May 23, 2026

The Responsibility of Awakening Revisited

The Responsibility of Awakening Revisited I sat with this question again this morning, before the emails, before the coffee — what am I supposed to do with wha...

The Responsibility of Awakening Revisited

I sat with this question again this morning, before the emails, before the coffee — what am I supposed to do with what I've seen? I don't have a clean answer. I only have the quiet suspicion that noticing something and then living as if I hadn't noticed is its own kind of harm.

The Question I Keep Returning To

There is a moment on the cushion, or sometimes in the middle of a Monday meeting, when something becomes visible that wasn't visible before. A pattern. A reaction. A small cruelty I hadn't recognized as cruelty. And then the sitting ends, or the meeting ends, and life continues — and I am left holding this small piece of clarity like a stone in my pocket.

What do I do with it?

I used to think awakening — even the small, provisional kind I've tasted — was a gift. Now I am not sure. It might be closer to a debt. Once you see, you cannot un-see, and the not-un-seeing asks something of you. But what? And to whom? And how did we, the seekers, the meditators, the readers of old books, come to imagine that private insight was ever the point?

What We Owe What We Know

I want to be careful here. I am not writing this to tell anyone what to do. I am writing because I genuinely do not know, and the not-knowing is louder each year.

There is a phrase I heard many years ago in a Vipassana retreat: bhavatu sabba mangalam — may all beings be happy. It is said at the end of sittings, almost as a formality. But when I finally slowed down enough to actually hear it, I noticed that it was not a wish. It was closer to a job description. If I am truly wishing this, what am I doing about it when I stand up?

And this is where different traditions have handled the same tension in different ways. I find it useful to lay them side by side — not to rank them, only to see the shape of the shared question.

Tradition	What is seen	What is asked in return
Theravada Buddhism	The impermanence of self and phenomena	Sila — ethical conduct as ground for further insight
Mahayana Buddhism	The emptiness of separation	Bodhisattva vow — remain until all are free
Advaita Vedanta	The one Self appearing as many	Seva — service as expression of non-duality
Christian mysticism	The indwelling divine in all	Love of neighbor as love of God
Sufism	The Beloved in every face	Adab — refined conduct, hospitality, generosity
Stoicism	Nature and reason as one order	Cosmopolitanism — duty to the whole
Ubuntu (Southern African)	I am because we are	Communal responsibility as identity

Look at that column on the right. Notice how none of these traditions stop at the seeing. Every one of them, in its own dialect, says: and now you owe something. The insight is not the destination. The insight is the ticket that lets you enter a harder room.

So how did we get here — to a moment where "awakening" is often sold as a personal wellness outcome? Where retreats are marketed the way spa weekends are marketed? I ask this without contempt. I have been the customer. I have also been, in smaller ways, the seller. When I run a company, I package things. It is what I do. So I understand the pull. But I want to understand the drift.

Part of it, I suspect, is that the older frameworks assumed a village. If you woke up in a village, your waking was immediately absorbed into the village — the neighbor who needed help, the child who needed teaching, the elder who needed water. The insight had somewhere to go. In our lives, insight often has nowhere to go except back into our own heads, or onto a podcast.

Another part, I think, is fear. Because if awakening is a debt, then I am indebted. And if I am indebted, then my choices — how I run my company, how I speak to my team, how I spend the last hour of my evening, what I do with the money that comes in — all of it becomes relevant to the practice. The cushion and the calendar stop being separate rooms.

I am not sure I am ready for that. But I notice I am no longer able to pretend they are separate. Something about the seeing does not let me.

I want to be honest about one more thing. When I frame this as "responsibility," I risk making it heavy, moralistic, another thing to fail at. That is not what any of the old teachers meant, I think. In every tradition on that table, the response to insight is not grim duty. It is closer to natural overflow. Water finds the low places. A person who has genuinely seen finds the places where seeing is needed. Not because they should. Because there is nothing else, at that point, to do with a life.

The Smaller Question Underneath

Beneath the big question there is a smaller, sharper one that I find harder to face.

It is not: what should awakened people do?

It is: what am I doing today, in this specific body, in this specific city, with these specific people who report to me, with these specific hours?

Because the abstract question is safe. I can hold it for years without it costing me anything. The specific question is not safe. The specific question notices that I did not really listen to my colleague yesterday. That I spoke sharply to someone who was already tired. That I bought something I did not need while pretending I was practicing non-attachment. That I meditated for forty minutes and then spent four hours in a mental loop of self-concern.

The specific question is where the practice actually lives. And it is uncomfortable, because there is no retreat, no book, no teacher who can answer it for me. Only the day itself, and what I do inside of it.

I think this is what the traditions were pointing at when they insisted that ethics and insight are not two things. Not because ethics is a rulebook, but because a person who has seen clearly cannot help but move differently. And if I am still moving in the old ways, then perhaps I have not seen as clearly as I imagined. Which is humbling. And also, in a strange way, freeing. It means the work is not somewhere else. The work is here.

What I Am Still Learning

I do not know how to end this well, because I am inside the question, not outside of it. I keep noticing that the people I most admire — the quiet ones, the ones who moved me when I met them — did not talk about awakening. They just seemed to be paying attention in a way I wasn't. They picked up the cup. They asked the question I had not thought to ask. They stayed.

Maybe that is what the responsibility looks like in the end. Not a project. Not a mission. Just a slightly different quality of attention, applied to whatever is already in front of you. The child. The employee. The stranger on the tram. The version of yourself that is tired and would rather not be kind right now.

I am still learning. I will probably always be learning. I offer this not as a teaching but as a note passed sideways, in case you are sitting with the same question.

FAQ

Q: Is this a criticism of modern mindfulness? A: No. I have benefited too much from it to criticize it. I am only asking, quietly, whether we might be stopping short of what the older teachers were actually pointing to.

Q: Do you need to be "awakened" for any of this to apply? A: I don't think so. Any small moment of clarity — noticing you were unkind, noticing a pattern in yourself — seems to carry the same weight. The scale differs; the structure does not.

Q: How do you personally handle this tension as a CEO? A: Imperfectly. I try to remember that the people who report to me are not resources. Sometimes I remember. Often I don't. I try again the next day.

Q: Isn't this just guilt disguised as practice? A: It can be, and I have to watch that. There is a version of "responsibility" that is really self-punishment. That is not what I mean. I mean something more like natural response — the way a hand moves when it touches something hot.

Q: Which tradition do you follow? A: I sit in the Vipassana lineage of S.N. Goenka, and I read across many traditions with respect. I try not to make any of them my identity.

Q: What do you do when you don't know what the right action is? A: I wait, if I can. I ask someone I trust. I try to notice whether my hesitation is wisdom or avoidance — these feel different in the body, though it took me years to tell them apart.

Q: Do you think awakening is real? A: I think something is real. I am not sure the word helps anymore. I prefer to notice what happens when I pay closer attention, and let the naming come later, if at all.

Paweł Sokołowski is a CEO, Vipassana meditator, and student of Ayurveda and Thai massage. He writes from the intersection of technology, consciousness, and the ancient body.

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