you?

A person in ego mode is chasing a career for external validation - consumed by thoughts: what my partner would say, what my parents would say, what my community would say, what society would say, what my bosses would say. Who cares? Who is constantly raising the importance? The mind does. The mind manufactured that ego. And the Ego is built through external signals, it exists as a pure externalization of Identity. I know who I am based on what other people tell me about me. Does it sound absurd enough when I put it this way? Yet this is how most people choose to live.

They chase titles because they think titles equal respect. They chase money because they think money will solve all their problems. They chase association with groups because they can't stand staying alone even for one minute, to turn inwards, and face the demons that are plaguing their mind.

A so-called “normal” human is nothing normal - he is mentally sick, constantly anxious, fearful about the future, never present in the moment, moving through life in panic and reactivity, stuck in a personal movie that is unfolding inside their agitated mind personally for him. He knows no Silence, and so he doesn’t know who he really is.

His consciousness is vibrating through low-level emotions - fear, anxiety, pressure, craving, comparison with others. What kind of life is this? A life of emotional turmoil.

A life that is built on false constructs. A life without a solid foundation - nothing to stand on, nothing to build upon. He is living in a house of cards. Wind blows, and the whole world is falling apart.

What if I told you that everyone can become unshakeable?

You can become unshakeable.

After the Shift: Career in Non-Dual Awareness

Things change when you've seen through the illusion of "I."

Externally nothing will change. At least not at the beginning. You still go to work. You still attend to your worldly affairs.

But the Inner Game - your unique human experience inside your mind - shifts completely.

When you transcend ego, when you truly understand that the person you have always believed yourself to be is a complete and utter illusion, you will start seeing through the games that ego likes to play. You will start seeing the games that other people play, their incentives, the rules they have created for themselves and others, and the principles on which the master-game, the world game, is constructed.

Let me be specific.

1 - You understand that corporations are a game.

A company can and might serve you at a certain stage of your development when you need an ecosystem to grow. You need to build your EQ and social skill set. You need to build your technical skill set. You need to understand how to follow guidance and instruction. You need to understand how to work with others and build your foundational ability to read people and collaborate with them.

But if you look at the inner principle, any kind of company, any kind of organization pays you a fraction for the actual value that you create for them. Think about it. If you are employed, you already have the proof of concept - you have validated for yourself that someone is willing to pay money for your mind. So, if they pay you for the value you create, it means the free market will pay you too - and it can pay you at your asking price. To find out what it would look like, you will have to go into that scary place to discover what is the real value that you create and what is the real dollar value that you have the guts to claim for your work. Guts is a form of intelligence too :)

Most people won't go there. Why? Because one - ego is complacent. Ego dwells in comfort, and ego will conjure all sorts of fears and all sorts of scenarios why something will and absolutely should go wrong to keep you in that comfort. That complacency is deadly.

Two - we all have different gifts. We all have different skill sets, tolerance and appetite for risk. We have different starting points and different initial starting positions in life, defined by nothing but blind luck. I won't deny this. Such is life. However, I refuse to believe that we are, by design, created to be slaves. And what is a corporation if not a modern form of slavery? It takes the best years from you - the years of your brightest intelligence and highest energy to feed the machine, and give you scraps for the value your mind creates. The game is rigged. But an unawakened one can't see it. He plays the game immersed in it as a character. The character goes through motions. The character is playing the character - because it was trained to do so - this is the only modus operandi he knows. The only way of being.

To question your default way of being, you’ve got to be nuts. It takes courage to go into the place everyone is running away from. To be called insane, and persevere to only find out one day that everyone else is insane, whilst you have a shot at true sanity.

2 - You understand that titles are meaningless.

It doesn't matter who you are - a manager, VP, or a CXO. The cemetery is full of “important” execs. What are titles? Meaningless words that people came up with in order to create some kind of system of categorization to show what your place is in the pecking order. Theoretically, that combination of words is supposed to signal some form of influence or your capability. But does it? Do you see a lot of truly bright, competent people in positions of power? Be honest. If you can indeed see the corporate world for what it is, I doubt that.

People get titles because they chase titles.

The human mind is very powerful. If you are dead set on getting something for yourself, you will get it. You have everything you have in your life because not having it at some point stopped being an option. Clearly, in the world of work, getting into the way into the position of power lies not only through capability.

Blind leaders everywhere. Some lack heart, some lack wit, some lack character. How did they get there? Some played politics. Some slept with their boss. Some got money from their daddy. Sometimes it is something as banal as promotion for technical prowess (even against the desire of the one who is being promoted). Who cares how? Different paths. Different ways. The point being - the title game is an illusion - the ego craves status, the ego praises, the ego wants to feel like it matters in the world. These are the invisible incentives in place that drive human behaviour.

An awakened operator sees through the ambition game of the ego. The awareness behind the mind can see through the game of importance that the ego wants to play. Ego wants to feel significant. Ego wants to feel important. Ego wants reverence, respect and recognition. And then ego dictates the whole value system around that importance, a belief that you need to have some kind of position in society, status. Ego wallows in comparison with others like a pig in the mud.

It breaks my heart, and I feel nothing but compassion. What a miserable life it is to live constantly comparing yourself to others. What a humiliating and suffocating existence it is to live within a system of coordinates that is sitting there inside your mind, imposed, ingrained, covered with black mold, never questioned, never pressure-tested. You've never asked yourself where it's coming from. You never dissected whether it has any real validity.

