When I look back now at my own experience of waking up from sleep in two important areas, I seem to have experienced the eureka moment by connecting the dots that seemed unrelated. I can see it now as the culmination of a long process of study, direct experience, and contemplation. I have often been inspired by experts who paved the way for those who are open enough to listen to them without prejudice while the rest of the world thinks they are crazy.
In one area - geopolitics - I'm constantly reminded of this experience as I encounter so many people, including those I know personally, who talk about two controversial issues as if they were not connected at all.
Especially when I hear such people talk about one of them with such authority and confidence, I can't help asking them - often playfully - what they think of the other issue and whether they don't see a connection between them. A typical answer I get from them is, "What connection?!" ;-)
I've learned not to try to convince them, as this is a futile attempt. Even worse, such an attempt by others, especially those who are close to them, can make them even more stubborn, as I remember very well from my own experience of many futile attempts by well-meaning people to wake me up through rational conviction. When we don't know what we don't know, nobody else can generally help us turn this unknown unknown into the known unknown.
And in a sense, it seems even less problematic to remain asleep in both of the mutually connected issues than to be awake in one of them but remain asleep in the other, not only in this specific area but also elsewhere. In the former, you are at least consistent, ;-) while in the latter, you use two separate standards without realizing that you do so.
My ongoing experience of waking up from the prison of the egoic mind involved a totally different kind of connecting the dots. If we see each creature as a dot, all the dots are interconnected. So connecting these dots is actually getting rid of the illusion of separation, rediscovering the connection that already exists, or even dissolving the dots.
Here, I haven't even tried to explain this experience to anyone who seems to be still trapped in this prison, imagining that nobody else could have helped me wake up from sleep rationally without my prior direct experience.
Of course, there is no guarantee that I, as well as my predecessors who paved the way for us, have correctly connected the dots in these two areas. But one thing I can say is that what used to look nebulous and murky looks crystal-clear now.
Website
Блог на русском
DeepL (probably the best machine translation available now)