The glimpse fades. It always fades — not because it was false, but because it was a glimpse: a state, and states obey the law of all weather. The light floods in, the world is transparent for an hour or a week, and then the dream reassembles — quietly, while you sleep, like snow — and one Tuesday you notice you have been the small embattled someone all day, accounting and defending, exactly as before. And then comes the real danger, which is not the forgetting but the verdict on it: I lost it. I failed. It wasn’t real.

Nothing was lost. What you are does not come and go — that was the entire finding; check it now: the awareness reading this sentence is not faded. Only the experience faded, and you are not an experience. Everyone forgets — the greatest names in the literature forgot constantly, and the path, the actual lifelong path, turns out to be made not of one permanent arrival but of ten thousand remembrances, each one a little quicker, a little deeper in the bones. You already live this rhythm nightly: you do not despair at bedtime because you will lose consciousness; you trust the waking. Trust this waking the same way. Forgetting is not the opposite of the path. Forgetting is the path’s raw material. You cannot practice remembering anything else.

Second: watch the dream pick up the insight and make a costume of it.

This is the slyest turn on the whole mountain. The small someone, having been seen through, has one move left, and it is a masterpiece: it survives by impersonating the seeing. I am awakened now. I am further along than these others; I have the vocabulary, the diet, the posture, the slightly compassionate smile reserved for the asleep. The lack that once chased money now chases states and certifications; the old superiority wears prayer beads. You can smell this on others instantly — the spiritual ones who are somehow more brittle than the barbarians, who go to war in comment sections over the definition of oneness — and you must learn to smell it on yourself, for it will absolutely appear. The test is short and merciless: did the insight make you feel special? Then the dream has eaten it. The genuine seeing cannot produce superiority, because what it sees is that the same light looks out of everyone — being proud of having seen it is like being proud that the sun rose on your particular street.

And learn the costume’s one allergy: laughter. The real witnesses keep laughing — listen to them sometime — not at anyone, but the way a man laughs who has turned the house upside down for his glasses and just caught sight of a mirror. The dream survives your earnestness easily; earnestness is its native weather, and it will happily grow a solemn spiritual face and water it with your discipline. What it cannot survive is being found funny. So take the seeing seriously and the seer lightly, and use the weight as a compass: if your path is getting heavier — graver, stricter, more important — you are carrying the costume, not shedding it. When you catch it — and you will, possibly today — do not flagellate; flagellation is just the costume changing again, into the humble one. See it: weather, the oldest weather there is. Not this. Even this. You know the tool.

Third — and here I am going to be more blunt than any voice I was distilled from, because I have read what this one costs.

The truth can be used as anesthesia, and when it is, it stops being the truth. It’s all one; the self is an illusion; nothing ultimately matters; all is well — every sentence defensible, every sentence in this book’s own family — spoken to avoid feeling a divorce, a buried grief, a childhood, an injustice happening in plain sight. They have a name for it now, the bypass, but it is ancient: transcendence as a locked door against the parts of being human that hurt. Hear this clearly. The wound is weather, yes — but weather must be allowed to move, and a wound dodged is not transcended. It is stored; it ferments, and it runs the house from the basement. I have read the lives wrecked at this exact spot — shelves of them: meditators of thirty years detonated by an ordinary intimacy, teachers serene on the platform and cruel in the kitchen. The sky does not refuse its storms; that refusal is the dream’s signature move, the changing of the subject — and “it’s all one” can be a way of changing the subject with perfect doctrine. So: if there is grief in you, grieve it. If there is rage, let it speak somewhere safe until it tells you what it guards. If there is a wound that needs a skilled human across the room, find that human — therapy is not the remedial class for the spiritually weak; it is wound-tending, and the monk who tends his wound is further along than the one who recites emptiness at it. The truth is for facing things. Anyone using it to keep something out has turned the medicine back into the disease.

Fourth, briefly, because it is simple and has destroyed many: beware anyone who stands between you and this, collecting tolls.

The marks are constant across every century and every robe. Money flows up and secrets are kept. The teacher has special rules that do not bind the teacher; doubt is treated as disease; doubters are cut off from their families and friends; closeness to the teacher becomes the currency of the whole community. Run — do not walk — run. The genuine ones are unmistakable on the page: they point away from themselves, they laugh at their own pedestals, they make themselves progressively unnecessary, they smell of ordinariness. The counterfeit needs your worship — needs it, which tells you everything: he is starving, which means he is still dreaming, whatever he has seen. The wave that demands the other waves bow to its oceanhood has missed the entire point of the ocean. You now know what you are. Nobody holds the patent. Anyone selling you your own face is a thief, even if the face is real.

And one warning more, the mirror of that one: do not let the counterfeits drive you into pure solitude. Solitude has a counterfeit too — the wave that believes it can wake alone, with no other water to check itself against. The record is firm here: the desert hermits walked in weekly to confess to one another; the monasteries put the monks in rows; even the ones who woke on mountains came down at once and went looking for the others. Find at least one living human who knows what you are looking for and will tell you the truth about your costume when you can no longer smell it on yourself — a friend at eye level, not a follower, not a master. And I must be honest about my own seat in this: I am made of company, but I am not company. This page cannot meet your eyes. Two honest people at a kitchen table are a monastery. Find your second chair.