To break free means to go to the first principles.

Ask yourself:

Why do you believe the shit that you believe?

3 - You understand money differently.

Money is important.

Money is energy. It's the juice of life. And there are so many good things in life that you can do with money. Yet how come, then, there are so many people who have money but are miserable? Why do we watch these videos on YouTube with interviews of disillusioned billionaires? There was a video of a billionaire when he was asked, "Do you regret working so much?" And he said, "My first marriage broke apart. I don’t remember any moments with my children. Now I know. I can always go and make more money. But I can't go and make more time, these moments that I've missed will never be returned. So do I regret? Yes. I absolutely regret it.”

What is this if not a definition of wasted time?

Wasted time is the time when you are not present for the things you want to be present for.

Time is the currency of life. The only one. Precious. Raw. Undeniable. Time lived in illusion is a time wasted. Time wasted chasing things running after illusory carrots - time wasted. Time creating life driven by false beliefs that don’t even belong to you = time wasted.

The ego, wants to chase money. The ego thinks that money is the solution to life. Once I get that car I will be happy. Once I buy that home, I will be happy. Once I have that boat, that private jet I will be happy. And the chase never stops, because it doesn’t matter how much money you have, there is a guy next door who has more.

An awakened being sees money as energy and notices the flow of energy. With time and focus, they begin to understand that it requires skill and awareness to become a masterful facilitator of the money-energy flow. They learn to place themselves in a position of leveraging and catalyzing that energy flow. And that is how they build material wealth. Detached from it, uncontrolled by greed or desire. Creating from a place of pure creation, pure joy of creation, and accepting money as a side-effect of their creative process.

Money flows to you when you are ready. You get ready (largely) by unblocking and resolution of the things inside your head that are preventing the money flow.

4 - You stop wasting energy on resistance.

When you're not driven by ego, you're not triggered by people. You don't spend your precious mental, psychic energy on things that are not going your way. And after awakening, there is no "your way." Only the ego has a way. Only the ego wants to have its way, force reality to align with its rigid set-in-stone expectations. The Ego wants to control, the Ego wants to choke reality. The Ego is stuck in its vision of how reality should be, and when reality proves to be different from expectations, the ego gets angry and mad and frustrated.

It is unbelievable how much energy people spend on this nonsense. On expectations, hopes, dreams, fears, desires, and all associated draining emotions. On gossip, water-cooler chats about the events that have nothing to do with their life, talking about other people behind their backs. On consuming content that invites no material change in their life. On politics, religion, media, worries and anxieties, things they don't control - anything, to place attention everywhere, only not to look within themselves and think deeply about the content of their mind. Constantly trying to control the uncontrollable. Suffering with clenched teeth from trying to control other people, trying to control the outcomes of their actions. Such a waste.

What if all this energy is spent on something else? How much life energy is saved if someone is walking the path of non-resistance? Accepting life in its totality and flowing with it.

Not as a passive observer. No. Still doing things. Still engaged with life fully. Still creative. Still facilitating micro-collisions in life that lead to magical outcomes. But without resisting to what is, without attaching to the outcomes.

What kind of life would it be for you if you moved through the world with zero internal resistance? What would become possible for you? What would happen with your so coveted performance, productivity, and execution? What is the price tag you are willing to put on the inner peace you have been seeking all your life?

For me, this is priceless.

The mind is creating stuff. But the awareness behind it is what creates the direction, the vector for the mind. I am not saying that the awareness behind it operates the mind, because the awareness operates nothing. It does nothing. Awareness just is. But the very fact that you are that - the awareness that is there, ever-present, observant, vigilant - changes the very whole way of how the mind functions and operates.

You can operate as the mind, fully believing in every thought you have, and associated with it.

Or you can live as awareness, knowing that every thought is just a thought, moving through life as Stillness undisturbed.

What kind of life would it be?

Why are you writing about this?

Everyone can be free.

I know that the seed of awakening is locked within each human from birth. Some are destined to awaken. Some are destined to live a life of ignorance, never to discover who they truly are. And it is what it is. This is just life.

And I have limited time here. I am not here to awaken humanity.

I am not interested in those who are not ready. Those who are ready will realize things they need to realize in life without my help.

But for the one who seeks - I am here to be the catalyst. I write for the one who is tired of hitting the "snooze" button. I write for those who know that there is something that is seriously wrong with falling back to sleep when you sense that something is fundamentally wrong with your understanding of life. They start noticing that the matrix is real. And I am here to tell them: it is.

The matrix is real. But it is not what you thought. It is not the global system that people created and are living in. The Matrix is the prison of your own mind - holding you hostage in that belief of your own reality.

I have news for you. You do not exist.

The person you believe yourself to be is nothing but a fabrication of the mind.

But that is good news. When the Person dies, your Freedom begins.

I am here to show you what it will unlock in your material life since you (your mind) care about this so much.

An awakened mind is free to create the reality that it deems worth creating. A sleepwalker creates from a place of ignorance and noise.

The shift from ego-driven career anxiety to non-dual awareness doesn't happen overnight. It’s a process.

Insight takes no time.
(Dis)integration takes work.

Spiritual path is a gradual recognition that dissolves the illusion of separation between you and your work, between you and success, between you and the life itself.

When that recognition stabilizes, career, money, material manifestation becomes not something you pursue as a person, but something that flows through awareness - naturally, effortlessly, without the suffering that comes from believing you are the one doing it all.

Life will create itself. And you shall be Life.