Q: I just finished your book, really committed to dismantling the false self. My job is very demanding. Will things move faster if I quit? Should I move into seclusion and just power through it?

A: The real question behind this question is: “Can I control my own dismantling?”

You’re asking if quitting your job or going into seclusion will make things “move faster,” but that question smuggles in an assumption that you, the very structure being dismantled, can manage, accelerate, or direct its own destruction. That’s the false self still trying to drive the process it claims to want to end.

It’s not really about whether to quit or stay. The deeper question is: “Can I orchestrate my own undoing without surrendering control?”

That’s the false self’s last strategy, turning dismantling into a project, a productivity goal, another thing to optimize. It’s still the same engine of becoming, only now dressed in spiritual urgency.

This question belongs squarely in Phase Two: Disruption. Here, the scaffolding starts to shake, the job, the relationships, the identity. There’s a desperate impulse to do something to make the collapse neater or quicker. But Disruption isn’t asking for movement; it’s demanding surrender. Not the performative kind–it’s not an act you can choose or execute. It’s the end of the chooser.

Disruption marks the point where the scaffolding starts to collapse, job, identity, meaning, belonging. The false self scrambles for a strategy: change careers, end relationships, retreat into solitude, meditate harder, quit everything. But all of those are still movements of control, ways of saying, “If I steer the collapse, maybe I won’t actually fall.”

The surrender this phase demands isn’t something you do. It’s what happens when you stop doing, when you stop trying to protect the self that’s unraveling. It’s when you stop intervening in your own death process. It looks like not turning away. It looks like not reaching for meaning when the ground disappears.

It’s silence instead of substitution.

It’s staying when the mind screams to move.

It’s watching every structure that ever made you feel safe, (career, competence, identity,) burn, and not rebuilding.

The ego scrambles to rebuild using new materials, seclusion, austerity, purpose. All of it is still the same architecture.

You’re not being called to quit your job. You’re being called to see that the one who wants to quit or stay doesn’t survive this.

So instead of asking whether seclusion will make it go faster, ask: “Who wants it to move faster, and what would that one lose if it couldn’t?”

That’s where the real traction is.