What is Spiritual Awakening?
I have always been interested in the written word. I LOVE writing, literature, non-fiction mostly, poetry, theatre, even spoken word, you name it, I’ve been enamoured since I was a little girl. I’m a life-long journal writer and I read voraciously. I practically fell in love with every English teacher I ever had, especially if they were passionate about what they did.
When I write about spiritual awakening, however, I find myself at a loss for words.
The very nature of “it” is ineffable, esoteric to the core. Thousands of spiritual teachers, Gurus, Monks and seekers have been trying to explain it for centuries and many of them have been successful in evoking the feeling and the meaning of what it is, giving us a beautiful picture of the wonder and awe of it. I am so thankful for their words of wisdom.
But words cannot really explain accurately, what exists outside of language. It’s like trying to teach a toddler calculus. There’s no common ground, no starting point that you can reference and expand upon. It does not compute for the tot. They have no concept that something called calculus exists, they just look at you and then go find something to play with that they can understand. You can’t even start with one plus one because that’s beyond their comprehension, too.
So, this is what tends to happen to me when I try to describe spiritual awakening to someone who has no prior metaphysical understanding of the world.
What is absent is the understanding with which to comprehend the concept of non-duality, self-transcendence , self-actualization or enlightenment.
Early in my awakening, in my eagerness to learn more, I would often engage people in conversations about the existential nature of reality. I was so very curious.
But I would often get blank stares……silence…..crickets.
How does one describe the infinite oneness of the universe to someone who has only ever believed that they were separate from it? How do I explain that we are all consciousness itself, that we are all one and the same thing when everyone thinks they are unique and couldn’t possibly be the same as their neighbour, or their enemy?
So, although it is very difficult to explain spiritual awakening, I love to try, because it is my Dharma to help others awaken so that we all may live in a world filled with infinite love instead of infinite suffering. It has been a huge life lesson for me in cultivating compassion, and for meeting people where they are.
During my awakening, my 3rd eye opened, my Ajna chakra was activated, and things became known to me. I can’t really explain it any other way. They are known as “downloads”.
I became aware of the mechanisms that drove me, pre-awakening, which I lovingly call my sleep-walking years. I understood so much more about life, death, society and humanity, and many things that once perplexed me, became crystal clear.
I truly understand what love is now, the true meaning of Love. Not the romantic kind of love you would feel for a partner or spouse, nor even the deep, caring kind of love you feel for your child, if you can imagine that. This is a total, soulful love that is infinite, a love without limits, an unconditional love that fills you completely and expands you to infinite heights and depths of being.
What came over me was this amazing sense of having discovered a part of myself, a very intimate and beautiful part, that I never knew existed. In actuality, I became a different person, I have a completely different perspective on reality. It’s delicious and sweet and exciting beyond measure.
A huge percentage of people living in the world today, believe deeply in a materialist, scientific, rational paradigm, as I did I. I was unaware that there were other paradigms, unaware that this one I held as the “truth” was actually very far from the Truth, and conversely, it was actually a very limited way of looking at the world. I was shocked into a new perspective, shocked by how much I didn’t know before, and I was so thankful for this gift of sudden awareness!
In the West, we are programmed to desire things from a very early age. We are convinced that to be happy, we should want to live in a nice house and drive a cool car, we should want to achieve success, we should want to acquire wealth and possessions. These outward “signs” of success.
We are fed this ideology through every possible avenue of distribution since birth. We absorb it from our culture, our parents, our religious leaders, our schoolteachers, our professors, our media outlets, our friends, our entertainment. This becomes our reality, and it seems so convincingly real that we never question it, unless we find ourselves unhappy despite having it all, as happens so often in our society. This was my experience.
Most people NEVER question this reality, and really, why would you? It’s like being a fish in a tank, the fish doesn’t notice it’s swimming in water. That is its reality. It doesn’t know that there’s something called “air” outside the tank, the fish doesn’t even know air or earth are things that exist.
This is the kind of feeling you have when you awaken, you get to peer outside of the tank and witness a whole other universe that you heretofore, were completely unaware of. It’s mind-bending.
It’s so completely foreign and yet so absolutely perfect and natural. It’s the biggest A-Ha moment you will ever experience. You come to know that what you thought was “real” is actually not, and you see that there is so much more to life than what you have been taught.
Much, much more.
Spiritual awakening is a catalyst for profound positive change in your life. I have a deep desire now to live my Dharma in life, to live my purpose. To experience joy every single day of my life and live in that infinite love.
I cannot express how truly blessed I feel to have awakened, and also, how incredibly sad I am that many of those that I love, have not, and may never in my lifetime.
It has been a challenging journey to integrate this new awareness into my life, at this age (somewhere in my late 50’s), but I would never go back.
It is a special gift to be liberated, I wish it for every human being on the earth, and I am humbly grateful that this came to me in this lifetime.
My sincerest hope is that one person reading this will begin to ask themselves “Can there be more to life than this?” and then I hope they start to look for an answer, because there is an answer and it’s a resounding YES!
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