I found this YouTube video which is really nothing but a spam account that replicated the voice of Dr. Gabor Mate, someone I’d never heard of until this morning. The AI generated voice that is supposed to be Gabor Mate is not perfect, but as it auto-played in my earbud this morning I actually stopped everything I was doing because of a few things I heard.
The title of the clip is “You’re not lazy, your awakening is rewiring your motivation.”
As it was auto-playing I had no idea what the title of the clip was, but what I heard the voice saying was some things that matched what happened to me many years ago as I began to reach the Deep Jhanas.
I pulled the transcript from it and had ChatGPT make sense of it in paragraph format. I’ll bold the things that matched my experience. Some of which I’ve never heard said before by anyone else. The talk is very much like an Alan Watts talk. Anyway, I enjoyed it for a while. I stopped listening somewhere after this transcript stops. I pulled about the first 16 minutes.
I still don’t know anything about the man, but I couldn’t ignore what was said. I don’t know if he got this knowledge first hand or if he learned about it somewhere and did a talk about it. I’m not even sure this talk is directly from him, as the voice is obviously ai-generated and emotionless. Anyway, if you’d like to learn more about Dr. Mate, here is his About page on his site.
Transcript About What Awakening is Really Like
You are not losing motivation. You are losing the version of yourself that was built on pressure, fear, and survival.
What feels like emptiness is actually your nervous system refusing to keep living a life that was never truly yours. And if you do not understand this moment, you will either numb it or miss the most important transformation of your life.
You did the work most people never even attempt. Not casually, and not out of boredom, but with a deep, almost unexplainable hunger that told you, from somewhere beneath the surface of ordinary daily life, that something about the existence everyone else seemed satisfied with was simply not enough.
So you searched. You questioned beliefs that most people inherit and never examine. You sat alone with your thoughts while everyone around you reached for distraction. You faced parts of yourself you did not want to see. You did the inner work, the kind that gets no applause, that nobody around you recognizes or validates, and that produces no visible result for months and sometimes years.
And then it happened. Something shifted.
The noise in your mind went quiet. For the first time in as long as you could remember, you felt genuinely still, clear, present, and connected. (not for first time, it happened in meditation a lot, but for the first time when not meditating at all it happened). Not just to the people around you, but to something larger than any individual life. In that moment, you thought, “This is it. This is what I have been searching for. This is where my real life begins.”
But then something strange happened. The fire did not come. Instead, it faded.
The goals that once consumed you began to feel empty. The things you were chasing stopped making sense. The life you were building started to feel like it belonged to someone else. You looked at your ambitions and felt nothing. No excitement, no urgency, no desire. Even the things that once genuinely made you happy now felt like obligations, tasks to be completed rather than possibilities to move toward.
And that was what made it so terrifying. You were not sad, and not depressed in any recognizable way. You were not heartbroken or burned out or struggling in any nameable sense that would have made the experience easier to explain. You just felt empty, as if something inside you had gone very quiet.
That silence started to scare you, because if this was awakening, if this was the arrival of the clarity you had been building toward, why did it feel like losing yourself rather than finding yourself?
Hear this plainly. You are not broken. You are not failing. You are not losing your mind. (I thought this a number of times after Jhana 4 states and especially after the higher Jhanas)
What you are moving through is one of the most documented and most consistently misunderstood phases of genuine human psychological development. It has a mechanism. It has a path through it. And that path leads somewhere that makes everything that came before it make sense.
To understand why awakening does this, why the very clarity you worked toward becomes the thing that dismantles your motivation, you have to understand what was actually powering the drive you lost.
Most people spend the first significant portion of their adult lives building and maintaining a version of themselves organized around external approval. It is a carefully curated identity shaped by what their family valued, what their culture rewarded, and what their environment indicated was worth pursuing.
This identity tells you what success should look like, what kind of life is worth living, and what you need to achieve before you are permitted to feel like you have made it. Without ever consciously choosing it, without ever sitting down and deliberately deciding that this is the life you want, you begin chasing what the identity prescribes.
