641. Angelo Dilullo

What Really Happens After Awakening

Summary: This conversation explores how a profound shift in identity can arise through self-inquiry and what changes when the sense of a separate self falls away. It also looks at the often turbulent period after awakening, including shadow work, body-held contraction, and the lived meaning of non-dual perception.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What actually changes when the sense of being a separate self collapses?
• How can simple self-inquiry reveal the gap between thoughts and the thinker?
• Why does the period after awakening often feel emotionally harder before it feels easier?
• What does non-dual perception look like in ordinary sensory experience and daily life?
• How can body-held contraction, helplessness, and resistance to life be met directly?

At the age of 24, after years of intense internal suffering and an intuition that something about the way we interact with our thoughts causes a lot of unnecessary suffering, Angelo had a fundamental shift in the way he experiences reality. This was a pervasive transformation and was life-altering at every level. It suddenly became clear that thoughts, and the way they “paint” our experience of ourselves, time, and space, are essentially unreal, something like ghosts. What replaced this world of thought, struggle, and suffering, was boundless clarity and intimacy with all immediate textures of phenomena. It became clear that this is simply the natural state of things and that it is true for everyone, even if there is some distortion in experience caused by thoughts.

It became exquisitely clear that suffering is unnecessary among humans and that any human being who has a genuine yearning to wake up to their true nature has the capacity to wake up to this boundless (non-separation) living truth. This led to the writing of the book, “Awake: It’s Your Turn.” The book is a combination of practical advice to help anyone who is on this pathless path, practice pointers and inquiry tips, and direct pointing (transmission) through language.

Book: Awake: It’s Your Turn

Simply Always Awake YouTube channel

Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group.

Transcript, summary, and key takeaways from this interview

Interview recorded April 2, 2022.

YouTube Video Chapters:

• 00:00:00 – Introduction and Background
• 00:05:38 – The Shift in Perception: From Suffering to Enlightenment
• 00:10:20 – Becoming Home
• 00:14:56 – Suffering and Awakening
• 00:19:21 – The Paradox of Authenticity
• 00:23:32 – Finding the Gap in Thoughts
• 00:28:07 – The Structure of the Mind and Perception
• 00:32:54 – The Unbound Consciousness
• 00:37:27 – The Natural State of Mind
• 00:41:59 – Embracing Pain and Sensory Input
• 00:46:51 – Overwhelming Sensory Experience
• 00:51:43 – The Nature of Experience
• 00:56:39 – The Dance of Nature and the Nature of “Ocean-ness”
• 01:01:06 – The non-dualistic nature of perception
• 01:05:29 – The Subtlety of the Spiritual Journey
• 01:10:39 – Shifting Gears, Changing Expectations and Enjoying the Moment
• 01:15:30 – The Meaning of Awakening
• 01:19:44 – Attuning to Your Instincts and Embracing Your Awakening
• 01:24:05 – Investigating the Relational Self
• 01:29:08 – Escaping Suffering and Dissolving into Reality
• 01:33:47 – Dissolving Boundaries of Perception
• 01:38:00 – The Importance of Focus while Driving
• 01:42:12 – Love for All Beings
• 01:47:04 – The Paradox of Enlightenment
• 01:51:51 – Trusting Yourself and the Unborn
• 01:56:26 – The Length of the Book
• 02:00:41 – Uncovering and holding discomfort in the body
• 02:05:12 – Going into the Contracted Area and Feeling Helplessness
• 02:09:47 – Investigating God, Death, and Reincarnation
• 02:14:12 – Energetic Realizations and Past Lives
• 02:18:34 – Wrapping Up the Conversation