IT'S NOT THE ICING ON THE CAKE!
Awakening is easy. It is your natural state, revealed when the fruit is ripe to fall off the tree. It was always here, but covered over by the web of your mind, obscured by the beliefs you have carried over this life-time, burdened by assumptions and conclusions about "your life".
But living as this naturalness is not so easy. It requires an ongoing excruciating self-honesty, an unwavering purity of the heart, a giving of yourself to the fire of truth in every detail of your everyday experience. It requires you to stand in your true seat of sovereignty as this naturalness in a sea of lies and deceptions, when the world pulls you in a myriad directions, when you are misunderstood and misrepresented.
Living the truth requires you to be in the world but not of it, and this is a great wrench in the fabric of normality. What a mind-bending paradox this is, what an unresolvable koan! It requires you to be much vaster than any perspective, both visible and invisible at the same time, both undefended and invincible, both awake and unconcerned with the polarity between awake and unawake. You have gone beyond the dreamspell, and yet you are fully here in this manifestation!
My friend, do not mistake awakening as the icing on the cake. It is not the final destination because there is no final landing place. There is only an eternal falling into the unknown ... and this is freedom from the matrix, whilst still seemingly playing in the matrix.
Welcome to my world!