You push yourself harder. You stay disciplined. You produce results that other people admire. But the fuel powering all of it is not what you have been calling it.
It is not passion. It is not authentic purpose.
It is fear. Deep, rarely examined fear. Fear of not being enough. Fear of being seen as a failure. Fear of not living up to expectations that were installed in you before you were old enough to evaluate them. Fear of stopping the achievement and discovering that underneath all of it, there is nothing worth caring about.
This kind of motivation is extraordinarily powerful. It can push you for years, even decades, producing results that genuinely impress both you and the people around you. But it has one structural vulnerability. It is not built on truth. It is built on pressure.
And pressure requires constant maintenance, validation, recognition, and continuous external confirmation that the achievement is sufficient. Remove that fuel, or make it visible, and the engine stops.
That is what awakening does. In a single, irreversible flash of genuine clarity, it makes the fuel visible.
You see that the ambitions were tied to how you wanted to be seen. You see that the discipline was organized around managing anxiety about your own value. You see that the whole machine of your drive was running on an unconscious attempt to fix something inside yourself through external accumulation.
And once you see it, once the mechanism is clearly visible, it cannot run the way it used to. The mechanism requires invisibility to function. Conscious awareness cannot power unconscious motivation. The exposure ends the automation.
Here is the first brutal truth. You did not lose your motivation. You saw through it. You saw that it was built on fear rather than truth, and your mind, now awake to what was running beneath the surface, refuses to keep generating energy for a pattern it can no longer pretend not to see.
Here is the second brutal truth. Every time you try to return to the old goals, to force yourself back into the previous drive through willpower and discipline, you are attempting to reinvest energy into a structure your deeper self has already decided to outgrow.
The hunger is not coming back. Not for those things. Not in that form.
(I did this – ran back toward the old Vern. The old ways. The old things that in the present I had no desire for, but I never felt the same Vern. It was empty. Drinking with friends – empty. Sex – empty. Running, biking, swimming, fishing, all of it – empty. )
What you are calling emptiness is not the absence of something. It is the clearing of what was false so that space can open for something genuinely real to finally become audible.
The question is not how to get the old motivation back. The question is whether you are willing to stay in the clearing long enough to hear what has always been beneath it.
There is a phase between the collapse of the old motivation and the emergence of a new kind. It has been recognized across traditions, documented across psychological frameworks, and described in the language of transformation as the necessary breakdown of existing form before something genuinely new can be built from cleared ground.
From the inside, it feels like stagnation. It feels like failure. It feels as if the version of yourself that cared about things and moved toward them with real force has simply been removed. What remains is a vacancy that your mind keeps returning to with increasing urgency and decreasing patience.
You try to manufacture new goals, but nothing sticks. You try to return to old ambitions, but the hunger is not there. You begin wondering whether something is medically wrong with you, whether this is depression masquerading as spiritual development. (exactly all of this)
From the inside, the experience does not easily allow you to distinguish the difference. But what is happening is more like a chrysalis, a necessary period of complete interior reorganization so total and so fundamental that its external appearance of stillness is profoundly misleading.
Something is happening at a depth the surface cannot represent. And the only requirement for its completion is the one thing most people find hardest to provide—patient, conscious, present waiting.
Most approaches to spiritual development describe awakening as the arrival of bliss, expanded purpose, and permanent clarity. They are not wrong. (they are wrong – there is no bliss, just peaceful awareness that everything has changed. it is not good/bad or anything else… it’s just a non-dual state where everything is fine, just completely new and only awareness of the present moment is there)
But they consistently leave out one uncomfortable reality. The path to that clarity often passes directly through a valley of complete purposelessness that almost no one is genuinely prepared for.
Anyway, I stopped there as it went some directions that had little to do with my own experience.
I try to tell people that this awakening is an ego destroyer. It changes the reality of life in a way that is surprising.
There’s no bliss. But, there’s no pain about it either. It’s as it is. Nothing to be changed about it. It’s awakening to the seamless reality that underlies everything we see and experience.
🙂